Q&A Week #11

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Hello and welcome to The SEO Show. I'm Michael Costin. I'm joined by Arthur Fabik and this week we are doing another episode of our Q&A series. Do you know we're up to episode 11 of the Q&A? Wow, that's a lot of Q&A's. A lot of questions. And we are here to answer four or five more. I forget how many. But as always, I'm going to put the call out to go to theseoshow.co Click on the dots in the header and you can submit your own audio question that we answer on the show. Imagine that, hearing your own voice on the show. Wouldn't that be special? It would be a trip out, wouldn't it? It would be a trip out.

ARTHUR: You're driving to work or on the way to work and you hear yourself on the SEO show.

MICHAEL: That's when you know you've made it. Really, isn't it? Doesn't matter what's happened in your career or having children, family, any of that stuff. If you hear your voice on the SEO show, you can really sit back and say, wow, I've done it.

ARTHUR: I've made it in life. And it really isn't that hard to do, just send a question and we'll play it. If that's your benchmark, then good news.

MICHAEL: You're going to get on the show. But I tell you who did do it, Apoover did it. So we're going to listen to her question first to kick off episode 11 of the Q&A week. So here we go.

CALLER: Hi, this is Apoorva from India. I wanted to know how does an entirely new business start link building, especially if it's bootstrapped and funds are not much. So where do they begin? How do they start building links?

MICHAEL: Excellent question, Apoorva. Now on the SEO show, we're listened to in over a hundred countries of the world.

ARTHUR: I was going to say, I'm impressed that we have listeners in India.

MICHAEL: Yep. So someone driving to work in India, tuning in here in a bit of Arthur, talking about links and wants to know how to build links on the cheap. And I have good news for Apuva. We're not going to answer that question this episode. What we're going to do instead… That doesn't sound like good news. Well, the good news comes next. Apuva, we're going to do an entire episode dedicated to free link building ideas. So the sort of stuff that you would do when you're trying to get a new site off the ground, we're going to do a whole episode on it for you. That'll come out in the next couple of weeks. So Apurva, you are the first question in SEO show history that gets your own entire episode dedicated to it rather than just an answer. So I hope you enjoy it, but we're not going to answer that for you now. You're going to have to tune in in the future.

ARTHUR: It's just the way you let into it. I've got good news for you. We're not answering it.

MICHAEL: There's good news and there's bad news. But let's move on. Let's answer Noel's question, because we can actually do that one on this episode. It's a big, hot topic in the SEO world at the moment. Is it AI? It's AI. I got to tell you, I'm sick to death myself of hearing about AI. People want to talk about it, understandably so. It has potential to shake the world up or it has potential just to be a tool that we use and maybe not as epic as everyone thinks it's going to be. Who knows? Time will tell. But Noel asked, with AI advancing so much, is it worth pursuing a career in SEO still? Should he even get into it?

ARTHUR: No.

MICHAEL: No, you say. No, no, no.

ARTHUR: Hey, no wrong answers. I was joking.

MICHAEL: You don't feel unsafe in your career? You think someone should still go into the SEO space?

ARTHUR: Yeah, because there's a lot more, I guess. I guess there's a lot to unpack there, isn't there? I guess with AI taking over and, you know, people saying that Google won't exist in a couple of years and all the way that Google works now will be completely different. That's probably true. But I still think there's going to be ways and algorithms and things that will determine what AI will present to you. So I guess it's that will still be SEO, but different.

MICHAEL: Well, I guess it's. Is AI going to kill search? Like at this stage, I don't even think it is. Maybe. Maybe. We did the episode comparing different search engines, like Google with AI and the user experience isn't great. You know, Google have rolled out the AI sort of responses in search results in a major way recently. Yeah. And now all of the Google help forums are filled with people demanding to know how to turn it off and getting annoyed at it. So yeah, we're talking totally changing people's because Google to Google something as a verb, you know, it's like, it's just so ubiquitous, you use Google to find things. So we're talking about changing people's behavior, like very deeply ingrained behaviors. And People are used to using Google the way it is, so Google are taking a big punt at the moment by changing their search results to have these AI summaries at the start. People might adapt to using that. They might continue to get annoyed by it and try and turn it off. But whether Google are going to totally blow up all like their income comes from Google ads being in normal search results. So it's a pretty big thing for them to just blow all of that up.

