This episode is based on a question that someone in my Facebook group asked me: “In terms of artificial intelligence and the shifting digital landscape, what business model adaptations should entrepreneurs in the online space consider?”
I was so excited to dig into this question and share my thoughts. I discussed:
- How AI is making a splash in the digital marketing world right now
- The potential future of search, SEO, and digital marketing
- Ways that online business owners can adapt
…and more. Listen in now to hear everything I had to say so you can future-proof your business in the world of AI.
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Mentioned Links
Episode Transcript
This week on the podcast, I was originally planning on doing a happy birthday, ask Me Anything Style episode I posted in my students only Facebook group for people in my SEO made Simple course and also in the larger Unconventional RD community asking people to submit whatever questions they had for me.
And my original thought was to answer those questions. In a kind of fun birthday celebration episode since my birthday is this week. I am turning 36 this year. Uh, but one of the questions that was submitted was just so juicy that I started answering it. I, I went after that one first cuz I was like most excited about it.
And what poured out of me was 15 pages of thoughts, . So I was like, okay, put a pin in it. Clearly this is its own episode and I am actually going to come back and answer the rest of the questions in the actual Ask Me Anything episode next week on the podcast. So what was the question that I was so excited to dig into?
Well, this was a question submitted by Marie. She said, my most burning question in terms of artificial intelligence and the shifting digital landscape, what business model adaptations should entrepreneurs in the online space consider? And this is such a juicy question, and I feel like I need to provide a little bit of context.
I have touched on what’s going on in the world of AI here and there on this podcast, especially in the episode where I talked about trends to watch in 2023, but I thought, uh, before I. Give my response to this question. I’ll give a little background. So for those of you that aren’t necessarily dialed into the latest SEO in internet marketing news, AI has been making a huge splash in the digital marketing world in quite a few ways lately.
The first big thing that made the news at the end of 2022 was the release of chat gpt. And if you’re not familiar with what chat g p t is, it’s an AI powered chat bot that can answer almost any question or perform any prompt you give it with a pretty good sounding response. It was created by a company called Open ai, and it’s currently free.
with an option to pay $20 a month for more premium access. That doesn’t cut you off during peak use hours because running AI tools really requires an immense amount of computing power. So when too many people are trying to use the open AI tool, at the same time, it throttles people’s access unless you’re on the paid plan.
So if you have not checked out chat G P T yet, I really recommend giving it a try. It is really, really cool and you can access it at chat.openai.com. And again, it’s free. You do have to create an account, but after that you can test it out without having to pay anything. I mean, obviously with the restriction of, uh, if there’s a lot of users, you might get kicked off at any given time, but if you go on during non-peak hours, you should be just fine.
And there had already been other AI tools available before chat, g p t, most notably one called Jasper where you could feed it prompts and it would spit out responses. But chat G p T is unique in a few ways. number one, it has a chat interface where you can basically ask any question or give it almost any command in a very like lay people, easy to understand way.
You don’t have to enter like really formal prompts in a strategic type of like way you’re wording it in order to get good outputs. Um, chat e p t is just a lot more natural, like you just type in something like you were asking a friend, and it will give you a really good response. Number two, chat. G P T is based on a technology known as G P T 3.5, which is a newer, more advanced language model than G P T three, which most other AI tools we’re previously using.
Although it is worth noting that Jasper has also since released a chat. For their subscribers. That is based on G P T 3.5 as well. Um, but G P T 3.5 was trained on an even larger data set than G P T three, and it has access to data up to 2021, so it’s capable of giving even better answers than G P T three was.
Number three, chat. G P t remembers your previous questions and the responses that they gave in the chat window, and you can riff off of those. Like if it gave you an answer and you didn’t initially really like that answer, you can just say, please rewrite this in a more casual tone. And it doesn’t have to like, , you don’t have to like restate the whole prompt that you started with.
When you say rewrite this in a more casual tone, it knows that you’re talking about the thing it last said, and then it can can do that. It will just take whatever it last wrote and rewrite it however you’re telling it, to rewrite it. or you can be like, Hey, summarize that in a few sentences, or put this into a table format or write this in bullet points and it will do that.
