#6: Getting Found in 2026: Google, AI Search & What’s Changing

Elish Bul-Godley (00:00)
Okay, welcome everybody. Welcome back to episode six. Here we are at Digital and AI Decoded with Content Plan. The gang is here. We’ve got Denis, we’ve got Niall, we’ve got Sinead, and she’s just had a haircut. See if you can notice. Look at that. Look at those lines.

Sinéad Walsh (00:14)
You can notice. Look how

grey I’m getting. It’s ridiculous. Catching up with Niall there.

Elish Bul-Godley (00:19)
Yeah, you’ll have to

join me at the salon where we cover our grays. Mine takes three hours, Sinead takes 20 minutes. So that take those statistics in hand. You see how hard that is to look like Sinead? The rest of us have to keep up. Okay, so how’s everybody doing? we’re survived back to school for some of us. Some of us don’t really care because our kids are 18. So, yeah, so September is on its way, no more sunshine, grey clouds are coming.

So lots of time to get your SEO sorted, okay? Just saying. So today we’re gonna get started. We’re gonna talk about search. We’re gonna get a conversation going about how search is changing, what’s happening right now, things have been happening. Google has made announcements about the AI overview and the AI mode. A lot of people are going to their chat bots to ask questions instead of going to their browser.

there’s a lot more places where you can find information. Information presents itself in so many different ways now and so many different portals. So, what is changing? How do we adapt to this in the world of search? What’s search anyway? So I hope somebody’s gonna explain what search is to me when I when I ask them. And of course, even when we’re adapting to the new changes, what do we keep the same? What do we stay consistent with? And

At the end, we’re going talk about the tools. What are the tools, the takeaways, the practical ways of doing things that will secure a good future for us in the world of search? And you know, what’s what great wisdom can we impart in the process? So let’s get the game going. I’m gonna get started. So getting found in 2026, right? It’s gonna have to bear in mind a lot of new search platform search trends, a lot of AI, but it’s also about

How we communicate? Are we gonna stay clear? Are we gonna be trustworthy? Are we gonna be easy to understand? Sometimes that’s some good old fashioned basics too. So we’re gonna be talking to Niall about good old fashioned basics. Because, you know, look at his beard. He knows all about that stuff, right? Like the beard says it all. Okay. Okay.

Niall Devitt (02:11)
Good old fashioned basics. We we

Sinéad Walsh (02:14)
Ha ha ha ha

Denis Jastrzebski (02:15)
Spirit of wisdom. Spirit of wisdom.

Niall Devitt (02:18)
we we go to the owl fella for stories from the

Elish Bul-Godley (02:23)
Don’t worry, there’s a lot of gray. There’s a lot of gray here as well. Okay,

Sinéad Walsh (02:23)
Come on, Granda.

Elish Bul-Godley (02:26)
so let’s get the ball rolling. I’m gonna start the conversation going. so what has changed about search, right? I’m gonna ask Sinead, perhaps we’re gonna get things going. Sinead, first of all, tell us what’s search in the first place, right? Where do we search? What are we talking about?

What’s SEO? What the hell does that acronym mean? And of course, what’s changed in from your point of view? You let us know.

Sinéad Walsh (02:50)
Sure,

sure thing. So I’ll try and keep this as condensed as possible. But SEO stands for search engine optimization. And it is that wonderful blend of mainly science, but a little bit of art as well. that helps you and your website become visible on the Google search engine results page. Okay. So, and when we talk about SEO, we’re talking mainly about organic unpaid activity, okay, as opposed to a blend of organic and paid activity. So

Focusing on the organic aspect of it. it has typically been a really effective way for businesses to focus on things like keywords on their website that relate to their business, their product, their service, whatever that might be. and on top of that, then, which I’m sure Denis can go into a little bit more detail, but there’s a lot of technical aspects that underpin that keyword activity as well. So even

simple things like making sure your meta tags and meta titles are filled out, making sure your images on your website have correct titles, tags that contain keywords, etc., even your load time can affect it, right? So all of that kind of underpins your keyword research and activity, so on and so forth. Now, what has changed? Typically, if you go to

Google something, let’s say red basketball runners. This is the example I always give in in in classes, right? You Google red basketball runners, and up until say the last couple of years, you would have gotten a series of Google shopping results of products that would accurately match the search terms used by the user, plus a list of the 10 blue links, right? As as we would classically call it. and the user would

Pick and choose based off what they feel is relevant to them, click on the website and away you go. However, what is much more present now is the AI overview. Okay. So Google uses its Gemini tool to give you a summary. And one of the things they have noticed is kind of they’re moving the average user is moving away from just searching a strict keyword or set of keywords, whether they’re short tail or long tail, and is more active in terms of asking.

questions or searching concepts or ideas and how to turn those de ideas into a practical real thing, right? So how do you make gluten-free carbon ara, whatever that might be, right? So we are seeing a departure from the very classic search engine results page and a much bigger focus on the AI overview.

Elish Bul-Godley (05:14)
Okay, so the AI overview, and just to recap, the AI overview is that thing you see on your SERP or as we call it your search engine results page, that page that that comes up on the screen after you put your query, instead of seeing a list of websites, what you’re seeing is a little paragraph from the AI that just tries to answer the question straight away. But on the side, you might get citations from certain websites along the way.

And in a way, that’s a good place to be, right? So what you really want nowadays is you want to be up there at zero position, right? So with alongside,

Sinéad Walsh (05:47)
Absolutely.

Elish Bul-Godley (05:48)
and then of course, when you answer when you go further, when you read the end of that paragraph, instead of looking at a website, you’re going to be prompted by the eye to ask another question, right? And then you’re going to ask the other question. And then of course, then you just get locked into Gemini at the end of the day, right? So I think for me, that’s like automatically like, whoa, this is gonna change. Like they’re never gonna see my website now, right?

So yeah, so back

Sinéad Walsh (06:10)
Absolutely.

Elish Bul-Godley (06:11)
to so so that’s a really good thing that you’re explaining what’s happening there. And you know, Google is still important, but the SERP, the search engine results page is different. What you’re getting to see can be in a different platform. It’s gonna be in general instead of your website. So how are we gonna deal with that, right? That’s what we’ll answer later. But first of all, Denis, what do you think are the big changes about search and and the big changes happening in Google today?

Denis Jastrzebski (06:34)
Yeah, so I’ll I’ll focus on how people are searching. That’s changing quite drastically. So we just talked about Google and how if you’re still using Google to to search for things, which I still do, that looks different. The the whole process looks a little bit different now. You’ve got the AI overview. But people are increasingly not even using Google anymore. They’re using their actual chat bots and LMs. So whether it’s Gemini or ChatGPT or Claude, if you have an account, it’s kind of handy because you you

You can go in there, you can ask it whatever questions, whatever context, it might know stuff about you already that you’ve you’ve given it through other conversations. So it’s a kind of a little bit more curated, a little bit simpler. and you can kind of just do all sorts of things. So you can talk to it, you know, you can write to it and so on. so that’s a big change. A lot of people are just going straight to to an AI model these days, as opposed to even going to search results in the first place. So that’s a massive change because suddenly if we get some information in our

chat bot window, there’s going to be some citation. So where where is that kind of information coming from? It might link a couple of websites, might even link YouTube videos and things like that. So, you know, how do we actually ensure that if people are looking for services or products related to our business in our area, how do we make sure we’re recommended by these chatbots? So that’s a massive thing because it’s a completely new area of SEO

And arguably it’s not really to do with with search as such in in the traditional sense. So that’s a massive change that we’ve seen over the last year or two that’s come in.

