How to Outrank 99% of Your Competition (SEO Content Plan 2025)

How to Outrank 99% of Your Competition (SEO Content Plan 2025) Speaker 2: In 2025, SEO isn't about keywords. It's about connection. AI can write a blog post in seconds, but here's the problem. Users can tell, and they can tell easily, and so can Google. In this episode, Steve Wiideman breaks down how to combine AI tools with real human insight to build content that ranks, converts, and actually resonates. If you're still chasing AI shortcuts, you're already behind the ball. Welcome to another Lunch With Norm eCommerce & Amazon FBA Podcast. Our guest today is the President and CEO of the Wiideman Consulting Group. He considers himself a scientist and practitioner of local and eCommerce search engine optimization and paid search advertising. Please welcome Steve Wiideman. But first, let's have a word from our sponsor. Are you spending more on Amazon ads and getting less return? There's a smarter way to grow and without increasing your budget. Levanta's Affiliate Shift Calculator shows what you could do if you really allocate just a portion of your ad spend into affiliate marketing. If you're an Amazon seller doing over $5 million a year, This is for you. And guess what? It's free. All you have to do is click on the link in the description to go to your custom forecast today. Sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee and welcome Steve. Speaker 1: Hey. Speaker 2: So what's going on out there? Let's start talking about what have you seen with AI and how's that affecting the SEO world? Speaker 1: Yeah, it's hard not to talk about digital marketing without talking about AI now. I mean, three years ago it was, hey, there's this new tool we can create content with that will save our writers and our researchers thousands of hours of time. All of a sudden, it all kind of came crashing down when they realized people don't really like AI content. They don't resonate with it. And folks that teach, you know, when we get our assignments back from our students, we know what our students normally write. And we can look at this and go, whoa, you totally used AI to create this. It's not even in your book. Speaker 2: I'm sorry. I got to interrupt you here because I don't ever want to give you a paper that I've written in AI and find out, how do you know? Speaker 1: From the teaching standpoint, when you've taught the same class and you know the type of content you get back, the paragraph styles, the general writing style, the answer format of how somebody would give their perspective on things, that first-hand experience, the I think and my thought was and I used to, those types of words are obvious somebody wrote themselves, but when it's written almost like a textbook and there isn't a lot of I and me and last time and one time and a lot of storytelling I suppose that you're used to seeing in content and then the girth of content to it's like used to get you know this much of kind of minimal viable products you know what they want to deliver out and now you've got you know 3,000 words all organized with bullet lists and emojis and And, you know, the long hashtags and everything, you're like, okay, yeah, no, this is, sorry, the long hyphens, you're like, no, this is definitely not something I've ever seen from a student delivered and it's obviously, you know, written with AI. And so I'll kindly, real politely, come back to them and say, Wow, this is one of the best things I've read from a student. You know what would be amazing though is if you could train yourself to not write like AI because as amazing as it is, if it was written by you, it could definitely be taken as something written by AI. So, you know, next time I'm looking forward to seeing more of your firsthand experience and personal opinions on things. So you don't have to be as structured. And so they come back with, because they're going to go, oh, he caught me, but he didn't actually catch me. Right. So, or he's pretending he didn't. So here's the answer. I don't know. I don't, because I understand, I understand what students go through and I understand You don't know what's going on in a person's life when they decide to take a shortcut like that. So, you know, I give them one opportunity where I pretend, you know, I don't care and they know by how I respond that I'm pretending like I don't care. So and it never happens again. So it works perfectly. I imagine Google's probably thinking the same thing as, you know, millions of pages are going live of all the same regurgitated content. Right? With all just kind of written differently by whatever AI machine you happen to decide to use. And at some point, you know, it's going to be, okay, which of these AI pages should I rank number one? Should I use the external signals? Should I I use the internal link signals or should I now look for clues that this wasn't written by somebody at the business showing or showcasing their first-hand experience and their expertise and the things that we know users really pay attention to. And what it's going to come down to, it's going to come down to just like what I do as a teacher is I'm going to look at that page just like a user is going to look at that page and they're going to go, Oh, cool. This company really cares about me and my needs and what I'm looking for. Or they're going to say, wow, this company just lazily threw up some AI content. And I'm kind of put off by it. And I think I'm going to go find somebody who actually has a video of them saying, Hi, this is Joe from Joe's Plumbing. Let me tell you why you should give us a chance and what you should be looking for in a plumber. As opposed to, you know, the traditional text heavy, paragraph heavy content. Speaker 2: Is it just me or have more and more commercials? I hear that. And I don't know if I just got this because I've seen this in ChatGPT so many times. I've got your back. And as soon as I hear that, I said, is this commercial generated by AI? Because you start to hear some of the same things come out and out like in these commercials. Even the AI voices, you know, they're using on some commercials now, which I don't understand why. Well, they're probably saving some money. I have a question about the content. Talking about Google and talking about what's acceptable maybe, I know you probably don't know, but it's looking probably for some unique content. You just said it's the same regurgitated content over and over and over. If you added 10 or 20% of your own content, is it worth it? Is there a certain amount that you think we should add if we're using AI? Did you know 80% of AI-generated content fails? Steve Wiideman breaks down how to mix real experience with AI to actually rank. Speaker 1: I don't think there should be a percentage. I think we're in the wrong mindset if we're thinking in percentages. I think what we used to do is we would take 8 to 12 hours and do really in-depth Keyword and topic research from our own search console, from historical data if we have it, from third-party tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs. We would use a little bit of AI to get some ideas for search terms. We'd use answer the public to get ideas of questions that we'd want to answer. And we basically take our four or 5,000 keywords that we found for a