How to Stay Visible in the AI Search Era

John Jantsch ( 00: 01.506 )

Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and I’m putting on a solo show. I’m going to talk about search engine optimization or as I’ve started to call it search visibility because the game has changed. Now, the first question you might be asking yourself is why is John wearing a cowboy hat? I’m wearing a Stetson open road for those of you who are watching the video version. this is the straw version in the cognac.

My favorite summer hat color is. just decided it’s Friday when I’m recording this. just decided to put it on and wear it for the show. This style hat was worn by my grandfather and father, and several US presidents have since chosen this style as their primary hat. So Stetson Open Road, there you have the story. Okay, now. As I said, I’m going to talk about search engine optimization, what we’ve always long called, not always.

Believe it or not, a 20 year history with something called search engine optimization, which is really moving completely. Over the years, there have been many adjustments, new algorithms, new things, and new search engines. But this is a fundamental shift in how that tactic or approach really is going to be applied going forward. And what it will actually mean for website owners and businesses going forward as well.

So I thought I would start with, before I jump into like eat and generative AI and AI overviews and things, just do like a 30 second kind of timeline on search. Well, I started actually playing around with search in 1998. And yet again, my first website was a do-we-rank website.

and get on page one, you know, what are the things we need to do? I won’t go into detail about everything, but the majority of them are unimportant today. At least, you know, that was in the early days of search engines. They were little infants and they were, you know, the game was to trick them into putting your stuff on page one. That lasted until about 2010; And then, you know, the search engines just got more and more complex and more and more, you know,

John Jantsch ( 02: 21.142 )

ability to understand what a page really was about rather than what we wanted them to think it was about. And so now you start having mobile be part of the deal. You have the neighborhood search packs. You’ve got answer boxes starting to show up about, you know, from 2010 to 2016, roll up to about 2017. And suddenly all of a sudden voice search is a factor, with featured snippets also becoming a factor.

near me becomes a factor also searched for. So a lot of things just keep getting injected. And of course, the ad units and how they appear throughout the page are also changing, you know. Kind of really shifting what even ranking, you know, on page one even meant anymore. So I guess move on to 2024 or, as it happened, AI overviews.

Um, SGE from Google, 60 % of, of, of us Google searches ending with no click at all, according to search engine land, uh, the, uh, the infamous zero click searches, uh, instead of, you know, a list of 10 links on a page. Um, you know, we’re now to the point where maybe you get featured as a source in an AI answer and hope that that generates a click, but,

Today, the percentage is six to seven. That search is just gonna end in somebody getting the answer or getting the information that they wanted.

What I’m referring to right now is the idea of a complete shift in perspective from keyword research and ranking, to this concept of search visibility. It’s kind of your brand’s share of the answers, the mentions, the knowledge panel, real estate, local pack slots.

John Jantsch ( 04: 19.086 )

really clicks for everywhere, and I believe that’s what we need to do right now. So, you know, chasing one phrase or two phrases or something. mean that it will actually have very, very little value. Um, unless it’s just a very high intent phrase that, uh, if somebody searches that they’re not looking for an answer, they’re looking to purchase. Um, those are really going to be the, um, you know, the, the, the highly sought after, guess, um, types of searches.

So I believe that it will actually be this, this entire collection rather than thinking about position rankings or impressions. And this is going to be hard for people to measure, but this whole collection of like branded SERP coverage, is really going to be the, you know, the, example. A local dentist publishes a case that asks,” Does whitening hurt?” they have an FAQ short vid, TikTok video, Google business posts, a patient story.

you know, now that now they have the chance to actually own the FAQ snippet for that, maybe the local, local rank, map pack for that, maybe a YouTube carousel. mean, so that’s how I believe we should begin considering these situations, since we know there is no more. There’s no more, you know, I want to show up on for this, you know, key search is it’s how do I put myself into this idea of answers? And you’re aware that many people are actually calling, you’re aware.

you know, not even calling them search engines anymore. They’re really answer engines. And you are aware that consumer behavior has changed so much. Search behavior has changed so dramatically. We were all predisposed to typing in six or eight words for the results we desired, and then hoping or maybe changing them if we didn’t get what we wanted. But now we can actually, instead of typing in, you know, plumbing contractor in my town, you know, now it’s

plumbing contractor with 24 hour service, more than 4.7 star reviews within two miles from me, whatever. mean, you can type that long search in and you’ll get a very specific result that you can kind of custom tailor the result to your liking rather than saying, okay, Google, give me what you think I want.

