The Future of SEO

so Google's AI overviews are extremely disruptive to the SEO industry and you need to change your strategy today and in this video I'll show you exactly what you need to do to survive and thrive in this new AI world I'm Nathan gotch an SEO professional and digital marker with over a decade of experience leading hundreds of successful SEO campaigns so here's what's happening right now number one Google has begun rolling out AI overviews for about 7% of search results and I've tested this myself and found that 99% of keywords that trigger an overview have informational

intent like what is minimum wage in Missouri how to quickly ripen an avocado and is foil non-stick but I haven't seen overviews for e-commerce keywords like Hawaiian lays or tree toppers or affiliate driven keywords like best air fryer best whitening toothpaste or best protein powder it also isn't triggering on any local searches right now number two almost 37% of Google searches end without clicking on any Google search results now this trend will continue because of AI overviews however many other Sur features cause this outcome number three chat Bots like chat gbt and perplexity are getting

better and many people like myself use large language models instead of Google searches in fact I use chat gbt far more than Google for various tasks throughout my day and perplexity is also picking up steam and Apple has joined the AI party as well it feels like a whirlwind of Chang change right now but that's because most of us are in it and are living in an echo chamber the data tells a different story because Google still owns over 90% of the search market share is the most popular website online and SEO is the most

in demand digital marketing channel so despite these three big challenges SEO is still one of the best marketing strategies for increasing organic traffic leads and customers however you must adapt and pivot your strategy to mitigate risk and continue to grow so here's what I recommend number one prioritize conversions so before you even think about doing SEO the first thing you have to do is you have to optimize your website for conversions and there's a few reasons for this number one is we don't want to just work super hard on our SEO campaign and send all

this beautiful relevant traffic that's ready to convert and then it lands on a website that just is not built for conversions in the right way and number two according to Google's recent antitrust case we know for sure now and this has been speculation for many many years that Google uses Chrome data to inform Google search so you can go and you know Google this and and learn more about it but the point is is that Google uses the user signals that are occurring here on Google Chrome to ultimately inform search which then can affect your

rankings indirectly so if someone lands on this site and they don't go to a second page they don't scroll they don't call phone number they don't submit a lead form they don't do any type of action on the site then it's like likely going to impact your rankings okay so you can actually measure this you can use a tool like Mouse flow for example this is the one that I use and you can you can actually use user tracking to see how people are interacting with every page on your website so this is really important

for conversions you can also go into Google analytics 4 and you can see the events inside of Google analytics 4 you can see the engagement rate so we have data at our disposal to ultimately build a a website that's built to convert so this is something that has to get squared away first before you even think about pouring gasoline on the fire with SEO now the question is you know what are we looking at here so I picked a random business for movers in St Louis Missouri so that's the keyword that I was looking at

and I just picked a random business uh and I just want to show a couple of ways that we could improve a site like this to drive more conversions okay so very very simple fixes that could make a significant difference so number one you know good to have a action above the fold this is the right idea but the problem is this phone number is not clickable so if someone's on mobile they're not going to be able to call this phone number and just by clicking on it they're going to have to actually either try

to remember the phone number or they're going to have to open up two different windows and try to go back and forth to type in that number so that much friction is going to kill conversions in this case Okay so and especially depend it's very contextual with the type of business that you have but for like a moving business the person the company that's probably going to win in this scenario is whoever responds the fastest uh to to an inquiry or who gets the lead first and so it's really critical that you're not missing out

on these types of conversions okay so that's the first part so make this clickable number two is remove the social media icons above the fold okay the this is not going to drive conversions all it's going to do is distract and it's going to cause a disruption in that conversion cycle and it's going to send people off of the website so I block all these sites so I can't really and show you but as soon as someone lands on Facebook or Instagram it's game over like the the chance of you converting them is practically zero