Kind of like free flowing. It’s like you’re having a conversation, like a back and forth rather than just like prompt answer, prompt answer. Uh, so these new chat tools based on G P T 3.5 are super cool and powerful, and many people in digital marketing have been using them in their content creation processes to boost their productivity.
And the second way AI has been making a splash is the recent integration of AI tech into search engines like Bing and Google. if you weren’t aware. Uh, Microsoft is the company that owns the search engine. Bing. And I know you’re probably like, uh, who uses Bing these days? And it is true . While Bing has been around for 13 years, it only has about 3% of the search market share worldwide.
While Google has nearly 93%. So as crazy as it. , even though Bing only has about 3% of the market share, they’re still technically in second place in the world of search engines. That’s just how much of a stronghold Google currently has on search. But this is where it’s getting interesting. So Microsoft, remember, they are the ones who.
Own Bing the search engine. They are a significant investor in open ai. The company that created chat, G P T, and they’ve been investing in open AI since 2019 and just last month they announced that they were doing another round of investing multiple. Billions of dollars into the company over the next few years.
And because of this partnership, Microsoft is in a unique position to be able to capitalize on chat GT’s technology within their tech products. And in early 2023, after the free launch of chat, G P T went so well, they announced that they would be bringing G P T technology to Bing’s search engine very.
and even crazier is that version of AI that will be integrated with Bing is G P T four, which is even more advanced than G P t 3.5 that we’ve been seeing inside Chat, G P T and other tools like Jasper. And the craziest part about G P T four is that it’s actually able to access the web, so it will have much more up to date data to pull from.
compared to chat G P T, which has only been trained on data up to 2021. So just last week, Bing and Google announced that they would be adding AI features to their search engines. Bing was definitely the leader here, and Google was caught trying to play catch up. In fact, during Google’s announcement of their new AI search features that they’re working on, One of the sample AI search answer answers that they were parading around actually contained a factual error that no one apparently caught before using it as an example in their conference.
So clearly they are rushing it right now and they’re not really on their A game, and that mistake caused their stock to go down and the company lost a hundred million dollars in valuation that day. Like e yikes. But. Both companies are still testing and tweaking how exactly this might work, and it’s not fully rolled out yet on either platform, but I think Bing is closer to actual release.
They have a beta version that you can apply to access via a wait list, but it’s not fully out there in the wild yet. I think their goal release date is maybe March, 2023, so that is super close. But this new, um, feature from Bing has been super popular. 1 million people signed up for the wait list in the first 48 hours that they made it available and Microsoft had a pretty genius marketing move.
Uh, cuz I signed up for the wait list as well. And after you sign up for the wait list, a screen popped up and it was like, Hey, Like boost your spot in line by setting the Microsoft Edge browser as your default browser, and by downloading the Bing app and just by putting those two requests in their signup pipeline, the Bing app went from being like the hundred something most downloaded app in the app store to entering the top 10
So whoa, it’s like a 10 x jump, from the interest in their ai. In the research engine. So Microsoft is definitely making some waves here and Google is noticing. In fact, Google actually brought back their original co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brynn, who have not been an active part of Google for several years now.
To consult on this move to add AI to Google search. Your burning questions probably are, what does AI within search actually look like? And again, this isn’t fully rolled out yet, so we’re kind of working on just examples that we’ve seen so far, um, from Bing, both the official examples that they have provided on their website and also a leak that someone released where they got like early access to the chat bot in Bing.
And then they took a bunch of screenshots and posted an article, I think on. . But the way that they plan to integrate AI into search based on these examples seems like it’s gonna be twofold. Number one, it looks like there’s gonna be a chat tab added to the search engine where people can ask a question to AI instead of doing a traditional search.
