From SEO to AEO: Driving Quality Traffic and Business Growth in the Age of AI

Welcome everybody to the Content Hub for Marketers HubSpot User Group event today. We're gonna talk about from SEO to AEO, how AI is redefining client acquisition. So this is the topic of the day. Like how is AI changing everything? So thanks everybody for connecting. Keep introducing yourselves in the chat and also keep telling us if you have anything specific that you want to learn. I love that other people came from the video bootcamp this morning. So fun to have you guys here if you want to put your cameras on like we always do. Always great to see your faces too. So let's get this party started. You're already introducing yourself. Most of you already know who I am. I'm Gabriel Maguglio. I'm the CEO and founder of Nextini Marketing. We are a platinum partner, Habsolute solution partner and we run multiple hubs. I'll share some of the different ones we run. This is the content hub for marketers, HubSpot user. So the content hub for marketers. HubSpot user group is all about website design and using the content hub which is websites, blogs, all the different pieces of content inside HubSpot to the fullest but without being a developer. So the whole point of this HubSpot user group is to allow regular marketers to create beautiful website experiences, to create amazing content and to make that grow over time. Fran, I have some old friends here. Good stuff everybody. Thank you for connecting from Spain, Espana. So good stuff, good stuff. So again, if you ever need any help with anything, I'm here to help. I'll put my email there later. But like I said, we run multiple hubs we also run the video bootcamp for marketing sales and service. Nice to see some familiar faces here. We have multiple events that we're running. I'll share some links here. First of all, I'll share the link for our company so in case you want to check our services or any of our case studies or any of our articles, we're always writing good articles to help everybody. I just shared three different links. I'm going share it again because that did not come through correctly. Thank you, Bevy, for not sharing the links properly. There you go. So there's three HubSpot user groups. The video HubSpot user group, the Sarasota, which is the local HubSpot user group, and the HubSpot marketers content HubSpot marketers, which is this one. We're running a whole series of webinars on these hugs about from SEO to AEO. So if you like this workshop, if you like this webinar, there's three more coming in the next three weeks. I'll be busy running the bootcamp in the morning and these hugs in the afternoon which is the best. The most fun I can have is teaching and talking to amazing people and helping people grow with marketing. So at the end of the day, these are all specific and they get more specific. This one is the main one that presents the from SEO to AEO, how it's changing. And the next one next week is the one about video, how you use video webinars and podcasts for this. The one on October twenty second is from SEO to AEO. Loop marketing versus inbound marketing, we'll see the differences if you're doing inbound marketing correctly, what needs to change, what needs to stay, how to get deeper into that. And then we'll talk about HubSpot websites and how to make the most out of HubSpot websites with an AI search. So a lot of events coming up, a lot of fun stuff. So let's talk about the agenda today. In the meantime, if you have any questions, keep introducing yourselves. I love that you guys are talking to each other in there too. Let me know if you have any questions in the chat. I'll try to respond as many as possible during the day and we'll do at the end of the session, we'll do Q and A and you guys come off mute and we can talk about it. So today we'll talk about the shifting behavior. Is SEO finally dead? Can we put an end to this conversation? We'll see. We'll see. We'll talk about how to go from SEO to AEO. We'll talk about what AEO is too. The loop marketing framework that could help with this whole thing. The power of being real. We'll talk about that. And practical AEO playbook, we'll talk about the things you can start doing today. Some of them more complex than others but we'll go from there. So if you have again any questions, let me know. Let's talk about the shift in behavior and is SEO finally dead? Can we kill SEO for good? So my question here, provocative question, if you will, is SEO going to exist in three years? Because search is changing from links to answers. It changed on Google. Now you have the answers at the top. Now you have the Google AI mode coming. ChatGPT disrupted this whole thing. There's a lot of changes going on. People are freaking out, right? CEOs want everybody to do SEO, I mean everybody to do AI everything. AI is everything. And AI took over the world and now people are not asking Google anything apparently. We'll go back to that. And everybody's asking everything to chat GBT or some other clod or grok or whatever you wanna call it AI. Now the question is, is this true? Is that what's happening? Well first of all, the first thing that you need to understand is the numbers are pretty interesting, right? First of all, sixty percent of Google searches now end in zero clicks. We had this problem before AI, okay? Like before AI, Google was already trying to never send anybody to a website. That was one of their main goals. It was like if I can answer the question, I did my job. And then AI came, ChaChipiti. AI has been here for a long time. We've been using it for a long time with many tools like Seven Sense and a lot of great things. But AI mainstream for clients, for users has been, since ChatGPT, a lot of things changed. But Google was already trying to answer questions without sending anybody to any website. If you ask for lyrics, they got in trouble for that thing. If you ask for the restaurant, they will put the list. Like they would try to give you list of things at the top and they did a bunch of those things over the years. Now Chattypiti disrupted a lot of that. The AI answer disrupt a lot of that but ultimately a lot of Google searches now end up in zero clicks which means nobody's going to your website when they're asking those things. Not nobody but a lot of those people are not going to your website. So how do you do marketing if nobody's going to your website? Well, the second part of this is seventy