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- [00:00]
Marketing Representative
We get it. After all the frustration, the endless cycles of hoping for a system that actually works, you're ready for something steady, something that delivers without constant workarounds or headaches. That's why we're excited to introduce the 2025 redesign of the Buzz CRM built with you in mind. It's more intuitive, faster, and smarter than ever. Finally, a CRM that sees your worth, streamlines your workflows, and gives you the tools to thrive with without needing to prove yourself over and over again. Because you deserve a lifeline after all those outdated platforms. You deserve a system that keeps up with your goals and grows with your success. This isn't just a redesign, it's a revolution. Visit thebuzzcrm.com today. That's thebuzzcrm.com I'm so excited to tell.
- [00:48]
Podcast Host
You about DeleteMe, the sponsor of this podcast. Have you ever googled yourself? It's so frustrating that things like our name, email address, phone number, and even the list of our relatives are being sold online by data brokers. This poses a considerable threat to our privacy, especially if our personal info ends up in the hands of scammers or stalkers. I wanted to put an end to this, which is why I went to JoinDeleteMe.com and signed up for DeleteMe. DeleteMe's privacy experts comb through the countless data broker websites looking for places your data shouldn't be, remove it, and send you a report on what they've done. They do this all year round so I don't have to think about it. Since I opened my DeleteMe account, I feel better knowing my info isn't easily available online to be used against me for fraud, harassment or identity theft. You can get 20% off your delete me plan when you go to JoinDeleteMe.com protect. Go to JoinDeleteMe.com protect that's JoinDeleteMe.com protect.
- [01:46]
Dutch Co-Founder
Time is precious 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.
- [02:22]
Scott Van Ak
Hello and welcome to SEO 101 on WMR FM. This is episode number 499. My name is Scott Van AK. I am the senior SEO at Step 4th Web Marketing and I will be doing the show solo today as Ross is away enjoying some beaches and sunshine and all that fun stuff that the rest of us here working don't get. Right now we are going to jump. I not we. I am going to jump right into some non SEO news. I don't have a lot but a few things worth mentioning here. What does this mean? If you currently use google ca, google.fr or any other country specific Google domain, they will begin rolling those out and eliminating the country specific URLs redirecting you to google.com Google says that over the years their ability to provide a local experience has improved. In 2017 they began providing the same experience with local results to everyone using search whether they were using google.com or the country's specific TLD. Because of this improvement, country level domains are no longer necessary. Oh, got a bit of a cough. My apologies. Google did add that it is important to note that while this update will change what people see in their browser address bar, it won't affect the way search works, nor will it change how we handle any obligations under national laws. So really this effect will be minimal to none at all. The impact on SEO will really be non existent. That said, in Google Analytics and places like that, you may see referral Traffic change from google.ca to google.com across the board. The raw data, the total traffic and rankings shouldn't really change at all. So it's something to be aware of if you do see that shift. If you're, you know, Canadian site and you're used to seeing all your referral traffic come from Google CA and now it isn't, you might start to wonder like what's going on? Well, it's just the way Google is serving their website. It has nothing to do with anything you're doing. And if you use LinkedIn, there is a study that has just come out that shows how to possibly increase engagement. A LinkedIn study by Metropol announced 48,000. Sorry, it didn't announce. A study by Metropol analyzed 48,000 company pages over three years and checked out 577,000 LinkedIn posts and their results found that posts that include links tend to get about 13.57% more interactions and 4.9% more views than posts that do not include links. This tends to contradict what other studies and experts have claimed. Historically, they suspect that LinkedIn displays fewer posts that include links, so you should get less interaction But Metropol has found the opposite of that, which is interesting. They did also show that about 31% of all analyzed posts do contain links, and those posts consistently did outperform the ones without links. They also reviewed that post using carousels had the Highest engagement at 45%. Posts using polls had twice the engagement of regular posts. Text only posts showed the worst performance of any other post type. So that's kind of true with most social media really. If you post anything to Facebook, LinkedIn, anywhere and it's just a straight bit of text, you're going to get less interaction. So make sure you include some links, a poll, maybe some various media, images, videos, charts, graphs, whatever you might have. Make it interesting. People will engage with you a lot more if you do. All right, now we're going to dive into a little bit of SEO news. Google AI Overview rankings are dropping off a little bit, at least how they overlap with AI overviews. I really fumbled that pretty bad. Let me try it again. Google AI Overview Organic Rankings Overlap Drops after the Core Update so Google's latest core update completed at the end of March and there were a couple interesting findings as a result of this. First of all, back in August, John Mueller confirmed that AI overviews are impacted by core updates. So it's no big surprise that this core update did have a bit of an impact on AI overviews. And it's good to know that in the future that will continue to be the case. According to Brightedge, content that is ranking organically in the top 10 is now less, slightly less likely to be cited in AI overviews since its latest update. Previously, sites that were in the top 10 had about a 16% chance of appearing in AI overviews. This, this has dropped to about 15%. So while it's only 1%, you know, we're talking about Google where there is billions and billions of searches every day. So 1% is still quite significant. There were some winners here though. Some industries travel sites saw an increase of 6.6%, entertainment sites saw an increase of 4.9%, and restaurant sites saw an increase of 4.6%. So if you live in the travel, entertainment or restaurant space online, your likelihood of appearing in AI overviews has increased fairly significantly. Really? But still, all in all, with AI overviews, we are seeing minimal traffic generated from that. There are more click through or, sorry, lower click through rates. The rates are dropping. We're seeing more zero click searches and we're also finding that you're competing more and more with Google. Google is linking to their own properties with AI overviews. So it's not all good, not all bad, but something to be aware of for sure. Also, Google has updated their quality rater guidelines. I've got a couple little points on that. They actually did an update to the Raider guidelines back in January of 2025 and I guess we didn't talk about it on the show because it was not in my notes from the past. I thought we had and I found some news about it that's recent and it cites back to these January updates. So I'll just touch base on what's going on there. They've added a scaled content abuse, so creating a lot of content with little effort or originality, with no editing or manual curation. Generative AI is mentioned as one example of this. So essentially if you use AI to help create your content and you really should be sure to vet what's created and expand on it to make it amazing, if your content is you're just scaling out content and, and not really putting any effort to humanize it, to add your expertise to add anything that AI might be missing or remove anything that it might get wrong, you might get in trouble with that. The next area with main content is kind of the same. Main content is created with little to no effort. So that is kind of a catch all section in their quality guidelines for low quality paraphrase content often seen with generative AI and other forms of automated generation. So again, any content you create, make sure it adds value. It has to add value. It has to be unique and we talk about this to death. It's so important though, make sure you do that right. And also they've added some information about misleading claims. Google is getting very strict on exaggerated or misleading claims. So keep everything on your site honest. Don't you know, don't lie about your numbers, your, your anything, any statistics. Make sure it's real. Google, if they find out that you're making up data, they're going to get in trouble for that and recovering from that's going to be a lot harder. So keep your claims accurate. And I think now we're going to jump into a quick break. When we get back from this break we will talk about some AI news. Welcome back to SEO 101 on WMR FM hosted by myself live on DAZN.
- [10:52]
Dutch Co-Founder
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- [11:22]
Podcast Host
So excited to tell you about Delete Me, the sponsor of this podcast. Have you ever googled yourself? It's so frustrating that things like our name, email address, phone number, and even the list of our relatives are being sold online by data brokers. This poses a considerable threat to our privacy, especially if our personal info ends up in the hands of scammers or stalkers. I wanted to put an end to this, which is why I went to JoinDeleteMe.com and signed up for DeleteMe. DeleteMe's privacy experts comb through the countless data broker websites looking for places your data shouldn't be, remove it, and send you a report on what they've done. They do this all year round so I don't have to think about it. Since I opened my Deleteme account, I feel better knowing my info isn't easily available online to be used against me for fraud, harassment or identity theft. You can get 20% off your delete me plan when you go to JoinDeleteMe.com protect go to JoinDeleteMe.com Protect that's JoinDeleteMe.com.
- [12:18]
Dutch Co-Founder
Protect time is precious and so are our pets. So time with our pets is extra precious. That's why we started Dutch. Dutch provides 247 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.
- [12:51]
Scott Van Ak
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.
- [27:12]
Marketing Representative
We get it. After all the frustration, the endless cycles of hoping for a system that actually works, you're ready for something steady, something that delivers without constant workarounds or headaches that's why we're excited to introduce the 2025 redesign of the Buzz CRM. Built with you in mind, it's more intuitive, faster and smarter than ever. Finally, a CRM that sees your worth, streamlines your workflows, and gives you the tools to thrive without needing to prove yourself over and over again. Because you deserve a lifeline after all those outdated platforms. You deserve a system that keeps up with your goals and grows with your success. This isn't just a redesign, it's a revolution. Visit thebuzzcrm.com today. That's the buzz CRM.com Time is precious.
- [27:59]
Dutch Co-Founder
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.