How to Optimize Your Author Website

Foreign. Hey there, I'm Shane. I'm the head of digital strategy at Book Launchers. Thanks for tuning in to our book launchers YouTube live today. If you haven't ever seen one of our YouTube lives today, welcome. You can introduce yourself in the chat and say hi, but if you have been here, welcome back. Thanks so much for tuning in. Again today we're going to be talking about how to optimize your author website for search engines and AI search engines. And I'm just going to kind of go through some down to earth, easy to understand examples of how search has changed tech that you can actually implement into your site right away to actually, you know, make measurable results now to your site plus how to play by the new rules with AI. This is something that's prevalent everywhere. The AI search revolution is here and it is actually changing everything in the way that we should be optimizing our websites and we should be putting our content out there into the world. So I'm going to go over all of those pieces and explain kind of what I've been finding recently based on the presentations that I've gone to, plus my own experience with optimizing websites. And this presentation is going to be for authors who already have a website or platform set up. Next Friday I'll be giving a talk on how to actually start one from scratch and build it really quite easily. But so if you, if you don't have a site right now, I would suggest tuning into maybe next Friday's live and then coming back to watch this one because this one's all going to be about optimizing your existing site. So yeah, you know, with that in mind, I'm just going to dive in again, introduce yourself in the chat, say hi, welcome if it's your first time, if it's not your first time, welcome back. Thanks for being here. So search engines have totally changed in the way that search has changed is I want to explain this using an example of somebody looking up a specific type of memoir. So I'm actually going to share screen and go through all of the different search engines, including Google and walk you through kind of what I'm seeing with search and how it's changing. So one second, let me share my screen. So. All right, should be able to see this. All right, so the example that I'm going to use is, you know, what people used to search online for is they would, you know, search a phrase, search something that they're looking for and then you scroll through all of the search results, you know, Maybe click on a few links and get some lists of things that you're looking for and then kind of dive deeper from there. So in this case, I looked up Inspiring Memoirs for men in their 20s. And this focuses on keywords and optimizing your site for keywords. So the keywords that you're optimizing for is Inspiring memoirs, Books for men in their 20s, memoirs for men in their 20s. Those are all keywords that you could use to optimize your site. You put those keywords on there, you write some content around it so that you're showing up for people who are searching for these things. And looks like the top search results here are, you know, lists from other people's websites, like five memoirs that guys should read. We have a Reddit post here, Emotionally Uplifting books. Then we have another list from Medium, we have a list from gq, Penguin, Random House. So some pretty big names on there because obviously they have a lot of supporting content and can, you know, show all of that stuff. So that's why they're getting those top placements in there. And you earn those top placements by having years, sometimes decades of content being added to your website all around a specific subject. And you've got tons of reviews, you got tons of page visits and recommendations and backlinks to your site. Takes forever to build up that reputation. But now the thing, things are changing. Like, people still do search like this, but now everything is more conversational in nature and these queries get much, much longer. So I'll go into all of those. So Google is, you know, this is what it's recommending. It's got some lists that you can click on and you can read more into it a little bit more. And then I also ask Google Gemini, you know, it's the same exact query as before, Inspiring memoirs for men in their 20s. And it gives you some recommendations here. So it just gives you exactly what it asks for. Right? Same thing with Claude. Inspiring memoirs for men in their 20s. It'll give you some examples that you can go take a look at. And same thing with ChatGPT, it'll give you some examples. And you can just go copy paste these and go check them out all on your own. So, yeah, in order to rank for these, you need lots of credible sources. You need lots of credible information that you've been updating on your website for a long, long time. But how search is changing is people aren't just searching like this anymore. You know, they are just asking this and then they ask ChatGPT more questions to personalize it for them. Maybe they list what their profession is, maybe they list what their hobbies are, maybe they list where they're located. And that is all taken into account and then given a personalized answer. So now I was like, we all look up something like this instead of just inspiring memoirs from men in their 20s. We do. I'm looking for an inspiring memoir to read to help me overcome a problem in my professional life. All these AI tools are overwhelming and I'm wondering how I can make the most of my position, help my company grow. So there's a lot more context to play around with it. Right. And what the AI results are going to show you are, you know, it's going to give you some more personalized memoirs that you can actually show up to. Yeah, there's some big ones in here. You know, this one's by Robert Iger, the CEO of Disney. And then we have Ben Horowitz, he's a big name. Phil Knight, the guy who, you know, pioneered Nike and grew that company. And then we have some smaller books that I recommended here like Human plus Machine. Like I believe this was like a smaller example right here. Like it recommended this book. It's only, yeah, I'm not really sure how many sales it has, but it's only got 47 reviews on Amazon. And you know, it's. So it's this simple additional context gave me a book