Shelly Fagin: Hello, hello, welcome everyone, happy Wednesday, I’m so thrilled to be here with y’all. My name is Shelly Fagin, I am a longtime SEO and very proud to be the Director of SEO at cloud hosting company DigitalOcean, we are actually siblings to the Cloudways team, so I was really excited to jump in and work with them on this project. So welcome to the 2024 Web Growth Summit.

We actually have, I believe, 10 expert speakers across seven amazing sessions, four of them are today, three tomorrow, and they all center around the topic of navigating AI as well as user experience, specifically for growth. In this ever-changing landscape, it is really critical to stay up to date, especially with all the latest news and changes, and honestly to have a forum or a platform to converse and hear the thoughts of different thought leaders and experts and ask your questions. So that’s really what we’re doing here.

I do want to encourage y’all to tweet or, I don’t even know what they call it now, post on socials, please use the Web Growth Summit hashtag. And I also want to thank my sibling colleagues over on the Cloudways team for putting together this wonderful event, they’ve really done a phenomenal job. I did want to do a little housekeeping just to point out some things about our experience on the platform itself.

To the right of the stage you should see a chat box, and we want to encourage you all to utilize it, please chat with one another. You should also see tab options across the top, first up is our chat, then you should see Q&A and polls, you probably won’t see polls until we publish them. In the Q&A tab we’d really like to encourage you to post your questions, because sometimes the conversation gets moving so quick that we could overlook them, so if you want to make sure we don’t, please post them in the Q&A tab so we get them answered for you.

So very excited today to bring up my co-speakers here on this panel. The first of which, we first have Alex Moss coming up, I want to welcome you to the stage, Alex. Alex kind of blows me away with everything that you’re doing, you are the Principal SEO at Yoast, but you are also the Director of FireCask, which I believe is a digital marketing and web development agency, and then I also saw you co-founded a WordPress Bootstrap theme framework, and then on top of all that, do you own a wine bar? This is absolutely incredible, I am in awe. And I’m not hearing you on my end, do we have audio? Just hang tight, we have a few little kinks to work out, Alex will be right back on the stage one second. Hopefully this works, can you hear me?

Alex Moss: Yes.

Shelly Fagin: Okay, we have audio, awesome, hi Alex.

Alex Moss: Hi, how you doing?

Shelly Fagin: I am great, welcome here today, we’re excited to have you, is there anything we should know about Alex Moss?

Alex Moss: Well, I did hear everything, so when I was replying yes, I did co-own a bar, yes, but my wife really ran it and all I did was go in there and turn the router off and on when it needed to, so I was like the techie guy and just went in for a quiet pint in the back, but yeah, it was an Italian wine bar and we did that. What else do you need to know about me? I’ve designed a backpack for when you walk your dog, don’t ask, that’s for another session, it’s nice to go back to the basics of physical products. But yeah, of course I am Principal SEO at Yoast, I’m one of two, Carolyn Shelby is another who’s going to be on another session here today or tomorrow, I’m not sure, I think it’s today.

Shelly Fagin: Amazing, we’ve been chatting, she’s lost power in her house, so she’s been all over the place, but has now found power back in a house, so she’s going to be around later.

Alex Moss: To impart wisdom, thank goodness.

Shelly Fagin: I saw that the storms went through the Midwest and everyone lost power, and I’m like, oh my gosh, I can’t imagine having to not have power, but knowing you’re speaking and you need power. But Carolyn is amazing, her session is going to be great, I’ll cue that up a little bit at the end so you know what to come and listen to, she’s incredible. We also have Gert, and it’s Mellak, that is joining us, he is coming over, hopefully we can get Gert up on stage. Or is it Gert, I gotta get this right, was I close? Awesome, I’m excited to have you here as well. For those of you who don’t know Gert, he is the SEO consultant, and founder and CEO of SEOLeverage, you guys specialize in conversion-driven SEO consulting as well as reputation management. Gert, I would love to hear a little bit more about your background.

Gert Mellak: Absolutely. Originally from Austria, based in Madrid here in Spain, I’ve been doing my fair share of web development in the past and eventually moved into SEO, and now we’re probably going to talk about this across different platforms as well, not only Google SEO anymore these days, it’s probably part of the discussion, right. We all have to wear many hats these days if you work in search.

