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The Digital Marketing Podcast
The Future of SEO
00:30:39
In this episode of The Digital Marketing Podcast, hosts Daniel Rowles and Ciaran Rogers explore one of the most pressing questions facing marketers today: what does SEO look like in a world dominated by AI search and generative answers? With Google...
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- [00:00]
Kieran Rogers
Hello and welcome back to the digital marketing podcast brought to you by Target Internet. My name is Kieran Rogers.
- [00:07]
Daniel Rolls
And I'm Daniel Rolls.
- [00:09]
Kieran Rogers
And today we are discussing the future of SEO.
- [00:22]
Daniel Rolls
Okay, so we have had multiple conversations recently in podcasts and in various articles about what's happening with search engine optimization. And the big conversation has obviously been about geo, which is generative engine optimization. And then there's been lots of debates. Is it really a thing? Is SEO just expanding? We've got AI overviews and then we talked a little bit about answer engine optimization which was. And anyway, this all seems to be settling down a little bit. Is it though? Well, no, if I'm honest, I would.
- [00:55]
Kieran Rogers
Say the SEO is dead. Mongers have gone into overdrive with it all. I'm hearing every. I know, right. But no, it's everywhere. Now you, maybe you were like the Herald that saw it coming first, but there's a lot of panic and there's a, and there's a lot of lawsuits flying around. People are getting that antsy about the chain.
- [01:14]
Daniel Rolls
Let's talk about that because you mentioned this to me as well. So that people are suing Google on the basis they're not as getting as many clicks as they used to get, apparently.
- [01:22]
Kieran Rogers
Yeah, yeah. There's a slightly consortium of European businesses. I'm not going to go into it because I don't want to get embroiled.
- [01:29]
Daniel Rolls
In the legal case.
- [01:31]
Kieran Rogers
No, not really. But if you search on that, I'm.
- [01:33]
Daniel Rolls
Sure you'll find it.
- [01:33]
Kieran Rogers
And I think it's really interesting. The basic premise of this is that across the board a lot of businesses, particularly content marketing focused businesses and publishers in particular, and I think that particular consortium is made up of a lot of publishers, have seen their organic year on year traffic absolutely decimated. And there's all sorts of numbers flying around between like 40 and 60% drops in some cases depending on kind of the keyword landscape that you're looking at. What I found particularly interesting is that there's also a lot of reports that actually businesses just aren't seeing those levels of drops within E commerce. Right. So this is much more top of funnel kind of content research. And that makes perfect sense because we now have AI answers, you know, that's been launched across the world. But I think my view on this is that actually what's actually happening is because of that people's behavior is shifting radically. Like before AI answers, you had to work a bit to get answers. You typed in your search query and you got your 10 blue links and Then you did, you clicked around and you visited quite a few places and you actually, it was a journey, wasn't it? You sort of learn a few things along the way. Sometimes when you're wanting to learn something, actually it helps to have to work for it rather than it just being handed to you on a plate like it's.
- [02:51]
Daniel Rolls
Well, let's talk about that then for a second because we've got AI overviews and it started off people saying these are useless and then they got better because the large language models got better and Google particularly got much better. And then we started to see that in some circumstances was answering people's questions.
- [03:07]
Kieran Rogers
Yep.
- [03:08]
Daniel Rolls
The thing is, like you've said to me before, they are, they're sourcing maybe three different links in there, three websites where this information has kind of come from to some extent.
- [03:16]
Kieran Rogers
Yeah.
- [03:17]
Daniel Rolls
And what's interesting to give you a quick example is that if you search what is data scraping? We always rank number one for that. Now when you search what is data scraping, there's an AI overview. We're still number one below that, but we're actually listed in the websites where the information has come from in the first place.
- [03:33]
Kieran Rogers
So.
- [03:34]
Daniel Rolls
So what that tells me is quite interesting is that actually by answering questions and exactly to your point, it's a bit of a killer strategy still at the moment of like actually working out what are the questions that people are searching for, answering those in a really effective way, that's still getting picked up by the search engines, but it's getting picked up to some extent by the large language models as well.