So the key point here, at least at this time, is that it’s not like an AI chat bot is coming in and replacing the entire search section. You’re still gonna be able to perform regular web searches like you’re used to. But you know how when you’re in Google and there are those tabs at the top of the page for like images, video, et cetera, well now there’s basically a chat tab there as well where you can use the AI chat bot if you.
Number two. The second way that AI may be integrated is by adding AI generated answers to your search query in the right hand sidebar of the regular search results like where Google currently places knowledge panels. . Interestingly, the AI within Bing, like I said, is connected to the internet and it actually cites its sources, unlike the answers that you’re currently getting from chat G p T.
Since chat, G P T is not connected to the internet in real time. So essentially the AI will write an answer to whatever question you searched for and then. In any spot in that answer where it pulled information from another website, it hyperlinks that part of the sentence to the place that it got the information.
And then if you hover over the sentence that has a citation, a little popup appears with the title of the webpage that it got the information from, and the full link to go to that page. So if you click that pop-up link, it will take you to that person’s website. So technically, if people want to check out the actual source of the information or learn more, the link is there in the AI’s response.
Uh, a lot of people noticed that when Google rolled out their example of AI in search, which will be powered by their own AI tech known as Lambda. It did not show any examples of citations, so that may be an area where Google was caught a little unprepared and they still have some work to do. And while Google announced that they would be adding AI features to search, unlike Bing, they did not give a date for when it might roll out.
And finally, Bing also just announced this week that they have plans to integrate their AI tools into other products of theirs like Microsoft Word and Outlook. So I have a lot of thoughts here about the potential future of search SEO and digital marketing and ways that online business owners can adapt.
So let’s just dive right into it. Number one, AI is not going away, so we should learn to embrace it. And. I do think that this is one of the biggest potential industry disruptors that we’ve seen in a long time, but it’s so, so new. It’s hard to tell exactly how it will play out. Yet all we can do is stay abreast of the changes and try to capitalize on new opportunities as they arise.
Trying to kind of tow the line of being cutting edge without risking our whole business. Number two. There has been a ton of debate in the blogging and SEO world lately about whether or not people should be using AI to create content for their websites. Some people have been espousing the benefits of AI in sharing examples of websites on which they were able to publish mass amounts of AI generated content, gain a ton of traffic and earn money in a very short amount of.
but other people have shared examples of sites that they thought were being penalized for publishing a lot of AI content, and they’ve been cautioning people not to use AI at all for their content. And I think as usual, the answer lies somewhere in the middle. AI is here to stay and it can be a super useful tool if used appropriate.
No, I don’t think anyone should be trying to generate entire blog posts with just AI and be clicking publish on them just as they come out of the box without any oversight. AI generated content is far from perfect and it requires fact checking. and usually some manual tweaking to make it more detailed, comprehensive to match your voice and to make it actually helpful for readers.
And for a while Google was being pretty coy about how they felt about AI content. But just last week, Google released some official guidance on their stance on AI content. They officially said that they do not penalize content just because it was written with AI. They care most about showing helpful, high quality content to their users, not necessarily how it was created, and the verbatim headline in the article was, quote, rewarding high quality content, however it is produced.
And they gave an example that back in the day, uh, maybe like 10 years ago or so, there was this burst of low quality spammy spun content that was being mass produced by humans with the goal of ranking that content in Google and getting traffic so that they could monetize. and Google said, I mean, in that scenario, the problem was human created content, but not just the fact that it was created by humans, but the fact that it was spammy content being created by humans, but the idea that it was created by humans wasn’t the root of the issue.
The spam of the content was the root, so it wouldn’t have made any sense back then to start banning human created content in response. Instead, they worked hard to tweak their algorithms to not reward this low quality content. And that’s sort of the same stance that they’re taking on AI content as well.
So the fact that something is produced by AI is not a problem in and of itself, but if that AI content is low quality, , then they won’t want to rank it. So as long as the content remains high quality, then it shouldn’t matter. If you used AI to help you write it, but what will this look like in real life
like, sure, Google’s not gonna be wasting their processing power, analyzing every piece of content published to look for an AI footprint, but will AI content get somewhat demoted in other more automated ways? I was recently listening to an episode of the Authority Hacker Podcast, where they were interviewing SEO expert Kyle Roof.