Shelly Fagin: 100%. Well, I did want to go ahead and kick off, we have our very first poll, I wanted to start it before we launch into questions. The first one is asking everyone in the audience, on a scale from one to five, how worried are you that AI will make your SEO skills obsolete. I know this is a pressing fear for people, I’m going to go ahead and publish that, so you should be able to access that poll over on the poll tab, and then make sure to come back to the chat so you can continue to converse with all of us there. We’ll close a lot of the polls at the end and go over the results. But wanted to jump in with some of our questions, the first one being, with all of this AI buzz, obviously if you’ve been an SEO for a long time it’s always on the brink of dying, but people are truly saying that AI is going to be the deathbed of SEO, so what is your take?

Alex Moss: My take would be that the death of SEO is the death of the search engine. If there’s a search engine, there’s someone to optimize it. SEO isn’t dead at all, it’s very much alive, in fact it’s more interesting now than it ever was in my opinion, especially with everything that’s happening it makes it even more important not to abuse the system and not to be mediocre, to really stand out from the crowd. So it’s harder, but the gains can be a lot more beneficial in the long term.

Shelly Fagin: I agree, Gert, how would you see the future of SEO shaping up in this AI-driven world?

Gert Mellak: I agree with Alex, it’s much more exciting now than it was in the past. I would say there are so many platforms that have a little search box on top of their page or their app these days, every search box essentially triggers a search result, and as long as there is information to sort and we need access to that information, search, and especially SEO or some shape and form of it, is going to have its place, because there’s always going to be a certain methodology we can try to figure out in order to get more visibility to our clients’ brands.

Shelly Fagin: Definitely true, I couldn’t agree more. As long as there’s search, that will be SEO, like Alex said. It’s always been on us to be on our toes, we’re always pivoting and having to change our approach and get better, so I just see this as another one of those points where we’ve got to rise to the occasion and figure it out, that’s what we do. So speaking of that, let’s say our tried and true SEO tactics really aren’t cutting it anymore in this day and age with AI advancements, what would you say would be some fresh approaches to stay ahead of the game?

Alex Moss: For me, I’d ask what was working before that isn’t working now, because if it was working before, maybe you’re lucky. I always go back to the base, what are you there to do, what are you there to achieve, what are the Webmaster guidelines, and the ethics of them. The base ethics haven’t really changed, it’s just the technology that’s changed and the rules around how to deal with the technology.

As SEOs, I’ve always come from a white hat background, it’s always interesting to watch black hatters experiment, see what’s true, see what succeeds, but the ones that generally don’t succeed are the ones that are more abusive. So to me I’d be like, carry on as you were, but think more creatively about what you’re doing and always think about the user, which is probably something I’ll say more than once during this panel.

Gert Mellak: I would say, yeah, the user is definitely not only on Google anymore, I think this is probably the new thing I would bring to the table. We have so many platforms, we definitely heavily focus on those platforms in my agency these days, because when you play a little bit with whatever AI tool is out there, ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity, it’s very interesting to find out where does a certain piece of information come from.

I asked actually about my own personal brand once, whether I’m a woodworker or not, I actually am, but there’s hardly any information out there, and then the answer went back to a tweet from two or three years ago where I was SEO reviewing a video on a woodworking site, and this was the only connection that was made back then. So what this means for us is, absolutely we need to focus on the user, but the user might be making a search on different platforms, or the search they type in might be coming from different platforms. So if a tweet from two or three years ago can be the input or the training material for a generative AI answer, I think we are definitely up for an exciting next few months and years.

Shelly Fagin: That’s a really great point. Honestly, as an SEO, not a lot has changed about how I operate on a day-to-day basis, like Alex spoke to, it’s focusing on the user, we just now have all these really great resources to help us do it better. So I would say, from a Google search standpoint, we’ve seen a lot of things going on with the algorithm, how do you think AI is shaking it up and what are some of the big changes we need to keep our eyes on?

Alex Moss: I don’t think there’s a bigger impact than what’s maybe being perceived. Wasn’t there 85% of AI overviews about two months ago, and now I think I read this week that it’s gone down, from 84 last month and now it’s on seven, so it’s clearly a test and it’s not being impactful. And if it is, in my opinion it’s not going to be for a good few years until it makes a true impact on the mass market and the way people behave.

If you look at social media and the way people adopted it, it took over 10 years for it to become the norm, saying tweet as an actual verb in the vocabulary took longer than everyone thought. And then we have to think about the technology of AI, when everyone’s saying it’s growing up, it’s not, it’s not even walking yet, it’s not taking its first steps, and people think it’s a lot older than it is, but there’s a long way to go.

And that’s what we’re going to have to adapt to and listen to, but it’s just about listening to what the technology is doing and making sure that you’re just not over-optimizing for a machine, because it will suss you out. That’s the thing, if AI can do one thing, it’ll be able to suss out what you’re up to if you’re doing something abusive in any way.

