Episode 20 Before It's Too Late...Please Do This

I just wanted to jump in today and record what I think is a brief but very important episode of the Local Voice. And I call it, I hope it's not too late. And what I mean by that is there this whole push with AI and AI search and specifically for local businesses and how that is impacting them or could impact them. And so I wanted to bring up some, some data that is very, very fresh and, and share it with you. My name is Jeff Harrison. I'm a company called Swing Point Media. I'm the founder and CEO of the company. We've been around since, well, since 2011. And you know, I received, I'm going to share a page here that I received from a gentleman who works for me. He handles our, our, all of our SEO and as you can see it came in this morning at 8:27 and said how are you? And it says it, you know, there's a little bit of a blurb there. But he says it's really very, very depressing for SEO specialists that already two months running but this spam update is not finished yet. I'm really very concerned for the update. Are all our var websites still okay for performance? And I said but there are a few. And then he said but there are a few of the websites. Organic traffics are totally crushed in this update Google removed number +100 versions of from features. And he says he'll give me his regular report because it happens on Monday. This is Monday morning. So I said okay. We are also continuing to update more and more of our content to include its ability to rank for AI searches as well. I mentioned this day many months ago when the search traffic from AEO would begin to be a major factor in ranking. Many thought I was crazy. But we are seeing our sight remain, our sights remain as should have been sites remain solid because we took action before this begins to happen. So in other words, we didn't try to close the gate after the horses were trying to escape from the corral. We said hey, let's look at this. And I think, you know, it's, it's the whole thing I try to work on is the premise of the Wayne Gretzky don't skate to where the puck is. Skate to where the puck is going. And so throughout this I want to share some, some things that I think are relevant. So I'll be bringing up different live pieces to show what I feel is relevant to local businesses. The reason I, I really point out local businesses as being, I would say most vulnerable but also with the highest rate of success is because, let's face it, as local business owners, we're entrenched in running our business. And sometimes all this AI stuff that's happening in the background or on the front page of the news, we don't get involved in because we're hiring, we're training, we're getting new clients, all that kind of stuff, and we kind of miss what this is doing to our business. So, on this next slide, I want to show you something that I think is. Is very important, and it's relative to what or it's relevant to what I just showed you. So this is a quote that I saw that I thought was. I thought was relevant to this. It says, whether you call it geo, aio, or SEO, one thing hasn't changed. Visibility is everything. In today's world of AI search. It's not just about being f found, it's about being selected. And then it starts with content. Traditional SEO fundamentals still matter. Now, the reason I bring that up is because, you know, there's not a day that goes by that I don't see some kind of an article or some kind of a video or a post on social that says SEO is dead. And that's not true. It's just one of those things that if you had a boat and, and used to only have a sail on it, and, and you're providing an engine, you don't get rid of the boat, you install the engine. Well, in essence, that's what SEO and GEO are doing. They're marrying the two. So geo, or aeo, if you will, I used to call, I referred to it, you know, seven or eight months ago as aio. And it is actually making SEO even more important or better. But here's the thing, and this is, this is probably the most important part I want you to get out of. Almost all of this podcast today is.

The engines that search with the large language models like Chat GPT, now with Atlas or Gemini, that type of thing, they don't see your website the same as a Google search engine. When that happens, it doesn't rank the things that you feel that were important in your regular website. So that means that you may not even show up in the conversations like in those AI overviews, or even if you go to Chat GPT and you're searching for something and it pulls it up and you're not there, it's because your site doesn't have the updates that are required for it to be able to read it. Because what happens in many of those, and I'M going to show you here in a picture in a second, where some websites actually have restrictions that these AI chatbots cannot search their web, their web traffic, or, excuse me, their website. So when that happens, it can't return a result. Over the weekend I was having some work done on my evaporative cooler and I said, well, let's just go to Chat GPT and ask the questions. And. And when we did, it had very little if almost no information on that topic about that business because that particular business is located in Phoenix and I'm in Southern California. It didn't have any information on there, meaning it won't rank well. And when we start relying more and more on ChatGPT as an example, you know, 800 million searches a week on them giving back the answer, an answer versus Google, and giving me a page of answers I have to sift through, well, that means a local business will be left out and they don't get into the conversation. And that's the big thing, as it says. And that starts with content. The content has to be created properly. So this next example I'm going to show you, it's an example of a website that I've used a tool to determine its rank, ability or searchability when it comes to aio.