- [03:53]
Kieran Rogers
But here's the problem. You're going to see a traffic drop, right? So across the board, in the accounts that I look at, I've seen lots of this. You see quite a big increase in impressions year on year, Right. But you're seeing a big drop in clicks and more recently a drop within the rankings. And that flows for me because I know that when you get a drop in click through rate, it affects your rankings, like your average ranking overall. So that kind of makes sense. Why aren't people clicking? Because actually for the majority of them, they've had their itch scratched by the AI answers. That's enough. You know, that is enough. So I'm not. So let's not forget, if you're on a mobile device, that lovely AI answers just push those 10 blue links even lower down the page. And we all know how lazy, what lazy fat thumbs we all have when we're on the mobile device. Like we just, it's Effort to flick up, down and actually, you know, if I've had the information itch scratched, why would I need to scroll down? You know, this is the thing, it's pulling together and actually it's quite smart. Before we had to get quite creative. Sometimes you'd need to rearrange the words or add in additional, you know, words to filter the results Now. Yeah, go on, go on.
- [05:03]
Daniel Rolls
So that the AI overviews are only including the exact phrase you search for in 5% of cases. So the point being is that they understand. Well, this phrase really means this phrase as well, and that's the same as this. And therefore, if I give you the answer to this is what you're asking for, you've just asked for it in a slightly different way.
- [05:21]
Kieran Rogers
Yeah, yeah.
- [05:22]
Daniel Rolls
So that kind of shows that.
- [05:23]
Kieran Rogers
Exactly.
- [05:23]
Daniel Rolls
This phrase I'm going to optimize for this phrase and I'm going to rank for this phrase is kind of gone.
- [05:27]
Kieran Rogers
I'm going to throw in another thought for you all as well. And I haven't got, unfortunately, I haven't got anything to back this up, but it makes logical sense to me. If you're getting, as a user, if you're getting used to having conversations with Google, you know, much like if you use ChatGPT or Gemini, you can have conversations with those ChatGPT chat entities as well, actually. And Google's research actually does back this up. The number of words people are searching on in a given search has increased quite dramatically since they numbers are there.
- [05:55]
Daniel Rolls
To back out stuff. They come out from Google but into the show notes.
- [05:58]
Kieran Rogers
So here's the thing. If I'm a publisher and for the last 15, 20 years, I've been dining out on optimizing for certain key phrases and questions when people stop asking those because actually they're phrasing them slightly differently, I'm not getting picked up. Right. So, you know, is that. Is it. This is the thing I think is kind of unfair to Google. I mean, they're big, they're big enough to fight their own battles. They don't really need me to do it, but I'm going to do it anyway. You know, it's not Google's fault that they've had to innovate, they've had to bring in this new technology. Let's face it, if they don't, they're going to get wiped out by other competitors within the marketplace who will. Right. And I think actually, from what I've seen, they've done a pretty good job of this. Like, it's Good, it's usable, people are using it, the data's there to support that. But if I'm on Google, is it really my fault that the whole marketplace is now using the web and search in a different way? Is it really my fault that certain businesses have over optimized for certain phrases that have been dining out? No, not really. That's just life. Every marketplace has that. People come in, new innovations happen, people lose their share, other operators still less under. But that's just how business has always worked. So I kind of alarming that like people are going down the lawsuit route. Maybe there's an angle on this I haven't kind of clocked and if so give us a shout.
