Heat. Heat. [Music] [Music] [Music] Heat up [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. Hello everyone. Thank you guys for joining. Today we are going to be discussing adapting to AI overviews and zeroclick experiences. You guys are very familiar with them now. We've all become accustomed to them. Whether it's, you know, AI mode or Chad GBT or AI overviews, we're seeing it everywhere. And it doesn't mean that hey, you're going to lose all this traffic, so there's no hope. What we're finding is when people do click, the conversion rates are much higher now because they've done a lot of research on platform. So the intent is much stronger. Um so each click is generating much more revenue assuming it's coming from the right sources like AI mode or chat GPT. Um in addition to that we're seeing many ways to adapt and get mentioned in some of these places as well to start helping you increase traffic as well. So let's dive right in. My name is Neil Patel. I'm the co-founder of NP Digital. We're a global ad agency and today I have the privilege of having Justin and Alex with us. Um Justin, do you want to give a quick introduction of yourself and then Alex you can go next? Absolutely. Uh Justin Lewis, I've worked with Neil Patel for uh six plus years now. Loved every minute of it. And uh in my day job, I do SEO for small to medium businesses. And really, I'm excited to talk about how AI is really shaping Google and how we interact with it. Awesome. Great intro, Justin. So, my name is Alex and just like Justin, I work on the SEO team here at NPXL. I work directly with clients and one of my passions is getting clients to understand how AI is impacting search and finding new and creative ways to increase awareness of brand and visibility online. So NP digital we see a lot of stats, we see a lot of data, have a ton of awards, have a lot of clients and we see it from all aspects. We do work with a lot of large brands. We also do have a SMB division um which Alex and Justin are here from and we want to share insights not just that work for enterprise organizations but also work for smaller businesses as well. Now before we dive in there's two things that I wanted to cover. The first is if you just want us to do the work for you scan the QR code with your phone. You could just bust out your camera, scan it. It'll take you to npdigital.com. You can fill out your information and we'll get in touch with you. The second is um if you want to track how you're doing on platforms like chat GPT, well, we have a AI visibility report. You can just go to uberess.com and you can look at the AI visibility report, put in your information and you can track your rankings for free. There are, of course, upgrades if you want to track more data more frequently and it'll even show you how your competitors are doing versus you. Um, and then in the upcoming weeks, we're going to be releasing more features on things like sentiment analysis and stuff like that. So, you can see all the positive mentions versus negative ones, etc. Um, which we're quite excited about. And you can do a lot for free. There are paid plans as well, but just want to mention both those things before we dive in. And the reason I mentioned that is in a zero-click world, it's important to know where your brand showing up versus the competition, right? Well, I get to start off and let me first just say one of the things I love most about my job is that I get to work with small to medium businesses because I feel like in the interactions I get to kind of glimpse their lives. And I I got to be honest, with the evolution of AI, I've seen their businesses impacted quite a bit. And honestly, a lot of a lot of business owners have had somewhat emotional responses. So, just curious, uh, go ahead and type in the chat if you've read or heard within the last six months that SEO is dead. Uh, and I have a hunch that a lot of you are going to be typing. Um, but my own personal story with this is about six months ago, my father-in-law was res-killing. He was trying to get into the AI space and he took a course from an AI consultant and every day he would come up to me and say, "So is dead. SEO is dead." Right? And obviously I thought back on that and over those conversations I I I had time to ponder and I really kind of came to the conclusion that SEO has evolved and that's why we we talk about SEO 2.0 is because this has been such an impactful thing that we are changing a lot of what we do and you're going to see that in my conversation today and in what Alex talks about because SEO is not dead. SEO is not going anywhere. People are still searching, right? But what we care about and what we pay attention to has to evolve. And that's going to be true forever, right? Ever since the light bulb was invented and people who lit lamps on the streets had to figure out new jobs, we have to learn new skills and how to look at data differently in order to continue implementing strong SEO practices. So, I'm excited and you know, let's get in. Uh, first thing to know is Google has changed with AI overviews. And for those of you who aren't familiar with what AI overview is or what I'm talking about when I say AI overviews, essentially it's when you go onto Google, you type in a query and instead of tight blue organic links, you see some sort of text box at the top that was generated by AI and it's essentially synthesized from a few different sources at least. and it's supposed to help answer your query as fast as possible. And the reason why this has changed SEO so dramatically and and honestly we'll get into uh more of the points, but the main reason is that now people can go to Google, get an answer, and leave, right? And this has almost rocked the entire SEO world primarily because up until now, rankings were essentially the gold standard, I guess you could say, right? if you didn't have rankings, you didn't really have an SEO strategy. And now we're sort of having to change what we look at and the things that are important to us. Um, as you can see there, ranking number one doesn't guarantee clicks anymore. That's really the biggest change. Even if you rank number one, people might not click on your result. But that's not necessarily always a bad thing, right? and and we're going to get into that, but as we talk, just think about the mental shifts that you might need to make with your SEO practices and how you view engaging with your audience in an organic way on Google. Um, so like I said, SEO used to be all about the click, right? With the rise of AI overviews on Google, we're entering a zeroclick search environment where search engines now give you the exact answer or maybe an answer close to it that you're looking for without you having to do any evaluation, without you having to do any deeper research. And this is interesting because now the way people interact with Google is they're treating it as a useful step on their discovery path, right? rather than doing a search and then perusing through the options, they're doing a search, possibly getting