So this is an example of a new client. And so what I did is I used a tool that allowed me to put in their website address and then determine, hey, how is it? Is it optimized for AI? And here's the thing I want to point out and make it really clear. It's not just it won't rank for AI very well, but it also is a clear indicator that it doesn't have very good SEO either. So the cool thing about this is like, you know, when we fix the AIO issue, probably nine times out of 10, we're also going to fix the SEO issue. And I'm going to show you a slide here in a second that proves that. And when this happens now, it's that saying of, you know, when the tide comes in, all boat rises. Well, when we fix this problem for this particular client, which we're working on now, we'll see that number rise and we'll also see their search traffic from Google go up. And that's an exciting time because these are things that can be done. And you can see here, it says technical score, 30 out of 50, structural score. This is the biggest thing right here. Most websites that are built like even with WordPress, and I'm guilty of it, I'm a believer in WordPress because it worked back when we, you know, pre, if you will, aeo. And so it doesn't really have the structure that, or I'm going to say, let's make it easy. It doesn't have the same language. So when that artificial intelligence comes onto the website, it doesn't understand what's on there. So it gives it a very poor score, the content score. Now this particular customer had no content, so whether it's SEO or AEO, it wouldn't matter. And then discovery score is, is 3 out of 10, meaning the chances of them showing up on the front page is pretty poor and showing up in an overview is even worse. So we look at this. This was kind of that first process. And by the way, this is not a tool I built. This is an independent tool that I know the, I know the, the person who coded it and manufactured or made it. And so I trust them very highly that it's a fair tool that we use. And so that gives me back the score. Now I said I wanted to show you an example of another client of what when we start working on this now, somebody's going to ask, well, when did you start working on this? Well, we became aware of it, or I became aware of it back in February and March. And I said, let's take action. And as I said in that very first slide, when I did this, a lot of people thought it was crazy. Like, oh, you know, this is whack. In fact, even when I would do what we call one on ones with other people that do what I do for long period of times, one gentleman out of Miami, I won't mention his name, but we had a conversation. I said, hey, what are you doing about this AEO or aio? And he said, you know, I've been doing this for 20 years. And he said, I've heard this. It's going to come and go. It's going to have no impact. I'm not doing anything different. I'm like, wow. That kind of, that kind of shocked me at first. It was like, wow, am I, am I, am I skating down the wrong lane? And then I thought, no, I'm not, because there's too much data stacking up that says we're going to take our phones and we're going to open up Chat GPT to do our search. And we see that now with chat, the atlas that Chad just released out as a, as a search tool or a search engine, I think it's going to make a big difference. So that started to surprise me. And there was not one of these one on one conversations I had with, with these digital marketing people.

Yeah, they refer themselves as digital marketing experts. I say I'm a practitioner, I'm constantly learning because every day is new. But I was really surprised with their, I don't want to say head in the sand, but really not taking any, not, not allowing this to have any weight in their decisions. And as I said at the very beginning, I hope it's not too late because here are people that local businesses, this other, this, this fellow out of Miami has been doing this for 20 years and has a tremendous number of clients that depend on him to make decisions and see around the corner, if you will, to help their businesses continue to succeed. Well, that's the responsibility I, as the CEO and founder of swingpoint Media that I take on. I'm like, I'm always looking, hey, is this the right path to go down? Is it a waste of time? How can we do this better? And let's make that shift. As an example, we have a product called, and this is not a pitch, just an example. We have a product called the Content Accelerator and we built it back in February and March of 2023 to help us automate how we create content. Now since then, if, if we did a version type of thing, if we were an open, a large language model, I don't know what it would be. It'd be like, you know, 9.7 and we've done a lot of updates. So every time the LLMs, the large language models, those chat GPT platforms, if you will, every time they update, then we go back and say, hey, do we need to tweak what we're doing? Making better images, doing the SEO better. In fact, adding the AEO element in there made a big difference. How it does us research on the front end and then adding agents to help it re examine the content that we make before it actually goes to our human optimizers, which is our project manager and she'll look at everything and then we have it posted. So this is one of those things where I started looking and say it is making a difference. We want to put this in there. So this next slide is. I want to show you, I want to show you an example of when we had a fairly new client come aboard and we started with not just improving their SEO but we also started doing their aeo. So let's look at that next. This is a client we put, I won't name the client but what we started with back in March. And I said, hey you know what, let's do this. That conversation I showed from the very beginning that I said, you know, let's get ahead of this. Let's skate to where the puck is going, not where it is. So back then we saw that that client had about an aver of 15,000. We use this with Google Analytics or Google Search Console to get this information and then we compile it. So at that point it had, it was being shown online. Now it's a local business. About 15,000, almost 16,000 times a month they were getting 93 clicks. And this is, it says this is, we were starting then its average Website traffic was 402. And you can see the very next month, the next 30 day period, we almost doubled that exposure. And then we started adding clicks because if it was being seen more there was a chance of, of it being seen as an authority or a trusted sussed resource and it'd be click. And it says we're growing. So we only only added like you know, 26 new people coming to the, to the website. Then the next month it grew up a little bit more. A few more clicks. The traffic was not bad. But you can see we've added a hundred extra clicks for this business. Now if you just do a 10% conversion, it's not a lot, but it's 10 new clients. And now you have to just say well if I have potentially 10 new clients because I convert 10% of that traffic, what does that actually equate to in revenue for your business? You got to take a look at that. And I'm not going to make up some crazy number. I'm just going to share the data. Now here's where it started taking off in June because things are starting to kick in. 52,000 impressions, 397 clicks. In other words, it almost again doubled in the number of clicks that are coming to their website. And the traffic, they had 1,700 going to their website. So that's pretty exciting. July from the first to the end, 88,804 clicks. And as it says still growing, almost 2,000.

