# AI Search Optimization Explained: Leveraging the Shift in Search Visibility — Transcript

Welcome back, everyone. For those of you who are just joining this room, I'm Gail Massberg, and I'm Sirius Marketing Manager. I get the pleasure of working for Sirius kind of behind the scenes, but also getting all of you lovely people to events like this. So I appreciate you being here.

For this next session, It's a pleasure to introduce Neil. Am I getting it all right? All right, close. You're like, no, but okay.

President of Digital Marketing Strategies. Neil has worked in online optimization strategy since 1997, giving him a front row seat to the full evolution of search from early SEO to today's AI-driven transformation. Over his career, he's helped more than 500 organizations strengthen their online visibility through consulting, training, and education. In this session, Neil will break down how AI is reshaping search optimization and what it means for your organization.

You'll gain practical strategies to adapt your approach, improve visibility, and stay competitive as search continues to evolve. Please join me in welcoming Neil and Teresa. Thank you very much. My moniker is the world's oldest digital marketing person because I've been doing this literally.

I was in marketing and sales. I was a sales manager. I was a marketing manager. And one day my college professor called me and said, I'm starting something called an internet services provider company.

And the actual conversation was, what is that? And he said, do you know what AOL is? So if you understand AOL, you'll know how far back I've been doing that. But I've also grown with it.

I'm not still proposing the things. I just know where everything came from on there. Let's move to the next slide and I'll show you exactly what we're talking about because I have a question for everyone here. How many people here notice that they're not getting the traffic they were a year ago on their websites?

And how many of you looked and seen, gee, we're still ranking well, we're just not really getting any traffic. That's where this started. About a year ago, I had customers come to me saying like, hey, we're doing everything, but we're getting like half the people coming through. And we'll get into this a little bit about what we call click-through traffic and where we have to kind of change our mindset.

So this is where the reason that is happening. So if you go back here to 2020, that's what, if you were organically #1, you were about midway in the page. Yes, there were videos. Yes, there were some Google ads ahead of you.

But you were still in visual range. Well, this little thing called the, especially on Google, this little AI overview suddenly appeared. And that takes up a lot of space. And then when you open it up, it really takes up a lot of space.

And then your ads. So now, even though you're organically #1, you're now below the fold. How many people here like scrolling through pages to get what they want to look for? Exactly.

So here's the biggest reason is because you've been visually kind of pushed out of the way. So what that translates into is last year, if you were organic position number one, you were going to see on average a 32% decrease in click-throughs. Meaning you're still there, just people don't get to it, so they're not clicking on you and going to your website, so you're getting less traffic. If you're in organic position #2, it's a 39% decrease.

And every month I go back and look at this table, the numbers keep going higher and higher. Organic information, anything below that, you're talking 77% decrease. And I do analytics and I do optimization for about 34 companies on a regular basis. So I get to see it across a wide range of industries.

This isn't one group. This is everybody it's happening to. So the, could you go back to one slide? Okay.

So that this isn't some crazy man up here just coming up with nice little numbers to show you. Some of the people that I was looking at to see, is this really real? Can anybody show me tangible evidence of this? And you see Search Engine Journal, which is to me, I think they're a very reputable organization.

Has anybody ever heard of the Pew Research Center, Search Engine Land, and even SEMrush? So the factors that are impacting why there's a change, it's not just that drop in the AI that's pushing everything down. It starts over here. I'm not sure how to pronounce that name.

I've gone to their site many, many times, but it's also on several other sites. Google has pretty much come out and said our new focus is e-commerce transactions. Have you noticed when you Google something, it's really not answers. It's a lot of products showing up.

They want to be the next Amazon is a simple way I can put it. So they've even admitted they really don't want to be a search engine the way they were in the past. So that's factor #1. Then we come over here and we say Pew Data Center confirmed 50% reduction in SERP clicks.

That's the other reason. The amount of space coming down on it, that's another reason. LLMs are overtaking search and AI recommendations. The adoption of people using LLMs or AI platforms to do searches is increasing.

