SEO Has Changed: What Authors Must Do Now to Be Discovered
Shane from Book Launchers explains how AI has reshaped search: AI now answers questions directly, so your author site must be fast, structured, and prove expertise through topic clusters and schema markup. Without these changes, AI won't cite you or surface your work.
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Foreign. Hello everyone. Welcome to our book launchers YouTube channel. Thank you so much for your patience. I know there are 11 of you here, so we had a fun little misunderstanding with some of our calendars. So I apologize for this confusion. But let me actually, I hear an echo going on. There we go. So what we are going to do is I am going to be giving you a preview of a sort of training that we do in our Author Business Accelerator because it was literally earlier today on this exact topic. So what is that topic? It is SEO has changed what authors must do now to be discovered. And we had Shane, who is our head of digital marketing and strategy, we are lead up that training. So what I'm going to do is we actually have this training recorded. It is in our Author Business Accelerator platform through school. So if you're not a part of that, I will post that link in the chat. But what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to play that recording for you so that you guys who were so kind to be here live can still get some value. Because this is a recording from earlier today. Shane is not here right now to talk about it, but what I will be doing is I will be hanging out in the background during this and if you guys have questions regarding this specific topic, what I am going to do is I will be collecting those questions just like I would on a normal live. Now what I will be doing though is I will be collecting them and then bringing them back to the team and we will get you guys those answers in the future. So they might actually be covered during the training because Shane did a nice long training. It's just over 50 minutes. So it might be answered during the training. But that way if you guys do have a question about something that is not covered, we will be sure to be sure to get that answered for you. So we do have some people here live. I saw someone say that this was their first YouTube live, so not normally like this. So I appreciate you still sticking around, but I would love to hear where you guys are watching from before I dive into this recording. So we've got Mary Kay from Toronto, Canada. We have Kevin hall from New York. Laura. I don't think it said Laura. Where? Oh, you're from Massachusetts. Perfect. We got Gary Anderson from Utah. So thank you guys so much for being here and for sticking around even though we had some technical difficulties. You guys are our true YouTube besties. So you know what, I think that there should be an extra special prize for those who are here and who have said hello. So before I dive into this recording, I am going to have the random name picker choose a winner. So please take a moment to say hello in the chat. Right now, if you're watching live, we've got 13 people here live. Let me know. You can just say hello if you want to say where you're watching from. I would love to hear, but that way your name could be entered to win. And what we are going to do is I am needing to order some new book launcher swag. So some of the swag that I have left is I do have a. If you're not familiar with our author launch kit, that is our marketing software. I do have a mug for our author launch kit. And so that is what the prize will be unless you are outside of the U.S. if you are outside the U.S. then we will have to figure out a different prize for you. So we will have to communicate via email to figure that out. And Perfect. I'm seeing more comments come in. Hello, Tony. Yet I hope that's how you pronounce your name. From Texas. Natasha from Pennsylvania. Prince. Hello to you, Master Kai. Perfect. Oh, from Ghana, West Africa. Very cool. Okay, well, let me get this giveaway tool pulled up. And you know what, if this is your first YouTube Live, which, Laura, I know you said it was, I didn't officially introduce myself because I'm on all of these and I assume you guys know who I am. I am Angela, the head of operations here at Book Launchers. I do usually hide behind the scenes with things, but I am the keeper of all of our YouTube or I should say Book launchers swag. So I deliver all of the prizes that our winners get. So that gave you guys a chance to get a few more things in there. Hello. Timothy from Australia, David from Virginia. So great to have so many people here. 17 people watching live. Even though we started late and had technical difficulties. You guys are fantastic. So, so let me get this going and I will share screen so that way you guys know that I am being truthful with who I say the winner is. So let me get this sharing right over here. Giveaway tool. Okay, perfect. So let's see who our prize winner is. We've got 12 people. Of course my name will pop up in there because I am book Launchers, but I can't win the prizes. Or I mean, I could, I already have them, but you know, it's more fun when someone else. Laura, how perfect being your first YouTube live. It was meant to be. How fantastic. Well, if you are located in the U.S. where did you say you were from? I think it was Massachusetts. So you can win our Author Launch Kit mug. Yay, Laura. So, instructions to claim your prize because I don't know where to send it, please send me an email and at team T E A M book launchers.com let me know your mailing address and I will get this mug put into the mail for you. Congrats, Laura. That is awesome. Okay, well, let me stop sharing this. I am going to get this recording pulled up and again, I'm going to be off screen. So that way you guys can see the entirety of this recording. But if you have questions, please do feel free to put them in the chat because again, I will be saving those for later. So let me just make sure that I can fully pull this up, because I don't want it to. I want to make sure it's fully downloaded to my computer. So that way you guys can watch it in its entirety. So perfect. Okay, here we go. I'm going to share screen guys. I will be in the background and I might be in the chat just a little bit. But here is the recording from a preview of the training that we have, the types of trainings that we have in our author business accelerator. And I will pull that link for our author business accelerator community. If you are not a part, I'll post that into the chat. It is a great community centered around marketing your book. So let me get the screen sharing and we are going to make magic happen. Oh, I could have done it through this. So that's different. I've never shared a video this way before. Uh, let's try it this way. I think this.