- [07:19]
Daniel Rolls
Well, I do know a little bit more about it. It's the fact that publishers, what's been happening is that publishers rely on the fact that Google is swallowing up some of their stuff, sourcing it in the search results. But then people are clicking through to the website so they kind of felt, well we've invested in creating this content but actually at least we are driving some traffic value from it. But what's actually happening now is that they're getting all that stuff in Google itself and they're not just seeing the value from it and they think it's a break in that relationship. Right, okay, but which I get. But that's not their fault specifically. It's because the operating environment has changed. Yeah, let's take a step back for a second. So we've got AI overviews showing up in the search results. Search engine optimization seems to be expanding to include this concept of generative engine optimization. I want to show up in ChatGPT, but the thing is we don't know a huge amount that's about how these large language models are working still. But we do know a couple of things. NLMs are basically built on neural networks essentially. And a neural network is a. So that's been around artificial intelligence for a long, long time. And it's the connections between things. Okay, as in if a particular phrase is mentioned in lots of different places and there's positive sentiment about it and there's all these kind of interconnections, this is probably relevant. Okay, so what that leads to is share a voice and brand sentiment being seen as really important. But actually that's not as advanced as what Google have been doing a long time. Because Google have that next layer of user experience to say, well we think this is the most relevant thing, but if a user clicks through to it, do they have a good experience? Do they stay on that web page, they just scroll to the bottom. So it's potential that the large language models are kind of putting stuff up front in their search results that might be mentioned a lot might seem to be good, but isn't necessarily a good user experience and so on as well. Now, lots of people would argue, actually Google's been showing stuff at the top of the search results isn't a good user experience for a long time. And you know, Rand Fishkin has been saying that, you know, for a long time. But what it does mean is when I use a tool like the HubSpot AI Search Grader, which has actually got a lot better, and it's trying to kind of estimate how visible you are in ChatGPT and Google Gemini and places like that, the two things they say is, where have you been mentioned? What's the brand sentiment? The brand sentiment analysis is pretty clever because it will say, these are the things that people thought were good about you, these are the things that people thought were potentially negative about you, but it's sourcing stuff that maybe isn't very reliable. So what they're looking at a lot is stuff that's mentioned in forums. So Reddit, Cura, those kind of places. Well, we know that Reddit is the wild west. There's some good user stuff in there. There's also some pretty wacky stuff in there as well. But it also, if there's a lack of, like, if you've got online reviews, but you've got, you know, mentions around other places, they can be picked up. So places like Appsumo, which I'll give an example of places like Wikipedia and so on.
- [10:10]
Kieran Rogers
Yeah.
- [10:11]
Daniel Rolls
So let me give you the AppSumo example. I bring that one up. We did an app Sumo promotion and if you're not familiar with it, you go into Appsumo, you say, right, we can do a special offer, we want a load of users just so we can test out our product platform, and they take more often than not 70% of any money you make. And you're supposed to give a lifetime subscription for like a tenth of what people normally pay.
- [10:33]
Kieran Rogers
Right.
- [10:33]
Daniel Rolls
It's a pretty, it's a pretty bonkers model when you look at it from a commercial point of view, because you have to sell a lot to make it work. But what it does give you is a user base and a test base. Right. So we did an Appsumo promotion. I can't say that I'm entirely pleased with the results, but let's skirt around that.
- [10:50]
Kieran Rogers
I remember you Being very excited before it went live and then you got crowny. That's all I'm saying.
- [10:55]
Daniel Rolls
Yeah. Well I tell you what was interesting was that my commercial director had said to me this is a really dumb idea. We've got a reasonably well established product. We're not the right life stage of business and I think that's completely right. It's like if you're a brand new startup and you needed a test user base, this makes perfect sense if you're as established as we were and because she said to me this is a bad idea and then I was like no, it's going to be brilliant. We're going to get thousands of users. And then we did it and it was a. It was like we basically given away about £50,000 worth of our product for about a thousand dollars.
- [11:24]
Kieran Rogers
Do, do your T shirt she gave you saying I told you so.
- [11:27]
Daniel Rolls
No, I've got so many of them now that you know. But anyway, you should probably. People listen to your commercial directors. Yes. So anyway you get a load of reviews from these people and these people weren't inherently our target user base. So we had some kind of strange. We had loads of really nice views. I mean it was still like 95% Polish positive reviews but because the large language model is looking for the positive and the negative analyse the brand sentiment. When you go in and I went into the AI search grade of the HubSpot tool, put our brand in and it says most people love you, you're brilliant. It's great. Here's positive stuff. But some people think and outcome these appsumo reviews from how many five years ago that it was kind of thing because we aren't on many platforms like that by nature of what we kind of are that will now haunt us forevermore.
- [12:12]
Kieran Rogers
Yeah.
- [12:13]
Daniel Rolls
So the only way you can really deal with it is say I need to be mentioned in more places by more.
- [12:17]
Kieran Rogers
Yeah.
- [12:17]
Daniel Rolls
So advocacy and I've been telling this to a few training courses recently. We were talking about advocacy before like, you know, it's not about influencers, it's about advocates. It's those everyday people that say nice things about your product. Yeah, you want a thousand true fans, all that kind of stuff. It's never been more true because yes, Google's looking at Reddit more now and places like that but actually these large language models are as well. So if there were two quick wins in this.
- [12:40]
Kieran Rogers
Yeah.
- [12:41]
Daniel Rolls
I would say the first one is advocacy. Get nice people saying stuff about you in more places.