okay so just remove these from above the fold if you want to have them put them down in the footer okay and if someone wants to follow you on Facebook or Instagram they'll find their way but that's not the objective of a website that we're you know that's built for conversions okay so that those two things alone will make a significant difference and then the second part of this is there's some contrast related issues so when you're you're working when you're trying to drive conversions you want to make sure that whatever the call to action

you have is can contrasts well with the rest of the site or the page so for example right here this is a this actually looks like a button but it doesn't function as a button it's really just a headline that's wrapped in this blue container so what that does is that actually causes a lot of confusion because you'd likely see some users likely clicking on this and nothing's going to happen right and then the actual CTA is the same color so we're causing some issues here just on this little and then I know this seems

very granular but this can cause conversion disruption okay so definitely not something that that you want okay and the same thing down here once again a big blue bar showing you know to call and to email but once again you can't click on any of these so you'd have to copy and paste it and it's just not going to be effective so I would revise this whole entire uh landing page okay we can go and look at some other ones like we look at mover St Louis and we'll pull up someone who's ranking well and

let's see we'll look at you know two men in a truck which is a huge company but you'll see that there's certain mechanisms in place that are really Built Well for conversions here number one they've got a beautiful clickable phone number number two if you don't want to call you can go ahead and get the quote in and you can submit a lead form so once again speed is the ultimate variable here and honestly even their side like I see some room to improve here even on this side where like they should have a CTA

above the fold here as well like have a little called the action button right here okay and then we go down and this is another this is a pretty solid landing page it's really built for SEO but if they were going to really be able to drive conversions better with this it is actually good they have the sticky menu so this is really a smart move to have nice sticky menu so it basically follows so at any point you can convert but I'd probably also have a form here uh you know on the sidebar because

this is just another opportunity to convert some additional people uh and then having the blog post section I wouldn't recommend that because you know this is a this is a commercial intent type of keyword so having blog posts actually kind of modifies the objective of what the Searcher had when they came here right they came here to find a moving service or a moving company so having this here would kind of deter them from the thing that we're trying to get them to do so I would either add a form here to to drive more

conversions or I would M add more uh in content ctas so there's not really any in content ctas here there's a lot of stuff that being discussed but there's no additional calls to action in this content which they should have they should have more calls to action uh and then going down here you know we got some it looks like some random videos and once again uh looks like some stuff for the blog so I would just eliminate probably these these sections unless the video is relevant to this query so otherwise it's just a distraction

so you know even a site like this that's doing really well and has a really good foundation there's still some that can be improved so the point is just make it easier for someone to become a lead it's as simple as that um and and there are some you know different variances here depending on the type of product that you sell so like you know Moving services they can be you know low to high ticket it's kind of a wide range but something that's higher ticket you can you you can intentionally add friction so in

some cases so like in the in the context of my business you know I sell a training program there's a significant amount of friction to get into my training program that's by Design right because we don't want everyone to be in the program because it's high ticket it's a high investment so it should be a little bit harder to get in but you can tell you know as you go through this process it's still a streamlined process it's just that the biggest friction element that we add is our form is very comprehensive right it's a

it's a there's a lot of fields intentionally to cause friction to make sure that only the best fits are going to be filling out this form right so different businesses require different conversion techniques but for a business like this that's very transactional in nature not a whole lot of branding going on it's more just like how do we drive conversions in the fastest way possible so definitely just adding more calls to action uh is is a is a good effort so I would probably rebuild this whole page and try to model probably you know this

top competitor here number two use the reverse SEO strategy so when you're trying to prioritize the keywords you want to go after an SEO campaign it's best to think about going from the bottom of the funnel and then working your way up this is the this is what I call the reverse SEO strategy you could also call it a reverse keyword research strategy but basically what you want to do especially with the new website is you really want to focus on the keywords where you can win the easiest okay so what I recommend a lot

of brands do especially SAS SEO you know campaigns or really just any campaign where there is some significant branding associated with it you want to go and secure as many as assets around your brand as possible you want to tackle every single key word around your brand okay because this is the quickest win you can you can ultimately dominate the first page and get your brand fully visible just based on targeting those kind of specific branded queries so you can tell here like for rankability uh you know there's a lot of assets here that you