The other one in August 79. Now keep this. My 79,000 start out of 15. It, it's added 600amonth. This is not just in total but a month. And it continues to grow. This is now this is my last information because again I'm just waiting for that report as I'm doing this in October. 102,000 impressions with 628 clicks with 2,100. As far as the traffic concerned, we 5x their traffic. What do you think that will do for them? Well, I'll give you an example, and I can't guarantee this with anybody because, you know, I can only. I can only get the horse to come to the water. I can't make them drink. But we had a client back pre Covid that we started working with, and then through Covid, we 5x their traffic and. Excuse me, no. Yeah, 5x their traffic. And what happened is their revenue went up by three and four times. So this is just one of those things. Like, this is not just SEO, but it's aeo. This little report here is purely SEO. And all we did is we added that element of aeo. Remember that structured data where that other, that other example, there was no, no sign of it, and it scored zero. These are the kind of things that are happening with our clients. So when my staff sent me this very, very depressing news, I said, hey, basically, hey, chill out. We're doing the right thing. We're on the right track. We are. We are that tide that's raising all boats. So when you see this. And he said, this has been going on now for almost two months. This, this upgrade, we see that we didn't drop in traffic like here. We almost tripled the number as far as traffic is concerned. We did have a little drop here, but it sprung right back up. My point being is we can't stick our heads in the sand and say, you know, I'll just wait for this stuff to shake out. It's really not going to affect me. Well, this next one I want to. I want to expand on and share something with you about, you know, is it going to impact you as a local business? So this is a picture from a. Remember I said I was a practitioner. I'm always learning. So now I'm in an AI workshop and I'm really. It's called a mentor in this process because I'm a little further down the road than most people. There's a lot of people, not many in this shop, but there's about 20 students from the local area to help them start upskilling. And then there are several people in there that are in local businesses, or there's another gentleman or two in there for marketing that we're. We're learning. Hey, what is the next step? What's happening right now that we can simply put in here? His name is Sat, and he runs a program at. At. It's called aicv and it's Artificial Intelligence Coachella. Valley and it is supported through the, I think he said it's through the Palm Desert City of Palm Desert is promoting it. And this is, this is an eight week workshop. Now. I've been doing this now with SAT for about a year and the content we get is just amazing as what we're doing. And that tool I mentioned earlier, his partner in crime, if you will, Habib Jeffer, is, he's a wicked smart young man. I think he's 22 years old. He's been coding since he's 10. And he created this tool and if you go to AICV Co, you can test your own website. And so that way it's independent of me. I'm not, I'm, you know, yeah, I'm a mentor of this, but I, I make no revenue from this. I just wanted to point this out and give him some credit because they are doing what I try to do, would just step out and say, hey, let's get you informed of what's really happening so you don't wake up one day and say, whoa, who moved my cheese? There's no cheese here. I can't survive. Instead of saying, let's start making these changes now like in the last example that I showed you. So I just wanted to bring this up and give him credit. You can always go to, I think it's called Luma, it's an app and it's called aicv. And, and you can actually attend these classes. There is a fee, unless you're a student, then it's free. And people like me, myself who pay a fee, we offset their costs and, and so they can continue to be, I'm going to call it up, skilled. And I got to tell you this, this is a, an eight week class. I just finished two weeks on Saturday. And while, you know, we build all kinds of automation and you know, go into businesses and do consulting and things that nature, what, what I was exposed to in the last two weeks, it basically compressed our time from building things like landing pages, websites, especially websites, from, from weeks to days to literally minutes. And that's going to be changing for what we do. And the cool part about that is what we're able to do, and I'm going to show you this in a minute, is we're able to take those sites, remember that one that was, had a score of 38 and turn it around and make it score very, very high so that the AI agents can actually understand what's on your page. And then you'll, you'll tend to show up much, much easier.

