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Hello everyone. We're going to let people file in here for the next 30 seconds or so. But from there, we're just going to hit the ground running. It's nice to see the sun here in Portland, Maine. We've had some long stretches of rain in a kind of a long winter in a way here, but it's nice to see some sun.
Some housekeeping notes. I do have Roslyn, one of my digital marketing peoples, on the Q&A line, so she'll be monitoring all the Q&A. So if you have any questions, you can definitely put them in there and then we can answer those at the end.
This presentation's going to go about 30 to 35 minutes, depending on how much I ramble, and I can answer all your questions at the end. And this will be recorded, so if you have to dip out early, you got another meeting, whatever it may be.
We're good to go. So with that being said, my name is John Paglio, the Digital Marketing Manager here at Flyte New Media. I oversee all of our Facebook ads and our Google ads, all the SEO, all of our reporting, GA4 Tag Manager, et cetera. That's really everything I do here.
However, I started out doing SEO. So I've been doing SEO for almost 10 years now. And where SEO is going, it's pretty wild from where we've been. So that's what the whole goal of this webinar is. Really, a where to put your money in 2025 when it comes to SEO. And not necessarily paid ad money, but your time and your resources to SEO.
We do want to invite everybody to Flyte Club. First rule Flyte Club and Flyte School is that you talk about it all the time. So we've been talking about it since January. We reinvigorated this brand. We've been having webinars every month. We've got a couple down the road, which I'll share at the end. And we'll also hopefully be putting on some live events here locally towards the end of the year. Some small events, but time will tell on all of that.
But let's move into SEO. Before we get into 2025 SEO, we need to get into 2019 SEO – where we were, where we've been, and how were we going to get there.
So really, SEO in 2019 is like a casino parking lot at 10:00 AM on a Tuesday. No one's really going to the casino. There's plenty of parking spots available at the front, at the back, valet. Maybe the valets not even open yet. But really, it's this really wide-open parking lot. You could probably even take driver's lessons there, that's probably how empty it's going to be on a Tuesday morning. But really, from an SEO perspective, it was like 10 blue links, a featured snippet might be sneaking in, local SEO, the local map pack might be sneaking in there. But really, it was really wide open to any and all websites to be ranked in the top 10.
I did a search, and I was able to get some research and some screenshots from a 2019 Google search for hoodies. And if we look at what that entails, and this is from top to bottom as these screenshots come in, there’s organic results, there's ‘people also ask’, there's images, and there's a map pack. Now that map pack was at the bottom, which I found wild, considering where we are now and how the map packs are usually right at the top in your face with three or four results plus that map that may get bigger.
This was all SEO was and the search engine result pages were in 2019. There wasn't much going on. Google was really like, “Hey, let's get people to your website. Let's do that. That sounds like fun.”
What else was big in 2019? Voice search. Voice search was all the rage. You had your Siris, your Alexas, all the other do hickeys and little things that would listen to you in your house, your phones, your computers. Now, I'm not saying voice search isn't a thing anymore. We still talk to our phones. We still use Alexas. We still use voice to talk. But it just didn't catch on the way marketers thought it would in terms of how to optimize your content.
Mobile indexing still here, still very relevant on Google. Google wants to make sure that your website is mobile friendly, it's responsive, it looks good on mobile, it acts well on mobile. That is an important thing to this day still. It was always Wikipedia. How do I beat Wikipedia in this? How do I beat Wikipedia in that?
Now it's Amazon. Amazon was starting to get a foothold in the search engine back in 2019. It was before that too. But really as the search engine started to mold, Amazon started to get like, okay, this is cool. Like we're going to start even ranking higher and higher for all these things. So now Amazon was the pinnacle of how do we beat Amazon, especially in the e-com world.
There was an extreme focus on metadata, your title tags, and your meta descriptions, and all the other metadata that you have on your website. Metadata is still important to this day, but there are things that have moved in front of it, in my opinion, in which you could be doing better with your SEO and your website content.
