--- title: 'Blogging and SEO in 2024: Adapting to Google Updates and AI' source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=QoaIS8qFHRs' video_id: 'QoaIS8qFHRs' date: 2026-07-14 duration_sec: 0 --- # Blogging and SEO in 2024: Adapting to Google Updates and AI > Source: [Blogging and SEO in 2024: Adapting to Google Updates and AI](https://youtube.com/watch?v=QoaIS8qFHRs) ## Summary The speaker discusses the evolving landscape of blogging and SEO, emphasizing the need to create content for people rather than algorithms, prove legitimacy beyond just content volume, and diversify traffic sources beyond Google. He also answers audience questions about starting new blogs, using AI, and adapting to recent Google updates. ### Key Points - **Shift to People-First Content** [00:00] — Google's helpful content update requires creating content for people, not algorithms. Algorithms are getting better at detecting low-quality content, so focus on valuable resources that answer multiple questions and are easy to link to from social media. - **Prove Legitimacy Beyond Content** [05:00] — Having lots of content is no longer enough. Legitimacy can be proven through social media presence, podcast interviews, natural backlinks, Google Business listings with reviews, and selling products. These signals help Google trust your site. - **Diversify Traffic Sources** [10:00] — Don't rely solely on Google search for traffic. Use multiple platforms like social media, YouTube, and email lists. Tailor content to each platform's audience to maximize reach and engagement. - **Roadmap for New Blog in 2024** [15:00] — Start with a content structure and topical map. Focus on one or two specific clusters of closely related topics. Create a strong resource post and serial content (e.g., step-by-step guides) to build internal links. Start social media participation early. - **Using AI for Content Creation** [20:00] — AI can be used to repurpose content, but the primary source of information should be your own knowledge. Use AI to refine outlines and scripts, iterating back and forth to improve engagement while keeping your original ideas and words. - **Niche Sites Are Not Dead but Need Evolution** [25:00] — Niche sites focused solely on affiliate marketing and ads are struggling. Treat your site as a business, create helpful content, and consider adding products or services to build legitimacy. Experiment with different strategies. - **YouTube as a Platform for Courses** [30:00] — For selling online courses, YouTube is more effective than blogging because video builds trust faster. Create a YouTube channel, publish regularly, collaborate with others, and use your website as a funnel with email lists. ### Conclusion Content creation is far from dead, but creators must adapt by focusing on people-first content, proving legitimacy through multiple channels, and diversifying traffic sources. Embrace change and experiment with new strategies to thrive in the evolving digital landscape. ## Transcript all right we're back um we're going live again all right um today and I I'm St for starting late I had a technical issue there after already starting late so uh but today we're going to talk about blogging we're gonna talk about SEO we're talk about digital marketing and um by the way if you can't hear me let me know right away because there's always a delay here so but I want to talk about where we're going okay um we had a comment on the live chat before um and by the way if you posted a question in the previous one just post it again here I I can't see the other one right now um s again sorry about that um but I want to talk about where we're going in why we're going there there's a few foundational things that are going to be important for Content creators and and for blogging um for a long time blogging was really exciting for people because it was so repeatable you could kind of follow a recipe you didn't even have to really know much about your topic which I always had kind of a little bit of an issue with but we did some of that ourselves too um realistically I feel like if I'm going to create content put on the internet it should be something I know something about funny thing by the way um getting to work on that outdoor troop website again the guy that bought it from us he told me he's like he gets phone calls all the time still about because of the cabin articles I wrote people like calling his business and asking questions about cabins and he's like H I don't really know and there articles I wrote It's and I because I wrote them based on actual experience so anyway um so there we go but I want to talk about just a few things that I think are going to be foundational going forward these are all things we've talked about a little bit on this channel but they're all things we're going to dive into more deeply as we go forward the first one and I gotta say I read the same articles you guys probably see I look at what other people are saying other YouTubers are saying whatever and while I see a lot of people who are going a direction I don't think is the right call um there are other people I see writing articles and they're saying the same things that I'm just like isn't that what I said like a year ago or six months ago anyway um but I got a lot of criticism for it and now we're now we're at a place where this is is where we're at anyway number one Google told us this um with helpful content update it seems like people didn't believe it but what they said was we need to create content for people now this isn't just because this isn't just to rank on Google but we need to focus on creating content for people not for an algorithm the thing is that algorithms are getting smarter in some ways in some ways I feel like they way