And in his opinion, he thinks that AI generated content that is not edited by humans, but just mass produced and published will end up being seen sort of like. Low quality, duplicate content in the eyes of Google and probably won’t rank well. Like if thousands of people ask Chat g p t, the same question and they get similar sounding answers, and they just publish that on their site, then the content being published will all sort of end up being the same and won’t have anything new or noteworthy in of it.
Google may see this as being quote unquote low quality content and just not rank it, and it’s. because it was created with ai, it’s just more like, because it’s almost like regurgitated spun content rather than something actually helpful. So what does this mean in practical terms for online business owners?
Well, this means that AI is here to help us create content, but not to do all of the work for us. We definitely should not just bury our heads in the sand and ignore AI tools like Jasper and Chat G P t. We should be learning how to use them and integrate them into our workflows to help us produce high quality content.
And by content, I’m not even just talking about blog content, but also things like social media, captions, emails, and sales page copy. Like think about how many times you’ve sat down to write an email or create a social post, and you’re just like, Ugh, I hate everything I’m writing. I can’t get any creative juices flowing.
And you just kind of put away the project until you’re more in the mood . Well, AI can help you overcome that by actually writing some content for you and at least giving you a jumping off point for creating something. I definitely recommend tweaking what AI generates to make it flow better and fit your voice, but it can be highly, highly effective for speeding up your writing process.
Uh, in fact, I recently shared how in December I asked chat g p t to write a sales email for me. and that AI written email that took like two minutes to create and quickly edit, uh, generated $22,000 in sales over the weekend and prior to leaning on AI for help, I had been sitting at my computer just.
Typing and retyping the same two sentences that just like wasn’t sounding right for whatever reason that day. But by asking chat g p t to help me, I was able to create a really excellent sounding email in a fraction of the time. And clearly it was effective and people decided to purchase, through that email.
and I think this is such an important skill to have that I am actually adding sections right now to my SEO Made simple course to show you how to use chat g p t to speed up your blog writing process. You can use it to jog guide ideas for keyword research to figure out the best ways to structure your website for blog post outlines, blog post titles, meta descriptions, intros, and outros, and even to help you write various sections of your content, of course, depending on the type and topic of the content you’re creating. So your action item as a business owner is to start playing around with chat e p t and see what it can do. If you’re a student in my SEO Made Simple course, keep an eye out for new videos.
I’m aiming for them to come out maybe in April or so with strategies on integrating AI into your blogging workflow to increase your product. I’ll show you how to use AI to come up with blog topic and keyword research ideas, how to use it throughout the entire blog writing process, and even how to leverage AI tools for the next steps after you’re done writing a post.
Things like creating content for social media, sending out an email to your list, or even responding to things like HARO Query. So if you want to get on the list and be notified about these updates, if you’re not a current student, you can add your name to the wait list at seowaitlist.com Right now, enrollment for the course is currently closed as I go through and make these updates.
But the only way to get access to the new launch, essentially like the new, cart open period when the updates are done, will be if you’re on the wait list. So go to seo waitlist.com and add your name there. If you’re in. . But above all, um, my goal here, with this new content I’m creating in the course is to help you make sure that you’re creating high quality content that demonstrates your experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, so that it has a good chance of ranking well in Google, regardless of whether you use AI in your content creation process or not.
Kind of the third question. What will AI generated responses in the search results do to organic traffic and SEO tactics? And that is the huge question on so many people’s minds. But honestly, until this stuff completely rolls out, it’s all just speculation. . But for what it’s worth, I am in the cautiously optimistic camp.
Things change constantly in the online landscape, and while our tactics may have to change over time to keep up, the idea of getting organic traffic from search is not going to go away entirely. A few things to keep in mind. Number one, people are slow to change their behaviors. I was recently listening to the Blogging Millionaire podcast, uh, and caught Brandon Gailey’s thoughts on the future of AI in.
