Summary
- I found that AI overviews can lower website clicks by 34%, so it's time to change our SEO strategies.
- We need to think beyond just our website and try to capture more space on search result pages across different platforms like YouTube, LinkedIn, as well as running targeted ads.
- The key to SEO success now lies in creating content that is highly relevant and available on various media, not just on a standalone site.
- Aim to become an expert in one topic across multiple channels for better visibility.
- Approach SEO with a funnel strategy, starting at the bottom with the most aware potential customers and moving upward. Focus on keywords that will directly lead to conversions.
- Understand your assets: Owned (website, email list, customer list), Rented (platforms like YouTube), and Earned (links and endorsements).
- SEO is no longer just about ranking high on a search engine; it involves a whole digital marketing strategy.
- Consider customer awareness stages – Unaware, Problem Aware, Solution Aware, Product Aware, and Most Aware. Tailor content for each stage.
- Capture branded searches by creating relevant, well-connected content that draws users to your own site.
- Amplify your topic's presence by using YouTube for video content, then adapt similar content for other platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter.
- Don't overlook Google's own services — optimize your Google Business Profile along with your other efforts.
- Remember, consistency and hyper-relevance in content can establish authority and drive traffic to your services.
Video
How To Take Action
I would suggest changing how we think about SEO. Let's go beyond just websites. We need to spread our content across different platforms like YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter. This helps us reach more people and get more clicks.
A good way to start is by picking one topic you really want to know well and make content about it on different channels. This makes you look like an expert. Also, look at different stages of customer awareness (like those who know nothing about the product versus those ready to buy) and tailor content for each group.
Our website is still important, so let's start there. But remember, YouTube can also be powerful. Make videos about your topics and share them there too. Google loves showing YouTube videos, even in search results!
I’d recommend looking at all our assets: Owned assets like our website and email lists give us control. Rented assets like YouTube mean we play by their rules, but they help us reach more people. Earned assets like backlinks build our reputation.
It's smart to think of SEO not just as ranking high on search engines but as a part of a bigger digital marketing plan. Make sure whatever content you make is super relevant and consistent. This helps people trust you more. Lastly, let's not forget Google's services. Having a Google Business Profile is crucial and can help get us noticed more easily.
Quotes by Author
"Relevance is the lead domino for your success as far as driving visibility, not only on Google, but across all the other platforms"
"You have to consistently show up and create content across multiple platforms"
"The SEO game has changed and you have to modify your strategy if you want to survive and thrive going forward"
"You can no longer rely on your website alone for SEO success"
"There's one variable that matters massively, and it's relevance"
Full Transcript
you get more clicks and traffic. But HR has found that AI overviews actually reduce clicks by 34%. So, here's the truth. The SEO game has changed and you have to modify your strategy if you want to survive and thrive going forward. So, here's a new SEO plan that'll help. So, the way that you're going to combat Google's AI overviews going forward is to focus more on omniresent SEO inside of Google and on other search engines. So, one thing you're looking at here is exactly kind of the issue that people are dealing with, which are these AI overviews. Now, this one in particular is very interesting because take a look at this. You'll see that the number one result, the number one citation is actually a YouTube video from my channel. So that means that even though my blog post is right here, I'm actually losing to this video that was created in June 2024. So this is this should show you everything that you need to know about the current state of SEO. You no longer need to just rely on your website. And in fact, if you just rely on your website, you're you're probably going to suffer pretty significantly. So what I'm going to be showing you is how you can really optimize the right way going forward. and and your website is still the pillar of this process, which I'll be showing you here in a second. But we need to be thinking more about how do we capture more SER real estate. And the only way to do that is we have to start expanding our content strategies outside of just our website. So just a small example here in this case, which is a very important keyword for my business. I've got a YouTube video and then we scroll down. We've got a dedicated blog post around this topic. We'll keep scrolling down and we've actually got three videos that are popping up here. And we're not going to stop there. We're going to keep going. I've actually talked about this specifically on LinkedIn as well. And that LinkedIn post itself is actually indexed. And just to take it to the another level, we're running ads as well for these queries. So, this is what an example of like how you truly need to try to dominate because the more spots that you can take on the first page of Google, it increases your odds dramatically of capturing those clicks. But if you're basically just rolling the dice with your one, you know, one listing, your one ranking, you know, you you're probably going to see a pretty significant decrease in revenue. And and at the end of the day, this is not just about traffic anymore, right? We we got to kind of reframe our mind when it comes to SEO. It used to be we would rank in Google and we would get organic traffic to our website and then magical things would happen. But what it's not the way consumers or even businesses behave anymore. Most people are consuming many pieces of content before they actually become a lead. In fact, we have people who join Gotcha SEO Academy who have spent nearly multiple years watching my videos before