Speaker 1: 0:54

Hello and welcome to SEO is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of the SEO intelligence platform, keywordfewpleusercom, where we help you discover the questions people ask online and learn how to optimise your content for traffic and authority. I've been in SEO and online marketing for over 20 years and I'm here to share the wealth of knowledge, hints and tips I've amassed over that time. Hello and welcome back to SEO is not that hard. It's me here, ed Dawson, as usual, and today is going to be a bit of an update episode. I know it's been a little while since I last released a brand new episode, since mid-April was where I started the mini break I've been having and in fact, when I started putting out the best stuff for my greatest hits episodes, I just really needed to take a bit of a break because of my schedule, for both personal and work reasons, which was getting a bit too hectic, and I've done a couple of new podcasts in that time, particularly on the MCP server model, context protocol server work, which really secures people use. But it's been great, to be fair, having a bit of time off to regroup. So today I just wanted to do an update episode to say what's been going on the sort of current state of SEO as I see it and what's next for the podcast and more basically. So let's dive into it. So first of all, let's talk about the state of SEO AI, traffic and revenue. There's been a lot going on at the moment around how AI is affecting SEO, and this is happening on, I'd say, two main fronts. So first, there's the impact on content production. We've obviously got chat, gpt for text and all the other major LLMs, but we're also seeing the rise of AI video content, ai avatars and sophisticated voice cloning and the ability to produce content at scale has exploded, and you're probably seeing everywhere people giving away the AI workflows and all the things they're doing to do these fantastic things. It is really hyped up at the moment. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, we're seeing how AI is changing search itself. So we're seeing Google, particularly in the US, move more towards AI overviews and the AI mode that they've got in there. That's experimental. I think it's in their labs and I have tried it. You don't have to be in the US to try it. You can use a VPN and just set your country to be the US in your VPN and you can then get access to the AI mode, which is like a cross between LLM and perplexity AI. If you've seen that Now I'm getting lots of reports from people and other SEOs that they're seeing clients that have that overall traffic is down and that it's causing a bit of a panic for anyone whose key metric is just the raw level of traffic that they drive.

Speaker 1: 3:29

But here's the interesting part For many, if not all, the revenue isn't down. So ultimately, people are looking to make a purchase. Still, they still have to make a purchase. The ai cannot physically provide them with a product. Something still has to be delivered or downloaded or provided. So the transactional traffic, the people who are ready to buy, are still finding their way to the right web pages, the right websites, and converting it seems to be general type of funnel informational traffic that's been reduced by ai overviews.

Speaker 1: 3:59

So what does this mean? If it means, if we're in the middle of a big shift, the quality of your traffic is becoming far more important than the quantity. So if your business is making sales, you're probably not going to panic as much. You might be thinking if I had more traffic, I could make more money, more sales. But you have to think differently now, the one area where this there is a significant problem for is any sites that rely purely on display advertising. If your business model is based on just monetizing eyeballs with ads, then a drop in overall traffic is a direct hit to your revenue. My advice for this is difficult other than just try to diversify your traffic sources, but I know that it's far easier said than done and that it's probably just like podcasts could be made on that. But yeah, the display ad model of revenue generation is really in trouble. Now if you rely on Google for your traffic Affiliate side less trouble. Okay, I still have got my affiliate sites sites. I'll talk about more of them in a bit. You can still work with affiliate side because you are closer to the sale, much closer to the sale than random display advertising. So how do we succeed now in this age of ai? How do we navigate this?

Speaker 1: 5:13

From my own personal, what we're finding is that our own sites that act as our big revenue generators are still doing fine. They're still driving strong traffic and they're still driving strong revenues, and I believe that's because our strategy has always been to synthesize data to create new resources. So, for example I've used this example before, but if you're not, you don't remember, you've not heard it before broadband at codeuk, which was a site I used to have before I sold it, we took uk postcode data and we combined that with broadband deal data so we could then say to people what services are available in what area I mean you what deals are available in what area. We could combine the two to provide unique value that a search engine themselves have never been able to really replicate at any decent level, and these kinds of resources are still driving a lot of traffic. So that's where you can give an answer that combines multiple sources, that the especially data that is hard to get at which you have to source from elsewhere, can't just simply be crawled, and this has always been the case and it's even more prevalent now content that just answers simple questions that's what's being absorbed by ai overviews, ai mode, that kind of thing.

Speaker 1: 6:28

So to succeed, you're going to have to go a step above now. This is where topical authority becomes absolutely key for your content to be featured or referenced by AI, an authoritative source on the subject. So doing that, building of deep interconnected content clusters proves your expertise and it makes your site a reliable resource for the AI to draw on when it synthesizes its answers. Now it might not send you the traffic and you might be thinking if the AI is answering the questions, how does my site get fined? Ai models still need to get their information from somewhere. They are searching the open web, they are using search engines, they are looking at link graph data. They're essentially using all the same methods as a human would, just incredibly quickly.

Speaker 1: 7:14

So the bots are coming to your site, reading your content, looking at and they're still using the traditional search engines. You know what this means is. All the stuff that worked for seo in the past is still the stuff you have to do now. You need to answer the human need. The old style of google wants you to do this and the new ai driven search still wants you to do this. There's no secret magic bullet at the moment that I can see. The basic principles haven't changed much. What is this? What's changing is our expectation of what we're going to get out of it. So your overall traffic might be diminished, but what's going to matter is your sales and your conversions, and I think that demand is going to remain. People will still going back to what I said at the start. People still want to purchase a product. People still have a problem they're trying to solve and you might not get the traffic, but you need, as the ultimate destination, for someone to make that purchase and they're only going to do that if they trust that you are that topical authority. So you've still got to do the work, but you are essentially see a lot of that. The human's going to trust the AI to be the one to recommend them the places to go that the AI thinks are the experts, and the AI are looking for the same things as humans in terms of proving expertise, proving topical authority. That's what's really important.