overshot here but the algorithms are getting are getting better and better at detecting garbage um in some ways in other ways it's getting harder to detect garbage because stuff that's completely wrong can sound really good it always has been true but with AI you can write a lot of really wrong stuff and have it um have it sound really good right and so and and you can optimize it you can even just train your AIS to optimize the articles for all of the SEO stuff we've we've known in the past right so first thing is we need to focus on creating content for people what that means is in the past like we talked a lot about response posts and how we're going to take a specific question and we're going to answer it and that way when somebody types in that specific question our article is perfectly positioned answer that question I'm I'm shifting that the reason for that is it's not that we shouldn't answer specific questions we should we should make sure that the content we write does have a purpose and that that purpose is tied to a search but more often than not the content I write on my website should serve as a valuable resource for people I'm not going to just focus on answering simple questions and maybe even diving in a little deeper but I'm going to focus on creating valuable resources the cool thing is when you make a post that's a good resource that answers oftentimes a bunch of different questions um those kinds of blog posts are the easiest things to link to from social media from YouTube videos from all over the place that doesn't have to be every blog post you write but I'm gonna make sure that any like we've talked on this channel about topical Authority and about um you know kind of having your top level categories and kind of subcategories and then clustering content within those subcategories kind of around central themes right if the central article any case is just a really good resource on that on that really more specific topic then we're just going to be in like it's going to be super easy to link internally between these articles and we're just going to have these fantastic articles that are just perfect fodder for social media campaigns um I'm when I say campaigns I'm talking about even organic just just posting and getting it out there in front of people okay so we're going to create content for people to try to help people and focus Less on trying to structure it in the perfect way for an algorithm honestly it's almost like the more you try to make it look perfectly structured the more Google knows you're trying to game them um second we have to prove we're legitimate just having a lot of content isn't enough anymore I've seen some other YouTubers talking about how on their own websites they've you know they published like hundreds of Articles using Ai and these articles are doing really well but it's like on their personal brand website that has a reputation because they're an influencer they're on YouTube they're all over social media like of course it's going to work they have a reputation so they're trusted but if like all of our reputation comes from the content we wrote on a Blog that's not enough for Google anymore because anybody can use AI to create tons and tons and tons of content and have it sound good and even have it generally match what most of the internet says that's something that we've talked about quite a bit in the past too is um when you're answering a question one of the ways to kind of prove to Google that your information is accurate is to generally agree with the consensus and so like if you answer a question with a totally different answer than everybody else Google is going to have a harder time trusting your answer the problem is sometimes everybody else is wrong because one person wrote an article once and everybody else copied it and so now all the rest of the Internet is just spewing out this wrong answer that somebody gave 15 years ago and the rest of us um you know um those of us who know the topics better we're trying to correct that misinformation sometimes and then we get penalized for it so and we've had methods to to kind of get around that usually what we would do is we would address the misinformation and then correct it so that way Google Sees like that common answer and then sees that we're giving justification for a different one but I'm kind of digressing there this isn't it's not enough just to have a bunch of content um there are at least a dozen ways probably several dozen ways um to prove our legitimacy Beyond just a topical Authority is still really valuable and I think important being able to answer a a um a question as well as related questions and stuff and have it all kind of tie together and cover a topic with with a level of depth uh super valuable super important right but that alone isn't enough and so what what we're going to do is we're gonna we're g to go to social media now you could spend forever on all the platforms reposting the same things over and over again but social media content does the best when you cater the content to the platform that you're posting it on and that starts to get hard so what do we do we're like oh well we'll use AI which is great by the way using like using AI to repurpose articles you wrote it's taking your knowledge your information in your article and it's just creating a social media snippet for that like that's a great use of AI um when you feed it the information and then you use it we use it all we use AI all the time here um to help us with content creation but we usually like to try to feed it as much of the concept as possible and then we use it to help us um refine the way that we talk about it um but back to the social media thing if each platform kind of has different