Relevance engineering & Reddit wins: How AI Mode is rewriting SEO

They've got to move past what the client knows about their own industry and really be able to be sherpas for their clients and show them these are gaps that are out there. Never use it for full publishing. It's a tool. Always have human intervention and QA because if you let that go, you're just peppering with spam. I do believe the age of a a major focus of technical SEO is waning away. Balance rate is really something that really should have never been brought over to Google Analytics. And now we can move forward with our questions. First of all, we will have a questions answer session with uh Aarin. And I encourage you to put your questions in chat. We will cover them after the session. So uh I think that will give us much more things to discuss. But let's start with the you mentioned hosting edge of the web over the years and interviewing many top SEO experts and so looking back what are a couple of some insights or lessons that

changed the way you approached SEO? That was certainly oh boy that's a that's a loaded question. So many great people that we've talked to and Joy Hawkins was one of them for a couple of different interviews. So got a a great panel of guests here. We've learned a lot. Uh, I want to give a couple hat tips to CindyRum. She's been on our show and she's a regular on our show. Uh, she was discussing Fraggles, mobile first indexing and knowledge graph 2019, 2018 and it really did pivot us as an agency and learning what we really do need to do and influence uh, uh, uh, Google. Uh we also had Bill Sloski on an incredible mind focusing on the patents that Google was uh submitting over the years over the decades and and it was amazing to be able to talk to him multiple times before his passing. Dixon Jones is also a sizable influence to our agency as we really jumped into his software in links uh right at at the onset of his development there and really learned a

lot from the interlinking methodology that's so necessary in in SEO. We've we've done a done a lot with a lot of great interviews, but I am not going to be able to service well how many thought leaders have been able to be on the show and that we've learned from. but a smattering of some really good insights from uh those individuals. We spend a lot of time with our clients and and we also dive in and and find areas of knowledge based on the knowledge graph uh concepts that we actually learned from Jason Bernard as well. So he was uh tantamount in having us understand and and pivot us towards what the what the knowledge graph reflection is for our brand. That's that's great. Interesting. And uh speaking about some recent guests uh you've uh just recalled a lot of interview from the previous thinking about recent guests uh and speaking about AI in SEO have you heard that it was really surprising or really

insightful for you and do you see any uh similar ideas going on like a consensus between uh all of the experts or there are some big debates and totally different views on what's going on? Okay. there there's a number of stages in that question. Um I think one of the biggest insights that I've had here recently was with Michael King uh over at IPole rank. He's been great to come on multiple times. Uh we joined him in SEO week a couple weeks back. But uh he's he's really at the forefront of understanding AI and what is happening in how it's understanding and processing and he's really coining the term of relevance engineering. And that really rg my bell whenever we were talking. We were doing a bit of a promo for SEO week back in I think midappril. And uh it really did dawn on me. Okay, all these pieces are coming together. All these different individuals having their different take on how Google's actually presenting its knowledge. And Michael really did pull everything together and show us that this is not

keywords, this is not strings, it's things. and more importantly um how you have to map the relevance on your own site as well as external uh it's a whole another dimension on on things he actually wrote a really really great post here just recently about AI mode and how it works and what the future of SEO is if your listeners or your viewers haven't come across that go check that out we're going to try and get him back on the show just to talk about that it's a 58 minute read time article so it is it is mammoth but um uh it really encapsulates a a great deal of the new paradigm of understanding what AI is understanding about a brand and domain and how it also processes. It doesn't look at just website rankings. It's looking at a a great deal of different relevant or uh concepts and questions that are answered uh across a a spectrum of different websites. saying I it's interesting to now see this science uh pivoting uh where it needed to be a very long time

ago and it started to grow there for the last 5 years. I think Britney Müller is uh huge in the AI machine learning space and she was ringing this bell a long time ago. I think the the concept of AI and understanding of documentation has to be multi-dimensional. has to be uh we all have to have to now step into a larger concept of not only competitive science but also subject matter knowledge. What's what is the completedness of a concept in a particular industry or a subpoint? And do we have a full map? And this is what marketing agencies have to understand. They have got to move past what the client knows about their own industry and really be able to be sherpas for um their clients and show them these are gaps that are out there. This is what we understand of the industry. We need to know more from you client about your industry and be able to find their way towards areas that you can influence