they finally made that commitment and that decision to apply for the program. So you have to consistently show up and create content across multiple platforms. You cannot be dependent on your website anymore. Otherwise, I mean you certainly can try to do that, but I'm just saying it's very dangerous. So I'm going to show you today how we can actually do this in a very practical way. So first, let's just quickly show about the good old days. This is how it used to be in SEO, right? You would you'd create your one nice, you know, page or blog post and around a keyword and you would rank it in Google and then you'd get like all the organic traffic. If you were in the number one spot back in the day, you could expect 30 to 40% of the organic clicks going to your ranking, right? And that was those are the good old days. Those days are not only gone, they are not coming back. So don't expect that to happen. In fact, you can see look at the way that Google's even structured their navigation. They put web, which is like the traditional search results. It they're burying it super deep into the navigation. In fact, in some cases, web doesn't even show up at all. So, that should show you the direction that they're going. This is over. This is not going to happen anymore because this is what the real reality is of what we're trying to do. And so, what you can see here is like so many different opportunities to capture different parts of the the first page real estate. Now, there's one commonality, and I've studied thousands and thousands of keywords at this point, uh, and and kind of refined my strategy based on this. And there's one variable that matters massively, and it's relevance. And this is nothing new. Relevance is the lead domino for your success as far as driving visibility, not only on Google, but across all the other platforms. So the example you're looking at here is for you know how to dribble a basketball but look at the look at this the uh profiles that are ranking like look at this particular YouTube profile that's ranking channel you know get handles basketball okay and that was from a video that was six years ago this channel all they do is talk about dribbling basketballs and basketball training they hyperfocused on that one topic so Google is rewarding them for that and so the key going forward is is that hyper hyper relevance and it's going to be on your website. It's going to be on YouTube. It's going to be across every channel. You have to pick one topic that you truly want to dominate. So, speaking of that, let's go into what I call topic domination. So, you've probably heard of topical authority or topic authority. That that's all cool, but that's typically applies to a website. What I'm talking about more is about dominating your topic across multiple channels. Now, the good news is the way that you do that on your website is very similar to how you go about doing it on the other platforms. There's not a whole lot of differences. It's just that the content framework and the content style changes pretty dramatically. So, let me show you some examples of this. So, first we have to understand the five stages of customer awareness. All right, very simple stuff here, but basically the way this typically works in a standard five stages is you have unaware, then you go into problem aware, then solution aware, and then product aware, and finally at most aware, your standard funnel. Okay, most people will start up here because when they go into tools like Rankability or Hrefs or Semrush, they see search volume, right? And because they see search volume, they think that that's a good idea. Oh, there's lots of demand, there's lots of search volume. let's go after those keywords. That's a massive mistake because what you should do instead is flip this flip it upside down, okay? And instead, I want you to start at the bottom of the funnel. So, start at the bottom of the funnel. And of course, you know, this is the actual bottom of the funnel, but we're going to focus all of our effort and our time and our resources toward towards dominating this bottom of the funnel and then we're going to work our way up the funnel. Okay? And that's the most important thing you can do because too many people start down here and you end up ranking for a bunch of keywords, number one, that don't convert. Number two, the large language models are just eating them alive. So you you're really playing a dangerous game if you do that. So what you want to do instead is just start with the keywords that are actually going to make you money. Okay? And I know it sounds like a crazy idea, but we want to start with those keywords that are actually going to drive revenue. All right? So let me show you a practical example. So in the in the example that I'm going to give here is for content optimization. This is the you know going back to the original idea the topic that I'm going to attempt to dominate. Okay. So the strategy here is very simple. We're going to be looking at a few different you know areas that we can hit and this is all your know you know your standard marketing things except with one variation. So first we have our owned assets. The only assets that we truly own number one is our website number two is our email list and number three is our customer list. Aside from that, you don't really own anything, right? You could also have a text list and maybe some other stuff, but for the most part, this is like 99% of your owned assets fall into this category. This is your most precious resource in marketing. It's your most precious resource in your business. Okay, this is critical. And that's why the focus uh for the topic domination will start with the website because we actually can control what we're doing. Okay? Then we have rented assets. Now you see a lot of people who say, "Oh my, you know, my YouTube channel or my LinkedIn profile, like those are owned assets." They are not owned assets. You do not own your YouTube channel. YouTube owns your YouTube channel. And at any moment if you make one wrong move, you can get suspended and you can lose everything. Okay? That means you do not own it. That means you are you are playing their game, right? And so it is rented. That is rented territory. So you have to treat it that way. And the reason why this is so critical to kind of shift your mindset that that's rented land is that whenever you're creating content on