Gert Mellak: I think one thing that’s shaking up things a little bit these days is that we need to check other engines. So you type in something in Perplexity, it doesn’t know how to answer it, it searches on Bing. Who has ever optimized for Bing? I definitely didn’t until a few months ago. To say we optimized for Bing is too much, but we definitely check rankings and check where we are and check those Webmaster tools over there, who would have done that before.

I would say we go a little bit broader now, we look into different platforms, look into what different engines actually know about the brand, we look more semantically through content as well, we look at what kind of semantics we have around a particular link. Everything got a little bit more technical from our point of view, where you really want to dive in and say, okay, if this is now not a user but a machine analyzing this semantically, does the machine understand this, does it understand which of the concepts on this page are more important than another one.

So we would ask tools like ChatGPT more often, or pass text through Google NLP engines just to see what comes back. It’s a little bit more technical, but Google has been training us for years to focus on user experience, focus on search intent, focus on specific answers to specific questions, maybe with some AI training in mind, so I think we’re definitely going to continue that route.

Shelly Fagin: Interesting. So Alex, you’re in house, and Gert, you have clients on the agency side, how are you answering their questions when they come to you with their fears about AI Overview?

Gert Mellak: Okay, our clients, we had a few fun weeks I would say when ChatGPT came out, from clients completely embracing it and increasing their engagement with us, to clients pausing for a couple of weeks until we calmed down their nerves and said, hey, Google is not going to go away tomorrow, and then they came back and we’re drawing a new game plan. Like Alex says, things don’t move as fast as we believe, then we’re always on this edge of what’s happening.

But we have a weird situation, we have clients where we still have to explain what retargeting and remarketing is, because they have no idea why those banners are following them after booking a trip to New York, and not even leveraging this as a marketing channel, and you come together with clients that are using WhatsApp and a chatbot that connects with ChatGPT so they actually ask for product information, and this is a very low tech-savvy audience. So I think we probably don’t want to say, okay, this is going to take too long, we just continue what we’re doing.

I would try to open up a little bit and account for both types of audiences. There might be a part of your audience that’s actually tech-savvy or using latest tech without even knowing it because it’s just so convenient, and then you have the really tech-savvy audience that stops using Google, or you have a young audience, my daughter would only search on Google if TikTok doesn’t bring up a result.

So in our agency it really is a little bit different based on the client’s final audience. Is this a product we sell B2C to 16-year-olds, then definitely not going to try to rank on Google too hard, but if it’s a product, most products still do really really well on Google, so we might focus on more traditional SEO.

Alex Moss: Yeah, from my side, as well as being in house, I’m also an agency owner, so I have clients. With my clients, first of all, most of them aren’t based in the US or don’t need to be targeting the US, so there’s no AI Overviews out really, they say they’ve been doing it in the UK but I’m in the UK and I’ve not seen it, and I’ve got two profiles, a Yoast profile, my FireCask profile, and a Gmail I’ve had for 10 years, and none of them have adopted anything to do with AI Overviews.

The other thing is, none of my clients’ end user is going to be using AI in a way that they would get the information my clients need to be giving to the searcher in the first place. It’s accountants, no one’s going to ChatGPT and saying who’s a good accountant near me right now, that’s at the moment still in the traditional sense of Google, your 10 links. So it’s actually not been an issue, although from a Yoast point of view I’ve got to be on it, because there’s people who use the product a lot who are very worried and concerned.

You’ve got people who have, can I say, fallen victim, they’ve been penalized by the HCU updates in a way that they believe might be subjective against them, so it’s quite hard on the other way. But again, it’s early on, and each time I do an SEO update every month with Carolyn, we keep on pressing the facts of, calm down, take a breath, it’s not going to take over, it’s not taking over your job, it’s not going to kill us all in the next four years, it’s again not even walking yet.

We’re figuring out our relationship from many different levels, from a humanity level all the way down to us figuring out how it’s going to be adopted in search results, it’s too much to happen in such a short space. And I think as long as we’re all listening and engaging with what’s happening, which is default for the jobs that we’re in anyway, we’d actually be all right and we’ll be able to adapt.

Time will be there, because it’ll change the behavior too much, and I think about my mom, my mom’s not going to go off Google for a long long time, no matter how many articles she reads about how ChatGPT is great, it’s not going to be something she defaults to. It’s the defaulting that’s going to take maybe a generation to change, and in that time we can figure it out and discuss it in nice panels.