Google and be able to be that a available subject matter expert. kind of went along there. But I think one of the other debates that are still happening and it's going to be sizable is the zero click scenario that we're talking about here, the loss of direct traffic as Google's providing more and more answers to its users uh without attribution or any type of destination URLs. That's the largest challenge in our industry. We certainly talked about that before. Uh and there's a lot of studies rolling out right now to be paying attention to. Um, I think the biggest takeaway that I have as I'm interviewing and reading this documentation is that the the user experience is changing is that the search traffic that we had two or three years ago is not the same search traffic because of the AI factor and users are changing their behavior based on the user experiences that they have. So we need to reach them as they're changing their pattern and their their uh deeper dive into concepts. That's a deep one

and that's actually uh can float us to the next question where I just wanted to ask speaking about the research that you mentioned or the recent IO Google's IO uh event or SEO week event where everyone is covering some developments or predictions on AI. Um, is there anything particular you think people should pay attention to because definitely we will not be able to to cover all of the things. So maybe something to focus on right now. No, I mean in the the freshest memory is literally the SEO week that we had. I mean Google's IO uh reveal and having AI mode now across the entire US was huge. They they revealed like 26 different new concepts that they were rolling out. I wouldn't be able to give that due credit here on the show. But from SEO week, uh we were honored to be able to be there and live stream for iP 4 days. It was fantastic experience. I knew a lot of these individuals. I still

want to follow up and interview a few others that I hadn't come across, but the predominant factor was AI and how we navigate I AI. And one of the most important factors for almost every presentation was the brand connection and what brand now means in the perspective of of AI is and from an SEO standpoint we've always been a little bit disjointed from how do you build brand how do you create brand momentum but we're in this space now where AI is paying attention to those factors and we really need to get a hold of it and teams need to come together to be able to create strategy ies that are that that support SEO visibility but also support brand. A couple of the presentations from that SEO week. One in particular was Will Reynold. Um he he was fantastic. He was really cutting to cutting to the chase here and kind of putting it to the SEO audience of just not writing content for content's sake. you much rather you write content that's

very good, very good quality and well thought through as opposed to the glut of content that's that's burgeoning right now at the scenes uh across the internet. And he and he really went even further and has has showed the lack of correlation or the inverse correlation now of organic search to revenue. So it's not about traffic build, it's the right traffic. And yet we've heard that time and time again, but I really do think he brought it home in his presentation. We're in a new world where you've got to meet your user to the degree of certaintitude that you've never had to before. AI is answering a lot of information and perhaps that con that traffic really didn't need to come to your website. You know, if you're talking about general answers on on a particular web page that aren't really valuable for a user to be able to connect to your brand, why do we have it on these pages? And that's what Google's really doing. It's scooping up content and presenting answers, but it's still

providing traffic to destination websites. It's just more nuanced. So, we got to be able to have more nuanced content uh available for our users. And I think that's the shift of uh that that I'm seeing uh from SEO along with it. Ross Simmons actually provided a really good bit of context when they unpacked Reddit u and just optimization and participation in the Reddit community. That's a huge brand plus subject matter authority play in that space. And now we know how important Reddit is into the entire search ecosystem. One strategy in particular that that we really took away from that SEO week was like we got to dive into Reddit. We got to champion our clients in in Reddit and not just and never just try to post information and back away from it. You have to engage. You have to engage with that community and Google's paying attention to that brand engagement inside of these different uh forum communities. So those are some cool takeaways from uh that

week out there. Nice touch. And uh you've already covered a lot of important things, but let's just go to the dark side a bit. And is there anything like overhyped like something that is everywhere, but you don't think it worth attention? Yeah. Yeah. I think and again I hearken back to all our all our conversations that we've had on this show as well as conversations that we had here recently in New York. I think we are hyper reactive on the potential loss of organic traffic due to to AI. I think we're missing the point that the user is getting trained in this new experience and the user is going to amplify and adjust how they're interacting. So I think the benefit of AI uh kind of interceding uh into the destination URL uh relationship we had it's refining uh the potential user and now we can match even more clearly to uh the user need user's needs and wants and uh if there's anything that I uh I'm taking away from my years of

