Your Marketing Ecosystem's Impact on SEO — Whiteboard Friday
You may have spent a lot of time learning about websites and SEO, but you probably haven't spent a lot of time learning about social or third parties in the real world. Discover how these can impact your SEO, how they are related to your marketing ecosystem, and how they relate to LLMs and AI.
You may have spent a lot of time learning about websites and SEO, but you probably haven't spent a lot of time learning about social or third parties in the real world. Discover how these can impact your SEO, how they are related to your marketing ecosystem, and how they relate to LLMs and AI.
And you may be wondering why I'm focusing on these elements instead, and that's partially because we're seeing so many changes in search that it is time for us to adapt and change some of the ways that we do things.
One, we know that search engines are using LLMs (large language models), but we also know that searchers are using LLMs and generative AI as search tools, even though they're not necessarily intended for that purpose. So we want to make sure that we're doing what LLMs like — what they're looking for, so that we can essentially be chosen as the best result for those questions or things that people are putting into ChatGPT or Google or Gemini or Bing anywhere.
Expand Beyond Your Website
So with that being said, your website is one of those things. We already know so much about that. If you're watching this Whiteboard Friday, you spend a lot of time learning about websites and SEO and how they interact together, but you probably haven't spent a lot of time on social, third-party, and the real world. And these are the things that can impact your SEO that are related to these elements of your marketing ecosystem and how they relate to LLMs and AI.
Social
So with social, there are semantic signals. So the sentiment people have about your business and the relationship, the different entities and terms have, and what they kind of give the LLMs and as the like overall arching summary of what your business is about, what you do, what you care about, and how people think of you.
Authority, so when people are sharing a lot about your business online, it's giving you some authority because it's saying like, this is a legit business. This is someplace that people actually interact with. It gives the LLMs more information, especially because we know that they do look at a lot of social media sites to get data and information, and especially forms like Reddit are extremely important too.
And that brings me to the last point was just user-generated content. LLMs are using tools like Reddit or sites like Reddit to train it to be more human, to understand us a little bit better. And having people talking about you on those platforms and it being positive sentiment and being related to your services, it being related to you being a problem solver. Those are all things that will help with your sentiment, with the semantics, with LLMs understanding your site and who you're trying serve.
Third-party
Third-party, this is one of my favorites as someone who works in local SEO. So we're always looking for opportunities for our clients to get partnerships because building your like brand, building your community is so important with local SEO. The more partnerships you have with other businesses or other organizations that serve the same community or serve the same type of products or services or related to them, the stronger you are as a member of that industry, it makes you seem more authoritative. It makes you seem more trustworthy of other companies. Other businesses are working with you.
Or if you wanna take this into another level, like if you're working with influencers and social, you can tie those things together and you can partner with people who are influencers for your customers and get them to help you reach to a new audience or more of your audience.
Barnacle, when I talk about barnacle SEO, I don't mean what we typically think about. And those are those garbage sites where someone is just putting up affiliate stuff. I'm talking about a tree barnacle SEO, where like if there's a top 10 list that someone has put together on a trusted site and it is on the first page of search results, you want to be on that list. You wanna figure out what you need to do to be on that list and to be visible, because that just gives you another spot in search results. If someone doesn't click on your website and they click on this other website that puts you in the top 10 and they see you in a Reddit post too, that's also showing up in search results. All those things together, it puts you in the mind of the consumer because they're seeing your brand and your name over and over and over again when they do the search.
Next, we're gonna talk about, I guess we can talk about directories a little bit. If you're in local, you know a lot about directories. There are places where your name, address, and phone number are found online. This is more of a like validation factor. So if they can go Google search engines, generative AI, LLMs, if they can go online and find the same information about your business in several different places, it's a validating thing so that because they know that one, you're legitimate and that two, they have the right information. So it's a great way to make sure that you are highly visible online is when they can trust that the information they have about you is correct.
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