Elish Bul-Godley (08:02)
Okay, thank you so much, Denis. So so you could see there from Sinead and Denis, like lots of changes are happening in terms of the interface, in terms of where we go to find information. But you know what? The person doing the search, they’re still a human being at the end of the day. So the us humans, we still we’re still the same, right? In the way we ask questions and the things we need to know. So I’m I’m going to you, Niall Niall of the Gray Beard, right? And the pet the salt and pepper beard, tell us us human beings.

What’s still consistent when it comes to search? Despite what’s happening on Google, what do you think still matters now that we should pay attention to?

Niall Devitt (08:36)
Yeah.

So what I would say is so a couple of things. So I’m gonna take it right back to basics. And some of this is kind of real traditional stuff, but it’s born out of my experience, right? from having, I suppose, dealt with lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of businesses over the years. So I was saying to you guys before the podcast, you know

Bigger businesses aside, and certainly some industries aside, the likes of hospitality and so on and so forth, but certainly if I look at SME businesses, I would say out of approximately four or five thousand businesses that I’ve spoken to over the years about SEO, right, I can probably count on one hand the amount that I’ve contact that I have come in contact with that were doing.

SEO well, and I’m going to tell you there’s there’s a very simple reason for that, right? And the very simple reason is this SEO is hard work and it takes up quite a lot of time, and you don’t get an instant reward from it typically. Okay, so I don’t consider myself an SEO expert, but I was building an international website back in the day, and I suppose

One of the kind of strengths in my character is I’m well able for the hard work and I do it consistently and I’ll do it over the longer term. So I started to get results. So as a result of getting those results, people started to go, Well, he obviously knows lots about SEO. Right? Now I don’t actually know if I know any more than I did with respect to SEO, sorry. I shut this down. back then. But I suppose

I worked a sales, so as a salesperson, you have to think from the prospect or the customer’s point of view, right? So I would say the very first step in terms of SEO is stepping into the customer’s shoes, right? So here’s a very, very obvious, very simple kind of explanation in terms of SEO. So SEO, search engine optimization. So let’s imagine for a minute that Niall Devitt wants to promote himself as a search engine optimization expert in Ireland, right?

So I would describe myself Niall David search engine optimisation expert, right? The optimisation in that context is spelled with an S. Right? Let’s just say I didn’t make it in Ireland, right? And I decided I’m going to move to the US, right, and set up shop there. Right. If I moved over to the US and brought my Irish website with me, the search engine optimization there.

wouldn’t

have the same value in the US because they spell search engine optimization with a Z. Okay. So I suppose that’s the most simple explanation that I can give in terms of search engine optimization. And we all have a kind of a an industry speak. So if you talk to me about what I do, I use phrases and terminology and words and all of that type of stuff, professional speak. But when it comes to SEO, and I would say now when it comes to AI, it’s not really how you describe yourself that’s important.

It’s how your customers describe you and what you do. Because ultimately when we when we talked about Google back in the day in terms of SEO, they were using Google to find you. So I suppose SEO was the process about finding out, well, how do they do that? And describing yourself as such. So when I looked into this, and I’m a little bit ashamed to admit ’cause I’ve been that busy this last twelve months, I was like, How many big impacts is AI after having? And

SEO, right? And what do I not know now that I’m supposed to know before this bloody podcast, right? But when an actual I actually looked into it, what I saw is broadly speaking, the basics are still the basics, right? If you do the basics and do the basics well, right, you’re probably going to within 12 to 24 months, you’re probably going to be ahead of, I would say, 80 to 90 percent of your competition. And the reason for that is this is hard.

It takes up time and you have to do it consistently to get a return on your investment. Okay.

Elish Bul-Godley (12:25)
Very wise words indeed. Thank you very much, Niall. Okay, so I’ll sum up what we’re saying

Sinéad Walsh (12:29)
Okay.

Elish Bul-Godley (12:30)
here, right? A lot has changed. What do we see? And basically, what is search again? Search is when someone’s asking a question and they’re trying to get an answer. So today, where do we ask the question? We go to our browser, but what do we see that’s coming back on the search results page? That’s changed. Yeah. where do we go to search? Is it always Google? That has changed.

Because even on the search results page, it’s multimodal. Multimodal being that you might get a result in a video on TikTok. You might get a result in the Reddit thread that will come up in your search results. You might get something that’s from a community forum. It’s not always going to be a website. It could be on YouTube as well. So what we see back is going to change. Where do we go for search? It’s not always the browser. It’s also the LLMs now. So that has changed just to sum it up. But we also do have

A whole community, a whole generation of people whose search engine is TikTok, you know? It doesn’t always have to be Google based. So

Niall Devitt (13:29)
Yeah.

Elish Bul-Godley (13:30)
that’s starting to kick in. And of course, back to basics, which now I was stressing, get it back to the customer. Things have not changed in terms of people still need to solve problems, right? And the more you understand about the people you’re trying to take care of, the more you understand their problems, the more empathy you have for them, the more you’re gonna get better at what you’re serving up on your content. So

Intent comes into play. Sinead talked about intent. So there’s a lot of things happening with intent. Where do people go at the top of the funnel when their intent is to get information? Where do they go when their intent is to make comparisons? Where do they go when their intent is to get direction or convert to convert and pay at the tail? Things can change. There are different platforms for that and different search results might matter. So that takes us to the next thing. Websites are really important for search, right?

So, what is happening here now? If you’re in charge of a website, your business has a website, you need to put that content in. How is this new world of search going to change things? And so I’m going to start with Denis this time. So, Denis, you’ve been building a lot of websites for our clients, right? And what is this gonna impact when it comes to us putting our website together? What should we be saying to our webmaster? What kind of boxes should we be ticking now on top of the existing boxes? And

Do our websites still matter at the end of the day?

Denis Jastrzebski (14:46)
Yeah, all really, really good questions. So yeah, they they definitely matter. And like we said, even though the way people find information is different, that information has to come from somewhere. And whether it’s an AI or whether it’s Google, it is going to be citing websites as as its kind of main source of information, especially things that are specific. So that’s a big thing when when we’re talking about websites and keyword research, all the things that Niall had mentioned, the basics are very much so still in place. But what’s really important now is

Is being more specific with the content that we’re serving up. So I know it’s something you’re gonna talk about Elish a little bit later with EEAT, but experience being a really big thing we touched on on one of the other episodes. So as part of the content that we produce, whether it’s a page, whether it’s a case study, something AI doesn’t have with the kind of generic content that it creates, is it doesn’t have a real life experience of of the events that we’re talking about or the product or service we’re talking about. So if we can include real examples, if we think of

what what are the things that are real like our customer reviews and all these things. All of these things are still really important, but even more important now because AI is going to use all those things to actually understand whose products and services are worthy of recommendation as opposed to somebody’s website that was created using AI and is just AI content that they’ve done up in about a day. So all of that stuff, all the basics are still there, but being specific and having more

user related content, things that are more organic and whatever your customers are saying about you online is going to have an even greater impact on what LLMs recommend you in the end.

Elish Bul-Godley (16:19)
Okay, thank you, Denis. so with Sinead, so your website has all the makings of the, you know, the structure that that was always there, but we’re gonna make sure that we get that right. We get the FAQs in, we make sure that the about us page is there, that our credentials are there to fulfill that that EEAT model. We’re gonna make sure that our content shows our authority. and we’re talking about on page SEO, right, Sinead? Because there’s different types of SEO. You’ve got your

Off page, you’ve got your on page, you’ve got your technical SEO. So what are some of the things like we should be adding on then in terms of on just in the world of on page and and technical SEO? What are the little add-ons we need to add in? And if you want, tell us about what could happen off page as well. Maybe that might matter to the new world of AI search.