the answer, and then maybe deciding on what they want to do next. Right now, we have to fight for influence past just getting people onto our website. And oh, oh, awesome. We have great questions trickling in. We're going to have time at the end for questions, but if we do have specific questions, um, we'll get to those if they kind of stand out. Um, with this you need to remember that rankings aren't clicks anymore. Um, back in the day if you had rankings it was basically assured that you would get clicks. It was something like 80% or maybe was I think it was 80% of clicks happened within the first five rankings of Google. Uh, now it it's to the point that a lot of clicks aren't even happening. And needless to say, this is very scary for a lot of small to business owner or small to medium business owners because the question is well how do I leverage Google to get more business right that's the question at the end of the day and we'll get to that in the next slide but let me just calm your fears and say that you can and it does happen right so in terms of the bottom line your website is where business happens right And with AI overviews, the simple fact is less people are making it to your website. But while that might seem like a doomsday prophecy, um it's not as bad as you might think because before there were a lot of people coming to your website that were not fully engaging. They might have come and read one blog post or even the headline of a blog post and then bounced. Now when people make it to your website, the data is showing that they are much more qualified. And this is a very interesting uh kind of phenomena for SEO practitioners because before we've sort of been gluted on a lot of data and now the amount of data we have is somewhat lessened because some of the touch points people have with the industry we're in or even our personal brand or or business brand. Um those touch points aren't as clearly seen. Right? You might have someone type in something about your business, get some information from an AI overview, and then months later make a decision to purchase, and there's no real way to effectively tie that to the first contact where they saw that AI overview or they were on another LLM. Um, so what we're having to do now is look at all of the data and take it in context, right? So, you need to understand your conversions might stay the same. They might drop a little bit. They might even get better. Your click-through rate will definitely drop because less people are clicking. The flip side of that is your conversion rate will probably increase because the people who do make it to your site are are more likely to convert. So again, all of this is to say with what's happening in the industry, you need to to flip your mindset a little bit and and stop just looking at clicks or keywords or rankings and start taking all the data in that you can to get a full picture of what's actually happening. So this is clear proof right here that the majority of searches, 58 to 60% are now zero click. And I think this is just my personal opinion and experience, but this goes beyond just AI overviews. It goes to other SER features like people also ask images, even more commercial experiences where you're typing a query and many products come up. You can now purchase those products through Google Merchant Center or you're directed somewhere else. it. The general trend is Google is trying to help you fulfill your search query as fast as possible. And and that's neither a good thing nor a bad thing. It just is. As SEOs, we just need to do what we can to take advantage of that. Um when you look here, pages with AI overviews lose about 34 to 35% of clicks. That's important because the majority of those clicks wereformational type queries. that was what people were um were writing their blogs about and that has made a lot of SEOs question exactly why are we writing blogs and what do we do with our content well kind of spoiler alert Alex is going to talk about that later um all this is to say it's kind of hopping on the same thing right you still want to get position one that's not going anywhere people still do click on that it's just much less what you do also need to take into consideration is the impressions coming from AI overviews and how you can leverage your content to be sourced and cited there. Um, now I think we have a question for all of us. This is what is the difference these days? Do the same tactics slash best practices carry over across both? What are the big differences between the two as far as getting results? Um, does anyone want to go uh give a crack at that first or I can? I'll give it a go. uh with the questions we can just uh Colin's just typing them in. You can just wait till the very end. So I would just ignore his chats and Sounds good. Okay, we we'll bank that for the end. So in terms of what you're going to learn today, obviously you're going to learn how things are different, right? What's the difference between SEO 1.0, I guess you could say, and SEO 2.0. You're also going to learn what this shift means in terms of how to think about your strategy and what actual tactics to do, including how to adapt your content, which is a very big piece in order to be cited in these AI answers. You're also going to be learning how and uh where visibility comes from and and what to look at if you can't just look at rankings or clicks, what other metrics are valuable and important for your SEO strategy. Because remember before we we had kind of the luxury of just being able to look at clicks, look at rankings, look at queries and and that was the SEO strategy. And believe me, I know because I I do monthly reportings to clients almost every week where that's like the main bread and butter. But now we can't just do that. We have to go deeper. We have to look at the bigger picture, dive deeper in what's actually happening on the site, what's actually happening off the site, which impacts the site, and sort of paint this complete picture. And now we're going to talk about what it looks like today. I mean, I know we've already talked about this a little bit, but this is a deeper look in terms of what you're actually seeing in the wild. So, Google AI overviews, Gemini Flash, all these other tools are attempting to deliver answers faster. They are summarizing the content, cutting down traditional discovery steps. Um, in my conversations with my father-in-law, I essentially broke it down like this. Search engines are designed to mimic the the human process of going through results and evaluating them to find the best result. Before they would provide 10 blue links that were essentially the 10 best results. Now AI is going even a step further in that evaluation process and pulling from those results, synthesizing data and and and providing an answer so that you don't even have to do any of the evaluation. It's actually quite an amazing step forward. And because of this, the way people interact with Google has changed. People aren't just searching to start their search, they're