I was at Brighton SEO San Diego a few weeks back, and I grabbed my camera and microphone and collected tips from the speakers and experts at the conference. You’ll definitely want to check out this week’s episode, it’s absolutely packed with killer tips that will help you be a better marketer.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Speaker 1:
Okay, so my best SEO for TikTok tip is most people, when they’re trying to get their video to rank on the TikToks up, is that they know they have to put the keyword in the caption. But you also have to put the keyword in the hashtag, in the first second of video, so the thing that you’re saying, and on the screen of the TikTok. You have to have it in those four areas. So, on screen, what you say, caption, and hashtag.

Speaker 2:
Hey everybody. My number one tip for your career progression is to work on effective communication. We know as SEOs, all the technical jargon is required to be able to get stuff done. But remember, our biggest audience is the C-suite who does not talk, you know, SEO dork. So simplify things, effectively communicate, build those narratives. That’s what’s gonna separate you from the rest of the SEO crowd.

Speaker 3:
Don’t let the size of your data set for your site deter you from testing. Small sites should be testing. And the best way to go about that would be running a time-based test.

Speaker 4:
It’s been weird for someone who’s been in this industry for over a decade paid media to really start recommending people to not start on Google right away. There’s just so many options out there, and so many unique targeting options that you can’t find anywhere else. So we really try to fill the gaps by having people start on the very specific channels first, like Reddit, Quora, TikTok search, Disney campaign. We’re starting to look at a bunch of other things first. Find your specific audiences on those channels, and then fill in the gaps with demand after on with Google and some of the other platforms. It’s really just focusing on where your audience is, not where you think you need to be right away.

Speaker 5:
One. Okay. We talk a lot about search intent with the content you’re putting on your website. I also want you to put search intent in your meta description tag. What we used to do is use the meta description to describe what the article is about, but now start using your description tag to a- actually answer the topic that’s being searched. If you look at like Nerd Wallet and a lot of the big, the big SEO powerhouses, that’s what they’re doing these days with their description tags. They’re starting to answer the question. They’re not describing what the article’s about.

Speaker 6:
Okay. Uh, so if you want really easy page speed optimization wins, look in your Google Tag Manager and see how many things are triggered on page view, and as many of them as you can, make it to DOM ready. You’ll have some instant wins.

Speaker 7:
So, all these people that are struggling with video verification, I have a great tip for you. You can sidestep it if you do the following. First, make sure that your Facebook page has all the exact matching information. Better Business Bureau, get accredited, make sure that all the information matches, your website, whatever’s linked to from your Google business profile. It should all have very much matching information. Uh, and your citations, data aggregators. Get all that stuff in line. And then, when you go back to the verification screen, you may get phone, email, or text as options instead of just video, because now everything’s lined up, and Google’s like, “Oh yeah, that tracks. You’re okay. You’re, you’re clear to go.” If your stuff doesn’t match, then Google’s like, “Okay, prove it. I need to see a video of this.” So that’s my tip for you today.

Speaker 8:
So my tip is to revive the use of Google offer posts, as well as add social media links, third parties, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, maybe Bluesky soon, to your Google profiles because Google is starting to show offer posts and third party social media posts in different discovery areas. So it gives you an opportunity to be more visible to customers in different services.

Speaker 9:
All right. They’re not reviews. It’s feedback. Your customers are telling you areas that you excel in, and areas that you need to improve. When you think about it like that, you can be a better company. Are you listening to your customers?

Speaker 10:
Alright, today I wanna talk to you about the newest thing that you should be doing in your GA4 and you’re probably not. You may not be aware, but when people come to your website via AI tools like Perplexity, for example, or Claude, that actually does show up in GA4 as a referrer, but it gets hidden under the referral channel. So I have a post my website that you can check out today that will walk you through exactly how to create what’s called a custom channel group that will create a channel specifically for AI tools. And then you can see how much traffic AI tools are already bringing to your website, and figure out how you can get more of that excellent AI tool traffic on your website.

Speaker 11:
Okay. Make sure you connect your Google Analytics 4 account to a Google Ads account even if you don’t use it, because if you don’t, you don’t get your attribution data.

Speaker 12:
If you are spending money on building links, make sure that the links that you are getting are actually in Google’s index. Most people don’t check for this. And we have found that a large majority of links that people have paid agencies to build them aren’t in Google’s index, so they aren’t actually helping your rankings or doing anything for your business.

