Part 3

​[00:00:00] 

[00:00:05] Crystal: if this traditional funnel is breaking, what replaces it?

And I've been creating this for Shopify stores.

A repeatable system that smaller business owners can actually follow without feeling overwhelmed but still feel like they're taking like some actionable steps towards growth and visibility for their stores: get found. Earn trust. Be chosen. To you, what does a modern visibility ecosystem look like?

[00:00:30] Aimee Jurenka: so a modern visibility ecosystem. Well. Again, foundational sEO, that's what I'm calling old school SEO. That's still very important. Right now that is as fast as this is all changing and as fast as AI is coming down the line. And agentic. 

and we're getting all these new connectors every day.

Traditional SEO is still where the majority of your traffic and sales are coming in.

For e-commerce, and I know for local SEO, especially. SaaS might be a little bit different, but, you know, but we're starting to see that sort of shift. So as that shift's going, make sure [00:01:00] that your foundational SEO is still solid. You know, your SEO titles, your meta descriptions, your titles, your descriptions, right? On your products. Your product feeds things like that.

Keep all that up and going and make sure that that's all strong and set up and ready to go and monitored. Make sure all the bots can still crawl all your sites. And then, and for this modern visibility, it's okay, well can the AI bots crawl my sites? You know, is that gonna happen? Can the AI bots see my site?

So they don't see JavaScript yet, so LLMs don't see JavaScript. So how do I audit for that? There's some tools that you can get plugins, sorry. I can't remember the quite right word yet for it that you can get and it, you can turn it off, you can turn JavaScript off and then just go through your whole site.

So if you're a small business owner, you can do that as well. And then what, what you can do from there, right, is kinda look at the basics of, okay, what's changed with on page? OnPage is your content. You know, should I change the way I'm writing my informational content? Yes, 100%. Start talking more about your brand.

[00:02:00] Start talking more about you versus your competitors. Start putting more numbers in there. Start putting prices in there. You know, start putting any of those sort of things that you would think that, that, that LLM, that AI bot, what would they wanna pull into a conversation that's not already easily accessible on the web.

You know, publish your customer service, publish your sales material.

Publish all that stuff that we used to not publish. 'cause it's not generalized. So no more generalization.

Back to who you are, what you do, why they should choose you. So put that every.

[00:02:28] Crystal: Yes! And I have to say I'm very proud because that's what my Semantic Analyzer does.

Yes! And that was what I was so excited to share because you know it was like okay you once you get the foundation on there how do you know that you got the right words on the page for a search engine and especially AI search engine to recommend you?

And it comes down to those semantic signals and the GPT that I well it's a gem I guess but created it actually tells you like the semantic requirements of the query Which is

[00:02:57] Aimee Jurenka: Perfect. Right?

[00:02:59] Crystal: Hey this [00:03:00] is what you should have and then it gives you a score of what you should have compared to what you actually

[00:03:05] Aimee Jurenka: Yeah.

[00:03:05] Crystal: And then it gives you the suggestion of what you need to add. And then rewrites it all for you so that you know semantically you're aligned with what a an AI search engine needs to understand about your business and your page.

To be able to feature you as a recommended source And so I was so excited because it's yes the foundations of SEO. Check. Okay we can do that You know that's something that we can check off But then understanding like the elements on a page that makes you recommendable. I feel like that's something that people really need to understand as well.

And it's always that tough filter too. Because it's a little bit promotional in nature. But at the same time it's not about the website brand itself.

It's about you know solving the problem of the person who is actually using the website Right

[00:03:51] Aimee Jurenka: Yes.

[00:03:52] Crystal: And so it's this bipolar experience bipolar SEO. That's what I should name my company: Bipolar SEO in

[00:03:58] Aimee Jurenka: I like it. Yeah.

[00:04:00] Crystal: [00:04:00] Okay So what about some other things? You've mentioned you know with the the Google the product feeds.

That's something that I really need to have an episode on... but making sure those are updated submitting your information to the product feeds within say, perplexity, Gemini, Chat GPT.

Are there any other things that smart marketers are experimenting with right now that someone might be able to implement?

[00:04:23] Aimee Jurenka: Oh, well this isn't even an experiment. So HT tags are back. I, when I first started having proper semantic h, TM L, which means you have your title, right? And then you have an H one, or H one might be your title. You might have separate one. That's okay. But after that, H one, right, is what the whole article's about.

