Surviving SGE: A Practical Guide to AI Overviews & Organic Traffic

ERIN (00:02):

It is the AI version of Chris.

SANDI (00:03):

I don't know. And check off all the places you see Bicycle to talk to Sandy to prove you're not a robot. I was like, what?

CHRIS (00:13):

It's the cap.

ERIN (00:15):

I know.

SANDI (00:16):

I don't know what you mean at first, so that I got it. I'm a little slow on the update, the story of my life, my slow jokes.

CHRIS (00:23):

But these podcasts in the future, I mean, they be done with AI and a robot. Really?

SANDI (00:29):

I mean, possibly. But then who would get our eighties jokes?

CHRIS (00:32):

Oh, nobody.

SANDI (00:33):

Although no, the damn AI would it, would it? It's really good with dad jokes.

CHRIS (00:39):

Yeah,

SANDI (00:40):

That is true. It's a little frightening, but I think people like hearing the sounds of our voices. I know they like yours, Chris. I'm sure they're sick of mine.

CHRIS (00:48):

I don't know about that, but yeah. So we're soon to be replaced,

SANDI (00:53):

Right?

CHRIS (00:53):

Is what you're saying?

SANDI (00:54):

We should, yes. But until then we fight.

ERIN (01:00):

What was that movie? Braveheart, where he, he's on the horse and he says they can't take our freedom or something like that. Isn't that Braveheart? He's like, I don't

CHRIS (01:09):

Know. Yeah. Yeah. That is Braveheart, but I'm pretty sure robots could.

SANDI (01:19):

So friends and listeners, if you haven't already figured it out, I guess we're talking about AI today.

ERIN (01:26):

We just went on a tangent. I know we're talking about AI today, but before we do, what did we do in the human world recently? Have you guys done anything fun or interesting with your time past weekend or otherwise? Didn't you go to a game or something, Chris?

CHRIS (01:44):

Oh yeah. I went to a baseball game, so I live close to San Diego, so the Padres, and they've been doing amazing lately, so well, first six games of the season anyway, so very happy, very happy.

ERIN (01:57):

How are my Mets doing? I don't follow it, but I cheer for the Mets. How are they doing that? So

CHRIS (02:02):

Good. Who?

ERIN (02:05):

Dang, did she say the Mets? My family's divided Mets and Yankees and I got to go for the underdog. Sorry.

CHRIS (02:14):

Oh, the Yankees will always be at the top. Thank you knows. Yes.

SANDI (02:20):

Not taking down a legacy. I'm a Yankees fan.

ERIN (02:24):

Well, it would be Sandy and Aaron, but I'm a fair, I'm not a fair weather fan. I just always go for the Mets regardless. But I know nothing about them and it's just because I'm from New York, so you know how that goes. That's a

SANDI (02:39):

Good enough

ERIN (02:39):

Reason. No,

CHRIS (02:41):

Game was awesome. Game was awesome, for sure.

ERIN (02:44):

Very cool. That's awesome. The most recent sports thing that I went to was Austin fc, so the soccer game or football, but yeah, and that's pretty fun. That's pretty cool. It's energetic and they just run back and forth on that field for 90 minutes plus, and there's green as their color. So there's green smoke and there's green lights and there's people playing, there's a band, and they play the drums throughout the entire game, and it's pretty exciting. We

CHRIS (03:19):

Lost. Oh, with all that running, it's kind of like you exercise. It's very cathartic.

ERIN (03:26):

Exactly. People are like, oh, isn't that boring? And I'm like, no, they run the entire freaking time. I proposed that they should change up the soccer because they don't, it doesn't go very high in points. So it's like you could have zero to zero, one to zero, two to one, and that's essentially it. Whereas basketball could be like 130. And so I'm like, I propose that they kind of not fix soccer. It is great how it is. I love you. Soccer. However they can maybe jazz it up a little bit so that they can get more points and be more exciting.