- [12:44]
Kieran Rogers
Yeah.
- [12:45]
Daniel Rolls
And the other one is Answer more questions in depth and think about the way that people are changing their searching.
- [12:50]
Kieran Rogers
Definitely. And like, I've seen this on Wikipedia and be warned, there's a big drive at the moment. People have clocked that a lot of the AI systems really rely on Wikipedia for facts. And it is quite good for that. Right. Because they have quite a robust system of editors, like human editors that double check stuff and double check edits when they're made. And I think for like a big organization, like take BrewDog for example. Have a look at BrewDog's Wikipedia page. There's a ton of stuff on their page. It's quite balanced. There's some positives, there's plenty of negatives as well. But, you know, overall, they've got quite an established, like, brand page on Wikipedia. Right. So something, you know, negative but relatively small happens. It's quite easy for that just to get ignored or missed because it's not relevant to the big entity that they are. Like, the editors will overlook it. However, if you're a new company without much history and somebody goes, oh, let's get a Wikipedia page, because then we'll exist as an entity and the LLMs will trust us more. Yeah, true, true. You have to go through this process of submitting an entry. You have to kind of make sure it's balanced, like, it can't be overly promotion. You have to submit it to an editor. The editor's gonna look through your immediate kind of recent history, just do a few sanity checks to check what you're saying. And if they find anything negative that you haven't included there, they're gonna slap that in there. Yeah. Or worse, ban you for, like, making an unbalanced, unbiased submission.
- [14:21]
Daniel Rolls
Right.
- [14:22]
Kieran Rogers
And then once it's out there, remember, this page is public property, so anybody can make an edit. And I think the problem is when you don't have. I suppose it's a bit like, let's say Kieran decides that he's important enough to deserve a page in, like, the Encyclopedia Britannica. Like, that's a nonsense. Like, I'm not. I'm just not at that level. I doubt I ever will be. Right. But let's say I decided I was going to push it. There'd not be very much verifiable fact that's interesting enough that you could put into that Britannica page. Right. And so what is there is going to be a bit skewed. Right. And if there's any one thing that's not, like, verifiably notable and it's a bit negative. That's definitely going in there. Right. And now you've got something that's factually true, but kind of biased because it's only focusing on the things that are big enough or epic enough or verifiable enough. And that's the risk with this.
- [15:14]
Daniel Rolls
So be careful what you wish for.
- [15:16]
Kieran Rogers
Yeah, be. Be careful.
- [15:18]
Daniel Rolls
What.
- [15:18]
Kieran Rogers
There's. There's a concept really here that actually, really wise people actually spend a lot of time thinking about the outcomes of their actions. Right. Fools just rush in and don't think about the outcomes of their actions and bad stuff happens. Right.
- [15:34]
Daniel Rolls
Well, that's okay. Of which, yeah, I. I decided that I was worthy of a Wikipedia page, so. Yeah. Yeah, because. Well, because published authors.
- [15:44]
Kieran Rogers
Oh, you do?
- [15:45]
Daniel Rolls
Published author. I've got quite a few. Like, I'm sitting. I'm the humble break behind me that no one can see is I've got the big book.
- [15:52]
Kieran Rogers
All these books are behind him and they're extensive. I'm only on half of one of those books. I don't know.
- [15:58]
Daniel Rolls
That's.
- [15:58]
Kieran Rogers
All right, well, I wrote half of it. Does that count?
- [16:01]
Daniel Rolls
You want two of them? Because there's one in another language, I think as well. But there's like 14 languages, blah, blah. Anyway, so I thought, well, that must be a good opportunity.
- [16:07]
Kieran Rogers
It's internally, I think, isn't it?
- [16:09]
Daniel Rolls
I think.
- [16:10]
Kieran Rogers
I think it's in Russian too.
- [16:12]
Daniel Rolls
Yeah. So there's a few languages.
- [16:13]
Kieran Rogers
There you go.
- [16:14]
Daniel Rolls
You're worthy of Wikipedia page. Look at you in multiple languages. But the point being is there was that and then there was like, I'm published at Imperial College academic papers and a few other things. But I thought, come on, this would be really good. From SEO.
- [16:23]
Kieran Rogers
Yeah, yeah.