searching to finish their search, right? Google is being seen as a result. Um, and because of this, it we sort of have to refigure how we treat Google itself as well, right? People are treating it like an assistant and the queries they're using because of this are changing. Right? Before you might have typed in bought a new puppy, vaccinations, something like that, right? Now you might type in something like bought a new border collar puppy 8 weeks old, firsttime dog owner, also have a cat. What vaccinations do I need and when? And searches like that more and more are becoming fulfilled, right? You're going to be able to see a AI overview up at the top giving you some information and even Google prompting you to enter AI mode to to sort of deepen this um this search. And because of this, a lot of the searches that are informational in nature are being pulled away to AI overviews. Um, you can see there on that graph, right? Uh, for the most part, informationational queries most of the time trigger an AI overview. Navigational, it's somewhat less because obviously the blue links, you might just be wanting to get to a blue link. And for transactional commercial, it's a little bit different. And for those of you who are new, the difference between these search intents is simply when you type in a keyword, what are you trying to do? Are you trying to learn something? Are you trying to go somewhere? Are you trying to evaluate products? Or are you trying to buy products? Right? And it it makes sense thatformational type queries would naturally pull in these AI overviews because that's what the content is geared towards. So in terms of what to do about this, you need to focus on trying to own the AI overview, which you can do to some extent, right? You can be cited as a resource. Oh, okay. Uh you can be cited as a resource. Let's move on. Uh in terms of what phrases or what terms generate AI overviews, obviously the longer ones pop up AI overviews more often. Um, if you type in something like puppy, Google doesn't essentially know your um, intent, but for the most part, longer search queries will populate AI overviews much faster. This is a very important slide, so I want you guys to like memorize this. The the the natural way of thinking is to think that the clicks are just disappearing, but they're not. What's happening is they are being rerouted to other destinations before eventually coming to your website. Right? And the reason why this is important is because we're entering a new phase of marketing where sort of digital marketing is kind of hearkening back to old traditional marketing practices. And when you think about SEO, you need to remember some of that old traditional marketing thought processes, right? You need to think, I can't just focus on clicks or traffic. I need to start thinking about owning mental space in my users's mind. So that way when they go somewhere, I can show up there and then reroute them to my website. Right? Wherever they're showing up, that's the start of the funnel and then eventually you can funnel them back to your website. Uh so here's a question from the audience. I write on Medium. How do you think Google AI looks at the site? Um, real quick answer to this. I think Google does pay attention to publicly available data, right? They would be it would be absurd not to. And this may not affect directly your website rankings or whether you show up on AI overviews. It can positively impact both how you show up on Medium and also how your brand is respected by Google. Uh because remember Google thinks in terms of entities and when your brand interacts in the wild on Medium in a positive way that can benefit Google's opinion of your website. So I think it's sort of an indirect tactic and I would really only focus on this if your users are very active on Medium. Uh one thing to know is that this isn't going anywhere right for now for for most people zeroclick experiences is becoming the default right people they are somewhat um they prefer convenience that's a that's a political way to say that um we all like things fast we all like things easy and AI overview is fast and easy for users and because of this we need to get used to this the question for SEOs is then how do we take advantage of this. Well, from AI overviews, the simple fact is you need to be cited, right? Whenever an AI overview pops up, it cites resources there for users to kind of check the facts against, but also dive deeper if they want to. And in order to own AI overviews, you need to be cited. And in order to do that, follow the cont the content tactics that Alex is going to show you in a second here. Um, and it's really the nice thing is it's not too different from what you already should be doing in terms of really well-written content. Yep. And yesterday, Chad GPT announced how they have uh Shopify, Stripe, and I believe Etsy stock was up because there's also Etsy integration. There's probably a few more that I'm missing, but a lot of these platforms and you're going to I bet you AI mode will follow suit in which you can just start doing transactions there without going to a website. Now, in reality, as a marketer, do you really care if someone visits your website? You're really optimizing for the lead or the sale. And as long as you can get either one of them, who cares if they visit your website or they don't? You just want the lead or the sale, assuming the quality is the same. Absolutely. And when I say quality, you get the user information, you can upsell, downell, maintain the relationship, etc. Cool. Here's further proof that it's not going anywhere, right? Um, Sundar Pichai has called this a permanent evolution in search. Uh, and you can see on the right there that in terms of user satisfaction, it's gone up tremendously. And logically, this is not going to get worse. So, in terms of hallucinations or mistakes, uh, it's only going to get better, which means it's going to show up more and more and it's it's going to be a permanent thing. So, this is something that we do need to be aware of and and learn about. The the biggest issue with this is that it's a moving target for SEOs, right? For users, it's super easy. It's designed to be user friendly. It's not designed for SEOs. It's not designed for business owners to learn how to take advantage of. And that's difficult because there's no real data. Well, that's not true. The data is somewhat more difficult and different than we're used to, which does require us to adapt, be agile, and learn about ongoing updates. I had a uh well, I'll save that story for another time. Uh and and this goes on to what I was talking about, right? There's no real analytics aside from impressions in Google Search Console showing you whether you show up in any overviews uh and and don't even talk about the other LLMs, right? That the data is a little bit harder to see in terms of what people are actually searching for. And because of this, we do need to get somewhat creative. There are some tools which I'm actually going to show one in a second. Um