ARTHUR: But we kind of talked about how that you could implement that in AI or having results presented to you. via AI. You just bid to be there effectively. Maybe. It's not too different to having ads on the top of the SERPs.

MICHAEL: And then the SEO part's not too different either. That AI is deciding to show that somehow. So there's going to be ways to influence it.

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MICHAEL: Just need to figure out what that is. Reverse engineer. At the moment, it's not that sophisticated, really. A lot of these AI summaries that Google are doing is just wholesale copying from existing websites and spitting it out in a written format rather than just in a featured snippet, which it used to do. So you might be able to influence these AI results relatively easily. We'll see though. SEO is not going away. There's going to be some form of optimization going on to influence these results.

ARTHUR: For sure. Yeah. It's too early to tell what impact AI will have in search.

MICHAEL: Yes. Long term. But in the meantime, pursuing a career in SEO, you know, it gives you skills in analytical thinking and marketing and communicating with clients, you know, probably sales skills in a way. Like if you're talking to clients, you're learning about sales essentially because sales doesn't stop once the client's on board, you're having to talk about results and prove yourself. So. There's all of that. And then even creative thinking, you know, if you're running digital PR campaigns, you're having to come up with cool ideas and deal with humans and that sort of stuff isn't really going to be usurped by AI anytime soon. You know, at the moment, AI makes some of the tedious parts of SEO. more fun. So things like compiling regular expressions, you know, like when I used to have to write regular expressions to put into analytics and you'd get one part of it wrong and you'd be breaking your head trying to fix it. Now AI can just churn that out or coming up with rewrite rules for doing redirects or robot files quickly. That stuff can be done quickly and easy with AI, which means you can focus on the more fun parts, the strategy, the dealing with clients, that sort of stuff. And Ultimately, if this great AI upheaval that may or may not be up on us is going to be enormous, then all careers are on the chopping block. So, you may as well get into one that you enjoy. So, Noel, if you think you want to pursue a career in SEO, I say go for it. What do you say, Arthur? You're on team go for it or? Yeah, I'm on team go for it. Okay, that's cool. I hate to tell you, we have another AI question here. God. This is the AI episode. It's what everyone wants. It's to add to the list of millions of AI episodes in every sort of niche at the moment. We're throwing our noise into the mix. And Luke has asked us, do you recommend using AI to write content? Are you asking me? Yep. Not asking anyone else. Luke's asking us and you're answering Luke.

ARTHUR: Sure. Yes and no. I mean, it depends on what content you're asking AI to write. So it's good to write. I guess if you've got like an e-commerce site or something, you can use it to generate product descriptions and category page content and things like that. But I think if you're going to be writing blog posts, you can use it. I mean, we use it as well, but it really depends on how in-depth you want your article to be, how well-written. It's going to involve a lot of prompt engineering if you're going to be using AI, and then you're still going to have to proof it, read it, edit it, so… Yeah.

MICHAEL: Short answer, yes. Yeah, I think using it to speed up the process definitely makes sense, but it needs a good layer of human editing and revisions to make it… actually enjoyable and useful to read. So you can think of it as like quick building blocks for, you know, speeding up the process, but don't just like put a topic in, say, write about this and then publish that because there's just so much of that stuff out there that, um, it's probably going to be ignored largely unless you're adding to it. What I would say is that if you're an informational type site at the moment, so like a publisher, Google with its helpful content updates and everything that's been going on lately is showing that it is out to take your lunch anyway. All these sites are losing traffic and the sites that are winning are like Reddit who have commercial deals with Google in place or Google favoring its own AI. To me at the moment, there is a case to be made to be cagey with publishing new content, like truly new content. So, if you're doing your own research and coming up with stuff that's not out there in the world, if you do that and publish that on your site at the moment, you can bet your bottom dollar that Google and ChatGPT and all these other tools are going to hoover that up to then basically spin into new content or summaries in Google search results. And this is a bit of a minefield, I think, for these tools in the future. They're basically stealing all of this content from people, cutting out the middlemen and then monetizing it for themselves.

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MICHAEL: There's got to be some sort of antitrust and sort of issues that open up for them on this. And if you are an informational type site, we're recommending that you do use AI to speed things up. But when it comes to just being freely publishing, you know, freely publishing groundbreaking new stuff that you've done, I would almost say going the other way and being cagey with that at the moment because of these tools stealing it all. You know, we're going to get to the point where people won't want to write new content. Journalists won't want to share articles that can be stolen or, you know, news or new information because they're not getting rewarded for it. They're being cut out, actively cut out by the search engines at the moment. So, yeah, what would you say to that topic?

ARTHUR: I thought I already said, yeah, I would definitely use AI.

MICHAEL: Which topic? No, the informational type stuff, like coming up with new stuff. Do you think I'm being a bit over the top in wanting to be cagey with that? Or do you think that is this ultimately heading to a point where people will be disincentivized from publishing new findings? And all this AI that's trained on this stuff, they're going to try and cut it off from having access to it. You know, it's commercially they're not being rewarded anymore. They're being punished.

ARTHUR: Well, I guess what's the alternative, not post anything?

MICHAEL: Maybe. Yeah. If your business is being crushed by Google updates, like helpful content, that's how you don't get traffic. And then the AI is being trained on all this content that you created and so that it can just churn it all out. Like, where is the incentive for you to keep researching and publishing whatever it is you do? Because you just know that the AI is going to steal it all in the future. And, you know, there's, there's, there's misalignment of incentives at the moment. And, What's the end game for it? Like tools, you know, Twitter cutting off API access, Reddit used to when they saw that all these AI tools have been trained on their data. Is it going to be that we're just in this world of AI spinning articles for other AI to copy and, you know, where's all the new stuff coming from?

ARTHUR: Well, I guess if you write for a living, you have no choice. You're not just going to stop publishing because you're worried AI is going to hoover up your information. You rely on publishing to make a living. So you can't just stop, otherwise the money stops coming in.

MICHAEL: Yeah, but there might be closed communities, walled communities, subscription rather than open web type stuff. Everyone trying to wall off.

ARTHUR: Yeah, that's a good idea. Like if you wanted to make sure, but I'm sure AI crawlers and stuff will still find it, right? Probably. It's interesting. Yeah. I mean, I know a lot of places that had copywriting teams have basically made the more redundant, except maybe a handful. So there is argument to make that it can help and that will reduce the number of people needed to, I guess, write copy. You need those original ideas to come from somewhere. So, I don't know.

MICHAEL: It's interesting.

ARTHUR: The human element is important. It's a tough one. I don't know where I sit on it, to be honest. Like I think from an SEO perspective and to like churn out content and be able to scale content, it's great. But I guess for copywriters, I can understand the flip side of that.

MICHAEL: Yeah, so I guess ultimately for Luke, do you recommend using AI to write content? Yes, to an extent we do. Just fire it up, churn that content out and then have humans making it actually useful. So AI is a tool to speed up the process, but it's not the actual finished product that you should be pumping out in the world.

ARTHUR: I will say something though, that with SEO content in particular, when we would use SEO copywriting services in the past, and we would pay whatever it was for an article, nine out of 10 times the article would come back trash. And we'd often have to either send it back with a new brief or just get a refund because it was always poorly written. And that doesn't go for all services, but I guess for SEO, we didn't want to spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars for just a blog post because it's not scalable. So yeah, it's definitely improved that area because you can get really good content written and then edited for a fraction of the price.

MICHAEL: Yep. Just so long as Google enjoys the content. Yes. Google's got to be sitting back and really enjoying what it reads when it lands on your page. So that human aspect and again, domain authority, like the stronger your domain, the more liberal you can be with your AI content really. Um, so if you have good links and you're an authority in your space, you can get away with publishing some of this stuff without that super strong layer of human oversight and editing. But if you're just, Small starting out, you're in a competitive space and you're just yet more AI noise in the world. You're probably not going to get any benefit from creating that content anyway. So again, the human aspect, having an SEO strategy behind it is important.

