In this post, I'll explain what an entity map is, what it helps with, and walk you through how I built one for my own site with Claude Code. You can watch the full live demo below.

The Problem Entity Maps Solve

When an AI search engine answers a question about your brand, it pulls information from across a bunch of different pages. That creates three problems.

Disambiguation. When AI runs into the same concept across multiple pieces of content, it can get confused and output something that isn't quite accurate.

Attribution. Your content might be part of an AI answer, but you aren't clearly identified as the publisher. You're in there somewhere, just tucked away so deeply that people miss it.

Relationships. If someone asks whether your brand does a particular thing or can solve a specific problem, the AI can't always connect those dots. When it can't, it blows the answer.

An entity map aims to solve all three.

So What Is an Entity Map?

It's a couple of files that describe your brand as a knowledge graph: your brand, the concepts it relates to, its services, and the canonical (official, authoritative) information about the entity itself.

There are two of them. An HTML file you link on your site, and a JSON file you reference from the HTML file, from your robots.txt, and in the head section of your pages.

If you've written schema before, it'll feel familiar, since it's also JSON. The difference is that schema works page by page, while an entity map is much more all-encompassing. It's meant to give the canonical picture of your whole brand and everything it relates to. You can read the full proposed protocol at entitymap.org.

Why I Decided to Build One

After the conference, a colleague shared a case study from Waikay titled "We installed an entity map on our site. Here's what happened." The short version: they saw measurable AI visibility improvements, plus better clarity and accuracy in how their brand was described.

In that case study, the entity map was cited more often than the company's own About page across Google's and Perplexity's AI results, and on one topic their AI visibility score jumped 26 points in just 48 hours. It's one case study, not a guarantee. But it's a promising signal, and an entity map is free to create.

How I Built One With Claude Code

The protocol has real documentation behind it, so the most important step is teaching your AI partner before you build anything.

I started a study session with Claude Code. I fed it the key pages from entitymap.org one at a time, the spec, the "why" page, the predicates reference, and the implementation guide, and had it review each before moving on. Some content is hidden behind dropdowns, so I used a text-grabbing tool to capture the full pages.

Then I pointed Claude Code at my own website and asked it to model me and my site as a set of entities. It pulled my live pages, including my services, case studies, and blog, and proposed a knowledge graph: me as a person, my agency as an organization, my services, and the concepts I write about.

From there, Claude Code generated both files. I ran the JSON through the validator on entitymap.org, which works like the XML sitemap validators you may already use, and fixed anything it flagged. There's also a visualizer that renders your entity map as a graph, which is a great way to confirm everything is connected the way you intended.

One Tip for Agencies and Consultants

One of the fields in an entity map is a metric. Make that metric something like ROI or profit, not a leading indicator like traffic or rankings.

If AI ends up referencing your entity map, the bottom-line outcome is what you want potential customers to associate with your brand. When I first built mine, Claude Code set the metric to organic traffic growth, and I had it changed to ROI right away.

Getting It Live

Once the files were ready, Claude Code deployed them to my site. The HTML file is linked in my footer, the JSON file is referenced in my robots.txt, and a small snippet in the head of my pages points to it. You can see the live result on this very site. Just scroll to the footer and click "EntityMap."

When an AI platform gets a query that requires it to retrieve information in real time (a process called RAG, or retrieval-augmented generation), it can find your entity map and pull canonical information that's under your control.

Why This Is Worth Doing Now

Here's the forward-looking part. Over the next one to two years, agentic AI crawlers, systems that act on their own to go find information, are going to become much more common. Giving them a clean, canonical source to consume is a smart way to stay ahead while most brands haven't even heard of this yet.

The Bottom Line

Entity maps are free, brand-new, and very few brands are taking advantage of them yet. There's at least one solid case study behind the idea, and the downside is basically just your time.

If this protocol gets adopted, the brands that tried it early could end up as the case studies that prove whether it works. That's a fun place to be. Give it a shot.

Purna Virji: AI Has to Prove Its ROI

The opening speaker was Purna Virji, and my takeaway from her speech was that AI has to prove its ROI. She said time saved is the ultimate vanity metric, and that's definitely something we give AI a lot of credit for, being really fast. But is it actually making things better? And is it actually impacting the bottom line? That's really what you should be focusing on, not just speed gains.

One of her great quotes was, "Better comes before faster." It's fine to be fast, but make sure it's actually making things better. And how should it be making things better? She gave three areas: it should be improving the quality of output, it should be increasing your scope or your competitive advantage, and it should be increasing capability, but sustainably. That was the kickoff of SMX, and it was a great mindset speech.

Kelsey Libert: Become a Source, Not a Summary

The next speaker I attended was Kelsey Libert. Search is expanding across channels. We know this is happening, and marketing is going to have to get more expansive and go beyond just websites. So yes, SEOs, we're going to have to crack the code on socials. This is in line with everything Rand Fishkin has been talking about for a while.

AI search had trust early on but has since lost a lot of it. People want disclosures if you're using it. On my LinkedIn, I've talked a lot about human sensitivity to AI and how many people are out there rejecting it when they identify it. So if we're using it for our clients and the brands we work for, we have to be really careful. You have to govern it. The best thing you can do with AI is give it a lot of context so the outputs aren't average or generic, and you want to supervise it every step of the way so it's not getting off course, hallucinating, and degrading trust in the brand.

She had some stats here. There's a quality problem with AI: 53% of marketing work uses it, but only 26% say it's faster and better, and 48% say it's making the work more average. That's right in line with what Purna was talking about. Adoption pressure is really high for analytics and SEO, so we actually have a lot of responsibility to use it appropriately.

If you're thinking about Google's AI Overviews, don't just let your content dissolve into the answer without your brand mentioned. You really want to be doing the long-term hard work to build a moat: build a brand, build yourself as an authoritative entity on the web. That's tough, but she gave some tips on how to do it: lean into original data, proprietary studies, and digital PR. We do a lot of this at the agency I work at, where everything we do is expert-led. We schedule regular Q&A sessions with our subject matter experts to keep things as unique as possible, make it hard for competitors to copy us, and make it more likely we're going to be selected by AI. Because if you're writing to the average, what compels AI or any other system to select you?

She talked a lot about repurposing to help build yourself as an authoritative entity, and that's something our agency is big on too. We love starting with video, because video can become long and short-form video, and you also have the transcript to turn into long and short-form text. All of those formats can go to a lot of different platforms, so it really helps with your spread across the web.

Her framework for success in AI search:

• Monitor platforms and choose the ones relevant to your audience.
• Build entity authority by getting your subject matter expertise out there.
• Triangulate visibility with a good spread of platforms where you're publishing.
• Govern for trust when it comes to AI.

Dave Davies: Can This Text Stand on Its Own?

Dave Davies was a more technical speaker, but there were some great takeaways we could apply to our work. When it comes to copywriting, his question was, "Can this block of text stand on its own and answer a specific question?" I just had an example of this the other day with one of my copywriters who wrote a key takeaway that was really dependent on the context from the paragraph that preceded it. You have to be careful with that, because it was a great key takeaway, but it couldn't stand on its own, so it might have a little more trouble being selected for an AI answer.

He also talked a lot about how powerful third-party mentions are for AI visibility, and that was a through line with a lot of speakers. It's not surprising, but there was a lot more talk of mentions being just as powerful, if not more powerful in some cases, than links. And he emphasized that freshness is important when it comes to AI, but if you're going to update your content, make sure the updates are significant. You can't just go in and change the last updated date and think that's enough.

Andrew Beckman and Andrew Shotland: Extracting the Gold From Local Owners

Andrew Beckman and Andrew Shotland held a local SEO seminar that was like an open forum to share your issues. It was really good. I actually went up to Andrew Shotland afterward and talked to him about how local business owners often have content that could grow their business locked away in their mind, and how our job is to extract it and get it out onto the web.