percent of B2B buyers complete their decision journey before contacting sales. We knew this when email marketing was a thing. Before contacting sales, people make decisions on which companies they like, what they do. Now with AI, it's a lot easier. You can have a full on conversation with the best salesperson in the world, ChatGPT, about these things and it'll talk about the different companies and the pros and cons. Go do this. Go say what do you know about and put the name of your company and see what ChatGPT knows about you, doesn't know and then challenge it. Say what are the bad things about this company? What are the greatest things about this company? Compare it with the biggest competitors in this thing. Do they work with these industries? Like go dig deeper and you'll see how much Chattypiti knows or how little Chattypiti knows about your company. So if it knows not a lot of things, then it won't cite you and show you in searches when people are talking about things. That's one thing. And then three times as much higher conversion in leads that came from LLMs and AI. So that means that even though there's some loss on searches and people are having more conversations and not so much going to your website coming from Google, The people coming from AI are higher conversion people, of course, because they had a whole three hour conversation with LGBT and they know more about you than you ever knew about yourself. So at the end of the day, AI is becoming the new homepage. Now is it already that? We'll see but it's becoming the new homepage. And your brand needs to be the answer not just the click destination. You don't just need to show up as many times as possible with just many things as possible like we used to. Yeah, hopefully people with intent and you analyze the intent and all those things with SEO but still, intent is great. You need to be the answer to your ideal client's questions. So this is a lot to take, a lot to freak out about. But don't freak out, okay? That's my main message today is don't freak out. I read this from Search Engine Land the other day. They launched a whole campaign. Google is still two ten times bigger than ChatGPT in search. So yes, a lot of things are changing. A lot of things have changed already. A lot of people, including myself, get frustrated with Google because it's not answering my question right away. I have to click on a bunch of links. So you know what we do? We go to ChatGPT. We go to Claude. We go to AI. So thank you, David. The webinar is off a solid start. I love feedback in the middle of the webinar. That's good stuff. Thank you, thank you. So Google is two ten times, not percentage, times bigger than Chateappetit. We're talking about, I think I saw another post. This was a post on LinkedIn. Again, there's a link for search engine land. I'll put it right here so you can read the whole study. Now I saw another one that said if you compare Chateappiti with Google, the size of Altman, Mike, the CEO of Chateappiti compared to the Empire State would be the comparison. Like his height compared to the whole Empire State building. That would be Google versus Chateappiti which I thought it was a funny comparison. So at the end of the day, still Google is very important. The people that are saying, you know, let's not do any more SEO. Let's do this AI thing. They're missing the point in two ways. Number one, if you optimize for SEO, you're optimizing for AI. That's the first thing I tell all of our clients. If we're doing an amazing SEO, we've been doing SEO for a long time, you should be coming up on AI. You should be coming up on ChatGPT. You should be cited by ChatGPT because if you're being cited by Google, guess where ChatGPT got most of their information. Google, right? Guess where Chateappiti is searching for most of their information. Google. Yes, they do use Bing and they use now they use more Google because Bing let's not talk about Bing because it's not amazing. But I'm not gonna say bad things about specific companies here but Google is much much better. And they also have their own bot that searches. Now yeah, Bing sucks. We can say it. So at the end of the day, ChatGPT still uses Google and will continue to use Google to search for things it doesn't know. And at the end of the day, it's trained on a lot of Google data but Google still has a ton of searches and a ton of people that are going with intent to Google to search for services, products and everything they need. So let's not freak out. If you remember one thing from today's webinar is this. Don't freak out. Continue to do amazing SEO. Now also SEO isn't dead. This was another post I found. Lazy SEO is is dead. Right? Like lazy SEO, the days where you would just post a bunch of stuff and then, you know, Google will just show your website on top of the list are gone, gone forever, right? Like we've been doing loop marketing for a long time. We've been doing amazing video optimization for SEO for a long time because we knew that just writing a blog or writing ten blogs a month, it's not the solution. You need deeper content. You need real content. You need know, you need FAQs. You need customer testimonials. You need case studies. You need to train people, teach people, become an authority not just spit out crappy content. Even before ChatGPT you could buy tools to create crappy content with AI for SEO. So this was a funny graphic I saw. It was like SEO is dead. It started in nineteen ninety seven. Like SEO is dead. This is a joke. This joke around SEO people and you'll see it on LinkedIn. It's like SEO is dead. Now there's a new, you know, Panda update in twenty eleven. Oh, now mobile devices and you know, SEO is dead. Now there's a, you know, touchy pity came out. SEO is dead. It's completely dead. What you need to know is that that graphic is showing the market value in millions of dollars of the SEO, market. Like companies doing SEO. So the SEO market grew from zero to two hundred million dollars since nineteen ninety seven while it's been dead and continued to be declared dead year over year. So just remember, SEO is not dead. Bad SEO, lazy SEO is definitely dead. The SEO of likes on Facebook and hundreds of blogs with just one paragraph or multiple pages with the same content but the different city name. That kind of SEO should be dead and is dead. And if someone's selling SEO and still doing those things, shame on you. And if someone is selling you those things, you