Yeah. Just so everyone knows this is recorded. So if you can't stay for the whole duration, totally fine. I am going to do a Q and A at the end. That's going to dive into some specifics. If you'd like. If you'd like to stick around for that, just hang out. And it should be about like 20, 30 minutes of this. So this presentation is all going to be about search engine optimization strategies for nonfiction authors specifically. Specifically. So if you have an existing website, you've tried content marketing, you have tried optimizing your website following all, like, the checklists that all the website builders tell you to do, and you're still not seeing results. I think you're going to get some value from this. And also we're going to dive into what changed in the world of SEO, like, with AI search now being like, the default search option. So obviously SEO is crucial for non fiction authors, just like small businesses, just like any other type of author, to enhance the visibility online and connect with their target audience effectively. SEO is what allows you to rank organically in AI searches and on Google searches, which are kind of just going away at this point. But when you optimize your websites and your social media channels for SEO for search engine optimization, you are making sure you're communicating to these search engines who you are, why you're the expert in your field. And when the search engines are able to identify who you are and really grasp all the content on your website and be able to answer people's questions very quickly, that's how people are going to be able to find you organically without having to pay for that traffic. So today I'm going to go over what has changed in search in the last year, what it means for author sites. And I put together like four pillars for authors. There's more things that you could consider. But I think like as of right now, some important things to go over, I put them just in four categories for everyone. So it's just a little bit easier digest to, easier to digest all of this information. AI workflows that you can actually use to kind of implement these strategies right away. And then like a 90 day plan with a template and a checklist to follow to do all of these things. Plus we'll have some FAQs at the end and Q&As as well. So what has changed in search and like what does AI search mean? Like I said, AI answers are now a default behavior on Google searches. Like whenever you actually go to search anything, the first, usually the first thing that pops up as long as there's information out there on the subject is that AI overview at the top on Google. And now a lot of people are just using ChatGPT to answer their questions. They're using Perplexity, they're using Gemini AI, they're using grok, they're using Claude to get the answers to their questions because they're giving, because now instead of like looking through a Google search results page with a bunch of different options to click and read on, now the AI overview gives you a specific answer to your question. So it's just more valuable to the user. And now as a business owner or as an author, you are now trying to appear on those AI recommended searches. So another thing that Google did is they cracked down on the quality of the content that is, that is going out there. So they have spam policies that, that are targeting scaled AI content. Meaning if you're just pumping out AI generated content onto your website without any sort of human interaction with it at all, you can actually be targeted as spam. So they're monitoring things like that, which is important to know. So it's and also like site reputation abuse. So if you are just you know, pulling information off a popular site or pulling information off a best selling author's website and just repurposing it for your own, you know they would mark that as spam. If you're just using AI to rewrite that content, they're going to mark that as spam. So they're cracking down on the quality of this information. So it's not about quantity, it's more about quality when it comes to posting content content on your websites and your social media. As far as page experience, these are, these acronyms, I wouldn't worry too much about them. But it's basically what this means is the speed of your website. Your website needs to be fast. A good easy way to check to see if your website is fast and if it's like hitting all the thresholds. The largest contentful paint, like largest contentful paint means like that first image that shows up whenever your website loads. So you want that to load in under you know, two seconds, probably maximum. And especially it's got to be fast on mobile devices too. So you can just go to, you can just Google, Google Page Speed insights and type in your URL. It'll run a speed test and it'll tell you what needs to be fixed. Um, and you know, you can either implement the changes yourself or hire a web developer on like Fiverr or Upwork to, to, to change all of those things for you. Okay, so that's kind of what's changed they're cracking down on. So just to summarize, they're cracking down on the content being generated. They it's not just about quantity, it's about quality content that's very rich and answers people's questions specifically and then just make sure your website is fast. And yeah, just know that your most websites now are just ranking in AI searches rather than actual Google searches. And what this means for authors is that you can expect more zero click answers on generic queries. What that means is you're not, people aren't clicking on things anymore. They're just reading the AI overview and then going about their day. If they want to dive deeper into a subject, they will click on it. But expect that you're going to get more of these Zero click answers. So if you provide lots of answers on your website, if you provide lots of rich content on your website, you rank more in these AI searches which gives you more opportunities to actually rank organically. Your site must, this is probably the most important part, especially if you're just like building the foundations of your platform or if you're, you know, you're looking to organize your content. Your existing content is that you must, your site must prove who you are. And you know, it's called an entity that's like the, the search engines need to be able to crawl your site and understand who you are, what you're about, what problem you solve, how they can connect you with, with people asking questions online. So they, you need to use A E A T signal. So experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust. Trustworthiness. So you need to showcase all of these things on your