I shared some of the ways I do that. Our monthly meeting is sixty minutes: the front thirty minutes is reporting and strategy, and the back thirty minutes is an SME Q&A session. Another way we try to extract subject matter expertise is to send questionnaires, whether there's a new page we want to create, a page we want to update, or a PR request for expertise. Then I asked him, "What other ways can we extract this gold from our busy local business owners?" And he said, "Why don't you ask if they record sales calls?"

I thought that was a great idea and wanted to share it. Sales call transcripts and recordings: you can mine those for subject matter expertise and customer pain points. There's a lot of gold in there. You can also start to understand the language customers use, and that might alter your copywriting a little bit.

Amanda Farley: Conversational Queries and a Local Video Tip

Amanda Farley leaned more into the e-commerce side, but she had a local tip I'll share too. She had a system where she took in data on search behavior, product intent, and audience intelligence, and gained insights she could then apply to product pages.

What we're finding with conversational queries is that there's a lot more detail about what people are looking for. They average about 24 words, from what I heard in another presentation, whereas traditional SEO keywords average about four words. So there's a lot more data in these prompt-based queries, and we have to account for that on our pages. One example I've given is someone might prompt for men's Nike shoes, size 11, that are good for both running and hiking and also for narrow feet. There's a lot of detail in there, and if our data is telling us that's important to people, we want to update our pages accordingly so the AI system can make those connections. It doesn't mean we have to make our pages a mess of fine details, but you do want to do this research so you can gain those insights and then intelligently and tastefully update your page content.

Her one great local tip, which harkens back to what I talked about with Andrew Shotland, is to capture local video in the field using Meta glasses and build a video bank for your clients. Then again, you've got video you can use on multiple platforms, and if there's any talking, it can become text. Meta glasses are not as expensive as I thought they were, so this is one I'm going to try.

Dawn Anderson: Lost in the Middle

Dawn Anderson gave quite a technical talk breaking down how AI systems and large language models read text. One of the big things was a paper called "Lost in the Middle": if you have an enormous amount of text or context, the large language model will tend to read what's at the top and the bottom of it. So the takeaway is to put your most important stuff at the top of the page so it doesn't get missed.

Then she came in with a great point: a lot of this is just good journalism and common sense, isn't it? That's definitely something for SEOs and marketers to take away. With AI coming into the fray, things are getting really technical. We're looking under the hood and trying to understand what's behind these systems, and I think that's great to do. But at the end of the day, it boils down to principles of good copywriting and SEO fundamentals. Get into the detail and understand it, but don't get lost in it and lose the bigger picture.

Monica Ho: Treat Reviews, Search, and Social as One System

Monica Ho shared a presentation based on a large data study of businesses with multiple locations. Here are some cool takeaways:

• Reviews are a gate. With AI especially, she found you don't even get in unless you have 4.3 stars.
• One in four people use social as primary search. That harkens back to what Kelsey and Rand Fishkin have been talking about: search is fragmenting, and you want to be everywhere your target audience is. SparkToro is a great tool for that. You type in some information about your target audience, and it shows you the social platforms they use, the AI platforms they use, and a ton of other great data, so you can get your content in front of them.
• One in three people use generative AI in over half their searches. A lot of people are using AI search.

She emphasized auditing your data, and this is tough to do. I think we're going to have to be more thorough as SEOs.

This is the kind of stuff we have to monitor, because the AI systems are grabbing onto it, putting it in front of people, and confidently telling them it's current information.

She said to treat reviews, search, and social as one system, not as separate fragmented teams, and I think that's a great mindset.

Beth Nunnington: Build Something Worth Finding

For AI search, pretty much everything Beth Nunnington said was great. First of all, stop chasing GEO or LLM summaries and build something worth finding. This is sort of what I was getting at with not getting lost in the detail or pulled into the hype of getting into an AI response. Think bigger than that.

So lean into your experts. From Beth: "Your experts are your strongest asset." I totally agree, especially in the AI era. They always have been, but now especially. It's not about manipulating outputs. Do the long-term hard work. Quick wins are fine for SEO, but they tend not to be lasting. You want to do things that are going to be sustainable despite how many Google algorithm updates are happening. Build a strong foundation, then build on top of it with good SEO fundamentals and strong PR.

This SMX definitely focused a lot on third party: the wider web pointing to you with something, a link or a mention. That is really how to build yourself as an entity, how to build authority, and how to get into AI outputs. Nothing new, but good to reinforce, and I think it's even more important when it comes to AI. She also emphasized that true brand building needs multiple teams working together, which is the same cohesion point Monica was making.

Grant Simmons: A Quick Word on EntityMap

Just a quick mention of Grant Simmons. He's involved in entitymap.org, and I encourage you to visit the site, see what this proposed protocol is about, and try the tool where you can experiment with it. It's quite similar to Schema, but it's a different kind of thing. I think it's a supportive layer for getting your content and subject matter expertise out there on many platforms with a lot of third-party support, confirmation, and additional context. Those are the primary drivers of AI and search systems understanding you as an entity, and the stuff at entitymap.org can reinforce that even further.

Kyle Risley: AI Will Work Around Our Mess (To a Point)

Kyle Risley was from Shopify, and there was a lot of talk about AI agents coming and how they're going to do a lot more of the navigating people used to do. You need to make sure that from a technical, foundational standpoint, you're as sound as possible. But at the end of the day, he emphasized that you just need to nail the basics. AI will work around our mess.

He invited us to raise our hand if we thought people were going to make perfect websites. Of course they're not. Google deals with this already: there are websites with multiple H1s on the page, and Google can figure out the actual primary heading through other clues. Google learned to work around our mess, and AI is going to as well, but only to a certain extent. You do need to make sure you get those basics right.

The Four Bigger Takeaways

That's a little from each individual speaker. Here are the four larger takeaways.

So there you have it, all my takeaways from SMX Advanced Boston this year. I hope that was useful. If you have any questions, drop me a comment. I love hearing from you, and I'll see you in the next one.

Here are four areas to focus on over the next twelve to twenty-four months if you want real success with AI visibility: subject matter expertise, audience research, relevance networking, and YouTube. You can watch the full breakdown below, or read on.

1. Lean Hard Into Subject Matter Expertise

I'm starting here because I've been having so much success with it. When AI writing started becoming common, I naturally rejected it. It seemed insulting to the people who would actually read the content, and I had a feeling search engines wouldn't love it either.

So I leaned into expert-led content instead. The format is simple: schedule a fifteen to thirty minute expert interview once a month. That's it. From that small block of time, you get a ton of material to work with.

You can use it two ways. Add color to content that already exists to bolster your current pages, or build entirely new pages around it.

My one rule: go nearly verbatim with what you get, whether it's a live interview or a written questionnaire. I'll pass the answers through an AI for light cleanup, but I deliberately tell it not to change much. I don't want AI writing here. That's the whole point of the exercise.

This stuff performs incredibly well. My clients are getting pulled into AI Overviews, cited in ChatGPT, and ranking in the traditional listings too.

2. Take Audience Research Much Deeper

This includes keyword research, but keyword research is a smaller piece of a much bigger exercise. This is where SEOs really need to push into new territory.

One thing we've learned from the longer, conversational queries people use on AI platforms is that they're complicated. A single query often hits several audience needs at once, sometimes in combinations you wouldn't expect. So you have to max out the empathy and go deep on what your audience is actually asking, what worries them, and what myths and misconceptions they hold.