Gert Mellak: I think there’s also an aspect to continue this thought process. I believe the big tech giants are really pulling the brakes up right now on what would be possible. Think of an Alexa or Google Assistant reacting like ChatGPT does right now, I think something like this could change the game really really fast. My mother-in-law, my biggest fan on socials, is definitely going to start using her Alexa if it starts giving better answers, she’s going to try to book meetings through Alexa, ask for opening hours, ask for directions, and if this device can access her photo library she probably also wants to see some pictures.

So I think there is this potential of AI tech just loosening the brakes a little bit and seeing what happens, like Google did with AI Overviews, they then had to pull back. I don’t think it’s going to stay on such low percentages for too long when they figure out a few things, but I do see this potential of the tech devices that we just use all the time to really open up and provide a much better user experience, which is definitely going to impact how we search.

Shelly Fagin: Yeah, I have teenagers and they start their searches on TikTok, so times are changing, that’s for sure. So AI stuff aside, we’ve obviously had a lot of ups and downs with search and Google’s algorithm updates, what would you say to people, is there anything specific that you have in your playbook in order to roll with these punches?

Alex Moss: Think of the user first, told you I’d say it again. The moment that you start thinking too much about how the search engine’s going to interpret that page or site, you might be overthinking it, and I know that even in house, when you have to live inside one website day in day out, you are going to start looking at the nitty-gritty detail, but it’s not just about that, just think about us.

And again with the leak stuff, I don’t want to chat too much about the Google leak, but one of those signals is user interaction, and if any attendee here wants to read more, just read anything by Mike King or Rand Fishkin about this in the last three months and you’ll get more context. Whilst it doesn’t tell you the weight of each of those variables, that it’s a variable, whether they’re using it today or not, is something they’re not going to tell us. But the fact that it’s there, and that Rand’s now proven it, is more interesting, and the way in which we behave around websites, mixed with AI, is starting to figure out a user and how it engages. It would know the difference between the three of us and the way we browse a website, so if it does use it, you’ve got to think about that.

Gert Mellak: That’s a good point. I see a lot of companies really wait for a Google update drop before they change something, and what we have found that works really well, and might work for others, we have a fortnightly rhythm here where every two weeks we reassess everything on clients’ websites, we check out their website, their competitive landscape, look for big shifts, and say, look, in the next couple of weeks these are the most important items.

As much as I love reading all the big Google algorithm reviews from the well-known SEOs out there, and I appreciate all the work they’re doing, we pretty much ignore them, because we are very close to what’s happening in our industry for the particular website for our clients. And this, paired with a lot of soft conversion tracking, where we track users’ behavior on a website, are they actually doing what I expect them to do with this article, gives you a lot of information and sets you up for pretty sustainable success.

So I would really recommend everybody not to worry too much about the big updates, but more about, like Alex says, what this user does on your website, do they do what you expect, or are they just coming here and leaving, is this even quality traffic to begin with. If you’re obsessed about ranking updates and wanting to know when the next one is, that’s a red flag already, because in a perfect world these algorithm updates should have no consequence to you except neutral or positive, if you’ve got to think there’s a risk somewhere, there may be a risk somewhere.

Shelly Fagin: Absolutely, and I would say even people, there’s some incredible SEOs that have a lot of great information, but being on the outside looking in and utilizing tools doesn’t show the whole picture of what’s happening, and some of the choices that might have been made for other reasons that affect traffic on purpose, they happen to coincide with the big update, and it’s easy to make the assumption that it was from that. I would say, I follow Danny Sullivan on Twitter, so at least we get a heads up, but you don’t want to wait until after an update rolls out to start scrambling. I love, Gert, that you reassess every two weeks, that’s really truly what you should be doing.

I’m going to go ahead and pop up our second poll, this one we just want to know which AI tool you think has had the biggest impact on search behavior, that is over on the poll tab and it is published live right now. There’s not a lot of votes, oh there you go, I was like, ChatGPT got 100% of the votes, not surprising I guess. So, let’s actually, we’re talking about AI, and how can we not talk about AI-generated content, it’s tempting to utilize these tools to generate content, I’m a technical SEO, content was never like the top of my list honestly, so what are some of the pitfalls we should look out for, how can we make sure this content is actually good and not just a copycat of what’s already out there?

Alex Moss: I’d start by asking what the list of advantages are to doing it, especially at scale. I feel like I understand, if I read AI-generated content, and I realized over the weekend who it sounds like, if you use the voice of Russell Brand, that’s what ChatGPT sounds like, it’s trying to use a very extensive lexicon to impress the reader, and it’s like it’s trying too hard, like an eight-year-old’s perception of what an adult would say if they were in Shakespearean times, it’s a weird tone of voice.