but because of this you need to not take data at the surface level. You need to dive deeper. Always ask better questions and and ask okay is are these impression jumps coming from AI overviews? Go look in the SER in the wild and see if that's the case. Um you can use tools like SCM Rush for AI overview rankings. Um but even that you always got to take it with a grain of salt. So kind of the moral of this slide is just with your data. Don't take things at face value. Always dive deeper. Yeah. And most of you are going to see a really big decrease in impressions and that's because of how Google changed the way people are scraping. So before when someone scraped exhat GPT or SCM rush or Uber suggest or whatever it may be um uh technically we use other third parties. We don't scrape ourselves but like a data for SEO or whatever it may be they would scrape 100 results per uh search query. Now Google limited to 10. So, if you're on page two, three, four, you're not seeing impressions. And that's why a lot of people are seeing their impressions. Sorry about that. A lot of people are seeing their impressions in search console down like 50%. Shows you how many scraper bots there are. It's always important to to like I said take your data not at surface level but dive deeper because it's it's always possible especially with impressions that people read the content and engage with it even on Google Gemini and then they never actually interact with your site driving sessions or conversions or anything like that. Right? So, with your content, you need to you need to understand that sometimes you're going to put out content without ever knowing that people are reading it, even though they actually could be through an AI filter, you could say. Um, so this this might cause some doubt for SEOs, but you just need to trust the process and understand that the data is a little bit harder to see, but you're still having influence even when conversions aren't being logged or sessions aren't being logged. You just got to trust that when you put out good content, it's working. Uh, another question from the audience. Our company has seen a huge decline in site visits since the AI update. We have been working with PR, updating schema, adding metadata, creating industry relevant content. Is there something we're missing? Feels like I'm running around circles with no info to make it work. Implementing AI with no AI experience and no coding experience has also been a struggle. Are there tools available to help make these tasks easier? Uh in terms of just AI visibility, I'm going to show a slide here on the tool called profound. We've found pretty great success with it in in our company. Um with with marketing, you can do anything, but you can't do everything. So, I would say always go back to your customer, find out where they are, right? What do they interact with? And and go very hard on that. Do very well in that. And then when you have extra time, do other things. and at at all times focus on high experience or high high expertise, high authority and high trustworthiness and you shouldn't you shouldn't be steered wrong. Uh the last thing I want to show is there are tools out there to get some visibility on what's actually going on. Now the data is different so you do need to shift your mindset a little bit but for example this tool profound we found it to be very useful uh in working with our clients because it allows you to see where or or when your particular website or brand is mentioned or or influences a query on AI LLM but also the sentiment associated right so when your brand is talked about how do people talk about your brand when your brand is talked about are they saying negative or positive things. So diving into tools like profound can be wildly helpful because it allows you to see how visible you are on LLMs which not exactly keyword rankings but it helps you understand the perception and market share or share of voice you have in the industry and you can do a lot of this for free also on Uber suggest go check out uberestess.com and just put in your you know brand name and you can get started with our AI visibility report for free's great as well but I know a lot of people can't um afford their pricing at I think it's like four or 500 bucks a month, something like that. Yeah, 500. Awesome. Well, looks like it's my turn. Justin, I want to thank you for giving us a great overview of where we're at in the SEO space. A lot of things are changing and what we're going to talk about is specific tactics on how to structure content for AI overviews. Okay, content as you know has evolved and now you can't just rely on on-site optimizations. Now you have to also create content that's useful and engaging to readers while also being scannable by these AIs. So AI parses content in chunks. So looking for clean structure and by that I mean having clear heading structure like H2s or even putting a summary of what the content is about especially on blogs and a TLDDR or for you people who are not maybe residents of Reddit too long don't read takeaways so people can just understand what I'm about to read before I go in and spend a couple minutes reading through the blog. Information should be concise and putting things in very easy to understand digestible sections is definitely best practice not only for your AI but for your human readers as well. Okay, now let's talk about clean formatting for these little pots. Onpage optimization is more important now than it was in the past and it's helpful not only for these bots but for our more human readers as well. So, there's these tactics that you can use for both. And some of those things are pretty intuitive. Having bullets or tables that can help uh both AI and readers just very quickly scan through information and extract answers is a great way to organize your content. Leading with those summaries, like I talked about, those TLDDRs can increase some inclusion rates as well. and paragraphs that are between, you know, three or four lines or higher might have that risk of being cut or misqued. So having that clear hierarchy of content where you can kind of see point one to point two, fact one, fact two, and any FAQs is going to be the best practice for formatting what goes on the page. Okay, take a look at the diagram to the right side here. Those boxes are highlighting metatitles and those metatitles jump out, right? It's the same with AI. And so when search engines are parsing metadata, they do that before they even go into the copy of the website page itself. So having strong keywords aligned with your titles helps to boost that scannability for readers and for AI. And your intro should frame the content, like I'd mentioned a couple times already, in one tight, clear statement. That really just gives people the meat and potatoes up front and they can have their little dessert afterwards. And creating topical authority. We'll talk about EA here in a bit, but this is so important. Authority grows through the depth of your content, not just putting out a whole