ARTHUR: Well, yeah. Also, you can't just get AI to write content and have it rank. You need to optimize it a lot of the time. Yeah. And that still requires the human to do that.

MICHAEL: Amen. All right. Well, let's move on to Aaron's question. You'll be happy to know this one is not related to AI. Um, he says he has a local business and he's trying to rank city pages and he's optimized it for the keyword service in city. And that page is all about that city. And since he's posted it, it's only showing on page two, but then it disappeared and their about page is ranking. And even though that about page doesn't mention the city whatsoever, like why is this happening and what can he do?

ARTHUR: Hmm.

MICHAEL: Unfortunately this does happen and I think ultimately it comes down to Google just being worse these days than it used to be in a lot of ways. The search results can be pretty odd, pretty funky in places. But the traditional recommendation to try and fix that would be A, that page has no authority, so you need to build some links to it. B, if you have strong pages on your site, so pages on your site that already have links, then you need to have some internal links from those pages to this new page to help it get a bit of authority. and then make sure that if that page is important, it's linked well from the site architecture. So whether that's in your main menu, your footer menu, or internal links from category pages, that sort of thing, you need to have links pointing to it to help Google understand that it's important and significant on your site. And then time, you know, if you've only just published it, it might take few days, a few weeks, even a couple of months for that site, that page to start being favored. But really if you've done all of your onsite well, it's well optimized to that city and you've then done all of that link building and internal link building, then there's not really much else that I would say you should do to try and get it to outrank your about page, which should not be outranking that site for a city keyword.

ARTHUR: If it keeps falling out of the SERPs, just go back and search console and manually crawl it and re-index it.

MICHAEL: Yeah. That's what I do. Yeah, change a couple of things maybe. Yeah. A couple of words. Sometimes Google just is stupid and it needs a bit of brute forcing and time. Amen. All right, Aaron, hopefully that helps. I'm glad you didn't ask us about AI, Aaron. Thank you for that. We've got Irene here as well and she has not asked about AI, which you'll be happy to know. I'll let you answer this one, but I'll ask the question. So my name is Irene and I'm asking, I would like to copy a few good Google reviews and to put them on the WordPress site. Would copying a review word for word be bad for SEO? Would it classify as duplicate content? Nope.

ARTHUR: No. No, we do it all the time with our clients and our site as well. I think. Do we have reviews?

MICHAEL: Oh yeah. So duplicate content is something people often get wrong, like they think just copying a few words from a review and putting on their site is going to be an issue. Duplicate content is really an issue for you when you might have, let's say, a thousand variants of a t-shirt, you know, black, red, blue, purple, green, yellow, large, small, medium, and all of those pages can be crawled and indexed and they're essentially the exact same thing all on your site. You've just got thousands of pages ultimately that Google has to wade through when it comes to your site. That's bad. Copying a few words from a review on your Google profile and putting it on your site is going to have precisely zero impact on your SEO performance. Yep. It might help it a little bit. Yeah, can't hurt really. It's definitely not going to hurt you. Or I'm yet to see an example where that's hurt a website. No, you'll be fine. So, hey, ready? Come on, Irene, put the testimonials on your site or reviews, whatever it is you're doing. So, probably people outside of Australia wouldn't know what we're talking about with that. That was an Australian song, right? No. Yeah, surely. No, it wasn't. It was. I don't think it was. Wasn't it Eileen, not Irene anyway?

ARTHUR: Dexy's Midnight Runners. Yeah, they're Aussie for sure.

MICHAEL: No, they're not. Oh, United Kingdom. United Kingdom.

ARTHUR: I think that song was massive all around the world, not just Australia.

MICHAEL: Anyway. Yeah, I don't know why I thought it was Australian. UK, Australia, pretty close. All right. Well, that is it. Let's not talk about random 80s songs anymore. Let's move on. Let's get back into SEO for another week. We'll be back with another episode of the SEO show soon, but until then, happy SEOing. See ya.

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