But to me I would say, no, do not do it, however tempting it is, how do I say this, heroin’s tempting but don’t do it, it takes you down a bad road and you’ll never be able to get out of it. It’s a shortcut to laziness and that goes towards abuse of the algorithm, which will again get you penalized, it’s a short-term gain at most but it’s not a long-term plan. Would you trust AI to generate content if you were the one who really made this brand yourself from the ground up? If the answer’s no, then you shouldn’t be doing it, and if the answer’s yes, you don’t care enough.

Gert Mellak: I probably have a little bit of a different view here, from the agency point of view. The times where you start with a blank page and start writing an article are over, for quite a few reasons. From an SEO perspective, using AI tools and machine learning to research what is ranking, what do those things have in common, what kind of outline can I pull together quickly to make sure my article is in line with what’s ranking, this has been standard for us and many other agencies for years.

We had a lot of AI writing tools that changed names, I don’t even remember the last name of the tool we were using before ChatGPT came out, they were crap, there was no way of using them productively, and we’d been trying for two years. Then ChatGPT comes out, everybody thinks, hey, I don’t have to do my job anymore, this thing with a one-line prompt is going to do what took me four hours and I can still report two hours, absolutely, this content is crap.

We’ve been doing a lot of work with prompts, feeding manually researched information into the prompts, feeding writing examples, brand voice examples, in order to come up with a decent enough piece of content where we have an editor rather than a writer go through it. We can apply frameworks, and now we have a proper knowledge extraction process for clients that come on board, where we have them talk about their industry for a while, transcribe it, extract the bullet points, and use them for content creation.

Ideally you have an expert write every single article, but in practical terms very often it’s not possible, a small car repair shop owner is not going to write a couple of articles each month to improve their SEO, there always needs to be a practical approach. Bringing in the client and their particular experience and making sure this is part of the prompts has been working pretty well lately, we’re even running an internal competition where our R&D guy is going against human writers, human writers can’t use AI, he’s just using AI, and we’re going to see if we can report on it. I do believe it’s made big jumps in the last two years, both on the GPT-4 side, GPT-4o now, and on how we use it, what context we feed into it.

Shelly Fagin: Yeah, I mean, Gert makes a good point, the two things I would note are that there’s still a lot of human editorial in the process, and you’ve had to create a system to make the right prompt, so there’s been a lot of work to get to a place where you could do it, and even then you can’t let it go on full automation and make the decisions for you. So I do agree, if you’re going to go at scale there still needs to be humans or a team of humans reading every word and approving it.

Leanne made a good point, Google has made it clear they have no problem with AI content, and to answer you, maybe I’m a skeptic, but I believe they have no problem with it because they don’t know how to figure it out, so this is to me a bit of PR talk. Maybe it is okay to have useful AI-generated content, but to me what Gert’s saying is more AI-assisted production of content, which is semi-automatic, which is the furthest I’d ever go, but I would never trust it without human intervention.

Internally, being the lone SEO, I can’t necessarily vet every piece of content we post, and our team of technical writers are not SEOs, so we’ve leveraged it internally in some ways to help enhance, but I’ve always said, ask your core question about what your article’s about, and that’ll feed talking points that need to be in your article, but what’s not there. It’s funny, Will Reynolds posted something the other day where he says how he uses it in content, and I was like, that’s basically it, we need to not be producing content today that an AI can spit out, but what kind of experience and expertise can we add that AI cannot. There’s some really great tools that’ll give suggestions for improving on the optimization standpoint, but not necessarily the content side, but I think there’s a place for it.

I’m hearing mic feedback which is odd, is there a long crew, sorry about that, I think it’s not mine. So I would say, we have a lot of SMBs and small businesses, what would you say were the most critical SEO tools and strategies you’d recommend they leverage to provide a good ROI, bonus points if these tools have any AI-driven functionality you can call out?

Alex Moss: I mean, I’ll self-promote and say that Yoast has AI functionality in title and meta generation, but I won’t go on about that, only in premium. Yoast is great for that, and it doesn’t optimize the actual body content, which is something we don’t want to delve into quite yet, at least not until the technology is walking. But I’ve also found Semrush’s AI functionality within their projects really useful, and again it’s more time-saving, it’s like an assistant, AI assistants are the best thing, they’re the icing on top of all the cake we have when we’re using all these tools, just making our work more efficient so we can do more, have more time.