And then finally, I think this is actually one of the biggest reasons, think like a customer. If you're a buyer and you go on to a search engine, do you really like going through seven or eight different websites and trying to find what you're looking for? What AI is providing people, and this is smart, a simple, synthesized paragraph, all tailored to the way you entered your information there. And it has little clicks to all the different places, all in a nice little place.

I don't even have to flex my finger to get down to the pages. That has a lot to do with these changes that are happening. So this is where we need to be. This is at the top of anything, specifically Google, but you're going to now see Bing has it.

DuckDuckGo even has it now. So I mean, there's an AI performance, AI result coming up on all the pages. So why do we need to be here? Very simply put, this is where the eyeballs are.

This is ahead and above all the organic listings. So it's important to understand where are these listings coming in? Well, this has actually changed over the last two years. Where it says Wikipedia plus five and it says citation, That originally looked like a little paperclip, and that's what I had people, what's a paperclip?

That's a link to the source. Why didn't they put the name on there? Well, they got enough complaints. They did change it.

They put the name on there, but this has a very low click-through rate. So Google started adding what looks like a Google ad or an actual listing to the right-hand side. These are called mentions. These do very well in click-through.

They're probably not as high as the traditional, But that's probably your best Ave. because that looks like a Google listing. People are choosing that, and that's one of the best avenues to go in. The other thing is, if you show up here, you show up here, you're going to notice that all of a sudden you're dominating the page. There is, I remember the days when people said, when I would do this about search engine optimization years ago, when people would say, well, that's because Google picked those people.

They didn't realize it was an algorithm. Well, it's even worse with this. Look, AI, that's smarter than anyone out here, and look what they picked. Well, that's kind of the same Ave. that happens.

It's very influential. But here's something we have to be aware of. We're not completely AI yet. We're not, we haven't lost all SEO.

So what do we do? We got to kind of balance ourselves between both of them. So from traditional SEO, it's about 50, 60% still of the work. We want to go with a hybrid approach.

And actually, the way AI optimization works is, if you think about it, really starts out with a layer of SEO. And I want you to think of how do we optimize from show up in these search results in AI. It's like an added layer on top of it. So that is what we call the hybrid approach, because it doesn't make sense to be not show up at all in traditional or to show up, you know, just only in traditional.

We're kind of in that halfway mark. This is the biggest thing that we have to have a mind shift in the way we look at it. We've all been trained, we work with pages, we have a keyword phrase we're going after, and it's one keyword phrase or a couple per page. Nothing goes past those.

They're all in nice little order because the algorithm knows these as individual pages. We look at pages, we look at keywords. We're going to change that thought process. We're going to go from that formula over to this, which means now we may take a paragraph out of this page and make a pile over on this side.

These piles we're creating are knowledge zones or hub spaces. So it goes beyond borders. AI doesn't see it as a page. It sees it as a piece of knowledge node buried in there.

So no longer do we have to, if we have to add more things to a page, we don't have to make the page longer and have it all on one page. We can create a blog post. We can create a technical document. And in the back end, as you'll see a little bit soon, is with the schema tags, we can connect those things so that the AIs know, oh, this is part of this, is part of this.

So instead of having to say, I've got to create more pages. No, you don't have to create more pages. You don't have to add more length to them. You can add them from other areas, because you can just say, take this part and add it to this pile.

That's the best way I can explain it. But the big switch, whether you look on either one of these, is we've got to stop looking at, and with 34 customers, I keep getting people, I don't care about this. Where's my ranking? Ranking's kind of lost its meaning.

Because what you want to look through is what is the click-through rate. So because you can rank number one on Google for a word, and if nobody clicked on it, really doesn't help you from a business standpoint. They got to make that conversion over. So when you look at that, there's all these new segments in the way organic search comes in.

There's AI search. There is people also asked. There are, I'm trying the other one was the images and then, but the big ones you want to look at is people also asking things to know which those results are generated from the AI results or influencing what Google comes in with on that. Before we start anywhere, before you even try to optimize, you got to take stock and clean your house first.