And then you have H twos, which are subtopics under that main topic. And then H threes or subtopic to the H two, right? And so you know, having that, those H tags actually using those for organization for the bots to see how you have your content organized. And what are the [00:05:00] topics and subtopics and how does it all support that H one is incredibly important again.

So when I first started, it was something, I called it HT tag nesting, right? And making sure that you had that so the bots could understand it. As the years went on, you know, Google got smart enough to where those could go back to being used as decorations. So what I always notice is devs don't, you know, do that.

A lot of people, they're like, oh, well I just want this size here. And so they pick an H two 'cause that's the size, right? Well I want that font there. So they pick an H five 'cause that's where the font is, right? And I want an H, you know, oh, well I want everything to be big, so I'm gonna make H ones all over because I want them all to be this and this big.

And that's no longer a design style choice. Go ahead and go through your whole site and try to reorganize them.

If you are like me where I'm like, well, I still want that font, there are ways to go back and hard code it in the back. You're gonna have to ask a dev, Google ChatGPT on how to do that.

'Cause I don't know how to do it, but I always have my devs go back and change them for the clients that still want that visual.

But be able to have that semantic H tag in the back. So that's something really [00:06:00] easy that we can go through our sites, that we can do. That, even me, who's just a, you know, WordPress editor can go back and fix in all of my stuff if I need to.

[00:06:07] Crystal: I have learned a lot through my son about the English language. And even about semantic stuff like subject predicate object. 

if I learned that at any point in my life I completely forgot you

[00:06:17] Aimee Jurenka: Me too.

[00:06:17] Crystal: but now he's in a computer class. And I feel like there's just such a missed opportunity for people who are teaching in computer and tech education.

Back in my day we learned in Microsoft Word.

But they always had the title and the H twos and the H threes all that stuff I never knew what that was I never knew why you would use it what it was there for.

I thought it was like you said just a font preference. And I'm like oh if anybody could just teach that properly to our young people. That would be so helpful as they're going forward.

We could just skip a generation of people jacking up all the heading titles. 

[00:06:52] Aimee Jurenka: Don't get rid of my work. I still need a job. Crystal. No joking,

[00:06:55] Crystal: that's true

[00:06:56] Aimee Jurenka: joking.

[00:06:57] Crystal: Okay so quick question. You [00:07:00] are so thoughtful in including you know the small Shopify stores and the small business owners. How do we build visibility without massive budgets?

[00:07:08] Aimee Jurenka: Build visibility without massive budgets. That's where I kind of see, and I, nothing's for sure, of course, you know, nothing's really been tested. All that sort of jazz. But that's where I kind of think like building visibility.

Of course, your foundational SEO. Go back and turn the JavaScript off. Make sure that you have your semantic HTML, your H ones, H twos, h threes for them so they can understand what your site is and see it, crawl it and understand it. As far as building the content out, you're right on the mark, I think Crystal, with figuring out semantic, because LLMs organize things semantically, they see things semantically, they break words down into little word chunks with numbers, right?

And that's the vector embedding, right? And then they organize 'em that way, and then it's kind of a token predictor, so they kind of pull 'em that way as well. So that's a very good way to go back through your content and be like, oh, hey.

Is this something, that the way lms like [00:08:00] organize things are gonna be able to understand what I've got here?

And then again, like I said, bring up that customer service information, bring up that sales information, bring up that brand information, bring up anything that you have about your product that nobody else has on the web. So where it used to be generalized, you know, 10 reasons for X, Y, and Z. Now it's 10 reasons why, why I'm the best.

It's just 10 reasons why this company is X, Y, and Z. It's very more branded. It's very more personalized. It's very more niche.

[00:08:29] Crystal: That was gonna be another question about like brand search. Do you think brand search matters more now with AI search?

[00:08:36] Aimee Jurenka: Yes,

[00:08:36] Crystal: before

[00:08:37] Aimee Jurenka: yes. And this is another thing I'm trying to eat up with my GEO. So I do feel the SEOs, AEOs, visibility strategists, we're gonna have to either learn brand. Or start working with brand. And it's another huge opportunity for us because I think in your branding, right, we know lLMs love grounding queries.