Here's where to mine for those gaps:

• Client conversations. They know their audience. Ask about it in your kickoff and beyond.
• Sales team feedback. They know the questions, the objections, and how to overcome them, which is gold for your copywriters.
• SparkToro. A treasure trove built for audience research: the sites your audience visits, podcasts they hear, channels they watch, keywords they search, and the AI platforms and prompts they use.
• Reddit. A fantastic place for audience insights. Add .json to any subreddit thread URL to see every comment, reply, and upvote. I wrote a whole post on the Reddit .json trick.
• Your own data. Social listening, internal call transcripts, and the forms that come in from interested customers.

Keyword research still lives under this umbrella, and so does prompt research. SparkToro can hand you real prompts to work from. You can also open Google Search Console and look for queries of, say, ten words or more.

You can even connect Search Console to Claude through an MCP and let it do the digging for you.

One more layer: query fan-outs, the related questions an AI engine spins off from your original prompt. The friendliest way to see them is Perplexity, which just reveals them to you. If you're more technical, you can watch ChatGPT's fan-outs in Chrome's inspector on the Network tab.

3. Treat Outreach as Relevance Networking

We all know link building outreach. I'm not saying abandon it. This is more of a mindset change, and that switch alone has gotten me better results.

I've started thinking about outreach as networking. If I'm on a service like Qwoted thinking like an outreach specialist, I'm just blasting journalists with my best responses. Fine. But the networking mindset makes it personal. I'm friendlier and more casual, and I invite follow-ups far more often, because I'm trying to connect with the person.

More often than not, the journalist responds. Sometimes we hop on a call, and a relationship starts to form. Whether or not I land that first placement, they're more likely to think of me for the next article. That's the networking paying off.

There's also a lesser-known SparkToro feature for finding genuinely relevant third-party sites that might link to or mention you. I covered it in a separate video. It leads to real back-and-forth over email, and I've had a lot of luck building ongoing relationships with publications relevant to my clients. We get cited, and we end up in their Rolodex for future opportunities.

4. Build Your Presence on YouTube

If you saw the recent Guardian article, YouTube just overtook Netflix for average daily viewing. So if you think your potential customers aren't on YouTube, you're wrong. They're absolutely there. It's a massive search engine, second only to Google.

It's time for SEOs to learn YouTube, and it is a different game. You'll have to prepare yourself through learning and experimentation, and you'll have to prepare your clients too, because getting them on video regularly is its own challenge.

Making it easy on clients is the most important and most overlooked part. The monthly SME interview is one path. For a local business, it can be as simple as turning on the camera at a job site and capturing thirty seconds of footage. I even heard a tip at SMX Advanced in Boston this year about using a pair of Meta glasses, which might be easier than a phone.

A few other things you'll need to learn to talk through with clients:

• Timelines. We're used to telling clients a website takes three to six or six to twelve months. YouTube is different and can take up to two years, so have case studies and the right language ready.
• Optimization. A different game, but honestly not too bad once you learn the baseline best practices and keep up with the trends.
• Audience growth. You have to engage and listen far more than you would with a website.
• Lead tracking and attribution. So you can account for the effort and show the value of your work.

My best advice: treat it the way we treat websites. The single best thing you can do, better than any course, is start your own channel. Post, experiment, and learn what works firsthand. You can do that right alongside your client work. Clients come in at different stages anyway. I've had brand-new channels and ones with 100,000 subscribers, and both were valuable because the game shifts at each level.

The Bottom Line

Do these four things and you'll thrive in the AI search era. None of them require a vector embeddings degree. They reward depth, empathy, and showing up consistently.

Do these four things and you'll do quite well in the coming years.

It's a fundamental, critical skill for SEO, and we're going to keep it simple. This is one of those topics where it can start to get complicated and you can tie yourself up in knots overthinking it. The best approach is to keep it super simple, so here are a few steps to help you choose the right keyword for your web page.

For this example, we're using Helen's Kitchen Cooking School. This isn't a client of mine, I just randomly selected it.

Step 1: Brainstorm on Your Own

Start by reviewing the content of the page you're working on. If you're building the page, you'll be quite familiar with it. But if it's a client, say you're a new SEO who just started at an agency, this might be the first time you're really taking in what the website is all about. So take a read.

Obviously, we're looking at a cooking school. In the main navigation, I can see "classes" as one of the central items, so it's probably cooking classes at a cooking school. I'm starting to get an idea of what this page boils down to. What's the main topic? That's really what I'm after.

Then I look at this sentence, which kind of says it all: "We offer hands-on cooking and baking classes to enthusiastic home cooks at our kitchen in Natick, MA." To me, the keyword, which should be a short phrase that my target audience would search, is jumping out: cooking classes in Natick, MA. I think that's the perfect keyword for this page, which is the homepage of the cooking school.

I can keep reading and I'll see more specific things like handmade pasta and sashimi, which hint at the different classes and foods you can work with. I might even learn a little about Helen herself. But it all boils down to cooking classes in Natick, MA. That's my first step: my own brainstorming, and I'm happy with that keyword. It makes sense and it's super relevant to the page.

Step 2: Tap Into AI

For step two, tap into AI. We've got this amazing tool now that we didn't have before. I wish I had it early in my SEO career, and we should definitely use it.

I like to use Gemini in Chrome for this, because it can see the web page I'm working on. All I have to do is open it in the upper right of my Chrome browser and ask: "What do you think is the primary keyword for this page?" I'm using AI as a collaborator, a partner in the brainstorming exercise. It gives me a second opinion, and hopefully it confirms what I landed on.

Here's what it said: based on the page content and the headings, the primary keyword is "cooking school" or the slightly more localized "cooking classes in Natick, MA." I don't like the first choice, "cooking school." It's way too general. In general, you want to be as specific as possible, especially for a smaller organization, and this looks like a small, private operation, not a Sur la Table.

More specific tends to be less competitive, and the less competitive terms are normally what you want to go after, unless you want to fight it out with the giants. The second choice, "cooking classes in Natick, MA," is exactly what I landed on with my own independent review. So this is really confirming. We're already on our way to choosing the right primary keyword.

Step 3: Check Google

The third thing you can do is take one or two ideas from your brainstorming and search them in Google. What you're looking for are pages that rank on page one and are similar to your own organization.

I already searched "cooking classes Natick MA." What's kind of funny is that Helen's cooking school already ranks number one, which tells me Google agrees with the keyword we chose. It thinks it's a great match.

I'll also look at the other results. I try to find ones similar to my business. Yelp and TripAdvisor aren't similar to Helen's cooking school, so they're not too useful here. Sur la Table is a big organization, but you can see they chose the exact same keyword we were targeting. I tend to focus on the organic results rather than the sponsored ones, but you can still get good ideas from sponsored listings.

Look at the title tags from the competitors to see whether they chose the keyword you thought of or something slightly different. That can give you more ideas and help you finalize your primary keyword. For example, one sponsored result from Cozymeal used the word "in-person." That's interesting, and it might be a way to make our title tag even more specific: "in-person cooking classes in Natick, MA." The more specific you get, the less competitive it tends to be, which gives you a better chance of ranking well and actually getting the click.

What If You Don't Have a Finished Page?

You might not have a finished web page to look at. Here are a couple of other scenarios:

You have a copywriting draft. Say you're a designer and you haven't built the page yet, but you have the copy. Read through it yourself and do your brainstorming, then drop it into an AI tool like ChatGPT or Claude and ask what it thinks the primary keyword is.

You don't even have a draft. Brainstorm on your own first: what page am I about to create, what's it all about, what does the topic boil down to? Then describe it to an AI tool in detail, the same way you'd think about it. For example: "I'm soon going to build a page about cooking classes led by a woman named Helen, who has experience from Europe and cities all over America, and she's based in Natick, MA." The AI can pick out the key details, boil them down, and give you an idea. It's a nice parachute for when you don't have a page to look at.