specific piece of content and spend half a day organizing them into groups. Those groups could end up being supportive cluster pages or they could be the topics of the page. And the great thing is now that sort of MVP version of doing that can incorporate all of those different topics and entities from what we see on the pages in the search results for the query. We're talking the titles, the headings, the subheadings, The page names of the URLs, all of those kind of SEO attributes can be part of the Search Console and SEMrush and answer the public keywords. And now you can dump all of that into ChatGPT and say, take all of these keywords, entities, and topics and help create a page outline that incorporates all of them with an intent to have the writer put in their first hand experience content. And then what's great is it spits out this beautiful outline and incorporates everything that you found from that keyword research. And then you tailor that and you customize it to what you really know about and what you do offer or don't offer. And then you give it to the writer and you say, now I want you to interview the business owner, the SME on the team and really get some stories, really get some backstory on why them and what's different and what they've seen from their customers. I want you to call some of the reviews that we have online. I want you to go to Reddit. I want you to go to Google Business Profiles. I want you to go to Yelp. I want you to call all that information about what people are saying about us and what we do and who we are and the names of the people and then take that outline and fill in the blanks with as much information about what we know and what's different about what we do from anything else. Then within a week, you've got this amazing page of content. Now, all you're missing is some media. Hopefully, the interview was video so you could use some of that. Maybe there's some audio that you could use from that as well. Just make sure if you are using audio that you provide a transcript for ADA and accessibility and so forth. And then create some graphics and images and maybe take some photographs so that your page is broken up, all that text instead of paragraph, paragraph, whole list, paragraph, has some images to break it up, has a really good page flow and layout. And you're going to just crush it with the competition. Just like any other page, it's going to take three months to a year to really appear on the first page of Google often, but it's worth it. You'll look back two or three years later and like, man, my page is still just right there at the top while the competitors keep throwing out all this AI stuff. And it's almost like You can focus your energy on creating new things and not having to keep going back and trying to figure out why your page isn't performing. Or you could just take the AI route and say, hey, AI, do all that research and then write the page for me. And then they're going to make up some things. It could be some false statements in there. The users are going to see the phrases and words and wording used, and they're going to know. And eventually, Google's search behavior signals, when they see people clicking on a listing and going back and choosing a different result enough times, they're going to say, nope, I don't think this was a very helpful page, and I'm going to continue demoting it. So, I would say don't think in percentages. Don't think about rewriting it after having it written by AI and paying somebody to just rewrite it without AI. You're trying to hack the system. It's technique. If you focus on strategy and not technique, you won't lose. You just consistently see growth. You pour water and sunlight on something that's going to become something great. What is it, that quote I think I used on one of the previous episodes from Jim Rohn, where he says, you don't have to do extraordinary things to be successful. You only have to do ordinary things extraordinarily well. That's fundamental SEO, and that applies to what we'll be talking about, I'm sure, in a few minutes around optimizing for LLMs and how the search behaviors have changed from just going to Google and doing a search, clicking, buying, and being done. Now they're doing a lot more with it. So again, I would say that when it comes to content specifically is do that MVP version. You don't have to spend 8 to 12 hours to do the research. Again, the sources were Google Search Console if you already have an existing URL. It's going to be tools like SEMrush around your page and the competitors' pages. It's going to be going out to the search results for the seed keyword that you want to appear for and really extracting out all those titles and headings and page names and all the attributes on images and topics and things and so forth that are on those pages. Answer the public for the FAQs you need to have on every page now, especially for LLMs since they're asking questions and you want to provide the answers to them, and then put all that data and ask for an outline. I guarantee you're going to get enough topic outline to have the absolute best page on the web for what you offer, but I would avoid I would avoid doing anything that we know eventually everyone else is going to be able to do. Nobody else is going to be able to know your past clients and stories and case studies and things that you've done, but they can absolutely throw that same topic outline into TPT. And spit out something similar that 50 other competitors are going to do in three years. So yeah, be different, be unique, stand out. Who's that? Seth Godin, who said that? It's not beat your competitor by being better, but by being different and standing out. Anyway, that was a lot. Speaker 2: No, no, that was great. And one of the other things you told me about this, I don't know when, second podcast, I think, When you were saying just adding the video, now it's so easy to take that, summarize and turn it into a video script, have that video script right in your blog, which is also great. But that visualization, those images, I think it's so important in small paragraphs, not long, 10 sentence paragraphs. Make it really short. People want to have like just a couple of sentences, not even like, I don't know. I can't put, you know, one, two or three sentences into it, but, you know, just a couple to make it easy to read. But the other thing I want to talk to you about, and I wasn't expecting to talk to you about this, but as you were talking, I said, Notebook LM. How can you use or do you use Notebook LM to help with SEO or putting out content right now? Speaker 1: I think right now it's still new enough that you can probably just use it as is. Throw your content in there and get your little podcast episode or whatever so that your page can be communicated differently than just text. I think it's acceptable because a lot of regular users don't recognize it. But eventually, if everyone's doing it, eventually people will recognize it and be like, yeah, I'm kind of, I don't want to keep hearing the same people, you know, over and over and over again. So I think right now it's fun to experiment and test and you might see some ranking improvements because of that search behavior. But I think over time, unless they create some ways to do some new voices and