Sinéad Walsh (17:04)
Sure thing. Yeah. So one of the things that is most effective in again to to hark back to Niall’s point earlier, some of the basics are still so, so relevant. today when we’re talking about AI optimization. One of those things is schema markup. Okay. So to to simplify it very, very it to really distill it down. The schema markup allows the search engine or the LLM in this case to scan the page, understand

What’s important, what content is labeled important, whether it’s title, headers, etc., what page, or sorry, what content on the page is paragraphs and you know, that kind and information and what’s an image, what’s a video, and all that kind of thing. So ensuring that your schema markup is correct when it comes to your HTML and your that kind of thing is crucially important. Okay. Now, as

Denis can maybe elaborate on. There are various different flavors of schema markup, right? So I’m talking quite generally here. but for example, how you would label written content is different to how you would label multimedia on your website. Okay. But essentially you want to make it as easy as humanly possible for Google or Gemini or ChatGPT to understand the structure of your page, know what it needs to pull from it, and move on. Okay. So

That is one of the most important things, in my opinion, when it comes to on page SEO and AIO. Okay. Now, just like you mentioned, off page, one of the things I’ve noticed a couple of businesses doing, or one of the things that has been recommended, is a dot LLM page. So similar to how like a uh.txt page would exist on a website. LLM pages are essentially

being created, not accessible. They’re not not they don’t tend to be accessible to anyone clicking around the website, but they would be stored within the website. and they are structured files that are again there to draw in the LLM’s attention. Okay. So to kind of flag with the LLM, this is a very how do I put this? Like it this is very easy for you to use as a source, and yeah.

I

I’ve seen that being used. Now, is it being used widely? No, absolutely not. I think there’s a less than a point one percent adoption of that for most websites in the world at the moment, but is definitely something to keep an eye on. and just see if that becomes more of a a widespread and commonly used approach to AI optimization. So those are the two things in terms of on page and off page that could help potentially or that I’ve noticed coming up recently.

Elish Bul-Godley (19:37)
Okay, so we could say that if you’ve got a good website a lot done, a lot more to do, basically, right? Let’s let’s Yeah. No yeah, we we

Sinéad Walsh (19:43)
Like the FENAFL don’t hang on, don’t FENAFAL two thousand and two general

election promise. Bertie Ahern, a lot done, a lot more to do. And he delivered

Elish Bul-Godley (19:50)
That’s a good memory. A lot done. A lot more to. Yeah. Okay.

So so it looks like websites are still important. They are, in my view, still the hub that people have to come back to. The reason I believe websites are still important is that it’s it’s the destination at the end of the day. So you can search for answers all you want. You can get all the blog content out there, but the sales still can

The conversion still needs to happen somewhere outside of the LLM, right? So, like even if the LLM tells me where’s the best place to get basketball sneakers, I still have to get the sneakers, right? So I still have to go to the website at the end of the day. So so at the end of the day, you’re still gonna need your website. You need that resource that your customer can go to and actually find your product or put in the request for the quote or

type in the the the into the form or subscribe for the newsletter or watch the video. You know, they still need to go somewhere to do that. So we bearing that in mind, Niall, right? It’s still a resource.

Niall Devitt (20:47)
Yeah.

Elish Bul-Godley (20:48)
Like, what are the good resources? What are good things we can do to make our website more engaging? Right. People actually do physical stuff. And you know what? We’re moving a little away here from SEO to CRO. We’re talking about conversion rate optimization now.

Niall Devitt (20:59)
Yeah, so so

I I I often find for non-SEO or non-technical people, if you give them kind of physical real-world analogies, that kind of always helps, right? so and again, and going back because I’ve seen the evolution of this kind of over the years and I’ve heard the latest trends and all of that type of stuff and so on and so forth, right? So we’ve talked about content and content marketing.

Right. And then content ultimately needs to build relationships or build on relationships. Your website is just another place for your content, really. Right. So it needs to do all of that stuff, right?

However, I put one caveat in here when it comes to websites. So your Facebooks, your your Instagrams, your your TikToks, your LinkedIn, all of these places, fantastic, right? You should certainly use them, and you should certainly use them if your customers are there. But what I’ve seen over the years is, right, if you put all your bags in the Facebook basket, Meta comes along and makes a change. Doesn’t consult you, right? Doesn’t care what you think.

And that can affect you in a negative way. The other thing I would say is, and again, you know, pretty much all of these platforms nowadays, because they can be, right, are pay for play. So they’re going to charge you to reach your audience. So once upon a time, probably before you guys can almost remember at this stage, but you know, twenty, twenty five years ago on Facebook, you could reach an audience on there with good content organically. You didn’t need to pay for the privilege.

Whereas

now that doesn’t really happen anymore. So, as I always say to people, right, your website is your house online. You set the rules, broadly speaking. But it’s like your physical house at home, right? So if I invite you guys over to my house, right, and my house is a bit shite, right?

You might think I’m the best guy in the world, right? But when you come into my house and you see it’s a bit dirty and the bed hasn’t been made for a week, and you know he obviously doesn’t wash himself or whatever the case may be, that’s more than likely going to damage the relationship with me, right?

So, in terms of your online content and building those relationships, what I would say is your website is probably the most important content that you have about your business online. And ultimately, think about this: if a customer visits your website, if they leave Facebook or TikTok or LinkedIn or whatever it is, right, the relationship has already started to take place. They’re coming to the website.

Find out more about your business, your products, your services, et cetera, et cetera. To a certain extent, the hard bit is done. Right. So your website can, I suppose, take advantage of that opportunity in terms of that relationship, or it can fail miserably. Right? And websites do often fail miserably. So Denis will tell you, right? And this is we design websites and so on and so forth. We’ll say to the client at the start of the

website develop design or development process, you know, we don’t know your business or customers as well as you do. We can advise you in terms of content. We can help you around SEO and user experience and all of that type of stuff. But ultimately when it comes to describing your products and services, you know best. So don’t expect us to know more than you do because we don’t know your products and services or your customers better than you. Yet

I would say on 50 or 60 percent of occasions, right, they prefer that we do the content. Right? Right. So what that ends up with, with the best will in the world, I’m never going to be able to make your house exactly the way that you want it, because invariably I’ll make it more a little bit more the way I I I want it. So what I would say to you when it comes to this stuff, it’s about your customer.

It’s

about what your customer needs and wants. It’s about helping to build a relationship with them and ultimately doing that to the point of the view that they buy your product on the website or they send you an email or they pick up the phone or they do whatever. Right? So the difference between again, I’d say in terms of it’s it’s it’s not, you know, it’s not that difficult when you drill it down. So the difference between creating a really good website.

And maybe a not so good website, it’s the same story as in terms of SEO because they’re so interlinked, right? It’s a bit of hard work, it’s a bit of time, and it’s doing it consistently. There aren’t shortcuts in this space. And that’s more often than not why a lot of businesses don’t get to a website that delivers a significant return on investment for their business because they’re just simply not prepared to put the time in.

And unfortunately, the story is if you’ve never seen a website really develop, deliver in terms of your business, right? If you can’t say my website last year was worth two and a half million to the business, right? If you don’t have that, right, you have to kind of get there first before you go, my god, the website is such an important piece of digital infrastructure and gr and it’s mine, right? So

To get the customer to put that effort in until they get to the results sometimes is a difficult thing to do, but it’s fundamental and it’s becoming more fundamental. So I would see the AI side of things as just, you know, an extension of all of that type of stuff. So I suppose a good example here is I’m really difficult to please when it comes to restaurants. I’m incredibly awkward. Right. So my my partner loves kind of Mitchell and Star really good. She’s really into her food.

