An Update on SEO, AI, and What's Next

I've been in SEO and online marketing for over 20 years and I'm here to share the wealth of knowledge , hints and tips I've amassed over that time . Hello and welcome back to SEO is not that hard . It's me here , ed Dawson , as usual , and today is going to be a bit of an update episode .

I know it's been a little while since I last released a brand new episode , since mid-April was where I started the mini break I've been having and in fact , when I started putting out the best stuff for my greatest hits episodes , I just really needed to take a bit of a break because of my schedule , for both personal and work reasons , which was getting a bit

too hectic , and I've done a couple of new podcasts in that time , particularly on the MCP server model , context protocol server work , which really secures people use . But it's been great , to be fair , having a bit of time off to regroup .

So today I just wanted to do an update episode to say what's been going on the sort of current state of SEO as I see it and what's next for the podcast and more basically . So let's dive into it . So first of all , let's talk about the state of SEO AI , traffic and revenue .

There's been a lot going on at the moment around how AI is affecting SEO , and this is happening on , I'd say , two main fronts . So first , there's the impact on content production .

We've obviously got chat , gpt for text and all the other major LLMs , but we're also seeing the rise of AI video content , ai avatars and sophisticated voice cloning and the ability to produce content at scale has exploded , and you're probably seeing everywhere people giving away the AI workflows and all the things they're doing to

do these fantastic things . It is really hyped up at the moment . Secondly , and perhaps more importantly , we're seeing how AI is changing search itself . So we're seeing Google , particularly in the US , move more towards AI overviews and the AI mode that they've got in there . That's experimental . I think it's in their labs and I have tried it .

You don't have to be in the US to try it . You can use a VPN and just set your country to be the US in your VPN and you can then get access to the AI mode , which is like a cross between LLM and perplexity AI .

If you've seen that Now I'm getting lots of reports from people and other SEOs that they're seeing clients that have that overall traffic is down and that it's causing a bit of a panic for anyone whose key metric is just the raw level of traffic that they drive . But here's the interesting part For many , if not all , the revenue isn't down .

So ultimately , people are looking to make a purchase . Still , they still have to make a purchase . The ai cannot physically provide them with a product . Something still has to be delivered or downloaded

or provided . So the transactional traffic , the people who are ready to buy , are still finding their way to the right web pages , the right websites , and converting it seems to be general type of funnel informational traffic that's been reduced by ai overviews . So what does this mean ?

If it means , if we're in the middle of a big shift , the quality of your traffic is becoming far more important than the quantity . So if your business is making sales , you're probably not going to panic as much . You might be thinking if I had more traffic , I could make more money , more sales .

But you have to think differently now , the one area where this there is a significant problem for is any sites that rely purely on display advertising . If your business model is based on just monetizing eyeballs with ads , then a drop in overall traffic is a direct hit to your revenue .

My advice for this is difficult other than just try to diversify your traffic sources , but I know that it's far easier said than done and that it's probably just like podcasts could be made on that . But yeah , the display ad model of revenue generation is really in trouble . Now if you rely on Google for your traffic Affiliate side less trouble .

Okay , I still have got my affiliate sites sites . I'll talk about more of them in a bit . You can still work with affiliate side because you are closer to the sale , much closer to the sale than random display advertising . So how do we succeed now in this age of ai ? How do we navigate this ?

From my own personal , what we're finding is that our own sites that act as our big revenue generators are still doing fine . They're still driving strong traffic and they're still driving strong revenues , and I believe that's because our strategy has always been to synthesize data to create new resources .

So , for example I've used this example before , but if you're not , you don't remember , you've not heard it before broadband at codeuk , which was a site I used to have before I sold it , we took uk postcode data and we combined that with broadband deal data so we could then say to people what services are available in what area I mean you what deals are

available in what area . We could combine the two to provide unique value that a search engine themselves have never been able to really replicate at any decent level , and these kinds of resources are still driving a lot of traffic .

So that's where you can give an answer that combines multiple sources , that the especially data that is hard to get at which you have to source from elsewhere , can't just simply be crawled , and this has always been the case and it's even more prevalent now content that just answers simple questions that's what's being absorbed by ai overviews , ai mode , that kind of

thing . So to succeed , you're going to have to go a step above now . This is where topical

authority becomes absolutely key for your content to be featured or referenced by AI , an authoritative source on the subject . So doing that , building of deep interconnected content clusters proves your expertise and it makes your site a reliable resource for the AI to draw on when it synthesizes its answers .

Now it might not send you the traffic and you might be thinking if the AI is answering the questions , how does my site get fined ? Ai models still need to get their information from somewhere . They are searching the open web , they are using search engines , they are looking at link graph data .

They're essentially using all the same methods as a human would , just incredibly quickly . So the bots are coming to your site , reading your content , looking at and they're still using the traditional search engines . You know what this means is . All the stuff that worked for seo in the past is still the stuff you have to do now .

You need to answer the human need . The old style of google wants you to do this and the new ai driven search still wants you to do this . There's no secret magic bullet at the moment that I can see . The basic principles haven't changed much . What is this ? What's changing is our expectation of what we're going to get out of it .

So your overall traffic might be diminished , but what's going to matter is your sales and your conversions , and I think that demand is going to remain . People will still going back to what I said at the start . People still want to purchase a product .

People still have a problem they're trying to solve and you might not get the traffic , but you need , as the ultimate destination , for someone to make that purchase and they're only going to do that if they trust that you are that topical authority . So you've still got to do the work , but you are essentially see a lot of that .