And the last thing, in ideation sessions for creative, we have someone asking ChatGPT and a couple of others, so there’s one person on one AI platform and about three people, and they’re all there like it’s another member of the team, like, what do you think of this idea we’ve come up with, and then it spits out what it spits out and it’s used just as another team member, but again it doesn’t rule the meeting, it’s just there to be another head, if it does have a head.

Gert Mellak: We would probably say Surfer SEO, Frase, these kinds of tools make our lives easier. It’s going to date me a little bit, but when I started out with SEO I would use handwritten notes of what the top results have in common in order to make sure our piece of content was actually good. Surfer was a big step for us back then, Frase has come a long way as well, so whatever tool you can get your hands on that compares what you have with what’s ranking well and shows you the gap, you can then decide if you want to close it or not.

I believe most of my team, myself included, would have some chatbot open right now, be it Claude, which is really really good and I recommend everybody check out the last version, or ChatGPT, just have it open, ask it questions. Not only as an additional team member, we try to have it simulate the client as well, so, pretend you own a car repair shop in the south of Madrid and you are focused on BMWs, what would you think of this article, kind of thing, really try to have fun with it and use it as an extra.

Also for persona definitions, what is this persona of a BMW owner like, and based on this persona definition, what would they probably be missing in an article, or what would they want to see first, then use it as inspiration. It’s obviously not 100% true, but it very often changes your train of thought or gives you inspiration, and you can pretty much do your brainstorming session you’d be doing with your colleagues with ChatGPT. The ChatGPT app is really fun in the car when I go and pick up my kids, I might do a brainstorming session with it, and more often than not I might send a note to my email afterwards, okay, this is really something I want to check out.

Shelly Fagin: I like that. I’m going to throw one more poll up because I’m curious, since we were talking about using AI to generate content, how many of you have used it and published it on your website, so we’ve got a true or false question. You mentioned local query, so it raises my question, how would you say AI is affecting local search optimization, and any strategies businesses should employ to improve their local presence?

Gert Mellak: I would definitely say many local businesses don’t even have the basics right that we’ve been doing for 20 years. Every single week I get at least one inquiry from a local business asking to improve their rankings, and then you open up their website and it’s hard to find a location, very basic things, or really getting some reviews on business profiles. Ultimately input equals output, and this is something we see with AI all the time, whatever goes into it can have an impact on the output.

If you want AI to talk about your brand as one of the main car repair shops in your area, you need to connect the dots, I always explain this to my clients with the join-the-dots game my kids play, you connect dot number two, dot number three, and suddenly this is a cat, this is exactly the way we think about SEO and have been thinking about SEO for many years. So if there is one dot, this is your brand, you need to connect it to your location, if you’re a car repair shop you need to relate it to car terminology, to mechanics, to other companies in your area that Google might already know, or some authorities.

Look at it through Google’s lens, what kind of connections would I need as Google on a local level in order to figure out that this car repair shop is a leading car repair shop in this particular area, and this is going to help you both on organic Google search, which we’ve been doing for many years, but also on AI.

Alex Moss: Maybe if I go further than get the basics sorted, let’s assume you’ve got the basics sorted, I would say the next step would be to ensure that all your content is going to have more transactional intent if it doesn’t already. I seem to see that more local searches are transactionally based, because you want to do something right now or you’re researching to do something very quickly, it’s not like you’re buying a couch, if you want to find the couch shop you probably know why you’re there.

And the good thing about transactional intent is that it can be mixed with the other three intents, for attendees there’s informational, navigational, transactional, and commercial, so you obviously want people to be in a more transactional sense if transaction is something you can do on the site, if not, commercial. It’s interesting that you should go for that mix, and then that might have more of an impact on Overviews, because it’s going to tell you what to do as well as who you are.

Shelly Fagin: Good call. So I have one last question and then I’m going to dive into the chat, we have so many great ones. I’d be curious on your thoughts of, should I be blocking LLMs from crawling my site, what sites should consider doing this, especially if we’ve spent years investing in high-quality educational content?

Alex Moss: Me, I don’t see a problem personally with blocking LLMs from discovering your site, because if they don’t discover it they’re never going to present it in any context anywhere, and the other thing is they might just ignore it like Perplexity did anyway and just go for it. But let’s say you did have control, I get that there are some sites that want to protect the content through trademarks or intellectual property, but when I’m thinking of this local plumber or hairdresser, why would they not want ChatGPT to know who they are and what they do?