Speaker 1: 8:34

So, moving on, a little Updates on my products and what I've been up to. A lot of this break. I focus on something I've been very keen to work on for years and I've mentioned it previously, a couple of years ago, and that's about a book. But that is a struggle to do. So what I've tried this is the experiment I'm working on now I've taken transcripts from every single podcast episode I've ever released and I fed them into Google Gemini and I basically said to it make sense of this. And it did.

Speaker 1: 9:03

My podcasts have never had a highly structured a to z format. I've never released them in the sequence. It's always been a bit random what I've produced stuff on. I know occasionally I've done a little mini series, like when I did my tip series, when I did the glossary series, but generally I've just done podcasts based on what I fancied talking about on any given day. And what gemini came back with from all these transcripts was a fantastic structure for a book. Taking all the knowledge it's over two million words from all these transcripts. It needed several Google Docs just to squeeze them all into. I hit the limits. I now know what the limit is on an individual Google Doc Bring everything from basic knowledge and philosophy to principles and frameworks.

Speaker 1: 9:45

And from that structure I've been working on producing a draft and I have used AI to help with a lot of the initial writing work, because it's all based purely based on my own podcast transcripts and information I've shared. It's not just going to AI and say, write a book about X, it is saying here, take my thoughts, my words and my knowledge and help me put it in order. I've since then I've been going through it meticulously, editing, making changes, additions and removing things which the odd thing that doesn't make sense anymore certain services that google's deprecated, things like that. There's a whole section around ai that I need to write myself because that's new knowledge. I haven't fully covered it on the podcast yet. I've probably talked about it more today than any other time, but I'm hoping to get that finished. I'll put the book out at some point soon. I think it'll also help shape some future podcast episodes, because I like to do a shorter recap series based on the content of that book so that I can literally say to somebody here go and listen to these podcast episodes. They're in the right order now. It's clustered all the right bits together. So, for example, on Topical Authority, where I might have done several episodes over the past couple of years talking about Topical Authority and certain parts of it that weren't all together in one episode, I can now get those all together in one. So here's a great episode about topical authority and it covers everything and it's poured it all in, for example. So I'll be doing a few things like that.

Speaker 1: 11:10

We've also been hard at work on new tools and services. We've been experimenting a lot with RAG Retrieval, augmented Generations. That's where you take these AI and bring in additional information from elsewhere, trying to give memory and context to some of the tools we've been playing with and like. For example, we wrote some prototype stuff the time language but the AI space is moving so fast that what's good now is potentially obsolete in a month. So we're not ready to release anything yet, but we're making progress. We're just doing a lot of experiment. We're really in experimentation mode at the moment. It's all I can. I've also been working on coding some projects using AI agents and they're brilliant for prototyping. So you can talk to any coding agent and it helps you get initial ideas off the ground way quicker than trying to explain it to a developer. And the AI doesn't complain when I skip to throw away a morning's work. It helps you really refine your process. The downside is it's still hard to get production level secure or scalable code out of it, but the technology has improved all the time and definitely for experimenting with ideas, it really accelerates that basic production and getting it off the ground. And then, yeah, on the personal side, as I said, I mentioned that the original I'm going to have a great podcast.

Speaker 1: 12:24

I've been taking some time to support my daughter, who's 14, and she's really into ice skating and she's now competed in two national competitions at her level and I'm incredibly proud of her and there's a great lesson in there for all of us in how she's doing that and approaching it. So in her first competition she finished second to last, but she wasn't expecting to win or even come anywhere close. It was just about getting started. It was about having to start somewhere. For a second competition, she came midway through the pack, 10th out of 20, and her technical performance scores increased about by around 30 percent, and it goes to show that you know what you're aiming to do with anything that you try in business. Get out there and start knowing you're not going to win straight away, but then you have to push through, do the reps and improve, and that's how you get somewhere.

Speaker 1: 13:07

On the farm, life continues. This time of the year in the uk we're having a bit of a heat wave and we're pretty much in a drought. It's one of the dry springs and starts this summer in many years, and that that brings its own challenges and it's another lesson that you can apply to business. There will always be external factors outside of your control that ruin the best laid plans, just like google updates, ai, all those things because with with the farming side, all farmers are now concerned. There isn't enough grass for the animals and not enough to make decent hay and silage for the winter. Hay is going to be scarce this year, animal feed is going to be more expensive, food prices are going to go up. You can just see all these things coming and they're just completely out of the control of farmers on the ground, and this is what happens. You can you can only control what you can control, and you have to accept the stuff that you can't and you have to work with it and you have to be adaptable, and there's a big lesson in that. So I think that just about wraps up um, the update that I was looking at. So, yeah, until next time, remember, keep optimizing, stay curious and and remember, seo is not that hard when you understand the basics. Thanks for listening. It means a lot to me.

Speaker 1: 14:15

This is where I get to remind you where you can connect with me and my SEO tools and services. You can find links to all the links I mentioned here in the show notes. Just remember, with all these places where I use my name, the link is in the show notes. You can try our seo intelligence platform keywords people use at keywords people usecom, where we can help you discover the questions and keywords people asking online. Post those questions and keywords into related groups so you know what content you need to build topical authority. And, finally, connect your google search console account for your sites so we can crawl and understand your actual content, find what keywords you rank for and then help you optimize, continually refine your content, targeted personalize advice, keep your traffic growing. If you're interested in learning more about me personally or looking for dedicated consulting advice, then visit wwweddawsoncom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is Not that Hard.