audiences the easiest thing to do is to focus on the platforms that tend to attract the people that should be in your audience and then you don't have to do all the platforms makes it a little easier okay um other things we can do we've talked on here before about getting interviewed on a podcast um natural and organic link building that kind of stuff and is good like just getting backlinks Google knows that that's been G it's been gamed forever okay um that's not going to do a lot for you but if you can legitimately be cited by so if you're using something like Haro or there's some other Alternatives now if you're using something like that and actually being a legitimate Source like that that kind of stuff is going to help you um and there again there are dozens of ways to prove our legitimacy others could be to literally have products for sale that Google can see because you create a Google Business listing too and then you actually get customers who bought those to leave reviews on Google that's a lot harder to I mean can you fake reviews can you pay people for reviews sure but the more of these things you do the less likely it is that you're faking it and then the third thing of kind of this Foundation we'll call it like it's there's kind of three corners of this Foundation you need at least three for a tripod right so we're creating content for people we're proving our legitimacy and three goes back to kind of what I was just talking about but even if all that works and you can start getting now traffic from Google we should always stay multiplatform don't just trust Google search to be the source of all of your traffic and for your business um just don't just don't trust them not enough okay um all right so now I want to come to the questions um I will say right now that this YouTube live is being sponsored by cloudways and so I will talk a little bit about cloudways and if you do have questions about hosting or security or anything like that related to the products that they have feel free to ask those too but I'm going to take all of your questions just about the topic in general but if you don't know cloudways is is an excellent web hosting platform it's who I use for all of my websites um and for any of you by the way who are on YouTube and you're like how do you get sponsorships that's something we can talk about but it's also something we talk about on channel makers our other YouTube channel okay um and and we are talking about that more because it's something we're doing more it's a it's another good way to to make income but um cloudways is who I use to host all of my websites are there other good hosts out there that are are worthwhile yes I've used many um I've never stuck with a host for longer than about two years except Cloud waste I've been there for three three and a half years now um with and moved all the websites there and I'm still um really happy that I have one of the things I love most about it by the way is how because I own multiple websites a whole bunch of them actually and I work on sites for clients too so um a lot of times if I'm just building a website for them I'll just host it charge them a hosting fee but I can set up a server is for as cheap as about 1112 a month and I can put several websites on one server um especially when you're building websites you can have a bunch of websites on a $12 server once they start to get traffic then you're going to split them out but at that point you know it's worth it once you're getting real traffic and making money from them um my web hosting costs dropped dramatically when I switched to Cloud wve because of the amount of traffic we were getting and what it was costing to host that traffic on other WordPress um shared hosting platforms gosh with cloudways it's just it's a virtual private server that's just the basis of everything it's a cloud-based server um and I can just scale up if I need if I'm like oh you know I've got these 10 websites on one server and I'm starting to get close to hitting my limits I just level up to the next level and um basically I have a whole lot more price in options so anyway there's Doug um Doug is when I'm going to end this just in time because I'm going live with Doug next by the way so I'm I was gonna do this at some point and I might as well do it now um I was just gonna post a link here to our live that we'll be doing right after this and we'll be talking about kind of the road mapap for how we're going to recover blogs going forward um I better make sure that I I can find that um there it is um here it is so right after this live um in about half an hour join us over there all right let's go to questions so um I was talking about cloudways lots of really good reasons to use cloudways again if you have questions about hosting or anything like that let's uh let's talk about that too but we'll start with the questions here so Barat suar says how are you um I'm doing all right lots of things going on in my life these days that uh but but I'm doing all right um you say will Google consider my site is Spam or duplicate if I use Google Translate plug-in to translate my English content into French or Spanish uh gtranslate converts very well without mistakes um that no that's not going to be an issue um duplicate content is a lot less of an SEO issue than people think for the most part um and I don't think it's going to be long with the way AI is before it's not going to really matter what language content was published in um Google's going to serve up in fact this has been on their road map for a while they talked about it um a year and a half ago at their big event for Google search basically we're going to get to a point I think where you're going to search something in your native