need to run the other way. So this was one of my favorite things to talk about. SEO is definitely not that. So how do we go from SEO to AEO, right? AEO is answer engine optimization. What's crazy is that AEO can also mean other things. People call it AI, engine optimization. Like there's a bunch of different names. I think the main consensus is that it's answer engine optimization which means to optimize your marketing strategy, your content strategy, your website, your blogs, your videos, everything not only for Google and Google pages and links on Google but also for AI answers. At the end of the day an AI answer means the Google answer at the top, Google AI mode, ChatGPT, Claude, any kind of the LLMs or even the use of those AI models by other apps because at the end of the day that's happening a lot too. Jai GPT could be used by HubSpot AI or can be used by other apps that you use on your phone and if you come up on Jai GPT, you'll come up on those two. Any questions so far? I see a lot of laughs, love this, one hundred percent. So people are not only agreeing but getting excited apparently about doing AEO which is what I wanted to make sure happened today is don't get into the doom and gloom of SEO is dead. We won't be able to get any people to become a lead on our website because nobody's coming to our website because nobody's googling anymore. Well, it's not so true. So let's talk a little bit about the differences, right? So Todd said, I'm guessing you're going to give us suggestions for optimizing answers. Yes Todd, again, this is a generic hug but there's gonna be some answers too. But I had to set up some foundation because people are freaking out and my main goal today is for them to stop freaking out. Thank you. Thank you for asking Todd. And should we still focus more on keywords and switch to questions? Amazing question. We'll talk about that in a second. So thank you, Taylor. So SEO was being part of those top five to ten links, right? AEO is all about being part of the answer. Whatever the answer is to whatever question someone's asking. SEO was all about keywords. Thank you, Taylor. Very timely there. And backlinks and metadata and rankings. Now that's not, everything that you see on the SEO column, it's still applicable. You need to understand this is not like we scrap that and we only do the other thing. Now AEO is also about using statistics and quotations and high authority sources. It used to be reputation of sources so meaning if you had great valuable content for your ideal clients and you were answering your ideal clients questions doing they ask you answer for example. Which is a great framework and methodology that I always recommend and it still works by the way. That's great and then if you were linked from like other great websites that had reputation like HubSpot would link to you then that website would get ranking. It's more complicated than that and a lot of you know more SEO than this but was the reputation of sources. Now it's reputation and repetition across sources. That means you need to continue to showcase that you're real and yes, you need those links and you need to be showcased and you need to be on social media showcasing that you exist and that you're real because all those extra things you do create signals for AI to say, oh, okay, this company is real. This company creates like souls for this issue and these are their solutions and these are the questions of their ideal clients and these are the answers that they provide. But also they showcase, they do this. They're not just talking about this. They're not just regurgitating, you know, content with AI every day because it's easy to fake everything. Like they have a testimonial from a client. They did a whole case study where they show graphics and stuff like that and they do webinars all the time and from those webinars they take the snippets and they share them on social media. So these people are actually actively doing these things. They're real. Before, how did we signal Google that we were real? We were creating citations. That still applies. I tell you to continue to do that because it still signals Google and AIs that you're real. You have a real address, a phone number, a website, a zip code and that information is the same in all different places so directories and all that stuff. I believe that for local SEO that will continue to be important and for local AI things that will continue to be important. You say this type of service or this type of product in this city, you need to have a real presence local etcetera etcetera. Google My Business, all those things. But now you need to showcase that you're doing real things. What's crazy is that HubSpot, I had a great conversation with a HubSpot manager, I think it was like twelve years ago and he said, you know what, everybody should, you know what you should be, you should stop blogging about the top ten things you're gonna do for SEO in twenty twenty five and you should start blogging about what you did for your clients last week and worked and didn't work and sharing it with the world which means sharing what's real, sharing what you're doing. So again, I know it's hard and I know sometimes I get questions like how do you share all these things and people will steal it. Trust me, sharing will get you more clients than the clients that you're gonna lose for sharing how you do things or what you do. So again, reputation and repetition across channels and we'll talk about how. And then optimizing websites for visits used to be SEO. Now it's optimizing for AI visibility and conversions. So at the end of the day, we want AI to cite you as part of a conversation. So I don't think a lot of people are gonna go and say, you know, Korean restaurant in Sarasota, Florida on Chateappetit. Even though I've tried it, it's not as good as Google, right? Because it's not optimized for that. Google is optimized for that specific need. But people can be searching for more complex services, B2B products and services and software and medical things. There's a lot of very educational content that could be used to showcase products and services and companies. And they could be having a conversation about what are the best ways to do this? What are the best ways to achieve that? And then as part of the answer, the answer is gonna be do this methodology and that methodology. It's like, okay, what companies specialize in this and you need to be cited