VMP 297: Will AI Kill Off SEO & How To Prepare Your Practice For The New Search

Brandon Breshears 00:00:00  If you haven't noticed by now, a search is changing faster than ever, and the way that people have previously searched is changing faster than ever. If you look at how Google started and before Google other search engines, it really started out as just blue links that were just showing up to adding on additional features like featured snippets, brief description, and brief summaries. And now there's even AI generated answers. This episode is going to explore what's happening within search, because it's going to have a tremendous impact on your practice. Consumer behavior is shifting like never before, and any time that there's big disruptions, whether it's social media or search or even email marketing when it first came out, when big disruptions happen, there are tremendous amounts of opportunity. And this matters more than ever if you don't keep up with this. You're absolutely going to be falling behind. I remember back in 2016 16. We could still give the references about like the Yellow Pages. You should stop running Yellow Pages ads. I think I might know a practice that is still running a Yellow Pages ad, and I think the veterinary industry is notorious for being late to the game.

Brandon Breshears 00:01:15  And so in this episode, my goal for you is you're going to have a clear understanding, hopefully as clear as can be because it's changing so fast. But it'll help you to think about how you should approach strategy when it comes to search SEO and AI, because things are changing. And one thing's for certain it's never going to go back to how it was. So if we look at the current state of search, there's traditional search models. You have your keywords that you're targeting, and then you can optimize for those keywords. there's two ways to do that. You can do results and you can do paid. But with the emergence of AI search, we now have Google search generative experience, which is called SGE. We have Bing's integration with ChatGPT, which actually, in my opinion, fell pretty flat. I thought that it was going to have a bigger impact than it didn't. But we have all of these native AI search tools now, like ChatGPT. There's a big consumer shift that's happening, because the way that ChatGPT answers questions is a lot more useful and helpful and easy to get to the bottom of.

Brandon Breshears 00:02:23  Obviously, it's like having an expert in basically any field in your pocket at any time, and so you have ways to generate really in-depth, nuanced answers and get to the bottom of the types of questions that you're looking for with AI like never before. And so we have two, number one, I think some of these most important things that you should be doing is using AI regularly. especially the way that it's you can use it for, conversations. It's getting incredibly good. ChatGPT five just recently launched, and so I'm talking. I did an episode in-depth of how to use AI for your marketing, but this is really going to be focused on how can you make sure that you're showing up and being recommended by AI when it comes to search tools right now, based on a bunch of case studies that I've seen, the way that I works for consumers is that it goes out and it acts like a person, and that it'll go through and actually run Google searches itself. It'll look across websites for expertise, authority, experience and trust.

Brandon Breshears 00:03:41  So it's called E, and it doesn't just go through the website like it used to. It'll also go through social channels, it'll look through Reddit, it'll look through all these different citation sites. But if you have the right strategies in place, you're going to allow ChatGPT and other tools to quickly find you as one of the the resources and then be able to refer. But I think it's going to be significantly different because we can't target the same types of searches that we used to, simply because it's not going to be useful and not going to have the utility. You can target certain searches that you did in the past, but you're going to be targeting it more to show up for AI, not for consumers, in my opinion. And obviously, all of this is new and changing really rapidly. So as soon as things change and come up, I will be sure to send or do updates on this podcast. Which leads me to the next thing. If you haven't subscribed. Be sure to subscribe in iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, Google Play wherever you get your podcast from.

Brandon Breshears 00:04:46  And if you're not a member of the newsletter, you should absolutely sign up for it. I send two emails per week. Sounds like a lot, but it's actually really practical tools, tips, tactics and things that you can implement right away. My goal with that email is that you're only going to get emails that are going to help you grow your business. So so far, the open rates are crazy. High click through rates are crazy high and people are not unsubscribing because it is full of value. And I'm not spamming people in that newsletter. So if you're interested, be sure to sign up for the newsletter. You can find it at Veterinary Marketing Podcast dot com. So I think with the writing is absolutely on the wall that Google and Bing and other search engines have seen a pretty dramatic drop in search when they're talking about the drop that they're seeing in search, though, there are certain types of searches that they're seeing drops in. You can kind of boil searches down into one of these three categories.