bunch of content like a daily blog or something like that. You need to demonstrate subject expertise across different related queries and not just one keyword. As Justin mentioned, people are being more conversational in their searches. And so that means having that human connection with your readers as well. That means not just including facts and stats. I know that's very important for how different types of content are cited in AI overviews, but reaching and connecting with that human element as well. And making sure that you include your professional and personal experiences will also help to demonstrate that authoritiveness. I work with people in the HVAC industry and I know how different it is from stateto state. here where I am in Texas, you can't just say, "Hey, AC maintenance is very important because it's uh you're getting ahead of problems later." You need to share those topics like, "Hey, we get these uh thunderstorms in DFW all the time, sometimes unexpectedly, and it can change a very nice and pleasant week into a hot, humid, muggy, horrible mess. So, this is why you need to tune up your AC before you're left in a situation where it's broken and everybody in the city is calling to get theirs fixed, right? Talk about that. Cover topics in subtopics as well so you can connect everything back to that core focus of your industry. Okay. Does structured data help with GEO? Yes, thank you for coming to my TED talk. Now, I know that's why you're not here. I can answer that question pretty easily, but let's talk about why it matters. The graph on this slide shows that structured content does help with visibility. So, just writing an article because you like it and you just thought it'd be a fun idea isn't really going to cut it anymore. So replacing those one-off articles where you just think something is maybe topical or a great keyword, you need to start to organize content hubs. And I'll show you later on in this presentation on how to build those for yourself. And you should also connect all those different clusters to each other and to that core pillar foundational content as well to provide that depth. Clusters make it easier to map out, but it also makes it easier for those people to fall into the rabbit hole of reading more and more of your content on the website. Okay, now let's talk about pillars and clusters. I told you that I would give an example on how you can use this and I'll use our own industry as that uh example. So with SEO, that's a very broad topic that uh involves a lot of different tactics that you can use. So in this diagram here, you can see that if your pillar page is about SEO and everything you need to know to become an expert, then your cluster pages can talk about keyword research and how to do that, link building strategies, local SEO tactics, technical SEO, and it can be for your readers to determine what matters most to them. For example, if you're a national business or if you're e-commerce, many topics about local SEO may not be as relevant, but you can just hop into one of these other cluster pages to learn more about what works best for your business. So, you'll need to start with a comprehensive pillar page on the core topic or authority for your industry and support that with those detailed subtopics that build that additional context. Schema markup also strengthens the connection between them and we'll talk about the different types of schema as well. And just keep in mind that readers and AI both see a clear knowledge hierarchy when they're going through and understanding the content in that structured format. Okay, creating new content is really great. It's fun. It's exciting. But SEO is also all about staying fresh and relevant. And you can do that by updating content and adding bios, which in my opinion, very underrated tactic. So when you're updating content and adding bios, you can refresh blog material or web copy to stay aligned with evolving search terms. Whether you see that there's new topics or questions being asked in these LLMs, addressing those can be a great place to start refreshing. You can add author bios for members of your team or if you're a sole owner about yourself that will signal the expertise and authenticity to readers and to search engines. And having those external references like research articles, other blogs and connections, local business testimonials are really going to provide those trust signals to these LLMs and search engines. rich media. We went from a couple of dark slides, so I know you're probably still adjusting your eyes, but let's shift gears a little bit into what rich media actually is. And if I had to explain this to somebody like my toddler niece, I'd probably say that rich media is just a bunch of pretty pictures. and they might move, they may not, but they're things that you can put into your website to really engage people uh instead of just having a big wall of text that you will probably burn your eyes out reading. Embedding videos and graphics increase engagement. We know that. We can see that from our research internally. Rich media adds topical substance again for both AI and for users. And these can appear in the AI overview in addition to those usual content heavy stuff. But the content variety helps prevent just a surface level summarization. And now we're back to black. Okay. So let's talk about schema. What is it? How does it work? There's different types. article schema, FAQ schema, how-to schema, review schema, a whole bunch of different types, and it's easy to use, hard to master. Schema gets AI context about the structure and the purpose of the content that you're providing. Article schema is great for long form content. That's your blogs, that's your comprehensive guides. FAQ schema is more helpful for very direct question and answer type searches. How-tos improve inclusion for stepbased queries and author schema like I mentioned in that last slide really helps to validate the credibility of the content instead of just coming from some random nobody. Going to address another question from the audience the same way that Justin did a couple slides ago. And the question that clients will often ask us is what is the best schema plugin to use? Because you may not know how to create this. Is there some way or tool that you could implement to do that for you? And well, like all things SEO, it depends. There are some great tools like AIO SEO, RankMath, Yoast is probably the biggest one. But I will say this caveat. Be careful when you use some of these plug plugins to create your schema because it does happen where you might use these tools and it applies a certain type of schema like article schema sitewide and that is not a good thing. You want to make sure you understand the concept and the theory behind using schema before you go in and just use it across the board. And if you feel like those schemas could create some complications and conflict with your website build, you can also use some other tools like WP code to manually add that schema from other thirdparty schema