or sometimes even AI will cite you automatically as part of the answer. Oh, this is the things that you should be doing and these are some of the companies that do it or it'll actually link to your article as a source for that answer. Which is great because that means you did your job which means answering a question with content and then answering in a Q and A fashion so AI found it and used it as part of their answer and cited you as the answer. So these are the other layers of how AI does things. And again, I'm not an AI expert in any sense but definitely from what we know and from what we have seen for ourselves, for our clients, other agencies that we talk to, I'm part of the AI partner advisory council at HubSpot. We have conversations about this all the time. This is what's happening. So Fran apparently is dinner time so you can watch the recording. We'll send the recording later thinking will be related to this subject. Yeah, definitely. So alright, let's keep going. So why this matter for client acquisition? So AIS influence trust before contact forms. So before someone becomes a lead, the AI answer will influence. The same way before we were trying to do this with blogs and videos and podcasts and webinars which is all part of what we're gonna do anyways, right? But now people are engaging with AI and asking the questions directly. What kind of framework is inbound marketing good for me? Is HubSpot good for me? Like let's say for me, I'm a HubSpot agency. If someone is asking about HubSpot, I wanna be the answer to that question, right? Because I could be the ones helping them implement HubSpot for success, right? So long story short, AI answer influence trust. Second, prospects make seventy percent of buying decisions before talking to sales. So because of that, you need to understand how much you can influence them as part of that decision before they even talk to a salesperson. This was a problem before. We were trying to solve it with Google and blogging and inbound marketing. With AI, you have a whole new layer of how the answers are being presented to people. The other thing is AEO is visibility and credibility at the same time. So you need to think about credibility as an important piece of the puzzle. And that's why being real is important and showcasing that you're real is important. Any questions? All right, I'll keep going so we can actually go through everything we need to go through. So let's talk about the loop marketing framework which is what HubSpot proposed at Inbound twenty five as the new framework. So we were talking about the funnel ten years ago and we were talking about the flywheel five years ago. And those are all, you know, what HubSpot is always amazing at is analyzing what's happening in the world, especially the world of marketing, sales and customer service, especially marketing, right? And then simplifying it for everybody and creating a framework, a methodology. That has been HubSpot other than creating amazing software that can help you do all of these things, which is the second part, what they do. They understand changes in society and marketing and business. They present incredible frameworks that simplify this for everybody so we can all go and do it and train it and test it and see if it works and how it works and then use the amazing tools they create to actually make it happen, right? They go and they develop the tools for us to use. So definitely, loop marketing has been a good evolution of what you saw with the funnel and flywheel. At the end of the day, what we're trying to do here and I'm gonna share some other links here too. I have one about the SEO playbook and I'll share one about loop marketing that we put together from the keynote at mBounce. You guys have all of that there. So what we need to understand is first of all, what is loop marketing and how does it differ from inbound marketing? I'll go in not too much detail. We have a whole webinar about that. But at the end of the day, it's modern inbound framework for the AI era. It's all about expressing, tailoring, amplifying and evolving. Without going too much into detail about this, expressing means giving AI and creating content that gives the real point of view to work with because it's very important that when you work with AI either to create content, to create context in your CRM, to have context from your data inside your CRM, What's important to understand is that AI needs to have the context of who you are, what you do, what your ideal clients are, like your ICPs, what kind of problems you solve for, what issues, problems, needs, etcetera. How do you solve for those problems? Why you are an authority? All of that needs to be very clear. If you follow the story brand methodology, you will notice that that is very similar. So if you have your story brand, you can literally give it to AI as part of what you give like your voice and all those things. So when you create content, when you create context in your CRM, AI knows exactly who you are, what you do, how you do it, why you do it, who you're doing it with, for and how you solve your ideal client's questions and problems. Now you tailor by using data and AI to deliver as personalized one to one experiences as possible. Today I was talking about on our video bootcamp this morning from HubSpot Academy. I was talking about creating video voicemails or creating FAQ videos where the FAQ are specific questions. So tailoring would mean to create specific videos for each one of your sales opportunities or marketing opportunities about the next step that a person is taking or a company is taking. Tailoring would mean to have a bunch of FAQ videos in your knowledge base for example and having your AI respond to specific questions using the content inside your knowledge base. And because it's using that content to answer questions then it's tailoring the right answer with the right video for the right question that people are asking at that moment. So as many automated experiences and semi automated experiences and manual experiences you can create that will tailor specifically to people and using AI to make it do it faster, the better. Then amplifying means diversifying your channels. We used to, you know, people with inbound marketing, they used to blog and they would think, okay, I blog, I show up on Google, then they come to my website, they fill out the form and I have a lead. Well things have become more and more complex