Now betting in roulette, if you're betting black or red, it's a near 50/50 chance, right? It's near that. I know there's a green spot and the house needs odds and blah, blah, blah. I get that. But really when it came to ranking in 2019, I really relay it back to roulette, because it was like that crapshoot. And I use crapshoot one time roulette. That's ironic, I know. But it's one of those things where it was basically a roulette table of, yeah, we can we can get there. Let's just optimize the site and how we need to optimize it.
So if we fast forward to 2025, the parking lot at the casino is now at six o'clock on a Saturday night. There are people parking on the grass, people are parking sideways. Some people are taking up multiple spots. It's just a complete cluster, right? You never know where you're going to land. You could be parked up front one Saturday, the next Saturday could be all the way in the back. It's just how the search into result page has transformed.
So if I did the same search for hoodies a couple weeks ago, and here's what I found. Near 20 shopping results at the top of the page with a filtering system on the left-hand side. Some organic results, which I was impressed to see. More products, whereas these products are probably the organic from your Google Merchant Center as the free listings. Brands picked for you. Now, I don't know. I haven't done much hoodie searching, so I'm not really sure how picked for me they are. Although those are all brands I would wear. Image search of hoodies, and then more brands that I want to explore.
There's five organic listings on page one. And this wasn't even all of it, there was more ads in the page, I only had so much real estate. It's pretty crazy to think of how different the search engine results page looks today. With the shopping, with the filters, the images, the brands, people also ask, people also go buy.
Then you have organic results. But then if you're not in the e-comm world, you've got the AI overviews, you've got local results, you've got featured snippets, you've got YouTube videos, you've got TikTok videos, you've got Reddit threads. There's all these things culminating in the search engine result pages that is going to be hard to figure out, where do I need to be? And where do organic results live at this point? And how do they maintain in this ecosystem?
Thus results getting a straight up blackjack, 4% odds. That's really how I equate ranking in 2025. Not necessarily it's 4% on every keyword or every term, but really it's that much harder. Think about it. You can win on black or red on the roulette table just by picking one color, 50/50 almost. And then getting that natural blackjack, so much harder.
So what's big data say? So there's a lot of big data out there, and some data is forward thinking, some data is analyzing what we currently have, right? So falling search volume is something that garners predicting will happen by 2026 by about 25% on Google. And that's due to all the AI search engines, all the other LLMs that have this internet search capability.
Now, does that change an SEO strategy? I don't think so. At this point, I don't think so. It could be proven wrong in four weeks, six weeks. So it can drop, and it likely will drop, but that doesn't mean your content won't be served elsewhere. It's still organic search in a way, it's just not be it Google.
On the other hand, SparkToro came out a couple months ago and said in 2024, Google search grew by 20 plus percent. And I know that's slightly, there's a little bit of AI in there, right? But Google's currently receiving about 373 times more searches than ChatGPT. So the usage on Google is still there.
But here's the biggest problem we're seeing. And these are whether the last two chips come into play. Zero click searches are all the rage from a user standpoint. They're like, this is awesome! I'm going to go onto my phone or go on my computer, I'm going to ask a question. I'm going to get that overview and I'm not going to click on anything because I'm going to get the answer. Which leads to sky high impressions, 20%, 30%, 40% year over year, which we're seeing with most of our clients. And our clicks dropping off dramatically, 10% 20%, 30%. Some are not, some are drastic, some aren't as drastic.
But it's because of the fact that you were ranking for all of these keywords that answered questions and getting that traffic back to your blog, back to your service, back to your product page or whatever. But now you're not getting that traffic. So how do you bridge all of that? We're not fighting for page one anymore, we're fighting for the click.
If we go back to that shopping example, there's almost 20 products in that first screenshot all the way to the left, and then organic listings. So you could be number one organically and never get clicked. Now, that's probably not the case, but that you're missing out on how many clicks – 20%, 30%, 40%. So it's just one of those things that we need to keep an eye out for of saying, great, we're on page one, but are we still getting the clicks? And that's where your click through rate numbers come into play in your Google search console.
The search engine result page is creating this interactive AI powered experience for users. Pretty soon, do we even think that users are going to have to go off of Google to buy? Google's already integrating the buying piece of it, but are they going to be able to book hotels, book flights, all through this AI-powered search engine? You just never know how this is going to react.