SANDI (04:02):

That is so American of you, Erin. First of all, it's nil, not zero. And it's super. I had nil in my head. I had had nil in my head. Has Ted lasso taught you nothing, my friend? We are going to, are going to get crushed in the comments over this. So I'm not saying anything about sports. I've already said my controversial take, which is I'm a Yankee fan. But yeah, I haven't actually been to any sporting event recently. I've been to the theater recently, which is the opposite. But looking forward to baseball, coming back in full swing around here. Even though my beloved Yankees are wherever they are. I mean, they're legacy, but I only follow them when they're playing their Red Sox so that I can cheer against Boston.

CHRIS (04:46):

Wow.

SANDI (04:47):

So yeah, I used to be diehard and now I've just sort of fallen off in Denver now, and so I have to try to root for the home team. And as you know, that can be hard. That can be really, really, really hard.

CHRIS (04:59):

They have great beards though. That team, they all have great, I mean they really work on those,

SANDI (05:06):

But that's like saying, oh, we like their outfits. So

CHRIS (05:10):

Yeah, I didn't mean to be condescending.

SANDI (05:13):

Okay. They look great. It's great. Yeah.

CHRIS (05:15):

Yeah.

SANDI (05:16):

It's like

CHRIS (05:16):

Love the spirit. I was trying to find the positive.

SANDI (05:19):

Positive. Yeah, the stadium's gorgeous. And the fan base is great. I really want this to be their year. I need one year to be their year, just like one in the next couple of years.

CHRIS (05:32):

Wow. They're bottom in the division right now, so I don't think it's this year.

SANDI (05:34):

I don't either. I'm just hoping now. I'm just hoping against hope.

CHRIS (05:40):

Should we steer back towards things that people came for?

SANDI (05:43):

Yeah. Yes. Talk about so we can go for my artificial hope in the Rockies to artificial intelligence.

CHRIS (05:51):

Great

SANDI (05:52):

Transition. Great transition. That was such a dad segue.

CHRIS (05:57):

I find that offensive,

ERIN (06:01):

Sorry to Chris and all the dads out there.

SANDI (06:03):

Yes, yes. So Chris, kick us off. Ai. SEO is near and dear to your heart. The thing that clients call you about all day long. What should we do?

CHRIS (06:13):

Well, this is a great, if you listen to previous podcasts, it's really interesting. We talked about a channel mix overall, and now talking about specific channels is really interesting. And there's none kind of in more flux today than SEO, right? Very true. What worked last year is not going to work this year, and it's been like that for a couple of years now. So I think the real challenge for a lot of marketers has been, well, this last year, for example, we had three plus algorithm changes from Google. We saw the AI overviews, the initial search results come up, the AI overview up top, and it's throwing everybody off completely. And so you've seen, particularly in e-commerce, we've seen entire businesses go away in the past six months to a year, which is really, really scary, I think, for a lot of people.

ERIN (07:08):

And looking outside of Google too. And it's kind of like polishing your SEO skills to figure out what lands and other platforms or other mediums as well, and kind of looking outside the tried and true traditional.

CHRIS (07:23):

And there's not a lot of tools yet. The data sets aren't exactly open

(07:28):

In some cases, so you don't know how many people are using what platforms necessarily. I think there's been some initial stuff out there. Chat GPT, for example is pretty dominant still just in terms of what people are using. But that's not to say that that'll change in two weeks a year or whatever. So there's a lot of, I guess, ambiguity and how to approach everything because so much is in flux. HubSpot came out with a AI sentiment grader around your brand, so you can go on their site and get that. I thought that was a great tool just to look at the overall sentiment, what you're looking at. But fundamentally, search results are different than you would find in a normal search engine, and I think marketers are struggling with that. I think there's a few insights though that we found, I think over the past six months.