than that because if you wanna show up on AI, now you need to show up, you know, that you're real so you could do webinars and then those webinars could turn into a blog which is very easy to do with HubSpot. We're actually, I'm actually gonna give you the actual prompt that I would recommend using with AI to turn a webinar into a blog and to optimize it for AI today. So at the end of the day you can turn that webinar into a blog, into a podcast episode, into a video series and then also turn it into short videos. And if you use Wistia and HubSpot, can track all of that information. Long story short, you have multiple different channels, social media, SEO, AI. You're sending emails, people are coming to your blogs, people are coming to your webinars because they sign up to the webinar but we know then more than sixty, seventy percent, this is a case study, more than seventy percent of the engagement on webinars is after the webinar. So if you are doing all the work to bring people to the webinar and then you do the webinar and then you post the recording and that's it, you're losing seventy percent of all the engagement you could have done, you could gotten from that webinar. So just repurposing that content into a blog, into a podcast, into shorts on social, on LinkedIn, not only brings more people that could become leads, more people that will see that you're an authority but also it brings Google which will prompt you in the search but also brings AI with real content. For example, you run a webinar, you'll have real people asking real questions. It doesn't get more real than that. So you know, Joseph asked me a question, I answer it. That part of the webinar goes into the FAQ section of that blog with the right structured data and all that stuff. We'll talk about it in a second. That's a signal for AI to say not only they are real, they're an authority. They are answering questions and by the way, this is the question that they ask and the answer is right here. So amplifying means diversifying your different channels and evolving means analyzing all of this with amazing tools like HubSpot and Wistia and all these great tools and iterating quickly. The whole point of the loop is that instead of running three months, six months campaigns and then seeing what happened with the campaign, you can run shorter loops of campaigns and repurposing content and things like that. So yeah, content marketing is on fire, Monica. You are right. Yes, good stuff. Good stuff. Let me know if you have any questions. So HubSpot presented this whole playbook. If you wanna take a screenshot, you'll get the slides. This is more of what I just talked about and how to use it. Like what the what, the why, the how and the wins you get from doing it. Now, my take, the same way I say don't freak out, Google is still huge. My take is don't freak out. The loop is not a whole new thing you need to do. If you've been doing inbound marketing the right way or any kind of marketing the right way and you're coming up on Google and getting leads and all these things, most of the things that you're doing are right and you should continue to do those things. So creating helpful human content that directly answers your idea of clients' questions. They ask you answer, Taya. It's a great methodology. Keep doing that. Go read the book if you haven't. There's a new version of it. They ask you answer, great methodology. Doing great SEO still works and it helps you show up in Google AI and Chateapiti. Methodologies like story brand messaging, conversion optimization, clear call to actions, forms, chat, call tracking to make sure that if people call you, you still get the lead in HubSpot. All of these things are still the backbone of your website and inbound marketing and loop marketing. Now video webinars podcast and being human with your audience is not only important, it's becoming more important. That's why the next one that we're gonna do next week, the workshop is going to be about how to use video podcasts and webinars. I'm putting the link right here. That's the next event. It's all gonna be about how to go from SEO to AEO using video webinars, podcasts and all that stuff. We'll talk about all that next week. But at the end of the day, you don't need to re learn all of it. The fundamentals of inbound marketing still apply. There's just some layers of things that you should do. I'll talk briefly about this because we'll do video next week. But the power of being real is huge. And I give this example because it's what AI is making me feel like lately. I don't know if you're familiar with the Matrix movie. If this is too much information and you don't want me to ruin the movie that happened twenty five years ago, that's fine, let me know. But definitely it reminds me of Morpheus telling Neo, welcome to the desert of the real. Where Morpheus was telling him all the real stuff is gone, the machines have taken over and everything's inside the matrix. So that's how social media feels like. That's how the world feels like. Everything's fake. Everything can be fake. And I could create an avatar of myself and have it give you this lesson on my behalf instead of me being real right here with you. Or I can create a video for LinkedIn with a whole new face and just have a whole new voice and create content with ChattypuTee that's crappy coming from just the internet. One blog every five minutes. So that creates a sea of fake stuff. So being real is a differentiator now. Being real is the most important thing you can do. No matter how you think people don't want to listen to you or don't want to see your face or it doesn't matter. Whatever being real means to you. Have your clients on a video, do webinars with your peers, have your employees do webinars among each other and talk to each other about things that they know. Just be real and showcase how you're real because it's only gonna get worse. I keep telling my kids, I have a bunch of kids, I have four kids and they're all artists because amazing, right? But because they can, right? Because I work really hard so they can be artists, right? So filmmakers, music technologists, so great stuff, I love it. And they're worried. They're worried about AI and they're like, what am I gonna do? And I'm like, dude, do not worry about it. Absolutely everybody's gonna be creating crap with AI every day and you're gonna be the only one doing real stuff. So just make sure you know how to use the AI