interviewing plus my recent uh experiences with different conferences I don't think we're going to have a problem with revenue or or conversions. It really does it does impact our organic traffic, but at the same time, we just need to be able to shift to another value point for our users uh that maybe we haven't done before. The flip side here is that AI is changing the behavior. It's forcing better content strategies and there's a discipline that has to be embraced now. uh we're kind of getting forced into that and um eat is obviously here key concepts around what you should be doing with your own content showing your work be behind the scenes insights that only you would know replacing generic claims with specific examples exact data specific cases freshness all these things that were yeah we'd like to do that but we were automating content or we were getting information out there

more quickly you need to now pivot around and take the time. Just don't hit a particular quota of content. Build the right content for the right user and have that as kind of a a layered effect on your website. By the way, yeah, speaking about the changing behavior, how does that impact edge of the web? Maybe you can just share some specific your u experience advice. How do you leverage that change of user behavior and the content that you have to produce? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, interesting enough is that we started building um knowledge graph entities in our in our show uh site about four years ago. So, everybody that we interview, we build a person page uh that is related to the show that they were on. So, you start searching for Cindrum, you start searching for Jason Bernard, you start searching for Mike King or Garrett Susman, you're seeing our our our knowledger graph page. It's actually getting pulled into knowledge

graph. it's getting into the top link. So, we are we now are trusted by Google as a as a a valuable destination for that personality. So, we started doing that about four years ago and that's really paid off because now we're not only in an SEO podcast search query and and and permutations of that. If you're looking for a Garrett Susman interview, you're going to find our show. And that was part of our strategy is be able to put together we've got 200 300 different entities that are defined and Google has really been um giving us a good deal of value in that space from an AI tool standpoint. We've done a lot uh being able to streamline a lot of our production podcasting. We're doing about two shows a week here at uh at the edge. So we do our interview series but we also do our news series as best as possible getting those two shows up. Using AI as a research tool has been invaluable, but you always have to check the facts, right? Making sure that you're always confirming what you're

seeing in the AI tool because of who hallucinations, but it does streamline things. We are also producing a number of other podcasts for other clients that aren't in the marketing industry whatsoever. So, we're helping them produce and streamline their execution. So, we're doing about four shows, five shows a week here at the studio. But are you asking about maybe other AI tools that we use? Maybe maybe you can share that too and maybe some immediate results with AI tools. Some some magic. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So there's there's a couple cool tools that I want to reference and we use them uh each and every week. One is Cast Magic. Cast Magic is a fantastic tool that processes your your audio and based on the prompts that are either kind of baseline prompts that it provides or your own custom prompts, you can actually create a wealth of content like social media posts, emails to be able to send back over to guests after confirmation that the site's been launched or the page been launched, blog content, different clip finder, the deep dive into the

entire audio piece and find key insight moments. Now, it's a great tool to be able to have all these pieces together. Human intervention has to be there because some a lot of times it's it's not really that valuable, but a lot of times it is, and it just helps streamline our content production, but also our social awareness. So, we use that uh a lot of times in in our uh content production. A lot another tool that's great from a video standpoint is Opus.io is a video snippet tool. So you can push the entire video piece that you've done on YouTube, move it into that, and it will do the same thing that Castm Magic's kind of doing, but it'll also create a series of scenes and put captions in a video snippet, give you a 30-cond minute aha moment kind of quick take. And uh you can also do a lot of production behind the scenes. So you can put music in beds, different intros and outros. So it does give you uh building blocks that you can then craft for your own brand. but it does certainly