that is not as popular as all of these other ones. So it's giving you, whenever you give it more context and you talk to the AI a little bit more and have a conversation with it, it's give you more and more personalized recommendations. And if you have a website, if you have your book that describes how you are the one to help solve this specific problem and you're niche down enough and you have supporting context and personalized experience that you've shared online about this. These AI tools can pull that information and recommend it to people. But ChatGPT seemed to be the one that recommended the most amount of like underrepresented books. So we have strong memoir and leadership picks. So it recommended this one. Leading Matters. I'm not sure if I did this one. Yeah, Leading Matters, this one's not. It's kind of an underrepresented book. It's only got 82 reviews. Then we have Making It Big Lessons from Life and Business. This one's only got 45 reviews on Amazon. So again, not like recommending the best selling book in that category. Then we have Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, obviously that one is that. And then I also, I thought this one is interesting, that I will survive. Comeback Stories of Corporate Warrior by Sunil Roberts. This was probably the most underrepresented book that I've seen on here. This one's only got 14 reviews on Amazon. Barely has a book description. I don't even think this is a book description. It's just a quote from the book or like a testimonial for it. And it just looks like a, like an older fashioned type book. So, you know, this is what ChatGPT recommended to me based on just a little bit more of a specific query other than just give me a motivational memoir that I'm looking for. And also this link to a Wikipedia page so that, you know, you know, we've been noticing that Wikipedia is being referenced a lot more on these AI search engines because Wikipedia has that reputation. So. Yeah, and I also did this on Grok too, but Grok kind of died out on me. So. But that's kind of what is changing there. And people are just asking more specific questions in there. So. Hey Angela, thanks for tuning in. So that's what's changing and why you don't have to be that top spot on Google anymore. You just have to have enough supporting context on a certain subject and just put your information out there. So what else I want to go into? Oh yeah, so what this means for websites. So obviously we saw like Wikipedia results showing up there. We saw Amazon search results all appearing there. So the first search that I did, just looking for memoirs is, is people in the decision making part of the buying process? Right. That searcher is looking for a book to solve their problem and they're almost at the buying process because they're now they're comparing and contrasting other different books. But what it means for websites is like what, what about those people who are, are, you know, in the discovery part of the process, they have a problem but they don't know yet who's going to be able to help them solve it. Or it's a book that will help them solve it or your book that will help them solve it. So for example, like say that your book is about starting and running a successful restaurant. There's going to be a lot of questions that people are going to have about starting a restaurant, starting, managing, leading a team in a restaurant. You know, how do I find a great location? What kind of food do people like to eat in this area? How do I find an amazing head chef with lots of experience? How do I Apply for a liquor license. Like all of these things, your book might include answers to all of these pieces together. But in order for people to find that, you have to display this information online, like on your website. And if, if you compare that information with personal experience and like authentic, you know, content around, like, what you've seen with this, why you're an authority figure here, why, like, people should listen to you and why this information is relevant. And to somebody searching for something like this, you know, that's all going to give these AI search engines more context to rank, rank your site on there and recommend your site or even your book to somebody asking these specific types of questions. So, you know, don't gatekeep your wisdom. Like, don't gatekeep your information, because people can find these answers anywhere online if they dig deep enough. But the thing is with bookmarking is you want them to find the information from you. You want them to buy your book, to go to your website, to sign up to your email newsletter. So, you know, don't, you don't have to give away all of your information, all of your secrets, because you don't want to, like, undervalue your book or, you know, just give away everything. But you can certainly answer a lot of some of your niche audience's biggest questions in a blog post or on a page on your website and not only answer their question, but like, make it personable, explain a scenario that you overcame, you know, some sort of difficulty or challenge when reaching this and, you know, link that to your book. Say, if you like this, go read more in my book. So yeah, you can post excerpts from your book. You can pair those with like, personal anecdotes and experiences for your own life. You can write blogs on specific topics around these types of questions. Like, like what I was saying, you know what, the restaurant book, how do I get a liquor license? How do I find a head chef? What location should I look for in placing my restaurant? You know, what kind of food do people like to eat? All of that stuff. And you know, your website won't just attract visitors on its own. Like once you build it and it's up there and it's live in the world. Yeah, it does make it real. It makes it like you have this digital presence and it's amazing and it's exciting to be out there, but people aren't just going to stumble across it unless you put. And these AI search engines aren't just going to recommend your, your website just because it exists. It's going to be Your own outreach that's going to drive people there and then it's going to be optimizing content on that website to, you know, give these search engines proper context to actually reference you. So technical aspects of optimizing your website. So all this is great in practice, but, you know, I actually do it. How do I apply this stuff? If you have, I'll start out with WordPress, because that's what I use. If you have WordPress, go ahead and download the Rank Math plugin. I'll see if I can put this in the chat. Rank Math plugin for WordPress. Yeah, so if you have WordPress, use rank math plugin on there and it'll literally walk you through, step by step, how to optimize each page, each blog post, everything in there. And alternatively, if you have Squarespace, wix, webflow, any of the other all in one website builders, all of these, they're called all in one website builders because they have all these, all the, all of these tools built in already. So just follow all of their tutorials, all of their step by step walkthroughs on how to optimize your site for SEO. And don't just chalk it full of keywords. Don't just put 20 of the same keywords on a page and expect your page to rank for all of those. You would want to maybe start with a keyword and then add a bunch of supporting context around it, like add examples from your own life, add examples from your book and maybe link to other resources that you found helpful along the way in learning about all of this. So let me remove this because not talking about that anymore, it's getting confusing. And also the next piece. So utilize the SEO tools that already exist on your website builder or for WordPress use rank math. The next piece is going to be ensure your website speed is at least adequate. You don't want to have people waiting 10, 20 seconds for your homepage to load. And there's tools to, to see if your website is fast. I'm going to post this one right here. So this one. Pagespeed.web.dev you can go to that link or just Google Google pagespeed Insights. So what this is, is. It'll be, it'll just be. I'll show. Actually just pull it up. Google Page Speed Insights. So let me share my screen and show you guys what I'm looking at. Okay. All right, so this is a pagespeed insights page. So you just type in your URL right here. I'll type in book launchers,.com hit analyze and it'll run an analysis and it will, it will give you a core web vitals assessment. It'll tell you how fast like the first page loads. It'll tell you if it is, you know, if it's optimized for mobile and like how long people are waiting. And then it'll give you a list of errors that you could resolve on your website if there are any of like if the performance is really low. It'll also tell you how accessible your website is and tell you how accessible it is, how optimized it is for SEO, the speed for it and yeah, then what you can actually improve on there. So speed is really key. With that, the next piece is making sure it's optimized for mobile devices. If you can only view it on desktops, that's not really that helpful because 90% of all people who are searching online are just on their phones anyway. I'm sure everyone here is either maybe half the people here are on their phone already and just watching me here. So but this link right here, this Bing.com Webmaster Tools mobile friendliness, you can just go on Google or Bing and search mobile friendly website tool and something like this will pop up and it's the same deal as the other one. You just plug in your website's URL and it'll tell you if it's optimized for mobile or if it's. And it'll let you know what problems are arising, like maybe text is being cut off, maybe images aren't displaying properly or text is too small or it's too big. These are all things that factor into optimizing your website. So it's not only just the content on there. You have to make sure that your website is fast, it's optimized for all the different devices that people are browsing on. Because if you don't have those pieces in place, these search engines are not going to rank you on their site. Another piece too, another technical piece of advice is search engines and AI pull content not just from websites, not just from, you know, e commerce sites and Amazon and all that stuff. It pulls content from everywhere around the web. Social media, comments like communities, forums. So it's really important to be active in all of those places. So not only are you having conversations with people and building relationships, but you're also driving people back to your own site in a bunch of different places. And if you are trying to become a thought leader on a subject, you're trying to, you know, get the word out There about your book. It's great to be in all of those different places and maintain, you know, active social media profiles as well. So, you know, it's not enough to just add in a few keywords and call it a day. It's really just like you need the context around everything to actually drive all of the stuff home. And then the technical aspect has to work as well, has to be fast and has to be optimized for mobile devices. So I guess kind of going back to content too. Once you have all of those pieces, the key is to be specific. There's, like I said earlier, the information on almost any topic can be found out there in the world somewhere. But the way that these AI search engines are working is it's all very personalized like answers and people are having conversations with it and trying to drill, drill down into the nitty gritty details. And if you have an optimized website that provides specific answers to these questions and like you offer a solution like your book has all of the answers to everything that this person is asking for. These very smart AI bots are going to be able to recommend that because you already have the, you already done the homework, you've optimized your site and you have great content on there where people can get value from. Yeah. So you know, all of these should drive people to your book and that has all of these answers. Like obviously getting people to your website will, will naturally drive people to where your book is hosted as well because you should have all of the links to your book on there. And yeah, people won't really find you unless you're sharing this information online. Don't, don't just gatekeep the, make sure to let the word, get the word out there. You know, share your wisdom with the world, let people know about your personal experiences and just be