tools so you're not just slow, right? But create real good stuff. Storytelling, amazing movies, amazing music coming from your feelings and your heart, AI cannot do that. Okay, so again, there is a huge benefit to SEO and AEO by being real. So Glymi is saying it seems that like the real benefit of AEL is that we do not have to rank to surface level information but instead target the decision making phase and focus yes and answer your ideal client's questions and be courageous with those questions and answers. Don't just answer the top level thin layer at the top. Be courageous, teach people, talk about the stuff and be real. In an AI saturated world, authenticity wins and there is a huge part of that that's video because authenticity wins. The human connection cannot be faked. Yes, you can create an avatar, all that stuff. That will make you feel absolutely nothing and when people realize as soon as they realize it's AI, they will get mad at you instead of saying, oh, they're so high-tech. No. It's the opposite. I I literally called someone the other day and I was like, hi. Good morning. It's Jennifer. And I'm like, pass me with a real person. And literally, I said that and my wife looked at me like, how do you know? How did you know it was not a real person? You were just screaming at them. I'm like, I knew, I knew exactly like the second that person started talking. It was fake. I knew in my heart. It was like, hopefully I don't do that with real humans in the future but definitely the human connection wins and being human and understanding humans and talking to humans and being nice to each other and listening to people and teaching people and that's where the stuff is, right? That's the stuff. So of course there's a huge multi channel power of video. We talked about a little bit of that. We'll talk about it a lot next week. How to repurpose content and all that stuff. And there's huge SEO and AI visibility upticks with this. So now let's talk about the practical AEO playbook. You know, I'll give you some practical tips. Not a lot because we don't have three hours. It would be amazing if I could keep going and definitely give me some questions. We'll go into Q and A in a second. Let's talk about some practical AEO. So the first thing is to optimize for questions and entities. People will be like, he's already talking like a robot. So I put it right there. Entities are the nouns that AI tries to connect to things. So people, places, brands, products, concepts. So instead of saying, we do inbound marketing for companies. You say, okay, we do AI search, Google search inbound marketing for B2B companies in the franchise industry. All of those are nouns that connect the dots of who you are and the more you add to that, the more AI will understand the layers. The same way, this is a great analogy, I was thinking about this and I'm like the same way before long tail keywords, you could rank a lot higher and easier because that meant that you were very specific about one thing versus ranking with Thai food. You could rank with Thai food in this neighborhood or amazing vegan Thai food or amazing gluten free Thai food. If you can differentiate or verticalize yourself, if you specify things, it'll be easier and faster to rank on AI the same way it was easier and faster to rank with long tail keywords. So think about those questions that you get, they ask you answer and think about those entities to connect the dots with those nouns, those places, those brands, those products, those concepts that you're helping with. Second, use structured data. And I'm gonna go to the next slide for a second and come back. So I'm not gonna go too deep into this. We'll talk a little bit more in our website design workshop on the twenty ninth. You have unstructured data and structured data. Unstructured data is like text. If you say your homepage has a bunch of text and pictures. Does Google know or AI know what all of that is or if you just put a whole document, does it know what is your name, what is the organization name, what are your services? No it doesn't. Not automatically. Sometimes it's semi structured because you're telling it, you tell Google this is the h1 tag so that is the title of this page. That's why we wanted to put h1 tags and descriptions and all of that has been part of SEO is because we were trying to semi structure the data of that page by letting Google know this is important. This page is about this and this is the description of that page. So now when you read everything else, read it with this context, right? So the difference between structured data and non structured data is because it makes it, structured data makes it easier for the bots of the world, not humans. That instead of reading, we are a company that does this and solves our problems that do this and we are in this city and we do. That's a paragraph that's unstructured. But if you say the name of the organization is this, that we are, what type of data are we going? It's an organization and this is the name and this is the URL and also, these are the services that we provide. This is a service and a service is HubSpot website design. And the type, by structuring the data like values in the CRM, if you wanna think about it in an easy way, if someone sends you an email, that's unstructured, right? But if someone fills up a form, that's structured data. If the first name goes into the first name, the last name, so then therefore you can now create workflow saying when I have an email and the person contacted me at the last, all of that data is structured and if you have good data, you've been doing a good job your CRM, that means you can make decisions. Same thing happens with Google and search engines and AI. So by using structured data, you're creating that structure to simplify the job of the AI instead of AI having to analyze all these things and try to understand what the heck you try to say. You can say these are FAQs. These are questions and answers. These are, this is my good examples of semi structured data in HubSpot. Your blog is a semi structured data. It has a title, it has a description, it has the main part, has an image, it has an author. The author, you can put a bio in the author. I recommend if you're trying to show up in AI, make your bio for your author on your blogs better. Like showcase who you are, video, like build your authors on your blog for example. But the blog was already structured, semi