And I'm not trying to do all this to scare you. I'm just trying to say that everything's changed. I'm not saying the SEO framework you've built needs to go up in flames, but it does need tweaks if you want to keep going.
So 2019 to 2025, crazy drastic difference. So really, now is the time for us to start reading the table. And the biggest way we need to read the table is understanding search intent, and understanding how AI overviews in the AI search come into play.
So where I'm starting is I'm starting with actually the Backstreet Boys. Backstreet Boys have the hit single, I Want it That Way. The “I” in this situation is Google. Now Google's saying, “I want it this way. I want the content this way”. And what do I mean by search intent?
So there's four types of search content. There's informational, I haven't even thought about buying. My money isn't even on my mind at this point. I'm literally just looking for a question. I have a question. I'm basically kicking the can down the road, how to paint kitchen cabinets. Do I need to take them off and paint them outside? Can I paint them while still hanging up? Just getting all this information to start before I even go down the process.
Navigational. Now navigational is something where I do also see it as branded content as well. Because if I'm looking for fine paints of Europe dealers, or I'm looking for Sherwin Williams blue, I already know the brand that I want to buy, that I want to interact with. It's even like hours of operation, bank of America ATM, Bank of America Hours of Operations. It's that branded search where the users already made up its mind.
Commercial. So I'm a little closer. I'm probably sitting on my wallet right now. Maybe my hand is in my back pocket, ready to pull my wallet out, but I'm still not officially there. I’ve learned all my research, but what's the best kind of paint? Water-based, oil-based? Not lead-based, we all know that. Or chalk paint, right? What are the pros and cons there? So typically with a commercial intent keyword, you're getting comparison guides. You're getting listicles, directory websites, where it's going to culminate the top 10 in your area.
From a wedding venue you might be looking for ‘top 10 barns in Maine’. And then The Knot or Wedding Wire will give you that website, that culminating list, and then you can click off from there.
Transactional, they're hot to trot. I've got my money in my hand. I'm almost waving it in front of your face saying I'm ready to buy. So how do I buy? If I'm looking to buy Barbie pink paint for my daughter's room, I'm going to go in, I'm looking at shopping results. I'm looking at Home Depot or Lowe's or whoever's showing up, but I'm ready to either walk in and buy a couple gallons, or I'm ready to buy it online. Which, I don't think you'd buy paint online, but maybe some people did.
So understanding the intent, and essentially Google, saying I want it this way. This is how I want it. I don't want a blog post. If people are looking to buy something, I'm never going to serve a blog post. I have a client who ranked really well for products from his blogs, like really well, for years. This search intent shakeup happened, and he lost so much traffic because his blog post wasn't appearing on the all e-comm. If people are looking to buy a product, they're not looking to read a blog about a product to then maybe go buy, right? So it's all intent in getting in your heads of customers of like, where are they in their journey?
So the search intent happened, and then Google decided to layer in the AI overviews. They just shook everything up. The AI overviews are great, in my opinion, to a degree. From a user standpoint, they're wonderful. I am someone who's not going to sit there and read a whole article. I love the way it summarizes it. It brings everything together from multiple sources. You can see the links, like the little chain-like icon that users can click to, and therefore people can then go and do their deeper research.
They can click off to the YouTube video. They can click off to that Reddit thread or any of the blogs that might be showing up there. So users are starting to not even scroll, and they may not even be clicking, right? So there's this whole next level. So while answering questions is usually the easiest form of content, what's another way you can answer those questions? Or if you answer the question, how do you make sure they get back to your website?
And that's the biggest hurdle to jump over right now. The Google Search Console tool, that's the free tool that Google gives you for all the organic search data that you can gather. That does not give you any AI overview data. However, if you do have SEM Rush, if you are using Ahrefs, any of the SEO tools, or if you haven't worked with an agency that uses those tools, you can pull the data of saying, here are all the keywords that are pulling AI reviews. And then here are the websites in that AI overview.
So it does give you that extra level if you are really serious about your SEO and tracking all of that stuff and seeing the growth there. The only thing with those tools, it doesn't show you like the click through to your website. That's where search console comes into play. So you kind of have to match the two data points and data sets up.