streamline the video production, especially the the quick pieces that need to come out of a podcast if you're doing the video side of things as well. Um, some cool tools there. There's a lot of other cool tools that are out there, but those are the two that I wanted to bring to bring to bear here. Nice. That's that's a pretty full list, too. So, I think that that would be valuable for our guests to to check them out. Okay. Just remember before anything else before anything else, never use it for publishing. It's a tool. always have human intervention and QA because if you let that go and just crank out content, you're just peppering with spam out there. You've got to find the choice pieces that are really aligned to what you're doing. So, you still have to have that context of what we talked about, why it's relevant, and and be able to have that production tool there. Sorry, just want to make sure I qualify. Sure. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. That's that's a good remark. Well, we've spoken about podcast. Now let's uh speak about your agency and how do you promote your brand and um how can SEOs right now keep track

of brand visibility in airdriven search results as we know that people find information different in AI search so how brands can ensure their visibility even yeah yeah absolutely well um if you ever listen to the show I love tools I love to dive into tools test tools out I'm a tool hoarder probably shouldn't have as many tools as we have at the agency but we always love to create bit of a picture of consensus from these different tools and how it analyzes domain uh how it analyzes page structure technical SEO as well as inbound. So, uh, your your own shop, SE Ranking, has a fantastic AI tool, tracking tool that, um, really was one of the first ones out of the market, uh, into the market around 2023. And we actually reported on that a while back. Um, and it's continually evolving, being able to show us a lot of insights into AI, uh, visibility, performance. Um, one in particular that I've come across, this is from Dixon Jones. It's from the in inlinks group just to understand how AI

understands you and your brand. It's called Wai. W AI Ky.io. It's a brand new tool. I think it's about three or four months old. And it actually is doing something unique that I've not seen them in the marketplace. It actually pulls your brand and your brand connection to a particular concept against three I'm sorry four different AI platforms. It goes against Perplexity, Chat, GPT, Google Gemini as well as Claude. It gives you an analysis of how much it understands about your brand and what it thinks it knows about your kind of your subpoint or your entity information. So it's not just about who you are but what you do, right? And then you can actually run it against your competitors, about two different competitors. And then you can start seeing topical gaps, ma major gaps as well as mentionable gaps. And you can start building a an a content strategy that is AI based as it's pulling these

different platforms and it can actually run each and every month. You've got a scorecard that can go up or down based on what you're doing. But it's the first time I've seen a tool out there that's querying to the platforms themselves and we're getting back real data. Granted, Wai has its own type of scorecard that is for their platform, but it does give us a really good mirror or a reflection from the AI tool sets in a consensus standpoint. So you can really find some major gaps that you need to invest in because if they if the AI doesn't understand you or hasn't seen an area of content, you really need to reinforce that uh with your website as well as any type of external references. So we've used those um we've we've started using WI here over the last 3 months. But um from an AI tool set, we've tried to stay away from any type of AI publishing, right? Any type of content writing. We'll use it for some some content brief analysis, but we really try to stop it there, clean up anything that we think

is not oriented towards our clients mission or value statements or their subject matter knowledge, but um we do use it with regularity inside the agency. Has some good results actually with utilizing AI in those type of content brief executions. Nice. Very very good. Very good idea actually. And uh my my next question was just around the content strategies. Uh what would you recommend adopting the content strategies for AI generated answers because this is the thing that everyone is going to devour. I'm going to throw back to Mike King's article uh what he just rolled out there about how AI mode works. had some revealing insights into how we need to adjust and match how AI mode now processes and uh presents information. There's multiple queries. They have this what's called a fan out query. So, it's actually looking at not only multiple sites but multiple queries obviously retrieving relevant passages um not just pages from across the web.

It's also using very specialized models summarizer comparer and validator. It's also doing a lot of personalization based on the user context and history. So there's a lot of things that you cannot address, but there's a lot that you can address. And I think one of the biggest factors that we as marketers have to have to embrace is the multimodal answer. Okay? And uh if you've known us for a while, we've been in the omni channel push. Uh making sure that we're in audio, we're in content, textual content, we've got video content. that needs to be um the mission for all all brands that want to have that digital presence because Google understands your entity as a kind of a mosaic, right? A a model of digital factors that en encompass all of those different channels. So, it's it's bringing you bring your brand into focus as you invest in those different channels, those different pieces of of modality there. And we're seeing that AI mode is responding just that way. So