Brandon Breshears 00:05:42  You have branded search, you have transactional search and you have informational search. So branded search is like looking for the name of a company. For example, if you're looking for like Nike. Com or American airlines.com, those types of searches where people have a specific brand name that they're thinking about. that is not the category that is decreasing as much. We have transactional search also with transactional search. People are looking for things like vet near me. they're looking for, you know, they're in-market. They want and need something right away. and those transactional searches, we're not seeing a tremendous amount of decrease there. That may change in the future. But, people are still using Google for those types of things. I think one of the big reasons that people are still using that is that they have the Google review infrastructure in place. And when we're thinking about what we should be doing, what we should be focusing on, we need to look at the the strengths and weaknesses of each of these platforms. So for example, ChatGPT does not have a review system, it doesn't have that infrastructure in place.

Brandon Breshears 00:06:50  And Google has decades of experience in this. They have a tremendous infrastructure that has a high level of trust, and people really are trained to value reviews. Amazon really, I think, is responsible for this shift. So many people use Amazon every single day. And when you're looking at products in Amazon, going through and looking at the star reviews is a big driver. And so when we're thinking about consumer behavior, it's important that we look at these types of elements, because the way that people purchase anything is how they're going to also approach the purchase process when it comes to your veterinary hospital. So I think it's incredibly important to say, okay, what is the current method that people use for purchasing things? And I really want you to start taking note of any time you're shopping online or shopping on Amazon. Like kind of take a step back and start to think about, okay, why did I choose that product when you are looking at friends or family. Ask them why did you decide to buy that and start to kind of be like a marketing psychologist and get to the root of what are the things that made this buying decision happen, especially with people that you think are going to be the type and personality type of your ideal clients? I like to do this all the time with my wife, who is not a marketer, and I'll just be like, why did you choose that one? And she'll be like, well, it had free shipping and like the decision making process will have her like described to me why she liked that more.

Brandon Breshears 00:08:23  What were the factors that went into it? Because I like to get other perspectives. I think a lot of times people fall into the trap of thinking that everybody thinks like they do. There was a recent study that came out that said, like, I think it's 50 over 50. People can't think of pictures while they're thinking of I'm sorry it wasn't pictures. It was actually that when they're reading, They have a voice in their head. I have a voice in my head. That's like saying it in my mind when I'm reading something. But other people have nothing. They just read the words. And so it's a big paradigm shift when you realize that certain people have a completely different framework in the way that their brain works, because you just assume, oh, this is like the same for everybody. Everybody does it this way. But that couldn't be further from the truth. So it is incredibly important you start thinking, why are people making decisions? What is the the principle here? That's that's driving these conversions and especially with the way that people are going to be using ChatGPT or Google Search, really try to figure out how people are getting to your site, how people are engaging with your content, and then what is it that's making them become a new client? people are usually very open to sharing this.

Brandon Breshears 00:09:43  And so it just be curious And you need to think about kind of like the larger picture instead of just coming for for tactics and strategies. Think about the bigger picture of why people are making these behavioral choices and what is driving that action rather than just, okay, I need to do some citation creation so that we're going to have higher rank authority. Not like that doesn't help you over the long run. And the more that you can think about, especially the way that people are changing how they use social, there's a lot more kind of interest graph. rather than social media, meaning that all of your content within your feed is really tailored to you and people like that. It's really sticky. In fact, it's kind of like addictive. And so this has impact across search. And there was recently an update this week to Google Search where you can set your default news sources. So now when you're searching for news topics or any types of stories, or in the discovery tab on your phone or on your browser, it's going to start sending you more like biased information, because it's going to be just a few sources.

