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Dutch Co-Founder (12:18)

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Scott Van Ak (12:50)

Scott Van Ak, Senior SEO at Stepforth Web Marketing Remember, we do have a show notes newsletter you can sign up for@seo101radio.com don't miss a single link and refresh your memory of past shows at any time. In addition, I do invite listeners to connect with Ross on LinkedIn and let's dive into it before before the break we're talking a bit about SEO news and now we will dive into some AI stuff. So more recently Google has been using AI for a lot. We all know that with AI overviews and the way they're impacting search and just a million other things. Well they've also been using AI to help shape their paid ad landscape and try to Eliminate bad players in that space. In its annual ad safety report, Google has highlighted how AI has helped shape these paid ads in 2024. So this is just a few statistics here. Quickly. They have removed 5.1 billion bad ads. They've restricted 9.1 billion ads. They've suspended nearly 40 million advertiser accounts. It's. That's a lot. 40 million. They've enforced 1.3 billion. Sorry. They've had enforcement against 1.3 billion publisher pages. 1.3 billion. That's just such a big number. These are all bad players and ads. And they've blocked or removed 415 million scam related ads, which is so good. I mean I still, I see scam ads more often than I should. They should never slip through the filters and they do. So there's a good thing with AI. Let's, let's get rid of these scammers if we can. Over at Search Engine Roundtable there was a report that Matthew Kerr found. So it's just a fun little bug. Over at AI Overviews, he found that AI Overviews was linking to itself in a bit of an endless loop. If you searched for the word narcissist, AI Overviews would give you a description of the word and within that description a link to the word narcissist. You click on it and it would reload the exact same search results with the same link to the same results in kind of an endless loop. Just obviously a bug of some sort. You know they, they need some fine tuning with their AI over at Google. But I mainly mention this because I want to know what else you people have seen. What, what else are our listeners finding in AI Overviews? That's just ridiculous. That's wrong. It's inaccurate. I would love to see that stuff. So if you could share it with our Facebook group that would be incredible. I would love to have a little section on our show where we talk about some of this stuff just for fun or maybe every few shows. So let us know what, what you're spotting out there that seems interesting and ask your questions and get involved. It would be amazing. And here we have another Google AI overview study. We seem to see these fairly often. This one is by Trustradius and it has shown that business to business buyers are significantly interacting with AI overview citations with about 90% of them clicking through to verify information, which is quite interesting. So excuse me. In their study they found that about 72% of searches done by B2B are finding that there is AI overviews present of those approximately 90% are actually clicking through the citations and checking things out. So I've got a few notes from their study about this. The behavior does contrast with earlier concerns about declining click through rates due to zero click searches. Of course those zero click searches are not going to be across all industries. Just as this is a bit more specific with B2B instead of B2C. So it could be that the B2B stats are increasing in clicks. The study suggests that while organic search traffic patterns are shifting, they aren't disappearing. B2B buyers display a tendency to fact check AI content, signifying a distrust or a quest for validation. Optimizing content to become a trusted source for AI systems is becoming increasingly valuable. That's not really a big surprise. We've been talking about that a lot and how to get listed in AI overviews, how to get listed in search GPT. I'll have a few recommendations based on that after this. Actually, vendors are being encouraged to create authoritative ungated content to boost discoverability. AI models can't access gated content for training. So you know that may limit what AI can see on your website. So let AI in, let them see what they need to see to help get you ranked. For SEO professionals, the research indicates that a shift in focus from sheer volume traffic to to quality authoritative citations and maintaining visibility in AI overview queries, which that's 100% true. You know, you don't always want to target the highest searched keyword. Some long tail terms, other highly relevant, you know, quality terms are going to produce a higher level visitor to your site. So don't always just look at the high volume. The importance of eat is still up there. Expertise, experience, authoritativeness and trustworthiness in AI content. So you know, get that authority in there those AI models are looking for this stuff. The report also hints at possible increased relevance on paid search due to the changes in organic traffic flows. Unfortunately that could be true in some industries. If you find that your industry is being hit or your site is being hit by Google for some reason, paid traffic might be the way to recover those sales. Not ideal always, but something to consider if you're in that position for sure. And although click through rates may reduce, the quality of traffic is expected to be higher. So focusing on informed purchases later in the buying process, that's what a lot of people are doing. Yeah, so you might get less traffic, but hopefully you're going to get a higher quality traffic in a lot of cases. So there we go. And then these are some notes that I had actually from Ross. Ross had these prepared for a previous show that he did and he didn't end up using them and asked me to go through this today. So let's do it. Essentially, the heading is what you can do to improve your site's visibility in AI search. So with the help of AI, Go figure. Ross created this list of AI SEO that you should consider. The first point is add extra information with structured data. Imagine giving search engines a roadmap to your content by adding your help. By adding your help, search engines understand there's a typo in there, I think somewhere. By adding structured data, you help search engines understand the specifics of your content. For instance, if you have a recipe page, structured data can highlight details like ingredients, cooking time, calories. And generally, structured data makes it easier for search engines to display your content in rich results, which can attract more visitors. We said this before, structured data does not have a direct impact on your ranking. So if you have a page and it's ranking in say position 10 for some search term