But you got to hold onto your hats because guess what? There's more. So if we're looking at the AIO takeover, informational searches – and this study was done in March by Ahrefs – 99.2% of all informational intent searches hold an AI overview. It's a lot, right? It's almost like a guarantee an AI overview will be pulled if you ask a question. Guaranteed.
So personally, I think you're going to start to see more commercial and transactional overviews start showing up. How they get pulled and what they look like, I'm not sure yet. Especially if there's no question being asked.
But that's just time will tell on some of that stuff. But it is really serious to note that if your main content strategy is blogging, and you're not looking at the AI overviews in which your current target keywords have, then there's a big disconnect there. And it's not just Google who's pulling in more AI traffic. I talked about it at the beginning, but there's more players now.
It's not just Google AI overviews, there's Gemini, there's Bing Co-pilot, there's Claude, there's Perplexity, and there's more kind of coming to the surface. And there's starting to be a little niche as well of saying, here's your AI for this. Something that we just need to pay attention to.
In October of 2024, Google's market share dropped below 90% for the first time since March of 2015. Does this mean anything? And drastically, you got to light everything on fire and everything's bad? No. But it just goes to show that there is some power in these AI search engines and that people are starting to use them more. Again, not trying to change your strategy, but just one way to think about okay, maybe there are going to be less people using Google or Bing.
And on top of that, you've got ChatGPT leading the field, which is a no brainer, I feel like. A really bad example, but you know how when we were in the pandemic, the pandemic and Covid was like these two words that you said about a thousand times a day. I feel like ChatGPT is becoming that. Like I'm saying ChatGPT all the time. Sometimes I'm even saying ChatGBT because it's just, anyways, besides the point.
Gemini, Deep Sea, Claude. I think what we're going to see over the next couple years is things are going to start to even out a little bit more. I think ChatGPT is going to be the comfortable one that we're all used to, but the more experienced AI users are probably going to start to beef up some of these numbers in Gemini and Deepsea and Claude.
And there's two ways that we're tracking how users love using AI right now. And that's conversational and direct. So in a conversational world, the users are asking questions, and in return they're getting some sort of natural language response that’s being received as contextual. And I can be like, explain this to me like I'm a 10-year-old, explain this to me like a new hire, explain this to me like I'm the boss of X company. So it's giving you context and different ways to understand. And you go back and forth, and it can almost be a coach for you if you want as well. I'm not saying therapist, but a coach of some sort. Maybe don't take all their suggestions.
And then the other way is direct answers. And that's the example you're seeing here play out on your screens. The direct answer is basically saying, how do I get good at sports betting? There's no answer, trust me, I've tried for years. But what it's doing is it's taking a bunch of different articles and summarizing in one spot, very similar to what a Google AI overview is doing.
But I can also dig deeper, and I understand it without actually getting too deep and having to click into search result, one coming back, click into search result two, come back. So all these different ways of having access to these direct answers is the best way forward. And this is where the brand visibility's changing, too. And we'll get into brand in a little bit.
So why am I talking about all the AI search engines? Because the user journey is changing. That's the biggest thing here is everything is changing. People want it quicker. Maybe they're a little more savvier, they're quicker to bounce. They're looking to be satisfied. They're not always just looking to read something to read something. People want to get in and get out. That's really what they're looking for. Especially from the informational standpoint. When you get further down the funnel with those keywords, that's when you can sink your claws into them and really get what you need to get out of them.
Google is starting to grade stuff faster. SEO is still a long game. It's still a marathon not a sprint, but content is getting graded much faster. And here's an example. I have a client who does bathroom remodeling. He does a lot of glass block walls as well. He's getting some blog posts ranked much quicker because he's going much deeper into a topic and Google's like, oh, this is great. It's that topical authority that we're trying to build up.
I have another slide on topical authority that we can get into more, but just an example of how content's getting graded faster, and users and Google and the search engines are saying, yes, I'm satisfied with this. Let's go. It's thinking less, and this is the new mantra that we're starting to instill in ourselves here at flyte, is that we're thinking less about ranking for keywords and we're trying to solve more problems.