to, you know, to lighten it up or maybe even use your voice, I don't know that I would put a lot of energy into that as a long-term strategy, but short-term I think it's fun. I enjoy it. I've used it a few times. One of our clients is an attorney. We took one of his pages and we said, hey, make an episode out of this content. And then it tests this little podcast and it's all. So there's this guy, right? And it's really kind of cool the way they do it. And it's fun. It's engaging. I've noticed that the page view times are much longer now because they're watching the videos and listening to the audio. So I feel like right now it's a neat little competitive advantage but again it's technique. The right way to do it is actually create your own video because no one's going to be able to replicate that. So I would look at how can we do this ourselves and I know this is my biggest challenge too as a business owner. We haven't put out video in well over a year I think at this point. We've just been so tied up with clients and procrastinating on doing what we know we need to do and that is invest in video, short form video, YouTube, how-to's, real shorts. People are really engaged with short form content. Their attention spans are less and if we want to survive as a digital marketing brand, we've got to do video and it is the hardest thing because you have to wonder how much, you're always wondering how much is going to cost me. If I go to a video editor, they're going to be $1,000 per video. But maybe I can do the Philippines or somewhere else and save some money, but gee, the quality's not there and they got to do a lot of editing. It's expensive and that's what we're all afraid of is, you know, not recording the videos. We can do that all day and cheese it up as much as we want to, but when it comes to the cost of the video editing and production and SEO, Businesses just don't have the budget for it. We're already budgeting what we have for SEO and putting our budget into paid search and paid social. Now I've got to put thousands of dollars into video editing every month. This is getting really expensive. And so we're going to have to parse out some of our other budgets, our lesser performing campaigns to to find the budget to do it or bring in some students from some of the local colleges and universities and see if they'd be willing to do some internships to get some practice and develop it into something and maybe doing video suddenly gives you a 20% lift in your revenue and you look at that revenue and you're like, wow, that's an extra $200,000 a year. I can afford to take a part of that and pay for video editing now. So it might be, you know, again, a crawl, walk, run, or approach, but I think that's the thing we're all thinking about in the back of our minds is we got to do video. We know it's important. We're looking at videos all day. We see our competitors. We see other brands in there, but we're just not doing it for fear of how much it's going to cost, you know, and how much effort and time it's going to take off our hands that we don't already don't have enough of as is. So I think that's a big component of it. But I do love the tool. I think it's great and I think it's still neat, the Notebook LM. Speaker 2: Yeah, with Notebook, one of the things I like about it are the questions. So you've got the frequently asked questions that come up, which you can also create a video about or add it in whatever content that we were just talking about, blog articles. But here's something we did, which is a little bit different. We've taken the interview and we bring it over to HeyJen. And then we animated. It could be me, it could be another person, but I've got two people talking back and forth and we edited in there into short clips. And it works out really well because now you've got a different voice. And you've got animated people, and it still looks like it's AI-generated, but the voices aren't bad at all that you're getting, and I can use my voice in there as well. Just going down content, Kelsey did something very unique, and he created a newsletter for one of my friends, but he's taken, Kels, it's his clubhouse, right? Unknown Speaker: It's for Startup Club. Speaker 2: Yeah, Startup Club. So it's his clubhouse. He gets the audio. Kels puts it into his newsletter, and then he puts it into, I guess, a notebook, and he gets an in-depth research done. And then that goes out there. And then now you've got all this content that you could put out for SEO. Speaker 1: It's so cool. Speaker 2: So it's just a different way of doing it. Stop guessing about your keywords. Steve Wiideman reveals how to use ChatGPT with Search Console, Reddit, and your reviews to build expert-level outlines. Speaker 1: Holistically, I think the digital marketing landscape's changed. I gave a talk last week at Digimarcon about how How we can start incorporating SEO into what other emerging platforms are coming out that people are using like ChatGPT and talking about the new blended, the continuously blended search results. Instead of the blue link, black text, now we've got forums and discussions. We've got local content that's showing up in there. And then the eCom side, you've seen all the different modules of different products that you'd see in a single page of search. So it's the landscape's different and it's not just performing a search, choosing a result and purchasing and being done. I feel like now they're performing a search and then they're going to go out to look for reviews on Reddit, on YouTube, on Instagram, wherever they happen to sort of verify that this is a product that they want to purchase or a company they want to purchase from. And then they might even do some extra research and go back to the ChatGPT and perplexities and so forth and ask questions. Who are the best? How does this product compare to alternatives? What are the alternatives? They're going to be performing those types of, especially on higher end products that aren't just a $10 iPad cover or something, right? So, and then they'll come back and do a branded search. I know Danny Sullivan talked about this recently and people immediately, SEOs, immediately took it out of context and said, so you're giving favor to big brands. He's like, no, I'm not saying brands, bigger brands get higher rankings. What he was trying to convey was that when people are searching for your brand more often, especially in correlation to the keywords they're using before and after your brand, that there's a signal there. And it's not even a brand, right? Your brand is an entity in their database, in their knowledge graph, right? It's an ID. And if that ID becomes more associated with search terms that people use, and they're doing those searches and choosing the brand more often because they recognize it from billboards, from radio, from TV, from banner, from native advertising, that behavioral signal of them choosing you in the search result because they recognize and remember you. has an SEO impact. And so, again, it's not just, hey, you're Amazon, you're a big brand, we're going to give you more prominence. It's because people are choosing Amazon more often than the other listings that they're seeing above the Amazon and moving Amazon up in the search results. So I think when we kind of look