John Jantsch ( 06: 49.39 )

We need to start thinking about when it comes to writing the 101, or how to blog content, and I have to set this up a little bit. And many people are finding that they’re losing all the search traffic that used to come for that because why would they send them to your page? They can answer that very easily because it was just basic information to begin with.

you’re wasting your time, I assure you. If you continue down that path of just creating the 700 words on blah, blah, blah. very generic And the bad thing is of course AI makes that really easy to do. You can, you can spin out 10 of those a day now, without really much sweat, it’s, it’s practically useless unless you are in just such a niche category that nobody else is trying to create content around it. It practically has no value. So Google has this new

No, it’s a relatively recent acronym called EAT. And there’s two E’s in there. So E-E-A-T. And forgive me if you know all about this, but I’ll explain it in very basic terms for those who may not understand it. However, the underlying premise is that they want to see more than just expertise. That’s one of theE’s, but they want to see experience. Have you carried out your intended purpose?

They want to see authoritativeness. That’s the, the other a, or I mean, that’s the a. So they evaluate whether you are receiving links mentioned or, you know, have you been in the local press? I mean, are you appearing in industry lists? So they’re asking themselves,” Do you know what this subject you’re talking about?” So experience, expertise, authority, and then the last one is trustworthiness. are there signals, of trust, warranties, refund policies, secure checkout badges.

real contact details. mean, all those kinds of things go into the mix as well. Therefore, I believe it is no longer sufficient to write this article on a topic. You have to actually have a case study in there. You have to have examples of maybe you doing it in actual real time or behind the scenes.

John Jantsch ( 09: 02.603 )

So that it’s very clear that that you’re not just talking about this. You do this, of course. This is something you’re an expert on. This is something somebody can trust for you to do for their business.

John Jantsch ( 09: 16: 844 )

So in March, 2024, I’m reading a stat here. According to search engine land, knowledge graph update extended each signals by 38 % to truly surface credible people and brands again. that certainly signals that this is not going away. I mean, that this is going to be a significant piece as well. How do you compete in an AI world, an eat world, and other worlds?

In a world where really the need for producing content is still there. Basically, consumers still require the information. So now it’s just a matter of, you know, how do we stay visible so that we can even offer them that information? first thing is There’s five step plan here, right? Okay. One audit of your content gaps. So

Export the entirety of your website URLs. List the top 25 customer questions and use Google Search Console. Again, what we’re trying to do is find how can we become an answer engine? therefore, take a lot of your content. And again, this is a place where some of the AI tools are really good at this. You’ve written some excellent, useful material. How could it be better? How could it answer more questions? How might FAQs be added?

to the end of all of your service pages. How could you include a table of contents in your long form? How could you add a description box? Some people call it too long, didn’t read TLDR, you’ve probably seen that. How can you include that at the top of your article to make these…

They’re not really search engine spiders, but so that the AI tools that are going out there and trying to surface good sources for content can have a very quick view of what it’s about. It becomes very user-friendly. It’s very structured in a way that shows kind of the hierarchical structure.

John Jantsch ( 11: 24.718 )

This subject of hub pages has been a topic of conversation for years. Um, and the idea behind that is that if you write about, I use an example, if you’re a kitchen remodeler and you’ve got a whole bunch of blog posts about various aspects of remodeling a kitchen. What if you turned that into a kitchen, the ultimate guide to remodeling a kitchen and you took all of your content you’ve written over the years instead of just having them randomly placed on a blog, uh, out there in the ether.

And you placed it on that page. don’t mean physically all of it on that page, but at least structure it in such a way that somebody can jump around to how to pick countertops, how to pick cabinets, how to pick finishes, um, how to pick lighting. Then, uh, you know, those all start to sound like a playlist for anyone considering, uh, designing, um, or remodeling a kitchen. So we’ve been talking about that for, I would say at least eight or 10 years.

and the good news is that it was a very successful SEO tactic. mean, it, as soon as we would build those for people, it would immediately change, how, how Google viewed their website, but it’s also very user friendly. Somebody comes to that hub page and they want, they are interested in information. Instead of just finding one, I went out and randomly looked and discovered one, one blog post on something, so here’s the entire guide, you know, depending on what I’m trying to do. So the, the, you know, the,

The doubly positive news is that those pages are also extremely highly rewarded in an AI world as well. So think about your top three or four services, your top three or four products, your top three or four things that your company does. And think about ways that you could create a very useful guide or a hub page around those and collect it. In some ways, it’s actually the same content. You’ve just structured it dramatically different. Boy.

FAQs, and again, in an answer engine world, having answers to the questions that people ask is a clearly makes a lot of sense. It’s also been a very useful piece of content anyway, but now really being rewarded in this answer engine world. So, I believe that, regardless of whether it has a Q&A section or just an FAQ section, each of your service pages, product pages, or About Us pages should now, as per the current structure.

