April 21, 2025 • 47 mins
In this episode of The POMCAST, Andres Fernandez, Director of SEO at Premier Online Marketing, breaks down Google’s March 2025 Core Update and what it signals for the future of search—especially for small and mid-sized businesses.
Andres explains how AI Overviews are changing search behavior, pushing many small business websites further down the page or out of view entirely. He discusses the rise of zero-click searches, the increasing influence of large language models like ChatGPT and Grok, and how local businesses can adapt without blowing their budgets.
You’ll hear practical strategies for making your website more visible and resilient, including how to leverage structured data, create content that taps into conversational queries, and use tools like Google Search Console to stay competitive.
Key insights from this episode include:
- What Google’s latest core update really means for local SEO
- How AI-generated summaries are reshaping search results
- Why structured data is more important than ever
- The role of FAQ-style content in ranking for modern queries
- How to think about SEO in the age of AI and zero-click searches
- Tools and tactics every SMB should consider using now
Whether you're in automotive, multifamily, legal, or another local industry, this episode will give you clear direction for navigating the rapidly evolving search landscape.
Premier Online Marketing helps businesses grow through smart SEO, content, and search strategies. Learn more at www.premieronlinemarketing.com
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Welcome back to the podcast.
This is the official podcast ofPremier Online Marketing and,
like, I think, every episode,I'm your host, sean Reince.
Today, well, we have actually areturn guest from Premier
Online Marketing.
We're digging into searchtrends with a very sharp focus
on what matters most for smalland mid-sized businesses, and
(00:29):
with us is SEO strategistresident algorithm whisperer,
andres Fernandez.
He's the director of SEO atPremier Online Marketing.
Welcome back to the podcast,andres.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Thank you, Sean.
Glad to be back with some news,hopefully Good news.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
That's good stuff.
It's like right up your alley.
This is so.
We'll be talking about latestGoogle, the core update, the
AI's growing impact on searchbehavior, cutting through all
the noise to do what premieronline marketing does, which is
just bring you practical,actionable insights.
So let's get into it.
(01:10):
I want to start with bigpicture.
Andres, let's just startbecause we're still early in
2025.
How would you describe theoverall direction of search in
2025?
What are the most importantshifts that you're seeing that
small businesses probably shouldunderstand?
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Yeah, well, the the the biggest shift is how search
behavior has been changing.
Over the past couple of years.
Google dominated all the searchrisk, most of the queries, you
know just everyone going queries.
All the attention going toGoogle and Bing had some search
(01:54):
share, for sure, but what we'reseeing nowadays is more people
are adopting LLMs, chatbots,chat, gpt and all that.
But also how Google is alsodisplaying search results has
changed with the AI overviews,and so we're seeing a
significant shift in how peopleare searching, but also how
(02:21):
search results are being servedto the user.
How search results are beingserved to the user and that has
had an impact in smallbusinesses, local business
websites and people that wouldshare their expertise about
their industry and whatnot arenow being buried under a wall of
(02:46):
AI overviews, five ads, searchsnippets and then finally
showing their website.
So, unfortunately, that's thelandscape of 2025 for search of
2025 for search.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
So let's dig in a little bit and start with this
Google update.
That's happened here in Marchof 2025, described by a lot of
people as a core update, and Ithink a lot of people that
follow your content and are inthe digital marketing space,
especially on SEO, are familiarwith the fact that Google makes
updates regularly all throughoutthe year, but some are much
(03:30):
more significant and it feelslike this one here in March.
Well, the month we're still in,well, end of March is pretty
significant, so can you sharewith us what's changed and how
might it be affecting local seofor small and mid-sized
businesses?
Speaker 2 (03:50):
yeah.
So this core update um whichjust finished rolling out
recently.
Um, it pretty much focuses onthe quality and relevance of
search results.
Um, and what this means isGoogle once again is focusing on
content quality.
They want to serve original,high quality content and
(04:16):
especially with LLMs, we'reseeing the same content just
regurgitated in a different wayand with a different tone, and
so Google is rewarding, or wantsto reward, original content.
Also, user-generated content isbeing rewarded.
(04:51):
You know forums and, of course,you know Reddit, quora all of
those appear at the top when youhave more of a conversational
query than just thinking abouthow can I improve my content is,
how can I add my industryexpertise, which is crucial,
(05:14):
right for content quality, foruser experience, and answering
Google's questions.
On top of that, google isputting an emphasis in reviews,
just trustworthiness signalslike reviews, citations, even
(05:40):
also just having high qualityphotos instead of having render,
renderings, you know, buthaving high quality reviews,
trustworthy reviews, and andhaving, you know, high quality
citations, citations that are,you know, in line or very
(06:04):
similar to your name, address,phone number, you know that
match.
All of that is very importantfor local businesses.
I would say, if you're notdoing that, you're falling
behind.
And in the topic ofhigh-quality photos, you know
(06:25):
we've seen in the past few yearsis that when people look for,
just for an example, for a powersports dealership, if you look
for a power sports or motorcycledealer, you will get, you know,
the local map pack and then thethumbnail will be the
(06:47):
storefront.
Whereas if you look forside-by-sides for sale and you
get served a map pack query, thethumbnail will change to a
side-by-side or you know anin-store picture of a group of
side-by-sides.
So super important to have allof those signals and really just
(07:14):
have as much information andcreative in your listings to
maximize that.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
Were there other types of businesses, from a
local SEO perspective, that wereimpacted by the update, and
were there any ranking changesthat hit one vertical more so
than another?
I know you guys are heavy inapartments.
(07:45):
Some people refer to that asmultifamily.
I know you guys are heavy withautomotive, power sports,
motorcycle dealers, rv dealers,lawyers.
Are there any that kind of?
Oh my goodness, if you haven't,you should go and check that,
because I know that this thing,I think, just finished, within
the last couple of days, thefull rollout.
(08:07):
So are there businesses thatyou're like, hey, you guys are
probably more likely to beimpacted for better or for worse
.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
Yeah, that's a great question.
Us.
The majority of the impact thatwe're seeing is in law firms
because, you know, for law firms, the good thing about you know,
law firm SEO is that you havethe ability to create content at
(08:37):
a state level because ofdifferent laws and regulations,
and even at a county level andregulations even at a county
level, and so what we're seeingis that when attorneys create
original content, that contentgets pulled from their blogs and
then it gets served as an AIoverview.
And so an AI overview is azero-click search, which means
(09:01):
that it answers the user'squestion or query and they don't
create any traffic.
They don't get pulled into theattorney's website, so they
don't go through the funnel orthey lose the chance to get some
brand awareness out there.
(09:22):
They lose the chance to getsome brand awareness out there,
and so we're seeing for someattorneys just losing that
traffic clicks and impressions.
Well, clicks actually notimpressions, but clicks going
down because of this AI overviewand just the new way of
(09:45):
searching.
Interesting, but in the realmof bottom funnel, local searches
, everything stays the same.
I think that the good news isthat AI overviews don't seldom
(10:08):
impact local searches, map packsearches, and we've even had
some clients ask me if we couldrank them in chat, gpt for map
pack searches, and there's awhole way of AI-proofing your
(10:35):
website.
For sure, but the attention isstill on Google, and so shifting
strategies to chat, gpt orsomething like that is not um,
um, roi.
(10:55):
You know it's not a good returnof investment, for sure.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
I want to ask you a little bit about structured data
and you also mentioned a littlebit of the AI readiness.
