Speaker 1: We're going through a period at the moment that's seeing some of the biggest changes in SEO in well over a decade. And in today's video, we're going to show you not just how to survive, but how to thrive. So we're going to cover this in two parts. Firstly, we're going to go through three major changes that are happening in SEO right now. And then we're going to help you plan for each of these to build them into your strategy so that you can use them to your benefit over the next year. Change number one, AI and SGE. For sure, AI is the buzzword of the day, but it is transforming not just the way that marketers do marketing, but also how search engines work and present their results. And Google's SGE or search generative experience is probably the most profound change that we marketers need to be aware of. And here's how it works. When you search for something, rather than seeing the regular organic results down here, you get this big AI powered snapshot at the top. This is really significant because rather than getting a whole list of websites that people can scroll through, the searcher basically sees three links. And of course, this means that if you're not in those three links, you could see a significant drop in traffic. The race is on. Over the longer term, SGE could actually change how people use search engines because it allows you to have a conversation with Google. It allows you to ask follow up questions and ask much more personalized searches than you would if you are only looking to surface results from websites. And of course, if we as marketers want to take advantage of this, we need to be optimizing our content for that type of search and to get it shown in this carousel section at the top of the page. This is one of our key battlegrounds over the next year. But I think this is an incredibly exciting opportunity. Let me show you an example. So here I'm looking at search for what is a USDA loan. Now USDA is the United States Department of Agriculture and they basically guarantee certain mortgages in rural areas. In the regular organic results, the USDA is ranking position one and it's ranking position three, which is kind of what you'd expect, right? Because what is a USDA loan? Who knows better than the USDA? But here's where it gets exciting for marketers because the USDA is not linked to in this section the carousel at the top of the SGE results. So if I'm a mortgage broker or I'm some business that benefits from ranking for USDA loans, finally, I get a chance to leapfrog the USDA site that's been ranking at the top of Google for ages, get my business featured here and pick up some of that traffic. Now of course, Google may change this and the USDA may be ranking all the time. That's not really what I'm talking about here. What I'm talking about is the fact that SGE seems to use slightly different ranking factors to the regular organic search results. We've covered this in more detail in our webinar all about SGE. But this is a really exciting opportunity for any business that is always looking at the top authority sites in their space ranking for everything saying, how can we beat them? Well, here's an opportunity to beat them. If they're not even thinking about optimizing for SGE, you can just skip them completely and start picking up way more traffic than they will be from this new change. Now we're going to cover exactly how to plan for this in just a minute. But before we do that, the second major change that we're seeing over the next year is short content ranking. Yes, best practice wisdom in SEO is always that you need to provide long content on a page if you want it to rank on Google. So everyone's been writing ultimate guides, answering all of the possible questions that people might have about a topic in order to get them ranking on the first page. But over time, we've started to notice a shift where actually Google is starting to reward in some cases, shorter content instead. Sticking with our rural mortgages, here's a bunch of website pages that are ranking well for rural mortgages. This is quite a high commercial intent term, so it's going to be very valuable. And usually, historically, we would have expected to see medium to long pages ranking for this. But take a look at the variance in content length. This is the sort of page that we'd normally expect to rank for this. It's very, very long, loads of detail. We've got FAQs all answered in detail. We've got statistics, all that type of stuff. A very, very long comprehensive page. But sometimes, maybe that's too long. Maybe you don't need the entire history of the universe. You just want a really simple, straightforward page. Well, this page is also ranking, and it is incredibly straightforward. We've got a couple paragraphs of text here. We've got a testimonial, a bit of related info, and then that's pretty much it, a really short page. Now, here's a mid-length page that's ranking for this phrase. It's all about how to get a rural mortgage. We can see that there are lots of sort of related questions here, and then we've got a CTA at the end. So that's a pretty mid-length page. But then look at this one. This one actually has no real sort of long-form content at all. It's just a couple of sections of bullet points, and that's it. Now, here's the important thing to note. All of these pages answer the searcher's question. Some answer it in a long way, others answer it in a short way. But they all serve the searcher, and Google seems to be rewarding that. Again, we're going to come back on exactly what you need to do with this information in just a minute. But first, big change number