know we developed right so I have I have a review page here on got SEO that kind of talks about like the development of the product and all this stuff right then I've got some other people who are uh using the tool who have created reviews um and then I have even YouTube videos that are actually targeting those specific keywords as well and so we actually have a dedicated reviews page on rankability as well so taking advantage of the root domain to build more relevance and then on top of it even posted on LinkedIn to

you know leverage the power and authority of LinkedIn to ultimately rank for this so I'll be talking more in second about how to blanket the serps but this is just a small example so always begin with dominating your own Brands keywords like if you're if you're not even doing that then you shouldn't even be thinking about the non-branded stuff yet dominate all your branded keywords you can just go into sem rush and just search your brand and see what's popping up and if you have a brand new website you can go into semrush and you

could you know go into one like this like for exploding topics or maybe we could even go to like I'll show you an example here we'll go to a bigger brand so let's say I was like I was building a brand new business and I obviously didn't have any brand Equity or branded searches so we go you just go to a brand a really big brand like this and go to positions and then what we'll do is we'll filter it so we just see the things that are related specifically to their brand okay so now

we're going to see are all the Branded queries that are associated with HubSpot and if you're in a similar business model this going be the exact industry but a similar business model you could probably hit on a lot of these similar keywords so HubSpot Academy HubSpot pricing HubSpot career so just replace HubSpot with your brand and you know there's probably some opportunity to create some content around your branded queries okay so just a very simple thing that you can do but you may have to leverage another Brand's uh branded keywords to be able to identify

these opportunities okay so speaking of the reverse the reverse SEO strategy here so we start with our branded keywords and basically we don't stop doing that until we've completely squared that away okay and then once we squared that away then we can move into more non-branded queries now the non-branded queries that you go after should be directly related to what you sell this is really important it should be highly relevant to the thing that you sell it should not be such a massive divide between that keyword and the thing that you sell you shouldn't really

be going after keywords like that until you've completely dominated the keywords that are a very close match to that core offer that you have okay so here's an example of SEO tools for agencies a very specific type of keyword but you'll see we specifically targeted this because of course the objective here is to rank and then of course promote our software okay we're going to promote our software here and once again just another opportunity to build relevance and and to rank for something that our ideal clients would likely be searching okay that's really what matters

so there's a lot of work to be done just in that small little bucket and you can see don't just stop with Google also YouTube like look look what's going on here and I'll explain how this is possible in a second here but the the re the biggest variable that we're using here to rank is just by tapping into NLP technology and I'll explain you know what we do for that but the point is is start at the bottom of the funnel and then work your way up and slowly just start to chip away at

those keywords that are super close to your core offer and that will put you ahead of many of your competitors that are targeting just a bunch of junk key words that are that are designed to purely raise traffic numbers and vanity metrics but are not designed to actually drive conversions number three create content for organic Discovery so one of the most important things that you can do right now in SEO is not just rely on Google Google is still by far the number one search engine it's also the number one website as far as traffic

so it you definitely need to be there there's high demand so it would be foolish to not be optimizing for Google but you should also be thinking about content Discovery as a whole organic content Discovery okay so we want to obviously Target Google as our priority but then we also want to start thinking about other platforms and here's the good news once you understand how to optimize for Google it's actually pretty easy to optimize for the other platforms as well a lot of the same ideas apply there it's just with uh some different elements involved

here so number one actually picking key words and topics to go after okay so that's going to be the same on Google and YouTube and Linkedin and x and threads all of them it's all going to be the same thing so you have to identify a topic that has demand and then we're going to create content around those topics now the way that we create content is definitely going to be specific to whatever the platform is that we're going after so in the context of of Google SEO there's certain types of content that tends to