Validate It With Free Search Volume Data

Let me point you to another tool: Google Ads. Search for "Google Ads signup," go through the free signup process, and you'll land in the interface. On the left, go to Tools, then Planning, then Keyword Planner, and choose "Get search volume and forecasts." Then enter your keyword ideas.

When I was doing this exercise, I came across two ideas. One was "cooking classes Natick MA." The other was "cooking classes Boston MA," a suggestion I actually got from AI, which pointed out that Boston is a bigger area with potentially wider interest, so it might help attract more customers. Interesting idea.

But watch this. The average monthly searches for "cooking classes Boston MA" are way higher than the Natick variant, so a lot more people are searching for it. AI was on the right track there. As you'd guess, though, look at the competition column: the competition for "cooking classes Boston MA" is high, while Natick is medium. Helen's Kitchen seems like a smaller organization, basically one individual, so I'd go after the lower-competition term. Once again, that overconfirms my choice of "cooking classes in Natick, MA" as the primary keyword for the homepage.

Don't Forget the Title Tag

When you look at Helen's result in Google, that clickable headline is called a title tag, and it's really critical for SEO. When you have your keyword in the title tag, it's a very strong signal to Google that your page is a good match for anyone searching that keyword.

So even though Helen already ranks number one, putting "cooking classes in Natick, MA" in the title tag, followed by something like "Helen's Kitchen," would help lock her in place above Sur la Table and the other larger entities. (I might do a separate video on how to find the title tag in the code and update it.)

Final Thoughts

Those are the three steps: brainstorm on your own, use AI as a partner, and do a Google search to see what competitors are choosing for their primary keyword. Add in a free tool like Google Ads Keyword Planner for real data, and you can make a great choice on the primary keyword for any page you're working on.

Sometimes it's tricky to choose, because it isn't always this straightforward. If you're in one of those scenarios, leave me a comment and we can talk through it together.

What Are Skills in Gemini in Chrome?

If you open Gemini in Chrome and click the plus sign, you'll see an option to browse skills. That's the whole point here: you can create skills for Gemini in Chrome, and it's incredibly useful if you're used to skills in Claude.

These are not as detailed or powerful. Claude skills can do a lot. They can deploy multiple agents that report back up to a manager or orchestration agent, they can crawl the web, and there's so much you can do with them. The skills in Gemini in Chrome seem more limited. Basically, it's saving prompts that you already have. But that's exactly what makes them handy. There are a couple of workflows I typically do with Gemini in Chrome that were perfect for these skills. I can save them, call them up quickly, and run them really easily.

How to Create a Skill

Creating one is simple. You go to the skills section, click your skills, click add, name your skill, and then drop your instructions or your prompt in. That's it. I've already done this for a couple of mine.

The first is a content comparison skill. It compares the content of multiple pages and shares the most effective elements, like outline sections and multimedia. I put right in the instructions that I want to learn why the content might rank well and get strong engagement, because typically I run this on top ranking pages to try to figure out why they're ranking. It's at least another perspective.

The second is a design comparison skill. This one also runs on multiple pages, and it looks at things like UX and CRO and tells me what the most effective elements of those pages are.

Demo 1: Comparing Design Across Pages

Let's run the design one first. I've got three websites here: wise.com, Miro, and Airbnb. These just showed up on one of those sites that aggregates the best-designed websites.

I come down and click the plus, and I make sure that Miro and Airbnb are also selected so Gemini in Chrome can see them. With them selected, I can choose my skill from the menu, or I can summon it with a forward slash, and there it is. I call it up, run it, and in seconds I have the insights I'm looking for. It starts with Wise and works its way through Miro and Airbnb.

Now, this is AI output, so some of it is going to be throwaway, but some of it is really good. It talks about the immediacy of the calculator that Wise puts in front of users, which is super cool and kind of just screams engagement. It calls out the social proof, and there are all kinds of other insights from the other pages as well.

Demo 2: Comparing Content Across Pages

Next, let's run the content comparison workflow on a couple of Yellowstone National Park guides. This skill is going to tell me what it is about the content that helps it rank well and get good engagement. I'm assuming it gets good engagement because it ranks well, since we know engagement is part of ranking well. I can't confirm that through their internal data, but it's a reasonable assumption, and that's what I want the AI to look for.

I open Gemini, make sure both pages are selected (my National Park Lodges page and the other one), choose the content comparison skill, and run it. Gemini in Chrome makes it so easy, since it's all right there in the same pop-up.

It looks at structural elements and content outlines first. One page focuses heavily on actionable tips, while the other employs an exhaustive, geographic-first approach. Then it gets into multimedia: the Lodges page uses polished, professional imagery, authentic storytelling, and even the power of captions, which is cool. Finally, it covers the trust-building and authority signals on the pages, which are really impactful for readers.

A Third Use Case: Comparing AI Search Studies

There's one more use case I want to share, though I won't demo it here. I use it a lot, especially with the number of AI search studies coming out these days. I'll open up multiple studies and run a skill that compares and contrasts them. It tells me where there's consensus, where there's disagreement, and it draws out insights that can only be gathered from reading all of the articles together.

Final Thoughts

All three of these use cases are fantastic if you're an SEO or a marketer. If you hadn't seen that Gemini in Chrome has this Skills feature, I hope this was useful, and I hope you'll play around with it. And if you have another use case, let me know in the comments. I'm sure other people would like to see it as well.

We're using the same example business from last time, Helen's Kitchen Cooking School, and the primary keyword we landed on was "cooking classes in Natick, Massachusetts." I took inspiration from that website and built a couple of mockups of the top of the homepage so we can talk through what to do with the keyword. The primary keyword is the most important one, so it gets prime real estate, which centers around the top of the page.

The Big Four

Here's what you do with your primary keyword for SEO. You do what I call the big four. You put it in the URL, the title tag, the H1 headline, and the first paragraph. When you use it in these four areas, they combine to send a really strong ranking signal. If someone searches for "cooking classes in Natick, MA" and you've used that keyword in all four places, it makes it really easy for Google to match your page with that search.

You won't always land all four, and that's fine. Google will get the point if you use the primary keyword in at least two of these four areas. Let's walk through each one.

1. The URL

The URL is basically the address of the web page, the part you see at the top of Chrome. (Worth mentioning in case you're a beginner.)

Helen doesn't use the keyword in her URL, and in my mockup I don't either. Without introducing an exception too early: you have to use your discretion in every SEO situation. This is a homepage, and her business is called Helen's Kitchen, so the homepage URL is going to be the brand. We can't really sneak a keyword in there, and I wouldn't try. I'd let the homepage URL be the brand.

If it were a deeper page, though, it would work really well. For any page other than the homepage, you can usually work the keyword in, like helenskitchen.com/cooking-classes-natick-mass. So the URL is the first area to consider, but if you're in a scenario where it doesn't fit, don't force it.

2. The Title Tag

The title tag lives in the code of a web page, so you can't see it just by opening the page in Chrome. I want to keep this simple and skip the code, so here's an easy way to see it: in any browser, hover over the tab and wait, and the title tag pops up. For the real site it reads "Helen's Kitchen Cooking School," with no keyword.

In my mockup, I'd make the title tag "Cooking Classes in Natick, MA | Helen's Kitchen" (that vertical bar is called a pipe). That gets our keyword into the first of the big four, and I recommend front-loading it so the primary keyword is the first part of the title tag. If you're not sure how to update it, you don't necessarily need to touch code, platforms like WordPress let you edit it in the back end. (I'll cover that in another video.)

One more thing about title tags: when you search Google, the title tag is exactly what shows up as that clickable blue headline. So if someone searches "cooking classes Natick, MA" and sees those words right there in your title, they think, "perfect match." It's not all about Google, we want people to see that match too. That's why the title tag is such an important place for your primary keyword, and such a loud ranking signal.

