How Leading Brands Are Preparing for Google's Generative AI

So we're here to talk about SEO. I get really excited about SEO, as you guys can see. I've been doing SEO for a long time. Two decades. I love talking about SEO, thinking about SEO and doing these conferences now. Earlier this year. Hi, my name's Dale. Earlier this year, I was offered a large web project. And these web projects are like catnip for me. Not only are they a payday for my agency, quick aside, I run an SEO agency. We got 24 people on the staff. I have stress as an agency owner because I got to keep everybody employed and paid through the end of the year. They all have families and mouths to feed at home. Oh, wait, I'm sorry. This is not a therapy session. Sorry, sorry. That's my trauma, not yours. But this big project would have solved some problems for me professionally, let's say it that way. Also for the client that we were working with, they were a mortgage company, a national mortgage company. They were going through a time when interest rates were up and demand for mortgages had fallen through the floor. So they needed this project to succeed just to stay in business. The problem was that they were competing with the big boys in their space, the Lending Trees and the Rocket Mortgages. They had a lot going on. Now, I wanted to take this project, but I couldn't. And the reason why I couldn't take this project was because it was based on an outdated SEO and content strategy. Let me dive into it a little bit here. I'll tell you what they were trying to do. So they wanted to build thousands of pages of educational content for SEO. Now, I know everybody, we've probably all of us have done that at some point. They also were targeting keywords. They wanted to target keywords like first time home buyer. And their strategy was to put the keywords in the title, put them on the page. They were going to get traffic, make a lot of money, and retire. Also, I mentioned that they had so much competition in their space. It really gets worse than that, though, because they were competing with bank of America or Rocket Mortgage LendingTree. What I explained to the CEO of this national mortgage company is that he was trying to win a game against these big players that had already been played and won. And the winners were hoisted their trophies and posed for their photographs, and they had left the stadium. If he wanted to get into this game, he needed to start building this website out maybe 10 years ago with this strategy in order to make any headway with the site that he was planning to build. The other issue was that he was Ignoring his own data. If you take a look at their site or look at their Google Ads account, the types of searches that were landing on their website and converting really well were mortgage rates searches or loan type searches or searches for a mortgage application. That's what was converting. In addition to that, the CTAs and conversion tactics that were actually working on their site were things like an interactive tool. It's a mortgage calculator to calculate your payment. After your website visitor puts some information into it, they get the payment number and it dumps them right into the application. Easy breezy, that elevates conversion rates. Also the comparison widgets were working really well and other CTAs that would also dump people right into the mortgage application. But the biggest thing that made me cry is they were ignoring the future of search. Search is changing. We all know that everybody in this room has seen Google's AI overviews. Everybody in this room has tried ChatGPT. At this point we know that our customers are using these tools, trying them out. They're going to be expecting that they can get direct answers to their questions. They're going to expect that they can ask complex questions and have a follow up conversation about them. They're going to expect to get their information from alternate content formats, not just long form articles. That is what their customers are going to be expecting going into 2025. Now the reason why this was a hard conversation with their CEO is because I can't argue that this, his strategy isn't working today because it is working today. There are many of you in this room who are creating informational content and you'll take a look at your analytics after this talk and say, what was Dale talking about? It's still working for me today, but for a large project like this, half a million dollars for a national mortgage company, they need to skate to where the puck is going. And one thing that we all know as marketers is that generative AI and Google's AI overviews are a better solution search experience for our customers, full stop. As soon as it becomes more widely understood and available, they will use it and this is how they will make their purchase decisions. I'm also going to go out on a limb and tell you what I told him, which is your customers would rather use a conversational AI search engine that is wrong 5% of the time but gives you a direct answer than to work with an old school, let's say Google traditional search engine where instead of a direct answer, it gives you a research project, it gives you 10 articles, 10 links, 10 pages to sift through and find the answer yourself. We're all human in this room, except for the AIs who are recording. And we know innately that humans are going to choose the lazy option. I should get a T shirt. Humans always choose the lazy option. And the lazy option is an immediate answer that might be wrong. That's it. Oh, just in case I forget who I am, I'm Dale Bertrand. I run Fire and Spark. We're an SEO agency. We only do SEO strategy. We don't pretend to be world class at anything else. I have a technical background, studied AI in grad school, built a supercomputer for the NSA, which I'm still talking