ERIN (08:20):

Yeah,

SANDI (08:20):

I think the thing I've been struggling with AI and SEO, and it actually just goes to consumer behavior, not to get us off track, but I've seen in younger people, like younger generations, specifically my nieces and nephews who are Gen Z and Gen Alpha, they don't go to Google to search for things. They go to TikTok to search for things. And it's making me think like, oh, are the chat GBTs of the world? Are they going to be the first place that you go to ask the question? And if so, then how does that just blow up your SEO strategy? Because Google's built an entire enterprise around all things related to being findable. But if the first point of entry, I know there's probably a better way to say it, but if your first thought when you're researching a product or looking for an answer to a problem is to go away, just go away from the traditional channel, what does that do to what's a marketer to do with juggling those channels? They couldn't be more different. It's like, what have you seen?

CHRIS (09:27):

Well, this is why marketers have been caught with their proverbial pants down, right? It's because they've over rotated on one platform and people have been doing it for over a decade. I mean, I can remember a long time ago you'd even put invisible text on a page, try to get ranked or you do, you know what I mean? You'd be doing all this affiliate stuff and link swaps and all this other kind of stuff, which is very gray hat, black hat type of stuff now. So people just don't do that kind of stuff now. But any type of that gaming in the system, it is just not going to work long term. In fact, I think this goes back to, I think research that Google did, I don't know, a decade ago at this point, nine, 10 years ago at this point, which was this rule around, what was it called? The 7 11 4

SANDI (10:15):

Rule,

CHRIS (10:15):

7 11 4 7 11 4 rule, which is that basically someone needs to consume about seven hours of content from your brand to be able to be willing to engage with it. 11 touchpoints. So a touchpoint could be a visit to your website, it could be a download piece of content, it could be whatever. And the four is across four platforms. So I think to your point, Sandy, what is TikTok? One of those platforms? Is YouTube one of those platforms? Is Google still one of those platforms? Is chat GPT one of those platforms? So I think marketers have tended to over rotate on one platform, which is Google, which has been the lifeblood of a lot of people. But that's not the future necessarily. I mean, they're going to try to hang on to with Gemini and with all that they do there and with their current search volume, that's the core of their business, so they're not going to let that go. But I think there's a lot of disruptors in the space that could potentially change the face of it. And as marketers, I think the more you can, content you could put out there across multiple platforms that's cohesive, that tells the same story in the same messages, it goes back to content. But a lot of marketers don't know how to do that. And running integrated campaigns is really, really tough

SANDI (11:36):

All back to

ERIN (11:37):

Content. And it's also new. And I think I had a similar thing when all social media came about, and it was just like, okay, well now you have to write for social media. And it's not social media as an umbrella. It's like social media, all the different platforms and audiences that go there. And so you have one piece of content, but it has to work across all these different mediums and audiences and how they ingest content, how they find content, and that sort of a thing. So it's similar in that you have content that needs to be found in all these different areas because between my kids don't ever talk about Google, they talk about YouTube, TikTok, that's where they get their information and that's how they learn every time they come up with something, oh, mom, did you hear about this? And I'm like, no. Where'd you learn about that YouTube, TikTok, what have you? And it's finding out and not just blatantly being okay, I guess this is what's happening now, but where is your audience? Where are they going to get this info as

CHRIS (12:50):

Well? What was really interesting about what you just said was, you've referenced a lot of video platforms, so I'm going to date myself here, but when I first came into marketing marketers were doing traditional pr. They were doing, this is how old I am, magazine ads within their specific industry. They were doing things like Bill

SANDI (13:10):

Wars, what's a magazine, Chris, I'm much younger than you.

CHRIS (13:15):

Those paper things, they were doing bill wars and they were doing radio and stuff. So I replaced all those people. When I came in the industry, I knew how to do digital marketing, and it was a rough, rough, rough transition. We're going to go through the same thing now, I think with ai, and unless you adapt and you learn and you have this growth mindset, I think around that, you're going to be in the same spot that I saw all those years ago. And so I think one first point to make about this is how do you adjust is you have to get good at things that you're not good at. And so that might be video, for example. I think that's just one area. It doesn't mean that that's everything, but well, how do you do that? Well, you also have to think about how do accelerate what you're doing in a smart way.