based on the query, based on the question, they actually may push number of videos before anything else. So you've got to be there in in those spaces. So I think making sure that every brand that either you represent or your own brand is investing in as much as you can into these different lanes of digital consumption, these modalities. I think it's going to be a a strong insurance that you'll weather any type of organic drop off. You're going to be there as an answerable brand and the consumer sees you in those queries. So, uh you're having a incredible brand touch even if you don't get the immediate traffic, you're imprinting on that user and uh the user will will find you in in a number of nuanced longtail searches. Interesting. Yeah. And we've covered a lot about content, but I want to jump into technical SEO a bit as we don't have much time. We can talk content for for the whole evening and still not cover that. But technical SEO

is also important. And what do you think about uh the ways we can support uh a technical with AI? Do you think we should automate something or as there is still a lot of hands-on work to do? I'm a bit of a purist when it comes down to technical SEO. I don't believe AI is in a position to give really good strategic advice when it comes down to um technical SEO aspects. We do use a lot of tools like I said before to get a general consensus. We use SE ranking and as well as a number of different kind of lenses on the patient so to speak so we can see what's happening with the website and what are some of the impediments that you have there. I do believe the age of a a major focus of technical SEO is is waning away is that with so you know the CMSs that are there um yeah you can c certainly have some problems but I do believe that Google's not paying attention to technical nearly as much as it was doing a decade ago. So

you have to you have to weigh out the factor of how much time and effort do you put into for example core web vitals that was a bit of a red herring and we know that was we were looking at that for three years going okay got to move fast got to got to got to get these pages from a user experience standpoint that's fantastic and it should still be there but from a technical SEO standpoint that wasn't really the the valuable effort that we all put into it and we kind of learned that Google was benefiting greatly from Everybody's speeding up their own website because of their crawl uh their crawl data and how expensive it is to actually pre through these websites. So, you know, the the fact of the matter is pay attention to the user and the user experience. If there is something impeding and if it's it doesn't if the user can't find what they're looking for, right, with a technical issue, then absolutely address it. But some of the underpinning things that we used to really pay strong attention to, I think um aren't nearly as valuable as they were. Thank you. Thank you very much for covering this

and uh just uh one more question to wrap up and then we will move to our comments and Q&A. So if you could choose like one top advice for SEOs trying to navigate uh the resume, what would it be? Um hearken back to Will's Will Reynolds presentation. Don't make content for content sake, right? Make it good and take your time actually doing that. the glut of content that's out there, especially the AI and spam. We've got a lot of homogenized content that is not specialized. Take your time with your client. Learn more than ever before what makes them special and learn the industry because what you're going to find are is Google rewarding you for filling in some of the gaps that it needs to know. So, it's not about speed of content. It's really about getting even more valuable content on your on your on your site map. but also understand that you've got layers that you need to actually uh move through in on your website. And sometimes you should actually gate some of the more

specialized content because we're still we're looking at some this environment. You just can't give away everything. You need to have a much better user experience and and build that user loyalty and give them information. Just don't give it away to Google. Right. I'm sure I'm sure I'll get a bit of flak from that, but it we're we're in this space where Google's wanting to answer everything. They're in the business of not just indexing websites, but indexing answers. And now now you've got to start with your clients or your own site making sure that some of that is is protected because that's what's going to be valuable for your users check checking out your own brand. Yeah. Awesome. Final for our discussion and now let's move to our comments. Are you ready to have some Q&A from our Sure? Go right ahead. So, first of all, if we visually redesign our entire site with minimal copy changes, will this affect our SEO

rankings with via Google thinking these are brand new pages? Well, we do know that Google has been paying attention to user experience from the leaked DOJ documents back last year and that the Chrome data is quite valuable for understanding for Google's understanding of how uh users are are diving into your website. So, a a overhaul of from the user experience is a ranking signal. We know that it is as long as the users are are benefiting from it, right? Uh, so hopefully that answers the question, but I don't believe that you're going to you'd be persuading Google that this is a new page, especially if the content's predominantly the same. It's just going to be a better user experience, which is which is the the good thing from both of you, from the user point of view and from the Google's one. So yeah, thank you very much for covering. Uh, next one, SEO and digital ads. I would love to hear some tips on making those work best together. SEO and digital ads. I