I don’t see it as stealing, they’re not physically stealing business from you, if someone wants to get their hair cut, then why wouldn’t you present that to them, why are you hiding it? It’s like saying, do you want to be de-indexed, do you want to have no index on your site, because if the AI aren’t going to see you, why have anyone look at it. But again, skepticism by me.

Gert Mellak: Yeah, I agree, I actually got asked a similar question where somebody was asking if they should index their book, because you can obviously on ChatGPT now get very good book summaries, and my answer there was similar. It depends on your business model, if your business model is selling books and you need the revenue, it might actually be hurting you to see your book indexed, on the other hand it’s so easy to get a PDF version somewhere and AI is going to use whatever content is out there, so it might stand up there anyway.

For websites specifically, you want to get eyeballs to your site, so why would you block potential eyeballs from ChatGPT. Yes, they should be paying for using your material as training material, and you can put it in terms of service like YouTube does that it can’t be scraped, we know from the Google leak, talking about Chrome clickstream data and stuff, whatever data is out there at some point is going to be used, so just allow it.

Shelly Fagin: Yeah, I kind of in that same train of thought myself. So digging into our questions, because we have some really great ones, we have Kevin here asking, two to three searches on Google result in a no-click, what would you say it’s worth spending on SEO if you still can’t get into positions one or two, but at three or four?

Alex Moss: If you look at the whole overview of a SERP, and I forgot his name, Marcus Tober from Semrush, he did this in a talk where he talked about how, in fact, SEO is more valuable than it ever was, because there’s less real estate to fight for in the SERP itself, especially above the fold, if you’re going to go down a bit because AI is taking it over. There’s still a position one, and yes, while some people may get the answer from position zero, if you’re not in position zero you’re nowhere, and you may as well try to fight for position one and at least get an answer, so there’s brand marketing and exposure, and at least try to be in position three and four, cannibalize as much as you can.

Gert Mellak: I would also say, it’s not only about this one single keyword you’re going for that’s not driving clicks, if you check how many keywords you actually rank for it might be 3,000 on a particular article. And just coming up in position three and four means you’re one of the top five most relevant websites out of five million or 50 million, which is not something to be underestimated, especially as Google is very quick to shift search results, you might suddenly end up as the featured snippet, or the source for an AI Overview, or jump a few positions.

So the value of SEO broken down by particular position you can or can’t achieve is really hard to assess. We see now with Reddit obviously taking over big spaces, we can’t necessarily with a website compete with Reddit, but there might be cross-platform strategies where I say, hey, maybe I can participate on this Reddit thread that’s ranking so well and still get brand exposure, for me this is these days a big part of SEO, we see who is coming up and how can we make sure we connect our brand to this particular result.

Shelly Fagin: Great answers. Diving in, Gary is asking, how much of an impact will metrics like site speed, a cohesive bug-free user experience, have on search in the next few years?

Alex Moss: It’ll still be important, I think. I always say, don’t try and get to a 100 score in all of these page speed things, because you may actually be sacrificing user experience to obtain a perfect speed, and a perfect speed isn’t a perfect experience. Whilst a technical person, especially from web development or design, I get that strive for coding perfection and optimization, all three of us here will know that from our SEO background, but there’s other things at play, just like ranking, you may get to position one, two, or three, but that’s only half the journey, once they click into your site there’s a whole other challenge from speed but also UX and conversion. So yes, it will be important, maybe less important as the years go on and it focuses more on the content within, it may take pity on a poorly performing site because it’s that helpful.

Gert Mellak: Right now, site speed, use whatever you can do to improve the user experience, I think is worth doing, don’t chase the 100 page speed, completely agree. The better AI gets, the fewer times we’ll have to actually go to the website and depend on the page speed, this is probably something a few years out. But I would see it through a conversion lens, just because you’re faster you’re not getting more conversions, maybe more but not better conversions, sometimes it’s the people that are happy to wait a couple of seconds for your site to load that actually then convert.

So we try to relate as much data as we have to actual conversions and attribute these conversions to actual sales, it’s not even the number of conversions, it’s actually the sales that count. Very often we get overly focused on individual metrics, and every developer wants to report a great page speed metric and every site owner wants a fast site, but ultimately everybody wants this project to make more money, grow the brand bigger, and make sure we are present everywhere, so if you focus on the conversion, very often a few of those individual criteria don’t seem that important anymore.

Shelly Fagin: Agreed. What services, if any, Ron was asking, do you think might be better than ChatGPT, are there any tools or LLMs that you like working with?