builders. If you're not on WordPress, that's fine. Other builders like Web Flow also have features within their CMS to go in and add that schema to specific blog collections or pages. Okay, using schema properly. This has caused a lot of issues for people who try to implement these new tactics themselves. So, I'm going to talk about some warnings, best practices for you to keep in mind before you go in after this really exciting presentation and try to do some of these things on your own. So, misuse and using the wrong type of schema can actually be a little bit more detrimental. So you want to be careful about how you go in and surgically add these things. Only apply where structured data experience matches the type of content that you have. For example, product events, articles. Avoid misleading markups as well, where you're just slapping an FAQ on all these different pages that don't actually have any FAQ content on them. And test and validate using Google's rich results tool. accuracy and transparency outweigh volume and markup. And I want to emphasize that if you slap every single type of schema to every single type of page on your website and just let crawlers figure out the rest, that's not going to work. And I mentioned this fun little acronym, too. You probably see it everywhere for Google. E A T. This is the one time where I'll say the fake it till you make it approach will absolutely blow up into your face because you want to build content that demonstrates your experience, your expertise in your industry, the authoritiveness of you versus other websites or businesses and the trustworthiness that your customers and clients are going to rely on you for. Google is able to assess the tone, consistency, and authenticity of the content that you produce. So, fabricating credentials is not a great practice. You want to be authentic about being a new business. You want to be transparent about your business practices. And you want to have real bios, references, and subject matter testimonials that are going to stand out in generative results. We here at NPA, we also have a combination of tools that we use from the AI perspective, but we also have, of course, your human SEO specialists and content writers that can go in and really elevate content to the next level. AI is a tool. It's not the artist. You wouldn't expect a pencil to just write the New York Times bestseller for you. And you shouldn't expect AI to do all the nuance of marketing for you either. But pencils are still great for a first draft. AI can draft structure and surface level coverage about the facts and just the objective uh overview of whatever topic that you're writing about. But human experts can inject that nuance. It can add that perspective and credibility to your content that's going to tell readers and really anybody that your content is genuine and not just one of the many thousands of articles that are published every single day. We can also see from the research that we've done internally that AI human content where you're merging the two together actually sees higher engagement and I know that firsthand as well when we go in and use more of that human touch nuanced approach. This mix not only creates those trust signals but it can also help you move people down the funnel as well. Let's take this one step further and talk about distribution and discovery beyond your website. So Neil talks a lot about search everywhere. And when I say search everywhere, I mean everywhere. Search behavior has really expanded to different websites and places like YouTube, Reddit, Tik Tok, even Slack, and Discord. So, you have to stay visible and meet your audience where they're at. So, you don't have to be that trendy, hey kids, I'm hip with the Tik Toks. No, understand where your audience is actually using these platforms on a regular basis and meet them where they're at. Generative tools like Chat GBT answer questions without even going to the Google search results. It will pull answers and discussions from Reddit. It may pull short video clips from Instagram. And so you want to make sure that if you're noticing that there's different rich media appearing in AI overviews relevant to your industry that you're in on that too and you're going to be there as well. All right. Repurpose and repurposing content across platforms. Do you all remember that catchphrase um reduce, reuse, recycle? Okay, let's add another R with repurpose because you can do a lot of the same thing with your content and the impact of repurposing content is a lot more visibility when you adapt core material into video and audio. For example, taking a blog post that you've written and turning that into, let's say, a five minute video, breaking that into chunks for YouTube shorts or Tik Tok, making audio content that can play with people as they're reading the content or doing community posts. These are great ways to repurpose your content without having to write one blog, uh, write one podcast, make one video. Now, you can use one thing in multiple different ways. And reusing frameworks while adjusting for the tone, maybe it's a little bit more casual on Tik Tok. That's really going to help with engaging your audiences. And not only that, it boosts the efficiency to make sure that if say for example, I don't use Facebook. That's just me. I'm a little bit too much of a zoomer here and I use Tik Tok a lot of the times. So if I'm looking for products, I might actually see them on Tik Tok before I even see them on Google. All right, here's another question that we've gotten from our audience and that I've also heard many time from the businesses that I work with. How does a brand new business adapt to the changes from SEO to AI generated SEO? And let me say this, many businesses that have used traditional SEO tactics for years have been panicking after this onset of AI overviews has just really decimated their click to impression ratio. It's changed the game. So, new businesses are uniquely suited to seize this opportunity and start generating new content and repurpose their content across different platforms like I mentioned in that last line because these different forms of media like YouTube, Tik Tok, Instagram, Blue Sky, they are very underutilized and they've been neglected a long time uh prior to this advent of search everywhere. So, this is an opportunity for new businesses to go in and capitalize on this untapped area and to also do a lot more research into your buyer personas. Who is it that you're actually working with? And if you can beat some of these big players in the industry to get on blue sky first, it gives you a very early and easy advantage for AI generated SEO as well. Okay. tracking brand presence in LLMs. This is probably one of the largest challenges that we've had here in SEO uh in quite some time. There's a lot of tools out there for tracking keywords. They're a dime a dozen, but right now a lot of people want to understand what people are searching for in LLMs, too. And there are tools like Noatitoa. Uh Justin mentioned