structured. It has tags that tells Google what it was about and you could structure it with links internally. So that's why blogs work beautifully for SEO It's because it was already structured better for Google to understand what that blog was about and what it was and the keywords and all that stuff. So we wanna do the same and more for AI. Another good example is knowledge bases. If you have a knowledge base in HubSpot, that's structured data. The structured, the schema work, the structured data work behind the scene is already almost done for you by HubSpot because if you're using the knowledge based system, it already has a queue, a question and an answer and tags and all these things are done so not only it shows up on Google but now it's a Q and A. Dylan asked, what are your thoughts on FAQ schema without the same FAQ on the webpage? What do you mean? Just putting the schema but not showcasing the context, the content on the page itself? Is that what you're saying, Dylan? If you wanna, we can go off mute later and ask the question. Go off mute and tell me, go ahead. I can't hear you. Are you saying anything? Is Dylan saying things? I don't think so. I think what Dylan is saying or asking is if I have an FAQ on a page, can I use the f but can I use the FAQ schema to create more more questions and answers that aren't on the page? Oh, no. They have to be on the page. That would be faking it again. And this is kinda like, I remember when we used to put or not we, when people used to put at the bottom a bunch of keywords on the same color of the background at the bottom with like all the cities in the world so they would show up on Google. No, I would not. Don't worry about it, Dylan. Keyword stuffing, baby. That's it, that's it. So don't create schema that's trying to fake content that doesn't actually exist. Create the FAQs, create an article with FAQs, create a blog and put some FAQs with schema. By the way, schema and structured data, this is a little bit more development related so ask your website designer, ask your developer to add that little code in there but maybe adding just an FAQ at the bottom of your blogs that's something that for example I've seen a lot when I'm creating blog articles now with AI, I add an FAQ section in the blog with some schema in it. So that actually helps AI understand that in this blog article not only I have a, you know, TLDR section at the top, know, too long to read section which by the way don't call it TLDR because TLTR to read. Don't say TLTR, that sucks. Like don't put that at the top of the blog. Don't copy paste just what AI is telling you to do. Just create a section that says this blog article is about these things. That's great for blog articles, right? That's part of the structured data you're trying to do. You're trying to say this section tells you what this whole blog is about. Then write the blog and that goes to the tip number four which is publish FAQs and conversational content. When you're creating content, instead of saying this is what happened with this, it's like are you trying to create this? Do that. If you're writing in conversational mode which AI does that a lot and sometimes you're like why is this sounding so weird? It's sounding weird because it's putting the question and the answer as part of the text of the paragraph. That is trying to create some structure of the Q and A inside your blog article. You can also do it with subtitles. You know, H2s have always been super important for SEO. Now we want those H2s to be the question. So if it's the question then the answer is in the paragraph below that H2. So again, optimize for questions and entities, use structured data. We can go into structured data very deep and we'll do more in the other sections. Publish FAQs and conversational content and then create video and transcripts, add the transcript chapters. If you use Wistia for example, which is an amazing video tool, I would totally recommend using chapters because chapters allow you to put a question and an answer. So let's say you have a video that answers multiple questions or that talks about a topic but in the topic, there's like these questions as part of that topic. Make the chapter name of each one of those sections a question that you know your ideal client's asked and then the video is answering that question and then create a transcript for that video which is super easy with Wistia or any other tools nowadays and that transcript is part of the SEO of that video. So that video has structured data that says and Wistia does this amazingly, this is the title of the video, this is the description of the video, these are the tags of the video, this is the transcript of the video and these are the chapters with the times. So then AI can actually go and watch the video. I know that's still not there for a lot of AI. It's not sending you to a video to watch this little piece but they're reading and they're watching the videos. Trust me, that will continue to come if you structure your videos, it'll get better. Just get better for you. How's that tool? Wistia is the best video marketing webinar tool in the world and I will talk a lot about it next week exactly, not the same time, three pm Eastern Time on seminar we have, on that webinar we have about optimizing your content engine with video webinars. I just put the link down there. What's beautiful about Wistia is that it integrates with HubSpot beautifully. So it sends a lot of data, structured data to give you engagement from your leads and all that stuff on video. The FAQs, we talked about that. And then keep doing great SEO. Remember, you know, great SEO will be great AEO. Do not stop doing amazing content for your human audience. Do not stop optimizing your pages with H1 tags and creating topic clusters and pillar pages. All of those beautiful, amazing foundational SEO concepts you've been trying to do for years, continue to get better at them. A pillar page is a long form page that talks about a generic topic that's one of your pillars of your services and stuff like that. Definitely keep doing that. Then create topic clusters, topic hubs around your pillar pages with more long tail keyword content. And if you do all of this and you add these little layers of schema structure data, FAQs, more videos, more multi channel that will expand everything you're doing and make it much, much better. So the other pro tip I have for you is ask AI how to optimize for It