Brandon Breshears 00:10:59  So people that like watching Fox News are going to get all the Fox News sources, people that like CNN are going to only get the CNN sources. And so it's just going to continue to kind of feed them that type of information and bias that they're looking for, if that makes sense. So there's a lot of interesting things happening with respect to search with respect to the way that people are consuming and engaging content. And so whenever we're thinking about behavior people, when it relates to technology, there's some core principles that you can really kind of identify and then use that to basically leverage and grow, especially on these things that are newer. So thinking about like the strategy overall rather than just specific tactics. So this leads me to the next point of where this is all going. And I think that the generative first search experience is a lot more conversational. It's summary style. And they're really trying to distill information to give it in quick bites. But that means that there's going to be fewer people visiting, your website for certain things.

Brandon Breshears 00:12:06  And so we need to be thinking about what are the types of things that people would actually want to go to the website for to do their own research or further research about. a good example of this is if you're searching for the weather in your area for today, if you search weather for like, I'm in Grangeville, Idaho, weather for Grangeville, Idaho, and I put that into the search bar, it's going to put a featured snippet, which is a new edition that came out probably 7 or 8 years ago, where it just pulls the data from weather.com and puts it at the top of the page, so you don't even have to visit the web page. There are certain times though where I will click that because if it says rain, I want to see the Doppler on there. And so I am clicking. But there is a condition to that. And I think there's going to be similar things with respect to pet owner behavior. That's going to be like that. I think that most of these search impacts are going to be initially informational, and then it's probably going to get more around transactional.

Brandon Breshears 00:13:15  And what I mean by that is it will be like instead of going to Google and then searching for windows, my dog need vaccinations at what ages, and then it shows a summary result or an error as a result used to show a web page. People will click the web page and then they would go to a website. They would see, okay, you need to have your first Vaccines, and I apologize. I'm not a veterinarian. I don't know what it is, but you know what it is. It'll say at like three months. Again, I'm sorry. I don't remember what it is off the top of my head. and then you would go back and then let's say your your puppy was three months old. It's time for the first round of vaccines. Okay. Then they'll go in search for vet near me. How is that going to change in the future? It's going to be. At what age do I need to get vaccines for my my puppy. He's three months old and then it'll say, great.

Brandon Breshears 00:14:11  Here's the suggested, vaccine schedule for most puppies, right? And it'll list that out. And then at the bottom it would say, you know, would you like me to find some good, veterinarians near and around Grangeville, Idaho? And then I'd say yes. And then it would pull up different results. And from that point, we need to be optimized so that ChatGPT Is understanding that we are, in fact, experts in this market and that we serve puppies. I'm going to show how to help do that. But really this dramatically reduces the number of clicks. Does that mean that we should focus less on SEO? I do not think so. And the reason for that is ChatGPT is not indexing the website. So it has to go out and find this information. It's more efficient for it to find the information than it is to index everything and host that knowledge, because also it's being updated all the time. There are going to be fewer visits to websites. There are going to be more answers just readily available at the top of Google or at ChatGPT.

Brandon Breshears 00:15:23  Also, the thing that we're seeing pretty regularly is that there are specialized AI engines in AI agents. We see that happening in medical. We see that happening in legal. We see that happening in travel, where you have specialized, trained agents that can go out and do things for you specifically, like travel. So you could say, I want to go to this spot. Here's the dates I'd like to be. Go out and find me the best basic deals and it'll go and do that, that type of specialty. I don't know that that's going to be as big in vet med. unless a big company is trying to push through like an eye veterinarian. And I think that most of the medical boards will probably not allow that. right now, it might be inevitable, I don't know. but I think that for the most part, things like ChatGPT and grok and, the Google SGS are going to answer a lot of those basic type questions. so I do think that the barrier to being like a with what we've seen with telemedicine in particular, as being difficult to get through, I do think there's going to be resistance to having a specific I veterinarian, but I'm not super involved in all of the politics of that.