website. What your experience is, what you're an expert in, your authoritativeness, you know, how, why you're the person to go to and trustworthiness, like why are people able to trust you? So if you're able to articulate all those things on your site, you know you have better chances of ranking on these AI searches. And then structured data and fast UX basically UX is user experience. So make sure your website is structured, I'll show you that in just a second. The, what structured data is. And then you make sure that your user experience is smooth, cohesive and just easy to navigate around. And that will allow the AI summaries to be able to read your website fast. Because when you look up something on any AI or any Google nowadays, they give you an answer in a few seconds. So those bots need to be to, able to crawl your website quickly. So it's great to follow Google's like structured data rules. This is kind of like a technical aspect. You know this, this is just, but, but it's worth covering because this is how Google is reading websites. This is how AI is reading websites. They are looking for structured data which is things like frequently asked questions. You see that they appear in this like accordion style thing. Everybody's seen it in the Google SE results and it keeps expanding and expanding, expanding as you open these questions because it's just giving you more and more answers to dive into the topic that you're looking for. Image metadata. I don't know if I can zoom in here, but whenever you look up like a Google image, right it shows the image and then it shows the title of the image down below and then some other recommended images There like the AI can read photos now. However, these AI search engines still need to be able to decipher what this image is. So if you're descriptive with the images on your website, these search engines can understand more about what this content is about and why this picture is relevant here. And it just gives you another opportunity to rank there. So more structured data. So frequently asked questions, image metadata, your products or your book. Make sure that it has these like elements to it on, on your site. Like have the, have the title, have a description of the book, have any reviews that are available on there, the pricing, your ISBN 13 number. Like all of those things are great to have in there so that your, these search engines can, can decipher what this product is on your website and then reviews. Obviously you know where the review exists, what the rating was and you know this is just so it's just the structured like if you just have all this information scattered around your website and little text blurbs, you know, it just won't be able to read it as well. But when you structure it like how Google's rules are, it makes it faster to read. Same thing with video too. If you want to get really detailed with it. You show obviously the thumbnail title description and then you can even divide up the sections of the video. Like if, if you're doing five, ten minute long videos, break it down and like you know, in this, these two minutes I talk about this and these two minutes I talk about this. So again, more of a technical piece, but I think it's just worth considering just so you understand what these search engines are looking for as far as the SEO pillars for authors, I figured that these are probably four of like the most important things to cover in this call here. That would be really great for you guys to know. So entity and brand foundations, book and product pages, nonfiction content strategy and AI search optimization. I'm just going to go into each one just to explain a little bit more about what it is. So like I said earlier, you want to make your site the entity home for you and your books. You as the author are the entity. Or if you're just doing book focused content, your book is the entity. So make your site, you know, the Wikipedia for your book, the Wikipedia for you. Like have all the information for all these search engines to decipher and for people to find all the information they need to make a purchase decision or sign up to your newsletter. Like all the information should be on there. It should be detailed and clear, clearly explained. You want to have a Robust author page with a headshot, bio, credentials, awards, press, speaking topics and a contact form on there as well. Like, like any, any sort of credibility that you can establish on there. That's that authoritativeness like that these AI search engines are looking for. Like why are you a credible source for this information? And how can you like explain, you know, with, with your own personal stories and your own expertise that you, that AI should be ranking your website for this. On your author page and on your book pages, make sure that you are linking to your Amazon author page, your Goodreads page, YouTube, LinkedIn, Wikipedia. If you have a Wikipedia page, which Wikipedia ranks extremely well on search engines and on AI. So if you don't already have one, it might be worth getting a Wikipedia page for your author, for you as an author. If you have a podcast profile, Spotify literally anything, put links to all of that on there so that these search engines can see that your website is the home base for all of these pieces and that it will now when people look you up, they will refer to your website for your information. Consistent name usage across site. You know, make sure that your name is prevalent all over the site or your book. Again if it's just book focused content, do that all over the site and make sure that your book title, subtitles and isbns are all uniform like book title, subtitle description, ISBN, like so that it just, that's that that structured data so that it can read it easily. And if you like, don't switch the order of those things as you go throughout the site. Make sure that all stays the same. Also a good idea to publish media press page and like add your Author bio, photos, speaker, one sheet, media kit, PDFs, all that kind of stuff. Again, it's just establishing that credibility, that authoritativeness so that these search engines and people can trust the information you're putting out there. Book and product pages make every book a high intent landing page. This is extremely important. You want to put one book per page. You can have a page that has multiple books on it, like your entire archive of books, if you have a bunch of them. But I would highly recommend doing one page per book and then you know, have these elements on there, what the hook of the book is, what you're promising readers. Table of contents is a great idea to put on there, what three to five