(14:06):

So let's take an example. We go and do an interview or even a podcast like this, we go and do that. There's a lot of great nuggets of things within that. You might have a one polished long video, and then you might have different reels or smaller short form video that come from it, or moments. You might have a transcript that turns into a blog post, but you could actually put the video up top and you might have social posts that come out of it too. And then you could probably spin it off and pay to ads too. So the single sourcing I think of content becomes much easier with something like video or audio where you can multipurpose that and get to that 7 11, 4 type of ideal state. And I think that would be to me, just the first step and being able to evolve a team, a marketing team, to be able to be good at that, and to be able to be consistent with that. And that can be the hardest thing in the world because you have traditional skill sets, traditional siloing within an organization, and so you really have to come up with different ways to approach it and a different mindset as a team.

SANDI (15:13):

So interesting that you brought that up. I feel like marketers, if you've been around long enough, you've reinvented yourself a few times because we have to always keep up with the tech and keep up with the industry and just keep up with the broader landscape. But when it comes to ai, if you're an SEO, if SEO has been your skill, it's been the thing that you've done for your company and maybe done for other companies, and now you're looking at what AI is doing to search, is it the case that they need to throw out the old playbook or does the addition of AI almost feel like it's another channel and that you just need to learn the rules of how that channel works in order to optimize it so that if someone does go to chat GBT and ask a question, you get found? What are the rules around just kind of being found there?

CHRIS (16:08):

Well, the rules that there are no rules. No, no. I think Google's guidelines around that, around content have always been, Hey, produce value. That's the upshot of that message. And so I think what has happened, we moved away from some of that black hat stuff over the last decade or two, and it's been, Hey, you have a pillar topic of topic that may get a lot of traffic, a keyword gets a lot of traffic, and then, okay, what are the other keywords related to that could be sub pillars, and we're going to create content around that, and then we'll create blog posts to support that. And that's a pillar strategy, which has worked for a long, long time. The problem is, is that the large language models are getting smarter and they're getting better at gauging intent of people. And so this is maybe the second part besides that 7 11 4 type of approach, which is am I really creating content that addresses the intent of someone when they come and they look for information regardless of what platform they're on?

(17:10):

So the intent may be something like, Hey, I want to know how to do something. So there's a step-by-step process. The intent is how. And so that follows a structure that's more a step-by-step. And then you may have someone that wants to come in and the intent is, oh, I know what the problem is. I need to compare solutions. So you may have a listicle or something that is more about that matches the intent around comparing things within a topic area. And then there's other forms of intent too. But those are just two examples of how you not only have to think about keywords. I think the keywords are one way to think about it, but I think probably your better course forward is to really look at intent and making sure that you're matching the intent that people have when they're searching for things for topic areas that you cover.

ERIN (18:08):

And with the popularity of all these AI tools where everyone's leveraging, not everyone, many are leveraging to create larger volumes of content, it's become even more important to make sure you have your voice and your tone defined, because that's one of the things that's looked for. And so let's use Google for an example. If you write something largely composed with ai, throw a few edits in there and publish it. Cool. But also if it sounds like ai, which is harder now. So I remember, gosh, Chris, what was it? I don't even know. A year or two ago, I think chat GT had been out for six months and we were testing it and we were just like, oh, no, this is not, this is awful.

CHRIS (18:57):

This is

ERIN (18:57):

Awful. It's not good. Mayday mayday, but it's come along so much.

CHRIS (19:03):

What was the phrase that used to always use

ERIN (19:06):

At the beginning

CHRIS (19:07):

Of everything?

ERIN (19:07):

It's in the ever changing landscape or in the involving

CHRIS (19:12):

Landscape, always use the same phrase. You're like, oh, okay, this is ai.