Brandon Breshears 00:16:42  And so I just kind of see what happens. And that would be my guess probably at some point in the future, like, who knows what the world's going to be like in five years if we're all here. Still, who knows what seems crazier than ever? But, you know, it's it's really hard to predict that far in the future. So again, that's why we need to think about this from consumer behavior, which is really what's going to be driving where this goes. So again, I can't stress enough you need to be a user of this. You need to see how it works and you need to use it regularly. And the cool part is that veterinary medicine is really embracing AI, especially for things like soap notes and, just all of the different tools that are out there. So I think that it's cool that lots of people are using it, but if you're not using it, you need to start using it more often, and I think you'll be really Impressed with it too.

Brandon Breshears 00:17:37  But with what I see right now and where I think it's going. trust and authority signals are more important than ever. What I needs is high quality content, verified sources, really clear schema markup, really clear as structural SEO and then content. That's going to give the depth and context for the types of things that you're looking to do. I think it's important that you're not trying to just create content for the sake of creating content, but rather creating content that's meaningful, that is unique, that shares your expertise, your experiences, and your authority, and really helps to get you the right types of eye interaction that you're looking for. And that's really weird to think, but if you think about it, AI is behaving like a human going through search, pulling results, looking at your reviews, looking at your Facebook page, looking at your mentions on Reddit, and then it can pull contextually what all of that means for the person that is searching. So, for example, if you have a bunch of people on Reddit complaining about how expensive your practice is, but the experience was great.

Brandon Breshears 00:18:46  You're going to probably be seen as a high end location. And if ChatGPT knows that you're actively budgeting because they have all of the other history within ChatGPT, they're probably not going to give a recommendation to somebody. But if they know that somebody is consistently looking for luxury or high end stuff, it's probably going to go through and make that recommendation. I have seen that ChatGPT does have a price bias, and so they're typically looking for lower cost things in general. I've tried this with new models that I haven't logged into before. So I'll create an email. I'll jump into ChatGPT with a brand new account, and then I'll pull and see. And it looks like price, bias is is pretty heavy, so it just doesn't reference there. But putting things on your website like fair and affordable pricing, fair and transparent pricing, stuff like that. Euphemisms for for good pricing. If you're low cost, then I would absolutely highlight that. and just be clear about who you're looking for, who you're who you are for.

Brandon Breshears 00:19:53  And, I think you're going to get better results with being referred by ChatGPT and these other things. and that kind of also goes back to schema markup. Schema is a technical SEO piece of code that you put on your website. It's kind of like a label for the search engines and then also for AI. And if you think about it like if I handed you a box and you didn't know what was in the box, you wouldn't be able to necessarily guess what it is if you just had the box only. But if I put a label on it and it said pizza, and I handed you a box that was a pizza box, you'd say, okay, this is a pizza box. I know what it is because it's labeled properly. And so that's ultimately what schema is for your website. It helps you to basically point to all of your social channels. It says, this is our business. Here's our location. Here is our price range. Like you can add pricing. You can add zip codes, area codes, latitude, longitude.

Brandon Breshears 00:20:52  You can add your social channels in there. and it is a map for ChatGPT in these other places to quickly go through and see. Here's all of the relevant links to the site. here's our Google business profile. So then ChatGPT can go through and quickly see what the engagement on your socials are. You can see what the engagement review is on your Google Business profile. You can see your hours. You can see your price range. it can also go through and see all of your additional citations. So if you have additional citations On directories and listings, which I think still does have a pretty significant impact within Google Business Profile rankings. I think that that's also really, really important. And so you need to technically have your SEO in a good place so that you're making sure that I can quickly and easily go through, see all of your social channels. And that also comes back to the fact that I think you need to be focused on branding. Branding is going to help you to have a consistent experience across all of these social channels, and you're going to want to make sure that your brand is visible on all of these different social channels, too.