bullet points. What are the benefits of reading the book? Social proof, have reviews like embed those right from Amazon, what formats it's available in. Ebook, paperback, hardcover, audiobook, retailer. Links to all of these different places or just a universal book link if you got it. And then an email opt in is a good option as well. So on these pages for the book it's not enough just to put the book and like the schema, markup, title, title, subtitle, ISBN, you need to put all the information on that page necessary for somebody to make a purchase decision because that gives more context for these search engines to rank you. Also a good idea to add a sample chapter media experts as well. So non fiction content strategy. This is like a content strategy just means putting content onto your website so that AI search engines or just search engines in general can have the proper information to establish you as a credible source. So it can rank you on search engines. And the real goal here is just totally own the problems that your book solves. Be the expert in everything about your book because your book probably helps a wide array of people. So there is, there's got to be multiple different ways for you to write and to write about different topics that are all around the same niche. That shows how you are the person to solve this problem. So what we would call them in the SEO world is like topic clusters. So a cluster of different keyword topics that you can use to create content on your website. So these, these words here, three to five P pillars of 2000 words and six to eight supporting posts each. What that means is a content pillar is like a category. So if you know, if you have a book on a specific subject you can have multiple categories within that subject. And then a pillar page shows is like a very, very detailed like let's see you go to like a, one of those nerd wallet or, or like like a HubSpot article that, that has the top 10 tools for social media scheduling, right? Like it, it'll, it'll, that is like a pillar page. It'll, it'll give 10 full examples of tools that you can use with, with links to all of them with links to other on their own website that go into detail on why like each feature of these schedulers is important and you know who they're for. Use cases for these, all of these things, all of like the links inside of this pillar page are all the supporting posts. So the pillar is like the overarching topic but then you write all of these other supporting posts off of it and then it's like this structured kind of pyramid. Like it starts at the top with this one topic and then it branches out so it gives all the supporting information but it all leads back to the source of like what this person's answer might have been. So it allows searchers to dive deeper into the subject. But now it, now it's allowing AI to dive deeper into the subject because you have all that information that was kind of a lot, I hope that was easy to understand. I'm happy to answer questions about it a little after. But basically you need support and context to explain that you are the, you know, you are the person to solve the problem that your book is about. It's great to have the answer to any question. Like anytime you add content to your website, anytime you add a blog post, answer it in the first two to four sentences of the of the blog post. And then you know, continue down with bullet points, continue down with headings, subtitles, all that stuff and add original insights with case studies, frameworks, worksheets, checklists, original originally created content that just further establishes you as a credible source and establishes you for, you know, original information. Add many frequently asked questions in the article as well publish firsthand experience to align with perspectives and hidden gems, all that kind of stuff. So again, it's not quantity, it's quality. Like human generated content is still very, very relevant today. If not so, if not more so. And the last pillar is be cited and summarized by AI and win the click. Anyway, so you want to be in those AI summaries and you want to also encourage people to click on the little link, the little source link or scroll down and actually find your website on there. And to do that you have, you'll have clear answer sessions on your websites, scannable headings, schema, outbound citations to authoritative sources. Basically what that means is that you have just very organized content on your website and it's not just jumbled in there. And you provide like whenever you quote a statistic, whenever you reference a quote or reference a book, link out to those resources that where you found that information because you know that just establishes you as credible. Because it's like here's where I found that information and this is like my, I'm deciphering that information into my, my post here my website add too long didn't read summaries and step by step blocks including evidence. So tldr too long didn't read just like a summary at the top that so that's that scannable. That's like the ability to just hop on your website and understand what it's going to be about in the first few seconds. And then if they want to dive deeper, they can continue reading along and then have step by step Instructions on how to do a certain thing and include evidence, data, images, quotes like, like again that original content piece. And yeah, avoid scaled AI spam edit. Like whenever you have a blog, write AI. Whenever you have an AI, write a blog for you. Make sure you edit that pretty heavily. And like add little human elements in there, add personal experiences, and that's really what's going to help you rank on there. Okay, so the actual AI workflows to implement these things. I actually have like suggested prompts at the end that you can ask AI to do these things for you, but you want to generate a keyword cluster. So before AI happened, the way that we ranked on search engines was ranking for keywords. You found a specific keyword that people would search for and then you built your content around that. It's kind of similar, but now it's about getting clusters of keywords and ranking for many keywords now because there's just more and more information out there than ever and you want to be able to hit these topics from many different angles because people are asking very specific questions. And now AI is able to summarize, you know, a lot of information at once and give that person a very personalized answer. So if your website, you know, answers all these different angles, then you can actually rank organically for these things. And again, briefs to drafts. Use AI to assemble the outlines of.