The human's going to trust the AI to be the one to recommend them the places to go that the AI thinks are the experts , and the AI are looking for the same things as humans in terms of proving expertise , proving topical authority . That's what's really important . So , moving on , a little Updates on my products and what I've been up to .

A lot of this break . I focus on something I've been very keen to work on for years and I've mentioned it previously , a couple of years ago , and that's about a book . But that is a struggle to do .

So what I've tried this is the experiment I'm working on now I've taken transcripts from every single podcast episode I've ever released and I fed them into Google Gemini and I basically said to it make sense of this . And it did . My podcasts have never had a highly structured a to z format . I've never released them in the sequence .

It's always been a bit random what I've produced stuff on . I know occasionally I've done a little mini series , like when I did my tip series , when I did the glossary series , but generally I've just done podcasts based on what I fancied talking about on any given day .

And what gemini came back with from all these transcripts was a fantastic structure for a book . Taking all the knowledge it's over two million words from all these transcripts . It needed several Google Docs just to squeeze them all into . I hit the limits .

I now know what the limit is on an individual Google Doc Bring everything from basic knowledge and philosophy to principles and frameworks . And from that structure I've been working on producing a draft and I have used AI to help with a lot of the initial writing work , because it's all based purely based on my own podcast transcripts and information I've shared .

It's not just going to AI and say , write a book about X , it is saying here , take my thoughts , my words and my knowledge and help me put it in order .

I've since then I've been going through it meticulously , editing , making changes , additions and removing things which the odd thing that doesn't make sense anymore certain services that google's deprecated , things like that . There's a whole section around ai

that I need to write myself because that's new knowledge . I haven't fully covered it on the podcast yet . I've probably talked about it more today than any other time , but I'm hoping to get that finished . I'll put the book out at some point soon .

I think it'll also help shape some future podcast episodes , because I like to do a shorter recap series based on the content of that book so that I can literally say to somebody here go and listen to these podcast episodes . They're in the right order now . It's clustered all the right bits together .

So , for example , on Topical Authority , where I might have done several episodes over the past couple of years talking about Topical Authority and certain parts of it that weren't all together in one episode , I can now get those all together in one . So here's a great episode about topical authority and it covers everything and it's poured it all in , for example .

So I'll be doing a few things like that . We've also been hard at work on new tools and services . We've been experimenting a lot with RAG Retrieval , augmented Generations . That's where you take these AI and bring in additional information from elsewhere , trying to give memory and context to some of the tools we've been playing with and like .

For example , we wrote some prototype stuff the time language but the AI space is moving so fast that what's good now is potentially obsolete in a month . So we're not ready to release anything yet , but we're making progress . We're just doing a lot of experiment . We're really in experimentation mode at the moment . It's all I can .

I've also been working on coding some projects using AI agents and they're brilliant for prototyping . So you can talk to any coding agent and it helps you get initial ideas off the ground way quicker than trying to explain it to a developer . And the AI doesn't complain when I skip to throw away a morning's work . It helps you really refine your process .

The downside is it's still hard to get production level secure or scalable code out of it , but the technology has improved all the time and definitely for experimenting with ideas , it really accelerates that basic production and getting it off the ground .

And then , yeah , on the personal side , as I said , I mentioned that the original I'm going to have a great podcast .

I've been taking some time to support my daughter , who's 14 , and she's really into ice skating and she's now competed in two national competitions at her level and I'm incredibly proud of her and there's a great lesson in there for all of us in how she's doing that and approaching it .

So in her first competition she finished second to last , but she wasn't expecting to win or even come anywhere close . It was just about getting started . It was about having to start somewhere .

For a second competition , she came midway through the pack , 10th out of 20 , and her technical performance scores increased about by around 30 percent , and it goes to show that you know what you're aiming to do with anything that you try in business .

Get out there and start knowing you're not going to win straight away , but then you have to push through , do the reps and improve , and that's how you get somewhere . On the farm , life continues . This time of the year in the uk we're having a bit of a heat wave and we're pretty much in a drought .

It's one of the dry springs and starts this summer in many years , and that that brings its own challenges and it's another lesson that you can apply to business .

There will always be external factors outside of your control that ruin the best laid plans , just like google updates , ai , all those things because with with the farming side , all farmers are now concerned . There isn't enough grass for the animals and not enough to make decent hay and silage for the winter .

Hay is going to be scarce this year , animal feed is going to be more expensive , food prices are going to go up . You can just see all these things coming and they're just completely out of the control of farmers on the ground , and this is what happens .

You can you can only control what you can control , and you have to accept the stuff that you can't and you have to work with it and you have to be adaptable , and there's a big lesson in that .

So I think that just about wraps up um , the update that I was looking at . So , yeah , until next time , remember , keep optimizing , stay curious and and remember , seo is not that hard when you understand the basics . Thanks for listening . It means a lot to me . This is where I get to remind you where you can connect with me and my SEO tools and services .

You can find links to all the links I mentioned here in the show notes . Just remember , with all these places where I use my name , the link is in the show notes . You can try our seo intelligence platform keywords people use at keywords people usecom , where we can help you discover the questions and keywords people asking online .

Post those questions and keywords into related groups so you know what content you need to build topical authority .

And , finally , connect your google search console account for your sites so we can crawl and understand your actual content , find what keywords you rank for and then help you optimize , continually refine your content , targeted personalize advice , keep your traffic growing .

If you're interested in learning more about me personally or looking for dedicated consulting advice , then visit wwweddawsoncom . Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is Not that Hard .