Profound, which is a really great one that I enjoy. And there's also Uber Suggest. I'll throw a little plug in there for another useful tool that we use too. And these large language models pull from all different sources aside from SERs. And you can track that influence in these spaces to guide a smarter content strategy. For example, Uber suggests when you're seeing brand visibility, you can understand also what people are searching for when they're uh comparing brands and products. And now let's talk about distribution across channels. I'd look at this graph as a budget breakdown for what's needed for marketing success. Now, this doesn't always apply equally across industries. Like I said, you really don't want to be um pharmaceutical research company trying to present a lot of very in-depth information on TikTok. This is a phrase that you'll often hear if you've taken a marketing 101 course, but it's all about being at the right place at the right time for the right audience. And so you can do that by balancing these human machine channels, different tactics and systems for SEO to reach that success. So the human channels drive the relationship and a lot of the direct engagement with your brand. The machine channels will determine how AI surfaces your brand in search. And let's talk about those human channels. This is where you really want engagement because this is what drives ROI. People think of email as a product of a bygone era just like you know people see the phone books but email is great and we actually see some of the best results when it comes to ROI from email marketing tactics because it provides a controlled and direct area of communication. In most cases you've already seen that these people are opting in for more information and contact from you. So why not use those warm leads to your advantage? LinkedIn positions thought leadership. It shows you as an industry expert. And I'm sure as you know, you've seen Neil in your inbox. You've seen him on LinkedIn. And this is why so many people turn to Neil as an expert in SEO and digital marketing. And those newsletters build that recurring visibility and trust within your audience's inbox. Let's talk about those robots again. Uh machine channels are equally as important and tools like Uber suggest can really help you understand your brand visibility in AI search. Machine channels like Perplexity and Gemini integrate brand mentions into AI answers. Chat GBT browse surfaces sources without standard SEO signals. And then you have Google AI overviews that blend content and links into a unified summary. Now this slide talks about seating content where AI pulls that from. And I don't want to make the assumption that everybody here knows what seating content actually is. So let's start there. What is seating? Seeding is an SEO strategy that involves strategically distributing your own branded content across various online platforms like YouTube, Reddit, and Kora to increase the reach of your brand and ultimately to improve your search engine optimization. So, think about Johnny Apple dropping those seeds while he's traveling across the lands, right? Blogs, news, and social platforms are some of the top sources cited in AI overviews. Being cited in these ecosystems will obviously expo expose your brand to more people. And seating allows you to ensure that AI references your brand and your material. So you want to be discoverable and not just indexed, which means these LLMs, search engines are finding you, but you actually want to reach the actual person in your audience. Visibility requires being reusable. Answering forums and participating in expert roundups can improve your discoverability and success, as I mentioned, really depends on trust. So disclaimer here, be careful. If you try to enter a arena like Reddit, you will be eaten alive if you're coming just to plug your brand and leave. Stay human. Stay authentic. And on that note, let's quickly talk about some additional opportunities here. Being included amongst the best and the best lists helps people make that decision between two choices. Roundups and Q&A can also increase your credibility. And each listing that you're included in just helps to continue and build that topical authority. And AB testing is something that you can do when it comes to putting content together as well. Test out different formats to see what is being cited in AI and what's not. If it's not, optimize your headlines, add summaries, add those FAQ sections to your content and continuously experiment that on that until you reach the success that you're aiming for. I always say be that kid at the science fair who has that really great pretty trifold and build out your hypothesis. Test it, refine it, and then test it again if that hypothesis wasn't confirmed. Okay, last slide before I stop my yapping here. And I think this is really important too. You need to create content designed for trust and contextual reuse. Build material that algorithms see as credible and reliable. pair it with those answers and citations just like I mentioned prior and build those contextual signals from references, industry updates and things of that nature for your content so that the likelihood of people sharing and reusing it is even higher. And if I have to leave you with just one message, it's to stay creative, keep asking questions, keep testing, and remember that SEO is about reach. Reach people, not metrics. All right, so let's wrap up really quickly and get into some Q&A. So, key takeaways, you know, if you're not leveraging um the new way of doing SEO, you're going to miss out. Don't just focus on getting clicks. Make sure that your brand is visible. Uh you're not just competing for rankings anymore. And winning means showing up wherever AI is pulling from. Whether that's Reddit, whether that's from other websites, whether it's from social. And to do really well in today's world, the big chunk of money that you got to spend on that a lot of people aren't is digital PR. That's why we have a massive digital PR team at NP Digital. Ranking on these LLMs in this zeroclick world requires a lot more digital PR than it used to. And of course, if you want to work with us and just have us do everything that we mentioned today, you can scan the QR code. It'll take you to npdigital.com with all your information and then go from there. All right, Colin, let's get into some questions. Great stuff, you guys, and a lot of really positive comments. Um, I always sit there and and watch what's going on on YouTube. Everyone loved the content. Great, great stuff. And actually, Neil, slide 51 and that chart that you had over on the right side, I think answered a lot of the questions. Like many questions were, what's the difference these days between SEO and geo and AI SEO and how do I prioritize, you know, onpage titles and metadescriptions versus digital PR. So, that was that was spoton and and money. Another question that that came up and I don't know if we have like a great answer to this but I I want to pick everyone's brain