at the perspective of the multi-channel approach we need to start thinking about, not just for the LLMs, which we can get deeper into, but also to make sure our prominence is where it needs to be on a Google search. Instead of just having that blue link, black text, now we can be in the map results, we can be in the people also ask, we can be in the video carousel or image carousel or both. We could be in the. You know, the forums and discussions. But to do that, we need to basically assign ownership and accountability to other team members to pay attention to those other platforms, to have a Reddit strategy, to have every page on our website that we want showing up in Google represented across those different platforms. That means having a YouTube video for that page that describes the page, maybe even a YouTube video for each passage or topic or subtopic on that page. We need to have the same representation in Reddit and not just from us but from our customers. Speaker 2: Don't just write for search, write for large language models or LLMs. Steve Wiideman explains how AI is changing what ranking even means. Speaker 1: I think if we're going to win with the way that search is evolving and the platforms that are available to us and the diverse types of results we see in Google, that we need to encourage our patrons, our brand advocates, to share their feedback about the specific products and services they used across more than just Google business profiles, across more than Google Maps. And this is where we have to start being creative and maybe point of sale, you've got some things that say, hey, do you have a Reddit account? We'd love to hear why you think we're the best store for, right, and put it Best store for, not telling them to use that, but hinting that you want them to use phrases like that. So when people are performing prompts, like, what's the best store to find X? It goes across all its different potential citation sources. It looks at Yelp. It looks at Reddit. It looks at ChipAdvisor and says, gee, everywhere we looked in these different places, it says that this brand is the best store for And so it must be a good answer. And suddenly we start to see ourselves, you know, in the LLMs simply because the citations are coming from a diverse array of platforms instead of just being myopic on Google. So I feel like there's, and I'm sure it's the exact same for product, right? As product AI and ChatGPT now doing shopping ads and everything, as users are starting to do more commerce with LLMs, I think it's important for us to continue that same sort of pattern of behavior and shift our thinking from just give us a review on Trustpilot or specific review sites that instead we broaden it to The other areas that AI and AI overviews and AI mode that's coming soon to Google are going to account for. Speaker 2: Do you want to future-proof your content? Steve Wiideman walks through the strategy that he uses to keep his pages ranking even years later. Speaker 1: It's not going to be an easy transition because the world has been pretty easy. Fundamental SEO hasn't changed. It's still great content, new links. Influence search behaviors. Those things are fundamental, but we need to also start thinking a little bit beyond search and making sure that when we know our user is going to come back and do a branded search, it's because they've looked in all the places that we've paid attention to outside of Google. And that might mean starting with just a Google Sheet and saying, here's the places we need to pay attention to. What's our game plan going to be? If you're not sure, Shoot, AI is right there. Ask AI. Hey, ChatGPT, could you give me some ideas on ways that I can expand my visibility across these platforms? Oh, and also incorporate some ideas that include all the different pages on our website that drive customers. And then we'll give you a plan. You say, you know what, can you make it a calendar? And then you make it a calendar and then adjust it and mold it into what your content team and your social media teams need to be able to play their part in it and be able to make it usable for them. And that might be a starting place. And in six months from now, you may recycle the whole thing and say, okay, this didn't work this way, but in the process, we learned some things. Let's take those learnings and mold it into version two. And then a year from now, you'll do the same thing and you'll merge it into version three. But at least you took the time to start with a simple little spreadsheet Across all those different features we mentioned and all those LLMs that we know are important, measure what our baseline is right now for some of those important prompts that people are going to make, and then just continue to do that, maybe every six months. Maybe if you want to be aggressive, do it once a month. But I think it's important for us to, again, get our mind out of our myopic view of Google being the end-all. Yes, people still start with Google and search isn't going anywhere. They only lost One to three percent of their market share, 40% of people didn't move over to ChatGPT. Literally, Google only lost one to three percent. And when I did my research on it, I'm like, well, how is that? I use ChatGPT all the time. It's because people are still going to Google and they're typing in ChatGPT into Google. 550,000 people in March searched for ChatGPT login. So they're still using search, even though they're experimenting with and using these LLMs. You know, and ChatGPT obviously has to share a voice from the LLM side of things, but in the scheme of search market share, Google's still at the top, and they only lost one to three percent. Some of that went to Bing and Copilot, thanks to their partnerships with OpenAI and, you know, the things that they're doing to expand their product with those partnerships. But honestly, people are still using search. It hasn't changed. So again, let's look at making sure we're doing those fundamental things. But let's also start putting some time and energy into exploring ways that we can get our content out there and get our brand ambassadors out there talking about our content. Across Reddit and Quora and all the places that we don't often think about. Speaker 2: Very good. Okay. It's the bottom of the hour and like, well, first of all, if you're listening for the first time, we do something different at the top of the hour and that's called the Wheel of Kelsey. So if you're interested in the Wheel of Kelsey, all you have to do is hashtag Wheel of Kelsey, tag two people, you'll get a second entry. And today, Steve, what do we got as a giveaway? Speaker 1: We're going to do an SEO review. This new SEO review that we do in 2025 includes a little bit of visibility tests in these LLMs we talked about. We're going to take a look at tech and content and off-page a bit, but we're also going to take a look at how you're optimizing your site for the way that people are going to be using prompts in the future, particularly hands-free. Yeah, it takes us a few hours to put together and we'll need your website and some business objectives and within a couple hours, we'll have a report for you to show you kind of what your current state of SEO is. Speaker 2: That's fantastic. So if you're interested in our prize