So if, does anybody here know what Screaming Frog is? Okay. It's a free tool. Download it.

It's worth it. Screaming Frog can tell you everything that's wrong with your website. And if you have a site under 500 URLs, basically it's free. You can use it for free.

Screaming Frog. Frog. I'm going to get a drink of water. I think I'm parched.

The reason I like Screaming Frog is this is kind of a representation of it right here. You can enter in your URL. It'll give you everything. It'll tell you your URL, your page title, description tag, H1 tags, H2 tags, all the content, anything wrong with your site.

You can go ahead over here and say, show me what all the issues are. they serious? It'll tell me down here, it'll tell me what the issue is and what the impact it's causing. It'll also tell me how to fix it. And then if you click on this, window over here will tell you everything about where that problem is.

Why is this important? Because AIs also look at sites the same way traditional search engines look at it. If you've got broken links, if you've got a large amount of duplicate content, those are problems. and they can't be fixed by just saying we're going to optimize for AI. You've got to clean those up first.

So you've got to go through, take inventory of what you have, get that started, then we can move on to the next one. And this is kind of the workflow process. Now I'm going to walk through this, understand This takes some time. So I apologize if I don't go down to the root level of every single ed.

I'm going to walk through the concepts involved with each one of these, because they take time. And I don't think we have that amount of time to do that. There are four basic audits, and these translate directly to what is important to AI, to LLMs and to AI overviews. The first one is what is called an entity audit.

Take the word concept, topic, or page and change it to what AI understands it to be, those are entities. In other words, they are unique nodes within there. So what an entity audit does is it kind of maps the page and translates it into these are all the entities your site has, primary, secondary, tertiary. It'll also then give us a mapping, and it'll also give us within every entity that is described by an RDF triple.

And we'll get into that in just a second. The way we do each one of these audits is the first part is we say, make a perfect entity map. Or you go in and you find out who's showing up in the AI results, and you say, audit these companies. Take these people and show me what their entity mapping looks like. whether you use the perfect or what's existing, you then follow that up with the next prompt in there is going to be, give me a gap analysis.

What entities are they showing up under and what am I missing? So we're basically doing that. We'll do that for every step of every one of the audits. We then do a semantic audit.

We then do, has anybody ever heard of EEAT? Same thing, slightly different meaning for AI than it did for organic optimization. Then we want to look at a topical authority audit, but they all do the same thing. What's the perfect?

Where are we at? Give me a gap analysis. This is iterative prompting. I've tried doing this with a chatbot.

I've tried doing that. You need to do this one step at a time. If you try to combine It throws, there's, I've not been able to get it to give me a solid result. You need to take one audit at a time and add to it.

When we get to the end, we'll say, put a summary together and give us all that information. So the core deliverables of an entity audit are, it'll identify what the entities are. It'll develop an entity gap analysis. It'll give us a basic schema markup validation.

It will help us resolve any ambiguities, and I'll explain that in just a second. Authority, sentiment footprint, and identifies wiki data matches. And this goes back to the ambiguity. If I've had, and I've actually had this happen, I had a customer that said, we want to be #1 in windows.

I'm a bit of a smart alecky person, so I said, well, do you mean those kind of windows or those kind of windows? I said, what do you mean? I said, they're both windows. See, that's one of the beauties, is AI in this.

You'll notice it says Wikidata, and it usually has a queue number in front of it, right here like that. If you go to that, and you have to have an AI agent to be able to get into it, defines it. So it defines it as in a triplet, and that's basically an object predicate noun, and it'll say windows. It'll say glass, construction or visibility, Windows, software, Microsoft.

So that little number is called a knowledge note. It's in a knowledge graph. And it's for a lot of things you don't realize it already covers. So if you can identify with what your item is, especially if there's like multiple meanings for it, by attaching it through the schema to that number, It now validates that, no, you make glass windows that are used in construction, not Microsoft.

So it clarifies that, which means you're going to be in the proper searches, not in the wrong areas. It helps define things. The other thing on there is when we talk about the, like here's one that we did for an actual company. So the company's called Williams and Hussey.