Your, of your blogs.
Use it to write a blog, but just make sure you add the human element in there. Add frequently asked questions that you typically get about a subject. Add your, your own personal stories, your own data, your own screenshots, that kind of thing. Also, quick tip too, like after you write a blog post, you can just post it in AI and say, you know, analyze this and see if there's any like, external links. I can link to any resources that I can provide here for, for source information. And then also include links inside of your own website too. Internal links is a link from your website just to another page on your website. External links is from your website to a different site. SEO is like, you want to optimize for both of those things. Um, you want to just, you don't want to just have a page on your website or a blog on your website to be a dead end. You don't want to have people get there and then have nowhere to go afterwards. You want to continue providing them opportunities to go and navigate around for local SEO. Like if you're just trying to rank locally, you know, in your, in your town, in your state, in your county, or if you're optimizing for speaking as well. You would want to create a speaking page and include what you talk about. What are your.
What are the topics.
That you go over? What's the name of some of your presentations? Do you have like a detailed like bullet points of things that you go over in those talks? What are you promising audience members that they're going to get out of this talk? And like what is the outcome of it? What do you have a speaker reel? Do you have any testimonials that you can show in there? It'd be great to like, if you've had post events, include where that event was, what time it was, what the date was, what the venue, you know, who the organizer was with, add a ticket, URL, all of these things, like all the information that you can put on there just gives more information for these search engines to rank you for. And if you teach locally, regionally, you can consider a Google business profile, like an author, speaker or coach. So, so Google can actually rank you as like one of those Google business things that has reviews, that has pictures, that has a phone number, email, website, all that stuff. That'd be a good idea if you're trying to rank locally in your area. And then for email growth, this is, you know, I've given multiple presentations on lead magnets and email marketing, um, every high traffic page. So your homepage, blogs that get a lot of traffic, your book page probably is, have like a primary call to action, like a lead magnet or a, like a free, a freebie, a free download. You can put a sample chapter on there. Oh, I have lead magnet on there twice. Great. But make sure that these high traffic pages have an action to take on there so that, you know, like, okay, I have a thousand people that are going there. You know, I'm getting two to three email subscribers. So you know, it's just a numbers game at that point. So okay, we gotta keep driving people there. It's a good idea to capture intent in your book. Sessions and FAQ blocks, measure newsletter signups to store, to add carts. SEO should feel like your email list and then, yeah, so Search Engine optimization, it should feed into your email list. So organically it should feed into your email list and then from your email list. That's where you make the sale. Because now those people have established you as the authority and trust you already to be on your email list. So then it's at that point you reach out and say, hey, my book is available and you can buy it here. Okay, so if you were to take the next three months and implement all of these things, I would start out with the technical piece, lay the foundation. First, run a Google Page speed insights test. You can just Google pagespeed Insights and type in your URL and it'll tell you how fast your website loads on desktop and mobile. It'll tell you how long things take to load, where your problems are, any issues that are on your website, and it'll give you like little quick wins to actually implement. And if you're unsure of how to implement some of these things, ask ChatGPT, ask Google, or you can actually just go and hire somebody on Fiverr to just, you can send them the screenshot of the actual page speed insights analysis and then they'll go and implement all those things for you. You usually hire somebody for like 50 bucks, maybe $100 to speed up your website and fix all those technical issues. Then I would work on building your author page. Great book pages. Add product book schema in there, all of your pages, plan your keyword clusters, plan all of the different angles that you're going to be writing content around. Write two pillars, so two main top of the pyramid type content pieces and then write a few blog articles underneath to get started there. And then the last few weeks is to publish the remaining pillars. So you know, if you forgot what I said earlier, it was like four pillars.
So four pillars total.