Right, I’m the opposite to fuss. So if you give me a little plate and it’s designed really nice, I I I I can’t i I I have to look like I’m going to have a feed for me to eat it. Right. I’m a country boy in that respect. So it’s a very difficult thing for her to find a restaurant that serves good food, but displays it in a messy enough way that I’ll eat it. Right. So how has she circumvented that problem? Chat GPT. Right.

I love my food. I’m married to the most awkward man in the world. Here are his peculiarities. Can you recommend restaurants for us?

Sinéad Walsh (26:50)
I can’t believe Chat G P T can even cope with you, let alone your your wife.

Elish Bul-Godley (26:52)
I know. Yeah, I know.

Niall Devitt (26:53)
I t I I

I didn’t Sinead Sinead, I

Elish Bul-Godley (26:54)
I don’t I’m afraid to ask that question.

Niall Devitt (26:56)
didn’t think it would be able for the job and I have

Sinéad Walsh (26:59)
Yeah.

Niall Devitt (26:59)
been pleasantly surprised, right? Wh

Elish Bul-Godley (26:59)
Yeah. Well

Sinéad Walsh (27:01)
Amazing.

Niall Devitt (27:02)
which makes me a greater fan of AI than I was before, right?

Elish Bul-Godley (27:06)
my god.

We’ve got. Wow. We’re gonna we’re gonna send that one to Anthropic and OpenAI because you know

Niall Devitt (27:13)
Yeah.

Elish Bul-Godley (27:13)
they’ve got a convert here. It’s good. But it’s really

Niall Devitt (27:15)
Yeah.

Sinéad Walsh (27:16)
That’s fantastic.

Elish Bul-Godley (27:17)
it’s really interesting that you the way you describe that example it really got us into the head of a customer, right? Because it’s like like we’re really getting inside your shoes and we’re understanding intent, we’re understanding the relevance of where AI sits in this whole thing. And you know, yeah, yeah, I I like what you’re doing there.

Thank you so much, Niall. So, just to sum it up, right? The question we were raising, right, was that things have changed, but what do we need to do in response with both our websites and our content? And notice how we separated that websites and content, not necessarily the same thing. And here’s my proposition, right? So you’re talking about your websites. Yes. Both Denis and Sinead, they’ve made a really good case of some of the really more technical things that need to happen to your website.

So that for AIO or you know generative optimization, you know, you can optimize so that your answers come up in their answers through those LLMs as well. And of course, if you structure your website properly with good FAQs and with good schema, with good you know, call and response structures, you know, then you’re gonna get a lot more of those citations, perhaps. You’re gonna get served up a lot more in the in the AI search results.

But don’t forget that everything you’re doing for the AI to make it easy for understand that easy for it to understand, that’s gonna work for your customer as well. And at the end of the day, you still need that website, which is back to what Niall was saying. You need that hub, you need that resource. What Niall was saying is that your website is the only real digital asset that you really, really, really own. And I would say next to your CRM, it’s the only thing you own. Everything else is rented space, is an apartment that you’re renting from a landlord, right?

And and for those of us living in Dublin, we know how tri precarious that can be, right? So so basically the website is still the only resource you have. So I posit, this is what my take is on it, is that in a world of zero-click search, which is what we’re implying, that you don’t click on anything, it’s a zero-click search result, that there is still a whole a place for your website. And you can get seen in those citations if you’re lucky. But even if you’re not lucky, I posit that.

At some point in that journey, in that search journey, because a search journey is one of intent, right? That when the intent gets closer and more specific to actually making that conversion or getting stuff done, that your website has to be equipped, like Niall said, it’s got to provide all the things you need for that customer to make that decision, right? So all those trust signals, and this brings us back to the EEAT model. What Google has done, and this is another change that’s affecting websites.

Is that they’ve clarified that they’re going to prioritize, you know, for in terms of your content and the EEAT model, which stands for expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trust. And you know what? Back to basics, that’s what every human being wants from a business, right? So, what do we do in the website in terms of remember we said on page versus off-page content? So we’re saying on-page content, the EEAT model is asking us.

To showcase our expertise, what can we bring to the table that the AI can’t make it fresh, that the AI hasn’t found yet? What we can do in that be the first person to talk about it. Expertise. How do we show our credentials? How do we show our research? What are our titles? What are our awards? What you know, how how are there trust signals going on there? So authoritativeness again, all of those things come into play. Do we have guest articles? Are we, you know, do we have backlinks? These

affect our off page as well and of course trustworthiness. Do we have reviews? You know, are there things in our about us page that, you know, say a lot about us that we can say, this person is accredited author. They know what they’re doing. So these are all very human things. And basically what the algorithm is asking us to do, what Google’s new sort of ranking factors or signals are actually asking us to look after humans much more than we ever did. So ironically, the changes in the algorithms as as far as I’m concerned is AI is forcing us

To get closer to the human, to get closer to our customers. And if we did that right, sure, there’s a lot of things that we can do technically, like Sinead and Denis said, but at the end of the day, it’s all about choice. It’s all about like whether people think you’re the one they should spend their money on. And those those little checklists that I we’ve just talked about, the EEAT model, that’s gonna help you get there, right? So that’s my

Sinéad Walsh (31:31)
Mm-hmm.

Elish Bul-Godley (31:31)
take on it. and yeah, and I think now you’ll be happy with that, right? I’m getting back to basics there with the human.

Sinéad Walsh (31:36)
Mm.

Niall Devitt (31:37)
Yeah, yeah,

yeah, and the the one thing I would say so so again I go back to the whole kind of SEO thing back in the day and getting links and all of that type of stuff and so on and so forth. But I mean you can be quite proactive in terms of trying to make that, or at least you could be proactive in terms of trying to make that. So you could go out to kind of sites and you could offer to share your expertise by way of articles and and I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do that. If you had time to do that, that’s great. Right. But as I always said to people back in the day.

You know, so so so backlinks or or links to you and and specifically who they were linking for. So it wasn’t the number of links that you had, it was the quality of those links. So in other words, how trusted they were. But as I always said that like the secret to getting links, good links online is good content. So in other words, if you create really good content, people will link to that content because it’s valuable.

So at all stages, whether it’s for customers, whether it’s for links, whether it’s for anything else, for that, this is all about creating value. It’s all about creating relationships, right? So in that sense, at least all of the same rules apply. And the one thing that used to drive me a little bit mental, so to speak, is so I used to always say back in the so if I was dealing with client, I would say, Can I see your keywords? And if they couldn’t give me your keywords, they used to always Well, you haven’t done any SEO, right?

But I remember doing it’s a well known tourist attraction in Ireland. I was consulted in to do some SEO. So I started with the keyword research. So I’d been down to the tourist attraction a couple of times, right? Didn’t probably know a tremendous amount. But during my keyword research, I found out that a scene from Harry Potter was filmed there. Right? So I I wasn’t a Harry Potter fan, didn’t know anything about Harry Potter, but I could see globally this was huge.

Harry Potter was massive at the time. So we’re back to the website, expecting to see on the website a section in terms of this movie. And as it turns out, lots of movies, and there was none. Right? So they were missing a massive gap. And this was a meaningful gap as far as I was concerned. So certainly with a particular demographic at that stage, they fly into Ireland as a for instance, right? They probably wouldn’t be interested in this scenic area for the sake of it.