perform well so it you know an example here is long form content works very very well in the context of Google SEO but when we go to YouTube there is some similar elements here except obviously we're creating videos instead of writing articles and to create an engaging video requires a a different skill set but the one thing that you can do and and you don't see a lot of people talking about this so this article here was the way that I formulated this was using rankability and I did this by using the NLP keywords to

build out a highly relevant asset okay now this is what you should do you should almost always use NLP to build out these highly relevant assets and like once again I'll show you an example here this one here page optimizer pro Alternatives this one was built completely using rankability and you can see within two days it's already ranking number one okay I don't know if it will stay there but for now it's it's number one and that is without any link building that is without anything else it's just pure NLP optimization just to show you

the power of this um and and it's also the way that rankability recommends uh the these suggestions here right we're not concerned about injecting keywords we're concerned about covering the topic in full so big difference as far as the philosophy here but the point is is you use this for Google SEO but you can also use it for YouTube SEO as well because here's why this will work because you is also using NLP technology to understand what each video is about and the way that they do that is when you publish a video it crawls

the transcript it digests it it takes your whole transcript from that video and pulls the NLP keywords to get an understanding of what that video is about right and so it's initially using that and then once it understands what the video is about then it pushes it out either to search or it pushes it out to browse features or whatever it may be but it's going to push it out to the most relevant audiences possible um and so when you're working on YouTube You should also be thinking about the SEO component and that's why you

know I rank for SEO tools okay because I used a highly relevant script that specifically targets that keyword and I hit on all the important NLP keywords and that helps this video get visibility but it doesn't just help get visibility in YouTube because showed you earlier that when you do a good job of optimizing for NLP not only do you get the Google The Google result but you actually will rank in Google with the video and this is not always the case right just depending if there is a video pack but if there is a

video pack it's highly likely that you will rank okay so once again this is just a part of the process of we are trying to optimize for multiple locations multiple platforms because we're trying to have an omnipresent type of approach here so don't just focus on Google cuz think about it if I would have just focused on Google although I am ranking well I would have been missing out on all this opportunity here so instead of just having one listing I actually have three rankings on the first page now another thing to consider too is

that um is on the parasite SEO front Okay so funny little thing here if we go in here I know that I'm not going to be able to necessarily have a dedicated page on the site but what I can do is I can advertise on this site so we bought some space here and as a result now we actually have another listing on the first page for this so what we've you effectively done is we have four different channels on the first page for this one keyword so we should be thinking more about how to

blanket the Surfs across many platforms that way we're covering as much real estate and ground as possible okay and this is all possible through through Focus ing on building highly relevant assets across multiple platforms so I would start with just you know focusing on Google uh you know focusing on YouTube those are the two biggest Heavy Hitters but you can deploy these same Concepts Concepts to parasite SEO like you go and find authoritative website use the NLP to create a really good asset publish it on their website so you can leverage their power uh to

get you know to get that advantage and once again I've I've replicated the same exact strategy across multiple keywords once again SEO for dentists you know same thing down here in YouTube as well okay so you can occupy a lot of real estate doing this um and I just you really have to change your strategy we can't just be hyperfocused on Google we have to think about Google start with Google but then think about okay we we we got our Google spot now let's think about how we can expand uh the awareness here for this

keyword across multiple platforms so if you do that you're going to be way ahead of your competitors okay and the final thing I want to tell you along these lines is remember a lot of people these days are not just using Google they're also using large language models okay so going along the lines of like we want to dominate search across multiple platforms we also want to get some visibility in these large language models so what I'm going to show you here is you can actually train the large language models okay and most of the

the models including chaty BT or perplexity uh or really any of them honestly the way that they're being trained is through search so you should basically this is just a conclusion that we should begin with search like begin with Google search and flood the serfs with content around your brand and get other websites to write about your brand get reviews and flood the serers as much as possible because now at this point everything that is in Google everything that's in Bing or other search engines is going to be a mechanism to train the large language

