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Foreign hello, and welcome to episode 292 of the Kate Show. Today we are talking about Chat, GPT and aio. So basically, how do you optimize your interior design, staging, window treatment, website, organizing website for AI? Here's the thing, A lot of people in the home industry are starting to get leads from places like Chat, GPT, Gemini and other AI search platforms. And you might be wondering, or at least you should be asking yourself, how do you capitalize on that shift and take charge of your own AI rankings? When you optimize your business website for AI search, you harness the power of future success online. So I'm just going to go over all the things you need to know. So this is just going to be like, you know, instead of you doing hours of research to figure it out, I have put it all in one place for you. So take notes if you're not driving. All right, so the first thing, what is aio? Well, it stands for Artificial Intelligence Optimization. It is basically the sister of SEO. AIO and SEO have many similarities and operate with parallel rules, thank goodness. Often having good SEO, good meaning following Google's recent core updates will mean that you also have good or at least decent aio. Now, Google's recent core updates are pretty significant and in fact, they've caused a lot of people to lose some website traffic, myself included, until I adapted to the new rules. I mean, literally, Google changed the rules of SEO overnight. They didn't change all the rules, but they changed some pretty significant ones. For example, blog posts should have a summary at the beginning, FAQs at the end, they should be longer worth we're talking 1500, 2,500, even 3,000 words. Things have changed significantly. I'll get into why they made this change and what you can do about it to keep things easy in a little bit. Now, the next question that you might be wondering is, do I really need to be worried about this? Do designers, stagers, organizers need aio? And the short answer is yes. If you want your website to be recommended to users on ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or other platforms, your website will need to meet certain standards. Now, you will primarily need to be focusing more on eeat. Now you might be like, what the heck is that? Well, EEAT is a Google acronym for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. This is a set of guidelines that Google has put out to assess the quality and credibility of online content. Now, basically this ensures anyone who is turning out low quality AI produced blog posts or website copy, they're going to get like no traffic from it. You can't hack the system by having chat GPT turn out tons of content for you and call it a day. Now, to make it good content, it should include personal stories, personal anecdotes, personal education information. And it has to be truly helpful to to the person you're writing it to. It needs to include unique information. Now, like I said, if websites that try to rise to the occasion by just churning out tons of shallow content by saying, hey chatgpt, write me a blog post about interior design, blah, blah, blah, even if you're using a really detailed prompt for it, GPT is still GPT. You know, it's a computer essentially. It can only work with the information that it's given. So make sure that if you are using AI, you're using it to expedite the tedious parts of your production process when it comes to writing a blog post and maybe use it for research or for creating an outline. But the actual writing part needs to include that experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. And that can only come from a real human being. The websites that rise to the occasion by producing this really good content will be rewarded with more website traffic. And that is what we want, right? That's the purpose. Okay, so the next thing you might be pondering is how do I get my website to show up in ChatGPT and Gemini and such? Like I said earlier, good SEO translates to good aio. So you gotta make sure that your SEO is squared away, that it's up to par. We've been doing a ton of SEO projects over here ever since we started offering it as an official service. Our clients have been able to get not just on the first page of Google, but at the top within days. So obviously that's not going to be true for every client a hundred percent of the time, because Google does change the order of things to be fair to everyone else. But SEO works, SEO is, is amazing. And that should be one of the main sources of traffic to your site. Organic search should be where you get most or second to most of your website traffic. And if it's not the case, then you've got some work to do. Now, good SEO looks like understanding that each page of your website can be optimized for only one keyword or keyword phrase. It doesn't do you any good to try to cram a bunch of keywords into your homepage, for example, because Google's only going to rank it for one of them. And you have to be intentional about which one that is you have to use it a certain number of times but not be keyword packing. And you have to it in certain areas of the site, but it has to still read well. So it's as much a science as an art. And honestly, I've really enjoyed doing SEO for people. It's been fun. Similarly, each blog post on your site can only be optimized for one keyword or keyword phrase. So again, no keyword stuffing. It has to be readable, but those keywords have to show up in certain places, otherwise it's just not going to rank. Also, on a more technical side of things, your website should avoid using a lot of custom code because not all AI models can read that content. So that's very important to realize. And then make sure that your website includes reviews or case studies because that's considered highly important by Google's EEAT protocol. Again, Experience Authority, Trustworthiness protocol. And when you have those reviews on your site, they had better be Google reviews that are actually embedded into your site versus just typed in. Because then Google will pull that when someone is searching for an interior designer near them. And not only would your Google business listing show up, but also like if your actual URLs and pages show up, your star rating will show up with it. If you type in Kate the Socialite, for example, in Google, you're going to see my star rating alongside my actual web pages in addition to my Google Business listing. So it does work really well. Okay, so you also need to make sure that your portfolio is nicely displayed and easy to navigate. This is something that trips up a lot of designers especially. I've noticed that some designers will go for a slideshow that changes by itself or that you can't even see the whole image without scrolling up and down on the screen. Use a grid layout and then click an image to enlarge it. That's the most user friendly way to set up a portfolio. Those slideshows, not only can they slow down the loading speed of your site, but they're just hard to navigate. It's hard to really appreciate each photo for what it is. The next thing that your website should have for good SEO and AIO is a detailed service page with pricing. Now it could be a flat fee price, or it could be a starting at price. Obviously, if you're doing a kitchen remodel, not all kitchen remodels are the same price, but I bet you have a starting at price. Additionally, you should also be spelling out your process. You can call it how we work or what to expect. It's important that you share with people what comes next. Like you book a discovery call and then we have a consultation and so on and so forth. But don't make it like an 18 step process because that's overwhelming for people to read. You need to condense it so that it's more like four to six steps. Next, you should share your availability. Now this can be done using calendly