So here's a. Here's another one of our clients that you can see. There's just been a steady growth now. They've been a client for a while.

But what I want you to see is because we're also putting in a I O or aeo, it's even called Geo. That type of content, you can see what's happened. It's trending up, the traffic is moving up. Now just to give you a kind of a bit of a reference of what average looks like if you're a local business, and this is a local business there is called Coachella Valley Direct Primary Care. One of our clients, they have a. It says concierge, but it is a very affordable alternative to trying to go to an urgent care or emergency center because you can have them as your primary care doctor. Now, they don't take insurance and again, this isn't commercial for them, just giving you a little background. But it's same day or next, next day care and they do telemedicine. They're phenomenal. A couple of doctors and they're in Rancher Mirage. But anyway, so we've been doing this for quite some time and here's one of the things I want you to see. Organic research. This is just. This is not paid traffic. We have now about 2,400 keywords that they're ranking for and their traffic is 4,300 for the month. And this is, this is fresh. This is through the 17th of October. And you can see what's it, what is it doing? It's slowly rising. It's not paid for. This is stuff that's on there. So these are the things that, that we want you to understand is when you're making content, you can create content or a company like Swing Point Media can create content for you that doesn't just help you today, but helps you in the future. And I'll give you an example. One of our clients used to be Anthem Air Conditioning. So one of the common things that we say is, well, if we had a video and an article on your website that says, hey, why is my. And it could be depending on the season, why is my air conditioner blowing warm air or hot air? What we do is we create that article and that video and put on their website. And now what happens is because search is less keyword and more phrase, if you will, natural language processing, it will tend to pick that up. And so it will drive a tremendous amount of traffic back to that website. We did a similar Thing with another customer. It's called Lux Electric Golf Car. One of the very first articles we put in on their website when we first started with them was how often or no, let's see, how long should I leave my golf cart plugged in and that that particular article continued. Now remember I said an average website gets about 3 or 400 visits a month. This one article generated over 1700 unique visitors month in a month out for years. And so it's one of those things. It's like planting the tree. Once it begins to bloom and put leave leaves out, it will create shade for an indefinite period of time. We're seeing this with this client as we see their numbers continue to grow. And what, what does that mean? It means more people when they're thinking about the stress of well, I got to go set in the waiting room. Do I have to take my child to urgent care? The deductibles are high, the stress is high, the wait times are crazy. Well, why don't I just pay $99 a month and go to Coachella Valley direct primary care and get in the same day and if I need any meds then I can use my insurance or I'll get a discount for a Z pack. Because they're not into. That's not where they make their money. They do it on the membership and they'll help you out. Well, we can see that type of service is growing for them. So this is just another example of what I want to show you of the proof is in the real numbers and it's organic. Otherwise it would say paid. But this is all organic traffic that that we see and it continues to go up 4, 300. In other words, it's about 10x what an average local website will produce. Now I want you to just as a reference, take this back to the very first slide I showed you the concern about from my SEO expert Saz who said, hey, this could impact websites. You can see right here. It doesn't. Our numbers went up. We saw in the numbers for another where we showed that graph on the last one we had a slight dip and then it went right back. And because we have the right stuff content. I heard this over the weekend when I was at that that AI workshop is one of the gentlemen says, you know, again, it looks like content is king. Well, quite honestly, I never thought content wasn't king. I think it always does does the job when you're creating content that helps bridge a customer's problem or your ideal audience's problem to you as A solution with explaining what it is and how it's happening. And if you need help, click here. I think that does the experience, expertise, authority and trust. Google calls it EAT E E A T. I think that bridges that in such a way that it just every time you put a piece of content on there and we do it weekly for our clients, it just keeps stacking on one another. And because we also now are testing everyone and again this has been since about April, every article we put out we find out, hey, does the AI engine, can it read this? If it's not structured properly or it's not readable, then what do we do? We change it before we put it on a client's website. So these are just some of the things I wanted to share with you. I think that it really important as I start to wrap up today's local voice, I just wanted to say don't wait until you're forced to because here's what's going to happen if you wait until you're forced to. You're probably already seeing a lack of issues. It's almost like it reminds me as a kid is when I used to live in Wyoming, Colorado, and when you would see rust on the outside of your car and it was too late to fix it because it originated on the inside, when you see your traffic drop off significantly, it's usually too late because the damage is done on the inside. And now when you call a company like ours, it can be very, very expensive to fix this up. Now I want to show you one situation that I think is pretty slick and what we did is we built a, a second Swing Point media website and I just want to show you some of the data when the before and the after of what it does whenever you increase the aeo. So hold on just a second.

