599: Ranking In The Age Of Chatgpt: What Google Isn’t Telling You With Jeff Oxford

00:00
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. Now in this episode, Jeff Oxford and I tackle one of the biggest shifts happening right now. How SEO is evolving in the age of AI and chat-based search. We break down what’s changed, what no longer works, and what you need to be doing today to make sure your business actually shows up. But before we begin, I wanted to let you know that tickets for Seller Summit 2026 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com.

00:28
And if you sell physical products online, this is the event that you should be at. Unlike most e-commerce conferences that are filled with high-level fluff and inspirational stories, Seller Summit is all about the tactical, step-by-step strategies you can actually use in your business right away. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches. People who are running their own e-commerce stores, managing inventory, dealing with suppliers, and scaling real businesses. No corporate execs, no consultants. Also, I hate big events, so I intentionally keep it small and intimate.

00:58
We cap attendance at around 200 people so you can actually have real conversations and connect with everyone in the room. We’ve sold that every single year for the past nine years and I expect this year to be no different. It’s happening April 21st to the 23rd in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. And if you’re doing over 250K or $1 million in revenue, we also offer a private mastermind for higher level sellers. Right now, tickets are the cheapest they’re ever gonna be. So if you want in, go over to sellerssummit.com and grab your ticket. Now onto the show.

01:35
Welcome to the My Wife, Could Her Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Jeff Oxford back on the show. Now, Jeff runs an SEO agency called 180marketing.com where he teaches others how to get their sites ranked in search. And he recently spoke at my annual e-commerce conference, The Seller Summit. Now we all know that the traditional search with those 10 blue links has been getting disrupted by AI this year. So in this episode, Jeff and I are going to talk about how SEO has evolved.

02:04
and the steps you need to take to improve the visibility of your business in the age of AI and chat-based interfaces. And with that, welcome to show, Jeff. How are you doing, Steve, always a pleasure. Thanks again for having me. So I really loved your talk at Seller Summit. I was actually there live. And I wanted to go into more depth since I actually got a chance to re-watch your presentation again last night. So let’s start with, you for the listeners here.

02:31
who obviously didn’t get the opportunity to listen to you talk live. What is the current state of search and traditional SEO? It’s a good question. And what I’d say right now, there’s two ways of looking at it. We can take a snapshot of where things are right now, and then we can look directionally where things are going. Let’s do both. So first, where are things right now? Google is still the 800 pound gorilla. Google search, the 10 blue links on page one. This is still where

03:01
You know, Google’s market share really hasn’t been disrupted. I’d say chat GPT might be taking like one to 2 % market share from just like the typical search queries. So at this point in time, right now, you know, June, 2025, it’s Google is still killing it. You know, we’ve looked at analytics accounts for multiple e-commerce sites. Organic search is still the number one driver by a lot. You know, referrals from AIs is just, it’s, it’s growing, but it’s minuscule. So first part of it.

03:31
You know, yes, we’re seeing some progress, but right now SEO Google search is still the king. Now, directionally, where are things going? So we’re seeing some interesting things now where there’s a lot more referral traffic from chat. You’ve never before. We’re seeing more and more people use chat CPT than they ever have before. So while yes, there’s still a lot of value in SEO. The question is.

03:58
what will look like in three years, five years, or 10 years from now? Right. I actually just saw this article in TechCrunch. I don’t know if you saw it, but it said that the Google search AI features are killing traffic to publishers by 36%. Yep. So if Google still is as powerful as it is right the second that we’re recording, it doesn’t seem like that traffic is getting to publishers as much.

04:27
Yeah, not a good time to be a blogger publisher. AI overviews are just eating a lot of those informational queries and just kind of back up for a second. And the world of SEO, we have different types of keywords people use. If I search how to start a drop shipping site, that’s an informational keyword, I’m looking to learn something I’m looking for information. If I search by linen handkerchiefs, that’s a transactional search. That means I’m looking to purchase something.

04:55
So these informational queries that used to, you you could have a blog, you could have AdSense on it, you could have affiliates, that kinda got killed. I saw a similar study from HREF where they looked at whenever there’s an AI over you on the page, the traffic from that page was down 34%. So it was very in line with the 36 % that you quoted. So.

05:19
SCI, I mean, I’m almost safe saying SEO is dead for informational queries, especially if you’re kind of a standalone blog. it’s, it’s really these AI overviews have taken so much. It’s just, it’s dead in the sense that the ROI and the numbers just don’t make sense. Like they used to, you have to spend way more effort to get less traffic. However, you know, I would imagine most people listen to this are probably in the e-commerce space. And that has not been touched. In fact,

05:47
H refs, which is this big SEO tool provider. They did a study of I think it was like a million million different keywords and what they found is these AI overviews. They 99 % of the keywords that trigger AI overviews are informational keywords. So if I say again, if I search, you know, how to maintain linen napkins, like, yes, there’s going to be an AI overview. But if I search by linen napkins, there are most likely will not be an AI overview. So

06:17
Luckily in the e-commerce space, we’re safe from those AI overviews, at least for now. mean, this stuff is changing month by month, so I could be eating my words in a few months. So are you trying to say also then, or implying that content related to your products, like you mentioned buy linen napkins, but what about the benefits of linen napkins over cotton napkins? Is that content that should no longer be written on a store blog, as an example?

