What Google’s Insistence on AI Means for Your SEO

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EDITION 02:

May 31st, 2024

• What Google’s Insistence on AI Means for Your SEO

• Get your free trial of our new data analysis tool, Data First Step!

Housekeeping: Sick but still scheduling!

We’ve had ourselves a slow production week on account of 100% of our staff coming down with a pretty bad cold. We’ll be getting back to building a regular production schedule shortly, but until then our beloved subscribers will have to be content with the comparatively less labor-intensive (but not labor-absent) newsletter.

Make sure you check out the bottom for your invitation to try our new Data Analysis tool, Data First Step, free for 30 days!

What Google’s AI Insistence Means for Your SEO

I don’t think I’m breaking any ground here by making you aware of the absolutely abysmal rollout of “AI Overview,” Google’s new “AI” powered search summaries functionality. In case you missed it, here’s a popular narrative:

Last week, Google unveiled a new feature–bordering on bug–wherein a user could perform a search as usual but at the top of the results where they might usually find sponsored results (also part of the problem, but in due time), they would find a “summary” of the results generated by their own Large Language Model.

It became big news because the results it returned for common questions were mostly false and in some instances dangerous. Some of my favorites included recommending adding glue to mozzarella to get it to stick to pizza better or suggesting it was healthy for humans to eat a few pebbles every now and then.

Understanding how to navigate this new SEO environment is to understand what made it function this way and why Google’s SEO has been flawed for some time.

Let’s start with Search Engine Optimization. When Google indexes websites, it logs the occurrences of specific words and the HTML heading level where those words occur. When I user searches for a certain keyword or phrase, depending on how many of those keywords appear on your site and in what header hierarchy, Google may place your site higher than someone else who has fewer of those keywords. SEO is then the tactical placing of specific keywords to game the Google algorithm and get your results to organically be placed higher. Traditional SEO was a good tactic until roughly 2012 (the year I was taught it). By that point, everyone with a website knew about SEO and it became a metagame of who could include the most keywords. Run a travel blog? Your articles don’t really need to talk about your experiences of the places you travel to to get noticed, they just need to mention those places over and over again in a few different ways. SEO tactics became sink or swim, perfection or desolation, do or die. Add to that the major increase in “sponsored results” and from a user’s perspective Google results were getting worse and worse at answering everyday questions quickly, the functionality that made Google a verb.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Googlers began including the names of other websites that utilized more meritocratic indexing in their searches, websites like Reddit. Google sees the huge influx of users seeking answers on forums like Reddit and in an attempt to get them back in Google’s good graces, I have to assume, gave their LLM a significant bias towards answers in forums like Reddit. The only problem is that LLMs can’t reason through what is a joke or not. There’s no way to prepare it to disregard sarcastic answers in advance, humans remain uniquely situated to answer human questions.

As of right now, Google has no solution for this besides manually removing certain results from specific searches which will help for a time, but is far from a genuine solution. Every time the internet generates new information, which I’m told happens pretty regularly, Google’s model will need to be retrained and re-censored.

So now the question is begged, “What becomes of my SEO if the top of search results are being determined by an LLM instead of organic indexing?” Unfortunately, as with all things online nowadays, the cards are held tightly by the platforms and they aren’t likely to share their secrets anytime soon.

Google is still building the model and especially now after their dismal launch, one should expect even further changes. It’s this author’s opinion that the best course of action would be to consider what a post-Google internet age might look like. From a content perspective, what has SEO even been good for? It’s great for site traffic, but conforming to it makes your site’s content sound like it was written by an LLM with short-term memory loss.

At CaJu Creative, our recommendation in this trepidatious time for Google-based site traffic would be to forgo a purely SEO-centric site philosophy for driving traffic and consider leaning towards more organic means of spreading the word about your site. We think that creating quality branded content for sites like YouTube and Instagram can be the proverbial lighthouse of Google’s turbulent and foggy waters.

Rather than praying to the SEO gods that Google will deem your site worthy of appearing higher in the search results, and making your site content sound robotic in the process, one might bypass that strategy altogether and put your content directly where your audience is. A strategic content campaign that delivers useful and entertaining content to online viewers where they’re at does something for them and endears them to your company before they’ve even seen your site. It gives them a reason to seek you out as opposed to playing by the SEO rules for a chance at viewership.

If you already have an SEO strategy, I’m not going to tell you to stop what you’re doing, some form of SEO is likely to always be necessary, but it’s quickly becoming clear that there is simply not enough space for everybody at the top of the search engine. However, if you do begin to see a change in the ROI of your SEO, we here at CaJu Creative would love to discuss how a content strategy could be a bold and definitive way to advertise your business authentically at a time when it seems all the old tried and true methods now require compromise. For those wanting to stay updated with the latest recommendations, consider reading how to adapt your SEO for Google's new changes.

WE MADE AN APP! (Kind of)

As a special thank-you for being a Fresh Picks subscriber, we’re giving you a first look at a Data Analysis tool that I programmed called “Data First Step.” The basic idea is that most people haven’t had the time or experience to either learn data analysis or hire an analyst to dig into their data for hidden gems that can lead to business insights. Data First Step is meant to alleviate that by allowing business owners to get a quick and comprehensive look at their sales data. All one has to do is point the program at a .csv or .xlsx file and the program will do the rest! It can handle time series and can impute missing values by asking just a few simple questions. It also does correlation analyses to see how predictive features of your data might be to other features. It does that and so much more and exports everything to a nicely organized folder. I call it a tool rather than an app because as of right now, it is only a command line interface. Future versions will include a graphic user interface, but for now, one will need to input file paths manually. 

To download your free 30-day trial just visit http://www.caju-creative.com/dfs

And to learn more you can always contact me at caju.creates@gmail.com

Until next time, stay fresh. 

- Casey