But if it was promoted a little bit better and a little bit more that Harry Potter was in, there’s every possibility they would take the bus or the train there to visit it on that basis alone. So keyword research, which is number is, is an an incredible and has always been an incredible marketing opportunity on behalf of your business because it is quite literally the words from the horses are in this case.

The customer’s mouth. Right? So I could never, you know, I could never kind of understand that. You have this gaping market research opportunity, the literal words from your customer’s mouth when they’re searching for your products and services, and you wouldn’t put in the effort to find out what those words and descriptions were. Bonkers, as far as I’m concerned.

Elish Bul-Godley (34:28)
Well, thank you so much. Now, so you’re, you know, what still matters is is what we’re talking about right now. So we talked about the changes we’ve made, but what still matters? So I’ve mentioned the EEAT model, people still matter, trust matters, experience. But how do we actually put that into action on the website? So if I say go for the EEAT model, but what do I physically have to do to make that EAT model come alive? We’ve hinted at it. Niall also mentioned good old-fashioned keyword research still matters.

So I’m coming back to you, Sinead. What are the real actions we can take? that, you know, what still matters for getting found and how do we physically make that happen, right? We talked about the technical stuff, you talked about schema, but like what about content wise? What should we be doing?

Sinéad Walsh (35:12)
Yeah. Yeah. So there’s a few different approaches that you can take, right? But let’s take one of the E’s first, right, in terms of experience. So writing from a first person point of view can be extremely helpful. Okay. And when I say writing, I also mean if you are using video on your site, that can also count, right? If you’re doing a video diary of a travel blog or so, you know, whatever it may be. So writing from the I perspective or the we.

Is very, very good, right? Because again, like we were saying, AI can’t experience things because it’s an inanimate object, right? But that’s a that’s a big plus. In terms of adding bylines as well, that can be really, really useful. Okay. So many people use WordPress as their their content management system for their website, right? What we actually all forget is, and I’m just using WordPress as one example, there’s a million out there. What we actually all forget is

WordPress originated as a blog site. So something like WordPress, it’s very, very easy to attribute. whether it’s a blog entry or an article or whatever it is, it’s very easy to attribute that to a person. And that person will have a profile on the about us, and that in within the about us, it could link to their LinkedIn, which will have like a list of their credentials, blah, blah, blah. Right.

All of that matters. That chain of logic matters. And again, it comes down to not only the trustworthiness aspect of it, because there’s a name and a face and a real person behind it, but also the authoritiveness as well. Okay. So you again, your LinkedIn, your qualifications, and all that stuff can really, really matter. And then in terms of authoritivenesses again, I can’t pronounce that word, authoritiveness. Yeah, right.

Elish Bul-Godley (36:48)
Yeah,

it’s too many slides. A indicate She ate.

Sinéad Walsh (36:48)
You know what I’m talking about. The A. The A, right? So yeah, the A. it

Niall Devitt (36:50)
Yeah.

Sinéad Walsh (36:55)
yeah, she she ate and left no crumbs.

Elish Bul-Godley (36:56)
Yeah. Yeah.

Sinéad Walsh (36:58)
the authority aspect of it is using good sources and references and and stuff like that. So whether that’s an external link within the piece you’re writing or whatever it may be, linking off to a good source is a positive, right? Really, really good in terms of helping your

your piece, your argument, or your content, or whatever it may be, stand up. So they are a few of the the bits and bobs, shall I say?

Elish Bul-Godley (37:23)
You can do.

Sinéad Walsh (37:23)
and sorry, just to say I as well, scatter brain thinking here, the usual, I’ve had too much coffee. But when I said about video and talking from the experiencing, just

Elish Bul-Godley (37:29)
yes. Yeah.

Sinéad Walsh (37:33)
to note as well, if you say it in a video, that is as effective in this day and age in terms of AI as writing it down. Okay. So

It’s important to remember that when you are creating, remember the likes of YouTube is also a search engine. It’s a Google product. So, yes, your tags, your titles, all that kind of thing matters, but it will pick up, whether it’s Gemini, ChatGPT, whatever it is, what you are saying. So the example I always give in class is I’m a mechanic, and I put up a video, what is that funny noise in my car? Okay. And in the

In the video I’m talking about inspecting car, here’s the thing, la la, it’s a grinding gearbox. I mightn’t have grinding gearbox in the title, but because I say it, Google will pick up that segment. And if Niall searches how do I fix a grinding gearbox, etc., I am likely to be returned even for that 30 second segment as a result there. So sorry just want to clarify that is why I mentioned YouTube or video in the experience piece.

Elish Bul-Godley (38:30)
Very good. That’s a lovely, colorful and like so varied way of coming at content as well, right? Just thinking of it in so many different formats as opposed to just just the one thing. Like it’s not just keywords and text. Now you’re thinking outside the box a little bit more. So Denis,

Sinéad Walsh (38:45)
For sure.

Elish Bul-Godley (38:46)
from your point of view, because you have such an intimate knowledge of AI, that you’re you’re at that stage where you kind of you get more than the rest of us, I think, like how AI makes those decisions about what it cites.

in the LLM. So whatever about us working with the EEAT model, what are the things that we could be doing physically on that website just to get those citations up and running a little bit more? We talked about structure. We talk like are there any things that you could do outside the website, for example, to be cited a lot?

Denis Jastrzebski (39:13)
Yeah, yeah, no, really good question. So when we’re talking about our off site optimization, that’s increasingly more important. It’s always been important with with website authority and having, you know, other websites that are authoritative linked back to you. Those things were important, but now even more so because as LLMs scan through the internet and and with Google and Gemini all being integrated, they’re using the same kind of assessment of authority as as before. But

That’s how they decide whether to cite you in the in the the actual LLM. So whether it’s Chat GPT or any of those other ones. so yeah, having backlinks, same as before, has been important. But now pretty much what what Sinead said, but to expand on it is the social media side of things actually has a lot more im importance than it used to. So we used to kind of see Instagram, Facebook, etc. as kind of closed in platforms. You know, if you didn’t have an account, you couldn’t really even see posts on it. Now th those platforms have

adapted because with with AI they’re making those posts available on Google search results so these things can pop up now. So a good example of that is if you were to look up the digital and ai decoded podcast on Google now you will get us in the AI overview. And

Elish Bul-Godley (40:24)
Okay.

Denis Jastrzebski (40:24)
as we kind of launch the podcast there there’s been a progression I’ve kind of kept track of of how how everything shows up there. So at the beginning it mentioned

When we had our first episode out, there was about three podcasts with a similar-ish name with similar topics. And as the episodes progress and as we added show notes, and also we have a a number of different social media posts that go out after each episode on all the platforms. now at this stage, a couple of episodes in, there’s a dedicated AI overview for our podcast. It shows each single episode, the show notes to that episode. But it also in the AI overview links our Facebook and LinkedIn.

reels that we’ve uploaded. so it takes

Elish Bul-Godley (41:03)
Okay.

Denis Jastrzebski (41:04)
the captions and as Sinead said, it takes the transcripts of of of what we’re talking about in those videos and it’s showing up. And so same with ChatGPT and any of these other LLM models, they’re going to be using increasingly more sources to try to make authentic content. and and that’s what they’re going to cite in the end. So if we think of like YouTube, people tend to watch a 10 minute YouTube video on a topic because it’s a person talking to them.

about a topic. It’s a little bit more engaging than reading a blog post, even if it’s the same information. So like we said, the way search is differentiated now is is between really generic content and then really useful, very specific sometimes. So if we can use kind of our social media as as a kind of a an accessory to our website and to have kind of interlinking between those things. So we have videos that are talking about the podcast in this case.