these platforms, your mindset needs to be to get them back to your owned assets so that you can actually control some of that traffic, right? you can actually start to get some leverage because otherwise if you're just constantly creating content here and you're not bringing people back to your email list, get it, you know, trying to drive sales, you're just you're basically wasting your time. Unless you're trying to be an influencer and then if that's the case, this is probably not relevant to you. But if you're trying to actually drive revenue, leads, customers, sales, then you got to get people back to your website. You got to get them on your email list. I'm going to show you what that looks like here in the context of a proper funnel. Okay. Next, we have paid. Okay. This is also critical. It's not the first place that you should start, but we do want to start to think about once we've tapped out all of these assets and we've got some good systems in place, then it makes a lot of sense to start investing in some paid. So, it's basically we can throw some fuel on the fire and truly go to full domination of the topic like I showed earlier with the start SEO agency query. You see, we're running Google search ads with that, too. So what happens that gives us another spot on the first page that allows us to capture more traffic and obviously more leads and sales. Okay. And finally is earned. Earned is critical for this whole thing to work especially with your website and the owned assets because number one links are the most important ranking factor in Google. Like hands down it's the most powerful ranking factor but it's also a very important ranking factor in the large language models like chat GBT and Perplexity. So, we really want to be constantly trying to acquire backlinks. And I'm not that's kind of outside the scope of this video. I have some videos about link building on my channel, but but the point is like this is also a critical piece. You need all of these things working together. Now, now that I've absolutely stressed you out and you have to do a billion things, let's get hyperfocused and I want you to focus in on a few kind of critical elements here. Um, and this is this is in the order that you need to go. Okay? So number one, first what we want to think about is the way that this kind of flows. Okay, so with rented assets, there's a couple things that we want to have happen. Number one is by creating content on the rented assets, if we do it the right way, hopefully that will increase our branded search volume. That branded search volume will end up back at our website. Like I mentioned before, we wanted to go back to our owned assets. So this is the the indirect effect of creating content on these platforms is you will get more branded search which then is some of your best traffic that you can possibly get. Branded search traffic is is traffic that is is truly the best of all. Right? Because anyone that already knows your brand, they're already somewhat warm to it. They're much easier to convert. Okay, so that's the idea here. I won't get into, you know, creating content on these platforms, but just in general, like that should be the mindset is either A, we're doing this to drive more branded search or B, we're doing this to get them on our email list, which then allows us to remarket to them. Okay, so now what we want to do is focus at the bottom of the funnel. So, we're at the most aware phase here. And these are keywords that are directly related to your brand. like to the point where like if someone searches this, the probability that they're going to convert is extremely high. Okay, so someone's searching like rankability pricing, they're they're in it, right? They're really close. They already know what Rankability is. They're interested in uh you know to see if the price is a good fit for them. Um and that means that they're very very close to becoming a you know to submitting a free trial, right? And that's really important. Or they're looking into like how our scores work, right? They're investigating our brand. and they're investigating our tools. That's all good stuff. That's But you need to dominate that stuff first. You need to start creating content around these topics and you need to completely dominate the SERs for these keywords because these are your most critical and they're going to be the ones that actually drive real sales. Okay? And then on top of that, uh there's also the bottom of the funnel content. So those are going to be your sales pages, your testimonials, your results pages, your case studies, all that good stuff that persuades someone to to do to buy your stuff, right? That's the most important part. So, you want to get this stuff squared away first. Don't start with all the the fluffy, you know, keywords with lots of search volume. Like, start with this stuff that will not have a lot of search volume, but is going to actually drive you direct revenue. This is where the focus should be in the beginning. Now, you might be asking, if you're a brand new brand, you're not going to have search volume associated with your brand, just naturally. Like, you're not going to be able to go into Rankability's keyword research tool and like find search volume around a brand new brand. Um but what you can do is go to an existing brand. So like for example what we did um when we started is we I went and looked at uh Clickfunnels. I went and looked at HubSpot. I looked at very well-known SAS companies and I looked at what are the queries that are popping up for them. So like you know HubSpot pricing, HubSpot X, you know, insert whatever brand plus a particular idea and then we just said, okay, these are all the ideas that we should also cover for our brand uh proactively so that when these searches do start to occur, we're already there, right? And so you can do this proactively in advance before that search demand starts to rise, which means you'll already be in a place to succeed. And that means anyone else that tries to come in and get you. You've already got some you've already got some age on those pages. Okay. Number two, we want to go to the product aware. So, as you can see here, we're slowly going up the funnel. Okay. So, now we're at the product aware phase. Now, this is where things get interesting because now we're look like there product aware is still really really good. Like you could still tech someone