06:46
So if we look at the customer journey and you have the awareness stage, the research, and then you have the purchase stage. we’re gonna simplify to those three stages. So we’re at the top of the funnel. If someone’s searching like, what is a linen napkin? It’s probably not worth spending the time to create a really good article about that. Because even if you get there, there’s gonna be an AI overview, the clicks from that query are gonna be so low. And even if you get there, the conversions just aren’t there. If someone’s searching,

07:15
is a napkin, they’re probably not even close to whipping out their credit card and making a purchase. But if we go a step lower to that, then we have like the research phase. If someone’s saying like, what’s the best type of linen napkin or linen verse, what’s the other type of linen verse cotton napkins for dinner party, something like that. Now they’re, you can tell by the query that they’re looking to make a purchase. They just have to do a little bit more research first.

07:43
So I’d say those are probably still worth going for just because the conversion potential is there where you can actually get some revenue from it. But even a lot of those, they’re still gonna be like, I’d say it’s not as frequent, but you still see AI overviews and some of those. So again, it’s one of those things. You can spend all this time making a great article, optimizing it. You could rank number one, but if nobody’s clicking on it because of an AI overview, then you’re kind of screwed. I guess what I’m leading towards is

08:13
will AI, because it sees that type of content on a certain page, be more likely to show your products in AI search? I was talking like if someone types in chat, GBT, how that content. Okay, so now we can shift more towards away from. We’ll get into the SEO stuff and just. I just. We’re going down this rabbit hole right now. So the AI, so we’ve done, you know, we work with only e-commerce sites. So this is something very important to us. And we’ve specifically been looking a lot at.

08:43
know chat GPT specifically the product carousels. So if I type in best protein powder, sorry, if I I search like what is the best if I asked chat GPT, what is the best protein powder, it’s gonna have a product carousel and it’s actually going to show images of products and it’s going to have links to purchase those products. So that that’s like what I’m really focused on what I’m seeing is chat GPT is often citing sources and it’s pulling in like product reviews like I have one client

09:13
that sells indoor fireplaces. And they wrote an article of top five indoor fireplaces. And that article, when I went to chat GPT and I said, you what are the best indoor fireplaces, it pulled up my client as a source. It looked at that product roundup, that buyer’s guide, and those products had influence on the final output. So it’s interesting. This is the first time really talking about creating content not necessarily for driving traffic in Google.

09:41
but creating content for large language models to see it influence the chat GPT outputs and get more people to your products that way. So does that imply that we should start making reviews of our own stuff? I, you know, I’ve been asking myself this exact question this past week. I think anyone that wants to have more exposure from chat GPT, there’s two types of pages you should always have. One is a, you know, so we’ll stick with like protein powder.

10:10
what if you had a, I would highly recommend having a best protein powders page, but I’d also recommend getting specific. like the way people use chat GPT, it’s very specific. Like what’s the best protein powder for a beginner male age 37. Yeah. It’s like that. So, you know, I, I, I’m finding that the people that are getting sited more often that are winning and chat, you’d be thinking the most referrals have more specific content.

10:38
It’s not just best protein powder. It’s like best protein powder for beginners, best protein powder for men, best protein powder for seniors, but you you, you name it. It has it. That will have a higher chance of getting picked up. So should you go off and create this? Um, if you’re just doing it for chat GPT, probably not yet. Oh, I got a, kind of thinking this through as we go. Here’s the thing. There’s just not enough referral traffic and revenue from chat GPT yet.

11:06
to justify the amount of time and energy it take to do it if that’s your only reason. However, if we look at the growth rate of chat GBT and referrals from chat GBT, it’s growing at a rate where it’s not a bad idea to make a bet on chat GBT as like a major traffic source and get into these LM’s early, kind of build like a little bit of a moat. So I wouldn’t expect the positive ROI from doing it now.

11:34
but I bet a year from now it’s probably gonna be one of those things where you’re glad that you did it. So let’s kind of revisit the original topic then. What sort of content should you be creating for an e-commerce store or is it more just about optimizing your category pages and your product pages at this point? I would find, you know, we work with lot of e-commerce sites. I’d say 80 % of the time,

11:58
Blogging is not worth it. It’s not gonna be a positive ROI exercise. I know this goes against a lot of Things you hear online like you have to have fresh content You need to keep putting fresh content on your website Google loves fresh content and there is some truth to that but You know a lot of times those those blog posts that we talked about people are gonna have like very top of funnel Topics like what is protein powder? That’s not gonna drive any revenue but if it’s you know anything that has like best like what is the best protein powder or?