They’re linking back to the website and the website links back to podcasting platforms. That that shows LLMs, it gives it so much context about the podcast. So now when people are asking or putting into episode titles, they’re popping up along with the reels we’ve published. So that’s a huge thing now. that that’s what LLMs are looking for. That’s how you’ll stand out between somebody else that’s not really doing that, has the basic information. So social media is kind of a massive accessory to to search now.

Elish Bul-Godley (42:19)
Thank you so much. So you’re really driving home the idea that the off-page mentions, those brand mentions do matter, but not just willy-nilly. Like if I’m selling shoes and I got mentioned in an academic paper on statistics, it makes no difference to my website. It has to be contextually the off-page mentions and the backgrounds need to matter. And of course, everything needs to chime. It needs to chime around those back to the keywords. It needs to chime around those.

Those consistent topics that we want to be known for. And as a whole, it all comes together, right? And then the brand mentions, the signals all lead to the LLMs putting us out there in their citations. And then we get the traffic as a result as well. so back to Niall. Niall, you’re you’ve got a lot of things up. I just want to, but Niall, can I just ask you, you’ve you’re

Niall Devitt (43:01)
Yeah. So so yeah, it’s crawl.

Elish Bul-Godley (43:06)
really good at the whole local thing, right? Because you mentioned local

Niall Devitt (43:08)
All right.

Elish Bul-Godley (43:09)
search before. And I and I think there’s a lot to be said here on on this topic around local search as well.

Niall Devitt (43:14)
But but before we do, I’m going to give you and this was one that that surprised me lately or took me by surprise, right? So like Denis, I go on to the Google AI overview and I see how a website evolves over time and I start to ask it questions and cause problems and all of that type of stuff and see how it responds, right? So a couple of things happened there recently that kind of surprised me, right? Right. So the first thing, as you guys know, I’m involved in another podcast with my mates.

Right. It’s probably fair to say I’d possibly like to keep those two parts of those two podcasts. In other words, it’s not the same guy in either podcast, but the bloody AI figured it out.

Sinéad Walsh (43:53)
Yeah, show notes, yeah.

Denis Jastrzebski (43:51)
We’re gonna link it in the show notes as well now. So yeah, it’s

Elish Bul-Godley (43:52)
Go on, go on, plug it now, plug the podcast. Do it,

Niall Devitt (43:53)
Alright, right. But he

Elish Bul-Godley (43:55)
do it.

Niall Devitt (43:55)
but but but

Denis Jastrzebski (43:55)
there’s no escape now.

Niall Devitt (43:58)
here’s a better one. So I was I was I was on Google

Sinéad Walsh (44:00)
Yeah.

Niall Devitt (44:01)
and I was I was doing the AI and I was looking how the other podcast says it’s it’s a bit it’s six or seven months ahead, so you know it has more content and so on and so forth. So

Elish Bul-Godley (44:07)
Okay. Yeah.

Niall Devitt (44:10)
it it described the podcast as funny. So it

Elish Bul-Godley (44:13)
Wow.

Niall Devitt (44:13)
was like how could you possibly know that?

Elish Bul-Godley (44:16)
Why are we laughing Chinews?

Sinéad Walsh (44:16)
True.

Niall Devitt (44:16)
Right, so so so

like even for me now

Sinéad Walsh (44:18)
True.

Niall Devitt (44:19)
this was too much. So clearly, funniness is subjective, it’s a human thing. I’m not prepared to accept that the AI can judge the podcast as funny. So I challenged the bloody AI. I said, How do you know? Prove it. Right? So

Exactly what Denis more or less happened. So it took some of the descriptions from the website, it took some of the reviews, it took some of the comments on social media, and it put a narrative together. It was a very

Elish Bul-Godley (44:43)
Yes.

Niall Devitt (44:44)
believable narrative. Right now, clearly, I’m not suggesting that the AI is in a position at this point in time to say that that podcast is funny or not funny. Right. But the rationale that it created to convince me that it might be funny.

was enough for me if I was a potential listener to go and listen to the podcast and make a decision whether it’s funny or not. Okay. So what this has changed for me, I would suggest to you if Ashley was just using Google back in the day to try and find a place to go eat with her incredibly awkward husband with that, she’d probably fail via Google or it would take a tremendous amount of time, months of searching,

Elish Bul-Godley (45:25)
Mm. Yeah.

Niall Devitt (45:27)
right?

Whereas with AI, she can have a conversation. There’s a sophistication to that conversation. Right. And she can come. So for me, it’s moved from kind of keywords. We used to talk about keywords, short tail, long tail, and what that said about the customer. Short tail means that it was awareness. Long tail means they were closer to buying. I think it’s moved from keywords now to conversation. So if I’m the business owner.

I have to kind of move beyond keywords. They’re still important because the descriptions that customers will use to describe my product. But I have to start thinking in terms of conversations. Right? And strangely enough, right, the AI’s description of why the podcast was funny was enough for someone probably to check out the podcast. And that’s kind of all that matters, really, at this point. Yeah. Okay.

Elish Bul-Godley (46:12)
Great, yeah. Yeah, that’s really good.

Denis Jastrzebski (46:14)
And I I I just

want to mention a little point before we move off with this topic as well, just to to showcase the imperfections of the technology as well. So we’ve talked about all

Elish Bul-Godley (46:21)
Yes.

Denis Jastrzebski (46:22)
the benefits and there’s these are all great things, but these

Elish Bul-Godley (46:25)
Yeah.

Denis Jastrzebski (46:25)
new ways of search are also very much so open to manipulation and people are trying to figure out ways of doing that.

Niall Devitt (46:31)
Yeah.

Denis Jastrzebski (46:31)
We’ve kind of known the gray or the black hat SEO tactics over the years, people trying to cheat the system. There is ways people are doing that now. And a really funny one, this guy did it completely harmlessly.

But because LinkedIn was such a a website that the LLMs love to quote when it comes to content and all this stuff, especially over the last twelve months, he did a test. So he wrote a a LinkedIn post. This guy had maybe, you know, a couple hundred connections, wasn’t an influencer by any means, but wrote a post and he said, you know, my name is X and I’m the world’s leading expert in whatever industry or field he was. It must have been a consultant in, let’s say tech tech consultant. And he said, That’s everything. Thanks everyone. And he got like

You know, 20, 30 likes, people found it funny. He said he’s just running a little test. And then within 24 hours, he googled in an incognito tab, and a few other people done this as well, so they got the same result. you know, who’s the world leading expert in this industry? And he popped up as the number one AI overview result, saying, This

Elish Bul-Godley (47:25)
No.

Denis Jastrzebski (47:28)
guy is the number one. And it’s obviously cited his LinkedIn posts as a source. So it’s very easy for somebody to do something like that. Now, since then they’ve fixed that issue, but

Elish Bul-Godley (47:36)
Yeah.

Denis Jastrzebski (47:38)
It just shows you these systems are they’re they’re not perfect. if anyone did that, if if a few people caught onto that, probably could have gotten away with it for a couple of months if it didn’t get as much traction. so we can just tell LLMs in a post that we’re great at something.

Elish Bul-Godley (47:52)
Yeah.

Denis Jastrzebski (47:53)
And they will quote that like like with Niall’s example, they’ll say we’re funny because somebody else said that we are.

Elish Bul-Godley (47:58)
Yeah.