And one of the things on here is it says wood planer, third one down, wood planer. That's actually defined in Wikidata as a Q206-1054 secondary function node surfacing, surfacing of wood products. That defines it exactly. Because one of the problems we have in content, we don't have the space, nor do we want to make things overly wordy on a page.

So the problem is it gets lost in translation. This helps identify that. And then what this will do, and this again here is the subject, predicate objects, wood molders used for architectural millwork. Each entity is defined by all of these triples in there, the RDF triples.

So this is breaking it down into what do we have and what don't we have. So that's one area. The next area is going to be the semantic audit. And whereas the entity audit is going to work on objects and actors, the semantic audit is focusing on verbs and content.

So what we look at here is core deliverables of a semantic audit is going to be the intent mapping, the alignment, so it analyzes for search intent, information, navigation, commercial, transactional, topic depth, In coverage, supportive terminology, are you an expert in this, which will go into the next audit. Contextual hierarchy analysis, vector distance evaluation. It's looking at all these important little subcategories and it's evaluating, again, by best practice and then by you and providing a gap analysis, providing you the answers of how do you get to be #1, how do you show up in AI. And each one of these evaluations or audits is a part of what AI is looking at and what is slightly different than traditional SEO.

So an entity audit puts you on the map. The semantic audit ensures you are the best answer. So the first is kind of, are you in the right category? The second one is, yeah, you've got the information to be here.

Somebody raised their hand that they remembered what the EAT principle was. EAT principle was actually developed in 2014 by Google, and it was only EAT. In 2022, as AI started becoming more popular, it basically added another E. So there's experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

What they mean by experience, On your page with your product, your service, do you just say, we are the greatest thing, trust us? Or do you say, here's a case study? The whole point of experience is it has happened in reality and you can prove it. And that's where this can come in and be able to actually show, no, here's a case study.

That in the eyes of AI makes it that it is an event that has happened, not something you've discussed, which is what the first E stands for. The second E, expertise, is pretty much, are you covering the topic like an expert? Are you giving me technical specifications? Are you giving me tolerances?

Or are you just saying the best manufactured item in the world? One is marketing language, the other one is showing that you're an expert because you're providing more information. That's what the whole point is of expertise. Authoritativeness This is a big change.

In traditional SEO, you need to get backlinks from very authoritative websites. Good luck on that. That's a hard thing to do, and it takes a lot of time. One of the differences in AI is that it doesn't have to be a they link to you.

It can actually be you're listed somewhere. It's on a reputable site. In the schema code, you can link to it. It's the same as having a backlink.

I'll give you a real world example on this. I have a company that was called metal injection molding. It's kind of the world of, imagine filling a plastic injection molding machine with metal powder. It's the same thing.

So we're going through a conversation with them one day and I said, We need something to show your authoritative, that this. is your lifeblood. And the guy looks at me and he goes, well, the owner of our company wrote the textbook that's used in every university for this subject. I'm like, yeah, that would be a good one to start with. Oh, but the publisher would never link to us.

The publisher doesn't have to link to us. In our schema code, all we did was say, knowledge expert, and then point to the published book where his name is listed as the writer and the editor. Guess what? It's now a fact.

And that's where it's different. If it's posted somewhere and you link to it, I'll give you another example. When people put up ISO certs, they put up a little badge on their page. It's like, if you can actually link to the registrar that has your name in there, that's validation.

The other validation, believe it or not, LinkedIn. If you have engineers, it lists all their credentials. That adds what they're talking about right here, authoritativeness. The last piece is trustworthiness.

Examples are just following the right things. Clear contact policies, identity. You should follow ADA requirements, meaning you don't use your header tags for styles. You use them for the content organization they were meant to for ADA purposes.

So these are all important things to keep in mind on that. This translates into just more or less, it shows us like the gap. I'll give you an example. Our articles are written by our admin or staff.