Brandon Breshears 00:22:09  It's very, very important, too, that you have a high level of experience and authority within your site so that, like you're giving context for, for example, who wrote the article or blog post. If you have blog posts and it says that it's authored by the veterinarian who owns the practice. That's going to give AI systems the high quality, verified source that it needs to understand. And so you're going to want to make sure that your authorship information is set up properly. You want to make sure that you're also being optimized for. It's called multimodal search. So that's going to be voice video and image queries and thinking about that. Like for example, if somebody takes a video of their dog and they're like what's wrong with my dog? And they upload it to ChatGPT and then it quickly says, oh, it looks like your dog has an issue and might need a TP of surgery. here's all the different options. And then it lists the sources that I've found it from. If you have content on your site that's about deep below, you have images or even videos about TP yellow.

Brandon Breshears 00:23:17  It can give AI systems high quality, verified sources that it can compare against and draw from. and so making sure not only that you have the proper schema setup, but that also your images are optimized for search, that you have Q&A sections that you have, your site just completely optimized structurally too. And one thing that I see happening very, very frequently within the vendor space is that most of the website companies out there, not all of them, but most of them simply create templated setups that they use over and over again. And so keywords repeat very frequently. they don't put alt image text to describe what the images are about. They don't put keywords and metadata in there. And it's just really very, very basic in terms of the level and quality, of SEO out there. So let's talk about why this shift is happening and why it's only going to speed up more and more as people use ChatGPT more, I think. User expectations are dramatically shifting. I don't think people are going to be consuming blog content unless it is very, very narrow and like the exact rabbit hole that they're trying to go down.

Brandon Breshears 00:24:41  So if you're creating content, I think this very high level, top of funnel content that's going to be like, what are the best places to take your dog camping? Or, like firework tips for 4th of July? Those types of blog posts should be stopped because people are looking for instant curated answers that are relevant to them, and so that type of content is going to. I'm sure it already is being immediately solved by ChatGPT. And as more and more people are using it, it's only going to get less and less effective to try to create content around this ultra top of funnel content. that is informational. And so when I say top of funnel content, I mean that's trying to just cast a very wide net to attract the clients that are going to be, they're not even in market, but they're searching for something that is just informational that a pet owner would be wondering about. AI is really reducing friction. It's making things a lot more efficient. There's less scrolling, there's fewer decisions. And any time you can take decision making out of the process, people are happy about that.

Brandon Breshears 00:25:53  people spend more time on social and I think that increase, like those types of top of funnel, blog posts probably should be more focused around social because you're trying to get people to explore and find you and become aware of your brand. So social, especially with the interest graph versus social graph, meaning that you're not seeing so much of like what your friends are doing in pictures of first day at school pictures. When you go on Instagram, you might see that within your feed, but as soon as you click on a reel, that's your friend's Instagram post. Like go through this real quick jump on Instagram, pull up the first post from a friend, click on it, and then scroll to the very next post. It's going to be somebody you've never heard of, never seen, but it's going to be interest graph related and that keeps you on there. And the reason for that is tick tock. It's about interest and finding out what you're interested in. Not so much the people that you're connected to socially.

Brandon Breshears 00:26:53  I'd say the exception for that is Facebook, but still within the reels and video content system on Facebook, that is interest graph based. and so thinking about content shift, you know, I think that that is the new paradigm within marketing that you're not going to be able to capture traffic in a meaningful way for these top of funnel searches. So I think it's really important to think about also the economic incentives that Google, Microsoft and OpenAI have when it comes to keeping users. in the early days of search engine optimization. Focus was really on how do we provide the highest quality results, because especially early on in Google search, it was very easy to manipulate the search results based on the algorithm that was very clear on what you needed to do. And so I don't know if you remember it, but there was like different updates to the search engine algorithm. Now, it happens so often that we don't even really hear about it. unless you're in marketing and you're actively studying it like I am. But you know, like the Penguin update I remember was a big one because it took all of the spammy SEO type, activities that all of the SEOs were doing at the time, and it made it so that there was a huge traffic cliff that made it so that the search results were providing better results, but that really hurt marketers.