you want, adding structured markup to that page will not help you boost that number 10 listing to number 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. It won't. What it can help with is having data from that page be included in rich results and things like that. So you can help increase exposure, which can help get traffic, but it won't directly impact your actual organic listing. So that's important to know. If you are adding it and you're expecting to see a big boost, that's not where you will see the benefit. You should be targeting specific detailed search terms. So yeah, people, I just talked about this a moment ago. People often type longer, more specific phrases into search engines. So these are long tail terms. By focusing on some of these long tail terms, they kind of mirror natural speech and you can increase the chances of your content matching these queries, which can help increase results in AI search results. This is true with organic results at Google, Bing, wherever as well, but it's definitely true with AI. So doing a bit of focusing on this long tail stuff is definitely valuable. You should incorporate images and video. Again, this is one of those tips that applies to regular organic as well as AI having relevant photos, videos, infographics, anything you can add that can make your site more engaging. AI likes this. Regular Google likes this. AI is still pretty new, so they're getting better at understanding all these different elements. They're not perfect, but this is a growing space so make sure you include that media. Even if you're just putting out blog posts. Include some visual aspect to your post. Don't just have a few hundred words of text and nothing else. Really try to make it pop, try to make it valuable. It's kind of no brainer stuff, but a lot of people overlook it and encourage visitor interaction. Search engines do notice how users interact with your site. If a visitor spends more time on your site, it can signal your content is valuable and so you really want to boost that engagement. Creating content that invites people to leave comments, to share, to discuss around your content, keeping them on your site, you know, directing them to various other relevant quality content that will help them. Just really try to encourage that interaction from people. And finally, keep your content fresh. You know, I've said this to clients all the time. You know, update your content, make sure everything is up to date and accurate. Creating new content where you should. Maybe you need to add guides or some help documentation for your product or service, something like that. But keeping your content fresh, refreshing articles, all that kind of stuff is really good for organic SEO and is very good for AI as well. Well, and finally, I just want to talk a little bit about a scenario that happened to me a few weeks back. It's. It's kind of funny because it's something that's never happened before. It's never come up in 22 years. And then I made a small mistake that was easily fixed. And so in this instance we were redirecting a bunch of not found URLs that were spotted in Google Search Console. And part of my routine when this happens is I take the 404s that Google points out, I run them through Screaming Frog to get an update on the header status to make sure they're still 404s. Usually they are, but sometimes they aren't. I then extract those 404s and we redirect them to somewhere appropriate, whatever that may be. It might be another product page or an article, or maybe even just a homepage. Quite often it just really depends on what that 404error URL looks like and we try to match it up with whatever is most relevant on the site. Currently in this situation, we had a few 404s that popped up, ran them through Screaming Frog, Screaming Frog said they were a 404. Great. I manually tried checking them. They were a 404. They didn't load for me, no problem. So we redirected them. Well, what happened in this case was that they were not actually 404s. They should have been 401s unauthorized. The pages actually existed, but were only accessible through a logged in account. So it's not really a traditional paywall that you might see on a news site, but a little bit different than that. But what ended up happening because we added the redirects when logged in, users went to try to access those pages they were being redirected, they couldn't see them. Naturally that's a problem of course. So that was resolved very quickly. Ended up not being that big of a deal at all. It could have been if they stuck around for a long time, but we caught it early, it was fixed early and all was good. So now we've recommended that the client switch the head the status from 404 not found to a 401 unauthorized, which is the header code that should have been returned. If that were the case, we would know right away that yeah, the page exists on some capacity, but spiders and some people should not be allowed to view it. So really just something to keep in mind, if you have content that is blocked through a paywall that may return a 404 when it shouldn't, make sure you're aware of it. Make sure that people who work on your site, whether they be SEOs or developers or anyone else, make sure they're aware that this is a situation that could arise and then you can watch out for it. You know, it took me 22 years to make that mistake and it was caught early and fixed and I don't plan on making it again, but I guess that's how we learn sometimes. Well, on behalf of myself, Scott Vanek, Senior SEO at Stepforth Web Marketing, and our CEO Ross Dunn, who is not here because he's having fun. Thank you for listening today. Remember, we have a Show Notes newsletter you can sign up for @seo101radio.com. Don't miss a single link and refresh your memory of a past show at any time. If you have any questions you would like to share with us, please feel free to post them to our Facebook group, found easily by searching SEO101podcast on Facebook. If you enjoyed the show, we would appreciate any feedback on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher or your favorite podcast stream. We are everywhere. We do listen. We would love as much feedback as we can get. So have a great week and remember to tune into future episodes which air every week on WMR fm. Thank you for listening everybody.

Marketing Representative (27:12)

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Dutch Co-Founder (27:59)

And so are our pets. So time with our pets is extra precious. That's why we started Dutch. Dutch provides 24? 7 access to licensed vets with unlimited virtual visits and follow ups for up to five pets. You can message a vet at any time and schedule a video visit the same day. Our vets can even prescribe medication for many ailments and shipping is always free. With Dutch, you'll get more time with your pets and year round peace of mind when it comes to their vet care.