12:27
a comparison like versus, you know, linen verse, um, uh, clot linen verse. What was the one you said, Steve cotton cotton linen verse cotton napkin shirt you’re wearing. It’s probably made of cotton. know I wouldn’t be surprised. So that’s why I say like for most clients, there’s just not enough high converting keyword. Sorry. There’s not high converting topics to justify creating blog posts. I’d say maybe only 20 % of sites that I come across. There was actually a lot of opportunity for it.

12:56
So I don’t think you really need to create content specifically for blog traffic. But again, like with the way things are going with large language models and chat GBT, I think it’s still worth creating like a buyer’s guide. It’s still worth creating like a product roundup or maybe a few product roundups that are even more specific. And the other type of content format that still could be helpful is a glossary. Now this has kind of two benefits. One is just if we get in the SEO world of topical authority and

13:25
making sure Google fully understands what your site is about, identifying all the common terms in your industry, having a clear definition for them and having that on your site. Not only does that help with SEO, but we’re also seeing that get pulled in a lot to chat, GPT and large language models. In fact, one of my SEO director, he shared with me a fascinating case study that we haven’t shared with anyone else. So he lives in Maine.

13:54
And there’s this little kids dance studio that does like tap dancing and jazz dancing for kids. And he built their website for them using AI. And as part of this, he created a glossary is a super in depth glossary that had like, you know, different pages for each keyword. And again, this is just like dance terminology, you know, dance styles, different like fourth position, tempo, beat rhythm, like everything you could think of. This is a brand new website has a domain rating less than one. It’s

14:24
This glossary is already being cited in AI overviews. It’s already being pulled into chat GPT sources when you search for like dance terms. So it was just fascinating to see that you could have a site with zero SEO, no backlinks, nothing. But if you have like very in-depth content that’s defining terms and explaining those terms in a clear way and it’s all interlinked together, that can get picked up.

14:51
very quickly in AI overviews and then also chat GPT sources. Yeah, it’s funny. I just told you before I hit the record button that I found this article about, it’s not an article, it’s a paper. It’s very hard to read, it’s very dense. But it was saying basically that all the AI, it has all the content already. So it knows what’s, in a way it knows what’s good and unique and it knows which is kind of regurgitated stuff to a certain extent at this point. So I suspect that that

15:21
glossary is very comprehensive. And so it became like a trusted source. The domain authority doesn’t matter as much. Yeah, in that case. So let me ask you this question, though. He has he’s showing up in a lot of AIO reviews. Has that led to more business for that? It was interesting. This literally just happened the last seven days. Okay. Okay. So this is like a brand new website launched it.

15:48
and within seven days, they’re now showing up in the AI overviews for dance terminology. Okay. Yeah. Would you recommend that for an e-commerce store? And do you think that would lead to sales? I would say

16:05
I think if you’re putting a lot of time and effort into this and it’s gonna take this big cumbersome project, maybe not. But I would say if you can use AI to scale the process in a way that’s not too time consuming, and AI is very good at like define this term, what is this? This is where it really shines. There’s not a lot of places to mess up asking about dance styles.

16:30
So I think it’s worth doing that, like take the LLM chat GPT out of the equation. If it’s just SEO, like a lot of top SEOs swear by this, but like have a glossary page, define your terms, build your topical authority. Google can see like, oh wow, this site has full coverage of this topic. Like there are SEO benefits alone that could make it worth it. It’s not like this direct thing like building backlinks, but there’s some indirect things going on that can help. Add in the chat GPT, LLM, AI overviews benefits.

16:59
And yeah, I’d say it’s probably worth creating a glossary on your site. Okay. And then a lot of these things that we’ve been talking about, the content, should that go on your product pages, category pages? You’re recommending not putting it on a blog anymore. So this will be the one exception to my don’t create a blog post. Like I’d say don’t create blog, don’t spend a lot of time blogging except it’s probably worth creating a glossary on your page and it’s probably create worth creating like a buyer’s guide that like lists the

17:29
the best protein powders, the best gaming laptops, or whatever you sell. And this is purely for topical authority so that you’ll rank higher in Google? This is primarily for topical authority rank higher in Google, but there’s also a side benefit of getting more exposure and more referral traffic from large language models like ChatGPT. Okay. What other strategies are you recommending for ranking products in the e-commerce store? Because there’s not a lot of content

17:58
in a store if we’re not blogging, right? I always recommend like on your category page, try to have a few hundred words of content. So don’t just try to don’t do fluff. Don’t just put in like AI garbage, you know, ask yourself what like here’s a prompt sequence I use if I want to create content for category page, I’d ask chat GBT, were the common questions someone might have before purchasing protein powder. Now create a category description that answers all these questions in an easy way a beginner would understand.

