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I recently sat down with Kevin Willett of New England B2B Networking to talk about how AI has evolved over the past year—and whether or not you can reliably use AI tools for SEO. How is AI changing? Kevin: There's been some changes to AI since we last spoke about it, right? Let's talk about them. Emily: We have seen a lot of changes recently with AI. I know you and I had talked about AI in the past. And at that time, ChatGPT, which is a really big AI tool that lots of people are using, wasn't able to regularly connect to the Internet. And now it can if you pay for their premium subscription. You can use ChatGPT to browse Bing right while you're chatting. So I see a lot of people starting to ask, you know, "now that it can connect to the Internet, can this really replace doing a Google search? Can I use it for business research? Can I use it for SEO?" And there's still a lot of unknowns that a lot of people are experiencing around that topic. Which AI tool should someone use? Kevin: I've been seeing commercials for different AI tools. How do I know which one to use? Is one of them better than the other at maybe writing content? Emily: That's a good question. There are some tools that are specifically designed to write content—but they actually all use the same technology that either ChatGPT or one of its biggest competitors, Claude, uses. Those two programs built the backbone of most of the AI writing tools you see today. So, personally, I don't really think it's worth it to pay the premium for an AI writing tool. If you really want to try and do AI writing, I would just use ChatGPT or Claude—you're going to get similar results. Now that said, it's not good for all kinds of writing. It still tends to fall off a cliff, we'll say, when you try to write something long, and there's a reason for that. It's based around probability and how many different variations something can have—it's math. But you can explore using it for really short form things, like an email or maybe the summary for one of your YouTube videos. Can AI help with keyword research? Kevin: Can it help me determine what keywords I should be focusing on? Emily: Unfortunately, no. Not yet. Now if you try to ask ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, or Claude to give you keywords, a lot of times they will produce an answer that has keywords, and it'll tell you how many searches there are per month. And it looks good on the surface, but what you're actually seeing is called hallucination. The AI tool is just making something up. I have tried this many times by asking different AI tools to help me with keyword research, and give me some information about how popular different terms are. They are always wrong. I go and I check these keywords against paid SEO tools that I use. They're wrong, and not by a little bit. I'm talking by, like, tens, if not hundreds of thousands of searches a month wrong in the estimation they're giving. So while you could try using ChatGPT to write headlines for your SEO blog posts, or, like I said, emails, you still need to do your own keyword research using Google or work with someone who can give you a report of keywords. Kevin: It still seems a little scary, to be honest. If I'm relying on it and it's not correct, I'm thinking, "Hey, wow! You know, I'm learning all these new keywords I should be using"…and then find out that I may be putting my efforts in the wrong area. Emily: Yes. It is definitely scary that it can give you answers that seem confident, so to speak, and seem correct, but they're actually really wrong. And I personally am nervous that a lot of busy business owners are going to put time into using this tool, and then creating content and doing SEO things based on what this tool tells them, and they're actually going to be wasting their really valuable time because it's all wrong.