today, which you should be, it's hashtag WheelOfKelsey, tag two people and you'll get a second entry. Kelsey, let's go to one of our sponsors. Tired of negative reviews dragging down your star rating in sales? Traceuse has your back. Traceview specializes in removing non-compliant Amazon reviews the right way. I'm talking 100% compliant with Amazon Terms of Service. And with over 11,000 reviews removed for 400 plus brands, they know what it takes to protect your reputation and boost conversions. And here's the best part. You only pay for performance. That means you only pay for reviews they successfully remove. No contracts, no monthly fees, just results. Plus, as a Lunch with Norm listener, you get two reviews removed for free. Ready to clean up your reviews? Visit TraceFuse.ai. That's TraceFuse, T-R-A-C-E F-U-S-E dot A-I. Steve, you know... I've had a lot of people talk to me when I go to events just about SEO. Simple SEO. They don't know anything about it. They try to get somebody either from Upwork or Fiverr or wherever and nothing's ever worked out. Now, they don't know what to ask. They don't know what they're looking for. They're just taking it for granted that these people that they're hiring know their stuff. But can you help us? Can you give us a few questions or is there anything that we should look for when we're looking for a good SEO agency, somebody that knows 2025 and not 1995? Speaker 1: You know, it's funny. I actually started a project several years ago called SEO Verified where we were basically giving a whole guide away of questions that you would want to ask your agency. I haven't touched the site in years. I imagine it might still be functioning, but one of the things that we would do is ask pre-qualifying questions. Things such as, in the content side of things, is do you use AI? Do you own the assets you work on, or are they our assets that you're our wingman on? In other words, if we decide to cancel with you, are you going to extortion us and take down everything that you've done? That's a really important one. Same thing with analytics. If you're doing any sort of analytics, do we own those analytics or do they go away when we stop working together? If you're doing Google Ads for us, is it your Google Ads account or is it ours and you're a manager of it? So those types of ownership questions are by far the most important. And then, of course, just kind of your standard best practices. Tell me a little more about how your team handles technical optimization and then bounce that list off of ChatGPT and say, does this sound right to you, right? That's a simple way to find out if the technical things that they plan to work on are aligned with what you want to do. I would also ask about Modern SEO things such as the use of structured markup and schema. How is that used and is it a big part of what you do? Tell me about your content development process. Did it include all those things we talked about earlier, right? Did it include looking at our current data in Search Console? Did it include third-party tools like SEMrush? Did it include questions from Answer the Public or elsewhere? Those are also important. The most important to me, more than anything aside from ownership, is going to be off page because that's something that could get us penalized if they're doing some shady link building or anything that could hurt or reflect on us negatively as trying to manipulate search results. It can take years to recover from and most businesses that get penalized by Google never fully recover ever. In some cases, they have to start a new brand, a new website, and promise themselves they're never going to hire a link builder ever again. The other thing I'd recommend is get a consultant to join the call with you. The consultant will likely do it for free with the hopes that they'll earn your trust and you'll want to do a retainer with them down the road. So reach out to a seasoned SEO consultant and say, hey, I'm having some calls with some agencies I want to work with. I'm just nervous we're going to get taken advantage of. Can I have you jump on the call and play our director of digital for us or our director of SEO just so that we know that somebody who knows their stuff can be there to see through any kind of misleading information? I think that's a really smart thing to do to have a wingman there. And if the consultant does help you and they do a good job and you want to make sure that they're keeping the agency honest, consider giving them a retainer. Right now, there's a lot of need for value, especially in the U.S. because of the state of the economy and everything. So you've got so much room to negotiate where two or three years ago you didn't. So work with your agencies and your consultancies and say, this is what I have budgeted. Will you work with that? I know you said this is going to be X amount, but this is all I have. If you ask at this moment in time anyway, most likely you're going to get a yes or they're going to continue to negotiate with you at a much lower rate than they initially proposed. So I would take those two things into consideration for sure. But yeah, SEOVerified was the site we created. Available, shoot me an email or just DM me. I'm seosteve everywhere and I'll get you that guide. It's literally, you just read through it and ask the questions straight from the document. Speaker 2: So for Amazon sellers or let's say eCom sellers, what are some low-hanging fruit, maybe some opportunities that businesses are just missing out on? Speaker 1: For sure, I would say it's tapping into their existing client base. I feel like once a business gets a sale, they stop. They stop marketing to the people that have already purchased from them and just continue trying to bring in new customers. But they've got this huge, incredible customer base of people who love them. And I think sending messages out and getting them as part of an ambassador program or a loyalty program, you know, where you do giveaways and you do free events and maybe even do some hangouts. We get to hang out with the CEO of the company as part of being an ambassador. In doing that, you create an ambassador checklist of things that are included. Here's some of the benefits of being one of our brand ambassadors. Here's some of our events. Here's a private Slack workspace that we have and some other really cool things that would encourage customers who love you to be part of that. And then you're like, hey, we've got a new product. We'd love to give you our ambassador discount to check it out. It might be at cost, so you don't make any money, but you get the ambassadors to get out there, purchase, give reviews, and then when they do test it, you send out that email a week later, and you're like, here's some places that you can share what your feedback was, and here's some samples of what you might say, and you wordsmith that to make sure it addresses LLMs and prompts. You know, as part of that feedback, so I think I think embracing your own customer base of people who purchased from you in the past, getting them to be part of an ambassador program and getting them to share their feedback across all those different channels. It's going to play a huge role in how we affect our appearance when we continue to untether ourselves from our cell