18:27
It’s like that right there. You’re making content not necessarily for search engines first, you’re making it for users first, but it happens to have your keywords in there, which can have a positive impact on rankings.

18:40
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19:10
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19:21
Right. And should we be mimicking like an Amazon page where there’s like an FAQ section and, uh, you know, bullet points and all that stuff. I’d say, um, do what’s best for users, which usually means having an FAQ section. I think a lot of you will find that helpful. mean, there’s, there’s Amazon tests, everything. So my, my theory is if you’re seeing something on an Amazon page, there’s probably a reason why they’re doing it. So if they’re, if they have FAQs, there’s a chance people.

19:51
you have the conversion benefits where maybe your copy or your images didn’t answer a question. Having additional content in there might be able to save someone who would have exited out and found another product. But also the SEO side, I think provides a really good experience. It makes your category descriptions more thorough. So yeah, there’s definitely some benefits for having an FAQ section. Do you recommend putting it above the products or below the products?

20:19
So yeah, I get asked this a lot on category pages and collection pages. I’d say have two or three lines of the category description shown with the read more link and then have that expand to show the entire category description. That way you’re not having this big ugly block of text pushing down your products. But if someone maybe they want to read a little bit more before they purchase something or click on something, they’ll have that information there. So it’s kind of a good hybrid between UI UX and also what’s best for SEO.

20:49
Okay. All right. So let’s move into some other topics that have been on my mind. We all know that getting backlinks is a strong ranking factor. Moving forward, when you see AI come into play and maybe where Google’s going, where do you see backlink generation? I think the foundational approach of reaching out to other websites, building relationships will be the same.

21:20
The difference is the focus will shift. It’s gonna be less on have a link to my site and more of make sure my site is mentioned. So it’s less about is the text hyperlinked versus is the text even there in the first place and what’s the sentiment around when my brand is mentioned? Is it positive, is it negative? What are the words that become, that happen before or after my brand is mentioned? Is it talking about products, is it talking about a lawsuit?

21:48
I think that context is gonna be a lot more important. And I think it’s gonna be a little more targeted. So right now with SEO, if you do link building, you just wanna find, like let’s say I sell furniture. Well, I’ll probably wanna find some interior design blogs that I can write a guest post on or I can review my furniture to get back links from them. If I’m doing this type of outreach for chat, GPT and large language models, what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna go into chat GPT, I’m gonna type in,

22:18
what’s the best protein powder for beginners? I’m see what are the sources that chat GPT’s citing. Very good chance there’s gonna be some product reviews, product roundups. And I’m gonna reach out, what I wanna do then is reach out to all those sources that are applicable and pitch my products to them. So it’s a lot more targeted. I’m not just finding any type of fitness blog or weightlifting blog. I’m finding the ones that I see chat GPT citing and that will, if I can get my products included,

22:48
and those roundups that will have a big impact on my product showing up in chat GPT and how high it shows up in chat GPT. So does that apply to Google like the old school Google search now? Even you don’t get a backlink? Yeah, if you I mean, if if you find if we stick with protein powder and let’s say you find some fitness blogs as a weightlifting blogs and they link to you. Yeah, those links are going to have a huge impact on on your ranking. So if you get relevant site linking back to you is always going to have

23:18
strong impact. I kind of wish it wasn’t as powerful as it was in 2025. You know, could have the best content, you could have a really well optimized site with a good user experience. But the sad part is, if you don’t have enough backlinks, you’re just not going to rank as well as your competitors at end of the day. So it’s an unfortunate truth about where Google is now. And there was actually a study that hrefs did recently that kind of confirmed it, I think they found that backlinks to a page is still one of the top highest correlated ranking factors.

23:48
Wow. Okay. So Google isn’t just crawling the source page and looking for the mention. It’s still looking for a backlink and it’s important. If you’re looking at those 10 blue links on page one, you need the need back links. And one, one interesting way I like looking at it is if we stick with like, if I want to rank for protein powder, there are thousands of protein powder brands out there. Yep. So, you know, all those great ranking factors you hear about, like, you know,

24:18
time on site, bounce rate, are people staying on your site or are hitting the back button to click on a competitor? That only applies to the site’s ranking on page one. So your UI UX does not even, it’s not even taken into consideration until you get to page one. So you need backlinks to get you into the competition for page one and then your awesome prices and great product and UI UX can help get you even higher.

24:47
Are you seeing that’s the case for getting mentioned in AI for Gemini, let’s say? I don’t use Gemini, I, yeah. You’re talking about like AI, getting mentioned in Either in the AI mode or the overview if it shows up.