Because if we're trying to solve more problems, it means we're satisfying the user. We're satisfying Google. We're satisfying everybody at once. It's great that our keyword moved from page six to page one, but we're still not getting traffic to the website from that keyword. That's the problem. We're still not satisfying it. Google's saying, yeah, you're in the realm of these things, but there's still a disconnect there. And really that's the biggest thing.
Solving problems is how you compete. That will be the other piece of advice I'll give you. Solving problems is how you compete on the search engines. And not necessarily solving the user problem but solving your own website and your own content problem as well.
If you know me personally, if you know me professionally, even, you know how competitive I am. I am like full go 200% of the time. I hate losing, but I also understand the value of losing as well. I also think my wife… no. I know for a fact that my wife doesn't have a competitive bone in her body, and I have all the competitive bones in my body, which is why we even each other out. And she loves to purposely not compete because she knows how crazy it drives me. Anyways, story for another day.
But in the terms of SEO, in the casino theme that I've put together, we talked about the house in the casino, the house always wins. The house is Google and Google isn't beatable. You can't beat Google at its own game, but you can beat your competitors, because your competitors might not be paying attention to search intent. They might be just writing blogs to write blogs. They might just be putting videos out to put videos out, but they're not actually paying attention to who's watching them and how they're watching them.
Visibility here isn't the prize. And I feel like that's been a good theme throughout w the last 25 minutes or so, is that it's great that you're being seen, but if people aren't clicking, you're not winning, and clicks are what you need to win because you want them on your site. It's crazy to me that you can appear on page one and still lose it. It’s wild to me, I'm still getting over that, but we're getting there.
Trust me, when it comes to the search engine engines, there's so many distractions. So when you're trying to compete, there's just so many distractions that could be happening, right? There's AI summaries, there's image carousels, people also ask, map pack, shopping carts, Google ads, Google shopping ads, Google display ads, et cetera. They’re all right there.
So just because they're all there and you're like, well I've got a blog post. Great. How do I do that? Now you have that piece of content, that one piece of content, and how do you spin it into more ways for people to understand your content? And by people, I mean Google and the AI search engines, and people for that matter. Because the more you show up, if you're on page one, but you're in four or five different spots in page one, that's an incredible brand recognition. By saying, okay, I've seen this brand now four times, I should probably click them. Google, had that 10 blue links, right? It's not like that anymore.
It's a dynamic playground, really packed with features that steal attention and distract people from what they were doing. I could be going to look for new skis, and then all of a sudden I end up on the X Games highlights from 2015. Who knows how I got there, right? But with all those videos coming into a search, now I'm all over the place. So how do we appear? How do we structure our content to get into featured snippets?
Now, featured snippets are going this way. AI overviews are going this way. But featured snippets are still alive and well. So it's really about formatting the content, whether it's a blog or service page that answers questions directly. So typically, probably a blog in this case or a piece of content, a resource using clear lists and tables, maybe writing the answer within the first 40 to 60 words. Making them short paragraphs, very digestible content is how you've been able to show up in featured snippets for a long time now.
People also ask, this is a great way to build up your FAQs, build up other pieces of your content. Remember that top local authority I was talking about? This is one way to spin one blog post into five blog posts, right? So just using the ‘people also ask’ drop down to see also, who's there? Are your competitors there or are industry experts there, or is it just a bunch of random sources that Google's bringing in that you know you can beat out because you have the expertise to write about it?
Schema. Schema is this magic code that it tells Google exactly what it is. So you've probably seen it with rich results when you are looking for skis again, right? And there's a rating underneath the product on the blue link. It's four and a half out of five stars that schema. Now typically, there's a lot of schema already built into websites. Built heavily into e-comm websites, so there's not a lot that the webmaster has to do. But there are other schemas that you could be putting on to tell Google, hey, this is a blog post all about this. Or, hey, this page has FAQs about this.