phones and do voice queries with prompts and conversational searches. All of our customers are going to be out there sharing all sorts of great information and suggestions for us that will lead the LLMs to suggest us as an answer. I think that's where I would start. Speaker 2: Okay, and over the last five or six months, we've heard about schema. And there's a lot of people who don't know exactly what it is. We've talked to them about going to schema.org or telling or checking it out. Making sure that they have Schema properly set up for their websites. Why is it so important? When we talk about Schema, could you explain exactly what it is and what are some of the opportunities that businesses have that they're not using right now? Speaker 1: Sure. That's a really good question. And Schema has been around for a while now. I wouldn't go to schema.org, though, if you're unfamiliar with it, unless you're a developer. You're just going to look at it and throw up. I would definitely work with your content and tech teams and get them to provide a strategy for you. Or, here's something that I did that I thought was really fun. I took all the documentation I could find across schema.org and across Search Engine Land and Search Engine Journal. I'm a web.dev, and I dumped it all into a custom GPT, which if you've never done that, you just go to the top of your ChatGPT, and you click the right little icon up there with your picture on it, and you create a GPT, and you say, I want to create a GPT that helps me to become a schema, or that you become a schema expert. I'm going to dump a lot of documents in here, and I want you to reference them and create a structured markup plan for me, and then it'll spit everything out for you once you've created it. What it comes down to basically is just some extra code that you add to different elements of your page that help. Search engines understand a little bit more about what you offer. This is an image. These are FAQs. These are breadcrumbs. And they can use those in different ways. They could use them to enhance your search appearance, to give you some rich results, which affect that third principle we talked about. Remember, content links and search appearance. So if we can get star ratings in our search results because we used schema.org slash rating, we're going to stand out. And where the competitor just has a blue link, black text, we're going to have a blue link, black text, and star results. We might even have additional breadcrumbs or thumbnails of images, excuse me, and videos that we have on our page just by adding a little bit of extra code that says here's, you know, what these elements are. Now that part for the rich results and click-through rate, to me, that's like gold. That's what's ultimately going to help us to dominate number one. But there's also another part that we don't often consider and that is making it clear to the search engines what the meaning of a word is. Sometimes, a word has 20, 30 different meanings. It could be a product. It could be a service. It could be a noun. It could be a verb. It could be used in so many different ways. When we use some markup to basically say, if you see this word on our page, search engine, this is what we mean by it. And sometimes we'll reference a Wikipedia URL. It's not a link, it's just a reference in the code that says when we use this word, this is the definition that we're referring to. Now what this is gonna do is this helps Google in particular in building their knowledge graph. When they're looking across their knowledge graph and trying to find pages that have topics and entities, And you're specific about what your topic and entity is by using that. That's same as markup. This is a thing and this thing is about or it mentions. I'd say about is probably more important. But by doing that, you're basically helping build the knowledge graph and help you to become a resource when they're going to decide who they want to show in the search results. Now, there isn't a direct SEO or organic impact to adding markup. You're not going to add code to your website and suddenly see higher rankings. But what you are doing is planting a seed and basically filling Google's database with more information about you to qualify to appear for a broader array of keywords and topics and entities and needs and intents and prompts, right? So down the road, as they start to show you more often, if you stand out in the search results and get clicked on and are the final result, that is going to play that correlation role in helping you to rank in the search results. So I would explore doing structured markup across every page of your website. The homepage is going to be about the organization and the organization, all the information about who the company is, when it was founded, everything and anything about the company. And then you might also use, you know, some structured markup for words on the homepage and maybe some other features and videos on your supported pages. A product category page, for example, that's a listings page. It's got a list of all the different products that you offer. That's the markup you'd use basically as a collection page to tell the search engines this is a collection page with all these different products. The product page is just going to be a product schema. So it's schema.org slash uppercase P product. And it's going to contain all sorts of different attributes that could play into the rich results. Every attribute on that particular product could be something like the product rating, it could be size, dimensions, all sorts of unique helpful information that technically you should be using anyway for organic SEO. But now adding it to the market puts it in a structured table that feeds into a database that allows you to appear for, again, a broader array of how people are going to be searching, especially when they're using prompts, when they're saying something, I'm looking for a product, That's three feet high, that's the color black, and is the 2025 edition. And if you've added all those attributes to your page and to the markup, the search engine is just going to know to show you more often than you would have had you not had those elements anyway. So I think structured markups are a really beneficial way to help search engines. And LLMs don't directly use them, even though I've heard that Copilot still reads through Copilot's Microsoft's LLM. They actually still read through and use some of the structured markup, but for the most part, it's really for the search engines more than it is for the LLMs, but it's still, again, something that you can experiment with. I wouldn't do any sort of immediate measurement of it. Like I mentioned, I would probably plan something out six, 12 months down the road and see how it's benefited your click-through rates in Search Console for keywords that you know are an important part of that play. I would look at screenshots of what your listing looks like now and then again in six months to a year just to see what the listings look like in the search results. Maybe look at the competitors as well because maybe you're doing the wrong, focusing on the wrong markup. Maybe it should be rating. Maybe it should be something else, but it absolutely should have a strategy that includes the