Denis Jastrzebski (47:59)
which is a good thing for us because then we can think in our content, we can mention some of those

Elish Bul-Godley (48:01)
We can manipulate that now.

Denis Jastrzebski (48:03)
things, like the things we want to represent ourselves with.

but also there are ways your competitors could, you know, use that against you. All sorts of bad things can happen from that. But the technology is is is yeah.

Elish Bul-Godley (48:10)
Yeah. Yeah, it’s like it’s like black hat. It’s like black

Niall Devitt (48:14)
Yeah.

Elish Bul-Godley (48:15)
hat AIO instead of black hat ASU.

Niall Devitt (48:17)
Very quickly

Denis Jastrzebski (48:17)
Yeah, and

I’ve no doubt people have done that. So it’s yeah.

Niall Devitt (48:18)
’cause you asked the you you you asked

the question, Alish, in terms of local search,

and we don’t have

Elish Bul-Godley (48:22)
Local, yeah.

Niall Devitt (48:22)
we don’t have enough time to go into a lot of detail here. In terms of local search, one tool that I’d recommend and is underutilized by certainly a lot of SME businesses, because very when we talk about local business, we’re talking about SME business.

Is Google Business and Google Business Reviews, right? Huge opportunity for businesses

Elish Bul-Godley (48:36)
Yes. No brainer. No brainer.

Niall Devitt (48:40)
there, but you have to be a little bit proactive. And again, to rank locally, typically it’s not hard and fast, but generally speaking, because there’s less competition. So the bigger the area, the bigger the territory, the harder it is to rank. Locally, there’s less competition. Generally speaking, you can rank quicker, faster, easier locally than you can nationally or internationally. But Google business would be the

the starting point I would say in terms of that. And again, a lot of stuff that we talked about in terms of AI, it’s important there as well. Okay.

Elish Bul-Godley (49:08)
Yeah,

and like for those of you who are not sure what we mean when we say Google Business Profile, basically when you’re on your phone and you say plumber near me and it it throws up Google Maps. And if you’re on Google Maps and you create a Google business profile, your whole company hour opening hours, your phone number, your click to call, all that pops up. So it’s literally the yellow pages of today, or as we have in here, the golden pages in Ireland. But you know, and it’s free, right? Ten minutes set up, free, and then just keep at it.

Niall Devitt (49:35)
Yeah. It’s i i i i i i

in effect it’s Google’s tool for managing your business information across Google, including Google Maps, et cetera, et cetera. So again, it’s it’s it’s it’s an underutilized and under recognized tool in terms of value. And and again, because we still use Google so much, oftentimes the first reviews that you’ll ever encounter in terms of a business are Google business reviews because you get on your phone and go to Google and search that way, so you encounter those reviews first. So

Elish Bul-Godley (50:04)
And in

and in a way you’re

Niall Devitt (50:05)
Brilliant.

Elish Bul-Godley (50:06)
answering that that off page thing and the trust signals that we talk about, the EEAT model, the T and Trust, we’re talking about brand mentions and signals to the AI. It answers all of those questions, right, as a tool, because if you get your reviews in the and you get your five stars, you’re all automatically going to be cited in in L L Ms as well if you’re doing well.

So, okay, thank you so much, Niall. So we’re ready to move on to our next stage. But before we move on, I’m just gonna sum things up a little bit more, as opposed to how far we’ve got so far. So we talked about how the websites, you know, are still important despite the changes, but because of the changes, we talked here about how we can adapt to it. We talked about things like the EEAT model. So we talked about websites, but we also talk about content. And the reason I’m separating the two is your content can live on your website, but it can live outside your website. And Denis has just spoken to that.

You can have your content out as video. It could be on LinkedIn like we did with the podcast. And it’s all those moments where your content appears outside of your website, whether it’s in Reddit thread or whether it’s a TikTok video, those are all signals. Those are brand mentions. And when people respond to them and people talk about you, now let’s move on to UGC. So it’s not just your c your content off site, but it’s your UGC content, your user-generated content off site.

If they’re talking about you, you’re gonna get more citation potential, I’d say, on your on your AI. So now think holistically about your content and and your website. How does your website become a repository for all of that traffic? How does it link up to places outside the website? UGC that comes into play. So I’m gonna pause it that think about your website, think about your content, think about your community. That’s the last thing I want to add here. So

The fact that your community is talking about you is gonna raise up your your SEO, your s brand signals, your brand mentions, all of those things. So let’s move on to tools. Niall, thank you. You’ve given us a really good tool, which we give to a lot of people when we talk about local search. Sinead, what would you like to talk about tools-wise? What’s your takeaway for here for us to use?

Sinéad Walsh (52:02)
Yeah,

I suppose the two things I would really like to hammer home is first of all, schema markup. Okay, I know I sound like a broken record, but I promise you it is not

Elish Bul-Godley (52:09)
Okay.

Sinéad Walsh (52:13)
that difficult. It has a big impact, and it will do you the world of favors. So whether it is text based, multimedia, video, image, all that kind of stuff, your podcast schema markup, all that.

there are a there are variations out there. Learn them, learn what is relevant to your site, implement it, please, for the love of God. Okay. that will do you the world of favors. And I have a couple of good resources that I will send on and we will include them in the show notes. So a couple of blog posts that I have found and YouTube video that I’ve found really, really helpful in terms of learning more about that. And then FAQ pages.

Elish Bul-Godley (52:50)
Hmm.

Sinéad Walsh (52:50)
my God, they’re such

an easy win. Now, what I would say to you when you are thinking about your FAQ pages, think first of all, as the searcher, like we were talking about earlier, right? What questions are they likely to ask? And strip out the marketing fluff. There’s no need. There’s no need. If you I’m gonna go back to the boiler example I said earlier, right? If you can imagine someone asking an LLM or Google or whatever it may be, how much is it to get a boiler replaced in Dublin?

If you give an airy fairy answer, that is something along the lines of prices vary, la la la. Google is gonna say, I don’t care, skip on. Okay. Where if you say if you start that answer with boiler replacement in Dublin typically cost between a hundred to two hundred, whatever it may be. or prices generally start from blah, blah, blah. That is much easier for the LLM or Google to lift that information and put it into its summary. So

Take the crap out, take the marketing fluff out, stick to facts, stick to a question and answer scenario. Build a good FAQ page and again you’re doing yourself the world of favors.

Elish Bul-Godley (53:54)
You so much. Thanks for that. okay, so Denis, have you sort of nice tools and takeaways for us to work with when we get off this podcast? What would you like people to start playing with?

Denis Jastrzebski (54:05)
Yeah, so I I have one concept and it’s also a tool at the same time. and just for the application, this is more so if you’ve already engaged in SEO, maybe you’re you’re kind of a little bit more advanced, you might be using some SEO platforms like Hrefs or SEMrush or Uber Suggest. So if you’re you’re kind of familiar with those and you’re using those, everything you’ve heard in this podcast is kind of a nice update to the standards and and what everything is changing. But if you’re already using and and optimizing

your website using these tools. I’d like to introduce a concept called an MCP server. So you don’t have to worry about the the context of it, what it means, any of that stuff. But you’ve you might have heard this thrown around over the last 12 months in the context of AI. And all it is is it’s in the simplest terms a translator or a bridge between two pieces of of software. So if if I’m talking about an MCP in this context, HREFs, which is a SEO platform SEM rush,

All these platforms have their own MCP servers. So if you have a subscription with them, it’s something they’ve added. And what you can do is you can take that, connect the MCP server to something like ChatGPT work or Claud Co-Work. So if you’ve started to use those kind of agent-based AIs, you can connect those two things and now you can talk about your data specifically.

in your kind of little window. So you can ask it to pull in keyword research information or information about your website. And it’s a little bit more of a an easier way of interacting with your data. So kind of similarly, instead of having to download and take screenshots and upload all this stuff and then describe what it is and where it’s from, you can just ask it to pull in the latest data from the latest audit it did of your website last week. And you can talk about that data. So this is a little bit more advanced if anyone’s already using these platforms.