authentic when you are reaching out to people about this. So you know, share your expertise, share your personal experiences, be authentic, be honest. Don't just have AI write everything and then post it out there like write it in your own voice, do all of those homework pieces and these AI search engines will be able to showcase your work to recommend you to others. And yeah, it's marketing is really all about building relationships. You know, if you want to get more sales for your book, if you want to become a keynote speaker, if you want to be a consultant, coach, etc. Etc. In the digital world, you need a website and you are putting content out on that website and you're making sure that content resonates with People and people are getting tremendous value from being there. And how do people find you? They find you through these search engines. So again, I kind of covered a lot of different things here, but it's really what it all comes down to. If I could simplify all of this, like what it boils down to is just sharing your expertise, being authentic and sharing your expertise, making it personable, sharing a personal antidote, sharing how you came to this realization or what you know, what you read, what you experienced to then learn this and why you put it into a book. Like all of those pieces matter and all those people, all those pieces are being considered when search engines are trying to rank you online so you don't have to overthink it. Just, just put some quality over quantity all day long. So that's really kind of the name of the game now. And those are the rules that we're all kind of play by moving forward. And if you, if you already have a website and you've been putting content out there for a while and you know, you've done all of the great SEO pieces that we've been telling you to do or other people on YouTube been telling you to do for a long time, you're not at a total loss. You don't have to go back and redo everything. That just adds additional credibility to what you've already been working on. Just from here on out, going forward, make sure that you are giving those. I, I think, you know, sharing the content, linking it to a personal experience or, and then, you know, showing that you are the authoritative figure in this space. And that's how you're going to gain trust from these search engines, how you're going to gain trust from your readership and your, you know, future readers as they come along and find you. So that's about it. I'm going to check for comments here. If anybody does have any questions about anything I talked about today, go ahead and drop it in the chat. And I'm happy to hang around for a couple minutes and answer some questions, but anybody who came in here late, this is recorded and it's added into our YouTube channel. You can just go to Bookawatchers TV and it's. Or just our YouTube channel and go to the live section and you can see all of our previous lives, they'll always be there. And whenever we upload new ones, they'll always be there as well. You can see the scheduled ones coming out. Like, I have another one next Friday for people who don't have author websites yet. Okay, so Gary said, I see it like a flashlight in the dark. The bigger the light, the easier it is to see the thing holding it. Yeah, that's true. I'm not sure I get the reference entirely, but yeah, it sounds kind of something like all the World Wide Web, there's so much information out there. I think this is kind of what Gary's getting at is there's so much information out there. These AI search engines, all they're trying to do is link information to personalized requests for people searching on the platform. So if your website is optimized and has a lot of great content on there, that flashlight is going to be able to find you. Cool. Well, I've been talking for a while, but if nobody else has any other questions, definitely go and check out those tools that I linked on here. Plug in your go to Google PageSpeed Insights or this link right here and run a test on your website. See how optimized it is for SEO, for accessibility, for speed, and any other issues. And then this tool right here will show you if your website is optimized for mobile devices. So at the very basic level, I would definitely go check those out first. If you have any issues with those, try and resolve those fast as you can. And then, you know, there's also tools out there if you want to get really serious about it, like SEMrush. SEMrush. So it's called Semrush. And this is a tool that we actually use, and it's really useful and it goes super in depth into your websites. It'll run a whole audit for your website and they have dozens of tools in there to help you use it. And then also we have our marketing software. It's called Author Launch Kit. You can check it out here. Okay. And what this is, it's a book marketing software just designed to take the guesswork out of book marketing completely. So instead of just searching on Google, like, what should I be doing to market my book? I have this, this, and this. What should I be doing next? It just saves you all the hassle of doing that. We've been marketing books for over six years now, and we worked with over 800 authors. So we basically compiled together a software that is a roadmap showing you everything that you should be doing to market your book right now. Whether you're in pre sale, post launch, you have 10 books out, you have two books or you're working on your first. It applies to everybody in there. We're going to be rolling out updates, you know every. So every few months to actually improve this. Keep up with the new AI improvements as they. As they pop out. And yeah, it's. It's an exciting tool. Go check it out. You can buy a lifetime license or pay yearly, and there's a lot of great tools in there that will help you market your book. But it doesn't look like anybody else has any questions, so I'll end it now. Thank you, everybody, for showing up. I. I appreciate it. And we'll see you all next Friday, where I'll be talking about actually building an author website from scratch. And it's going to be really easy. We're having a guest speaker come on and show us this great tool that will help you build a website in just a few minutes. Cool. Thank you all so much. Appreciate you being here. See ya.