Again, it's just a tactic that you can use to be seen more. Again, not getting the click just to be seen more, but also the chance to get that click. I will side note, very quick side note, the one thing I do hate about schema is there's no way for us to track it. So just because I put it on a page or put it on a website, I can't come back to someone and say, yep, it's because we put schema on there. Sure, there's trends and patterns to it, but you're ever-changing content on your website, so it may not always point directly to schema. It's just one of those nice to haves.
And then lastly, your metadata. I said that title tags and meta descriptions aren't as important. They still are important, but they're not as important as some other things. It's your ad copy. If you're not running Google ads, that's fine, but think of your organic title tag, your organic meta descriptions, ad copy. So how can you show value? How can you promise clear, direct benefits or solutions to what users are looking for if they do make it into the organic results?
How do you have success with AI search? This slide made it into this deck yesterday because I've been getting bombarded with newsletters the last two weeks with this kind of stuff, and I figured that it needed to be in here. First of all, people want it fast, which is why I think drive-thru casinos are a terrible idea and I don't think I'd ever do one, but you never know. Vegas, Atlantic City, may do one, one day, right? Who knows?
But when you're writing, make sure it's structured right. This is where your logical H1, H2, H3 hierarchy comes into play. Short and short, single idea paragraphs. You're not all over the place. If this H2 is about this, then write about that. Don't go all over the map. Don't talk about a side story. Be very specific with that.
Front loading your key ideas is also really important. And that kind of goes back to how to get ranked for featured snippet, and that's been around for a while, right? You want to front load all the important information, so people don't have to scroll 60%, 70% of the way down the page just for the answer.
Sometimes using somatic cues can help. Like, “this is step one” or “here's our key takeaway”. We actually just released a Meta ads blog on the flyte website. And what we decided to do is, since Izzy Siedman wrote it, we actually had her call out in each section, like “here's Izzy's Take” Yes, she wrote the whole blog, but she has “Izzy's Take” three times throughout that blog, so it's a little bit more eye-catching. And if there's anything that you were to take away from that blog, it's those key takeaways.
I'm a little wishy-washy about this last one, about avoiding the clutter, like popups or a noisy layout or just a confusing design. I could be swayed. I'm on the fence with this one. Yes, no one likes popups. No one likes exit intent popups. If content is hard to read, if it's not loading right, all those things play a factor. So just make sure that if a user's coming to your website to get something, they're going to be able to get it without having to close that and open that accordion and scroll all the way down and click that button. Make it very much more streamlined.
And what I mean by ‘exact keywords’ is that yes, if you're doing keyword research and you're trying to find longer tail keywords, the search volume might be zero, the search volume might be 10 or 50. It's not very high. However, we're starting to take this approach a little bit more here at flyte is, let's start using those exact keywords. Let's start talking about what we want to talk about. Let's not let the Ahrefs algorithm and the SEMrush algorithm dictate how we do our keyword research. Let's start really going after those keywords that our clients are talking about, their clients are talking about, and how can we best suit our content to fit their needs.
Having success with AI search is based on clarity and comprehension, and we're trying to meet users where they're at in their process. If they're not ready to buy, then I don't want them landing on a product page that has a CTA saying, ‘buy now’. We want them maybe landing on a tutorial page, a blog page, et cetera. So that's having success on… and when I say success on with AI search, that basically is how to get seen within an AI search and being those results served in an AI search.
So how can we have more success on Google? EAT has been around for quite a while now. It's been part of many algorithms in the past, but this is one of the places where I feel is going to, you're going to keep doing this. This is something that's going to remain constant. If there's one thing that you can go back and look at your content after all this, it's go back through the EAT method. The experience, the expertise, the authority, the trustworthiness – how are all those things blended into your content? Blended into your website as a whole?
Doing that strategic audit is going to be important. So when you're writing content, make sure those authors are real. They're not funny, cartoon, there's no author attached to it. Give them a headshot, give them a byline. Are there any credentials that writer has? Link over to other blog posts that author has written. All these things can build trustworthiness and expertise by saying, “Hey, Izzy's our expert on Meta ads. She's written four or five blogs about it already. You should go read the other ones”. That's how you can start moving users down the funnel when they get into your content.