So write the other two, the two top of the top of the pyramid content pieces and then, you know, add videos to these, add events to your site, add internal links to all of these individual pages, make sure that all of these blog pages link to each other, you know, and just keep people navigating around your site and things that you're going to track for success, like during all of these things, is how many organic sessions are you getting? Are they increasing? Are you getting more traffic to your website over time and are you getting more newsletter signups from this and is that ultimately resulting in more book sales? So those are three ways you can track success with these metrics. Even just more visits to your website show that you know you are getting ranked in these AI recommended searches and what you're doing. The effort that you're putting into is working for like a blog post. This is an example of a layout template here. So and by the way, I'm gonna put the download to this PDF into the school community so anybody can just download this afterwards. So starting at the very top with H1, heading 1, describe the problem that you're solved, that you're that you're solving and the outcome that your reader wants. Very clearly in one sentence it should tell what this blog post is going to be about. Then have the answer box in two to four sentences. Direct plain English solution. Like anybody can just read that answer box and not have to continue on. And then the body structure is the context why it matters. Step by step solution with screenshots or you know, if you, if it's not digital, you don't need screenshots but any sort of graph, any sort of just original content will do. Have an example case study mistakes on how to avoid this problem. Tools and template download if you have that available, that'd be a great place for your lead magnet. And then a mini frequently asked questions so you can tell it's pretty detailed but it has all the information for these search engines to rank you. And just for anybody browsing around, they have all the information they need to, you know, move on about their day. Common mistakes to avoid is publishing thin articles at no set at no at scale. And this is like AI generated articles like just saying chatgpt, write me a blog article and then doing copy paste send it out on your website. I would, I would avoid doing that ignoring imp. So it's slow interactions from heavy themes script but basically that means ignoring the speed of your website. Over relying on depreciated rich results as a strategy. So over relying on very commonly held beliefs or just like you don't need to put information on your website that is like just anybody can find that information anywhere. It's just like a general fact like you don't want to over rely on very very popular information that everybody already knows about. Like create original content. Not having your ISBN 13s on there and not having a book page for each book and then no internal links from new posts to book pages. Some frequently asked questions that I figured people are going to be like considering I'm going to do a. Oh yeah, we're at 36 minutes so I'm about to wrap it up and we can do questions after this. But is AI written content okay? Yes, totally. I would definitely advise writing content with AI. You know, saves you a lot of time, prevents you from having a blank space. But just make sure you edit it, add original content and just make it very content rich. How many blogs a month should you shoot for? 2 to 4 per month would be like a really strong way to expand the content on your website and then you can scale that over time. That's a lot over the course of a few months over the Course of a year, if you only sell on Amazon, your site should still. Or like you only sell on another miscellaneous site, your site should still own that narrative. Your site should clearly sell who you are, what your book is about. And you know that all of these principles that I just kind of talked about all still apply. And when will you see results from these things? Typically 36 months for steady growth. I've seen it faster, but yeah, usually takes some time for these things to implement. But yeah, it does take time for these things. Oh, prompt ideas. We don't have to go through all of these actually, but I'll still. I'll send this into the school community so that you have it, but these are things that you can actually copy and paste in the AI to kind of implement a lot of the things that I talked about today. And that is all. So thanks everybody for hanging in there. I know that was really like, content heavy, but.
Oh, I muted. Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for sticking with us for this recording. This is a preview of what we will do in our author business accelerator community, which if you're not a part of it, I would highly recommend it. I did post the link for it in the chat, but I can post it again just in case you joined a little bit later. I will grab that for you. And if you haven't seen, we have Shane joining us. He is our head of digital strategy. So he is actually here to answer some of the questions that have come in live in the chat. So hopefully you guys are still here or you catch it on the replay because Shane is very clearly an expert in this. So, Shane, anything that you wanted to say before we dive into questions?
Yeah.
Sorry I'm late, everybody.
That was a lot of information.
I went over some technical pieces that, I mean, I covered so much, so much stuff there and it's clear that AI kind of has changed the game with SEO.
A lot of.
A lot of things are still similar, but now these AI search engines have different filtering tools, have different spam filters, and are now looking for a specific type of structured content on your website. So I didn't want to offer a bunch of additional advice and, you know, dive into all the details of the content you should be creating and all the work that you should be putting in without having to address the technical aspects in the very beginning. Because if your website isn't set up to be optimized for search engines, then, you know, you're gonna do all that extra work and you're not actually going to yield the benefits of It So you want to make sure that your website is properly set up for those types of things. So that's why I kind of dove into all of those details. But I tried to do like an overview of everything. If anybody has more specific questions about their website or just specific questions about, you know, how to optimize their own sites, where they should get started, all of those things, drop your questions in the chat. I'm happy to hang around and answer all of those, trying to help everybody get started here. So it is a fast changing world we're living in. And you know, these are probably going to change and fluctuate in the future, all of these SEO rules, but really the foundational pieces of SEO still apply. So if you've been putting a lot of work into your website, a lot into your content, all of that stuff is still going to apply. It's just now you're gonna have to change your strategy just a little bit with your new stuff. And if you have the time, if you have the resources to do so, you can go ahead and update some of your older messaging and content as well to cater to these new search engines that everyone's using now.
Yeah, absolutely. Having that foundational knowledge is going to be key because other things might change, but that foundational knowledge will still be useful for you in the future. Okay, well, let me. I've only got three questions starred so far, so unless others come in, this might be a quick Q and A session. But I'll post this first one from Laura, which she asks, how do you get a Wikipedia page? I didn't realize that you can get it for yourself or your business.
I actually have never set one up myself. However, it's just something that we started.
Paying attention to because these AI tools are recommending Wikipedia pages pretty often. So if you're looking to build a brand around you as an author, it'd be a great idea to create one for yourself here. And I mean just quickly looking it.