3. The H1 Headline

The H1 is your primary heading on the page. Helen's current heading has no keyword in it. In version one of my mockup, I set the primary keyword as the H1, which sends a really powerful signal.

Here's where discretion comes in again. Maybe the client doesn't love that, her current H1 is something like "Welcome to Helen's Kitchen," and she may really want to welcome people warmly. So we might compromise. In a second mockup, I put the primary keyword in an eyebrow (the small line above the H1) and then use warmer, friendlier copywriting as the actual H1. That's good technique: you get the keyword signal in, while working with the client to accommodate what they want.

So go for the keyword in the H1 if you can, but if it reads unnaturally, the eyebrow-plus-H1 setup is a great option.

4. The First Paragraph

The fourth area is the first real paragraph of the page. You might ask, "isn't that the text right under the H1?" Arguably, yes. But I want to teach you to build pages tastefully. The goal is to use the primary keyword, true, but we don't want the page to turn spammy or sound unnatural. We're not stuffing keywords everywhere and ruining the experience.

So rather than force it into the very first line, I'd often place it a little lower in the opening content, where it fits naturally. The keyword still lands in the first paragraph of real copy, it just reads like something a human would actually write.

Be Flexible

That's the big four, and that's how you use a primary keyword for SEO:

• URL - use it if you can, which mostly applies to deeper pages; on a homepage the URL often just has to be the brand, and that's okay.
• Title tag - definitely try to get it in, and front-load it.
• H1 - try for it, or use the eyebrow-plus-H1 compromise if it reads unnaturally.
• First paragraph - work it in tastefully.

If you can get all four, it's extremely powerful. If you have to compromise on one or partially compromise on another, that can be okay too. It's fine to be flexible, Google will get the point if you use the primary keyword in at least two of these four areas.

What's Next

So now we know how to choose a primary keyword and how to use it. In the next video, we'll talk about secondary keywords: how to choose them and how to use them. If you have any questions, or you're in a scenario where you're not sure how to get the primary keyword into one or more of the big four, leave me a comment and we'll figure it out together.

If you've been following along, we've been using Helen's Kitchen Cooking School in Natick, MA. It's a real business that we're using as our example, and our primary keyword was "cooking classes in Natick, MA." For this secondary keyword exercise, we can just drop the location and think about the "cooking classes" part.

What Are Secondary Keywords?

If "cooking classes" is our primary keyword, what are the variations we could build off of it? Here are some: cooking school, culinary school, cooking training, cooking lessons, cooking experience, classes for cooking. There are all kinds of variations that could exist, and it's a good idea to use them.

Remember the big four from last time: you use the primary keyword in the URL, the title tag, the H1, and the first paragraph. Once you've done that, you've pretty well established the primary keyword. Then it's time to start using variations, so that Google can match your page to all the different ways people might search for what you offer.

Where to Use Secondary Keywords

I suggest using them in the second half of the title tag, in subheadings, and in body paragraphs. There are other areas where you can use keywords too, like images, but I want to keep today's lesson simple. We'll cover images and other fields in the future.

How to Come Up With Them

This workflow looks a lot like the one for finding a primary keyword:

• Brainstorm variations on your own. Look at your primary keyword and think of the different ways people might search for it.
• Work with an AI. I love using Gemini in Chrome because it's so convenient, but Claude or ChatGPT work too. Give it the full context: here's the page I'm working on, here's some info about it, here's my primary keyword, and now I need some secondary variations. You'll get new ideas and confirm some of your own.
• Use Google's Keyword Planner. It's free to sign up for (if you have trouble, search "how to sign up for Google Keyword Planner free").

In Keyword Planner, go to Tools, then Keyword Planner, and this time choose Discover new keywords. Type in your primary keyword, "cooking class" or "cooking classes," it doesn't really matter. Notice I dropped the locality and didn't include Natick, MA. That's because of the tool's own guidance: try not to be too specific or too general. "Cooking class" is enough to help the tool understand what I want variations of. I'll also drop in Helen's URL, then click Get results.

Now I can see my primary keyword plus a list of keyword ideas. "Cooking school" is a fantastic variation. "Kitchen cooking," not so much, at least in my opinion, and this is where human discretion comes in. Don't just accept everything a tool gives you.

"Culinary school" is a pretty good one, but I wasn't sure at first. I thought it might surface more established schools or colleges, so I verified it: I searched "culinary school Natick, MA" in Google to make sure it's relevant to Helen's business. Sure enough, she shows up number one in the map pack and number one in the organic results, so it's a no-brainer, I'll use it. That's basically what I did, going down the line and vetting each keyword. You can also check the competition column and make sure everything is medium or low. As we decided in a previous lesson, we steer clear of high-competition keywords unless you're a well-established brand.

Two Ways to Use Them: Full or Partial

So now we have all these great keyword ideas. What do we do with them? Like I said, use them in the title tag, subheadings, or body paragraphs. But here's a cool technique.

One way is to use the full keyword, obviously, like "cooking school." Another is to use just part of the keyword, so you don't sound too repetitive. Say your title tag already reads "Cooking Classes in Natick, MA," and then you come in with "cooking training." It doesn't read all that well. So I'd drop the "cooking" and just use "training." We've got plenty of great words for that: training, lessons, experience. Since it's already obvious the page is about cooking classes, the keyword is almost implied, so you don't have to repeat the whole thing. If you did, the page would turn out spammy and wouldn't read well.

I want to teach you to be a tasteful SEO who creates content that reads well, so know that this technique is available. Here's it applied in the title tag: "Cooking Classes in Natick, MA - In-Person Lessons and Training." The primary keyword leads, and "lessons" and "training" are partial secondary keywords worked in naturally. That's a great title tag.

Seeing It on the Page

Let's see things in action on the page. We have the title tag above, the primary keyword in the eyebrow (from last lesson), and some great audience copy in the primary heading. So where do the secondary keywords come in?

• First paragraph: the primary keyword, which is part of our big four.
• Subheading: "More than a cooking school," using the variation a little deeper on the page.
• Body paragraph: "Helen's began as a small culinary school and grew into..." so we naturally fit in another variation.
• Echo of the title tag: "in-person lessons and real training," using the partial secondary keywords in an organic way.
• Another subheading: "cooking experience" and "classes for cooking."

You get the idea. We're getting these in well, and it all still reads naturally.

Final Thoughts

That's your lesson on secondary keywords, the variations on your primary keyword. I've given you three ways to come up with ideas (brainstorm, AI, Keyword Planner), three places to use them (title tag, subheadings, body paragraphs), and two techniques for using them: the full keyword, or just the partial keyword when you want to be a little more tasteful.

If you have any questions, leave me a comment and I'd be happy to help. I'll see you in the next lesson.

Lesson 1: Thin Content Does Not Perform (Google Panda Update)

The first one of these tectonic shifts for me was Google's Panda update, which really focused on content quality. What you're looking at on the right side here is an actual client page that I worked on, and this is all the content that's on the page. It's barely 100 words.

My big takeaway from this time period is thin content does not perform. It certainly did not perform well after Panda. I know a lot of clients are averse to having really wordy pages because they feel like their site visitors don't want a reading assignment. But if the content's really good and it's what people are looking for, they really do want to consume quite a bit of it. Sometimes they need that before they convert.

If you want to be a strong marketer, a powerful partner, or a collaborative client, it's time to embrace robustly informative pages. This could be a home page, a service page, or a blog post. Any one of those really does warrant a strong outline and deeply informative sections. It's going to be good for your customers, and it's going to be great for your SEO.