three, Google Perspectives. This is one of my favorite changes to SEO, but nobody really seems to be talking about it. Now, this is only visible at the moment on mobile, in the US, or using a US VPN on Chrome or on a Google app. But this is already out there. Google has already launched this, it's testing and it's collecting feedback. Here's how Google Perspectives works. When you make certain types of searches, you see these filters up at the top of the page. Now, we're used to seeing the filters like shopping or videos or images or news, but you'll notice that for some searches, there's a new filter tab called Perspectives. And when you give that a tap, what you'll see is user-generated content. So here we can see a fairly typical Perspectives result, where we've got some long-form YouTube videos, we've got some Reddit results, we've got short-form videos, we've got some TikToks, we've got some Quora, questions and answers in some cases. But all of this is individual people's Perspectives, rather than branded content or, you know, TechCrunch doing a roundup of the best rowers. This is all individual people's content or discussions. You'll also notice some of this type of thing making its way into the regular search. For example, if we just scroll down the regular search results page, we'll see this Discussions and Forums section down here, which has some links to Reddit. And we're noticing Google testing more of this Perspectives content in the regular search results, just as it does, for example, by showing videos in the regular search results, as well as on the Videos tab. Now, I suspect that this is Google sort of hedging against SGE, feeling a bit impersonal for some people. If you watch different types of people's search, you'll notice that some people prefer to go to really high authority sources that have done a big roundup and evaluated all the options. Whereas, sometimes, some people want to go to a whole bunch of individual people's Perspectives and do that filtering themselves. SGE seems to be way more suited to the first category, collecting and aggregating all of the information on the internet and providing you with a summary. Whereas, Perspectives is more about the second category. It enables people to hunt through and find the right information for them based on the sort of profile that they see in the results. It's also Google's competitive play against people using TikTok for search. And I think that Perspectives is going to open a new type of SEO for businesses that it's relevant for. A type of SEO where businesses need to focus on the user-generated content that's being produced about their products and services, where they need to spend time in Reddit and Quora answering people's questions because those questions might find their way into search. A type of SEO where businesses need to incentivize customers to create YouTube Shorts or TikToks about their experience with the products and services in order to get them ranking in these types of searches. So, again, we're going to come back to this and how to plan for it in the next section. So, it's great to know about these three changes, but how do we actually plan for them? How do we make the most of them to make sure that we're seeing the growth in our SEO over the next year? Well, let's start with SGE. Here's my recommended plan of action. Step one, sign up for SGE. To do this, you need to go to Google Labs, just search on Google for Google Labs, and you need to be using either a US VPN or you need to be based in the US. This will allow you to sign up for the SGE Search Labs experiment. Once you've done this, you can use Google Chrome to start experimenting with SGE. Get a feel for what sort of searches in your space are bringing up SGE results. Click on the links to see which sort of websites are being rewarded and what are the snippets of content on those pages that SGE is referencing. Your goal in all of this is just to collect information to get a feel for how SGE is working. The next step is to start testing and doing some experiments with your own site to see what you can do to get your pages ranking. This is what we're doing for our clients at Exposure Ninja. So, we're testing with a few pages on each website just so we can work out what are the levers that we need to pull for this specific website for this specific search to get it ranking in those all-important SGE results. That way, when Google decides to roll out SGE fully, we know, okay, this is what we need to do. This is our game plan for the rest of the website. But if Google changes SGE significantly before rolling it out, we haven't spent a whole bunch of time optimizing every page on the website for SGE rankings. Here at Exposure Ninja, we've been getting some incredible results with our own SGE experiment. So, if you want a hand in optimizing your website and getting ready for SGE, then request a free website and marketing review from the team here. All you need to do is go to ExposureNinja.com forward slash review and tell us a little bit about your business and your digital marketing goals. We'll then take a look at how well your digital marketing is performing for you at the moment. We'll then make a prioritized action plan for you to follow, including SGE, for how to significantly increase the volume of leads that your website generates over the next 12 months. This service is completely free of charge. So, go to ExposureNinja.com forward slash review to apply for your free review today. All right, what about this whole shorter content thing? Do you need to go back through your website and start trimming down all of your