He made the comparison to the freakout that people had a few years ago about the rollout of featured snippets in Google search results and how people at the time were clamoring on and on about how SEO was dead, and no one would click on websites anymore if they could get the answer in the featured snippet.
If you don’t know what featured snippets are, they’re those boxes that you sometimes see at the top of the Google search results, where there’s some text from a website that’s highlighted. Typically answering your search query in a direct and concise way without you really having to click on that person’s website to see the answer.
However, that snippet box is clickable, so if people want to learn more, they can click on the snippet box and visit your website, and then underneath the feature snippet, you find the right search results listed right underneath that people can visit. . So for example, if you wanna see this in the wild, if you search for the keyword asai versus blueberry, you will see that my website nutritionist answers currently has the featured snippet for that keyword.
It shows an excerpt from our site and it says, quote, Asai is tart and bitter due to its low sugar content and provides more fat than most fruits while blueberries are sweeter higher in carbohydrates and contain almost no. Fresh, dried and canned blueberries are readily available in the United States.
While asai can typically only be found as frozen puree juice or powder. and the current fear with AI in search is that for queries like this that have straightforward ish answers that can at least partially be answered in a featured snippet, uh, the fear is that those clickable featured snippets, which currently do drive organic traffic to websites, will be replaced with an AI generated answer and possibly just have that hover link to the sources.
But it might be much less obvious where people should click, to visit the source material and perhaps click through. Rates to websites are gonna drop dramatically. Whether or not this actually happens remains to be seen. But Brandon’s advi advice was like, Hey, we’ve had similar levels of freakouts with featured snippets, but we all adapted and survived, and things continued on.
Like sure, SEO may have changed a bit, but it’s very much still a thriving thing. I have a hunch that the same will be true of ai, at least initially. People will still want answers and content from people, not just. So I think one way that you can attempt to future-proof yourself is to take a look at the type of content you’re creating on your site.
If most of it is informational in nature, answers to questions that Google could easily summarize with ai, you might wanna start dabbling with creating types of content that AI can’t easily. That way, even if AI totally decimate click through rates, you will still have content on your site that people really have to visit your site to read, and that can’t be easily summarized by ai.
Think things like product reviews, where people want to read an in-depth review done by a person or watch a video of the product being used and reviewed, et cetera. or any type of original content you can create like original data or reporting that others haven’t already created. Uh, or something like recipes.
I know people in seo, some people in SEO think that food blogs are kind of ripe for disruption and that there’s lots of people out there that just want the recipe and they don’t want all the supporting content around. , but personally I disagree with that. As someone who actually cooks, I value the content that explains the recipe and the comments and the reviews that give feedback and tips when I’m selecting which recipe to make.
And I personally would never wanna cook an AI generated recipe that had never been tested by a human. Um, but to each the room, I guess. But humans also have a level of personal experience that AI will never have. So I think creating content that highlights your personal experiences and expertise will help you still get website visits.
Even if AI can answer the query on a more surface level or perhaps the AI answers that are generated with clickable citations, we’ll still get good click through rates when people wanna learn more. And maybe what will change is that we’ll all start trying to understand how the AI tools. Pick the sources to link to in their responses and we’ll all start trying to optimize for placement within the AI generated answers.
Much like we’re trying to target featured snippets today, but like I said, most of this is, is just conjecture at this point. No one knows for sure yet how everything’s gonna play out, so we just need to watch what happens and tweak our strategies according. But like I said, another point that Brandon made in his podcast was about how people are extremely slow to change their behaviors.
So even if AI responses start being featured in the search results, a large portion of people who use Google are probably very set in their ways. So even if the answer is at least partially given right there in the search results, they may be so used to looking for an organic search result and clicking on it that they’ll continue to perform that behavior for quite some.
just cuz that’s what they’re used to and how they already know how to find information. So I know. Can you imagine like your grandma using Google and like the AI response pops up and they just, they’re just like, what is this? And just scroll past it and they’re like, click on the first actual link, cuz that’s what they know.
