Ep 042- Changes in Search Results
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Welcome to SEO Day Studio with your hosts, the Findability Queen Denise Millet, and the entrepreneur Whisperer, Kim White. This is a space to hear the questions that fellow entrepreneurs have about SEO and get them answered. So many discussions involving techy topics like SEO are loaded with jargon and unnecessary complexity.
So much so that anyone outside the tech industry has difficulty getting to the real meeting inside the information. Denise believes that every entrepreneur can benefit from search engines. Once they hear how they work in a clear and straightforward way. She's on a mission to help entrepreneurs get the content and they spend hours creating included in search engines.
So when their customers search online, they're findable because she believes if they can't find you, they can't do business with you. So stay tuned. The fun starts now.
Welcome to the SEO Day podcast. I am the official mailbag keeper around here, Kim White, and I am joined by the lovely Denise Millet, the Findability queen herself.
Denise, it's great to be here with you today while you help entrepreneurs and business owners across the world with their. SEO questions.
Hey Kim, thanks so much for being here with me today again.
Well, I am honored to be here with you and I dove into the mailbag to see what we had today. And this week's questions are submitted by a fellow entrepreneur who prefers to be anonymous.
So I want to say out loud, if you have questions and you don't want to be acknowledged on the podcast, no worries. Send your questions in, get them answered, and we won't even have to say your name.
That's right.
Question number one. If AI is answering the questions in search engines, will I even show up in search?
Great question. Yes you will. And I think we're all seeing AI show up in a lot of different places and it is providing basic information. But it also provides links within the information sometimes to where it got the information. So the basics might be there. Then it might take stuff from websites and bring that in and it'll show a little link at the bottom.
But the other thing to think about is people are going to figure out, they're going to research, they're going to find out all their data about things and their information. Then they're going to go to the place where they're going to look for somebody to help them. And they're going to use different keywords for that.
So if your keywords are in tune with someone looking for your service, or your product or your business, then when they go looking for that, they will find you. Okay. But right when they're doing research, they're looking for something different. They're answering a different question. So yes is the short answer and all that.
Other is the long answer.
Thank you, Denise. So question number two, what does organic results mean?
Okay. a search engine results page, or we call serp sometimes is, is what's made up. After you put your words into a search, it builds a page with results for you. Right. It puts ads in there now, puts AI in there.
It puts images, puts videos. It puts organic results, which are the listings from our content that we didn't pay for ads for. So this is all the things that the robots go out and read on all the website and they put it into their big catalog of information. Marking what it's all about, and then when someone searches for it, they fill in the gaps in the results page with organic things that they found something not paid for.
Got it.
Well, question number three, Denise. Do keywords still make a difference?
Yes, absolutely. Keywords are your connection to. Your people, they're the people that are sitting down at the keyboard or they're speaking into their phones and they're actually using words to make a request. You using those key words in your content is what makes the connection.
So you still need to think about what your people are looking for and be, aware of. What their intention is and why they came and sat down and what their language might be given their age and what their, who they are and all this thing. So you really need to pay attention to that.
It's not just looking up at an encyclopedia to get something. This is the things that are going to bring them right to you, to what you do. So, yes, it's very important.
Well, let's head over to a word from our sponsor for today.
This episode is brought to you by the findability Queen Denise Millet. Visit her YouTube channel youtube.com/@findabilityqueen for her collection of short videos, answering questions about findability and SEO for entrepreneurs every day.
Such great questions already this morning, and I want to say, Denise, thank you for answering them. Let's head back into the changes to search results. That seems to be some of the topic today. So question number four, where does the AI info come from in search?
Okay. Every search engine has its own set of data that it works from, and then it pulls from.
For search engines, they were typically going out to every webpage. They were allowed to read of any importance and just scraping information and reading information to find what they needed to fill in their search results page. So you can imagine they've been doing that for years. So they probably have a lot of information out there.
But I would also say that they want current. Information, up to date information, the latest information. So they're going to continue to look for sources that add to what they already have to make it relevant and make sure it's relevant. So you're going to see things like, if you look for taxes, there might be a piece, a snippet from the IRS website that you could then link on and go to, or they might hyper, they might highlight something within a paragraph and put a link to it that shows you where it came from.
They're also doing something different is they're providing results and then on the right hand side they'll have listings, like little slices of websites that match the idea of what you were talking about. So you, when you transfer over to real people, they will get there. So we don't know exactly where it all comes from, but we know that they've been collecting information for a long time and now they can connect it all together and then they go out and look for more.
It's exhausting to think about. I'll to say, well, our last question today, question five. There are so many ads in search now. How do I compete with them?
Yes, there are a lot of ads, but I'm going to say that people trust real people. So regardless of how many ads there are, there are some people that are going to want that brand name, whatever, because that's what they were really looking for.
But there are other people, if you do your keywords well and you're diligent about it, they're going to be looking for a person, they're going to want to get to someone they can trust. So they're going to continue to look until they get it. And that's not often found in sponsored results. And then there are some people that.
That don't trust ads and never have. And never will. So they're always going to look for regular people 'cause that's what they want and. What's going to set you apart is using the keywords and using their language, everyday language, not some AI stuff that's put together by a machine, which we can all tell what that's like now.
So I think it's going to set you apart. If you continue to build on it and provide more and more content like that, you're going to be a choice for people of a real person, and you're going to be fine.
Thank you for answering these questions, Denise. We're going to close the mailbag for today. We'll jump back in next week, but you did a great job as always, answering questions about SEO and all the things it surrounded, is what I'm going to say.
Thanks again for doing this with me, Kim. Thank you for our question, submitters. We appreciate you. I also want to help people with their keywords because that's a very important piece that you need to be successful with. SEO, is to get your keywords working for you. So I have a guide called Quickly Find Your Perfect Keywords, the Simple and Easy Guide to Being Findable, and the link is in the show notes.
Get your copy today and help you find some more keywords that'll work for your business. So until next time.
Thank you for joining Denise and Kim in the SEO Day studio for today's discussion. If you would like one of your SEO questions answered in the future episode, head on over to denise Millet.com/questions to let us know. The link is also in the show notes. We hope you enjoyed listening to this episode of the SEO Day podcast.
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