need a little bit more specificity specificity on the digital ad side of things. I'll take a stab at it. Uh if we're talking uh if we're talking paid, talking uh search ads themselves or going through Google Ads, both SEO and SEM traffic benefit from a better user experience. In fact, we're doing a test right now with one of our clients where we're doing multiple landing pages and multiple changes to their prime domain and borrowing from examples and and tests on the landing pages and infusing that into the user experience on the organic side of things. So, a user experience change has to be monitored. It has to be tested, right? But we do have a lot a lot of um opportunity with SEM that um gives us the ability to pivot quickly test and then influence the the prime site. So from a quality score standpoint, the better and better the user experience is and the better

and better you're matching the in the intent in the query of the user that obviously in uh influences your overall uh performance of the campaign. So you're killing two birds with one stone is making sure that you're testing that usability using that what lessons are learned and start trans transitioning your overall site to a better and better user experience and ultimately you also have better better conversion rates on the traffic that you're paying for as well. See user experience is always the key. So yeah it it really is it really is. So next one. How do you think all updates launched and announced during Google IO will shift, change, and reshape the internet? You've already covered some of these, but people are really worried about Google IO uh part. So, yeah. Yeah. And the announcements that that they had. Boy, I wish I could answer that in one big bow. Uh, I do think if you back up a little bit and you you hear what they said on a number

of different fronts, this is one of the biggest Google IO kind of cornucopia of announcements that they were that they had revealed. I can't recall um in recent history how something this large was actually delivered except for that one guy that was doing some weird uh rapping on the stage year ago. Anyway, regardless of that, um it it is very important to pay attention, but also listen to the wording of their their announcements because they do pre through this from a PR standpoint. Don't imagine things that aren't there, right? Don't infer certain things that are are not in these announcements because they position themselves with a particular level of protection that they're not making uh resolute changes. However, during the same IO u uh broadcast of of different topics that they they're pushing forward, they also changed uh a number of their documentation points around AI content generation. So, pay attention to those documents explicitly.

Uh in fact, I was just having a conversation with a client last week about these pivotal changes here. So, pay attention to their overall documentation, not so much the announcements. However, as as we're seeing VO come through and the type of video AI generation that's happening right now, it's it's it's frightening to see how realistic these these videos are here. Um, we're we're going to have to navigate this with the trust in the consumer that they'll also know AI from reality. And I think the the biggest pivotal moment is whenever you're moving any type of content, bring as much authentic knowledge into these these points of generation as possible to kind to kind of counteract the uh the AI generation that's happening there. I went into a rabbit hole there, but I wish I had a better answer here. We just have to see how everything plays out. No, it it's it's all good. I think that was pretty philosophical approach to to the Google rollout. So, we all needed to

hear that, too. So thanks very much for sharing. You're more than welcome. And uh yeah, another one with AI answering more questions in search are metrics like time on site or bounce rate still useful? I don't think so. I I I think dwell time still is valuable, but um we also are are dealing with micros secondsonds of of engagement and uh user experience here. So balance rate is really something that really should have never been brought over to Google Analytics for because it has such a misnomer there. But I do think multi multi- vvisit touches of a of a particular user are more important factors than the initial session because if you think about it if they're seeing you in AIO more often the brand's being imprinted and you will have numerous visits not just from organic search but also from paid traffic or social traffic or what have you. So that individual user is getting influenced by the AIO visibility of your brand. So t take it

as a a value prop not a detraction from your organic search. Thank you. Thank you very much Erin. And I think that was our last question. Uh fantastic because we are yeah short of time but thanks very much. That was really insightful and I believe me and all the guests here will share the one opinion. You've helped us be more confident and more philosophical about the uh upcoming changes from Google and from AI search in general. So, thanks very much for sharing those. Hey, you're more than welcome. Hey, we're all in it together. We're going to be surfing this thing for a good number of years, right? Thanks so much for for having me on. Appreciate it. Thank you for joining. Thank you.