There's certainly a lot ofdiscussion and you know effort
that people are trying toexecute against strategies for,
you know, showing up in searchvisibility.
(11:24):
If they're, you know whetherthey're using chat, gpt and its
ability to crawl the web, searchthe web or grok or whatever
their favorite LLM is.
Several of them are now webenabled.
There's a structured dataconversation that I think plays
in both you know, standard,organic optimization as well as
(11:45):
now in the rise of AI.
How and just your opinion likehow important is structured data
now in consideration of AI andLLMs as they search?
You know the search results.
I've been playing around withthis myself and is there
something that you would tell asmall business to do differently
, or is it still?
(12:07):
You know it's same strategiesright now, but is there anything
that they should be doingdifferently, or at least
thinking about?
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Yeah, well, structured data is a topic that
I'm very passionate about.
I've been, you know, leaningheavily to structured data for a
very long time.
And for folks that don't know,structured data is basically a
piece of code that you add toyour website, that you added to.
(12:35):
It's not invasive, you know,it's just something that you can
add.
It's a script that just containsstrings of code.
I mean, those strings of codecontain information about your
business or the page that you'reseeing, the web result that
you're seeing, and so we usestructured data currently for,
(12:57):
you know, local SEO, tobasically give the crawlers more
information about the business,service areas, entities, social
media links just leverage asmuch as we can the use of
structured data to add as muchinformation as possible.
(13:20):
And the reason why we do this isbecause we like to add this to
the homepage and to other pagesas well, but primarily the
homepage, because it's the firstpage that Google crawls and is
usually the one that's connectedto your Google business profile
URL, and so that's where Googlegets most of their information.
(13:45):
And since it is just a stringof code that doesn't need
rendering, it doesn't need anyprocessing or trimming or any,
you know, any type of like dataconsolidation, is very
(14:07):
lightweight and it's somethingthat is very easy for crawlers
to read and LLMs as well.
There's been recentconversations in SEO conferences
and other LLM like Twitter andsuch, that mentions that LLMs,
when they're consuminginformation from the Internet,
(14:30):
they give preference tostructured data because it's
just way cheaper to process, waycheaper to process to render
than getting the information offof the parsing a website
processing the information etcetera.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
You can just grab it from infrastructure data and
it's much cheaper much lighterand it's just a better way for
that to feed crawlers and LLMs.
Yeah, it's very interesting andI don't think a lot of people
spend enough time just to haveat least a base level of
knowledge around the importanceof structured data.
It's not new in terms of itsimportance.
It's actually been veryimportant for a long time.
(15:26):
But it's kind of one of thosefoundational elements that I
think people underserve in termsof how much they understand it
and why it's important Anytime.
Like you know, when Googlemakes a huge core update, that
takes, I think, this one, whattook a couple of weeks to
completely roll out.
Yeah, structured data isdefinitely one of those places
(15:48):
where you want to go start goingthrough the update to find out
hey, did anything change, right?
I mean, people look for anypoints of devaluation, any
points of devaluation if you'refinding like, oh, you know, I
know I read a couple thingswhere content from forums got
devalued.
Some programmatic contentstarted to receive penalties in
this update.
So structured data is just oneof those things where I always
(16:11):
tell people like you don't haveto totally go, you know, to the
deepest level of geek on it.
Like you don't have to beAndres and know it at the
deepest level.
You can taste the fertilizerYou're so deep in the weeds.
But you do need to understandit at a foundational level so
that when big updates happen,that you would at least call
(16:31):
Andres or whomever is your SEOdirector, expert and handling
that for your business, and beable to have an intelligent
conversation about it.
Or you can be taken by somebodywho talks about it or doesn't
talk about it, and and if theydon't understand it, um, there's
no way that you're going tounderstand it.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
So I think that's really important yeah, I just
wanted to add to that that, um,for those folks that have been
impacted by a core update,people tend to be very reactive.
They right away like, oh, I wantto change, I want to audit my
website and change everythingabout it and follow Google's
(17:10):
guidelines.
What we tend to see is patienceis very important.
Just waiting around, like beingaware of it, is great, you know
, but making drastic changes tothe website is not a great
strategy, because then you won'tknow what's working and what's
(17:33):
not working.
So being patient, you know.
So being patient, waiting atleast one month just monitoring
(18:05):
your search results, yourrankings and such on Google
Search Console or whateverrankings tools you use, is a
better strategy, because thenyou'll know, once the Google
update is rolled out, what'sworking, what's not, and then
you can assess.
You will have more data andthen you can assess the
underlying issues in your site,whether that's content, whether
that's, you know, mobilereadiness, or you know expertise
, experience, whatever it is,then you can start adding that
to your content.
But patience is key.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
Yeah, a lot of people don't appreciate that either.
It's like anything in terms oforganic optimization.
It's a long game.
There are very few things thereused to be in the in the older
days.
Uh, I just create some contentthe other day where I was
talking about the old days wherethere were, there were versions
(18:50):
of google search engine whereyou could optimize things
literally and get first pageresults.
They they were usually on veryunique keywords, but you could,
and so anyway, point being, allthese things change.
It's really, really good tomake sure that you have a
working knowledge, and patienceis very, very important.
You mentioned something alittle bit earlier, but we
(19:13):
didn't dig in on it.
I'd like to get your thoughtsaround conversational queries.
I don't think a lot of peopleare probably familiar with some
of those terms.
It might seem self-evident tosome, like a conversational
query, and this might be helpfulfor people, because you do see
a lot more of this over the lastfew years.
(19:34):
Is the FAQ content right?
The frequently asked questioncontent is really important.
Depending on the business typeyou're in, it could be
critically important to show upand give you a little boost in
terms of organic so searchbehavior.
It continues to get a lot moreconversational.
How would you maybe advise SMBsusing this kind of FAQ style
(19:58):
content to tap into those typesof queries that might be helpful
in driving traffic to theirsite and maybe, if you have
thoughts about it, specific tomaybe an example for a car
dealership, or maybe likeapartments or you know some,
something like that?
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Yeah, um so.
So to answer that question, Ijust want to go back a little
bit in time.
When people used to search onGoogle prior to AI overviews or
the search snippet at the topgiving you the answer, people
(20:39):
had to use the least amount ofwords.
The search snippet at the topgiving you the answer.
People had to use the leastamount of words.
They had to shorten theirqueries, their searches on
Google, because if you type thelong query, you know if you
(21:01):
typed in, for example, I want tosay where is the nearest, let's
say, hardware store that sellspower tools or wrenches or
whatnot, google would just getconfused.
The longer the search, thelonger the query, the more vague
(21:27):
the search results would get.
At times.
Google started getting betterat this and they're much better,
much smarter at answeringlong-tail queries and questions.
But nowadays, if you're a chat,gpt user or any LLM, the way
(21:50):
that people ask questions, theyinclude so much context.
I tend to include a lot ofcontext in my queries just to
get the most accurate response.
Typical article or blog postthat has the intro, that has
three sub-headlines targetingcertain keywords and then you
(22:27):
have a conclusion, which isusually the structure that we've
seen over the years.
What we've seen that's beenworking is turning articles into
more like FAQ style content,where you have might have a
little intro, but then you justhave open ended questions in you
(22:49):
know as headlines.
You're answering that specificquestion with your expertise or
with the business owner'sexpertise, and I think you wrap
it up with a conclusion.
You can add internal links toother relevant sources, whether
they're internal or external.
But we've seen a lot of successwith those type of articles.
(23:13):
They tend to get pulled intothe first page, top three or
even, like the people also asksnippets, and even into AI
overviews.
But we're starting to turn awayfrom those type of just a
(23:37):
statement headline for eachsection, whereas having
open-ended questions are betterand you can also complement that
with an FAQ schema, adding FAQstructured data to your page.
You structure data to your page, so you're kind of like double
(24:04):
dipping.
You're adding FAQ, you're alsoadding your article schema.
You're also answering popularquestions.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
And that's sort of like the advice that I would
give to business owners.
I like that Let me ask youabout.
Let me take you into zero click.
We've been seeing a rise inzero click searches, but I think
(24:42):
there's a lot of people,especially in the verticals,
that you guys really focus onthat.
Probably maybe you've neverheard the term zero click.
So, as we're seeing this risein zero click searches, where
are users you know gettinganswers without, and how are
they doing that without leavingthe search results Like, and I
guess search results like and Iguess, in addition to that,
(25:03):
what's the best way for an smbto still kind of log some wins
in this kind of environment?
Speaker 2 (25:07):
yeah, um, well, the search was zero click searches
is something that you know.
It's been skyrocketing over thepast year and a half after the
AI overview introduction.
We're seeing right like Reddit,quora, as I mentioned earlier,
(25:48):
and those are getting fewervisibility, less visibility
nowadays.
Nowadays, after this update,we're seeing Reddit and Quora
being sort of like demoted alittle bit.
But yeah, I mean, what I'mtrying to get at is zero-click
(26:11):
searches is when you perform asearch, the user is not clicking
on any website, they're justgetting the answer to their
question or their search ortheir query and they just close
google or move on um, and sothat traffic does not go to the
website anymore.
They, as I mentioned with thelaw firm example, they don't go
(26:34):
through the brand awarenessphase, they don't get to go
through the websites funnel andso that attribution is just lost
, that user is just not captured.
Basically and we're seeing thata lot more with AI overview and
(26:58):
also with the search behaviorjust people start have just Well
, at least for me, you know, inmy anecdotal experience, I'm
seeing, I'm hearing from otherpeople just how they're being
used and just regular users,right Like just non tech savvy,
(27:20):
just regular users starting touse chat GPT a lot more and so
to answer their questions.
Aside from the AI overview,people are starting to lean into
AI to get answers to theirquestions.
So it's not even about serialclick searches anymore.
(27:42):
It's about where the attentionis going as well.
We're seeing a rise inperplexityity and so many LLMs
are competing nowadays and newmodels coming out every week.
It's just completely insane howthe landscape changes
drastically week over week, noteven like quarter over quarter.
(28:06):
It's just like something newcoming out every day.
We had ChatGPT 4.5 come outlast week with image generation.
We're seeing Ghibli-styleimages coming out, where Gemini
Flash Experimental came out,also with image editing
(28:28):
capabilities, also with imageediting capabilities.
And there's so much turmoilcurrently in the AI world slash
professional world and you knowthere's also a lot of confusion
there because you know peopleare like which one should I use?
(28:49):
This new one came out.
Which one should I use?
This new one came out.
Which one should I pick?
Speaker 1 (28:54):
so yeah, I've been playing around with a lot of the
ai almost since the beginning.
I think I started using chat,gpt a month after it was
released and mid journey acouple months after it was
released, runway a couple months, maybe a month after it was
released and, um, you're right,it it does, it's.
It's pretty much uh changing,uh daily.
(29:14):
Um, if there isn't asignificant um release or update
uh daily, it certainly is uhweekly or a couple times a week,
I mean.
So it is so, so crazy.
I I'm on a couple of wait listsfor tools that I can't wait to
get my hands on.
So there's that as well.
(29:35):
And I would say this you know,because, on this particular
topic and I bet you give thisadvice a lot but it doesn't
matter if you're a dealer of RVsor motorcycles or cars, if you
are in multifamily listings,lawyers, really any small and
medium sized business.
If you're not even at leastgoing into the free versions, I
(29:57):
mean heck, you can go on X anduse Grok for free.
There are a lot of them thatare for free, that are really,
really powerful.
I mean, the recent Grok updateis actually really amazing.
But go and search your business,go ask questions about your
business so that you can seewhat's going on out there.
(30:19):
Because every time I'm talkingto businesses that use Premier
Online Marketing or they'regoing to talk to companies like
yours to make a decision, Ialways tell them to ask these
questions of the people thatyou're going to engage, because
they know the answers, like whenI tell somebody, hey, andreas
is a good guy to talk to aboutthis stuff because he's doing
(30:40):
this very thing.
You should also do it for yourvery own business.
The types of things that youthink people might ask AI or
previously ask the search enginenow they're starting to ask AI
anymore.
Go and do that for yourself soyou've seen it with your own
eyes and you follow that pathwhere it takes you, so that you
get some insight and some dataand then maybe keep a journal of
(31:03):
those things or screenshot itand keep a file of those things
so that you kind of have an ideaof where this goes, because
we're in a brand new era and youknow you're, you're, uh, you're
in a situation where all of usare where the internet was one
thing and a lot of people thinkthat it kind of came on fast um
(31:25):
uh, ai is making it look like,you know, like it took like as
long as, like an ice age.
It's like AI is just turbo lightspeed, super fast, and there's
a lot of cool stuff about itthat I think businesses should,
you know, put a wet blanket ontheir fear and make sure that
(31:45):
they actually have their armssomewhat around the basic
understanding of how it may ormay not be something that they
have to be concerned about,because in a lot of business
cases, you need thatfoundational knowledge because
it actually presents a lot ofopportunities for your business
to get better, all kinds ofefficiencies.
Just a lot of stuff, yeah, justa lot of stuff.
(32:06):
Yeah, we're talking on thatsubject of the AI and kind of
changing the role around SEO.
Do you think we're movingtowards a content strategy
(32:26):
that's very heavy on that sideof the fence, on the content,
and maybe is it going to be lessso?
Do you think, as far as thetechnical side of SEO, or do you
think it'll be still a blend ofboth?
Speaker 2 (32:37):
I still think that it's going to be a hybrid for
sure, I think.
Unfortunately, you know, Ithink this whole conversation
has been about how you know howserial click searches have been
impacting businesses, and soreally focusing on top of funnel
(32:58):
content is not the beststrategy at the moment.
I mean, it's still a goodstrategy, but it's not the best
strategy to nail down clientsand customers and get brand
awareness.
Still, what we're seeing iscontent that has a lot of
(33:21):
industry expertise is going tobe key to business success,
right, business success right,offering unique insights,
offering original content andoffering tools that your users
(33:42):
can play with or utilizethemselves.
Also, providing a good userexperience utilize themselves.
Also, providing a good userexperience on your website is
going to be key, and that'swhere SEO intersects a little
bit with UX by leaning intotechnical SEO, leaning into core
(34:09):
vitals and mobileresponsiveness and all of that.
But for local businesses, Iwould say, like, showcasing your
industry expertise is going toget you the best results, even
like just creating a case studyor creating, like an industry
(34:30):
you know um report.
That would be, you know, veryhelpful.
Involving uh expertise fromother uh thought leaders in your
niche, um, creating linkablecontent, right, uh, going back
to, like, industry expertise ifyou can create content that
(34:54):
other people can share.
We're also seeing, you know,linkedin and other platforms
social media platforms becomingsearch engines, right.
So having the attention there,having content and sharing that
content on social media wherepeople can look at it they don't
(35:15):
get buried under a thousand adsand AI overviews where it gets
served to the right audience,that's where it's going to be
helpful.
So our content strategy is notmuch more about just ranking on
google.
It's like creating a valuablepiece of information that other
people can share, right and andthat can be linked to and get
(35:38):
seo value indirectly.
On the technical side, you know,we we do have a ai proofing
sort of method and, of course,like integrating structured data
making sure that your robots iscrawlable by LMS and search
(36:03):
spiders alike is crucial.
All of that is is part of ourstrategy for AI proofing, but I
think that we're still going tosee a blend of both.
We just need to change theintent a little bit with how we
(36:28):
want to.
You know how we want to capturethe traffic.
It's not much more aboutranking on Google and getting
the search traffic.
It's more about creatingvaluable content that you can
share, that can be foundelsewhere and can be shared in
(36:50):
all platforms.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
Essentially, I've got a couple more questions before
I'm going to let you go, andthis next one is kind of around
maybe some recommended tacticsor tools, maybe a couple that
you would recommend for SMBsright now.
If being competitive is kind ofon their mind, but they don't
(37:12):
necessarily have huge budgets.
That always ends up being afactor, it seems like, for SMBs
when it comes to all things SEO.
It's like ah, I don't have thebudget, even though most of them
do.
They just don't realize it orit's allocated in the wrong
places and they don't know thatof them do.
They just don't realize it, orit's allocated in the wrong
places and they don't know that.
Yeah, but let's just.
Let's just under the assumptionthat the business does have
(37:35):
limited budget, but they'relooking for the, the kind of
tips that will help them themost in terms of staying
competitive.
Um, what would you say?
Those are, even if it, even ifit's repetitive of a couple of
things that you've shared,because a couple of things come
to mind that you've sharedduring the episode.
But if there's anything else inaddition to that, I think that
(37:55):
would be really great for peoplethat are trying to be budget
mindful but still competitive.
Speaker 2 (38:00):
Yeah, well, I mean, the best tool that you can use
as a local business owner forSEO is always going to be Google
Search Console, and it might beoverwhelming to look at the
platform as it is and theinterface, because you might not
(38:22):
understand what the differencebetween impressions and click is
how Google gathers their data.
Impressions and click is howGoogle gathers their data, but
at the end of the day, as longas you have it installed on your
website via, you know, tag orHTML tag or whatever, and you're
(38:42):
collecting data, you'll startto see what people are searching
for to find your website and alot of times, when you're not
optimized your website's notoptimized for those specific
queries it will start seeingsome glimpses of it, and then
you can couple that with anactual paid SEO tool such as
(39:04):
SEMrush or Ahrefs to do a deepdive into what the actual search
volume of that is.
There are, of course, cheapertools, such as Mangools or
Keywords Everywhere to get thatdata, but I'm just recommending
the ones that we use.
(39:25):
And yeah, I mean Google SearchConsole console, one of the seo
tools, such as hrf, setmanagement rules or keywords
everywhere.
Um, and I would pick one aitool.
I mean, um, it's not an seotool but, as you mentioned
(39:45):
earlier, I think it's a great uhrecommendation to to add an AI
tool to your stack, to your toolstack.
Right, just having a go-towhether it's ChatGPT, whether
it's Perplexity, whether it'sBrock being able to consume that
information is very, veryvaluable, very, very valuable,
(40:09):
and it just gives you a better,you know, a different
perspective of you know how LLMsthat have.
You know they spend millions,billions of dollars pre-training
them and they have 100,000 GPUsrunning to give you this output
(40:29):
.
It's very interesting to seewhat they consider to be
valuable and valuable output.
And so, sticking to one AI tool, my personal favorite one is
Rock, as well, as you mentionedthat one earlier.
For general purposes, I reallylike that tool, um, and there's
(40:53):
a few others that that I Irecommend, but they're a little
bit more niche.
Um, but, yeah, I think grok isis, uh, it's really good.
And if, yeah, I would add thatto your tool stack as a small
business owner, uh, to reallylike just speed up, um, how you
(41:16):
learn about your, your businessand your and your industry and
see what's being, what's beingsaid or discussed out there yeah
, I think that's good advice.
Speaker 1 (41:29):
Um, grok's just easy.
But you know, I don't know,maybe some people like I don't
like x or whatever, like getover yourself, just go use the
ai tool.
It's a really good tool, soit's um, I don't know, it's one
of the first I would do.
I would tell people the samething like grok's easy to jump
into, it's's really good.
It's like really really good.
(41:49):
The recent update, obviouslythe most recent version of
ChatGPT, is awesome, and I thinkI think I don't know for sure,
but I think ChatGPT still has afree version.
Might be like the older, it'snot the fastest one, but it's
(42:11):
not that difficult to go findone of them that you can use for
free just to get your you knowdip your toes in the water.
I think that's important, um, souh.
Last thing I want to ask youabout is you know what, what
will your mindset be around ifyou had to give just a piece of
advice for making a smallbusiness website resilient like
that'll stand up to these futureGoogle updates?
(42:33):
Because I think a lot of people, especially in the verticals
that you guys serve, but reallyall small and mid-sized
businesses, are always lookingfor tips and best practices and
those types of things.
So, as it relates to whenGoogle updates happen, is there
anything they can do that wouldjust make the site kind of more
resilient, or just what theyshould be mindful of?
(42:54):
What would that be?
Speaker 2 (42:57):
yeah, I would focus on what really matters, right.
A lot of times people getbogged down by the little
details like website load time,all text optimization, when in
reality, like you know, theirtitle tag, their headings,
(43:18):
they're not even like thecontent has the keywords that
Google or the topics that Googleis or users are searching for,
not Google, or users aresearching for, not Google, and
you know, focus on the thingsthat really matter.
Again, title tag headings,keyword or topics in the copy,
(43:44):
cover as much as you can in itand you know, obviously having
internal links helps if it's notin the whole pitch.
Definitely focusing on internallinks.
The other piece of advice forbusiness owners is just focus on
reviews.
I think a lot of times businessowners are like what else can I
(44:04):
do?
What else can I do?
But they have like five reviewson their GVP, on their Google
Business Profile listing, andthey're not even like good ones,
and so reviews play a key role,as I mentioned at the beginning
, is just, it's a bigtrustworthy signal.
(44:27):
I think, like more than 90% ofusers look at reviews before
making a purchasing decision,especially if it's like a big
life how do you say it?
Like just a big decision, suchas where are you going to live
and where are you going to likewhere?
If you're going to make a bigpurchase, if you're going to be
(44:47):
doing like hiring someone tolike, you know's also good for
conversions ensuring people goto your website or make a phone
(45:18):
call.
We've seen really good websitesand listings get buried under
the search results because theygot a barrage of negative
reviews and the business ownerdid not do anything about it.
And, unfortunately, becausepeople, of course, are going to
start clicking less on thelisting that has less than four
(45:39):
stars or 3.9, google is going tostart promoting ones with more
favorable reviews, and so a lotof times, people disregard that.
But it's really important forbusinesses to stay on top of
those reviews and even like thetype of review that you get,
(46:02):
like include as much media asyou can, whether it's photos,
videos or just write somethingnice about your experience.
Videos or just write somethingnice about your experience
that's going to help the reviewstand out and also stick around,
so it's not automaticallyremoved by Google's filters.
(46:22):
So, yeah, focus on what mattersand reviews gather reviews.
It's going to be my top twotips for business owners at the
moment.
Speaker 1 (46:32):
Awesome.
Well, that's a wrap on today'sepisode of the Palmcast.
Huge thanks to you, andresFernandez, for joining, sharing
some serious SEO wisdom.
If you are an automotiveapartment, legal or just about
any small business owner tryingto navigate the fast changing
world of search, remember, it'snot about chasing trends, it's
(46:54):
about staying strategic, andthat's exactly what Premier
Online Marketing does for theirclients.
So check them out atpremieronlinemarketingcom.
Depending on where you areviewing and or listening to this
, please like it, share it,subscribe, virtual high five us
and all that good stuff.
And until next time, remember,with Premiere search leads to
(47:18):
success.
Thanks again, andres.
Thank you, sean, good to seeyou.
Welcome back to the podcast.
This is the official podcast ofPremier Online Marketing and,
like, I think, every episode,I'm your host, sean Reince.
Today, well, we have actually areturn guest from Premier
Online Marketing.
We're digging into searchtrends with a very sharp focus
on what matters most for smalland mid-sized businesses, and
(00:29):
with us is SEO strategistresident algorithm whisperer,
andres Fernandez.
He's the director of SEO atPremier Online Marketing.
Welcome back to the podcast,andres.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Thank you, Sean.
Glad to be back with some news,hopefully Good news.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
That's good stuff.
It's like right up your alley.
This is so.
We'll be talking about latestGoogle, the core update, the
AI's growing impact on searchbehavior, cutting through all
the noise to do what premieronline marketing does, which is
just bring you practical,actionable insights.
So let's get into it.
(01:10):
I want to start with bigpicture.
Andres, let's just startbecause we're still early in
2025.
How would you describe theoverall direction of search in
2025?
What are the most importantshifts that you're seeing that
small businesses probably shouldunderstand?
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Yeah, well, the the the biggest shift is how search
behavior has been changing.
Over the past couple of years.
Google dominated all the searchrisk, most of the queries, you
know just everyone going queries.
All the attention going toGoogle and Bing had some search
(01:54):
share, for sure, but what we'reseeing nowadays is more people
are adopting LLMs, chatbots,chat, gpt and all that.
But also how Google is alsodisplaying search results has
changed with the AI overviews,and so we're seeing a
significant shift in how peopleare searching, but also how
(02:21):
search results are being servedto the user.
How search results are beingserved to the user and that has
had an impact in smallbusinesses, local business
websites and people that wouldshare their expertise about
their industry and whatnot arenow being buried under a wall of
(02:46):
AI overviews, five ads, searchsnippets and then finally
showing their website.
So, unfortunately, that's thelandscape of 2025 for search of
2025 for search.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
So let's dig in a little bit and start with this
Google update.
That's happened here in Marchof 2025, described by a lot of
people as a core update, and Ithink a lot of people that
follow your content and are inthe digital marketing space,
especially on SEO, are familiarwith the fact that Google makes
updates regularly all throughoutthe year, but some are much
(03:30):
more significant and it feelslike this one here in March.
Well, the month we're still in,well, end of March is pretty
significant, so can you sharewith us what's changed and how
might it be affecting local seofor small and mid-sized
businesses?
Speaker 2 (03:50):
yeah.
So this core update um whichjust finished rolling out
recently.
Um, it pretty much focuses onthe quality and relevance of
search results.
Um, and what this means isGoogle once again is focusing on
content quality.
They want to serve original,high quality content and
(04:16):
especially with LLMs, we'reseeing the same content just
regurgitated in a different wayand with a different tone, and
so Google is rewarding, or wantsto reward, original content.
Also, user-generated content isbeing rewarded.
(04:51):
You know forums and, of course,you know Reddit, quora all of
those appear at the top when youhave more of a conversational
query than just thinking abouthow can I improve my content is,
how can I add my industryexpertise, which is crucial,
(05:14):
right for content quality, foruser experience, and answering
Google's questions.
On top of that, google isputting an emphasis in reviews,
just trustworthiness signalslike reviews, citations, even
(05:40):
also just having high qualityphotos instead of having render,
renderings, you know, buthaving high quality reviews,
trustworthy reviews, and andhaving, you know, high quality
citations, citations that are,you know, in line or very
(06:04):
similar to your name, address,phone number, you know that
match.
All of that is very importantfor local businesses.
I would say, if you're notdoing that, you're falling
behind.
And in the topic ofhigh-quality photos, you know
(06:25):
we've seen in the past few yearsis that when people look for,
just for an example, for a powersports dealership, if you look
for a power sports or motorcycledealer, you will get, you know,
the local map pack and then thethumbnail will be the
(06:47):
storefront.
Whereas if you look forside-by-sides for sale and you
get served a map pack query, thethumbnail will change to a
side-by-side or you know anin-store picture of a group of
side-by-sides.
So super important to have allof those signals and really just
(07:14):
have as much information andcreative in your listings to
maximize that.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
Were there other types of businesses, from a
local SEO perspective, that wereimpacted by the update, and
were there any ranking changesthat hit one vertical more so
than another?
I know you guys are heavy inapartments.
(07:45):
Some people refer to that asmultifamily.
I know you guys are heavy withautomotive, power sports,
motorcycle dealers, rv dealers,lawyers.
Are there any that kind of?
Oh my goodness, if you haven't,you should go and check that,
because I know that this thing,I think, just finished, within
the last couple of days, thefull rollout.
(08:07):
So are there businesses thatyou're like, hey, you guys are
probably more likely to beimpacted for better or for worse
.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
Yeah, that's a great question.
Us.
The majority of the impact thatwe're seeing is in law firms
because, you know, for law firms, the good thing about you know,
law firm SEO is that you havethe ability to create content at
(08:37):
a state level because ofdifferent laws and regulations,
and even at a county level andregulations even at a county
level, and so what we're seeingis that when attorneys create
original content, that contentgets pulled from their blogs and
then it gets served as an AIoverview.
And so an AI overview is azero-click search, which means
(09:01):
that it answers the user'squestion or query and they don't
create any traffic.
They don't get pulled into theattorney's website, so they
don't go through the funnel orthey lose the chance to get some
brand awareness out there.
(09:22):
They lose the chance to getsome brand awareness out there,
and so we're seeing for someattorneys just losing that
traffic clicks and impressions.
Well, clicks actually notimpressions, but clicks going
down because of this AI overviewand just the new way of
(09:45):
searching.
Interesting, but in the realmof bottom funnel, local searches
, everything stays the same.
I think that the good news isthat AI overviews don't seldom
(10:08):
impact local searches, map packsearches, and we've even had
some clients ask me if we couldrank them in chat, gpt for map
pack searches, and there's awhole way of AI-proofing your
(10:35):
website.
For sure, but the attention isstill on Google, and so shifting
strategies to chat, gpt orsomething like that is not um,
um, roi.
(10:55):
You know it's not a good returnof investment, for sure.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
I want to ask you a little bit about structured data
and you also mentioned a littlebit of the AI readiness.
There's certainly a lot ofdiscussion and you know effort
that people are trying toexecute against strategies for,
you know, showing up in searchvisibility.
(11:24):
If they're, you know whetherthey're using chat, gpt and its
ability to crawl the web, searchthe web or grok or whatever
their favorite LLM is.
Several of them are now webenabled.
There's a structured dataconversation that I think plays
in both you know, standard,organic optimization as well as
(11:45):
now in the rise of AI.
How and just your opinion likehow important is structured data
now in consideration of AI andLLMs as they search?
You know the search results.
I've been playing around withthis myself and is there
something that you would tell asmall business to do differently
, or is it still?
(12:07):
You know it's same strategiesright now, but is there anything
that they should be doingdifferently, or at least
thinking about?
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Yeah, well, structured data is a topic that
I'm very passionate about.
I've been, you know, leaningheavily to structured data for a
very long time.
And for folks that don't know,structured data is basically a
piece of code that you add toyour website, that you added to.
(12:35):
It's not invasive, you know,it's just something that you can
add.
It's a script that just containsstrings of code.
I mean, those strings of codecontain information about your
business or the page that you'reseeing, the web result that
you're seeing, and so we usestructured data currently for,
(12:57):
you know, local SEO, tobasically give the crawlers more
information about the business,service areas, entities, social
media links just leverage asmuch as we can the use of
structured data to add as muchinformation as possible.
(13:20):
And the reason why we do this isbecause we like to add this to
the homepage and to other pagesas well, but primarily the
homepage, because it's the firstpage that Google crawls and is
usually the one that's connectedto your Google business profile
URL, and so that's where Googlegets most of their information.
(13:45):
And since it is just a stringof code that doesn't need
rendering, it doesn't need anyprocessing or trimming or any,
you know, any type of like dataconsolidation, is very
(14:07):
lightweight and it's somethingthat is very easy for crawlers
to read and LLMs as well.
There's been recentconversations in SEO conferences
and other LLM like Twitter andsuch, that mentions that LLMs,
when they're consuminginformation from the Internet,
(14:30):
they give preference tostructured data because it's
just way cheaper to process, waycheaper to process to render
than getting the information offof the parsing a website
processing the information etcetera.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
You can just grab it from infrastructure data and
it's much cheaper much lighterand it's just a better way for
that to feed crawlers and LLMs.
Yeah, it's very interesting andI don't think a lot of people
spend enough time just to haveat least a base level of
knowledge around the importanceof structured data.
It's not new in terms of itsimportance.
It's actually been veryimportant for a long time.
(15:26):
But it's kind of one of thosefoundational elements that I
think people underserve in termsof how much they understand it
and why it's important Anytime.
Like you know, when Googlemakes a huge core update, that
takes, I think, this one, whattook a couple of weeks to
completely roll out.
Yeah, structured data isdefinitely one of those places
(15:48):
where you want to go start goingthrough the update to find out
hey, did anything change, right?
I mean, people look for anypoints of devaluation, any
points of devaluation if you'refinding like, oh, you know, I
know I read a couple thingswhere content from forums got
devalued.
Some programmatic contentstarted to receive penalties in
this update.
So structured data is just oneof those things where I always
(16:11):
tell people like you don't haveto totally go, you know, to the
deepest level of geek on it.
Like you don't have to beAndres and know it at the
deepest level.
You can taste the fertilizerYou're so deep in the weeds.
But you do need to understandit at a foundational level so
that when big updates happen,that you would at least call
(16:31):
Andres or whomever is your SEOdirector, expert and handling
that for your business, and beable to have an intelligent
conversation about it.
Or you can be taken by somebodywho talks about it or doesn't
talk about it, and and if theydon't understand it, um, there's
no way that you're going tounderstand it.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
So I think that's really important yeah, I just
wanted to add to that that, um,for those folks that have been
impacted by a core update,people tend to be very reactive.
They right away like, oh, I wantto change, I want to audit my
website and change everythingabout it and follow Google's
(17:10):
guidelines.
What we tend to see is patienceis very important.
Just waiting around, like beingaware of it, is great, you know
, but making drastic changes tothe website is not a great
strategy, because then you won'tknow what's working and what's
(17:33):
not working.
So being patient, you know.
So being patient, waiting atleast one month just monitoring
(18:05):
your search results, yourrankings and such on Google
Search Console or whateverrankings tools you use, is a
better strategy, because thenyou'll know, once the Google
update is rolled out, what'sworking, what's not, and then
you can assess.
You will have more data andthen you can assess the
underlying issues in your site,whether that's content, whether
that's, you know, mobilereadiness, or you know expertise
, experience, whatever it is,then you can start adding that
to your content.
But patience is key.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
Yeah, a lot of people don't appreciate that either.
It's like anything in terms oforganic optimization.
It's a long game.
There are very few things thereused to be in the in the older
days.
Uh, I just create some contentthe other day where I was
talking about the old days wherethere were, there were versions
(18:50):
of google search engine whereyou could optimize things
literally and get first pageresults.
They they were usually on veryunique keywords, but you could,
and so anyway, point being, allthese things change.
It's really, really good tomake sure that you have a
working knowledge, and patienceis very, very important.
You mentioned something alittle bit earlier, but we
(19:13):
didn't dig in on it.
I'd like to get your thoughtsaround conversational queries.
I don't think a lot of peopleare probably familiar with some
of those terms.
It might seem self-evident tosome, like a conversational
query, and this might be helpfulfor people, because you do see
a lot more of this over the lastfew years.
(19:34):
Is the FAQ content right?
The frequently asked questioncontent is really important.
Depending on the business typeyou're in, it could be
critically important to show upand give you a little boost in
terms of organic so searchbehavior.
It continues to get a lot moreconversational.
How would you maybe advise SMBsusing this kind of FAQ style
(19:58):
content to tap into those typesof queries that might be helpful
in driving traffic to theirsite and maybe, if you have
thoughts about it, specific tomaybe an example for a car
dealership, or maybe likeapartments or you know some,
something like that?
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Yeah, um so.
So to answer that question, Ijust want to go back a little
bit in time.
When people used to search onGoogle prior to AI overviews or
the search snippet at the topgiving you the answer, people
(20:39):
had to use the least amount ofwords.
The search snippet at the topgiving you the answer.
People had to use the leastamount of words.
They had to shorten theirqueries, their searches on
Google, because if you type thelong query, you know if you
(21:01):
typed in, for example, I want tosay where is the nearest, let's
say, hardware store that sellspower tools or wrenches or
whatnot, google would just getconfused.
The longer the search, thelonger the query, the more vague
(21:27):
the search results would get.
At times.
Google started getting betterat this and they're much better,
much smarter at answeringlong-tail queries and questions.
But nowadays, if you're a chat,gpt user or any LLM, the way
(21:50):
that people ask questions, theyinclude so much context.
I tend to include a lot ofcontext in my queries just to
get the most accurate response.
Typical article or blog postthat has the intro, that has
three sub-headlines targetingcertain keywords and then you
(22:27):
have a conclusion, which isusually the structure that we've
seen over the years.
What we've seen that's beenworking is turning articles into
more like FAQ style content,where you have might have a
little intro, but then you justhave open ended questions in you
(22:49):
know as headlines.
You're answering that specificquestion with your expertise or
with the business owner'sexpertise, and I think you wrap
it up with a conclusion.
You can add internal links toother relevant sources, whether
they're internal or external.
But we've seen a lot of successwith those type of articles.
(23:13):
They tend to get pulled intothe first page, top three or
even, like the people also asksnippets, and even into AI
overviews.
But we're starting to turn awayfrom those type of just a
(23:37):
statement headline for eachsection, whereas having
open-ended questions are betterand you can also complement that
with an FAQ schema, adding FAQstructured data to your page.
You structure data to your page, so you're kind of like double
(24:04):
dipping.
You're adding FAQ, you're alsoadding your article schema.
You're also answering popularquestions.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
And that's sort of like the advice that I would
give to business owners.
I like that Let me ask youabout.
Let me take you into zero click.
We've been seeing a rise inzero click searches, but I think
(24:42):
there's a lot of people,especially in the verticals,
that you guys really focus onthat.
Probably maybe you've neverheard the term zero click.
So, as we're seeing this risein zero click searches, where
are users you know gettinganswers without, and how are
they doing that without leavingthe search results Like, and I
guess search results like and Iguess, in addition to that,
(25:03):
what's the best way for an smbto still kind of log some wins
in this kind of environment?
Speaker 2 (25:07):
yeah, um, well, the search was zero click searches
is something that you know.
It's been skyrocketing over thepast year and a half after the
AI overview introduction.
We're seeing right like Reddit,quora, as I mentioned earlier,
(25:48):
and those are getting fewervisibility, less visibility
nowadays.
Nowadays, after this update,we're seeing Reddit and Quora
being sort of like demoted alittle bit.
But yeah, I mean, what I'mtrying to get at is zero-click
(26:11):
searches is when you perform asearch, the user is not clicking
on any website, they're justgetting the answer to their
question or their search ortheir query and they just close
google or move on um, and sothat traffic does not go to the
website anymore.
They, as I mentioned with thelaw firm example, they don't go
(26:34):
through the brand awarenessphase, they don't get to go
through the websites funnel andso that attribution is just lost
, that user is just not captured.
Basically and we're seeing thata lot more with AI overview and
(26:58):
also with the search behaviorjust people start have just Well
, at least for me, you know, inmy anecdotal experience, I'm
seeing, I'm hearing from otherpeople just how they're being
used and just regular users,right Like just non tech savvy,
(27:20):
just regular users starting touse chat GPT a lot more and so
to answer their questions.
Aside from the AI overview,people are starting to lean into
AI to get answers to theirquestions.
So it's not even about serialclick searches anymore.
(27:42):
It's about where the attentionis going as well.
We're seeing a rise inperplexityity and so many LLMs
are competing nowadays and newmodels coming out every week.
It's just completely insane howthe landscape changes
drastically week over week, noteven like quarter over quarter.
(28:06):
It's just like something newcoming out every day.
We had ChatGPT 4.5 come outlast week with image generation.
We're seeing Ghibli-styleimages coming out, where Gemini
Flash Experimental came out,also with image editing
(28:28):
capabilities, also with imageediting capabilities.
And there's so much turmoilcurrently in the AI world slash
professional world and you knowthere's also a lot of confusion
there because you know peopleare like which one should I use?
(28:49):
This new one came out.
Which one should I use?
This new one came out.
Which one should I pick?
Speaker 1 (28:54):
so yeah, I've been playing around with a lot of the
ai almost since the beginning.
I think I started using chat,gpt a month after it was
released and mid journey acouple months after it was
released, runway a couple months, maybe a month after it was
released and, um, you're right,it it does, it's.
It's pretty much uh changing,uh daily.
(29:14):
Um, if there isn't asignificant um release or update
uh daily, it certainly is uhweekly or a couple times a week,
I mean.
So it is so, so crazy.
I I'm on a couple of wait listsfor tools that I can't wait to
get my hands on.
So there's that as well.
(29:35):
And I would say this you know,because, on this particular
topic and I bet you give thisadvice a lot but it doesn't
matter if you're a dealer of RVsor motorcycles or cars, if you
are in multifamily listings,lawyers, really any small and
medium sized business.
If you're not even at leastgoing into the free versions, I
(29:57):
mean heck, you can go on X anduse Grok for free.
There are a lot of them thatare for free, that are really,
really powerful.
I mean, the recent Grok updateis actually really amazing.
But go and search your business,go ask questions about your
business so that you can seewhat's going on out there.
(30:19):
Because every time I'm talkingto businesses that use Premier
Online Marketing or they'regoing to talk to companies like
yours to make a decision, Ialways tell them to ask these
questions of the people thatyou're going to engage, because
they know the answers, like whenI tell somebody, hey, andreas
is a good guy to talk to aboutthis stuff because he's doing
(30:40):
this very thing.
You should also do it for yourvery own business.
The types of things that youthink people might ask AI or
previously ask the search enginenow they're starting to ask AI
anymore.
Go and do that for yourself soyou've seen it with your own
eyes and you follow that pathwhere it takes you, so that you
get some insight and some dataand then maybe keep a journal of
(31:03):
those things or screenshot itand keep a file of those things
so that you kind of have an ideaof where this goes, because
we're in a brand new era and youknow you're, you're, uh, you're
in a situation where all of usare where the internet was one
thing and a lot of people thinkthat it kind of came on fast um
(31:25):
uh, ai is making it look like,you know, like it took like as
long as, like an ice age.
It's like AI is just turbo lightspeed, super fast, and there's
a lot of cool stuff about itthat I think businesses should,
you know, put a wet blanket ontheir fear and make sure that
(31:45):
they actually have their armssomewhat around the basic
understanding of how it may ormay not be something that they
have to be concerned about,because in a lot of business
cases, you need thatfoundational knowledge because
it actually presents a lot ofopportunities for your business
to get better, all kinds ofefficiencies.
Just a lot of stuff, yeah, justa lot of stuff.
(32:06):
Yeah, we're talking on thatsubject of the AI and kind of
changing the role around SEO.
Do you think we're movingtowards a content strategy
(32:26):
that's very heavy on that sideof the fence, on the content,
and maybe is it going to be lessso?
Do you think, as far as thetechnical side of SEO, or do you
think it'll be still a blend ofboth?
Speaker 2 (32:37):
I still think that it's going to be a hybrid for
sure, I think.
Unfortunately, you know, Ithink this whole conversation
has been about how you know howserial click searches have been
impacting businesses, and soreally focusing on top of funnel
(32:58):
content is not the beststrategy at the moment.
I mean, it's still a goodstrategy, but it's not the best
strategy to nail down clientsand customers and get brand
awareness.
Still, what we're seeing iscontent that has a lot of
(33:21):
industry expertise is going tobe key to business success,
right, business success right,offering unique insights,
offering original content andoffering tools that your users
(33:42):
can play with or utilizethemselves.
Also, providing a good userexperience utilize themselves.
Also, providing a good userexperience on your website is
going to be key, and that'swhere SEO intersects a little
bit with UX by leaning intotechnical SEO, leaning into core
(34:09):
vitals and mobileresponsiveness and all of that.
But for local businesses, Iwould say, like, showcasing your
industry expertise is going toget you the best results, even
like just creating a case studyor creating, like an industry
(34:30):
you know um report.
That would be, you know, veryhelpful.
Involving uh expertise fromother uh thought leaders in your
niche, um, creating linkablecontent, right, uh, going back
to, like, industry expertise ifyou can create content that
(34:54):
other people can share.
We're also seeing, you know,linkedin and other platforms
social media platforms becomingsearch engines, right.
So having the attention there,having content and sharing that
content on social media wherepeople can look at it they don't
(35:15):
get buried under a thousand adsand AI overviews where it gets
served to the right audience,that's where it's going to be
helpful.
So our content strategy is notmuch more about just ranking on
google.
It's like creating a valuablepiece of information that other
people can share, right and andthat can be linked to and get
(35:38):
seo value indirectly.
On the technical side, you know,we we do have a ai proofing
sort of method and, of course,like integrating structured data
making sure that your robots iscrawlable by LMS and search
(36:03):
spiders alike is crucial.
All of that is is part of ourstrategy for AI proofing, but I
think that we're still going tosee a blend of both.
We just need to change theintent a little bit with how we
(36:28):
want to.
You know how we want to capturethe traffic.
It's not much more aboutranking on Google and getting
the search traffic.
It's more about creatingvaluable content that you can
share, that can be foundelsewhere and can be shared in
(36:50):
all platforms.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
Essentially, I've got a couple more questions before
I'm going to let you go, andthis next one is kind of around
maybe some recommended tacticsor tools, maybe a couple that
you would recommend for SMBsright now.
If being competitive is kind ofon their mind, but they don't
(37:12):
necessarily have huge budgets.
That always ends up being afactor, it seems like, for SMBs
when it comes to all things SEO.
It's like ah, I don't have thebudget, even though most of them
do.
They just don't realize it orit's allocated in the wrong
places and they don't know thatof them do.
They just don't realize it, orit's allocated in the wrong
places and they don't know that.
Yeah, but let's just.
Let's just under the assumptionthat the business does have
(37:35):
limited budget, but they'relooking for the, the kind of
tips that will help them themost in terms of staying
competitive.
Um, what would you say?
Those are, even if it, even ifit's repetitive of a couple of
things that you've shared,because a couple of things come
to mind that you've sharedduring the episode.
But if there's anything else inaddition to that, I think that
(37:55):
would be really great for peoplethat are trying to be budget
mindful but still competitive.
Speaker 2 (38:00):
Yeah, well, I mean, the best tool that you can use
as a local business owner forSEO is always going to be Google
Search Console, and it might beoverwhelming to look at the
platform as it is and theinterface, because you might not
(38:22):
understand what the differencebetween impressions and click is
how Google gathers their data.
Impressions and click is howGoogle gathers their data, but
at the end of the day, as longas you have it installed on your
website via, you know, tag orHTML tag or whatever, and you're
(38:42):
collecting data, you'll startto see what people are searching
for to find your website and alot of times, when you're not
optimized your website's notoptimized for those specific
queries it will start seeingsome glimpses of it, and then
you can couple that with anactual paid SEO tool such as
(39:04):
SEMrush or Ahrefs to do a deepdive into what the actual search
volume of that is.
There are, of course, cheapertools, such as Mangools or
Keywords Everywhere to get thatdata, but I'm just recommending
the ones that we use.
(39:25):
And yeah, I mean Google SearchConsole console, one of the seo
tools, such as hrf, setmanagement rules or keywords
everywhere.
Um, and I would pick one aitool.
I mean, um, it's not an seotool but, as you mentioned
(39:45):
earlier, I think it's a great uhrecommendation to to add an AI
tool to your stack, to your toolstack.
Right, just having a go-towhether it's ChatGPT, whether
it's Perplexity, whether it'sBrock being able to consume that
information is very, veryvaluable, very, very valuable,
(40:09):
and it just gives you a better,you know, a different
perspective of you know how LLMsthat have.
You know they spend millions,billions of dollars pre-training
them and they have 100,000 GPUsrunning to give you this output
(40:29):
.
It's very interesting to seewhat they consider to be
valuable and valuable output.
And so, sticking to one AI tool, my personal favorite one is
Rock, as well, as you mentionedthat one earlier.
For general purposes, I reallylike that tool, um, and there's
(40:53):
a few others that that I Irecommend, but they're a little
bit more niche.
Um, but, yeah, I think grok isis, uh, it's really good.
And if, yeah, I would add thatto your tool stack as a small
business owner, uh, to reallylike just speed up, um, how you
(41:16):
learn about your, your businessand your and your industry and
see what's being, what's beingsaid or discussed out there yeah
, I think that's good advice.
Speaker 1 (41:29):
Um, grok's just easy.
But you know, I don't know,maybe some people like I don't
like x or whatever, like getover yourself, just go use the
ai tool.
It's a really good tool, soit's um, I don't know, it's one
of the first I would do.
I would tell people the samething like grok's easy to jump
into, it's's really good.
It's like really really good.
(41:49):
The recent update, obviouslythe most recent version of
ChatGPT, is awesome, and I thinkI think I don't know for sure,
but I think ChatGPT still has afree version.
Might be like the older, it'snot the fastest one, but it's
(42:11):
not that difficult to go findone of them that you can use for
free just to get your you knowdip your toes in the water.
I think that's important, um, souh.
Last thing I want to ask youabout is you know what, what
will your mindset be around ifyou had to give just a piece of
advice for making a smallbusiness website resilient like
that'll stand up to these futureGoogle updates?
(42:33):
Because I think a lot of people, especially in the verticals
that you guys serve, but reallyall small and mid-sized
businesses, are always lookingfor tips and best practices and
those types of things.
So, as it relates to whenGoogle updates happen, is there
anything they can do that wouldjust make the site kind of more
resilient, or just what theyshould be mindful of?
(42:54):
What would that be?
Speaker 2 (42:57):
yeah, I would focus on what really matters, right.
A lot of times people getbogged down by the little
details like website load time,all text optimization, when in
reality, like you know, theirtitle tag, their headings,
(43:18):
they're not even like thecontent has the keywords that
Google or the topics that Googleis or users are searching for,
not Google, or users aresearching for, not Google, and
you know, focus on the thingsthat really matter.
Again, title tag headings,keyword or topics in the copy,
(43:44):
cover as much as you can in itand you know, obviously having
internal links helps if it's notin the whole pitch.
Definitely focusing on internallinks.
The other piece of advice forbusiness owners is just focus on
reviews.
I think a lot of times businessowners are like what else can I
(44:04):
do?
What else can I do?
But they have like five reviewson their GVP, on their Google
Business Profile listing, andthey're not even like good ones,
and so reviews play a key role,as I mentioned at the beginning
, is just, it's a bigtrustworthy signal.
(44:27):
I think, like more than 90% ofusers look at reviews before
making a purchasing decision,especially if it's like a big
life how do you say it?
Like just a big decision, suchas where are you going to live
and where are you going to likewhere?
If you're going to make a bigpurchase, if you're going to be
(44:47):
doing like hiring someone tolike, you know's also good for
conversions ensuring people goto your website or make a phone
(45:18):
call.
We've seen really good websitesand listings get buried under
the search results because theygot a barrage of negative
reviews and the business ownerdid not do anything about it.
And, unfortunately, becausepeople, of course, are going to
start clicking less on thelisting that has less than four
(45:39):
stars or 3.9, google is going tostart promoting ones with more
favorable reviews, and so a lotof times, people disregard that.
But it's really important forbusinesses to stay on top of
those reviews and even like thetype of review that you get,
(46:02):
like include as much media asyou can, whether it's photos,
videos or just write somethingnice about your experience.
Videos or just write somethingnice about your experience
that's going to help the reviewstand out and also stick around,
so it's not automaticallyremoved by Google's filters.
(46:22):
So, yeah, focus on what mattersand reviews gather reviews.
It's going to be my top twotips for business owners at the
moment.
Speaker 1 (46:32):
Awesome.
Well, that's a wrap on today'sepisode of the Palmcast.
Huge thanks to you, andresFernandez, for joining, sharing
some serious SEO wisdom.
If you are an automotiveapartment, legal or just about
any small business owner tryingto navigate the fast changing
world of search, remember, it'snot about chasing trends, it's
(46:54):
about staying strategic, andthat's exactly what Premier
Online Marketing does for theirclients.
So check them out atpremieronlinemarketingcom.
Depending on where you areviewing and or listening to this
, please like it, share it,subscribe, virtual high five us
and all that good stuff.
And until next time, remember,with Premiere search leads to
(47:18):
success.
Thanks again, andres.
Thank you, sean, good to seeyou.
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