sounds stupid, right? It sounds like is worth faking. It's like going to Google and saying, how do I cheat Google? How do I show up on Google? Google, tell me how do I show up right here? Want the Google CEO to tell me how do I show up on the first page. Well, it's crazy but AI is an entity, right? It's a thing that tells you things and when you ask AI, AI tells you how to optimize for AI. A lot of these things will show up there, they will be part of it. But what's crazy is you can say, I wanna optimize for AI. I wanna create an article from a webinar for example. I'm gonna give you a transcript and I want you to be a marketer that teaches this and this and this and I want you to optimize this for humans first because hello, let's make content for humans because still humans are the ones reading this thing and those are the ones that you have to convince to buy something from you. So make it flow. My managing director, every time I create a blog article, she's like sending it to our content management and say, can you make this flow? Like I create articles that don't flow, that have amazing content optimized but they don't flow at all. So they have a human layer of that. Well, can ask AI and I've been doing that a lot and it's much better and I don't get so many rejections for my content to be approved internally. So yeah, as a CEO you would think that wouldn't happen. Everybody needs to be approved and edited and checked, right? So at the end of the day, optimize for humans, optimize for Google with keywords and all these things and then say optimize it for AI, for answers. Like optimize this article to be the answer to people's questions. And these are the questions and these are the answers And how do I do this? Give me the schema, give me the code to put on the website on this article. So I'm gonna say, this is something I came up with today. I was like, I went through this process with ChatGPT and I said, I want you to tell me what should be my prompt to you. So this is called meta, Darmesh talked about it at Inbound, this is called meta prompting. You ask, you say this is my prompt, this is what I want you to do. Now tell me how to make this prompt better. So when we do this together, I give you all the information that you need and you will create better content for me, right? So at the end of the day, I create it with multiple iterations. The ultimate prompt for turning webinar transcripts into high performing blogs. So literally, think I can copy paste this. It doesn't matter. You can take a screenshot. You'll get a slide from this. And by the way, I'm gonna put here, there's a structured data article from HubSpot that can help some people that might be lost with structured data there. But this is a good example. It's like you and when it says you, it's like me telling you Chatuchipiti, you are an expert content strategist. And you're an editor who specializes in turning spoken transcripts into high quality engaging blog article. I'm telling Jai Chi Preeti who it should be when it's doing this thing first. It's like put this hat, put the hat of the marketer, the specialist that turns this kind of content into that kind of content. And then say, I want you to flow for humans. I want you to optimize it for SEO, identify keywords, intent, all these things. AI optimize it, right? And then polish it for editor. Eliminate filler words. Like literally this was Chatchipiti telling me what I should tell it and then it says, this was a key one. Then ask me, you Chatchipiti, ask me any clarifying questions you need about tone, audience, call to actions, etcetera, etcetera. And what I would add to this is you would copy paste the transcript of that webinar. You can put the slides and you can even say, by the way, these are three blogs I already wrote about similar things. Take the voice out of these. This is my voice. You already know how I write. This is how I write. You already know my website. This is my home page. You already know who we are. This is our about page, services. Say all those things, tell it all those things and then the piece of content will come up much much better and optimized for AI. AI is the biggest tool you have to optimize your website for AI which is like, sounds like cheating but it's amazing. Alright guys, so key takeaways. SEO is evolving, don't fight it, just loop it. I had to do it. Sorry, I had to do it. It was so easy. And by the way, that was Chattypiti that came out with that which was amazing. I was like, dude, just loop it. That sounds great. It sounds human. How about that? Authenticity is your differentiator. Be real, guys. Be real. And then AEO is caring about what AI wants, caring about what humans want and then iterating to get better and better and better. Loop it real good. Yes, definitely Dylan, good stuff. So again, thank you guys for joining. This is the session. We're gonna go into Q and A now. Rate it, tell me one to ten how we did. We always wanna get better. Put it in the chat. Ten, I did amazing. Nine, I did amazing. Everything else forget about it. And then again, we're here to help. So if you need any help, let us know. We actually have a special running in October for everybody joining our TAMs or HUGs. We do twenty percent on HubSpot websites and twenty percent on HubSpot help checks. So definitely if you wanna join us there and definitely if you have any questions for that. And I'm gonna share the hug events again if you wanna join us for the other ones you'll get notifications and stuff. Any questions? Anybody wants to come up mute? Thank you guys. But I'm here to answer questions. If you wanna come up mute I can stay some minutes. I'm gonna stop sharing right here and we'll have a deep conversation about SEO. Did I get deep enough? Probably some people are like, this was nothing. This was our general conversation. If you wanted more, there's three more coming the next three weeks. Three more events about SEO to AEO. Video, loop versus inbound and how to structure your website and help your website. Monica, thank you. Love the energy. Thanks again. Was my first one. Keep coming back. Have all the energy here. Too much coffee these days. Two workshops a day for the next four weeks. It's gonna be fun for sure. You'll get the caffeine of two pm hit for sure. If you have to go, have a great week. Connect with us. I'm gonna give you my email right here, gabrielnextnimym dot com. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help.