language and it's going to search the entirety of the internet and it's going to serve up content or an AI generated answer in your language so we may start to see I don't know how that's exactly going to work but we may start to see more like Google translating content on the Fly the the AI models are getting to where they can do just such a good job of translating again nothing's Flawless um just like Michael here said nothing is Flawless um but man they're getting good we're I was reading an AR arle months ago about Ai and one of the ways that they measure to see like how quickly AI is developing and how intelligent it's becoming is based on like how many Corrections have to be made by like a human translator to things that it's translated and it was basically getting to the point where um human translators were not needing to make very many uh Corrections so the AI is able to predict well enough how things should work because of the language models um anyway it's pretty crazy um tenv says what's the road map for starting a new blog website in 2024 here's the main thing um I'm going to start out similar I'm G to create a website and I'm I'm going to kind of come up with my content structure I want to have kind of a topical map for what content I want to have on my website but then I'm going to start with I've I've and this is what I've said for a couple years I'm going to start with one or two fairly specific clusters because what I what I don't want to do is write 30 articles covering a broad spectrum of topics across my entire Niche um that that doesn't lend itself to a great website it doesn't work for Google and actually hasn't for a while so I'm going to pick kind of a cluster of content of closely related topics I'm probably going to try to build some sort of strong resource post um another thing we're going to do is I recommend creating some serial content where um we we used to do this years ago and it's working super well for some project 24 members um where basically it's kind of like somebody comes to your website and you're just like hey if this is something like this is your problem we had this on income school you want to start a blog well here's what you do and then it it would link them over to a page and it would be like step one through 10 and it would list out the 10 steps but each one would link out to a post or or another page on the website that covered that step and then from there that article could potentially link out to a bunch of other articles that cover specific aspects of that one step for people who just need more information and so you get all this inter internal linking all that just for step one right and then at the end of that article you've got a link to go back to the 10 steps or go forward to step two it's very simple right um and so then you end up with 10 steps we we used to do this on like all of our websites and um we haven't done it much in a while but it's working super well for some members but I'm going to create some content and then much earlier than before it used to be I'd say right 30 even 50 blog posts before you worry about anything else and it still is really valuable to have a strong Foundation of content before you're really probably going to have anybody interested in interviewing you on a podcast or whatever but we can start some social media and we can start some industry Outreach and participation and not just posting on social media but participating in social media join other people's groups in your industry and participate as your brand name or as your name um some of them won't let you participate as a business page um some groups are finicky about that because they don't like a bunch of self-promotion but participate in social media I think that's as probably as valuable at least as posting on social media so post on your own accounts great but um participate and just start doing all of the other eat stuff um probably I'm going to um I'm probably going to try to do more with things that are going to grow my eat I may do a little bit more with monetization a little bit earlier in terms of my own products that I sell rather than a bunch of affiliate marketing because those things again can lend you more credibility um one of the easiest things to do is to just set up a a way for people to be able to hire you to coach them or consult with them on the topic of your Niche it's a great way to start interacting with customers you probably won't get very many right off the bat um but it's a great way to start interacting with people show that you have an offering and then um as you interact with people you're going to start to learn more and more what people's needs are their pain points are and that's gonna lend you to um just tons and tons of good uh good opportunities for new content as well as um other sorts of courses or other products that are solutions to these problems for people all right um what is the future for online tools like websites like free tools file compressors YouTube to MP3 I think um a lot of those kinds of tools are we're already starting to see a lot of them just being completely overrun because the big companies uh are just kind of including them in stuff um but also you can use AI to do a lot of things so um I'm also seeing people who are creating their own like Chrome extensions and stuff using AI like people who don't know how to code they're just like hey I want a Chrome extension that does this and so then like the a website based tool that does that is no longer necessary because I created my own extension that does exactly what I want and AI told me exactly what code to use and where to put it uh it's kind of crazy um you you just mentioned like U like file compressors and stuff somebody was telling