- [16:24]
Daniel Rolls
So I went on to Fiverr and I found this guy that like specializes in. In doing Wikipedia pages and must be good. Well, he was actually. He was really good. I'm not going to diss the guy, but he. I spent like an hour and a half writing an email. Here's all the links to all my stuff, here's all my books, here's the conference of the judging that I do, the things that I'm members of and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And after an hour, if I submitted it within 45 seconds, he'd responded to me going, you really don't deserve Wikipedia page. So that's brutal.
- [16:54]
Kieran Rogers
All right, well, thank you. He's been there though, right? He knows how the bar is. That was the point, is the thing. This is the thing. And I think that's the danger with this and let's say you get your company there and it only mentions one thing about you and that thing's a positive thing. Everyone's happy, right? Until something not so good happens and it gets reported on in the press and then you just waiting for that, that to drop. Right. Could happen at any point. They might. Here's the thing, when you first submit, everything's double checked once you've got a page. Actually what I've seen, I found quite a few examples of companies that had all sorts of, you know, advertising standards agency rulings against some stuff never mentioned on their Wikipedia page. But because the Wikipedia page was created maybe six, seven years before that happened, right. So but at any point that could catch up and when it does, it's very difficult to get rid of it and that's permanently on your record and that is totally going to get skewed. So you could be in a situation where, yeah, the large language models are using it and they're now only citing one thing that's a bit negative because they're trying to give a balanced view and actually it doesn't. So be careful.
- [17:53]
Daniel Rolls
Okay, so we've got share of voice is important, brand sentiment is important. Be careful, your brand is showing up something. So we've got increasingly got this no click environment where you're not getting any clicks and that's because people are searching, getting the answers they want. You might get more direct visits, you might get more brand searches.
- [18:11]
Kieran Rogers
Keep an eye on that. Really important. See people are still thinking about you but they're not doing it in a way that you can measure. Right, they're not clicking and it's the clicks that we can.
- [18:22]
Daniel Rolls
Well, you mentioned to me off platform research, I thought that was an interesting idea.
- [18:25]
Kieran Rogers
Well, I do it all the time. Like before I Google stuff now I'll go to my large language learning model and I'll do my research there and I'll refine my search down for two or three things sometimes just one thing I was telling Daniel, I've just bought my first Windows PC. I'm so excited about it. Secondhand result. I needed to use some Windows software for a project that I'm doing. So I instantly I decided, right, I'm going to try out the agents feature in ChatGPT and I set. So I've just bought my first Windows PC, very excited about it, secondhand. I needed it for a personal project working on I need some Windows software that was only available on Windows. So I set my agent to find me the cheapest, best spec laptop on ebay for under 150 quid. And it came up with an absolute stone credit. It did all this work for me. Now previously I would have been clicking through, you know, ebay would have it search after search. Yeah. So Google's going to get a trail of it. Ebay's going to get a massive trail of what I've been looking at and thinking it's going to start showing me ads based on what? I didn't have any of that because actually what it did is it found me a really lovely like X1 carbon thinkpad from 2019 for 135 quid. I'm like, get in there. I said, two pound 300 quid model. It's got decent memory, decent hard drive, SSD. Loving it. So I just went straight on and bought it straight away. So suddenly all of that click and evidence data that previously would have been used to stalk the hell out of me and market, to me just irrelevant. Didn't even happen. Right. And actually my decision process from okay, I need this to finding the right solution was literally about 10 minutes you try and reach somebody in that window. Right?
- [20:11]
Daniel Rolls
Physics, complete change in search.
- [20:13]
Kieran Rogers
It just shows, actually, I think people do and that. So lots of people are doing this in lots of different levels, not just with agents but just with, you know, chat services in general. And so they're refining it before they even start searching. And that is a massive change. You know, people used to do half a dozen searches to refine. They just use Google for doing this. Now they're using other tools as well as Google. So you've got a double effect on that. And I think, you know, we're kidding ourselves if they think people are still behaving the same way they were this time last year. So when you're doing those year on year comparisons, like, you know, you have to factor this in.