25:03
I’ve found less correlation with backlinks for AI overviews and chat GPT surprisingly. Okay. Which makes sense. If you look at how these large language models work, they’re not really factoring in a website’s authority or links. It’s just taking in a bunch of data from a bunch of data sets. And like the example I shared, there’s a, a brand new dance website, a dance studio launched one week ago.

25:31
is already showing up in AI overviews for the term dance terminology. Right. We’re talking zero authority. So when it comes to getting cited in AI overviews and chat GPT, I’m seeing less of importance on backlinks and more of importance on how thorough and comprehensive the content is and how simple and how guess how boring it’s written. the unfortunately the Wikipedia style of writing

26:00
is favored heavily by these large language models, it’s really easy for them to understand it. If you just say, this is this, and this is related to that, that matter of fact style of writing makes it way more likely that your content’s gonna get cited by these large language models. Whereas if you’re telling stories and using anecdotes and weaving it all together, it’s gonna provide a great user experience, it’s gonna be great for your brand, but unfortunately you’re probably not gonna get cited in large language models as much.

26:30
Are you implying then that the topical authority matters for showing up in AI? I’d say so. Yeah. A lot of the things that you would do to increase your topical authority, you know, answer very specific questions on your site, have very concise answers, have it all structured in a way that’s easy for a search engine, a large language model to access it. That’s working really well with getting cited for chat, GPT and other AI platforms. So does that imply then?

26:58
that perhaps hiring a PR firm that just gets you mentions, not necessarily backlinks, might be a worthwhile investment? I would say so. I would say if you have a PR, because if you look at these sources for, if I search what is the best protein powder, and it’s gonna be like bodybuilder.com, Forbes, it’s gonna be very large publications, most SEO companies don’t have the capabilities to do those pitches properly.

27:28
For that, you probably need a PR firm or maybe a PR firm that specializes in the fitness industry. Okay. Yeah, I was just looking at my site the other day and there’s a couple of these sites that are not authoritative at all outranking Bumble Bee Linens. Right? And I remember going up to you and you said, hey, you know, it’s probably because these category pages don’t have links to products. So I changed that.

27:56
And that actually helped a little bit, I think. But these sites are still outranking. Some of these sites are still outranking me because they got like a mention in some really authoritative publication. And so that’s how I was thinking to myself, huh, OK, maybe if I hired someone who had contacts into these larger organizations just to get a mention, I don’t even need a backlink. That might make a difference. But then I was questioning myself also, like, if the fundamental way

28:25
search is gonna change going forward, should I be investing in this? That’s a tough one. I think it depends on your industry. So for example, if you’re already just breaking even ROI wise, you can probably anticipate that maybe a few years from now, it’s gonna be a little bit less of an ROI. But if you, so like if, I know for your keywords, like maybe people are searching it a few hundred times a month, maybe a few thousand times a month for some of your top keywords.

28:54
Yeah, that, know, you can make a case where like, you know what, I’m not going to put too much effort into this. I’m to focus more on long-term and go more of like, how do I get more exposure and large language models and, and other places like that. know, but if you’re in an industry where people are searching keywords thousands of times or tens of thousands of times, and it’s not too competitive, I mean, it’s probably still worth doing where not only can get lots of revenue now, but you’re still probably going to be getting lots of revenue in the future. So.

29:24
Yeah, for if you have just a little bit of search voluntary keywords, you know, you can make an argument that maybe it’s not worth investing in SEO, which is a long term approach. It’s going to take six months to get some momentum anyway. Maybe that budget could be better spent somewhere else. So what’s the playbook? Let’s use protein powder since clearly you’ve been taking it because I’ve noticed your muscles. is your what is your strategy for protein powder? Let’s say someone’s selling it.

29:53
e-commerce store, what is your strategy? Are we talking about ranking higher in Google? We’re talking about more exposure from our we’re talking about ranking in Google and looking forward into the future where you think things are going. So we’ll start with the Google process first, if you if I want to rank number one for protein powder, which is a very extremely competitive keyword. Yeah. But here’s what here’s what you do. First, you want to figure out which page are you going to push for protein powder. So for that, I’m to search protein powder into Google.

30:21
And I can see that mostly Google is ranking. see Amazon product page. I see a category page. Okay, I’m seeing like all category pages. So that tells me that I should be pushing a category page instead of a product page. So I’m gonna find a category page on my site to push a protein powder. Once I have that in there, now I wanna optimize that page with the keyword. I wanna put the keyword in the title tag.

30:48
the meta description and the header tag. And if you’re not familiar with that, what that is, if you go into Google, there’s that blue link that’s pulling from the title tag. It describes what the page is about and you want to put your keyword front and center, make it the first phrase of that title. Meta description are those two lines of black text and Google search results that show up below the title tag. It’s not really a ranking factor. It more so is just your, your, it’s kind like your ad copy for SEO. You know, it’s your opportunity.