Brandon Breshears 00:28:27  The incentive for these big companies is to provide the best experience for their users, and so it's always going to be focused more towards instant curated answers and less scrolling and fewer decisions. That's ultimately where they want to go. Now, Google's biggest driver of revenue is Google Ads. Google ads still works great, and they have new eye placements for their ads as well. The cool thing that's coming out within Google Ads is going to be called their Imax ads. So for example, if somebody goes to Google, they're searching for informational type searches that AI is going to generate. They know the intent that's mapped to that action. And so in follow up questions they're going to be serving ads to people based on intent. They said that those are coming out in September. We'll see when those come out. But I'm really excited about those. I think that's going to be great. Microsoft in being you can run ads on being, which is going to use ChatGPT. it's actually super simple to get your Google Ads campaigns into Microsoft, but it's just a really different demographic and user base.

Brandon Breshears 00:29:32  So it might work for you, I think if you're interested in that, you can test it and you can reach out and be happy to show you how that works. OpenAI does not have, an ad product yet. I would bet that they're going to have an ad product. And then if you think about the detail that people are sharing right now with OpenAI, like it's going to have contextually some of the best targeting out there. So I hope that it opens up. Not sure if it will. Right now you have to pay for premium. I'm paying for premium. Most people I know are paying for premium. So in products where people pay to use it, usually the ad experience is not there. so I do think that they would like to get ad revenue though, just because they would make tons of money, so I wouldn't. I would expect that that ads would come to OpenAI and ChatGPT at some point, but we will see that's still to be determined. And really it's going to be just better.

Brandon Breshears 00:30:31  Personalization is going to give contextual answers based on history, preferences, and it's like talking to an expert who knows everything about your life. When you're talking to them about your kids and you're talking about going back to school, and you're talking about how busy it is, and you're like, how can I optimize my schedule so that it's not stressful in the morning? And then you say, okay, I need a vet for my appointment, and then it's going to go through and check and say, you know, these three vets are affordable and they have drop offs available in the morning. Like it'll know contextually that it's going to be valuable to you, which is another reason why I'm so excited for all of these opportunities. Again, this is all brand new. And so as it's changing, I'll update you. But you need to be thinking about how you're using it and how your clients and customers are going to be using it, because things are absolutely never going to be the same. So let's talk about what you can do right now to optimize for AI search.

Brandon Breshears 00:31:24  I think that these are pretty safe pillars of what you can do so that in the future, like right now. And then also over the next couple of years, it will help you over time. And I think just because things are changing so fast, it is important that you're thinking of long game. It's always okay to test things, to see what's going to work. But don't spend all of your time on type like fringe type stuff that might produce short term results. And then things change and it doesn't work. But I think these principles that we're going to talk about what you should do to optimize for AI search is going to be really, really helpful. Number one, you still need to have a content strategy for AI answers. I think you need to think about this a lot differently though. You need to be focusing on depth and clarity. You want AI to easily synthesize all of the information that you have. You want it to consume it and understand contextually what you're about. I have a client that's in Austin, Texas, and we were looking at the results.

Brandon Breshears 00:32:24  And when you're looking up results on ChatGPT, ask it why it recommended that and why it didn't recommend these other options. So it'll tell you why it did that. In looking at this result, it didn't refer my client that we're running ads for. It referred three other clients. And so the other clients looking through their site, they had deep niche content for each of these things I was looking for. I can't remember what it was that I said, but I was I said, I have a toxin with GI issues. Who should I take my dog to if I live in this zip code? And it popped up three results. I looked at all of those content on the site. All of them had GI and digestive issue content. So depth and clarity is really important. You need to use natural language with Q&A structure. I totally think it's okay to use ChatGPT to create content. However, I will say this with the caveat you don't want to just paste it direct from ChatGPT. I typically like to start and have the starting point where I will either dictate something like this podcast episode.