Speaker 13:
There are so many tips I could give. Um, I think I would s- I wanna give two tips. Number one, link building is at an inflection point right now. It’s time for our industry to shift how we’re thinking about reporting on link building. We need to move from reporting on metrics of the linking page and website. Not to say that we ignore these things, but these are not relevant to the CMO. Right? The CMO doesn’t care about a list of links and their attributes.
The CMO cares about impact of the links we’ve built. Uh, so my, my number one advice is (laughs) talk to James Worth from Citation Labs, and build out a campaign concept that’s focused on your money pages, your sales pages, and driving links to them so that you could show impact, uh, at the URL level. And I think this is going to be very, uh, at least something to experiment with. And I think it’s something that, overall as an industry, uh, SEO needs to veer into and lean into as much as possible, which is, uh, demonstrating impact of the work that we’ve done. That’s my tip. That’s my first tip.
Second tip. Is this too long?

Speaker 14:
So, as we have worked at building links to money pages or sales pages, we’ve, uh, become aware that there’s a gap, uh, between what people know to ask, the questions people know to ask, and then the questions that they don’t know to ask. And we call these the frequently unasked questions. So our thesis now is that we really need to bear down and focus on these unasked questions. Uh, we have, uh, prompts, AI prompts that help us work backwards from a URL into stakeholders for the purchase decision, and then, uh, predict what types of questions they might be asking.
Now these are used as starting points only, but now we can begin to understand the, I guess, ecosystem, so to speak, of where the offering that’s for sale is going to be providing benefit. And when we can focus very specifically on the stakeholders of the purchase decision, and understanding their worst-case scenarios, their worst-case outcomes that could potentially happen, now we have a better sense of what content actually needs to live on the page. This all gets validated out through, uh, interviews and surveys. So we’re not just taking, uh, AI’s word for it. But AI has really helped us with structuring our investigation into stakeholders, their worst-case scenarios, so we have a better sense of what content actually needs to live on the sales page itself. That’s tip number two.

Speaker 15:
Schema Markup is really about building your knowledge graph. And you can actually find easy ways to do connections using Schema Paths. It’s free tool. Um, just Google it. Um, and it’ll help you connect things and start building semantic connections.

Speaker 16:
So if you want to increase your effectiveness and efficiency working in any aspect of digital marketing, have your robots talk to your robots. Use different AI tools to figure out how to write really good prompts, have them enhance the prompts, and then put them into other tools to get better results. And then that way you can use that more efficiently and save you some time, make you more available, get you more money.

Speaker 17:
So, my tips are usually terrible, but Greg still puts them in, so thank you, Greg. However, okay. Gen- um, AI overviews in Google is gonna be really good for local because of the GBP. GBP is not going away, so really work hard on your local to get into their AI overviews. However, SearchGPT, local is terrible. Where does SearchGPT gets information from? Bing. So check on your Bing local to see how you’re performing there to get into the local search of SearchGPT. So look at your Bing to get into ChatGPT.

Speaker 18:
Alright, awesome. So, with all the advancements in AI and, uh, the search community is, you know, going bananas over, uh, not only AI overviews, but now SearchGPT, I want you to make sure you focus on where they’re referencing. So where they’re pulling, uh, their information from. It’s a lot of aggregator sites. If you’re in the travel and tourism space, it’s things like TripAdvisor, it’s things like Yelp. Go and pay attention to where your brand shows up on those sites to then influence how your brand shows up in AI search.

Speaker 19:
All right, folks, if you haven’t created a custom GPT and uploaded everything you’ve done in the life of your career to have it write for you, so all you have to do is edit, what the hell are you waiting for?

Speaker 20:
Hey there. I’m super excited to share with you my key for getting ahead as an SEO. I think the most important thing that you can do is help as many people as you can. And what that looks like is mentoring, coaching, maybe even building or being a huge part of any kind of SEO community. And the reason why is that as you give and help as many people as you can, you’re gonna deposit little karms- uh, little coins of karma over and over and over again. So if you ever get into a place in your career where you need help, there’s gonna be a ton of SEOs who are just dying to help you figure out how to get to whatever’s next. Thanks a ton. Have a great day.