The fix that would come out as a recommendation or a gap would be, let's create individual author entities, link them to the social profiles and professional listing using personal schema. That's how that corrects that. Topical authority. Originally when I did this, I thought it was the same thing as EEAT.

It isn't. Topical authority is more about the what and the depth of what we're talking about. So it shifts from general organization to topical authority using what's called node mapping. Very simply put, if you're an expert or if you have topical coverage, are you just giving like the three bullet points on a photograph of the item, or are you explaining it?

Now, I'm not talking about a 500-word dissertation on it, but do you give enough information that it demonstrates you have expertise or that you have knowledge and that you're covering a good basis of it? Number one, the reason AIs are looking for that because it's an answer. Again, remember, it's based on me providing answers, not marketing statements. So the more information that you can cover something, the better you're going to be considered by AIs to be included in their overviews.

And then let's go ahead to the next one. Part of the is also the connectivity gap. So one of the things that I love about when you're doing AI optimization is you've got all these things saying you're missing all these pieces of the puzzle. In this part, it will then explain to you how one can become what is called the hub and the pillar.

Are anybody here familiar with hub and spoke or hub and pillar pages? The idea is that the hub has all the basic information. If you're missing something, you can create it in an article, a post, anything like that, and that ties to it. This helps build what those relationships are.

This is kind of the precursor to when we start doing the schema tags. This is helping connect, this blog article is tied to this product or service, is tied to this testimonial, is tied to this blog article or technical article. It's pointing out these are all the connections. That's what then leads us into the next stage.

I'm sorry, two more steps. The last stage when I said next stage is going to be when we put it all together. There are two more little minor audits that we kind of take a look at. I don't know if you were, what other sessions you were in, but there was somebody made the comment of, should you be using AI generated content?

And here's kind of your answer. This is what makes sure that it reads like a human. It's called... a natural language query is what you've put on the page, answer question, and is it readable by a human being? So if you've generated something AI and it meets it, then you're good.

If you've generated swap, I think is the term, it's not going to be read by it. This helps indicate on the basis and the parameters that AI looks at content, is this meeting that or do we need to change this? Again, it's like a filter. You're just going through steps to see are we hitting it or do we need to make changes?

The last part of it, is it machine readable? Have we made it so that we've made it easy for the AI or the LMM bots to parse the information? Do we have it buried in a JavaScript that it only shows up when we use a certain kind of accordion expanding, or is it physically able to be viewed? And I'm amazed how many people, when I do audits for people and I kind of look through their websites, it may look good by doing it a certain way, but you've kind of balanced that by it's not readable by Google.

And I have that happen a lot of times. Dynamic content can cause problems like that. I'm not saying that's bad, but if there are certain pages, you have to kind of like balance it out. Is it, you know, is it can it be read by a machine?

This again is that final piece that takes a look at it. And we'll go to the next one here. So putting it all together is essentially we've got actually more like 6 reports. So you can basically put those all done through.

And each, like I said, each report is a separate little prompt that continues on. I personally use Gemini because it works very well for this. If I get to a point where it's dinner time or I want to do something else or I've been here for six hours and I want to know I do something other than sit at a computer table all day, I can go ahead and save it as a gem and leave it there. Here's one key thing I've learned out of this.

If you do these as an iterative prompting process, which I would recommend, if you stop somewhere, save it and don't add anything to it. Don't say I want to switch gears and look at another project because that somehow infiltrates everything you've done. So this way it keeps it pure and clean and the thought process kind of stays right along with it. This will now tell you and when you say what gap analysis In the prompt, it'll say what hub and pillars need to be added, what topics, what entities need to be filled, what RDFs have to be filled, what semantic relationships have to be established.

It will then print you out every step. These are your missing entities. These are your missing content pieces to describe and fill in the EEAT of that entity. And it'll bring it all out.

And it'll even tell you, here's hub page number one, here's what your pillar pages should be. So you can go ahead. It plans all of your gaps and things you need to have and puts it in a very neat and way of being able to execute everything on there. The only thing you have to do is write it.