could still search, you know, rankability verse insert competitor and they could still go and submit a free trial. Is it as likely as someone who's at this stage? Probably not, right? So, that's why you want to have two options. Option one is we drive them to a free trial. Option two is we use internal linking to drive them to another asset that's deeper into the funnel. And as you're going to see here in a second, this is the idea. Okay. So, at the product aware phase, they're going to include the actual brand in these queries. Okay. Number three is solution aware. Now, at this stage here, we there the likelihood that they're actually going to go and submit a free trial. It could happen. It could happen. It's certainly possible, but more than likely, they're going to do further investigation. Now, keep in mind the way this works is not as linear as as you're seeing here, just as just a demonstration. But what's going to really happen is like if someone searches, you know, best content optimization tools, they're going to read some sort of blog post like the one that I have on Gotch SEO and they're going to learn about all the options that they have. Then from there they're they they might do a few things. Number one, they could just leave and, you know, go and watch cat videos. That could certainly happen. Uh or they might go back to Google and start searching about the brands that were in that list. So that's why you have to show up for those branded queries because they go back and search, you know, rankability review or rankability verse Clear Scope, right? You're going to show up there. So then they're going to click through and they're going to come right back to your site again, right? And this is this is what you want. You want multiple touch points. And that's why you got to be hitting all of these different ideas at each stage of the searcher journey. That way, you're covering as much ground as humanly possible. Now, you're going to leverage internal linking though to to guide some of those those searchers through that funnel on the site itself. So, you're tackling a few things at once here. But the pillar of all this is creating these assets. If you create these assets, you use strong internal linking. Obviously, we acquire links and all that good stuff. that's going to help us drive organic traffic and most importantly actually keep them isolated on the site and push them through the funnel um you know through that journey on our website itself. Okay. And now the next one is problem aware. Okay. So now we're starting to get very very broad. Okay. Now we're talking about just content optimization or how to use uh how to use AI for onpage SEO. People who are searching these types of queries, they're very early in this process, right? They know they have a problem. they've identified the fact that they need to do content optimization and but they're not quite like ready to make an investment in in a piece of software, right? So, what you want to do here, this is where things change, right? So, you can see in these first three kind of middle to bottom of the funnel phases, you see that you can go direct for the the core offer that you're selling, right? So, we in this case, we can pretty much promote the free trial. A percentage of people will take that free trial. A percentage of people will go through and and you know do more investigation. Okay, that's that's what you want. But at this phase, you could try to go for a home run and go straight for a free trial, but it's probably not going to work super well. You'd be much better trying to take the traffic that lands here for, you know, content optimization checklist and drive them to a free lead magnet that's does not require a credit card, does not require any, you know, significant investment uh really at all. Make it completely free. The only investment that is required is an email address. And then what you do, this is critical. When you create a lead magnet, and this is not just applicable to SEO, it's any industry, create a lead magnet that's actually actionable. So if they use this free thing that you gave them, and they actually get some type of result, it doesn't need to change their entire life, but if it get if it helps them just achieve a little tiny result, help them uh gain an insight that they never had before, then you are going to build so much trust. And so the way that I do it in my lead magnets is I you know I create I typically create some sort of template and within that template I you know real subtly also promote the tool right as a as one option to go through that process right and so I can indirectly send some people here once they've downloaded that lead magnet only a small percentage of people though at this phase are ready to do that so then the next thing that we want to do is email marketing okay and email marketing is consist consistent emails that get someone to know, like and trust your brand. Now, in this process, what we will also be doing is, you know, using some standard kind of like native emails where it's like actually building trust and giving them content in the actual email itself. But other times what we'll do is we'll just promote some of the other assets that are deeper into the funnel. Right? So someone comes in here and they searched, you know, content optimization checklist and we know they downloaded, you know, maybe a free SEO checklist or a free content optimization checklist. We know that that's the stage that they're in. So the next logical step for me is be like, hey, uh, you know, I just published this blog post about showing the best content optimization tools. Here's a link. And then you you actually link to that blog post in the solution awareness phase. And now you've you've set the wheels in motion to push them deeper down that journey. Okay, this is how it all works together as a system. And finally, the last phase here, which is honestly, you may never get to this phase because there's so much work to do just among like the first four stages. And then also like getting it getting people back into these assets that you you may really never need to go this broad, but let's say you do. You can see how broad these start to get. Like so now we're just talking about just straight SEO content, okay? And so, you know, if someone doesn't even know what SEO content is, we've got a long way to go before they're actually going to, you