about 15 years later. And we have a bunch of clients at our agency with logos. So we've all seen Google's AI overviews by this point. I assume they'll give you direct answers to your most important burning questions, like, who is Jeff Bezos dating? These AI overviews are wonderful for your customers because they're gonna give direct answers. And remember, your customers are lazy, but they're problematic for marketers like us in the room. They're problematic because they're going to steal traffic. They're already stealing traffic. Like, what we're seeing in the data is a slight decline in organic traffic across many different properties. Everybody in this room has the same question. It's like, why is my traffic declining? But maybe we haven't shared that amongst ourselves. It's a conspiracy, people. It's Google stealing your traffic. Because Google wants to maintain its ad revenue and their founders need to buy a third, fourth and fifth Jumbo 787 or whatever it is. They fly nowadays. But that's really what's going on. And Google will. I'm going to go out on Lynn again. Google will expand their AI overviews. There are people in this room, feel free to raise your hand and out yourself, who believe that when Google launched their AIO reviews in May and then pulled them back because a small percentage of the answers it was giving were wrong, that that was the end of it. Oh, yeah, they tried it. It didn't work. All right, let's all walk, march back to the stone Age, right? And maybe we should be using Lycos or Yahoo. God, I hope there's nobody here from Yahoo. But I'll say one other thing like, and I want you guys to raise your hand, who in here is intentionally optimizes for Bing search engine? Oh, there are a few people. I don't have a joke for that, but there are a few people. I should have prepared that one. The reason why the majority of you don't optimize for Bing is because that's not where your customers are. Up until today, your customers have been on Google. So it makes sense for you to optimize for Google to get your information, product, service, messages in front of your customers. Where they are. What we know is that they're starting to trickle over to new platforms. Perplexity, AI, ChatGPT, SearchGPT, YouTube, TikTok, I mean, Facebook search. They're starting to trickle over. Google is still the dominant search engine. And I believe that Google will stay the dominant search engine. And it's because they're going to expand AI overviews. They're going to figure out how to make them more accurate, even though we all know in our hearts that, that they don't need to be accurate. Digest that one for a second. There are many of us who are thinking, well, I don't know how accurate they're ever going to be. They're going to, you know, AI lies to you. It hallucinates like it has a fever, the flu, or it forgot to get its Covid shot. AI doesn't need to be perfect. If you believe that AI needs to be perfect in order for them to roll it out, just think about the web. Before AI was information on the web ever perfect? My kids believe that there are aliens that stalk the house at night that want to eat their brains. And I asked them, where did you get that idea? And they said, we read it on the Internet. This inaccuracies on the Internet has always been there, even before AI. So I've come to believe that our customers will be making this shift whether we as marketers, like it or not. And today's presentation is going to be about what I'm doing about it, where I'm putting my money, my time. Because I personally don't want to risk my livelihood, which is my SEO agency, by publishing the wrong content, publishing last decade's content, or optimizing for the wrong search engine or the wrong search features. But like I said before, search behavior is changing. Now, how many of you are old enough like I am to remember the Yellow Pages? Anybody? Oh, hey, like half the people here. That's awesome. I wish I could. Do you like Oprah? Like, you get a car, you get a. But. But if you remember the Yellow Pages, the government's probably going to take away your license soon anyway. So we'll see how that works out. The Yellow Pages taught us that to search by looking for the category, maybe photographers and then you call and some of them pick up the phone. Then Google came around. Google was a much better search experience. Sure, we all had to learn how to type in these cryptic keywords. Things like ice cream, Boston or best ski boots. People don't talk that way. We've trained ourselves in thinking maybe we do talk that way. We don't. Now that we have generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Google's AI overviews, we can search in a much more natural way. I could say my kids love ice cream. I would love to find an ice cream place near our hotel that has dairy free options and isn't ridiculously expensive or tourist based or something like that. I would love to be able to have a more natural conversation and ask follow up questions. And importantly, what it needs to feel like is I'm having a conversation with a trusted helpful expert or I'm getting this information and it feels like advice from a friend. A friend that actually cares that I get the right answer. And if it's wrong sometimes, and forget the Internet, sometimes my friends are wrong. I'm not going to go there because this might be recorded. But I was going to give you an example. Now because these new platforms are available and our customers are learning how to use generative AI search, customer journeys are changing and we need to figure out when we're doing our SEO strategy and content strategy, how we are going to adapt to the changes that are coming in customer journey. Now I want to give you some examples here. Now imagine traditional search engine. So this is traditional search, let's say it's, you know, Google before AI overviews, if your, when your customers were going online, they'd be looking for information about whatever problem they have and they're very early in their journey and they might get that information from your website because you published educational content that they found through Google. Awesome. You got them to come to your website. Now you have the opportunity to move them farther through your funnel. Maybe you cookie them and hit them up with retargeting ads. Maybe you grab their email address and then try to convert them with your email marketing. Now the goal of those retargeting ads or email marketing would be to send them to the sales page and get them to hit that buy button. Now with generative AI search in Google's AI overviews, you could imagine that at the very beginning of your customer's journey, they're getting their information directly from Google. They're not landing on your website that Educational content that you published is simply training data for AI. That's it. You do have the opportunity in the world that is coming to target your customers. Once they've learned a little bit more about their problem, they've identified a few solutions and options and you can hit them up with mid Funnel content. Mid Funnel content is different from that top of funnel informational educational content that we're used to writing for SEO. Mid funnel content looks like comparison pages or interactive tools that can help your customers make a decision or a very focused, very helpful visual buying guide, something like that in the middle of the funnel. And then you can use that to push them towards the sales page. So recognizing that the new technology is not just. It's not just the technology, it's how your customers are making decisions differently and how that journey's gonna look different going forward. Now, another an upside of this is that we expect the people that land on our website to be higher quality visitors because they've already been educated by AI. Maybe Google's AI overviews, maybe ChatGPT, whatever it is. Now for the rest of my talk today, I'm going to go into exactly what I'm doing and to figure out what I was doing. I talked to a few of my friends that work at some big brands because I wanted to know what these brands were doing to prepare for 2025 because they're not stupid. They've got high paid consultants, consultants that probably charge more than I do. Well, I know they charge more than I do that are helping them understand the technology, helping them understand how their search behavior is changing in their market, and consultants that are helping them to measure how search behavior is changing in their market. Now I found five opportunities I'm going to go through in detail. The first one is to diversify content formats. Also updating existing content rather than creating new content, and focusing on freshness because Google's algorithm prefers fresh content for for certain searches and how to craft unique content because Google doesn't need me too. Content that has already been published by one of your competitors. And investing wisely, this is a grab bag for a number of best practices that the marketers and SEO experts at these brands are following. Now. Let's start with diversifying content formats. There was a time that SEO was synonymous with blog articles. That makes me cry. I'm sorry. There's a lot more that you can do than just blog articles, especially if your goal is to convert that traffic or push them farther down your funnel. Blog articles tend to rank for keywords that are Informational. These are searches that are most likely to trigger an AI overview. Now, once again, back to the customer journey here. So imagine you have a friend at the beginning of the customer journey and she is problem focused. She's thinking, my door lock is broken. And what she does is go to Google and type in door lock repair. The type of content you would expect her to find is educational content, informational articles. Maybe she's using a chatbot to figure this out. Then you have someone in the middle of the funnel who's solution focused, who's thinking, because they've already learned about their problem of a broken door lock. But this person's thinking, I want to upgrade to a smart lock because that's what they learned. In this case, you would want to publish the comparison content or buying guides or the interactive tools which I get excited about because you can create them with AI. You don't need a programmer anymore. I'm going to show you some examples of that. But if they're at the end of their journey, they're ready to buy. They might have narrowed their options down to one product or maybe two products, but they've got some final questions that need to be answered before they can hit that buy button. So in this case they might be thinking Google Nest has the best reviews and they type in Google Nest door lock. The content you want them to land on with this search is a product page or a service page with a buy button or talk to or schedule a time to talk or something like that so they can talk to a salesperson. Now I'm going to show you the content that we are focused on. This is content that would rank for searches that are least likely to trigger an AI overview, content that is more likely to convert, and content that Google's AI can't summarize. That's huge. First example here is data driven comparisons. This is mid funnel content. And if you're building out visual representations of the data, this is content that Google's AI cannot summarize. Next is guides and worksheets. If they're presenting complex information, once again, the more visual the better. Google will have a hard time summarizing it. In the example I have here is your step by step tutorial for pivot tables. Then there are custom tools. As I talked about, these can be things.