Alex Moss: I saw talk of Jarvis and Claude, but again I’ve not spent too much time producing new content, as someone who’s terrible at producing content and being an editor myself with the more techy side, so there’s other people who’ve done that, but I have heard of both in a positive light. I use Perplexity for research, because it is good and it does present data well, cites it properly, it’s kind of a bridge between the traditional SERP we’ve known for years and ChatGPT, there’s something I don’t like about the chat relationship, I want to ask a question and be given structured research in front of me rather than at most bullet points, but again that’s my personal preference.

Gert Mellak: I’m probably mostly using Claude and ChatGPT these days, but I think it’s more important to make sure that you use the tool well and put some time into figuring out how to use it best for different purposes. I’ve been keeping notes of prompts and prompt templates for a couple of years now, where whenever I ask for an article I fill in all these things, I just shared on LinkedIn the other day some template of this, to show how you can efficiently work with it, and then refine those. Whether you paste it into ChatGPT or Claude, you might get a good result as long as you know how to use it well and provide enough context, so just really pick a tool, try to get good at it, and make it work for actual use cases.

Shelly Fagin: I wanted to pull this one up, Manav, I’m probably mispronouncing his name, I apologize, this question might apply to all jobs, but he specifically asked how AI might affect user experience or UX jobs, it’s taken over the UI as he said, so what are your thoughts on the impact of AI on our jobs?

Alex Moss: It will be, again, slower than you think. There’ll be assistance for now, but they’re not going to take over our jobs, there’ll be some elements that might be more restricted on what we’re doing now. But remember, we were all developing websites that had no mobile-friendly version because not everyone was holding mobile phones, so what was the point in optimizing for it, but now we do, and it took a long time. Mobile-first indexing is now only this year, it was only in the last few months that they finally chopped off desktop as a consideration, and when did they first talk about it, maybe 10 years ago, and we’ve all had mobiles for more than 10 years, so this is again one of those slow-boil things. So I wouldn’t consider the UX and UI jobs gone, because as those things deprecate, new skills will come out that you can excel in, be friends with the AI, not enemies, it’s our friend I think.

Shelly Fagin: Awesome, I’m going to pull up our poll results. Going backwards, in reverse, for a lot of people, 82% actually said that they’ve used AI to create content that they publish to their website, 62 people voting on that one, so that’s a significant percentage. As far as which AI tool you think had the biggest impact on search, obviously ChatGPT kind of stole the market there at 82%, I’m surprised Bard wasn’t a little higher.

Alex Moss: Interesting, the monopoly is the opposite of the search monopoly, where Google has more than 82%.

Shelly Fagin: Right, well, if you combine ChatGPT and Bing AI as one group, I’d guess you get into that.

Alex Moss: That was Google and Google Bard, they did it, but personally the name’s not the best, they didn’t do the launch the best, the PR was bad when they did that incorrect fact in their only demo video, like, you had one job, just make sure this one fact is correct, and they didn’t, and because of that it probably got a lot of distrust, which is keeping people sticking with ChatGPT. The longer this happens, the more ChatGPT is going to solidify itself above 80% in my opinion, Google have to do something big, because I think they thought they’d just release Bard and everyone would join it like when they opened Gmail and Google Plus, and you can’t force people onto it like you could with that stuff.

Shelly Fagin: I’ve been doing some really cool stuff with Gemini, but more in my tools from a productivity standpoint, integration in our Google Workspaces, I wouldn’t necessarily say for me personally it’s had a big impact on search behavior, that would go to Bard for sure. But on our last poll, most people are right about three or four, I’m nervous, that AI will make our SEO skills obsolete, so I’m not surprised, only 10% of the voters said five, they think it’ll make us obsolete. I get it, change is hard.

Next up, please join us back in about 15 minutes, actually join early, we have Carolyn Shelby hosting a live website SEO audit session, if you don’t know the brilliant Carolyn, she’s a Principal SEO, formerly from ESPN and Chicago Tribune, an expert at audits, so please join us. But I would love your feedback in the chat, Alex, Gert, how do you feel your session went today?

Alex Moss: I mean, it’s good to have agreements and different sides of the scale as well, especially on production of content, but it’s been lots of fun, it’s going to be interesting to watch this maybe a year from now and see what predictions we thought may come true or not, maybe that’s something for next year’s conference.

Gert Mellak: I think that conversation went really really well, it’s so interesting when everybody has their experience in different projects and with clients or without clients, you just try to apply what you hear, we might be hearing and reading the same things but we apply them very differently to the project, so sharing experience I think is always a good thing.

Shelly Fagin: I couldn’t agree more, thank you guys for joining me, attendees, please come back in about 15 minutes for Carolyn, thank you so much.