know, sign up for some software, right? It's just there's a lot of education and a lot of things that have to happen before they get to that point. So, what you want to do though is think about this like you want to tackle each stage of this process. And this is what's going to set your business up for success. And do not take this lightly, okay? This is so critical. But start at the most of most aware and then go backwards. Don't start here. This is going to be a big mistake. Start over here and then work your way through this until finally you're higher up in the funnel and now you're going for full awareness. So the final piece of this equation is I want you to take everything that you do here that you're going to publish on your website. And then I want you to just take this and do the same exact topics on YouTube. Just go to YouTube and and create videos about the same exact topics. Do long form content and do short form. Absolutely blanket YouTube and knowing that Google is going to crawl those videos and index them in Google as well. So now you're starting to capture more real estate. Then what you do is after you've you've completely tapped out your website, you've pretty much tapped out YouTube and now you're starting to kind of just, you know, uh, consistently create content on YouTube around these ideas, then the next place you should go is thinking about creating micro content. So creating micro content on LinkedIn, creating micro content on X, whichever platform that Google's showing a preference for, just start to consistently create content around these same topics over and over and over. You got to have that consistency. And what you're going to do is you're going to start to build topical relevance. Topical relevance on your website, topical relevance on YouTube, topical relevance across every profile that you have. Okay? And that's the way that you truly start to dominate not just on Google, but across all these other platforms as well. So, this is so so critical. I cannot stress it enough. This is honestly there is no such thing as just like being an SEO expert or a Google SEO expert anymore. Like if you want to be able to truly dominate going forward, you have to be a you have to be a digital marketer at this point. SEO is one piece of this equation as you can tell. But you got to learn how to how to put all these pieces together and make this work as one holistic system because the days of just, you know, ranking your your one page on your website are far gone. We that is not that's not going to work anymore. Um and so we got to really start to expand our horizons. Now, good news. Um I have a template for you. So, this template, you can just go ahead and scan the QR code. Um, and you can get it for free. No opt-in. Just go ahead and make a copy of this template, and I'll show you kind of what it looks like, okay? In a, you know, kind of practical environment here. So, this is what I call the topic domination uh template. Okay? And you can see here, this is basically the way this is set up. It has all the stages that I discussed today. Okay? So, you see all the stages here. Um, and you just go in and select the appropriate stage. And what that does is going to force you to think about okay this is this is how I'm going to prioritize these keywords right prioritize these topics okay then what you can see here is the channels right we've got own rented earned and paid okay then finally we've got the platform so you pick the platform and then you just document all this and you can see just a very small example like even for just uh content optimization tools which is a very very specific topic look at all of the pieces of content content that we've already produced around just this one topic. 42 assets around just this one idea on our website. Okay? And that doesn't account for all the assets I've been building across other platforms as well. So, just keep in mind this is a way that you can organize this and start to get just really systematic and deliberate about this process. So, once again, if you go back here, uh you can just scan the QR code, you can get access to this template, make a copy of it, and you know, play with it. This is you got to get organized in this because honestly there's just so much work to do at this point. Uh and so the idea here though is like we're going to use the website. We're gonna focus on the website first, then move on to YouTube because Google owns YouTube and it loves it and it loves to showcase its product. So we're going to double down on that. And if you want to go to the next level, you should also the other like the other uh Google product that obviously gets a lot of coverage is Google business profile. If you don't have a Google business profile, you're missing out on a lot, right? So, like in the case of Gotch SEO Academy, you can see this like 97 Google reviews here, this thing is like helps so much with our business. Like when some when I create content on YouTube and people go and search Gotch SEO or Gotch SEO Academy, this pops up. So, before someone even gets to, you know, gets to our website, they can, you know, immediately start just looking at reviews, reading reviews, uh, you know, and and showing the proof that we actually know what our do we're doing. So, they're already uh in a position where they're starting to know, like, and trust our brand before they even talk to a single person in our business. Okay, that's critical. So, then they come in here. By the time they get to this point, they're already, you know, let's let's say it, you know, somewhat halfway sold. Okay, but it's because it's all real. Like, you can go and fact check it. So, so the point is like you need to think about what are the assets that Google gives a lot of uh preferential treatment towards. Obviously, Google search, YouTube, and Google business profile. Like, you need to be you need to have those things. Google uh is always going to give more preference to its own products over anyone else's. So, the point is is go ahead and, you know, get access to this free template. And if you want to go to the next level, if you're an agency or a consultant or freelancer and you want to like learn all of my SEO systems and you want me to help you twice a week to stay on the cutting edge of SEO and digital marketing, just go to goto.com and submit an application. Okay? Thank you so much for watching. Compression.