acuity or other online booking tools, but it's professional and efficient to allow people to book a discovery call with you through your website without having to email you back and forth. Also, as a reminder, make sure those five star Google reviews are embedded into your site and regularly ask for more reviews from happy clients because the quality and the quantity of your Google reviews does matter. The next big thing is get a blog that's updated at least monthly because AI platforms are constantly crawling the Internet for fresh information that relates to users who are inadvertently training them by using their platform and whenever possible get featured in article lists. So like the top 10 interior design firms in Charlotte, because that does help ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI platforms know that they should show you to their users. Now the the thing that you need to be careful of here is making sure that everything you do is on brand and high quality. And you can certainly DIY it if you have a good foundation. I'm never actually against diying. A lot of my business has been DIY until I turned into the actual professional, so I'm not against that. But you have to understand what your end goal is. For example, the end goal of blogging is not to get clients directly from blogging, it's to get website traffic. The end goal of email marketing is not to send people to go read your blog posts. The end goal of email marketing is to get people to respond. Or at least the very least open your newsletters on a regular basis. You have to have the appropriate expectations for things, otherwise you'll never be able to gauge how well it's working. But in the name of all things SEO and aio, let's talk a little bit more about your blog posts. So the AI must haves for every blog post you put on your site are as follows. You need to include three to five frequently asked questions at the end of every blog post that pertain to the topic of that blog post. You need to include a summary at the beginning of every blog post and a call to action and an author bio at the end of the blog post. You need to avoid making Every blog post a listicle. So the top 10, whatever, you can use that sometimes, but not too much because it is overused. And then your blog post should be longer, around 2,000 words, allowing you to meet the EEAT protocol of in depth, helpful, authoritative content. And then you need to include your author, headshot and bio in your footer or at the end of the blog post like I mentioned, to further meet that protocol. And then lastly, AI matches results to everything it knows about their user. Thus it's going to present your site to the user if your site describes your ideal client in detail. So again, back to the ideal client. You not only need to know who they are, you need to talk directly to them on your site, state blatantly who they are so that AI models understand and can be matchmaker between you and your next great client. All right, so what if you're like, well, I think my SEO is pretty good. My site's great. How do I know if my site ranks well on ChatGPT or other AI platforms? Great question. First, there's a good way to test this. Go to ChatGPT and turn on search results so that you can see the references GPT is using. And ask ChatGPT tell me what you know about and then your business name. And then just read what it shows you and make sure the results it shows you are accurate and detailed. But if they're too generalized or inaccurate, then you definitely have some work to do. And the changes you make on your website today, ChatGPT could already have picked up and started using by, you know, 48 hours from now or sooner after running it through ChatGPT and just asking, hey, what do you know about this business? You can also enter one of your website pages at a time into ChatGPT and then say, summarize this web page. So you could copy and paste your about page or your services page in a chatgpt and say, hey, summarize this for me and then review the results. Is the summary accurate? Does it make sense? Is it engaging? The third thing you can do is verify your website with Bing Webmaster. Because here's the deal. ChatGPT gets its information from Bing Search, not from Google. So make sure that your website is verified on Bing. You can do this pretty easily. Um, I have a little process here for you. So step one. Go to Bing Web Master Tools. Sign in using your Google account, Microsoft or Facebook, and then add your website by entering in your domain name and select the option to import your site from Google Search Console. Now, if you don't already have Google Search Console set up. Go set that up first before you do any of this. Hopefully you already have Google Search Console set up and that makes this process take about three minutes. But. But it's actually very important to have Bing Webmaster Tools set up and have your site verified with them. All right, so with all of this being said, you've probably heard from my last episode or gotten some of my emails regarding the AI changes that we are making in Socialite. While we are still ensuring that our blog and email content is human derived, not created by AI, we are using AI to make it a lot faster. So now when you log into the vault and you want to pick a newsletter, instead of having to fill out a work order or grabbing one of our templates that's already written and then trying to rewrite it in your own voice, now you can just tell the AI tool that we've built, hey, I want this newsletter and I want it written in my voice. And we will have already plugged in the information about your brand voice and it will immediately refine that piece of content to match your particular brand voice. And then you can make further changes to it. You can say, you know, make it longer, make it shorter, whatever that is. But because it's all human generated content, it's going to meet Google's requirements, the EEAT that I mentioned. And also it's just going to make it a lot faster. So instead of having to write a blog post and then come up with FAQs and then come up with a summary, um, after you first figure out what topic to write about and then figure out how on earth to optimize it for the one keyword that you can use. We've taken care of all that for you and we have trained our own AI tool on what to do for those busy work pieces so that we can continue focusing on the strategic pieces and the actual content creation, which will always be from humans and not from AI. I cannot say that enough. All right, guys, I want you to be successful in your businesses. I don't want you to spend a fortune on marketing. I don't want you to spend hours and hours on marketing. It's really not necessary. There's a smart way to use AI and there's a dumb way to use AI. Let's. Let's use it the smart way. And that doesn't necessarily mean just work with me, Wink, but it does mean that you need to be very thoughtful about how you're approaching this new technology and making sure that the content you're putting out on your website or or sending through your email list is meeting standards set forth by Google, the EEAT protocol, experience, education, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Because if you don't meet those standards, the chat tools, the AI models, and search engines are going to begin disregarding your content. And that is so easily avoidable. So I am excited to bring these new developments into the Vault. If you love the idea of having beautiful, professionally created content that can be instantly right before your eyes, refined to match your brand voice, and even sent out on your behalf or put on your website without you having to lift a finger or click a button, then you should go check out Socialite Vault. And you can do that by going to socialitevault. Com. All right guys, until next time, keep your marketing simple and your message clear. I will talk to you soon.