So what they do is they take their knowledge that they've been trained on. When you ask 'em a [00:09:00] question, they make up an answer. And then they go out to the web, right? And they look all over the web to see if they can find additional information from other websites and across the web that match that as a grounding query to prove that what they think their, that their answer is, is true.

Right? So that's where we get like hallucinations is they go out, they make up an answer 'cause they don't know the answer from their training material. They go out, they don't really find anything. They kinda make stuff up, they come back.

But side note, bonus tip: if you have an AI hallucination that's a content opportunity, go write a blog post on it.

So what you're gonna wanna do is make sure that you know exactly what your brand is, what your brand positioning is, who you are. How you wanna be represented, the words you want to use. The target markets you wanna be in, things like that.

You're gonna wanna know your brand and actually do some brand research. And then go ahead and. Figure out your somatic triplets. I don't know what they are yet, right?

I've heard echo blocks. I like that as well. Figure out what those are and how to use them.

And then incorporate 'em into your site. And then also update any of your listings. If you can go up and update your nap listings, your Yelp, your Angie.

If [00:10:00] you can go make sure your Google business profile, any other listings or anywhere else where you can touch the outside world for those grounding queries.

Even if it's doing a cheap press release post, not for traffic.

Not for humans, but just to get some of those grounding queries out there. Go ahead and do that. So.

[00:10:17] Crystal: What about the outdated KPIs that are misleading companies. You have any that you wanna call out?

[00:10:24] Aimee Jurenka: So many, so many. Like I said, right now we just don't have the data we used to. Right? So sessions, I mean, look at it, look at engaged sessions, but don't have that be our last metric any longer. Because we know that that's no longer gonna be, we're no longer doing inbound marketing. You know, traditional SEO is dying.

Dying. And so we're gonna have to, you know, exactly, we're gonna have to do better.

Which is more work, which sucks, but, okay.

We'll do what we gotta do, right?

And start looking at sort of like visibility. So where we used to do keyword rankings, right? We wanna start looking at, hey, do we have grounding queries in, in [00:11:00] Bing AI report? And then our prompt tracking.

So I have my own version of prompt tracking that I've kind of been working on,. And that's get a large enough dataset, so. Currently I'm like, if, if you wanna look at prompt tracking, let's do it by topic. You know, or by your brand name. Let's do it by topic and then also by persona. So you have your persona and you want, you know, this brand to be known for these sort of topics or these sort of attributes or what they are.

And then do a group of 'em, right? So do a group of prompt tracking that you track every month over and over in the same tool. The number of that and how we go about that. The rise. I've got an article on that. I, I hope other people jump in that are smarter with math than me and we can keep poking it with a stick as an industry 'cause it seems like a really fun nut to crack.

But go ahead and start doing that. Because you're gonna need, we're gonna need to figure out a really valid way to do that. To prove our visibility to leadership clients. So to be able to prove that, hey, we did this and your visibility is higher, right? So your visibility is higher. So what does that visibility now relate to?

Is it referral traffic that you can take and, make a customer [00:12:00] report in Google Analytics? And we can pull that information from so we can see an overall arc in sales? It's about this topic or about that product? That we know that we've gotten visibility in. Have our brand searches increased? Brand searches and clicks increased in Google Search console.

We feel it's a halo effect, that we know that we did this and now people are Googling our brand and that direct traffic, 'cause that will go into direct traffic usually, right? That direct traffic of branded searches is actually converting. ' cause usually it doesn't. In the past it didn't. So it's kind of figuring out where those kind of customer journey's going to go and how that customer journey is gonna be for your industry and who you're trying to see what we can do there.

It's gonna be tough, you know, because it used to just be like, oh look, rankings. sessions. Yay! You know? And we had a direct line, you know, we had the last click data attribution.

[00:12:46] Crystal: Lots of opinions on those

stats,

[00:12:48] Aimee Jurenka: right?

[00:12:49] Crystal: you know just from a very small business

perspective.

 But real quick, we gotta have a rapid fire session. Do you think that there's some marketing skills now that are becoming less valuable? Part [00:13:00] two of that: what roles do you think are becoming the most at risk? Or will be more at risk in the next few years?

[00:13:06] Aimee Jurenka: Doom and gloomer. I know people ask me about hot takes too, and I'm like, I just don't pay attention. I don't know. Because I'm always like, I'm a happy, shiny.