ERIN (19:15):

Exactly. Always ai. When I read things, I can tell, I'm like, oh, that's ai. So it's very predictable, but it's getting a lot better. And so writers and content creators can leverage AI a lot more than they used to, and it's going to continue to become better. However, we kind of always harp on the fact that organizations should have a content strategy. They should have their voice and tone, their style guide defined, and now that comes into play even more. If you're going to be leveraging ai, you just have to ensure that it also kind of marries that together. So it's still a representation of your brand that is quality and genuine, and so that you don't get hit by Google kind of assuming, oh, this is all AI content, so I'm going to deprioritize it.

SANDI (20:06):

Yeah, and likewise for your audience, I mean the same way that you have to really know what your voice and tone is. I think going back to both of your points, just to tie it together with how product marketing fits into this is you really need to know who your audience is. You need to know what their pains are. You need to know what the jobs to be done, what are they trying to accomplish? Because if I'm understanding what Chris was saying earlier, SEO used to say, Hey, answer the question. They ask your audience, ask the question. You answer it. A-I-S-E-O is the question behind the question. It's the more context and how can you anticipate what it is they're actually trying to do or what they're trying to learn or what to do next. And if you know your audience well, then I feel like you're really well positioned to tackle both of those so that you don't lose, so that when someone asks the question, you can not only serve up content that addresses that, but take them one step, just sort of one step along their journey, whether they knew whether they they needed it or not.

(21:05):

I think that's where the magic comes in when it comes to just knowing who your audience is and really knowing what it is they're trying to do. And all your product or service addresses that.

CHRIS (21:15):

And I would say know what your value add is on top of all that, you need to know what value you're bringing on. In addition, if you don't have anything to say in your subject area and your product is in a subject area, you might need to sit down and think about that a little bit. You have to be able to do it. And that's one area that you will always be ahead of AI potentially is if you keep innovating, you keep looking at new ways to solve problems, and you're part of the algorithm. That's the ideal state is that you are that source that the algorithm goes to figure out how to advise people. That's ideal.

ERIN (21:53):

Exactly. Because that's getting a lot better too. I remember when we were testing it back then, I was appalled because give me a stat on whatever the topic was, and it gave me this beautiful, insightful statistic, and I'm like, wow, this is incredible. But it didn't give me a source. And so I was like, okay, please cite your source. And then I was like, literally was told me, you asked for a stat. We gave you one. We made it up. They made it up. They made it up.

CHRIS (22:27):

And

ERIN (22:28):

I was just like, what? So now,

CHRIS (22:31):

But really, I mean, can you blame it? That's what we do as marketers. We make it up as we go too. That's true.

SANDI (22:37):

Never confuse marketing with the truth. That's very true.

ERIN (22:40):

Yeah. Random max of marketing. Yeah. But now when you do that, when you're like, sometimes it'll just cite sources without you even asking it to. And so it always does. And it's getting a lot better with that too. So do your point, Chris, of you want to be cited. You want to be one of the sources to be found and cited within. When people use chat GBT for search or to get insights or statistics or whatever you want to come up in there,

CHRIS (23:14):

That's sometimes really hard to do too. Different large language models place emphasis on different things. Some will place more emphasis on Reddit, some different places. I found Perplexity to be a great platform because it has deep sources that it sites. There's other platforms that are like that too.

(23:32):

Claude's been really great recently as well in terms of what it's doing, how it translates that into actual insights that you can create for people. So there are so many tools out there right now that can help you with that. It's interesting too, I think along with the insightful comments, you have to be able to structure data in a way that you're going to get picked up. So I think there's changes in the schema and how you use schema. So those little tags behind the scenes on the page that will identify what the content is, how the content's structured and everything. They help these large language models be able to crawl that faster and recognize that faster. So

(24:18):

This is where a lot of companies break down. And particularly if you've been doing programmatic SEO, right? You've been doing this semi-automated or automated way to produce a lot of pages. We work with some companies that will do 10, 20, 30,000 plus pages on some of this. This is what I consider in the hacky type land in terms of what they're doing. But yeah, if you start doing that, often what'll happen is you'll see a slowdown, you'll see a slowdown in the pickup of your page just because it takes real compute time to be able to crawl your site and larger your site gets could be an issue. Maybe you're not getting crawled as often. Google's going to make choices as well as other engines. They're going to make choices around who they index, how often and all that. So the easier you can make it, the faster you're going to get index and more likely that you're going to get picked up. Right? Right.