31:16
tell people why your product’s better and get a higher click-through rate. So you’re wanna have a well-written captivating meta-description that, know, mention your keyword at least once, you Google’s gonna bold it so you can get a higher click-through rate, but the most important thing is put your unique selling points in there, put a call to action in there, try to get more people to click on your listing. So we’re gonna optimize our page, but we also wanna optimize the content. So on that category page, we’re gonna have a few hundred words of content about…

31:42
Why are protein powders great? Where we source the whey from and how we don’t use any chemicals or whatever it is. And we also want to answer any questions that a new bodybuilder or someone who wants to buy it might have in the content. make it user-first content. We’ll also want to include related keywords in there. So if I go into Google Image Search and I type in protein powder, I’m going to see keywords like…

32:10
see here, I’m going to see keywords like muscle, way, chocolate, weight gain, nutrition, body, vanilla, gym. These are all keywords that Google is associating with the term protein powder. So the ones that are applicable, we want to include those into our content as well to make our content seem like a more comprehensive overview of protein powder. So once we’ve done that, now we have we have the right page, we have, of course, everything you’ve talked about, right?

32:36
Yeah, this is all kind of standard stuff. We want to do some internal linking. So make sure your homepage is linked into your protein powder page. Make sure any blog posts that you’ve done in the past or will do in the future, those have internal links that are relevant to your protein powder page. Make sure your products have breadcrumbs so they point up to the protein powder page. All those internal links are going to help. And then next is going to build backlinks. So maybe you find some

33:02
fitness blog, some bodybuilder blogs, you send them some free product for them to review and try out. And they write about on their site and they have a backlink on your site. That’s going to help a lot. Maybe do some guest posting you offer to write an article for them. They and you can include a link back in the article to your site that can still thing Jeff guest posting. know, Steve, I wish it wasn’t. But unfortunately, even in 2025, we see really good like, okay, I will tell you my theory about why

33:32
people are pessimists about guest posting. There is so many guest post providers out there where you spend X amount, you’re gonna get a guest post link, it has a high domain rating, high traffic, maybe get 10 of them, maybe get 20 of them, and your traffic is just flat. It doesn’t go anywhere. This happens all the time, and people are like, hey, guest posting doesn’t work anymore. Well, I’ve looked at a lot of these sites that people, you know,

33:59
When I, whenever I see it, I look under the hood to see, well, let’s see these sites that the guest posts are on. They have a high domain rating, maybe in the fifties or sixties. They have high traffic. If you look at poem up and H refs or S M rush, they have very high traffic, no thousands a month. But if you look at what keywords and pages are driving traffic, they’re artificially inflating their traffic. They can spam certain queries to make it look like they’re getting searched thousands of times. The H refs.

34:26
But really they’re not getting searched at all. So a lot of these sites that you think you’re, you’re getting a guest post from that are really good sites. Like, it’s got great domain rating. It’s an authoritative site. It’s got great traffic. Google must love it. It’s all artificial. The site is just dead. It might be hurting you. So like what we sound like our guest posts, like our, our website screening process is really intense. Like we built a proprietary tool that yes, so pull the domain, ready to pull the traffic.

34:54
It’ll pull the year over year traffic to see has this site been penalized by Google. We have the tool take a screenshot of the page, feed it to AI to do like a visual inspection to see if anything looks off. But the main thing we’re looking for is we’re gonna pull the top pages from hrefs and the top keywords from hrefs to see are these keywords in line with the focus of the blog or is it clear it’s just spam that’s just getting through.

35:20
And those are the ones you want to skip. But honestly, I’d say most people, in fact, most agencies don’t even go that depth with their link screening. So they just keep buying these garbage posts that aren’t going to do anything. But if you find ones that are qualified, are good, are natural, yes, guest posting still helps. You know, what’s funny is I used to get requests for guest posting on my blog multiple times a day. It’s pretty much dried up now, actually. I might get one a week at most.

35:48
So you’re saying now’s a good time to pitch you for guest posts. We’re going to get to the top of your inbox. Okay, so backlinks seem to be a fundamental theme here. What about looking forward and where you think things are going at the rate that they’re going? The big question mark is AI AI mode. So like right now in Google, like you, it’s kind of in this experimental phase where Google is testing out AI mode, which essentially makes

36:18
AI look like it will make AI look, make the Google homepage look more like chat, GPT and Gemini and less like the 10 blue links. So that they just, I think they just put that out like a month or so ago. Yeah. Yeah, they’re doing some testing. So it’s going to be really interesting to see what Google comes back with. If this is something, a feature they want to make, like they want to push more, make it the default, or do they just kind of keep it as an optional way of searching for things? Now the one

36:48
thing that we’ll have to consider that I don’t hear anyone talking about is just the financial viability of Google search. So to run a regular web search versus an AI result for Google, it’s like 10 times the processing power and 10 times the processing cost to serve that query. Then you also have to look at the revenue side of it. Right now, you know, we…

37:12
Google ads is making a lot of money off those sponsored links. You you ask businesses that are advertising, they’re spending fortunes every single month on Google ads. So we know they’re making a lot of revenue, whereas with AI mode, we’re not seeing any sort of revenue potential yet. So even if it provides a better user experience, I’m sure Google is gonna have to be weighing how much is it gonna cost us to serve all these queries and how much revenue are we gonna get from it.