Lesson 2: Easy Links Tend Not to Help (Google Penguin Update)

The next update I wanted to talk about was the Penguin update. This one focused on backlinks, particularly low quality backlinks. This screenshot right here is just a snippet from some of the backlink removal work I did at the beginning of my career. Basically, what it represents is a large network of sites owned by a single individual who used to sell link placements to help sites rank well. Back in the day, you could rank number one if you bought enough links.

When this update came, it was pretty much overnight that sites participating in this were just knocked off the first page completely. There was a panic to remove them all. Unfortunately, individuals like this made a lot of money not only selling the links in the first place, but charging to remove them when everyone panicked and tried to get them scraped from their backlink profile.

The takeaway here was that easy links tend not to help. Essentially, any link worth having was going to be more difficult to get, if not really hard. And that's kind of the way it should be. Anything worth having shouldn't really be easy to get.

There are still links that are fairly easy to get, and some of them are pay-to-play. If you're a local site, you might purchase a link on a chamber of commerce site or something like that. But this was a completely different thing. This was just spam, and I'm glad Google made this change.

The takeaway for marketers and clients is that we really want to get authoritative, relevant, high-quality backlinks into our profile.

Lesson 3: Keyword Stuffing Is Dead (Google Hummingbird Update)

The next update that was significant for me was the Hummingbird update. This was Google's way of getting more sophisticated in applying context to a user's query. But it kind of extended for me to a philosophical change where we were once focused on keywords and using exact match keywords in the copy of our content, using them a lot—even keyword stuffing, if that's a term you're familiar with.

After this update happened, it really helped a lot of marketers mature into the next phase of optimizing content, which is to make sure that content is meeting the user's search intent. Personally, I not only like to meet their intent—I like to anticipate it.

If I'm creating a page outline, I'll do audience research into things like People Also Ask questions, and I will try to make sure that the subsections of my page anticipate the next thing the user would be wondering about. What's the next most likely thing they might want to read? How can I draw them into the next section of the page to keep them engaged, keep them on the page, and develop a good relationship between that user and the brand?

This is also a period of time where I started utilizing more natural language processing, like keywords and entities, and incorporating those kinds of things into my content. It wasn't just relevant for the user, but it could be relevant for search engines as well.

Big takeaway here: keyword stuffing is dead. That didn't make keywords unimportant. They're still important, and you can still win with exact match keywords. But the emphasis has been greatly reduced. In fact, when I produce content now, I just do audience research and write first. Then I use keywords kind of like a final treatment just to make sure that we've got those signals somewhere on the page.

Lesson 4: Always Lead with Expertise (EEAT Updates)

The next tectonic shift had to do with a couple of Google updates like the Helpful Content update and the Medic update. I'm not sure if those were the official names—I can't remember anymore. But this was all about EEAT: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Getting those kinds of signals into your content and onto your website, along with things like proper author bios, credentials, and professional titles.

What I started to do in this era was source my content from the experts first. Make sure I'm collaborating with the client. Make sure I'm getting in front of the experts and having them source the content and the writing that's going to go on the website.

The results were far better, and it got me further away from that sort of "set it and forget it" marketing where some intern from an agency is writing content about plumbing in a certain area when they don't have that expertise and they haven't lived in that area.

If you want to write great content, you need to lead with expertise.

Lesson 5: Amplify Your Signal Across Platforms (LLM & AI Search Era)

The final lesson is one that a lot of marketers have neglected for a while because we didn't really have to think too much about it, but it's becoming more and more essential. If you're someone who can crack this code and figure it out—because it is high effort—you are going to outperform the competition.

Your footprint is going to be much larger if you've got a website, you've got mentions on the web, plus a presence in whatever platforms are relevant to your business.

That's why I've incorporated a workflow that allows me to interview an expert for just 30 minutes every month and then utilize and repurpose that information across a number of platforms. Really powerful. It helps a lot with your presence in LLM search, like ChatGPT web search. Honestly, it's just downright fun. Once you start doing it, the old way of just focusing on the website kind of feels stale.

How It Works

The process is pretty straightforward. A user can ask ChatGPT to help them find a great housewarming gift, providing details like "handmade, ceramic, under $100." ChatGPT surfaces a number of products, and when you click into one of these, a mini session opens up on the right side. You're still within the ChatGPT session and window.

After you select the option—and by the way, you'll have a dropdown with a bunch of product options here based on what's set up in the store—you get a "Buy" button. You click this and go to checkout. This is, again, happening all within ChatGPT. Then you can click, in this instance, "Pay Etsy," and the checkout and purchase is completed. It says it right there: "Etsy confirmed your order."

Early Days, But Promising

This is a new experience. I've heard mixed reviews about it, but we're just in the first iteration, and it's very likely to improve. So it's good for e-commerce sites to be aware of this.

For now, this is already working for Etsy shops, which is great—you don't really have to do anything. But it is coming soon to Shopify, and according to OpenAI, other platforms. I'm not sure what those platforms are going to be, but for Etsy and Shopify, you probably don't have to do anything.

How to Get Your Store Connected

If you're an e-commerce site or merchant and you aren't using one of those platforms, you'll probably want to think about this. OpenAI released information on chatgpt.com/merchants. When you scroll down the page, you'll see a form. This is for e-commerce websites that aren't on Etsy, Shopify, or one of the soon-to-be-released platforms.

Go ahead and fill out this form, and OpenAI is going to respond to you. They're going to work with folks on a rolling basis to get your site hooked into this shopping and checkout experience.

The Technical Details

One of the key elements of this is going to be the product feed spec. Now, if you've set up Google Merchant Center before, or you've had it set up for you before, you're probably going to be okay because this looks really similar.

For the product feed, they give you a number of file format options—CSV is one of them, so that's pretty familiar and convenient. What you'll put in that product feed are a bunch of attributes and details, just like Merchant Center: product ID number, product title, product description—that sort of thing.

You can work with your developer or your agency to get this set up. My recommendation would be to just fill out this form and get that ball rolling, because we're not sure of the response time from OpenAI, and you definitely want to get hooked into this.

Why This Matters

From what I've seen, referral traffic from large language models like ChatGPT isn't a large percent of website traffic, but it does convert really well. That's because users can work with the large language model to do a lot of research, build trust, and get much closer to a purchase decision in a much shorter amount of time. It's really convenient.

E-commerce sites might see that here too. It might not account for a huge portion of their sales, but the conversion rates might be quite high. So I wouldn't miss out. Get yourself signed up and acquainted with this shopping experience. I think it's going to improve, and it's something you don't want to miss out on.

What This Looks Like in Action

Here we have a search for "how to get oil stains out of clothes Reddit." You can see in a couple of examples, it's got the Gemini symbol, which is Google's AI or large language model, and it is basically summarizing the thread with AI.

For now, we're only seeing this test on Reddit threads.

Google Has Been Rewriting Meta Descriptions for a Long Time

It's important to note that Google has been rewriting meta descriptions for quite some time. And currently, it still does. Remember, this AI thing is still just a test.

In a Search Engine Land article, it states Google rewrites somewhere between 60% and 70% of all meta descriptions, depending on what study you look at.

The Big Takeaway

The big takeaway here with what Google currently does and what it's testing with AI is that it's just not a worthwhile activity to manually write meta descriptions anymore.

In fact, it's not even super efficient to write them with AI. Google is mostly rewriting them, and it's looking to incorporate AI into rewriting them as well.

Data-Backed Support

I've got a little support for this. Mark Williams Cook is basing his thoughts on this on data and testing. You can see right here: we don't recommend writing meta descriptions anymore.

So in both cases, he feels like it's not a worthwhile activity. There's plenty of other things you can be focusing on, and that's our agency stance as well.