ultimate guides into short bite-sized snippets? No, don't do that. Here's how I would suggest approaching this. When you're producing new content, think about the amount of information that you actually need to provide in order to be really useful to customers. Let me show you an example. So, let's say I want to make some banana pancakes. Now, I've noticed that this website here is ranking for banana pancakes and it's just two ingredients. That sounds about right to me. But let's have a look at the information on this page. Okay, how to make two ingredient banana pancakes should be fairly simple. This is probably the sort of thing that you can answer in a couple of sentences, right? Well, yeah. But firstly, I need to scroll through all of this stuff. I need to pass ads. I need to pass pictures. How do these only have two ingredients? I really need to read this section, don't I? Do they really taste like pancakes? I need to read tips on how to flip them. I need to see a presumably affiliate-linked spatula that I could use to flip my banana pancakes. I need to find out about adding nuts and chocolate and more, which does sound good to be fair. And only then do I get to the recipe and the instructions. But look how far I've had to scroll in order to get that information. So it seems to us that Google is starting to realize that sometimes this type of thing isn't the optimal user experience. Sometimes the searcher just wants the information that they're looking for. At the moment though, Google is still rewarding this type of content in some instances. So it's always important to check, even if you think, right, we can answer this question in just a few paragraphs. Check what Google is currently rewarding in your space. If you see shorter content ranking, then by all means, produce a shorter content piece and see if you get the ranking that you're after. But however, if you see that Google is only ranking super long detailed guides with loads of background and next steps, you may still want to take that approach because perhaps Google has decided based on measuring user metrics that actually people do want that additional info. They do want a bit of backstory. They do want to understand the next steps that they could take. The important thing as ever is understanding exactly what your customer or your target customer wants and giving them that so long as Google is rewarding that approach. What about perspectives? Well, again, the first thing to do is experiment with it and see what types of searches are bringing up perspectives results and just spend some time getting familiar with it. For example, is it videos that are coming up? Is it written reviews and discussions? When you find a discussion going on, are people recommending particular brands and could you potentially add your brand to that list of recommendations? And by the way, a bonus of using perspectives is that you'll start to notice some of the things that your customers and potential customers have issue with about your competitors. This can help you with your brand positioning with the FAQs that you answer on your own website and on your product pages as well. For example, if you see in perspectives that people are saying that your competitor's product is good but the quality doesn't really match the price, well, that might be something that you want to emphasize in your own marketing, knowing that there is dissatisfaction in your space. And then you may want to think about how you incentivize your customers to talk about you online. Some businesses are already doing this. For example, Gymshark shares the images posted by its customers ambassadors, giving them that praise and boosting their own social visibility. Whereas Figma has a group of designer advocates. These are full-time salaried positions that create Figma related content which Figma can then share on its own social pages. This has way more credibility than something that looks overly Figma branded because it appears to be user-generated content and it sort of is. So this approach isn't quite an influencer approach because you're not actually paying for their influence, you're just paying for them to produce content for you. But it can be a really powerful way of building up the sort of user-generated content that we're seeing being rewarded in perspectives. But you also might want to work more informally with people that have already been posting about you. So have a look at who's been tagging you on social media and see if you might want to work with them to produce some content targeting ranking and perspectives. So to recap, SG is going to have a huge potential impact on SEO over the next year. Some projections have it decimating up to 95% of a website's organic traffic, but only if you don't adapt to it and figure out how to rank your website pages in that carousel. Next up, we've got Google ranking different lengths of content and you need to be thinking about this, experimenting and seeing what's working in your space that you can then apply to the future content you're producing. Thirdly, we have Google perspectives and the opportunity to get user-generated content ranking for these types of searches, knowing that Google is already starting to show them for some industries. One of the common tasks you'll need to do across all of these new SEO strategies is keyword research. Understanding the words and phrases that your potential customers are searching for is absolutely vital. And in this video, we show you exactly how to do that keyword research using a similar approach to what we do for our clients at Exposure Ninja. Enjoy it. See you soon.