37:42
and are we shooting ourselves in the foot by pushing this? So that’s kind of the whole balancing act that is it even gonna be worthwhile financially for them? Yeah, so in terms of the 10x argument, I always think that that’s generally not a factor. It’s 10x right now, but in the future, it’s not gonna be, right? It’s go towards zero. But at the same time, and I haven’t used AI mode that much actually for shopping.

38:09
Maybe I should try it, but I’m wondering if like the Google shopping ads that I’m purchasing and performance max will just start more actually showing up in AI mode. I’m sure they’re going to find a way. I mean, this is this is their I think 50 % of the revenue comes from ads. So 56 % or something like that. Like there’s no ads right now in AI mode, but you would think they would need something if they’re going to make AI mode the default.

38:35
All right, so we’ve already talked about like kind of like the fundamentals of ranking an SEO today. What would you do to the site to kind of future proof it? So backlinks is one thing we already kind of talked about PR agencies and whatnot. What are you advising your clients? If you want to future proof UI UX is having a bigger role than it has before, you know, Google’s looking heavily on are people clicking on your site and staying there? Are they hitting the back button going somewhere else? So like

39:04
You know, in the SEO world, people don’t talk about UI UX as much as they should, but I think it’s very important. Um, it makes you have a good user experience. Uh, I’d say also just brand like brand building. We’re seeing having more and more of a fact in the SEO world, but there’s also a lot of overlap between brand building and exposure and large language models. So, you know, a lot of SEOs see correlation where the sites that get more branded search were like, if I’m searching for starting a drop shipping site and I’m typing my wife quit,

39:35
what is drop shipping. That’s a very strong sit on that. Oh, my wife quit her job provides really good information. People are searching for that. So build brand building initiatives, you know, getting your name out there, getting press, all these types of things. That’s going to help a lot. I’d also say on the link, and that’s also going to have additional benefits of just showing up more in large language models. And I’d also say link building wise, I think there’s going to be more weight.

40:03
on backlinks where Google can tie it to an author. like, Steve, if I go into Google and I type your name, Steve Chu, you have this knowledge panel. It knows that you’re associated with my wife, quit her job, knows that you’re a real person. So if anywhere you link to from my wife, quit her job, that’s going to have a lot more SEO value and backlink juice than just some faceless blog. And I think it’s almost like a tiered system where every site that you would link to, you know, if that site linked, if that webpage link somewhere,

40:32
it’s also gonna get some benefits. So I think Google’s gonna look at more of authors who are authors linking to versus just who’s this faceless blog linking to. The other thing I’ve been reading lately also is perhaps the death of the website. Like if people are doing shopping within these LLMs and whatnot, including Google AI mode or Gemini or whatnot.

40:56
Like are people even going to bother going to the website? I mean, TikTok shop has been really successful because people are buying in platform. Same with Amazon. So I, and I know you’re not going to know the answer to this, but where do you see things going in terms of just shopping? I have heard rumors that chat, GPT will experiment with like taking people directly to the checkout page and throw the product page. Like there’s been some stories about possibly doing that.

41:23
Instead of just taking that, cause what I read was different. It would just take the transaction directly in chat GPT and then the order magically shows up in your Shopify store. So I haven’t heard that then, but that’s like, wouldn’t, the technology that is there and the user experience is there where chat GPT has a map, has a big partnership with, um, Shopify. So they, they could easily have something like that where you can just purchase it. yeah, it could work very similar to how a tick tock would work. Um,

41:53
I would, I, I, I five years from now, I don’t know if I’d be surprised if that, if it had that capability. Cause chat GPT wants to provide the best user experience possible. You know, typically it’s a better user experience if it takes fewer clicks. So if you already trust it, you know, why have, why did you have to go to all these different websites, enter your information, create an account, whatever it is, when you can just push one button and it shows up at your house in a week. I mean, where do you see these 10 blue links going? I mean, how much time do you give it? Or do you think it’s longer than you think?