Brandon Breshears 00:33:35  and then it's my own thought, my own insights, my own experience, my own expertise, my own authority. And I put all of those things in. I'll leave stories in a lot of times. And then I will ask ChatGPT to help me write based on the transcript. And that way we're not creating content that's just total AI crap. And so I can make good stuff, but you can make it even better if you are the starting point, because it's going to be something that can't be duplicated by your competitors. The tool that I use, for pulling transcripts will be a tool like Pod Squeeze, which I use to transcribe all of my podcast episodes. you can. I don't think you can upload video files yet, but I'm sure at some point you'll be able to upload video and audio files into ChatGPT and pull transcripts. so depth clarity really get niche. So if you want to be doing more dental procedures and you want ChatGPT and Google search SGE to to show your results, you need to have content about dental care.

Brandon Breshears 00:34:38  I would try to create the best pillar content for dental procedures and not just one piece of content, but like a series of content around it. Talk about anesthesia. Free versus anesthesia. Talk about extractions. Talk about root tip fractures. Talk about cost. Talk about prevention. All of these things really in depth. You can create content at scale faster than ever using AI tools. So there's really no excuse for making something that is the best out there. Be sure to work on optimizing for local things so you want to make sure and include local keywords in the content, but you ultimately want to create depth. and so it's going to be more volume and more depth and more quality. Hopefully I would still make things so that if you shared it on social, it was an actually very valuable resource that if somebody was had a question about dentistry, they read your content, they'd say, wow, I learned everything I needed to know about that. And again, I is going to go through it and synthesize it and distill it back.

Brandon Breshears 00:35:48  But if it's good enough for somebody to read, it's going to be good enough for I to read. Also, authority and back linking is still important. It still matters. But you need to have the expertise, authority, experience and trust. And it's even more critical. That's also signaled by reviews. Use reviews are more important than ever. In my opinion, just because ChatGPT does not have a review system in place, it's still going to refer back to Google. So if you do not have a review system for actively requesting reviews, I highly suggest that you get something in place because it's going to be more important than ever. You're going to want to make sure that all of your profiles, all of your citations and everything that you can do is done properly. You're also going to want to make sure that your schema and structured data is set up properly. I'm going to be doing a in-depth workshop with this new tool that I've been using. It's called Search Atlas. It is the best out there.

Brandon Breshears 00:36:49  if you would like an invitation to this, please send me an email at Brandon at Digital Marketing Comm. I will make sure that you get that I'm currently building out that presentation, but it's going to be the best SEO strategy that's practical tools and tips that you can use. and I'm very excited about it. I've been testing this with several clients as a beta, and we're seeing tremendous results with it. So I'm very, very excited. So you need to make sure that that is set up. And if you're not a coder and I'm not a good enough coder, honestly, like I, I'm not a coder by any means. So I need to find a tool that let me do this. And so I've definitely found the tool and strategy that helps me to get that done. The next thing that you need to do is make sure that you have a multi-channel presence. So make sure again that all of your profiles are set up properly, that you have the name, address, and all of the details.

Brandon Breshears 00:37:40  Consistent branding is consistent. Make sure your social channels are active. Make sure that you're posting content that's getting engagement, not just posting for the sake of posting, and make it so that you are building context for AI. So make sure that you have some fun stuff in there, but also post content that is going to be helpful as well in that multi-channel presence too. I would say, if you can engage on certain channels like Reddit, I see. And I'm not a huge fan of Reddit in general, but I see ChatGPT relying heavily on it because it's a community based source that you can get context, especially with reviews of locations. Make sure that if you're showing up in Reddit, search your your practice name and respond to things inside of Reddit, I think that's very important. and it's only going to get more important to you when it's trying to pull context for how people are engaging with your brand. I haven't seen next door, inside of search results, but I would be curious if that would have impact as well.