And there's ways you can go about doing that as well. So the implementation strategy is create content to fill the gaps, running it through all the tests that come through it. basically we come to the last piece and that is schema tags. And I had somebody look at me earlier today and they said, are those new or have they been around? They've actually been around since like 2012.

But here's the thing, and this is the other thing that I've already had some people come in and say, well, our web builder says we already have schema tags and you're probably going to hear that. Yes, you do. There's a problem. The schema tags you have tell everybody that it's a web page or it's a technical article or it's a blog post.

It may even include the URL. It may even include one other piece of information or your Google merchant account. That is not what AI is looking for. It's part of it.

Again, it's a more defined area. Whereas normally what you're seeing right now is probably that big. These can be up to like that big. There's a lot more definition.

And it's also building those relationships. Because I have one company that we went through this with them when we did just the initial assessment. It's like, oh, your site is doing horrible. It doesn't even cover half the quantities.

When we added the relationships in, oh, you're at 95%. And it just needed that connection. And that's where schema tags come into this. So A JSON LD schema code essentially maps out all these relationships.

And you can do that per page. You can do that by per section. I won't get into the whole thing with e-commerce. That's a little bit slightly different.

You have to use templates because there's so many products involved with it. but your main category pages, main service pages, and all that. Basically, with all that information you've built, you can say, develop me, an entity and semantically optimized schema tag. It will generate the code for you. Once you have that, you can put that into your website.

Let's see if we have here. I don't know. I apologize. I updated this and then when I went to plug it in 5 minutes before we started, none of the graphics came up.

So I'm having to go back and look at what we have here. So one of the things I've said is when you go to put this in, you need to have a program to put it in there. Programs I would recommend are MathRank, WP Code. There's one program I would not recommend using to do this.

Yoast. Yoast does a great job of putting page titles and description tags. Doesn't do real well with custom schemas. Because when you go into any program that it doesn't allow you to physically make every single detailed element that's being discussed from your prompt, you're going to basically default to what the old style of schema is, which is it's a page, it's a technical article, it's a blog.

And everything you've done is now, then it's lost. So I would recommend either the math rank or WP code. Math rank's $150 a year, and I think WP code, if you have a non-e-commerce, it's free. If you have an e-commerce that uses WooCommerce, it's like $150 a year, well worth it, because it maps everything in there.

Now, when I talked about this is a new style of schema, these are 15 new elements that have been added. This wasn't used two, three years ago. This includes like ID, canonical identifier saying, nope, it's not WWW, it's non-WWW. Type declares the entity type is an organization, a product, a purchase, a service, custom attributes using a property value.

Identifier, SKU, model number, unique ID. But these are the ones I really look to, is related to, knows about, Main entity, same as, because that's where a lot of those relationships are built. Knows about, owner of company knows about metal injection molding. Why?

Because this address shows that he wrote the book on it. Do you understand where, do you see where it's connecting? It's all basically connecting everything. Now the great news is, most of you probably have a decent website that doesn't, that just needs these connections.

Because when I've gone through most places, it's I haven't had one yet that has said, oh, geez, you've got to start this whole thing all over again. But I do get a lot that it's not connected. Right now, the way we've looked at it, doesn't translate. And that's what AI looks for.

It has to have those translations created. The beauty is this makes it a lot easier. The benefits of this is, number one, you can finally get ahead of all major corporations because it doesn't worry about the backlinks. you can go ahead and do that through exercising, your LinkedIn profile, things like that. It allows you to add more content and things like that as a blog post, as a technical article, not, oh gosh, you got to add 300 more words to this page.

And I've had those conversations with people on that. So, and let's go ahead and, oh, I'm sorry. One thing we do have to look at is once you put the code in, and I would recommend doing this all at the same step, when you get the new code, you put it into your program, you want to go to two things. One is called schema.org, and you can enter the URL in, and it'll say, yep, you did it right, or it'll tell you exactly what you did wrong.

Number 2, the Google Rich Results Tester, just type that in. You put that in there, you'd like to see that green light come on, If it comes up red, it'll tell you exactly what it is. If you have the AI open when you've generated this, you screwed up, you gave me the wrong code, Google says this. And now, especially with generally, you just take a screen capture of it and throw it in there and say, you messed up.