Up here says you have to establish.
The subject's notability by proving it has received significant coverage in reliable third party sources. Then create a Wikipedia account to access the articles for creation process. So I'm sure there's a process that is available online like that in YouTube videos that'll walk you through it. I unfortunately don't have that information, but from what it looks like, you're obviously going to need content for that Wikipedia page. I don't think it's just a formality like you get it up there. I think if you've just Been in the space for a while, you've been building your brand and you have, you have a website, you have content out there, you have previous speaking engagements, you have a couple books out there. You know, it would be worth looking into that kind of thing if you're just at the beginning of your journey and you're just kind of getting started. Maybe focus on the other pieces first, focus on building your platform first and then branch out to Wikipedia. We just say that because we've noticed that Wikipedia is ranking very well with.
These search engines and there might be a Wikipedia page for how to get a Wikipedia page. Probably is a Wikipedia page for many things. Okay, Timothy asks, would you use Squarespace to build your website or would you hire an expert?
This, I mean, you could hire an.
Expert to build a Squarespace website. So it's not like really one or the other.
All of these website platforms out there.
In the world do like Squarespace, Wix, WordPress, GoDaddy, Hostgator, Webflow, they all do the same thing. They all get a website live for.
You on the web that you can.
Connect your custom domain, you can make all the edits to it.
My recommendation is if you worked with.
Squarespace before or you've already looked into Squarespace and you know, it seems like a viable option, I would just go.
Ahead and do it. What? Pick a tool that you're actually going.
To be comfortable going in there and editing yourself. Like if you're, if you're, unless you want to hire an expert to manage it for you, then I would hire an expert. Like if you don't, if you want to be more passive and you just want to have somebody else manage it, then yeah, hire an expert. But if you're looking to be more hands on, pick a tool that is going to work well for you, that you are going to be okay with editing and making changes to long term.
And Squarespace is a great option.
It's great for beginners.
And you can even, you know, you.
Can build a pretty advanced site on Squarespace. They, they load really fast, they're optimized for all screen sizes.
And I mean, my advice here is.
It'S not really one or the other. I would consider.
Do you want to be the one.
Updating this website or do you want somebody to do it for you? If it's the latter, hire somebody. If it's the former, then try out a couple different tools, figure out which one you like best and then move.
Forward with that one.
And it looks like he just said I had a Squarespace website and I got help to optimize it.
Amazing. Yeah, that's great. So I would just continue on working.
With the Squarespace site and just continue building on that. And.
If in the future you want.
To switch to a different platform, you want to hire an expert to do it, the expert would just transition everything for you. But if you're spending all the time in Squarespace, if that's what you're used to, I would just stick with that.
Yeah. And he says he likes it because it's top notch security.
Yeah, Squarespace is a great option.
And Kit, I don't know if she's asking about like Kit itself or Author Launch Kit. Did you mention Kit just now?
I didn't mention Kit, no. I think maybe she's just asking if it's. Yeah, Laura, maybe, maybe expand on that. If you want to know a little.
Bit more about Kit, that's the software that I'm most expert in as far as email marketing. I have most experience in that. So if you have any questions specific to it, let me know.
Yeah, put a little bit more context please, Laura. Okay, another question also actually from Laura. Like long tail keywords versus short one word keywords.
So that's, that's what's changing about AI.
Search is it's not really, I don't.
Want to say it's not important to focus on keywords. Like what I mentioned in the presentation.
Was to create keyword clusters to, to create many pieces of content around a number of different keywords. What AI, what AI search engines are looking for is very rich content that you have multiple different angles on. So instead of just optimizing for a single keyword like previously the way Google search was, you optimize for a specific keyword, you write a whole blog post all centered around that one keyword. And that's how you would eventually rank on higher pages inside of Google. But now it's all about the context around these keywords.
Like people are asking more and more.
Specific questions and AI is now able to provide answers to those very specific questions faster and just better, frankly than, you know, searching for a topic in Google and then looking through all the search results, reading a couple of blogs, getting all that information, like people don't.
Want to do that anymore.
That's how search has changed. People are getting personalized answers to their questions with context around it. So pick a, you know, pick multiple keywords to optimize for on your website and then, you know, you're, you're basically hitting your topic, your expertise, your niche from different angles. And that establishes your credibility and your trustworthiness online because you have lots of content on like one specific topic, hitting it from multiple angles. So that additional context, that additional information and content around your niche subject is what is going to allow you to rank on AI search results, because it needs that additional context to put together these really personalized answers. If you have all this great info on your site, you want to be able to answer all these questions with frequently asked questions on your pages, with supporting text, with external links that go away from your site, with internal links that go to different resources on your site. So yeah, it's just more content is better rather than just picking keywords.