me they they did that another person told me they literally created an app like that you could go get in the Apple App Store and they don't code but they created an app to do some like specific things they wanted it to do um just using just to tell them what what code to put where uh alpha alpha can you still use AI generated content yes you can um you absolutely can I don't recommend having AI be the primary source for the information because it's just going to go all over the place to look for information and and sometimes it's really good but a lot of times it's inaccurate so unless you can fact check it yourself because you know know a lot about your topic or you know what I do a lot of the time um for a YouTube video I'll I'll put together an outline of what I want to be in the video and then I'll be like hey chat GPT um and there's some better prompts for this and really the trick with AI is to iterate back and forth say I don't like this I do like that and ask it for improvements but um I'll say Hey you know here's an outline for my video you know turn this into more of a script and so then it'll give me bit of a script and it'll you know fill things in but I provided it with the information then I'll ask it to critique the script and how would you make it better and then it gives me a list of things it should improve and then I'll say okay now Implement these these improvements on the script and um the cool thing is is because it started with my words it's mostly still using my words throughout this whole process which is really cool it's using my ideas and my words but it's it's pointing out ways to create more engaging content that is more likely to keep viewers watching more of the video um anyway pretty cool stuff um all right Graham says before you say anything about cloudways use it almost exclusively now and had nothing but a great experience with them 100% thank you uh grahe I 100 totally agree I've had I've had websites where like they have a free migration plugin so when you want to migrate a WordPress site over to cloudways it's super easy and I did like 20 sites and so I had a couple where for some reason I don't know why but somewhere in the process they just kind of failed it just stopped and so then it's just kind of Sitting In Limbo and all I did was um and like this is the free ver like I'm not paying them to migrate the site but I just say hey I was doing the free migration this one got stuck here any idea what's going on and I just typed that into the chat and within a few minutes somebody's like oh I I found what was going on I fixed it for you and boom it's done it just they just fixed it for me and um so you don't have to be super techy I will say with cloudways it does feel more techy so if you're brand new to websites it might feel a little bit overwhelming but it's it's not you just have to kind of learn it um King me here says uh over the updates it's been clear that Niche sites are dead what should be what should be the plan of action we don't have the resources to go on other social platforms um first of all we've kind of advocated for not Niche sites for actually a few years several years now um we've been even minimizing how we how often we use that terminology because we don't want people to limit themselves to this concept of like I'm gonna write a bunch of Articles have some links to Amazon put some ads on the site passive income move on um the goal has been to try to help people build up something a little more substantial I would think of what you're doing as something as a business business think of it as a business even if you're not doing things that are dramatically different and that mindset shift is going to be a good first start and it's going to cause you to create content that is much more helpful for people and it's going to get you thinking about stuff that you could do even just creating a Google Business listing and selling something could be one of the things that helps even if you don't sell much of it it could be one of the things that helps legitimize your business it really depends a lot on um like there's not going to be one recipe that works for everybody whatever depending on your industry depending on what social media you can do um what kind of products you're able to sell any of that kind of stuff like that people are going to find different things that work so what we're going to do is try to expose you to um different options that could work for you but you're probably going to have to start experimenting and trying and seeing what works and what doesn't and so we'll try to help guide you through that um let's see um Ola says Niche sites are not dead at all I have a small 11 page with 60,000 page views alltime high after the last two Google updates that you know what they're not totally dead most of them died but they're not totally dead um there are exceptions for sure still happening right now uh Lewis Christianson says when it comes to not focusing on answering search queries but rather being a great resource does that mean we should ignore search engines and only drive traffic to the website through social media um not necessarily like I still want to try to answer questions like I want the resources I create to be related to something that people would actually search because I want to be able to get that search traffic if and when it comes um but I'm not necessarily going to worry about that for every blog post or every everything I put on the website I may create some really good resources that really aren't so much answering like a spefic specific question it's just foundational strong content that would be super helpful but may not be exactly what people are knowing to search for um sometimes it will answer things