42:24
It’s a big unknown. It’s a tough one. Because we don’t know what Google is going to do after this big test with AI mode. Maybe it’s something we’re not even picturing. Maybe it’s not a chat GPT interface. It’s not 10 blinks, but some type of hybrid model. We might be seeing something like that. So it’s difficult to tell for sure. a lot of the stuff that you do for SEO, there’s a lot of overlap with chat GPT.

42:52
getting your products found. And again, like we know that a lot of the sources chat, GPD is most likely pulling from like Bing results. So if you’re nowhere to be found in Bing, you’re going to be a hard time being sourced. So there’s a lot of overlap. I would say if SCA, as long as SEO is providing a positive ROI, it’s probably worth continuing. If you know, you people are searching your keywords a lot, but if you’re just kind of on the edges, like where there’s not as many people searching it you’re kind of on the fence of SEO is worth it. You know, it might not be worth pursuing.

43:23
It’s funny because one of my key takeaways from your talk was that everything that you do for SEO is kind of like brand building, right? Like the way we always refer to it as backlinks. mean, that’s not really what it is anymore. Really. It’s about getting mentioned, building the brand, getting people talking about it, which will get absorbed into AI. So it seems to me that the benefit is always there. It’s just hard. might be hard to measure going forward.

43:51
Right? Yeah, it’s like, it’s the same work. It’s just, you’re just slight, you’re just nudging in different direction. You’re not just doing link building for just any old site. You’re not doing link building for the sites that are getting picked up as a source. Um, you know, you’re not, like, you’re, you’re optimizing page. You’re not just creating any type of content. You’re creating content that large language models would like, like glossaries or product roundup. So it’s, it’s taking the fundamentals of SEO and just

44:19
nudging them and pivoting them a little bit so it’s more optimized for these large language models. And I think what’s frustrating to me as I’ve been reading a lot more out of this is like I could do the same query in chat GPT 10 times and get different answers. Right? Yes. So it’s, don’t see how you can measure that. Like whether it’s working. That’s what I’m saying. There’s all these like tools coming out now, like track your LLM visibility and we’re going to track it. It’s like, you know,

44:47
It’s what imagine doing SEO where every time you search the keyword the 10 blue links were completely different like yeah, it’d be impossible. be almost impossible to SEO. So that’s why it’s kind of hard to put marketing dollars towards something that you can’t fully track and that changes so much. You know, this is in its infancy infancy. It’s still evolving. We’ll see kind of where the dust settles a bit. But but yeah, AI optimization LM optimization. There’s for sure some best practices but

45:16
you still have to keep in mind whatever you search is gonna be different and all the more like the more you it’s gonna use what you’ve searched in the past influence your future results from chat GBT. So Steve, if you had a lot of queries about my wife quit her job, then in the future when you ask, you know, what’s the the best site for drop shipping knowledge or e commerce knowledge, it’s going to suggest my wife put a job more often only because it’s looking at your past conversations. Yeah, yeah, actually.

45:45
It knows a lot about me. and it actually is. This is what I don’t like. Actually, I’ll ask it a question now. And it’s the answer that gives me is now bias towards what I’ve liked in the past, which is what I don’t want. Right.

46:00
All right, so one thing that we haven’t really talked about, and this is like the last thing I want to touch on since we’re running out of time, is the role of like we’ve talked about written content already. What about the role of like video content? short form? What does it have any effect on SEO as you can, as far as you can tell right now? The only way can see that having effect is if you have a video and you’re putting it on a blog post or a piece of content, and that increases the engagement metrics where now you have lower bounce rate, more time on site.

46:27
that can help SEO that way, but I’m not really picturing any other way you can leverage video for SEO. Okay, but it probably has a profound effect on AI LLMs, which are reading all that stuff in perhaps. For sure Gemini. mean, Google’s using the YouTube data set very heavily in its training data. I don’t know how much, actually I think chat GBT is also using It does, it does for sure. The chat GBT, so yeah, it’s for SEO, pure SEO.

46:56
extremely minimal for this kind of new way we’re seeing of using large language models and AI platforms, I think that is going to be helpful.

47:09
All right, Jeff, we talked about a lot of topics here. If anyone is interested in getting your help for both SEO and just getting more brand exposure, where can they find you? Yeah, our website is 180marketing.com. It’s just 180marketing.com. Or you can just shoot me an email directly. My email is jeff at 180marketing.com. All right, once again, Jeff, thanks a lot for coming on the show. Maybe like one year from now, we should revisit this.

47:36
and just see how things have changed because things are changing literally every month as far as I can tell. It’s going to be a whole new ballpark. I wouldn’t be surprised.

47:46
Hope you enjoyed this episode. The days of traditional search are numbered, so you have to take these steps if you want to generate sales in the future. For more information and resources, go to mywifequithejob.com slash episode 599. Once again, the recordings for Seller Summit 2025 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequithejob.com and sign up for my free six-day mini course. Just type in your email.

48:16
and I’ll send the course right away via email.