Brandon Breshears 00:38:50  I really just diversifying your, your expertise where it shows up, making sure that you're on all of the major, major channels being Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube if possible. and making sure that all of these things are very clearly linked in a way that's that's helpful. next, we have brands and signals. You want to make sure that your brand is consistent across each channel. So the way that you're going to communicate on the channel is going to be different, right? If you're on Twitter, you only have, you know, the the context within Twitter of how to present your brand, but it needs to be set up in a way that is consistent and needs to have similar pictures, logos, descriptions, hours, location, website. All of those things need to be set up properly and consistent. I mentioned right now that brand is not being captured by AD, but I think it will be soon. within your Google business profile, if you're posting updates and events and things like that, those brand signals will be pulled in to ChatGPT.

Brandon Breshears 00:39:55  So for example, if you said to ChatGPT, where is what's the phone number for ABC? Animal hospital. It would pull up the phone number and be able to deliver that without a search. That would be an example of a branded search. But if you've noticed, every time inside of ChatGPT, it gives you an additional prompt to try to keep you engaged in there. And so I think, like if it went to your Google business profile, pulled your phone number and then saw that you have an event coming up, it would maybe say like, hey, they have an event coming up. Would you like more info about it? Things like that. So Brand Signals is important so that I can quickly know what you're associated with. And again, that goes back to your schema to make sure that your structural SEO is set up so that ChatGPT can find the right source and know what they're serving. So next steps that I think you should be doing are, number one, you need to audit your content.

Brandon Breshears 00:40:58  Is it AI friendly, create FAQ style and conversational content that's going to give depth and clarity. double down on building a brand, not just creating content for the sake of it, but what do you want to be known for? Who do you want to serve? And then how are you going to show up for them? when I had Chris Dough on the podcast, one of the things he said was like, If Nike built the hotel, what would that look like? You could have a pretty good idea of what that would look like if Disney built a hotel. What would that look like? You'd have a pretty good idea of it. If Apple built a hotel, what would that look like? That is brand. How do you want to be showing up across all of these locations? What do you want to be known for? And really double down on that. Who do you want to serve and how are you going to serve them? How are you going to actually stand out? I'd say it's important to also be experimenting with AI first Platforms.

Brandon Breshears 00:41:59  try to create AI summaries of your own content and see what it says. So if you create a blog post, create a content summary of it in ChatGPT and say, please summarize this in three sentences, see what it says. And then based on that distillation, how can you adjust the content so that it's going to provide more of what you're looking for there, and then also monitor traffic and be consistently monitoring traffic? I think most practices should be in Google Analytics at least once a month, looking at benchmarks, knowing what their traffic is generally, are they seeing decreases or are they seeing increases? And then also be on the lookout for ChatGPT? You'll see that as a traffic source, which is really cool. so monitor all of these sources and see where you're getting traffic from. The bottom line is search is not dying. Google is not dying. SEO is not dying. It's just changing, and the winners are going to be those who adopt early. This is, again, kind of like a land rush, where you can go out and establish yourself far and above everyone else before it gets really, really competitive.

Brandon Breshears 00:43:08  So winners early on are going to do better, and those who adapt early are going to do much better. And one thing that I want to leave you with here before we finish is I have an I search audit. That's a self audit guide. It has a quick snapshot that you can do that takes 15 minutes. It has a deep audit that you can do which takes about an hour. And then it lays out exact steps for you to make sure that you're going to be showing up as relevant as possible. It also has an AI ready page checklist that you can use to make sure that all of your pages on your site are properly set up and optimized for AI search. Definitely head on over to the vendor marketing Veterinary Marketing Podcast. Com. There's no just Veterinary Marketing Podcast. Com and be sure to sign up for the newsletter there. That way you can receive updates about the trainings that I have coming out, which I think are going to be really important. It'll help you to not only get a handle on all the changes that are coming out, but capitalize on all of the changes that are happening so that you don't see a decrease in your practice.

Brandon Breshears 00:44:17  I hope this was helpful. If it helped you. It would probably help somebody else too. So be sure to share this with those that you think would benefit from it. And I really appreciate your time. If there's any questions that you have, don't hesitate to reach out and have a great day.

‍