markup you should use across every template of your page. Oh, one big one is article. If you want to show up in Google Discover, having the article, schema.org slash article, a prerequisite is making sure you have an image on that page that's at least 1200 pixels wide. If you've got some new content, some new trending, here's what's new, here's what's happening, check out our new whatever, and you've got a blog post like that or an article, use that article markup, use an image that's 1200 pixels in width, and you might start to see some really significant traffic in Google Discover. And some correlations from what I understand Is that if you start showing up more often in Google Discover and people are interacting with your your listing when they're searching without using keywords by, you know, doom scrolling their Google Discover, there could be an actual correlation to higher rankings in Google Web results. There's not a lot of data around it, but some folks, really smart folks I talked to, did some testing and they saw when they had greater visibility in Discover, they got higher rankings in web search. So something to test. Make sure all of your articles and pages, especially those that have new information, updates, headlines, things like that, that they do contain that article markup and have that image. Speaker 2: Very good. I didn't know about that. I'll have to go back and check if we have those images at 1200 pixels. Another thing, and you just talked about Knowledge Graph, but I want to even go back one further. That's the importance of becoming an authority. Google has something called Google Knowledge Panel, and that's where if you apply Google, authorize it manually, I believe, that you are an expert or an authority in this area. And then you get something that looks a little bit different. It's panel view. So if you take a look at maybe an author or a movie star or probably Steve Wiideman, you're gonna come up with, when you're typing the name, It'll say Steve Wiideman and it'll say SEO expert and then it'll go down to an actual panel that would be related to him showing that he's an authority in X. And that'll be images or an image carousel, who you are, what you're all about or what the company or brand is all about. And then it'll just have a, usually the top page or the top ranking would be if you have a Wikipedia page or LinkedIn, and then it just goes down and shows everything that you're about. This is really critical right now. It's important to be an authority and you could be an authority like in your personal profile, your brand and your company. But getting this, for me anyways, you might not agree, but I think it's so important. A lot of people and brands aren't doing this. And then there's something once you get it called the Google Knowledge Graph, which you just talked about. Can you tell us a little bit about the two and how they, you know, work together? Don't forget to subscribe and leave me a comment saying I subscribe and I'll personally reply to your comment. Speaker 1: Sure. Well, the Knowledge Graph is something I think Google put it out in 2013 when they started to focus a little bit more on things, not strings. It was an important evolution. I think it came out of the Hummingbird update right around the same time. It was interesting because we hadn't seen this before in this format where it just showed so many different pieces of information about a single entity. Getting into the Knowledge Graph is the first way to make that happen. We talked about entities a minute ago. If you take who you are and what you do and you put it into a phrase or ask ChatGPT to tell you what your entity would be based on what you do, and then you do a site operator in Google, site, mysite.com, space, and then put in parentheses that thing, right, what it is you do, maybe you're a personal injury lawyer in Michigan was one example I used recently. And then you do that query and you don't see any content on your website that contains that particular entity, that phrase, then there's an opportunity. What do we want to be known for? What do we want to be seen for? And making sure not just on your website, but we just talked about a minute ago, using emerging platforms and Reddit and YouTube and all these other places. What we want to do is decide on what our entity is and what our scope of core services are and making sure everywhere online, including our social media buy lines, we use that entity and our core services Consistently, everywhere, now the bots are going to crawl through the web and Googlebot in particular is going to find your name, your business name, which is an entity, and it's going to find those other entities all over the web because you've strategically placed them everywhere and hopefully your clients have said the same things about you everywhere and other people and brand advocates and so forth. And then boom, almost immediately, Google's now got an entity for your entity ID, an actual physical number for your brand. And it knows, kind of like when you're brainstorming anything and you have the lines and the dots and the circles, it's figured it out. Everywhere I see this particular entity, I see these other entities that help define it. There you go, some clusters here. So, start by getting that consistent. I would start by the byline of your social profiles and of your author bylines and the company information in CrunchBase and Dun & Bradstreet and everywhere, Wikipedia, everywhere online that your business is mentioned, those entities should be prominent and consistent. If you want to become semantic to it now that that helps with the knowledge graph part of it. The panel is, you know, of course, drive from that knowledge graph. It comes from the information it has about that particular entity. And if your name is more prominent than someone with a similar name. And you've got a book or authorship and you've got social media profiles. And so if you've got that consistent, then like you said, you should be able to earn that great knowledge panel. But the Wikipedia definitely plays a part in that. There's a guy, I was actually talking to him this morning, named Jason Barnard. And he works for a company called CaliCube with a K. And he's just absolutely brilliant when it comes to knowledge panels. And he's got a lot of great content on his website about it as well. Jason Barnard, if you look him up, you should see his knowledge panel. Dig into a little bit of his content and watch some of his videos if you really want to dominate and have your name just kind of own that knowledge panel at the top of the search results. The other way I would reverse engineer it is look for other folks in your industry and their knowledge panels, if they have them, and look at where those citations are. Is it that they're active on Instagram and using some of those core phrases? Is it that they have a Wikipedia page and it's got specific structured data in there that we want to emulate with our own personal brand? Is it that their image, the same photo, is across all the different places where their authorship bios are instead of using, you know, a different image for everything that you do. Keep the same consistent image so that, you know, our entity correlates to that image and it knows to show that in the