here. There were a lot of comments and questions about personalization. Like we know that Google has been rolling out personalization and like rank tracking and rank track rank checking has been sort of disrupted for a decade plus because like it's looking at my search history and IP addresses and locations and all this other stuff. So, there were a couple people commenting on like, hey, you know, when I go and I prompt something specific on chat GBT, like I see my company being cited, but I'm not seeing any mention of that in the tool that I use, whether that's SEM Rush or or otherwise. Any thoughts on just personalization in general? There were lots of questions around like local like how is local being impacted when it comes to geo and presence within chat GPT. Neil maybe we sort of start with you and the other guys can kind of pile on there. Yeah. So everything is being customized to what extent is what really varies. And a great example of this is if you do a search into chat GPT um if you look at most of visibility tools including what Uber suggest does will run the prompt in many cases five 10 times. Why? Because they give this same you know when we're running the prompt 10 times there'll be variations in the responses we get and it varies quite a bit um from localization to general rankings. Yes, they are trying to go down more and more of this personalization route, but keep in mind they're pulling from a from sources. And even though there may be a million possible combinations, there may be 20 or 30 or 50 really good ones. So, you're seeing variations in the good ones. And what you want to do is make sure that you're one of the good ones. You want to do things like digital PR. You want to make sure that you're getting tons of brand mentions. You want to make sure that you're leveraging structured data. You want to make sure that you have positive reviews and ratings, right? A lot of the fundamentals still help you show up more often than the competition even in a personalized world. Yeah, great great response. So, we've got we're at the top of the hour, but just one more sort of comment. Let's go. Let's Let's try to, you know, just pick on one of us instead of all of us, but let's try to get at least three or four more done. All right. Well, so digital PR, like explain explain what digital PR is. I mean, I think so many folks that attend these webinars are so used to like link building and like anchor text and getting, you know, links from other domain sources. Like that has changed as well, right? Like with all of these LLMs, it's not just about, you know, the anchor text and the link pointing from one URL to to the other. Neil, maybe you can talk just a little bit about what digital PR is. I mean, it's getting seated and your content being placed in these other areas, right? Is that what digital PR is? Yeah. Think of like uh it's a new version of link building in essence, right? You're trying to get out there. You're trying to get your brand mentioned more. You're trying to get links. You're trying to sometimes you don't get links, but you just get brand mentions. You get people going really in-depth uh and mentioning you uh highly quality, relevant websites. The old way a lot of marketers used to do SEO is they would be like, "Oh, let me just go get links from this random site and just try to guest post and boost my rankings on Google." Now, it's more so, okay, uh, we have this new product uh, that's perfect for newborn kids when they're eating from a bowl, no matter how they spin it, there's a gyro in there, it's not going to get messy. So digital PR would be like, "Oh, there's this really popular I should have never used that example because I don't know the type of sites." Good Morning America and a ton of moms watch it and they're the ones who buy it. They have a website. We're going to get them to, you know, we're reaching out to them. Oh, they wrote an in-depth review and article on this and how it's going to change the lives for mothers. And you know, they may link, they may not, but that's more quality, more in-depth, and that's going to help you much more uh for your future rankings and mentions on all these LLMs. Awesome. So, last last question and maybe we can focus on Alex for this one. So, or Justin can pile on. a lot of people saying, "So, I mean, if if we're losing the clicks and the AI overviews are pulling in our content, do we want to move away from writingformational content since it's being displayed by Google?" I mean, isn't it isn't it sort of turning into a a branding exercise as well? Like, it's better to get the visibility and the citation and the mention. Yeah, you're losing the click, but at least you're getting mentioned. So, there were lots of comments around like, "Wow, like should we not be providing these LLMs all of ourformational content?" And then if maybe you could pile on with if you don't want the LLMs to pull in your content, are there things that we could do there? Sure, I'll go ahead and take a crack at this because there's kind of two ways to answer this. And of course, most importantly, it's really going to be dependent on your business and your business needs. But I'll say one great thing about AI overviews is that it tends to filter out any of the what we call lowquality traffic that was never intending to complete that conversion action. You see this a lot in local businesses as well where you may have some really superb content for a specific topic that you're writing about, but people are reading it from, let's say, for me here in Texas, somebody in Maryland or in Washington, and those people are not going to come to my physical location. But there's two things that it does. It still helps those people locally to discover you. And that content can also be shared on other platforms or used as a citation on other websites. And it's a way to just naturally generate some backlinks for your website as well. Beyond that, if people see you on those AI overviews, it doesn't mean that people are going to get that answer and be satisfied. A lot of the times, people will say, "Well, that's great, but I want to hear like the actual expert opinion here." And they can actually click on those little links to go to your website or scroll underneath. And if you're ranked high on that page one result, go into your website, read the content, and then just move further and further down that funnel. Yeah. I mean, and that's that's something that I know a lot of our clients are seeing is an when you see an an increase in citations or where you're being included in more Google AI overviews, a lot of our clients are also starting to see brand searches or brand impressions increase. So, and that's something that we haven't really been tracking from an SEO perspective. So, maybe we leave it at that. We're five minutes past the top of the hour. Great stuff, guys. Well, and if you guys need help with your marketing, check us out at NP Digital. Thank you guys all for your time today. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] [Music]