[00:00] Do blogs still help with SEO? Not if you're blogging like it's 2020. Look, I've driven traffic increases like this to websites, mainly through blogging, but also some other procedure pages, only to see the drop off that you've seen in the last couple of years, mainly because of
[00:15] AI. Now, this was largely unforeseen, but now that we have seen it, I know how to avoid it. And I'm going to share that with you in this video. All right, so let's get into it. To start off, do blogs help with SEO?
[00:28] Well, sometimes, but the way it gets done most of the time, it doesn't. Let me explain. If you're using blogs as a way to earn backlinks from other websites as part of like a digital PR strategy or a way to passively earn links,
[00:41] great, it's going to help your SEO. If you're using blogs in a way to answer your solution unaware target customers' questions and then presenting what you do as a solution, that's not only going to help with SEO,
[00:53] No, that's gonna help with your bank account. But as you doing that how do you future the whole thing So we have a framework that we use to qualify content topics to make sure that they going to have business value before we spend time on them It called Bars
[01:06] I'm going to link to it in the description. Not going to get into super detail about it, but I am going to talk about the A in Bars. Someone going to be satisfied by an AI answer. So for lots of topics, people are going to perform the Google search and just take the information they get from the AI overview.
[01:20] And that's it. And as the years go by, more and more people are going to bypass Google entirely and go to chatgpt for that information. At the same time, there will always be topics where people are not going to want to hear from AI.
[01:32] They're going to want to hear from people with firsthand experience with a topic and a perspective. Those are the topics that you need to be focusing your blog content strategy on. So let's take a look at an example. What are the types of intraocular lenses
[01:44] that you can get implanted when you have cataract surgery? AI can do a good job of giving you that answer. Honestly, you don't really need to hear from an ophthalmologist for that. And unfortunately, that's the kind of traffic that goes away like the screenshot that I showed you earlier and your ability to get in front of that potential patient for the first time basically is gone On the other hand let take a topic like how common are starbursts with multifocal
[02:08] lenses, specific type of lens that they can implant that sometimes when you're driving at night, all the lights that you see look like they have massive stars around them. Yeah, it sounds pretty terrible, right? People are going to want to hear from surgeons and people that have had these procedures
[02:20] before, not AI and that traffic isn't going anywhere. It can help put money in your bank account. And frankly, that's the kind of content that I'm going to tell you you need to be focused on. Now, what about getting cited in AI overviews?
[02:32] The studies that I have seen up until this point are showing low single digit percentage click-through rates on those citations. In other words, there's not a lot of value that you're going to get from getting cited there.
[02:44] And frankly, the same thing goes for chat GPT. And I think that that argument is coming from SEOs that are terrified about their livelihood possibly drying up. But what about doing blogs for AI optimization? In particular, when you're optimizing for query fan out.
[02:57] All right so what am I talking about here On ChatGPT in Google AI mode when someone types in a query they very rarely three questions People aren using it like they use Google They'll type in something like,
[03:09] I need a digital marketing agency that has experience both in social media and SEO and that has a track record of success working with dermatologists. ChatGPT in the AI mode will now take that phrase, perform dozens of searches,
[03:24] pull together all of the information that it was able to uncover, and then basically synthesize everything into the results that you get when you're using ChatGPT or Google's AI mode. Now, this is something that I think over time, we're going to have to reverse engineer on a,
[03:39] let's say, search basis. And your website being part of that whole result could actually increase your likelihood of being recommended in what ChatGPT or AI mode is delivering to people. But the truth is, today, we don't know.
[03:52] This is speculative and theoretical at this point. So the short of it is, some blogs help with SEO, but a lot fewer than in October of 2022 before ChatGPT came along.