knowledge panel. Do that little bit of a setup hygiene project of your own. And then if you want to continue nurturing it, just make sure every month you're doing something, whether you're submitting content and articles or podcasts, whatever you happen to be doing, just making sure that your name and those particular entities and service scopes and product scopes are omnipresent and you'll just continue pouring water and sunlight on it and you'll continue to own that knowledge panel at the top of search. Speaker 2: So even for the podcast or for an image or for an article, when you're talking about being omnipresent, you're talking about repurposing, putting it onto different social media channels or different blog platforms or just to get it out. Speaker 1: It's a matching game and the more matches you have. This is kind of funny. Back in the day when I used to optimize for SEO expert, one of the things I would show folks is that if you search for my name in quotes, you can still do this. Search for my name in quotes, Steve Wiideman, and then in quotes, space and in quotes put SEO expert. Back in the day, you would see some 14,000 citations of my name in the phrase SEO expert. It was a semantic play to try to continue to support my relevancy for that keyword. I became semantic to that phrase. So the more we put our company and the specific things that we want to appear for out on the web, As close together as we can, the more Google can make that association. The more verbatim we make it, the more data matches. If it's inconsistent, just like in local business, if our address is a little bit off, they might not rank us as well in Google Maps. I'm not really sure if you're on East 2nd Street or West 2nd Street. I think I'm going to show this other listing instead, but if it says, every single time I find this location, it says East 2nd Street, so I have confidence now. And that confidence is, you know, what the search engines and LLMs are going to use before they provide a result, especially when the prompt includes fact check, right? Speaker 2: Yeah, that's very smart. I mean, I wanted to, we could have talked all podcasts just on this. And you know what? I got through a small grouping of questions I wanted to talk to you about. I have tons more, but we're already at the top of the hour or at the bottom of the hour in this case. But Steve, you know, It's always great, not only because you're such a... A nerd? No, such an expert in everything. You're so humble. We're gonna head over to the Wheel of Kelsey. Before we do that, let's have a word from our sponsor and then we'll be back for Steve and he can give us all his contact info. Unknown Speaker: Start, scale, exit, repeat. I'm Colin C. Campbell and I've started over a dozen multi-million dollar companies in the last 30 years. I spent the last 10 years writing the book Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat to figure out what it is that these serial entrepreneurs do over and over again. We interviewed over 200 people. We created 58 chapters, over 30 illustrations, 180 callouts, and we quite frankly made this book for the ADHD entrepreneur. It's been number one on Amazon in 15 categories and has won 12 awards globally. Get your book today either on ebook, paperback, hardcover, or audible on Amazon or your favorite bookstore. Speaker 2: All right, I forgot one thing. It looks like Simon had a question or a comment, Kels. Unknown Speaker: Yes, so Simon's saying there's so many pieces to this eCom jigsaw. I get that we can ask ChatGPT to research and provide step-by-step strategies. Why can't we employ AI just to execute these GPT results? Speaker 1: Ah, so you're gonna talk about agents before we jump into it. Speaker 2: Simon, that'll be one of our next podcasts. Speaker 1: Yeah, but that's definitely going to be around using some of these newer agents. And there are platforms out there that are starting to really build these out where you're not just doing the prompts and so forth. They're doing a lot of that grunt work for you. You put in a URL, as long as you've connected your Shopify sites or your WordPress site, whatever you happen to be using. As long as you've made those connections, it's going to make some suggestions and you can say, give me a new one, give me a new one. Oh, I like that one. Implement, and it'll make that, it'll swap that change out for a title tag or a description or a product detail. I think SearchAtlas is one of them. I know all the big SEO platforms are starting to develop agents that allow you to do some of that grunt work. WordLift, I believe, has one as well. They do a lot of the schema markup. I can do some of that for you so you don't have to manually implement it. But yeah, we'll definitely do that for another episode. If you're cool with it, Norm, we'll talk about agents in more detail. That'll be next level. Custom GPT, information, agents, execution. Perfect. Speaker 2: All right. And I'm looking forward to it. Okay. Let's go to the Wheel of Kelsey and then we'll come back with the winner. Speaker 1: So, this is for last week's winner. Again, we've changed some things up. So, we do the giveaway today on the next episode. Speaker 2: Right. So, this is for who? Speaker 1: Daniella Bolesman's audit for your Amazon listing. Speaker 2: Very good. Speaker 1: I'm going to shuffle these up and let's see who last week's winner is. And it looks like. Speaker 2: All right, congrats Barry. I was just talking to Daniele yesterday and that's an awesome giveaway. So congrats. Unknown Speaker: All right. And again, everyone who entered for Steve's giveaway today, you've been entered and we're going to be announcing it next week. Speaker 2: There's already a ton. So I wonder how many are going to be there. All right, Steve, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and especially short notice. Unknown Speaker: Steve, do you have any contact info? Speaker 1: As I mentioned, my handle is seosteve, pretty much everywhere. You can find me online. If there's anything that you want, just throw a question by me anytime. I love to help people. As I mentioned, as Norm mentioned, I do a lot of teaching. I don't do it for the money. I love to help. So if there's anything that you just want me to take a look at, and say, hey, why am I not ranking for this? Or why is this competitor hitting me up? I love a challenge. So I'd love to help. Speaker 2: Very good. All right, Steve. Well, thanks again for coming on such short notice. We loved it. Great content today and can't wait till we talk about agents. Speaker 1: I look forward to it. Thanks, guys. Speaker 2: All right. See you later. Kels, do we have anything that people need to know about today? Unknown Speaker: No, I don't think so. If you missed entering today's Wheel of Kelsey, it's going to be in our newsletter too. So we put a link there to add yourself to a forum and we just add you to the Wheel that way. Check it out. That's lwn.news. New episodes, the edited episodes are out on Mondays and then our live episodes are always 12 p.m. Today was a little different with 1230, but yeah, 12 p.m. on Wednesdays. You'll get the live episodes here. Speaker 2: Okay, so that's it. Thank you for being part of the community and we will see you next Wednesday at noon. Unknown Speaker: I'm Norman Farrar.