I recently sat down with Kevin Willett of New England B2B Networking to discuss the SEO Trends and Expectations for 2024! Check out the conversation below, then submit a question of your own for me to answer in a future blog or LinkedIn post! Biggest Trend of 2024? Kevin: Today I want to play crystal ball with you. I want to talk about 2024. And what do you see as the trend? So I guess the big the first question, what do you think's gonna be the biggest trend of 2024. Emily: So I think the biggest trend of 2024 is something that we've already seen happening, but we're gonna see on a different scale. And that is, a lot of first person user generated content. So you know, if you get on like, Instagram or Tiktok, of course, you're seeing a lot of ads from brands and content from brands that show people who are apparently their real users using that content. And up to this point, a lot of that has been isolated to those video based social media platforms. But Google has rolled out a new search filter, like where you can click like shopping, or news. It's one of those called perspectives. And when you click on perspectives you get, you're supposed to get real people's first person accounts, and a lot of those come from, say, Reddit, or Instagram, but it is possible going forward for individual websites to show up in there. So I think we're gonna see a lot more companies posting that kind of content on their own owned channels, like on what might be their blog now, or their YouTube page, you're gonna see more first person content rather than slick marketing videos. AI in 2024 Kevin: That'd be nice. So you and I have been joking for the last few months about AI. You know, so what do you think AI is going in 2024? Emily: Well, it's definitely not going away. It's something that people are still interested in. And companies like Google and meta are pouring tons of money into developing it. But in all honesty, it's not quite yet at the point where it's truly going to revolutionize the way we do marketing like in the immediate future. Most of the tools that you and I have access to are still using old data from a few years ago, they're still trying to figure out how to make AI like connect to the internet and pull information in real time. And there's definitely some bumps to be ironed out. So companies like Bing and Google are working on adding AI into search. But it's not a finished product. yet. I think that over the course of the next year, we're gonna need to keep doing what we've been doing in terms of marketing, don't throw out what's been working for you start paying attention to some news about AI and search and AI tools and marketing, and just thinking about how you might leverage them in different ways in the future. And I think by the end of 2024, if we do this crystal ball session, again, I think by the end of 2024, looking forward in the following year, we'll be seeing more of a direct impact in the way we think about marketing in the way we do our marketing. Content: Quantity over Quality? Kevin: Emily, one of the pressures as a business owner is to develop content, you know, to use the Content is king expression was so we hear it all the time, you have to have content gotta keep it out there, that sometimes we don't think about the quality of our content. So might that's my question for you. Is it quantity over quality? Which one should win? Emily: At this point? That's a really good question. At this point, quality should win. So in the past, like even just like 5-10 years ago, quantity was really important. You needed to have a lot in order to be able to like it was evolving. It was a numbers game, it was sheer volume, could you produce more content than your competitors? If yes, then people are gonna see you more. Now that's not the case. Search engines have gotten a lot smarter. The people doing the searching have higher expectations now, because we've all just have years of like crappy content thrown at us. So whether you're creating video, audio written content, stuff for your blog videos for YouTube, you're gonna want to focus on high quality. That's what people want. It's what's going to keep them engaged. And bring it back to AI. My initial testing that I've done around how AI search will work in the future shows that these tools are trained to look for high quality content, they're not looking for fluff. So in the future when people searching Google AI is going to return a result for them and you'll be able to have a conversation with the search engine results page. And those tools are showing all the signs of looking for high quality, not volume.