So I think this is going to be kind of a fun one to wrap up on and let me see if I can get this to be a little bit larger.

No, that's okay. So this is, this is a website for Swing Point Media website and it's, it's not replacing what I have. It's an example of what I have. And so what I did is I dropped it into this a.

AC excuse me, AICV co and then I tested it on a third party analyzer and my number came back with 89. Now if you notice what it has, it says for.

Technical score 47 out of 50 structural score. Remember how the other one was really bad? It's 0 minus 25 out of 25. Content score 11 out of 15, not bad. And discovery score, 6 out of 10. So there's still some work there. But here's the cool thing. I am competing with other local businesses who are scoring 15, 20, maybe 30. So the chances of my, my stuff showing up are through the roof. So this is an example of what it is and you know, it says I built this in about five hours. So this was, it says the new website I built in about five hours. I did this over the weekend because I wanted to see if I could build what I call a side by side profile for my clients. Because my goal is this is to say I don't really need to go in and reach or update or build you a new site, but what if I could create a profile page that is in the language of AEO and geo and how would that affect you for your traffic? Well, I think would have a significant impact. The reason I say is because sometimes when these first came out, now I've juiced this up a little bit so if you, you, if you copied this and pasted it into your, into your browser, you would see what it looks like. I'll probably pull up here in a second, I'll show you. But here's the thing, it's more of a technical thing, remember about the structure. Well, when we're putting that in there, it, it's not very pretty. It's really designed to do one thing to communicate with the, the search agents for the AEO and GEO or the large language models. So it doesn't have to be something that is appearing on the front end. For like example, the Executive Aaron's website doesn't have to appear on the front end. We can build it on the back end and make sure the numbers are good and then it will go to work and it will start sending traffic to that other website. Here's my only caveat with that is, and I'm playing around with this is because I'm saying, well if I did that then would that I still need to go back to her original website and also do SEO. And while I'm doing, I'm probably going to do AEO search improvement. And so that's one of those things. But the cool part about that is as you can see in the example I showed you, it took about five or six months for that client to go from, you know, almost no clicks, 90 some odd clicks to over 2,000.

That's one of those things. It took some time. This can be in a matter of hours. And you can now go from we weren't out there to visibility of 89. And, and here's the thing I'm playing with. I was like, hey, what does that number really need to be to, and I don't mean this in a bad way, but to crush your local competition. Like, if I went out to you just pick the categories, pest control company or plumbing company or electrician. And I just said, hey, I'm going to make their, I'm going to improve their website. So I'm going to run through here, I'm going to get their score and it's going to come in at 15 as an example. And I'm going to turn around and I'm going to build this, this site for them, which now it no longer takes me five hours because that was my first time through. Now it takes me probably less than an hour and I can produce a page for them, test it and say, hey, now here's your number. Do you want to add this for your website and start getting traffic, not only, not only traffic from the large language models, but also from an SEO standpoint, Because remember, I said when we do that, it works together. We're not just saying, oh, well, this is only SEO. We're not doing that. No. In the whole structure that we use to build the example you see on the page, that's doing both with a, with an emphasis on making sure it doesn't forget one or the other. The SEO work tends to say, well, we're only doing SEO backlinks and things that nature which are not as important in the AI world, that it's more of, hey, structured data. In other words, this is a title. This is the, this is display, this is a headline. These are Frequently Asked Questions. This is a, all your images that are put in there are properly labeled, all those type of things, which quite frankly is true in SEO. So these are things I'm playing around with. So if you're interested, you know, please reach out to me and I can talk to you more about this. But I just wanted to share this with you today because I'm concerned that, hey, before it's too late, it's going to, it's going to start having a negative impact on your business space for local business. So I hope you enjoyed today.

It was a little, I thought it was very good news. Some of it is a little somber, but most part it's very good news and I hope you join me again. And by the way, if you are in the local Coachella Valley and you're saying, wow, I'd like to be part of that workshop. You can certainly go to AICV CO and sign up for that and we'd love to have you in the class. And if you, if you came through that route, make sure to look me up because I, I, I'm there every Saturday. It's from 11 to about 1:30 or 2 depending on how excited we get about doing things. I think last Saturday were there till two but it's easy to get to and you get a little lunch in there and at the same time people and you get a lot of questions answered. It doesn't mean, hey, if you're brand new that's okay. You know, you're like that, you're like that clean, clean slate. You can accept this and really pick up where you're at and start moving. So with that I'm going to say, hey, thanks for joining me and we'll see you again next time on the Local Voice. Thank you so much for joining me today.