100%, the things that are gonna be most at risk, right? Are the people that don't want to acknowledge the change. And that people that aren't gonna reprioritize. You know, a lot of the tactics that we're using and a lot of stuff that we're doing is.

We did an SEO.

But people that aren't gonna wanna reprioritize and repackage what we're doing. The people that are gonna be like, well, it's just SEO and it's all the same stuff. That's not what people wanna hear. And it's not just SEO. LLMS are not search engines. There are differences.

People want to know what those differences are, whether it be our clients or our bosses. They wanna know what those differences are and they wanna know that we're addressing them. So, you know, not only reprioritizing and figuring it out, but also repackaging the way we present it, I think is gonna be a huge issue.

So people that aren't, you know, willing to go, Hey, you know, I'm not selling snake oil. I'm not gonna give you all [00:14:00] the bright shiny things, but here's what we do know that works. And here's what we do know that changes. And here's what we go doing, blah, blah. Even if they wanna go that mellow about it. And not change the name of their title or what their program name is changing I think is gonna be what's gonna be most valuable.

And we're really gonna see drop off is people that refuse to change.

[00:14:17] Crystal: And you know you spoke about tinfoil hats

[00:14:18] Aimee Jurenka: Yes.

[00:14:20] Crystal: I tend to put those on every once in a while.

[00:14:21] Aimee Jurenka: They're so fun.

[00:14:22] Crystal: Yeah. And I think about, okay you've got these emerging LLMs.

Are these LLMs telling us anything about how to be visible and show up to their customers

[00:14:31] Aimee Jurenka: Not really. So that's another thing when I was saying about like my, my challenge this week is how to convince people to do some of these strategies and tactics without any proof, right? Without any documentation.

So Google just updated their documentation to include ai and a lot of it is just like, just keep doing what you're doing.

Right, but that's kinda what they said. And multimodal, they love that word. Multimodal. What does that mean? Make sure your alt tags are really good. Make sure that you have transcripts on your stuff. Make a video to go [00:15:00] with something. Infographics again, you know, multimodal, that's what that means is, you know, do more images.

So that's kind of what we're seeing out of Google so far. Microsoft put out. A-E-O-G-E-O handbook. And it was kind of e-commerce based. I was so excited and I kept putting it off 'cause I thought it was gonna be a big thing for me to read. And so I kept putting it off 'cause I was busy and I was doing other stuff. And I opened it up this weekend and either I'm looking at the wrong thing or it was like three or four pages.

It wasn't what I was hoping it would be. Probably have the wrong thing. I don't know. But I was like, this is very underwhelming. But it's great to get actual information. People are starting to give us actual things. When it comes to like them coming out saying, Hey, here's what you do to get into our, into our LLMs.

They're changing the way they operate every week. They're updating them and how they work every week. Even if they come out and say, Hey, this is exactly what you need to do. I'm like, well, you're gonna update your system in two weeks. We're gonna get a new model that comes out in a, in a month.

So I don't feel like they could really tell us how it works. When they [00:16:00] don't even know how it works yet. They don't have a finished product. They don't have anything that's gonna be able to be solid long enough. So it's just experimentation. Strategies, ideas, experimentation. And then figuring out those things, those, those core technical things that we already know, you know.

[00:16:14] Crystal: So let's do some rapid fire real quick here Okay So the only rule here is that you don't have to follow any rules here. I'm just kidding But if you could answer in one word or phrase or sentence or less if possible.

But if you wanna expound on it if you feel passionate about it you can expound Okay cause everybody does so yeah Ready

[00:16:36] Aimee Jurenka: Ready,

[00:16:37] Crystal: All right. A-E-O-A-I-O AI search GEO or something else What do you call it?

[00:16:45] Aimee Jurenka: AI search.

[00:16:46] Crystal: AI search

[00:16:46] Aimee Jurenka: search is where I'm going with this week. GEO is too hard to explain. Generative engine optimization is just too big of a word to try to get out in to clients and C levels. A EO answer engine optimization is too [00:17:00] narrow. So it doesn't apply to all the industries. A IO has been taken by AI overviews, so there's just too much of an over overlap in my thing.

And then anything like ai SEO, well, it's not ai, it's not a search engine. So LLMs aren't a search engine. And I'm just like a little stickler on that one. For some reason. I got my little foot in the sand on that. So yeah, AI search.