Sourcing citations, we learned this back in middle school and high school with MLA and APA and how to cite your sources. But really from a Google standpoint, a search engine standpoint, it's basically saying these people went and did this research, and I am just citing it and this is how I'm spinning it so you can be better. And really that's valued, right? It's not just saying I'm going to pull this out of thin air and just be like, yeah, that's my own research, or I'm not even going to cite it because I don't feel like it. So just citing your sources better gives it, once again, it builds that trustworthiness up.
Credentials, and I already talked about author credentials, but now I'm talking about website credentials, brand credentials. Are you one of the top places to work? Did your product win an award? Did your service win an award? Like any of the awards that you've won or any badges in which you're affiliated with, those need to go on the website on your homepage. They need to go on your product pages, on your service pages. They need to be everywhere, because this is going to help you build your brand.
And then lastly, the photo and video expertise is if you start doing your own keyword research and you're finding that YouTube videos are showing up, image searches are showing up, you need to be doing more of that. You need to be creating more tutorials, demos, walkthroughs. You need to be doing more of that to help build, again, you're building trust up with the user.
And not only that, but if you're a service and you go into somebody's home, you can make a video of saying, “When we come into your home, here's what to expect”, and that's your video. And you put it on the service pages, you put it on a couple other pages. You're building that trust up and your expertise as well is saying we know what we're doing when we come into your home. And then at the end of it, maybe you introduce all the people that might be coming into your home, or maybe that's part of your email campaign. Now this is much bigger marketing, not SEO related, but just where my brain goes when I talk about this stuff, I get really excited about it. So having success in Google is really following the EAT method, putting all the keyword stuff aside. And this is more so on your website itself.
All right, so where am I rolling the dice in 2025? Now, if you get this recording and you go back and watch it in June, all this information could be wrong. It could have changed. Who knows, right? That's how crazy fast SEO's moving right now. It's crazy. But I would rather strategically target a landing page that nails the search intent, instead of writing 10 blog posts that I know that are just going to get covered in dust. I'd rather take that time than write 10 blog posts, because that's where we're going.
What's working that I'm going to keep doing? Local SEO, hands down, will always work. Map packs will always work. Making sure your social profile citations are correct, making sure Google's profile citations are correct. Making sure your local SEO keywords in the service pages and landing pages are correct on your website. I don't think that'll ever go away. So if it's applicable to you, hammer home the local SEO.
I've already talked a little bit about YouTube and visual searches. If you're noticing that TikToks are showing up in a search, A) do you want to be on TikTok? And if not, then maybe those keywords you might want to omit. Or B) if you do want to be on TikTok, maybe you should make sure to start getting videos and start looking at how those videos are structured so you can go do them better.
I mentioned we'll talk about topical authority, and here we are. This topical authority is super important because Google's preferring content that introduces fresh entities or subtopics that are not already covered by existing top pages. So how to paint my house. I'm sure every big painter out there has written that blog post. But what if it's like, ‘How to Paint My Kitchen Cabinets for the First Time’? Super niche, topical authority still about painting. But now I'm getting really super niche-y.
Now, could those searches bring in 10, 20 people a month and that's it? Maybe. But how valuable are those 10 to 20 people who are reading it and might actually take action with you? So this is helping not only users, but also Google, understand they don't only offer exterior and interior painting. They actually offer unique insights about things that can be painted inside the house or outside the house. You know, what to do with my pro paintings when I'm having the outside of my house painted? That's more of an FAQ, but you see where I'm going with this, right? There's much more nuanced and niche topics that you could be writing about.
We’re in this world right now where people are just cranking blog posts out because AI's writing 90% of them, right? So how do we stand out better? This is the way to stand out better is not just talking about that big idea. Talk about the 10 little ideas that lead up to the big idea.
We talked about EAT website updates, and then the last one is branded search. Now, branded search is so important that it has its own slide. Branded search is going to become more and more important over time because of the fact that, and we've known this for so long, that the branded searches are warmer leads. We are near the ‘probably going to convert with us’. We have a trust and reputation already with a lot of these people.