Watch Out for Outdated SEO Audits

So watch out for this sort of thing, and make sure the initiatives in your SEO strategy make sense.

Getting Started

First, sign into Google Analytics and go to Reports. We're going to look at Traffic Acquisition.

When you're in here, the default view is going to show you all kinds of traffic sources like organic search and referral. We would like to see traffic from what I'll call organic AI. There are actually a couple of ways you can set this up, but this is the way that we found works the best. It gives you the most accurate data.

Creating Your Custom Report

Go over to the right and click Custom Report. Then we're going to go down and Add a Filter.

We're going to select the dimension and search for session source. Go ahead and select that.

Now we get to the match type. The match type I like to use is matches partial regex.

Setting Up the Regex Filter

Don't be scared of this. There are some characters we're going to use here that make it look complicated, but it's actually not all that complicated.

Here's where we start listing AI traffic sources like ChatGPT. The next one I want to list is Perplexity. But before I do that, I'm going to hold shift and press this vertical pipe character |. It might be a little hard to see, but it should be over by your delete key.

Now I can type in perplexity. I'm going to put in another vertical pipe. These pipes work like commas in regex.

The next AI traffic source is going to be Claude. Then I'll put another pipe. I'm going to finish with Gemini and Copilot from Microsoft.

Now I've essentially got a list of AI traffic sources and I'm done. Go ahead and Apply this.

Verifying Your Data

I'm going to scroll down and just confirm that it's bringing in the right thing. This is very commonly what you're going to see: Unassigned traffic and Referral traffic. That's really the big one we want to see, because traffic from these AI sources should basically count as referral traffic. It's a referral from ChatGPT if they find you there and then they visit your site.

Adding Session Source Medium

Before we save this, there's something else we're going to do. Come over here to this little plus sign and we're going to add another column to this report.

Select session source medium. You'll see that this is going to add a little more information to our table that helps us see exactly where our traffic is coming from.

Saving Your Report

Now we can go up to Save and we're going to save this as a new report. You can call this whatever you want. I'm just going to name this Organic AI Traffic. Go ahead and save that.

Let's click Back to go back to our previous view.

Now that we've saved this, we don't have to keep building this every time we sign into Google Analytics. That's great. But what would be really great is if we could click over here and see it within this acquisition menu.

Adding the Report to Your Navigation

We've got the Traffic Acquisition report here, but there's no AI traffic view. It would be very convenient if we could have that, and we can.

All you have to do is go down here to Library. If you notice, this report is under the heading Life Cycle.

I go over here in my library and I just find that group right here: Life Cycle. Go ahead and click the three dot dropdown and hit Edit.

We're going to search for what we called the report, which was Organic AI Traffic. You can see it shows up right here.

What we'll do is grab this and just drag it over here. I like to put it under Traffic Acquisition. Let me scroll down so you can see that better. We're going to have our Life Cycle report, then our Traffic Acquisition, and then our Organic AI Traffic right underneath that.

Go ahead and Save it. This one I'm going to save changes to current collection. I don't want this to be a new collection.

Viewing Your AI Traffic Report

Let's go ahead and hit Back. Then let's go under Life Cycle > Acquisition. You can see right here: Organic AI Traffic.

Let me go ahead and click that. You can see here that my filtering is already on. If I scroll down, I can not only see what type of traffic it is, but I can also see exactly where it came from because I set up those two columns earlier.

Conclusion

This is a great thing to have in Google Analytics 4 so you can follow the story about the impact AI traffic is having on your overall traffic.

This is a great solution for that. What you do is just take the URL of the thread you're looking at, add a little extension to the URL, open it up, and it's JSON. You have the original post, all the comments, all the replies—everything is right there for you to access.

The Simple Trick

Here's how to do this:

First, access the thread that you're interested in. In this example, I'm looking up how to learn guitar to see what people are saying about it. One thing I definitely like to do is choose a thread that has a lot of answers. I want a lot of material to work with in this exercise.

Now, here's where the trick comes in. When you visit the thread, it's going to produce a URL. Just grab that URL and add .json to the end of it.

That's the trick. And what that is going to produce is a mess of information—but this is all the information from the thread. It's the original post and all the comments and replies.

Understanding the JSON Structure

Now let's dig into the code just a little bit. When I first look at this, I like to get my bearings on what I'm looking at.

The selftext key has a value of the original post. For example: "I just got my first guitar a few days ago, but I don't know where to start." If you go back to the Reddit thread, you'll see that is the original post.

If we go a little bit lower, you'll see things like body and body_HTML. The body key is going to be one of the comments below the original post. You'll see this repeated in a key called body_HTML—it's just a repeat of the same comment.

What's really useful is the key called ups. Ups is Reddit's upvotes, and there's a specific reason I like this so much.

Three Uses of Reddit JSON

Grabbing information from a Reddit thread, there are three uses I want to talk about:

1. Discovering Questions and Pain Points

I love getting into these threads and seeing what questions people are asking. The original post is often a question, so that's gold right there. But you'll see people talking in the comments and asking follow-up questions. They share things that they struggle with. That kind of stuff I love for learning about an audience and coming up with potential content ideas.

2. Finding the Most Upvoted Comments

This is where those upvotes come in. You can just hit Command+A (on a Mac) and select everything and copy it. Then you can hop over to your favorite AI tool like ChatGPT or Claude. You can drop this information in. I use Claude and I like to turn on extended thinking and use the Opus model because it's better for complex tasks, and there can be a lot of JSON here to sift through.

What I'll do is I will ask it to find the comments that have the most upvotes. Why am I doing that? Well, I want to see what those comments are because people are clearly finding them useful. A lot of times what you'll see in the most upvoted comments is advice that people really value, and I think this is a great thing for brands to be aware of.

Often you can use that to guide some of your content initiatives. Maybe we're thinking of the next social post that we're going to do, or we think of a blog post we wrote on this topic but we didn't include a piece of advice. The insights we get from looking at these comments could become more effective social posts or a great update we do in a blog post refresh.

3. Identifying the Most Engaged Comments

There's one more thing I like to do with this information, and it's a little bit more complex. You might want to explore different solutions for it, but you can get away with using an LLM for this. Once again, I use Claude with extended thinking on and the most powerful model.

What I'm going to ask it to do is find the comment that has the most replies. There's no key and value for this in the JSON—I wish there was. So the tool really just has to count this manually, and it doesn't do it perfectly every time. But I would suggest that you at least try to do this and always bounce back to the thread itself to verify the accuracy of what the LLM has returned to you.

I'll ask it to find comments that have the most replies. Why am I doing this? Because that can be a signal of engagement. If I find a comment that gets a lot of replies or a lot of engagement, again, I want to dive into that a little deeper and investigate: what is it about this comment that's getting people to reply so much and engage so much? There might be an insight there that we can apply to our own social media posts or content.

Summary

That's how you turn Reddit threads into JSON. That's how you get all the expanded comments and replies without having to manually click them and then copy paste. And that's three ways you can use this information to inform content and learn about your audience.

I hope you found that useful!

Google's New Feature

But here's the interesting thing I saw from Google. So I updated my Chrome and when it came back, it had this G up here, the Google search side panel. Maybe this isn't something new, but I hadn't noticed it before. And when I clicked it, it actually reminded me a lot of how I've been using Harpa. So you can see right here, I can create AI-powered key points just by clicking this generate button, which is really cool. I thought this might be something that Google is trying to bake into Chrome, maybe because of extensions like Harpa AI or some other reason. But I found this really interesting and really useful. I don't think it's as good as Harpa, but it's pretty good. And if it is new, it'll probably get a lot better.