- [20:46]
Daniel Rolls
Let's make a little view actually on as well why the stats are being so confusing about this. And I'll give you an example. I thought what I'll do is a little study to try and work out how do people actually behave when they get an AI overview versus when they don't. And does it all look like. And my stats were completely misleading when I worked out. So what I did, every time I did a training course for a while, I got people during the training course to buddy up with someone else and just go, one of you search for something and the other one of you observe them and then you see their behavior which in my head was a lovely test. Okay, it's completely flawed. I'll explain why. The second I say to you, go and search for something, people in that kind of classroom environment go to a search engine and they put in a search phrase which in their head is like a two or three word phrase. But that's not what people are actually doing anymore. What they're doing is they're interactively asking questions and discussing and debating. But I've just said go and search them. I put them in a mindset which is what they were doing two years ago. So what I found in that scenario is that 82 people I tested this out on and it was only about 5% of them that got an AI overview answer and then didn't click through to a website. They just got what they wanted. Right?
- [21:58]
Kieran Rogers
Yeah, yeah.
- [21:59]
Daniel Rolls
Which shows if everything was just flat and Google was just having AI overviews now you'd already be losing 5% of the clicks.
- [22:07]
Kieran Rogers
Right.
- [22:07]
Daniel Rolls
But that's without all this change in behavior of me going into ChatGPT and researching something, my search terms getting longer because the fact that I'm used to now inquiring in a more conversational tone of voice as well. So you layer on that on top and you start get to the 30, 40% we're talking about as well.
- [22:23]
Kieran Rogers
When you just had 10 blue links, it made no sense to give it a three sentence question. It wouldn't give you better results. But now it's does and we've learned how to prompt and actually Google's learned how to accept prompt level inputs and actually increasingly people are just talking to Google like they're using voice and it's much more conversational because it can deal with that now like it couldn't five years ago. It was you could do it but you wouldn't. You weren't going to get the result, you weren't going to get anything extra back out of it.
- [22:56]
Daniel Rolls
Now you definitely two points in this, first of all is if you haven't seen it, we have mentioned it briefly before, they've rolled out AI mode in search which is basically you click the AI mode button and it drops into Google Gemini basically. And essentially you're having a contextual conversation, I. E. You ask it a question and then you can ask it follow up questions. So that's a complete different way of searching. And it's clear to me what they're kind of doing is saying well people are using ChatGPT but if they've got that built into Google search, hopefully more people will come to us. So it seems like a competitive move to do that. The second one from this is that if you think about previous search behavior, 10 blue links, you click through to them. What would generally happen is you'd ask a question, you click on the first one, it's like, oh, no, this isn't what I want. You click on the second or the third and you go through four or five of them and eventually you get the answer you wanted because they trying to work it. Well, actually, if you're taking that away from me and you're doing that work for me, which is the theory, it's not necessarily that they are, but that's the theory they're working out, what is the best answer? I don't need to do that dance. But what that also means is if that was five clicks to get to the right answer, four of those clicks were trash, as in, I got to your website, I didn't like what I saw and I left. And if anything, it was a negative brand touch point to some extent, because I got your website and you didn't really give me the answer that I wanted. So actually we're worried about this loss in clicks. But what is it a loss in quality clicks?
- [24:14]
Kieran Rogers
The evidence suggests not, but I think certain keyword landscapes, you know, the world's moved on, it's changed and whole sections are being decimated. That evidence is out there too, right? Because people are literally crying in the street over it.
- [24:30]
Daniel Rolls
Yeah, yeah, that's it. So. So look, if I were to try and take away some of this, like, what on earth can I practically do now? I would just go, like I said a moment ago, there's a couple of things you want to talk about. Share a voice of brand sentiment. Where can you get mentioned online by your advocates? How can you drown out the negative with positive stuff? That means be really nice to your customers and encourage them to engage online about you as much as possible as well. Build that advocacy, encourage those conversations as much as possible. Benchmark yourself now to work out where you're being mentioned. So you've got tools like AI Searchgrader from HubSpot, you've got way K which stands for what AI knows about you. IO. So Waycade IO they're tools that are basically saying kind of like social media monitoring is slightly different. Like, where have you been mentioned? Where are the brand mentions of you online as well? So audit where you are now and then think about, is that good stuff? If it's bad, how might you get rid of it? But also how Are you going to build up positive mentions? So brand advocacy, hugely important. I really work on that. And then the other piece is, okay, well, we know that people are searching in more complex questions. We need to answer questions and we need to think about those deeper questions and really do more research and speak to our target audience. So I think that's a really good starting point. One thing you mentioned to me, which I thought was interesting, which is the recency of LLM training now.