Perfect, thanks. Okay, Donsa, I hope I'm pronouncing your name correctly, says setting up each of my blog pages, info boxes on my web page. Should I have one box for the question, the next box, the answer?
No. So the info box at the very.
Top of each blog page is basically a TLDR summary, a too long didn't read summary.
So what you're doing is you're writing.
An entire blog post with personal experience and examples and case studies, all that kind of stuff. But at the very, very top, you have the title, you have the meta description, all that stuff, the image maybe, and then like an answer box all in one box with. With what that article is. In a nutshell, how can somebody just.
Get what this article is trying to.
Say in just a couple sentences? That's what that answer box is at the top. And that helps AI find an answer a lot faster for you.
And then if anybody wants to dive.
Deeper into that subject, they can click on the Source provided in ChatGPT or Perplexity or Gemini, any of the other tools, and then actually navigate to your site and learn more.
Sorry, I didn't realize I was muted. Another question from Donsa. Do you have any info on base 44, which is voice to web page and creating your web page?
That sounds like a pretty new tool. I've never heard of that before. I'm going to look it up. So build apps with AI in minutes.
It sounds like you just do voice to web page. You just describe what your page is.
Going to look like and then build it. That sounds like a. I'm looking at it right now. It seems like it's like an AI.
Website builder type of deal.
I don't have any experience with it. No, sorry. Dansa.
Interesting. Well, thanks for putting a new, a potential new tool in our toolkit. That's pretty cool. Okay, sorry. It looks like Laura. Okay, so for Kit, I think she was asking about is it good for building a web page?
Yeah, yeah, you can build a webpage on Kit really easily. Actually they just call them landing pages because it's just one page.
You can't actually build like a multi site website. But yeah, on Kit you can create multiple landing pages, all with their own individual links, with their own individual signup boxes. And also you can put products on there. You can, you can sell your books directly on Kit as well.
The only limitation is that you have.
To work within their templates unless you know how to code and you can manipulate everything in there.
But they have a lot of great.
Templates to work with and you just have to work within the constraints of that, which to some people that's actually easier and relief because you don't have to do a lot of design work. You just change the colors, fonts and pictures and then you're ready to go.
Cool. Okay, and I think the last question to come in, so we'll wrap up in just a minute, was about the, I think the keyword. So she sent a follow up question of I am quite new. So not like a niche down type topic, but more of an umbrella topic instead.
Yeah, it's kind of a combo of both, I guess.
So you do still want to stay niche down.
You don't want to just write about everything.
The idea is to cover everything in your niche, brainstorm lots of different ways that somebody could possibly ask questions about your niche. And you can use ChatGPT to help you with this. You can, you know, go to ChatGPT and say, you know, I am writing blogs about this niche. Here's my ideal readers. What are some potential questions that they would be asking or searching for on the web? And you know, make that granular for me so I can see what type of blog posts I could be writing. So that could give you a kickstart into how to make that happen. So it's not really like an umbrella per se, it's just you're expanding on specific content again. You're trying to hit it from multiple different angles. You're trying to just provide all that supporting context to show that you are a credible source for this information. You are providing external sources for people to go and dive deeper into the subject. You have more information on your website that is all relevant to this. So you know, if you say consistent with that content posting, you're going to get recommended on these AI search channels. Assuming that your website is set up with the Proper schema markup and structured data so that they can easily read this information off your site.
Cool. All right, well, I think that was the last question. Thank you for hopping on Live Shane to answer some of these. I did say this at the beginning, but this was a training that Shane did earlier today in our exclusive author business accelerator community. I posted the link a couple times in the chat, but it's just skool spelled with a K S, k o o l.com forward slash author business. So this is really key. If you're pre launch or post launch, you've got questions you want access to our awesome team members like Shane, our marketing experts. And there are trainings, there's office hours, there's that community aspect which we also have in our free school community. But this is a great example and kind of impromptu example of what you would actually get in that community. So we'd love to see you guys in there. If you've got questions, you can email me with any questionsametbooklaunchers.com But I think that's it. We are right about at an hour. So, Shane, any last thoughts before we say goodbye to everyone?
No, that's all. It's. It's a technical process. There's a lot of work that can go into it. But the good news is is that if you've already been putting a lot.
Of work in your SEO, all of that work is still going to bear fruit eventually. It's just a matter of expanding on that. And I think that's the main message here and what's changed and how you can adjust your strategy going forward. So hopefully get, hopefully everyone got a.
Lot of benefits out of this and thank you all for sticking around.
Sorry again, we were late, but tune in again for another one.
Yeah, have a great week you guys. And if you joined in late, I did post the presentation URL into the channel as well because there was so much content that Shane went over. So you can scroll back and find it there. But thank you guys for sticking around. Hope you found some value in this and we'll see you around, guys. Bye everyone.
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