[00:17:21] Crystal: Okay what is your favorite ai LLM to use

[00:17:26] Aimee Jurenka: At GPT 5.1. So

[00:17:29] Crystal: Why 5.1

[00:17:30] Aimee Jurenka: they broke it after that.

[00:17:31] Crystal: It's broken After that?

[00:17:32] Aimee Jurenka: In, in my opinion, in my opinion, it's broken after that. So mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So I use LLMs a lot for writing. I, I swear I have undiagnosed dyslexia. I know for a fact I do.

You know, so spelling and everything like that flows sometimes hard for me. So I use it as my, you know, my secretary, my editor, my, you know, thought, thought creator.

I use it to plan vacations. I use it for different things of that the majority of the time. And, and if anything, [00:18:00] after 5.1 doesn't seem to have the same logic that I was used to with the rest of them, and it doesn't really give the responses that I need.

[00:18:07] Crystal: Okay Best person in AI search or AI search adjacent area to follow?

right now 

[00:18:14] Aimee Jurenka: There's so many Aleyda Solis, if I say that correct.

She's one of the most comprehensive. So definitely follow her and sign up for her newsletter. Mike King and Garrett Sussman.

But Mike King especially is the most inspirational to me. They've always been very inspiring. So if you wanna get, you know, a little fire going and you're excited about it, that's a great place to go for that.

Jamie Indigo's got a great, a lot of technical facts, so she's kind of who I go to and I wanna get some fact checks and some technical side of stuff. After I get all that inspiration from Mike. So she's great for that. Trying to think. Oh, Kevin Indig's got a lot of great strategy, so sign up for his email. And he's got a lot of great strategy and idea that's coming down the pipeline every week.

[00:18:56] Crystal: Last one: your best or favorite AI tool that no [00:19:00] one knows about

[00:19:00] Aimee Jurenka: I am coming up blank. I mean, my best or favorite AI tool that not as many, that nobody uses. The way I use it is Air Ops. So instead of for content, I use it to build SaaS tools. So I use it to, I did like a brand I did a sematic content score yeah, a couple years ago. Year and a half ago or whatever.

I did like a brand audit where you update all your brand information, and then you compare it to what their answer is. So different things like that. So I love using, I know other people do like Mind Map or Mind Pal. But for me it's been Air Ops to build individualized SaaS tools instead of going out and buying one or finding one, so.

[00:19:35] Crystal: Very cool.

Oh man I love that brand audit idea. To compare it to what they think or what they're saying versus what is there that's Very cool Sounds like we had some similar ideas with the semantic tools.

[00:19:47] Aimee Jurenka: I know.

[00:19:47] Crystal: me feel validated you know just as an SEO. Cause I'm like oh this is cool I may be a year and a half behind you but I'm coming you know so wait for me

[00:19:56] Aimee Jurenka: No, no, no, no. We're all here together.

[00:19:57] Crystal: If someone listened to this and they either [00:20:00] wanna work with you or follow you, what's the best way for them to get in contact with you, Aimee?

[00:20:04] Aimee Jurenka: LinkedIn both ways. So LinkedIn is the best way to follow me and get in contact with me. You can email me directly. It's my name@gmail.com 'cause I'm too cheap to pay for a licensed one anymore. So.

[00:20:17] Crystal: And if someone did wanna work with you how could they identify themselves as a company that is the best fit to work with 

[00:20:24] Aimee Jurenka: you.

In the past I was really focused on mid small to mid-size companies. I do a lot of like SaaS. I do a lot of EDU. I do a lot of that sort of where there's the longer tail. I am in e-commerce to Smidge and so I'm able to do some stuff there as well. And some stuff in local.

But I do specialize in that, that mid sort of like that SaaS mid long tail where you're gonna do larger content plans. Where you're gonna have that longer funnel where you're gonna want to get email signups, things of that sort. Yeah.

[00:20:52] Crystal: Awesome I am so glad that our paths crossed during the SEO Week pitch contest.

I was just so impressed with your [00:21:00] serenity.

You were first and in a tough situation and I would've never known that you were in that tough situation if I hadn't watched it happen.

So I was like wow Aimee's cool I have got to get her on the podcast So thank you so much for coming on The Simple and Smart

[00:21:13] Aimee Jurenka: Oh, thanks so much for having me. This has been great.

[00:21:16] Crystal: All right guys Thanks for being here and I will catch you next time.