some people are searching for but a lot of the value in that post is going to come from um the additional information it gives above and beyond what anybody knows to look for so um let's see Barat says can I convert my site into real business type with Google my business but still it would not beside oh I'm getting a Spam call those are awesome um normally have do not disturb on that's what happens when I have technical difficulties um I wanted to convert it since Google considers now real businesses only for ranking uh so your Google your business would still be for the site not like the real business so in order to set up a Google my business you do have to have a business business purpose there's got to be something that people would interact with you for and even with a Google my business the the idea is for it to have a service area and that service area I set up a Google my business the other day for a client who they're they're willing to literally like their service area like for inperson stuff is literally the entire United States um because they're willing to travel it's a performer okay but there has to be some reasonable scenario where you would actually meet with a person in person you don't have to have your address show up but you do have to give them an address and it there has to be a scenario where you would potentially go to a client or they could potentially come to you we get around that because we do occasionally have people come in most of the work I do and most of the my paying customers are anywhere in the world I never see him in real life um but you know what I've had some people who have literally come into our office or who have met with in person and because of that I felt completely honest in saying yeah there's scenarios where I would potentially do that and I think a lot of our websites we could potentially do that um yeah let's see um I'm gonna have to kind of jump through here a little bit um mostly because I don't I I need to jump over to Doug's Liv stream here in just a minute so again if you want to keep asking questions um make sure you go over there um yeah I mean it's fine if it feels like you're venting or you're feeling kind of depressed the thing is anytime that there's massive change and AI is absolutely a disruptive technology anytime there's a technology disruption in an industry it's going to cause drastic change to happen change breeds opportunity but it's not always obvious what opportunity is going to work the best if that makes sense um all right uh somebody's asking here about PPC traffic can you buy traffic to your website I wouldn't unless you have um a a a high conversion or just a good offering on your website if you're just buying traffic to get traffic to the website to try to get it to Kickstart I've never really seen that work very well I'm sure there are situations where it has but um if you um oh yeah if you have like a really good funnel then absolutely um you know clickfunnels that's what they're all about right is having a really strong funnel um a very low cost or even free entry point where people can get something of high value so the ad sells The Either free or really cheap thing and that gets them on a list where they're fed even more stuff and then they get on a webinar and then the webinar sells them on a high ticket item that kind kind of stuff absolutely makes complete sense um all right if I wanted to start this is from Ant James um if I wanted to start an online course site selling drum kit courses what would be your action plan for the first six months content targets platforms Milestones um and then thank you for all you do you're welcome um if I wanted to start an online course selling these I would probably for the first six months I would mostly create a YouTube channel and um try to publish regularly whether that's weekly or bi-weekly um create your content there it's going to attract an audience faster and better I mean somebody could create a blog answering questions about about drums and want to sell me a course but if I've never seen them play or set it up or anything like that my level of trust is way lower um video is so powerful and we're not running into the same issues YouTube is is doing amazing um really like the people we're teaching YouTube too through um Channel makers like that it's just not even this is this stuff with Google is just like a non-issue and if you have that it's a lot easier to have your website sell your course create a funnel with your website email list and all that kind of stuff have some really good resources on the website for the people from your YouTube channel um you YouTube's also a place where people are really collaborative you can work with other channels all the time you can go do a live stream with a friend um people do all that stuff on YouTube bloggers bloggers are so like they're just like oh no uh everybody else is a competitor um anyway YouTube uh YouTube's the way to go all right I'm gonna drop off now because we're gonna go start a live stream here in a few minutes on Doug's channel so I link to it up above I will um I'll post a link here again there's so much more we could talk about and again I'm I wish I'd gotten this started right on time because then we'd have had a little bit more time but thanks for joining us today it's always it's always a pleasure and I'll try to do these more often because I know everybody's got questions I know everybody's worried about where things are going to go in the future content creators content creation is so far from dead but we got to change what we're doing um especially if we've just been focused on blogging and Niche websites all right awesome thanks everyone thanks for your patience and uh we'll see you all next time