I recently sat down with Kevin Willett of New England B2B Networking to discuss some of his questions about SEO—and I'm happy to answer yours, too! Check out the conversation below, then submit a question of your own for me to answer in a future blog or LinkedIn post! Does domain type matter? Kevin: One of the things I'm confused by is people's blogs. So sometimes I see, you know, .com/blog, sometimes I see blog dot, and then the domain. Does it matter? Emily: It depends. So it's really good question. And it's not something a lot of people think about. So Good going. If you have a relatively small sites, I would say and smallest relative, I would say, under 1000, total pages, I know 1000 Sounds like a lot. But when you think of a site like Amazon, it is expansive. If your site is is like under 1000 pages, you really want to have it structured. So it's like New England B2B dot com slash blog. And what that does is it includes the blog as part of your main domain. So your homepage, and your blog pages, search engines consider them all to be the same entity. Now, sometimes you'll see some businesses especially really, really, really large companies, like big international enterprises, they'll have, you know, company.com, and then they'll have blog.company.com, those are actually treated as two different websites by search engines. Now, these companies are so big, and they have so many pages on both sites that to them, it doesn't really matter. And it actually helps them. There's certain technologies they can use to manage that high volume of content that work better in that way. But for the average person who's out running a multinational conglomerate, you're going to find it more difficult to get your site to rank for search terms. If you have blog, dot your website instead of your website slash blog. That makes sense. Yes. The first two positions when searching Kevin: So we wouldn't be trying to do that to get the first two positions when someone's searching, is that why we would want to have the blog is kind of a separate entity? Emily: So if you if you're a really big company, and you have the blog and a separate entity, then yes, you could wind up getting the first two positions, because you do technically have two websites, the likelihood of that happening is getting slimmer and slimmer because search engines are getting smarter about figuring out when two sites are owned by the same company. But, you know, that's something that I expect might change some more in the future. But right now, that's what could happen. Backlinks and how they work today Kevin: I got a question about backlinks. Cuz I'm dating myself a little bit. I remember 10 years ago, that was the thing, you know, hey, Emily, put it back link to my website, I'll put a backlink to yours. Whether it was websites like hey, these this list of all my friends and it was 30 or 40 backlinks they're valuable is that is a really as important as we thought it was Emily: 10 years ago, totally right. That was a big thing. I remember having to do that for websites I worked for. And at that time, that was a big thing that was really important. Now, it's less so you know? I get messages on LinkedIn, sometimes from people saying that they're backlink experts, and they can help me get lots of backlinks to my site. Working with those folks can actually hurt your site more than help it in the long run. Because the only kinds of backlinks that are really good for your website today in this year, are ones that come about through more of a public relations exercise. So if you're paying someone to just make sure you get links in a lot of pages, search engines are wise to that they know what's up, they're gonna figure out what they're doing. They're gonna be like, hold on, went from having like 100 backlinks to now 15,000. What what is going on here? Something's not right. So what you want to do is, you know, backlinks are great, but you only want to get them from people you really know like, you give me a site back up on your website, you give me a link back to my web page. And that's great because we know each other, and we're associated with each other. Sometimes I answer questions from journalists and bloggers, and these aren't my answers go into articles posted around the internet. Those are valuable backlinks because I was engaged in that process. If a news site wants to link back to you, great, if a big company loves what you do, and you work with them, and they want to link back to you also great, but you don't have to take time out of your day to try to seek them out. Only focus on the ones that come naturally. What does is mean Google is crawling my site? Kevin: You use an expression that Google is going to crawl my site, and I go okay, okay, no idea what that means. What does it mean? Emily: Okay, well, you know, how we call the Internet, or at least he used to call the Internet, the World Wide Web. So think of a spider web. Google has these little, I say little they're not really real entities, but they are software programs called bots, crawl bots, and they go out onto the internet and they figure out what web pages exist, how they relate to certain topics, how they relate to each other. So we call it crawling. Because back when we called it the World Wide Web, the idea was that these bots were like little spiders that would crawl out on the spider web and collect this information, just like a real spider might collect bugs in its web. That term has persisted today, even though we don't say a world wide web as much. So what happens is, these crawl bots or spiders go out and they start with a link. And then they go to the next link and the next link, and then they jump over here and look at a new topic. And they map how all sorts of information fits together. So search engines know that you and I know each other because I'm linked on your website. And I now share these videos that we do on my website. So it's making those kinds of connections, we now have a string of the web drawn between us. But going back to my previous answer, once again, you don't have to worry about amassing the most possible web the most possible connections, you just want to get really strong ones that's based on people you know, and by talking about topics that you're an expert in.

Lots of marketers collect more data than they really need to. It's hard not to, when it's so easy to set up a tool like Google Analytics and let it run 24/7. But by considering how much data you REALLY need, you can reduce the amount of information you have to sift through, find the key details you need to connect with customers faster, and reduce the amount of information you might be responsible for protecting.

I recently sat down with Kevin Willett to discuss what Google's new AI search engine is all about—and what that might mean for your content marketing. Introducing Google's new AI search feature

SEO is ever-changing, and can be confusing if you're new to the concept. I sat down with Kevin of the "3 Questions With..." show on YouTube to explain the basics.

It may sound strange that an SEO writer doesn’t use Google Analytics on her website, but the truth of the matter is that I don’t need to.