I wouldn't say that, but basically put that in there. It'll say, oops, made a mistake. Here's the new code. I've done this over 300 times.

I've never had to do this more than twice. That's the longest. I've never had one like four or five times to still give me the wrong thing. It fixes it.

So that's very important because you want to make sure that's all running correctly so that it's working and it works so that AI recognizes it. Now we can go to the next slide. So does it really work? I'm going to show you four companies.

This is very hard to show. So I know I'm showing you like one page of 1 company. I have about, out of that 30, probably 15 to 18 of them, we've noticed that they're showing up in those AI responses. And a couple surprises came out of that.

It was one, traffic went up. It still shows up as organic traffic. Some programs will separate it out as AI traffic. But the thing I like is, here's one.

This is yes, this is my favorite client, the cannabis dispensary, the IT firm that specializes in cannabis dispensary firms. So basically, they show up there, and if you can see right here, just in there, there's a citation. They show up as a mention. They show up in the max overview.

So that's the very top of the page, and they're in three places. Here's the thing we never expected. They're also now #1 organically. Because as you fix all the stuff in AI and optimize for it, has a back effect of then actually improving your standard SEO.

Because you've done all the right things, you've matched things up that you probably didn't do when you were doing just traditional. So that is an add better benefit. The biggest thing is you talk about influence. If you were to see a company's name show up all over the top of the page, who are you going to pick?

As one of my customers said, I don't, I'm not on page one. I own page one. But, and we'll go to the next one and we'll show you another one. Just to show you this wasn't just a one-off type thing.

So who makes a wood molding machine? Williams and Hussey. One, two, three, 4. Again, they're at the top of the list.

Matter of fact, to be honest with you, have to scroll down halfway through the results to see their competition. Next one. This one I really like. Who makes steel racks with custom sizes?

I feel bad for this guy because this guy had a company, it went bankrupt. So he started still selling them, but he was using two other manufacturers to make the racks. And people could tell that right away. So he doesn't have a factory.

It's kind of hard to say, oh, I have all these great. Hey, I'm ISO. No, you're not ISO. You don't have that anymore.

So we started saying, let's just describe what the benefits you have. Let's say it's American made. Let's talk about the safety factors. Let's fill out that whole gaps that we're missing.

We did. And now he's at the top of the page on all of those things. And his biggest competitors are like three and four positions down. The point is, when you're up at this position, people have to scroll to get to your competition.

This is a great place to be. In reality, you're going to have other people show up in there with you. But these are just some case I happen to have that this is all them because their competition isn't there yet. In fact, I did do some research on that.

How many people are actually optimizing truly in the way we're describing for AI? It's less than 5%. The companies that I'm finding that do this are Dick's Sporting Goods, Fortune 500 companies. So why do it?

Because it's an advantage. You're already losing the space, so you have nothing to lose to adopt this. But more importantly, you have all the advantages. Because after 30 some odd years of doing this, I can tell you right now, if you get there first, that's a big thing with any AI, with any search engine. because you plant yourself, you become kind of the expert.

Yes, you can be kicked out, but it's more likely you hold that position if you get there. The other thing is, how many people would like to be the only thing at the top of their keyword that they're looking for? That's the point. And when you have that much space taken up, the footprint is that large.

Again, that's a big influencer to people. So this is, I wanted to give you a couple of posts to just work with. These are very, just the basics. You can take this and kind of work through it.

And basically, the persona acts as a knowledge graph, engineer, semantic SEO specialist. Actually, go to the next one. I think this will give us more willingness. If you're writing content for people, and there was somebody in this room that was in the last meeting that said, what should we write content about?

I'm not going to point. You know who I'm talking. Okay, you smiled. Yeah.

This is a great one. If you figure out what that topic is, just start out, act as a semantic SEO specialist. I'm writing an article about insert target keyword here. It will then tell you, analyze this topic and provide a list of RDF triples that define the relationship between the entities mentioned.