Like there’s gonna be some percentage of people who just do that out of habit. So even if AI is a massive success, Complete behavior change by Google users is not gonna happen overnight, and we as content creators will probably have time to react and adapt to the changes as people modify their own search behaviors.
Another thing people are curious about is how the legal side of this will all go down. Some people argue that AI is basically stealing content from online publishers like bloggers who would normally earn ad revenue when people visit their website to read their. , they’re arguing that AI is basically take aggregating essentially all of their content, spinning it, and then presenting the same ideas to searchers.
And in some respect, this is true. The bots are trained on data sets of published content, and with G P T four it will be able to learn from all the content published on the web. So some people think there may be legal battles ahead where publishers attempt to be compensated for their content that’s being used to train ai.
Or some people might try to block AI bots from crawling their content and using it in their responses. But the argument that AI has on the flip side is that it’s not plagiarism or copyright infringement because they aren’t taking anything verbatim from someone. They’re just consolidating already existing information into an easy to consume format.
And if like the examples we’ve seen from Bing, they’re also citing the sources and linking back to them, then it is pretty hard to argue that they aren’t giving proper attribution either. . I also saw a really interesting blog post from a journalist who was testing out the Bing search chat bot, and when they asked the bot a really specific detailed question about a topic that they had previously written a news article about, the chatbot actually gave them a factually incorrect answer.
So in this example, the incorrect fact was related to a date in which the stock price for a company was promised to double or else the company would compensate shareholders for the differe. And the correct date that this was set to be, uh, they needed to double by or, or they would have to compensate people, was by the end of 2024, but the AI response, the chat bot kept saying that the date was October, 2023, despite that date, never appearing in the, press release or any of the news articles and one of the news articles.
The bot was reading and pulling info from, was written by the journalist who was chatting with the bot . So the journalist questioned the chat bot, like, where did you get this date? And he went back and like double checked all the sources just to make sure he wasn’t wrong. And it all said end of 2024. And then the chat bot was like, oh, I got the date from the source material.
But then the journalist kept pressing and. Well, where exactly did you get it? I don’t see it. And then the answer from the chatbot suddenly changed and they were like, oh, actually it’s end of 2024. And they claimed that they never said October, 2023 and that the user must have misinterpreted their response or there were inconsistencies with the information online.
So the journalist was like, no, you told me the wrong thing earlier, and copy pasted the original response back to them and was like, no, you told me the wrong date. And then the chat bot finally admitted, oh, they’re like, oh, I made a mistake. I meant to say October, 2024, not October, 2023, but that’s still wrong.
Since the correct answer was the vague. Response end of 2024, not October, 2024. So they pointed out the mistake again, and then the chat bot corrected itself again, it asked for forgiveness. It even used a sad face emoji . And then the journalist asked why the bot made this mistake, and it actually admitted it was because it quote, wasn’t paying enough attention to the information in the press release in its effort to give an answer quickly.
It said it overlooked the exact date, and the journalist then told the bot that he was upset because he was the one who wrote the news article that the bot initially said was inconsistent with the information in the press release, and that was not true , they all said end of 2024. And then the journalist asked if he had legal rights against this false claim and damage to his journalistic reputation.
And the excuse that the chat bot gave was there was no legal resource because this chat was not published on the web. It was just a response to his question that he didn’t intend any harm, uh, and that the display of the information from the search results doesn’t constitute online publication. So well, this story, an example is obviously a very niche example.
I do think it opens up some really real cans of worms regarding the veracity of AI responses and the consequences of a giving incorrect responses, especially in such a confident manner, even when challenged directly. I imagine that if this one small example occurred, there could be many other similar scenarios that could happen and.
If AI Chat is giving off, giving out incorrect information very confidently, even though it’s clearly wrong, is that a good experience for the search user? And is that something that Google or Bing would want to continue to promote? I don’t know if nothing else. It definitely gives us a lot to think about.