This is how you can have a conversation with the data really and then kind of get it to do certain things within the platform on your behalf. So could make it a little bit easier because these platforms are pretty complicated as well. So if it is something new for you, connecting it to something like ChatGPT work or cloud cowork would be handy as well.

Elish Bul-Godley (56:03)
Okay, that’s really good. any last notes or takeaways now before we close off?

Niall Devitt (56:07)
Yeah, yeah. So I’m gonna go again, very basic one here. with websites, because again I go back to that point until you get to the website that’s bringing in a lot of value and revenue and customers and so on and so forth, you have to kind of believe this stuff to be true. Right. And again, amazes me. So again, SME business, you’ve you’ve built your website, it’s fantastic, you’ve put your effort in your content, you think it’s wonderful, etc. etc. You’re ready to put it out there into the blue yonder, right?

You kind of have to wait for the traffic, you kind of have to wait for the performance and all of that type of stuff. I’m a big, big believer. You all have six, seven, nine, ten customers, right, that you can ask. Go to the website, review it. Now, here’s the key thing, and as Irish people, we’re bad. Don’t tell me how wonderful it is. Right? Tell me what’s not working. Right. And encourage that, right?

Elish Bul-Godley (56:56)
Hm, yeah.

Niall Devitt (56:57)
Right. So

Elish Bul-Godley (56:57)
Brave.

Niall Devitt (56:58)
I’ll I’ll use the real world analogy here and Ashing she she she she booked a restaurant there. It’s about six months ago. Very well regarded and all this. Again, it’ll give you the example of the problems that she faces. Right. So I ordered a main course of chicken wings. I like chicken wings. Right. When it arrived on the table, it was as far as I’m concerned, it was a starter portion. Right. Now they were probably the

Beautiful chicken wings, they were okay if I’m being honest about it. But the fact that it looked like a starter portion, right? I was like, I’m never dark. If Ashing wasn’t there, I would just walked out, quite frankly. Right. So the point is I’ll never go back to that restaurant as well. Ashing loved it, right? But I didn’t complain or give out about it. Because I’m Irish, right? So to get that feedback from Irish people and Irish customers, oftentimes you have to press them.

Elish Bul-Godley (57:49)
No,

yeah.

Niall Devitt (57:50)
You often

even have to incentivize them. So I would say when you put the website out to the ten customers, offer them a discount or a meal for two or whatever and reassure them that if they say bad things, you know, your feelings aren’t going to be that hurt, you’ll get over it. Okay.

Elish Bul-Godley (58:05)
Hey, good good advice there. Ask for the wrong answers. Yeah.

Niall Devitt (58:09)
Yeah, yeah.

Elish Bul-Godley (58:11)
Which brings me to the tool that I’m gonna round up with. It’s something it’s almost old fashioned, but it can be rejuvenated for the modern day. It’s called an empathy map, and it’s a good way to workshop what you’re doing. We can put up a little diagram of the empathy mapping for your next workshop. Denis will put that up. and basically, and you know what? Rand Fishkin, I don’t know if anybody here knows Rand Fishkin’s really good SEO guy.

I love the way he speaks. He says customer empathy is the new source of your content nowadays, right? So and Sinead has spoken to this idea of being bespoke with what you’re doing. And being bespoke is the thing that gets you noticed as well in terms of the AI because it’s fresh, it’s unique, it’s your UVP. So how do you get bespoke? By getting into the head of the exact target customer. And so company customer empathy mapping.

Is a diagram where you can workshop, you can say what does the customer hear? What who’s influencing them? What do they see? What language do they use? What problems do they have? What’s how do they use it? So you you come at the customer’s perception almost through their five senses of how they live and breathe and interact with your product and what they know about your product or your service. And you start to build better. And how do you use that that mapping? Well, you bring in all your sources.

Dennis’s Arefs, things like SEOrush Moz, Uber suggests, Answer the Public, all those third-party tools that tell you the the you know the questions people are asking. But those are generic. So you need to go down to your sales team, you need to go down to your customer service team if you’re a big enough organization. Whoever’s at the front desk, they can tell you what’s going on in their customer’s head. Like they have to talk to them all day long. So this is where, you know, offline and online works. And therefore you’re in good another good piece of advice I want to finish up with.

Get a baseline. So go into your Google Analytics, figure out what it is that your traffic is coming from. Is your traffic coming from the LLMs? Is there a way to know where the LMs are sending you traffic? Because then you get a baseline before you make those changes in your analytics. If I make this change, can I see a rise in traffic coming from the AI? So so then you know, you begin to track your performance with those SEO changes that you’re making once you put in those schemas and what you know, use all those protocols.

So that’s a really good way and of course go to the LLM and audit what to ask the AI, what do you know about my brand? And if it doesn’t know anything about your brand, then you know what you gotta do. You’re gonna get fill in those blanks.

Niall Devitt (1:00:28)
Ca c can I give us all a small

piece of homework. This is a kind of in-house an in-ho

Elish Bul-Godley (1:00:33)
good. We love homework.

Niall Devitt (1:00:34)
an in-house joke, but the audience or the viewers are very happy to do it. So you guys remember when we were discussing about doing this podcast and how we wanted the podcast to kind of turn out and the niche that we wanted to address and how we

Elish Bul-Godley (1:00:46)
Yes.

Niall Devitt (1:00:47)
wanted to be different from other podcasts and all of that type of stuff.

Elish Bul-Godley (1:00:50)
No.

Okay.

Niall Devitt (1:00:54)
After this podcast, I want you to go to Google AI overviews and I just want you to simply put in digital and AI podcast, right? Give it no

Elish Bul-Godley (1:01:03)
Yeah. Okay.

Niall Devitt (1:01:04)
more information than that. And look at the description, look at how it describes the podcast, right? And see how that matches up with the vision that we had for the podcast or not. Okay.

And you you guys can you

Elish Bul-Godley (1:01:17)
That’s a really good idea.

Niall Devitt (1:01:18)
you guys can decide

Sinéad Walsh (1:01:19)
Yeah.

Niall Devitt (1:01:19)
from there after that. We can we can have this conversation obviously off podcast later on. yeah. There you go.

Elish Bul-Godley (1:01:23)
we can come back to this. We can actually come back next week and tell us tell us all.

Okay, so thank you everybody. Well done, folks. We’re we pulled through and we look we worked through SEO. For some of us, it’s you know, we’re more embedded than others. We got we got a sense of the landscape, we got a sense of what to do, we got extra homework from Niall. We even got some tools and takeaways. So on that note, go and have fun at creating your content, making sure it’s fresh, making sure it’s you.

Making sure it answers the question. Okay. So thank you everybody. Thank you, Denis. Thank you, Janae. Thank you.

Niall Devitt (1:01:54)
Ta thanks, Alish.

Well done. Bye everyone. Bye bye.

Denis Jastrzebski (1:01:56)
Thanks Elish. Thanks everyone.

Sinéad Walsh (1:01:56)
Thanks, Alish. Thanks, everyone.

Bye.

Denis Jastrzebski (1:01:58)
Take

care.

Elish Bul-Godley (1:01:59)
Bye guys.