John Jantsch ( 13: 42.826 )

at the bottom of it and you know, pay some attention to the inquiries you’re getting. Again, the AI tools are pretty good at that surfacing, you know, common questions around things, but you might think in terms of even some of the questions that you’re not being asked necessarily, but you should be people should be paying attention to so you can use that as an opportunity to educate around like why you and what you know, what you do that’s different than competitors, for example, that they might not actually be asking about.

You know, monthly case studies, you know, measurable results, quotes from customers, those kind of trust elements, even, you know, badges that, that symbolize that you’re in professional organizations and things that you’ve achieved certain certifications. mean, those, you know, the better, the more we can double down on, the more we can simply demonstrate that we follow our word, to put it simply. and then the last piece of the puzzle is.

John Jantsch ( 14: 43. 128 )

How can you keep this fresh? So, what I’m telling people, and I need to do this myself as well, is we’ve got reams and reams of content that we wrote years ago. It needs to be updated. In fact, about every quarter, you ought to make a goal of saying, Hey, I’ve got these five blog posts that, know, are decent blog posts. How can I update them, add more information, gain more knowledge, and provide more proof?

in these, maybe I can structure them, you know, with a table of contents in that TLDR, maybe I could add FAQs to them. You will be highly rewarded for for refreshing that content. And that is the last thing I would say. Start thinking, and this is particularly true for local businesses, not as much for somebody who’s really more of a national scale, but that Google business page, think of it as another

publishing platform Now you don’t own that platform, of course, but you have a lot of leeway and how optimized it is all the photos, the videos that you can add there, all the service descriptions you can add there. And you can post there. Create a Google or post on your Google Business page that can come from there, and I would be taking it again, in some cases daily if you’ve got a lot of content, but certainly weekly.

can be just a shortened version of something that you’ve written, and published, you know, years ago, but you’re giving it a new place, a new home. It’s just going to add all up to the long list of ways to be noted or quoted as a valuable source, you know. The other thing I would tell you to do is to do a bunch of searches, in some of the AI tools that there were searches you’d love to show up in, you’d love to win. Now, hopefully you show up in front of those. Hence.

I use my kitchen contractor, remodeling contractor. The best kitchen remodeling contractor in X city would therefore be a real advertisement for them. Right. And take note of who shows up. That is crucial. But also one of the things the AI tools do is they tell you the sources that they went to, to, to make that determination. And in some cases, these are directories, as you may well know.

John Jantsch ( 17: 03.63 )

common in the remodeling industry is one called house, that, they actually got a lot of that information from. So, here’s your checklist of things you probably need to add to, what you do to get in those directories, or to start participating in, you know, a Quora or Reddit or a house, dependent upon, or even if you don’t even have a listing in a directory as obscure as it may sound.

you know, the industry that you’re in. So, all right, there are a few common errors. Stop obsessing over a handful of head keywords. It just doesn’t matter anymore. Don’t write code that uses algorithms. I think this has always been true. Think about the human question that any question is posed by someone. We use a tool called Answer the Public. I highly recommend that you go there and…

If you’re not sure what questions people in your industry are asking, that can be a great resource for that. Frankly, the AI tools are pretty good at it. They can reveal the queries people are asking in particular industries. You can’t set and forget your website. You know, if I go and I look and there’s your last blog post was 2022. We probably still have some work to do. This is something that.

You just need to make it a weekly, monthly, or quarterly plan that you’re going to do X, Y, and Z and just commit to doing it. don’t obsess over all the tools. mean, don’t go down the rabbit hole. a structured schema, ormean is crucial. there are plugins that, that can actually do that. So that when you write FAQs, the underlying code tells Google or informs the.

Whoever’s visiting your website, this is an FAQ section. So, you know, spend some time on that part. Don’t get too excited about using engineering tools for this, you know. So here’s what I would say. Choose one if you have some ideas today. If you don’t have any FAQs, that’s where I would start. If you don’t have any case studies, I would certainly think in terms of that.

John Jantsch ( 19: 23. 666 )

if you haven’t visited your Google business profile, I would highly recommend that you think in terms of your strategy there. pick, choose one of the things I mentioned today, and immediately begin working on it. mean, don’t, don’t listen to all the gloom and doom and look at your Google analytics and say, my traffic search your traffic’s down because

there’s a good chance that a lot of that search traffic wasn’t that meaningful. Anyway, it was someone searching for an article. They were not actually looking for your product or service. We need to shift the mindset so that search visibility can be seen where people go to get their information rather than as an information engine. So if you got value, hopefully you will subscribe either to the YouTube channel or to the podcast itself.

Love those reviews on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen, share the interview, share this episode with, one business owner who needs a little marketing clarity, who would like a little, simple, effective and affordable, good old duct tape marketing practical advice. Okay, now. That’s it for today. Thank you for your time. Hopefully I’ll run into you one of these days soon out there on the road.