Speaker 1: 0:54

Hello and welcome to SEO is not that hard.

Speaker 1: 0:57

I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hello and welcome to SEO is not that hard. It's me, ed Dawson, here hosting, as usual, and today I'm asking the question is SEO dead? Now, quick spoiler alert I don't think it is, but it's a good question. It's a good question. It was asked to me by Trudy Rankin on the online business launchpad podcast, where she invited me as a guest recently and, yeah, we were having a. She describes it as a like a chat over coffee her podcast and she covers a whole bunch of things around you know how to do online business. And then she asked me on talk about SEO and one of the questions she came up with was, yeah, is seo dead? And she phrased it in the way that she'd recently found herself spending more and more time with chat gpt rather than google search when it came to. You know, getting stuff done. You know, um, and you know it was an interesting question to me, particularly because I'd thought the same thing myself.

Speaker 1: 2:18

Just, I think maybe two days previously I'd been, I was out, I was actually with my daughter. My daughter was at a gym training session and she's in a special um institute of sport group for elite sport where she does with her show jumping and she does these gym sessions anyway I've. It was in the nearest city, it was in Derby, and I'd taken her in and I was just sat in this big it's actually a velodrome um. I was sat inside um and, as there was lots of people cycling around this velodrome in the evening, I was sat doing some work and I was working on some workflow automation using na10, which I've talked about quite a bit recently. I know, um, but when it came to the work I was doing and how I was trying to achieve what I had to achieve, rather than going to google, googling the problem that I was trying to solve and then say, reading lots of documentation, working it out and from that and what to do, I was actually just talking to chat gpt and I was saying, right, I want to do this. I want to do that. It's come up with this error and giving it the errors and saying what do we do next? How do we solve this? And I was just doing the whole complete thing through chat gpt. I wasn't, you know, doing what I would have done two, three years ago, which is going to google to try and sort out the answers to those problems, and it had me sit there and I was thinking you know, this actually is changing things. This is where I'm not going to Google to get the answers to these questions. It had set me thinking, and so it was quite timely that Trudy asked me this exact same question.

Speaker 1: 3:47

Now I've been looking at this and thinking is SEO dead? I wasn't saying exactly that to you, but is this going to change how you build content on the web? Okay, is this going to change things if ChatGPT is now doing this? But then I was thinking about it and you've got to imagine so. Obviously, chatgpt gets its information from somewhere, and in the case of NA10, the platform there that I was using, chatgpt has obviously been, and it's read the content, it's read NA10's guides, it's read people talking about NA10, and it has then enabled it to be able to be queried and for me to talk to it and say talk about the things I'm trying to achieve. It can make suggestions, it can help me solve it through problems based on that information that it's pulled from the web. So that means you as a content producer.

Speaker 1: 4:37

It's still important to create that content. Okay, it's going to be important because two reasons. One, because although some people maybe a lot of people start using chat, gpt and other large language models and other ai to find solutions to their problems, but not everyone will, like I said, to trudy. You know there's still people out there that actually use the yellow pages and on, you know, paper directories and newspapers they're. You know it shrinks over time and the amount of people using Google is probably likely to shrink over time unless Google changes itself quite drastically. But there's still going to be a massive core audience for a very long time for Google. So it's still very important that you're in both places. It's still very important that you have that web presence because ultimately, people are going to come to you. You know NAN have a web presence. I'm a customer of theirs, I pay and I've bought their plan, the fact that I don't necessarily go to their website and their guys directly to get answers now doesn't master na10, because their product I'm still a customer of. Okay, the fact that chat gpt is there and reading their content and allow, you know, building up its knowledge base so that people can then talk to it about it is actually a positive thing for an a10, okay. So it's still important to create that content, that content to be good and to be understandable. So you have to sort of. You know the user is being removed from the website in many respects. The content on the website has still been provided to users through the large language models and in a way that gives them better results. So it's still valuable.

Speaker 1: 6:08

But could we consider it bad that someone like myself, instead of going to N8Ns or any website itself to try and solve my problems, that I actually use ChatGPT? Well, I think in this case, no, it's not a bad thing, because obviously I found an a10 because I said to google, not to google, sorry, to chat gpt. I'm looking for a work, you know, workflow automation tool like zapier or if, unless that, if this, then that. But I'm looking what? If there are any other options, and it was chat gpt that gave me a list of different ones to look at and pros and cons, which I did then go in google and I went to an end site and then I did buy on their site, signed up for a subscription. But then, when it came to you know, setting up my workflows and working out how to do that, I found it far easier for myself and quicker to talk it through with ChatGPT and get it set up that way. Now are NAN going to be upset that I'm not going to their website to do that? Well, they might, as a vanity metric, have preferred me to go and be a user and wander around their site, but obviously, at the end of the day, they've got me as a customer and the fact that I was managing to achieve stuff quicker and get problems solved quicker by using chat GPT than reading through reams and reams of manuals meant that I'm actually more likely to stay as a customer and I've actually built more complex workflows and I think I would have been able to achieve in the time I had available, as if I'd been trying to do it the old-fashioned way, essentially.

Speaker 1: 7:35

So does this mean SEO is dead? I think if you're selling a product, selling a service, no. Now if you are just selling eyeballs, then it might be a bit of a worry. Okay, now, if you're obviously relying on display advertising, if you've got a site that's all about, say, na10, but you're not NA10, and you are trying to get people to come to your site to solve the problems they have using that product or any other product, then ChatGPT could be a bit of a killer, or at least it's going to suppress the amount of traffic you might have got otherwise. So that is an issue. If you are actually trying to help sell people when it comes to a problem, solve a problem, sell a service, sell a product then you're still going to have traffic Because even if ChatGPT helps people find you as the solution, they've still got to come to you to purchase. And, like I said to Trudy, any website owner, they don't really care about the people that don't purchase. Okay, it's nice to have and you want to do a good job for them, but the ones that actually pay the bills, the ones that make your product, your website, viable, are the people that actually make a purchase. And that is the case for every website apart from monetized by display, by eyeballs. Yeah, challenging if you're one of those sites. All other sites are less of an issue.

Speaker 1: 9:00

So, revisiting the original question is SEO dead? No, seo has been proclaimed dead many times in the past when various things have come and changed the search industry and the place where people's attention is, but SEO is not dead. Seo may be very different in the future. I think SEO is probably at the point of inflection where it's going to change more than it has at any point in the past, maybe even 20 plus years, but it's not dead. It might be changing though, but remember, fundamentally, at the end of the day, seo is about getting eyeballs, getting attention in those places where traffic is not paid, and it's still going to exist because people's attention is still out there. And it might just be that you have to look in slightly different places to get that attention, but it's still there. You just have to sort of change where you look in some cases. But yeah, no, it's not dead, just changing, always changing, just like everything, everything changes. The one thing we can guarantee in life is change. It's the same in seo, anyway.

Speaker 1: 10:04

Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed that and I look forward to seeing you next time before I go. I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools that keywords people use, that you can book a free, no obligation one-on-one video call with me where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeopleusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up. Once again. That's keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon.

Speaker 1: 10:42

Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps. Seo is not that hard. It's brought to you by keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organize the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day. Try it today for free at keywordspeopleusecom to get an instant hit of more seo tips. Then find the link to downloada free copy of my 101 quick seo tips in the show notes of today's episode. If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at channel 5 on twitter. You can email me at podcast at keywordspeopleusecom. Bye for now and and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard.