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Have you noticed search has changed? Does that mean that organic traffic is something of the past? You can still maximize your written content reach with AI Search. Stay tuned.

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From burnout to breakthrough, we'll rewrite your story with AI strategy. Let's amplify your authority.

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Hello, hello everyone, and welcome to the Amplify Your Authority podcast. I'm Marissa Shadrick, your host. So you may have noticed that when you go to Google and you do a search, all of a sudden it looks different. You have a summary now. You don't have all of these links to search through and click through. That has changed how people find things and how will they find you now? Well, we're going to talk about that today. And why does this matter? Well, I want you first of all to take a breath because if you're a solopreneur like me, you wear many, many hats. You're writing the content, you're doing the marketing, you're doing the sales, you're doing the social media, you're doing the planning, you're creating the courses, you're doing, doing, doing. And one more thing that changes makes you a little nervous. Well, I want you to take a breath because all these changes, I'm going to try to explain to you what's happening. Now, I'm not an SEO expert, but I am a researcher. So all of this is data that I've collected and I've been observing what's been happening, and I want to just relay that to you. Now, this is going to evolve. It is literally new. I don't think there's one expert right now out there that knows exactly what to do, but it's not about hacks. It's not about gaming the system. It's about realizing what's going on right now and doing the best that we can with what we have today. So let me grab my notes and we'll get started here. So for you, the solo business owner who wears many, many hats, you maybe been blogging or creating a newsletter, and now you're wondering, is anybody going to see it? Now, here's something I want you to understand. And it took me a minute to wrap my brain around it. Maybe you'll figure this out much faster than me, but search is changing how content is delivered to people, not how content is discovered. Now that's important to realize. So let me say it again. Search is changing how content is delivered to people, but not how content is discovered. So all of the good fundamentals that you learned about SEO, take a breath. That's still gonna work, but we're gonna dial in and go deeper into what AI is looking for so that when you write a blog post, when you write an article, you know you've done the best you can. So in a visual form, just picture this workflow. Before the traditional search journey was you searched, you got a bunch of results, URLs, you clicked, you read, wasn't quite what you wanted. You went back, you scroll down, you click, you read, wasn't quite what you wanted. You went back, you clicked, you read, and finally you found something and you were able to make a decision. Today it's a little different. Today, with AI assisted search, the journey has changed. You search, you get an AI summary, and you make a decision. There's far fewer clicks now. Statistically, experts are saying there are less clicks and there's gonna be less clicks in the future. So, because there are fewer clicks, people are making decisions faster. So this is behavior change. So we need to reframe how we look at visibility, what this means for us as content creators. So, visibility today isn't about trying to appear on Google's first page, it's about being referenced in a summary. So, how do we do that? Okay, hang on, we're gonna get to that. AI still needs reliable resources. Content still matters, clarity still matters, clear, structured content gains value. This is a return to responsible authorship. Search will keep changing. What won't change is the need for thoughtful, well-crafted content that helps someone take the next move. They are looking for answers. And AI is trying to deliver those answers in a summary. So when I first started looking at this and searching, I heard all kinds of things from SEO, AEO, GEO, you name it, schema, markup, signals. It was overwhelming. And I can understand why many writers were starting to wonder what's going on because we don't even know what to call it, right? What do we call it? SEO, EO, AO, what is it? Well, we don't need to understand a lot of the technical language. So that's a relief. If you've been practicing good writing habits, you are okay. You're not going to have any problems whatsoever. Let me go over a couple of jargon terms for you. Schema is simply labels, and in the layman's term, because I'm not very technical, it explains what your content is about. It explains the author, the topic, the freshness of it. Is it dated content or is it relevant? Is it current? The structure. Tools like Yoast for WordPress, I still use WordPress, believe it or not, they handle a lot of this back-end stuff. If you've ever used Yoast, it gives you a green light. There's things that you need to do. You don't need to code, you don't need to be an expert. You don't need to add more technical stuff to your writing. If you want peace of mind, you can always go to Google's rich results test and you can put a URL of your blog post in there and it will confirm whether the structured data is recognized. We're going to talk about what you can do to be recognized in just a second. Now, when you write, you're leaving breadcrumbs so that AI can discover you, so you become discoverable. AI looks for signals of clarity. You're helping the systems, when you understand what it's looking for, to understand your content. And you're going to also help AI understand your expertise, your authority, whether you're trustworthy. And it's going to also understand the content type. What is this? Is it a blog? Is it an article? It's the same thing that helps. Well, I don't want to say her name because she's going to answer me, but you know, A-L-E-X-A. If you went to her and said, What can you tell me about and give her your name? She will give you a summary of who you are. I did this earlier today and it was spot on because all of these AI search engines are using this data for information. So when I asked Alexa a question about me, she gave me a summary about me. I didn't have to go click a link. So all this is working to not only help the results that you get, like on your desktop or your laptop or your phone, but also for the world that we live in. That's the audible world where we can just use voice commands to get information. So practices that still matter, and this is something you don't want to gloss over. The fundamentals of good SEO has not disappeared. You want to continue to maintain one main topic idea. You want to continue to do the best you can to find keywords for that main topic. And you still want to think about your audience awareness and consider what do I want them to think? What do I want them to believe? What do I want them to do when they read this article? You still want to have those internal links and external links and use the H1 and H2 and H3, all the practices you've done before. You want to have a good image for your blog post or your article. You even want to have some images inside of the article as well, because that means you've got some valuable information and you're even showing graphics to explain your point of view in this article. You want to have a structured framework that you can use over and over again. So visuals are very helpful. And if you're making a claim, cite it. Just like we used to do in school, cite the work and reference it. So all of this helps your credibility and also helps for you to be trustworthy. Okay, now to the writing craft. The writing craft is really important, which basically I really love this. I love the fact that AI, when people thought that AI was taking our originality away and causing us to just write lazy writing using AI, the search is actually telling us go back to the fundamentals of writing. Don't just put something in Chat GPT and have it write an article for you. You remember that you are the author of that article. So here's some key things that you want to keep in mind. You want to be able to open with the answer near the top. At least tell people what the article is about, the premise, the point of view that you are getting ready to share with the reader. So you want to have it near the top. You want to write for skimming first and depth second. That means people will skim and they will look at the subheads. They will take a look at the article before they go deep and read it. So you want to respect people's attention with white space. You don't want to have blocks of text. You want to edit ruthlessly. Have an editing process where you make sure your transitions are really good and you didn't leave things out and you explain certain things and you don't have jargon. You want AI to assist you with this. AI can help you. Once you give it the information, the knowledge, you can use Chat GPT to help you edit your content, or you can use Claude to refine your writing, but it has to come from you. Good structure isn't about gaming algorithms, it's about making your thinking understandable. So I love that we're going back to the fundamentals. I love that we're going back to the art of writing. And I think we can just start using Chat GPT and just maybe even on our phone with the microphone, begin to talk to it and say what we're going to talk about. I see this struggle in the world, or I know my audience is struggling with this, and I want to write about it because I have an important point of view that I think is going to help them. And just get on a rant and start talking. Then you can take that and you can begin to structure it a little bit using AI, but then fill in all of the variables. Put in your perspective, put in your frameworks, put in the things that really upset you about that topic and the things that are really helpful for your audience as well. You can write a how-to, you can write a perspective piece, you can write an educational piece, but give it some thought. And this is what I had to do when I was writing articles for magazines. Back in the day, I had to get a copy of the magazine and read it from cover to cover. And the way I analyzed, even though they gave me information about the particular magazine, they gave me demographic, I looked at the articles that were being written. I looked to see what perspectives were being given, how long the articles were. I looked at the ads to see how they were targeting the audience. I looked at the cover. What did the person on the cover look like? Were they professional? Were they casual? What were they focusing on to get a feel of the personality, so to speak, of the magazine? That's kind of like what we're doing now. And back then, that was our research. Today we have AI to help us research, to figure out what those pain points are so we can write the perfect article for our audience. So here are a few practical takeaways. Discoverability isn't just about being found, it's about being a source that's worth citing. So you become a source that AI decides, oh, I want to create a summary about this person because they created a very well-written piece of content that's going to help the reader. It's no different than when you ask Alexa to tell you who is and give Alexa your name, and she gives you a summary of who you are. Try it. So you want to be able to write content just the way you were doing, but go a little deeper. Go a little deeper and make sure you've got some compelling subheads. So when people are scanning and they see those subheads, they have a clear, clear view what that article is about. Don't make them guess. Don't make them use cognitive overload where they're trying to figure out what you're saying. Write it in simple English. You can tell AI, proofread this and make sure I wrote it in a way that an eighth grader can read this. Because you don't want that article hard to read. You don't want people reading and reading over. That's cognitive overload. Use long, short sentences, use one-word sentences. So sentence length variation is helpful too. Again, all the little things that we used to do to write content before we got a little lazy using AI, we're coming back to writing better content. So take a breath, relax, don't panic, it's all gonna be okay. And remember these five tips. Number one, don't chase every single change. Like I said, all of this is evolving. None of us are experts. We're doing the best we can with what we have. Number two, go deeper, not faster. More isn't necessarily better. Go deeper, not faster. Number three, keep serving real questions, real people. Find out what it is they're looking for. Number four, make small, steady improvements. So continue to improve, continue to perfect your writing process. And lastly, stay focused and don't forget you can repurpose your content and bring a different perspective. So even though you're going deeper, even though it's taking a little longer to write it, you can repurpose it and come from a different perspective. So you're really not working harder, you're just going deeper, writing richer content, and you're able to repurpose it from different perspectives and different angles. So I hope this was helpful for you. If it was, I would love it if you would leave me a rating and review. And if you're watching this on YouTube, yes, I'm back on YouTube again. I would love it if you would subscribe and even leave a comment. Thank you so much, and I'll talk to you soon. Take care.