model so once again going back to the original premise here SEO should be the focal point because it is the lead Domino for everything else so definitely think about this and remember that if you want to get visibility in the large language models you likely need to have visibility in Google so just keep that in mind and don't underestimate this the time is now to start training these these large language models to show the types of messaging the types of content that you want it to show and obviously we would like it to be positive

so the more positive reviews the more good things that are said about our brand the better it's going to be number five use intelligent link building so although using NLP technology and creating highly relevant and original content is is the pillar and the lead Domino for SEO you can create content all day you can use NLP all day but if you don't have the biggest variable which is a strong backlink profile then you're not going to see the best results possible so this is not a fair assessment when I show you rankings like for example

showing you you know the rankings for this one okay like this would not be possible unless I had this strong domain okay there are domains that are way stronger than mine but mine is strong and I WR about the same topics there's there's link Authority there's uh topic Authority there's a lot of good things that are working together to make this possible and so if you want to get results quicker you want to get results easier the way to do it is you have to have a stronger website from a link profile perspective so just

looking at my site which once again there's way stronger websites but just put in perspective my site has been around for going on you know I guess it's been 10 years at this point which is kind of crazy but I have almost 5,000 referring domains okay I have nearly 30,000 backlinks okay so there's a lot of strong stuff hitting this site and as a result when you have a powerful website when you publish a new piece of content you get an automatic Advantage right out of the gate compared to a brand new website so I

cannot stress this enough you have to build your site Authority it has to be a really really important thing and this is why on you know like my my uh you know SAS business here rankability I'm not even really going to be creating any content really on rankability decom because instead I'm going to be doing this I'm going to be building up the site Authority so I may create a few linkable assets so that I can leverage them to build the site Authority but the number one objective right now with this new website is to

grow that site Authority as much as I possibly can so then when we start to publish new content it's going to start ranking a lot easier okay so definitely needs to be the number one objective now the question is how do we go about doing it well you've got a few options first you can Outsource it so you can use a service like search intelligence the reason why I recommend them is because they focus on getting really high quality backlinks like those really powerful backlinks that are honestly very expensive to get on their own like

you can go to uh some of these you know these marketplaces to buy links and to get a link on like huffing and post could be you know $33,000 or $4,000 sometimes or on the New York Times it might be three four sometimes $5,000 to get that link um but the way that they do link building is they're focusing on creating assets they're doing you know obviously having the expert contribute to a lot of these articles so so they're actually able to get these Links at a much lower investment per link and you're going to

actually get a higher volume of links as well so you're getting links from very very strong sources and these days you don't want to be getting links from Mommy blogs and a bunch of blogs that you know everyone knows that they sell links and if you can go to a Marketplace and find you know find that opportunity to buy it well other people are also buying it which means it's probably already been uh it's not going to be effective anymore right so you really want to focus on the links that are a little bit harder

to get just there's a little bit more barrier to entry and so that's the beauty of using you know Outsourcing your link building to a service like sege intelligence okay but along those lines another thing that you can do is look at what's already successful we can go to the indexed pages section and we're going to be able to see all of the top pages that have attracted the most backlinks and then from there even if you're not in the same industry you can take some of these Concepts and make them applicable to your industry

so for example look at the types of pages that have attracted the most links they're pretty much all datadriven pieces of content okay like there's no secrets here data tends to attract a lot of backlinks so when we look at this we say okay we've got a model here that works and we can take this model and we can apply it to our specific industry so I hope that helps SEO is obviously very different uh than it was many years ago and there's a lot more that we have to do to drive visibility but at

this point lead with SEO like focus on Google SEO first because it is that lead Domino that builds upon everything else but then just start to layer on the different channels because if you're if you're doing well in Google and other search engines that's going to help uh your visibility in the large language models and then if you're doing a good job here you should just take what's working here and apply it on YouTube and x and Linkedin and all the other platforms so you can leverage their Authority to ultimately occupy more Sur Real Estate

so I hope that helps and if as always you know like this video And subscribe um and thank you so much for watching I appreciate it