It will give you a subject product object. It will also then give you the basis for that outline we were talking about. And whether you decide to have AI fill out more of that or write it yourself, it's at least getting you better and you're in a direction with something like that. Sorry about that.

Oh, one thing that really helps with AI prompting, if you talk a lot and if you go into way more details than people expect to hear. I think the biggest thing is the two things that I'll leave just as something I've learned over time. Number one, Try to put all of your prompts in a neutral position. Don't kind of lean that I'd like it to say this, because it will give you what you want to hear.

So you have to be neutral on that. The second thing is, be as detailed as you can. I use the analogy of the genie, the person finds the bottle, they have 3 wishes, and what happens, and they all have something terrible happen to them with their wish. Why?

They didn't think it through. And with AI prompting, especially in the generative process, you really need to think through that before you just enter into the prompt, or at least have a game plan to be able to go down through that. So as I'm going to take a sip of water, I'm going to have, does anybody have any questions or comments? Yes. say that you have a pretty good website, but it wasn't developed with, this AI has come on.

What does the scope of the project look like to make it more AI friendly? Run that audit and it'll tell you everything you need to fix and anything you need to add. If you have a lot of depth and you already have like case studies and stuff like that, I'm assuming you're B2B. If you have a lot of stuff, you're going to be surprised by the audit.

If you've already done a good job, all this basically is just refining it and making those connections. You're probably going to only have to upgrade all of your schema tags. You may have to write a couple more articles, but it's not like, oh, we've got to restart. No.

And don't fall for these. I've already had three people tell me, well, this company offers a program that you hit a button and it automatically. No, that doesn't exist. People are trying to jump on this with snake oil.

And I'm just warning you. There's a lot of good people out there, but there's a lot of people out there. And here's the reason why they're trying to do it. They know they're going to have a short window to get this all out, so they got to make their money now.

But that being said, that shouldn't be that big of a thing. Yes? How much effect are you? I'm noticing that, see the Google Merchant SEO, if it's in the schema tag, it does help.

If it has a brand name, and that's more of the areas that kind of comes into it, that does influence it a little bit more. But any other area than that, I haven't seen any huge uptake on it. Unless there's like a reason for it or there's something, like if you have reviews or something like that and you say the best of or what is the best of, that's potentially where this could add a little bit more to that. Yes.

So when you optimize your website for SEO and you're adding on this extra content and some of it's just for AI bots and not actual people visiting your website, how do you Find the right amount of, it's not too much text, but you're still getting in the SEO optimization. One of the things is that the actual text you're writing is not so much, it's not a matter of it's hiding. That's the schema tags that are hiding it. That, does, those can be huge.

That's all, nobody ever sees any of that stuff. Where do you put that information? That's where, to your point, instead of saying, I have to add it on the same page, the traditional sense is, if this is the page I want to rank, I need to add 301 words to this page. You don't.

You can now just say, let me write A blog article that has this information and put it over here. So you're not adding to it. You may be adding another page, but it's not directly influencing that. If you want them to read what that is, you can just link to it and be able to do that.

So that's why I like this, is you don't have to create these ungodly long scrolling pages. You can create little documents and put them in resources or a blog post or something like that, and then use the schema to make all the connections on the back end. Yes. So it sounds like the importance of all the connections is really what those AI bots are looking for.

Do you see that a lot of the website teams are the ones that can make that connection, or do they need more direction from the content team, the messaging team, on how to connect some of those points? I'm just curious, like, where does the work happen? Let me preface this that I do work basically all for web companies, web development companies, IT companies. So they are very skilled at what they do, but no, that is this is not in their wheelhouse.

This is something they need. a collaborative effort. And I even take the time, if I do this new for a company, is let me sit down with you and explain to you this process. Because I've learned that if you explain the process, everyone's like, oh, I get it. Or the fact like I had one company already, oh, we already put schema tags in.

You didn't read it. But yeah. That's a little careful discretion on that. Did I go over?

No, you're just around time. Let's give Neil a round of applause.