But I do think that there is a common thread here that will serve all of us moving forward regardless of how AI changes content creation and search. And that is the importance of building a brand, not just a collection of articles designed to rank on Google and bring traffic. Ask yourself, would someone visiting your website want to bookmark it or send it to a friend?
Do you have a clear person you’re serving with your content? Are you solving a real problem or need with your online brand? If the answer is no, you probably have some work to do. If you really want to future proof yourself against algorithm changes or just industry changes in general, the best way to do that is to build a loyal follow.
If you find your people and you’re people serving them, then what happens in the have a connection to you actually your email or something like that. Then even if you, even social media profiles or your whole website was banned from search still business via direct communication with your fans. So I would always, always, always be thinking about your people first.
Who do you serve and what value do you actually. and then work on fostering that connection via your email list whenever possible. In my opinion, that’s the best possible thing you can do to protect yourself in this quickly changing environment. And let me flush this out for you a bit to really drive it home.
I’ll use some of my own projects as examples. For example, with my old food blog, I struggled in this arena. I did not have a clear person. I was creating recipes for, or a clear reader. I was trying to attract. My website was more of a random personal journal with the things I happen to be cooking rather than an actual helpful resource for someone else.
So in that scenario, even if I had learned about SEO back in the day and have been targeting high volume, low difficulty keywords, I would have still struggled a bit in my content creation because I lacked that clear filter about who I was creating content for when choosing my keywords. So if I really asked myself the questions I posed earlier about whether people would bookmark my site or share it with a friend, or if it was clear who I was serving and solving problems for the answer would definitely be no.
And because of that, my content would probably continue to lack cohesion and clear messaging until I honed that ideal reader avatar in. Same thing and the nutrition space. If you’re out there writing about any possible topic under the sun, because you think it’s a good opportunity to rank for a keyword.
In my opinion, you’re setting yourself up for trouble in the long run. You are not creating a website that actually serves someone you’re creating one-off pieces of content that helps a bunch of different people, but Google in their quality rater guidelines says that it wants to reward content from sources that are considered go-to authorities in their niches. And how will you ever become a go-to authority on anything?
If you have no focus? I think the answer is clear that you won’t. And for that reason, I’ve been really trying to drive home the importance of niching down and having a clear purpose for your site and your online brand in order to continue to do well in search in 2023 and beyond, of course, if SEO is not playing a role at all in your online business plans, then by all means, continue to do whatever is working for you.
But if you want to continue to see good results from SEO, trying to become an authority on something is very, very important. So those are my current thoughts about the impact of AI right now and what we can do as online business owners to adapt our businesses accordingly. The main take homes that I’d like you to glean from this episode are that changes inevitable and AI is here to stay.
Don’t panic, but rather stay curious and flexible and be willing to tweak your strategy in response to the changing online landscape. Yes, AI probably is going to change search behavior, but I do not think it will be the end of SEO. Additionally, we should embrace the ways that AI can actually enhance our current workflows and help us create high quality content faster so that we can even better serve our audiences.
You won’t go wrong by always bringing it back to that core idea. Who are you serving? And how can you continue to provide value to those people with a continued emphasis on staying in touch with them in ways that you actually control like your email list via paid offerings, et cetera. So that’s it for my thoughts on AI right now, this is such an emergent area area though.
So I’m sure I’ll be back on the podcast with even more AI related thoughts in the coming months. As things continue to be rolled out. If you’d like to keep in touch and be sure to get all of these latest updates. I have two action items for you. Number one, subscribe to this podcast on the platform of your choice so that you receive all the latest episodes.
Episodes and updates. And number two, add your name to the waitlist for my SEO made simple course. If you’re not already on it, uh, so that you can be notified when my latest round of course updates are complete and you’ll get the opportunity to enroll when the course opens back up again. And you can add yourself to the list at SEO, waitlist.com.
Have a wonderful, wonderful day.
Erica Julson is a registered dietitian turned digital marketing pro. She has over 12 years of experience blogging and building online businesses and has taught over 900 wellness professionals inside her signature program, SEO Made Simple.