- [25:46]
Kieran Rogers
Yeah.
- [25:47]
Daniel Rolls
The point you were making about this was that an LM is updated every month, three months, whatever it might be. So. And what they're going to do, they're not going to be rebuilding the whole LLM each time, they're adding on what's new.
- [26:00]
Kieran Rogers
Yeah.
- [26:01]
Daniel Rolls
So actually the point you're making, that it's going to favor logically.
- [26:06]
Kieran Rogers
Yeah. There's a potential weak point you can exploit there, I think if you're publishing high quality, well referenced. And here's the thing, you know, you can't just churn stuff out guys, which says and claim stuff. You have to back it up with supporting links that show you know what you're talking about. And this is a bit more trustworthy than everybody else just standing on a soapbox spouting stuff. So I think it's one of the things I've been playing around with. I think like tools like Gemini are fantastic. Helping you to find stuff that supports what you're saying that's going to be taken by. But in a way our commercial writing has become much more aligned with what they would do in academia where you cite, you know, studies and references, reference everything you do. Otherwise it's just going to be more dross for the gris. It's just going to kind of get ignored. And publishing regularly on recent stuff and recent events, that's potentially somewhere where you could get attention because not everybody's doing that because it's hard work. And that's, it's a strategy that I'm exploring at the moment. I can report back on, on how well that works, but my hunch is that'll work a little bit better. I think also there's a great opportunity to, you know, we've always talked about, you know, take your diamonds and polish them. You know, actually if you've not recently updated your best stuff, maybe it's time to, maybe you need to revisit that.
- [27:27]
Daniel Rolls
I really agree with this. Yeah. And I think it's a big opportunity.
- [27:30]
Kieran Rogers
Site and reference it properly, whereas previously we wouldn't have done that. And just a Few hyperlinks in there can make all the difference. But make sure you're quoting, you know, well respected content. So suddenly I think your links to other people's content are much, much more important than they potentially have been specifically for this reason. But remember, you're now competing for, for the top three links, not the top 10, right? So there's a lot less people that are going to win with this. And I think that's the key take home for me on all of this. I don't think SEO is dead. Of course it isn't. There'll always be what, like things that you can do to help and exploit, you know, the systems that are out there that are indexing everything for sure. But it's become a lot harder to influence it and be wary at the moment there are a lot of absolute snake oil salesmen out there trying to sell you like solutions to things that are not really well tested. And I think, you know, brands need to be wary of this. Everybody's coming out of the woodwork with amazingly sounding like products that claim they do this. But where's the evidence? That's the key quote. Take a step back, where's the evidence? Like, I know they're selling something that you want because you've got a real problem here, but please just check, do some like, sense checking before you leap in and start spending tens of thousands of pounds on it.
- [28:49]
Daniel Rolls
Brilliant advice. Well, let's finish on the positive. I've got a really positive note to finish on here, which is a lot of the stuff we've just spoken about is actually demonstrating your expertise, your experience, your authoritativeness and that builds trust. Well, that's eat. That's Google's eat, right? And Google, ever since a lot of this AI generated content came out, said you must now demonstrate eat with your content. Add referencing, add case studies and examples, make your content different, you know, give answers to questions, your experience. So actually you can do really well in SEO by thinking about those principles. And we'll put links through in the show notes targetinternet.com forward/podcast to loads of other stuff we've done about E previously but actually that's going to help you from a generative engine optimization if you want to separate the two things as well. Now what we have done recently is we've done all of our members and our newsletter subscribers get these monthly update sessions. So if you're not a newsletter subscriber, Target Internet.com Newsletter we did one on AI agents and we did one on the latest Google algorithm updates as well. So if you're not signed up to newsletter, sign up, because you'll get those every month. It's a one hour live session online, but members have got the whole library of the recordings of those as well. What we've also got for members coming up is a half day masterclass on using AI agents and a half day masterclass on latest SEO techniques as well. So either get signed up as a member to Target Internet, the annual membership is on a really good offer at the moment, or just get signed up to the newsletter if you just want those monthly updates, because we're talking about this stuff a lot and it gives you a chance to ask some questions and those kind of things as well. Thanks for listening to the Digital Marketing podcast and we'll see you again very soon. For more episodes resources to leave a review or to get in contact, go to targetinternet.com podcast.