Welcome to episode 1 of Season 3 - 2023's first episode of the Opinionated SEO podcast!
I'll be discussing Google's issues that I'm seeing.
Slow speed of Chrome browser
Decrease in ad revenue
Google Analytics 4
We also spoke about how Microsoft and Open AI's collaboration on Bing is quickly growing and may surpass Google in the future.
Finally, we provided tips on how to use AI to help create content for SEO purposes and how to share it effectively on multiple platforms.
Phil:
Welcome to the Opinionated seo. Well, it's 2023 and looks like it's taken me about two and a half months to get an episode out, but a lot's been going on. So let's talk about some of the big stuff. You've heard it everywhere, right? AI Chat, G P T, open, ai B, Google Barred, all, all of that. So there's a lot going on, but I want to talk about two things. One, Google's a little bit of a direction. Issues that I think they're having. And the second, what you need to do if you're working on your own seo, may be local seo, some things that may seem like easy, quick wins, but really some ways to make it work. So let's kind of start a little bit on the Google thing. I, um, wrote a LinkedIn post about this and, and got a little traction and, and I thought I would expand a little bit on it, but it's really kind of interesting., what areas is. Really done well in. And what areas do they seem like they're just losing? And I think someone else had put it that they haven't had a lot of competition in a while. They did years ago and, and they really knew what they were doing to beat that. But, uh, let's look at like the browsers. Chrome is a great browser, but it's gotten slow. It's not as private as it could be., edge is a great browser. Most of my developers are using Firefox or Duck Dot Go. Chrome's still installed, still testing it. but it actually seems like it's not the default anymore. And one of the things that you can get from being on the Chrome browser is Google can still collect your data, even if you're in a private mode, incognito, look at those terms of service. That info is still potentially fed back to Google, whether or not it's tied to your account or anything. But either way, I feel like there's some really solid competition out there, and there's no reason why., any of those others can't gain more traction. The next is the advertising side of things. So I mean, we're looking at things like TikTok, overtaking YouTube, and of course YouTube is a Google company. Facebook advertising is still very strong. looking at Q4 2022 year over year numbers, Google is down. 1.6% in revenue for ads. Facebook's up 2%. People are still advertising on there, and some of the targeting might even be better because they have really great ways of tracking you, even if they can't track across other sites. Google ads. Removing really the ability to do exact match in advertising, forcing new types of matching China almost force a lot of the AI components into it Seems like it's really increasing cost, not necessarily with the same results you were getting before and with a lot less control, uh, the next. Analytics, Google Analytics four is horrible. I have actually removed Google Analytics from a lot of my smaller sites, um, using Plausible. Now I pay $10 a month, something like that, for up to 50 sites, and I'd rather pay that. than use Google Analytics four. It's just that bad. It literally gives me a headache just trying to use the ui., so I think Google's gonna lose out on a lot of data as enterprise solutions are gonna see that. Analytics four, even if you're on 360, are just gonna look at things like Adobe Analytics and, and some of the other big enterprise level solutions. So as they get less and less of this data, they're probably gonna have poor results. The big one is Bing and their open ai, so Microsoft and open AI collaboration. And what was there a million signups in the first like week for the Bing preview that has chat G B T. as part of it. there's a hundred million users on chat, G P T that they got in less than two months. It's the fastest SaaS adoption ever. Google probably can't catch up to this. There's just so much positivity on chat, G P T, the PR alone.. Even if Google has a better product, the people that are looking for that kind of experience are gonna start moving over to the Microsoft solutions. And as Microsoft integrates this more and more into their systems, which really makes a lot of sense. One of the use cases that we had discussed internally is things like, On Microsoft Excel, if I need a certain formula done, I can literally request it and say, can you take a two and remove this portion, add it to a three, and make everything lowercase and it can create the formula for me. Being able to tell it what you wanted to do and it can generate a formula. Those types of use cases are gonna be really helpful. And I think Google had the opportunity to put this in Google Sheets and hasn't, and I'm not sure why because they've got the AI backend system. So we'll see who ends up winning out here. And my, one of my final lines was, is Google going the way of MySpace? Are we. Going to see just a general decline until we start seeing Microsoft or Bing or whichever really starting to take over. So that's some of my takes that I'm seeing on Google right now. it's been kind of interesting. I've been doing this for 20 years, optimizing websites and video for Google. I think the next two years are gonna be really interesting just to see. How Google can keep that number one spot, which I don't know if they're gonna be able to. Um, now the second thing I wanted to talk about is, If you are an SEO and you're working on your own, or maybe you're not an seo, maybe you're a business owner, maybe you know, in this case I was talking to someone who was a brokerage owner for a real estate company. Um, one of the things we talked about was what type of content can you create that still is going to be a really good piece of content. Can you use AI with that? And I think AI does an amazing job. At summation, it really can pull together information and give you a really well-written, piece of content that really puts that data into words. What it lacks though is uniqueness and. Anyone can ask it to summarize something, but what you really wanna start thinking about is what kind of information can I introduce to the AI that it can then create? So in this case, we had talked about market conditions, and it's really tough for me to ask an. Well, what are the market conditions? Tell me if it's a good time to buy a house or sell a house. But if I were to feed it information that I had, I had feedback of X, Y, and Z, this person said this. Here's the stats from the last two months. Summarize that and it can start creating summaries, and you can start requesting it to make analysis on that. But then you can extrapolate and go further with it. And what you end up doing is you end up creating content that's not only unique. But it's unique because it came from you, but it also takes this information and puts it in a much more easy to digest format. Instead of having just graphs and charts, you say, well, here's what this actually means. And creating that kind of content is the type of thing that people want to consume. Um, this type of content is probably. Evergreen, but it's perfect for things like social media. So you create this piece of content on your site and you can share it on social media, and that's the kind of thing that people are searching for and looking for. It may not rank number one. But it's going to attract people and it's also going to be something that people will come back for if you continue to use it regularly because, and this is the second part, you want to take this content and you want to figure out a way to use it in more than one place. So if you are doing a market update, maybe this is something you're doing monthly. you want to add it into a Facebook post. You want to do a TikTok video where you're summarizing it. You want to do a YouTube video where you maybe dive a little bit deeper into the numbers and you want to add it into your newsletter or email that you're sending out on a regular basis to anyone who may be interested, and that's the kind of clientless that you would be creating over and over and asking for and helping. Get those leads to come in. And so these are the kinds of situations where AI can be really helpful because it can help put together that data or maybe help you create an outline, but it's not gonna be able to create it all for you, and you really have to give it the basics for it to have something that's worth reading. So I hope you guys liked it. This was kind of my take on what's going on with Google and some things that if you are doing. Small business or a local seo, and you're trying to use ai, some things to take into consideration that can really help with your success.