However, from an AI search perspective, that brand recognition helps serve results. So it's one of those things where the more you can put on your website, and that's what I mean by brand focused content. Can you talk more about all the rewards you've won, your mission, your value, and what makes you a great company? Any press releases that you have, any mentions of the press. Like making sure that all is getting somehow categorized and put on the website, on your social channels, in your email list. That is all taken into consideration, maybe not the email list. But everything that's on the web, on the internet, it has your brand name on there, is getting taken into recognition when Google's trying to serve results.
I talk about monitor and protecting your brand. I just thought I'd put this in here. This one always cracks me up. Any CRM out there loves going after their own keywords or other competitor keywords. Do the search for monday.com and lo and behold, the first four results are all paid ads, but none of them are monday.com, right? So this is how you need to monitor and protect your brand.
Now, do Google ads and AI search engine have anything in common? No, but you need to be protecting your brand in the sense of maybe I should be running some Google ads now, monday.com, and all these are these big players, and they don't have to worry about any of that.
But it's just one of those things where you need to understand are people impeding on your ground? And then how are you going to actually hold your ground? What I'm going to be less focused on is making mega pages. So if I have four services, I'm not going to put all four services on one page and call it a day.
Every single service demands its own page because again, going back to search intent, if I'm a plumber and I have all my services listed on one page, but someone's looking for pipe fitting or clogged pipes or whatever, and I don't have a page dedicated to that, then Google's going to get a little confused and maybe not know how to serve my page.
Keyword volume without context. And this goes to the fact of I'm not just going to choose a keyword because it has 3,000 volume. That's great, but what's the realistic chance you're actually going to rank for that keyword? Who knows. That's where you do your research. You go to Google, type in that keyword and be like, okay, this is a good keyword for me because I'm writing a blog post, and it looks like the first seven results are blogs.
I'm going to have a focus on the algorithms, but I'm not going to be worried about them so much. And just for the sheer fact of if I'm writing for algorithms, it's not going to work well with people actually coming to my website. It’s all about that natural language processing, that NLP, that we talk about all the time. And what I'll be less focused on is ignoring the SERPs. I used to spend all of my time from an SEO research standpoint in search console, in Ahrefs, but now I'm doing even more research just on Google alone.
That's the big piece of this is that I'm going to Google to do a lot of my research. You can't out Google, Google, right? Like we've never been able to out Google, Google. Every time we think we can, we can't. But you can outplay your competitors. You know the game, play the hand, and win the click.
We've talked about all of these things today. I know I've thrown a lot at you. I've thrown where we were, where we've been, how AI is playing a factor in it, and then all these things I'm going to do. My biggest three takeaways here though are audit your SERPs, your search into result pages. If that's all you do coming out of this, if that's the only thing you learned out of this, I'm good. Because I think that is such an undervalued tool now, is just going straight to Google and doing that research.
Align your content to intent, right? If you do a Google search and there's five blogs and four videos, and you're trying to target a service page, a local service page at that, rethink that. What kind of content do you actually need to rank for a search like that? And then own your brand search, making sure that your brand is out there as much as possible. Don't go chasing the press or chasing awards. Obviously, you can chase some awards, but don't force it. Let all that stuff happen naturally. Start using more testimonials, FAQs, videos throughout the website to help build the brand.
Before I'm done today, I just want to let everyone know that our next two webinars will be, The Art of Maximizing Your Google Search Ads Budget, which is very important now with Pmax coming into play and all these other different campaign types coming to the surface. That will be with our paid search expert, Rachel Burgard.
And then Roslyn Soper will be doing a webinar on Microsoft Clarity, a super cool screen recording tool, completely free. One of their taglines is always “free or will never be paid” or something like that. So it's a really cool Microsoft tool that rivals Crazy Egg and Hotjar, and much less load time on your website. But Roslyn will get into that in June.
With that, you guys are already on our email list, so you'll get first dibs when these come out. So just be on the lookout for that. Thank you.
Roslyn, did we have any questions today?
I don't see any. Kate South commented, not a question, “Super helpful info. Thank you.” Of course. I hope you're doing well, Kate.
If there's no other questions, I think we're good to wrap this up. I look forward to connecting with you. And go out and do your research on those SERPs, if that's the one thing I can tell you to do. So thanks everyone. Have a great day.