ERIN (25:19):

Very cool. And it's so new, so it's like, I'm sure we'll have many episodes on this topic because I feel like every month there's something else, some other thing that the innovation has expanded. Someone has learned something on how to leverage it more. It's almost like a to be continued.

CHRIS (25:39):

Oh, you know what we did the other week I thought was a really interesting exercise, is go out to something like chat, GPT and say you're a software company. Type in the main thing that you solve, the main problem you solve, plus the word software, blah, blah, blah, software, whatever category you're in, whatever, whatever software you go out there, it'll give you competitors. It'll give you your strengths versus competitors. You'll see your name in there versus others where you sit in that ranking, right? You'll see the why others were ranked above you in specific sub areas. You'll see what people are talking about, where things are going next, what are the main kind of thought areas where people are asking for more within your software area. There's so many things within a search like that that will tell you, oh, I need to create more content around this. Not the case. Or I need to do this because I can see they're being mentioned and we're not. Well, you would want to create content around that area, that sub area in terms of type of solutions you are. And I'll give you ideas around major type of guides or topics where they went for the information, right? Because see citations,

SANDI (26:50):

And also if you're one of those startup founders who's trying to create a brand new category, which I usually advise against because it takes millions of years, millions of years, millions of dollars

(27:00):

In years. But if you type your name in and you don't show up where your competitors are, but you're calling because you're referring to yourself as something else, you've made it fancy. That to me is your wake up call to do in the words of mean girls, stop trying to make fetch happen. Just if it's a duck, call it a duck. You can always differentiate from there. But trying to differentiate in a category where no one recognizes you as such, even your users, your audience is really fighting an uphill battle. And if you're unsure of what the world thinks of you, this sounds so dramatic. If you're unsure of what the world thinks of you, do what Chris said and type your company name into chat GBT or what you think your category is and see where you show up. It could be very instructive.

(27:48):

It's another way to reconsider how you're thinking about your company positioning and your products positioning specifically. And if you're not making headway because you've tried to create a new category, this may be the time to just rethink that and really just try to disrupt the category, the category that you're closest to, where you add the most unique value. So I feel like A-I-S-E-O could almost be a bit of a wake up call to some product marketers who have been fighting that good fight and trying to fight against new category creation because it really is such an uphill battle for all the reasons that we talked about, but not the least of which is AI is ingesting so much data across so many places. So if it has not distilled that you are a thing that you think that you, are you going to fight with that? Or are you going to join in and try to differentiate in a different way?

CHRIS (28:41):

Yeah. Good advice.

SANDI (28:46):

Well, when we hang up, I'm going to put our name into the chat, GPT, and see what comes up.

CHRIS (28:51):

Oh, don't do that. Don't do that. Not just yet.

ERIN (28:54):

Give us time. Give us time. Cool. Joey can edit this part out, but is there anything else that you guys want to talk about on this, or should we wrap it up?

CHRIS (29:08):

I think we could wrap. Okay.

ERIN (29:11):

Yeah, so as I said, this is kind of our first foray into chatting about this on this show, but we'll continue to, and if anyone listening, if you're like, Hey, I want to know more about this AI and SEO and how this works, or I discovered this, share it with us and we'd love to discuss it further and dive deeper into that aspect of it. Yeah. So thanks for tuning in everybody. Go Padres, and we'll see you on the next episode.

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