Useful Sections in Search Engine Land Page

Another really cool thing is you can click right to the section that Google is drawing this key point from. So this one says, the author says this could lead to more clicks for advertisers, but it's bad news for SEOs. So I can click and that is right from the "why we care" section. And then this third key point is from a Search Engine Land's "what is Google saying" section. As far as SGE goes compared to this, this just in my opinion, feels more actionable because it's hinting at what Google is finding useful from the content of the page. And if I can click on something that takes me right to two different sections that Google is pulling key points from, I think that's notable. I love these sections on the Search Engine Land page. I think they're incredibly useful. They kind of pinpoint the user to what matters the most and what they should care about. And so I think Google found them useful as well. So that's a great takeaway. I mean, if this is my page, I can kind of confirm that I've got some really, really useful sections of content that are going to provide a better user experience. And it might even help Google favor the page. I can also use this on competitors and see what Google is finding useful on their pages. And if it's missing on mine, I can consider adding it.

Related Searches and Other Features

So I thought that was really interesting. We'll get into the related searches in a second. This is just another example. I just pulled the "What is SEO" page from Search Engine Land just to see if it would do anything differently and it actually did. So when I click this, I can generate key points, but it's also got this explore on page section, which again, you can click on and you can jump right to specific sections of the page. So what does SEO achieve? And then it grabbed this content for that question. So I thought that was really interesting. I'm going to try this on a number of different pages to see what other features in the sidebar appear because that's pretty cool. And also we have related searches and these are kind of like loosely based on the related searches right from the SERP. They're very similar, but not the same. So you might actually be able to get an insight here in terms of what Google might be relating to the content of the page. So maybe this could inspire a new subsection of your page or not. Yeah.

Final Thoughts

So anyways, I thought this was really interesting. I think this is a bit more actionable than SGE has felt. I haven't really seen much chatter on something concrete that SEOs could actually do about SGE at this time, other than, you know, saying, make sure your content is as good as it can possibly be. And I'm just kind of like general tips like that. But this gets a little bit more targeted and it could be something we can use to improve our own content. We could use it to maybe do competitor analysis and get a hint or a clue as to what Google is looking for in our content and other pieces of content and what it's finding most useful and what it wants to put in front of users. So hope you found that interesting. If you did, make sure to give me a follow and I will see you in the next video.

Feature Overview

So let's go over some of the features that this page calls out. So the first feature is the ability to create summaries and even presentations out of your email and even some files in Drive. So you can see in this short snippet here, someone's working in their email, they get hit at the last minute with a request for a Q3 report. First they create a summary, and then the AI uses their email, docs, slides, and sheets all in combination to create a presentation. This is really cool and kind of shows the promise of some of the new tools that are starting to emerge.

Google Meet Enhancements

The next feature had to do with Google Meet. So there's going to be some improvements to lighting and sound, which is great. There's also going to be some features that help Meet be more inclusive when you have like bigger meetings. So dynamic tiles and face detection, that kind of thing. It was also cool to see a feature for automatic translated captions.

Innovative Meeting Features

There's a feature called take notes for me. And what it will do is send a summary to everyone in the meeting after it's over. And it can include things like notes, action items, and even video snippets, which I thought was really great. So you'll actually be able to see a clip of part of the meeting that was super important or something the AI wanted to highlight. There's also a feature called summary so far. So if you show up late to a meeting, it can kind of catch you up on what people have been talking about without anyone having to repeat themselves or you having to really interrupt the meeting.

Unique Features for Absent Attendees

And then there's another one called attend for me. So if you're not able to attend, what this does is, yes, it sends you a recap. I mean, I think that's pretty obvious. But the other cool thing it will do is it will deliver a message that you have prepared. So if you can't be in a meeting, it's going to deliver your talking point to everyone there. And then it's going to send you a recap of the meeting.

Potential Impact on Teams

I really like these features. I think this could be really impactful for, you know, for instance, agency teams. And I also think these features are great for upper management to help them be as efficient as possible and keep a pulse on things.

Duet AI Chat Features

And the last one that I thought was really cool are some features from Duet AI in chat. It's got kind of the typical summarizing of conversations. It's got a summarizing of shared documents. That's all cool. But another really cool feature is called huddles. And this is going to be an audio first kind of feature. As I understood it, this is when you have like a group chat and you can call a huddle. So if everyone's available, they can jump into the huddle and it's audio first so you can all talk to each other. And it's supposed to be more collaborative than just typing, but not so intrusive as to call a meeting. So it's kind of like an in between. This is interesting. I like the idea of trying to aim for the middle. I'm really interested to see how much people actually engage with this because I've used some different apps that have audio features and people just don't use them. So that's going to be a really interesting one.

Conclusion

Those are the features that is Duet AI for Google workspace. I think there's some really cool and interesting things coming out from Google. I think maybe some of these tools will be mimicked from other companies as well. And it's just a continuation of the direction we're moving in with all this AI integration happening. So hope that was interesting to you. I'm excited to see what people think. If you are using this, please leave a comment or reach out to me. I'd love to hear about your experience.

Getting Started with Harpa AI

So let's hop right in. I am looking at incfile.com, and I'm going to open up Harpa. I'm going to enable it to engage with the page by typing "/ask". I've got a series of prompts—there's four that I'm going to use to get the output I'm looking for. Now, I'm going to pretend like this is a new client I've never seen this site before.

Prompt 1: Understanding the Business

We pop that in, and it gives me super helpful information in seconds. It tells me that they're all about business formation, annual reports, business compliance is big, then it mentions some additional services like tax consultation, DBA, and so on.

Prompt 2: Identifying the Audience

So I know who they are, what they do, and what they offer—now who are they trying to connect with? This is already doing a little bit of audience research here.

Prompt 3: Addressing Audience Problems

The third prompt gets more granular in terms of the audiences. I've also asked it to include some example search queries for each one of these groups and problems.

Example Output for Entrepreneurs

For entrepreneurs and business starters, a problem they might have is a lack of knowledge on how to legally form a business. Their solution might be searching for information on how to start an LLC. This fast-forwards my understanding of the business, their services, and their audience.

Prompt 4: Crafting a Comprehensive SEO Content Strategy

The final prompt is much longer, but a lot of this is just to customize the output. This is just to give you a general idea of how a content strategy might look—it's just the scaffolding. You're going to take this information, do your own research, pluck out the best keywords, categorize them, create a content calendar, and really think through this to give the client a great strategy.

Keyword Research

I've asked it to give me the broad keyword topic areas, which is really helpful for your own research. We've got business formation and structure, compliance keywords, registered agent services, and tax consultation. It's giving me the big categories, which is super helpful for research.

Content Types and Conversion Queries

It goes through some effective content types like blog posts and case studies. Then we've got the high, medium, and low conversion queries. High conversion queries are action-based, medium conversion is like "how-tos" or "steps to start", and low conversion is the purely informational stuff.

Conclusion

That's how to create an SEO content strategy using Harpa AI and four targeted prompts. I hope that was useful to you. If it was, please engage with the CTAs on whatever platform you're using—like, follow, subscribe—all that good stuff, and I will see you in the next video.

Five SEO-Boosting Structural Links

Today, I'm going to show you five examples of structural links that can be great for SEO. Let's get into it.

1. Main Navigation Links

The first example of a structural link that is really powerful for SEO are main navigation links. This example from Shopify shows the pages that they've chosen to prioritize and give an SEO boost to. The first example is the solutions drop-down. It's no mystery why these pages made it in—it's because they're so closely tied to conversion.

2. Informational Pages

The next part I wanted to highlight is more of the informational pages on the site. We've got the blog homepage here, then we've got some specific blog posts and blog categories under popular topics, and then they've stretched that inclusivity to show essential tools as well.

3. Breadcrumbs

The next example of a structural link I wanted to highlight are breadcrumbs. We're all very familiar with these, but it's worth pointing out they can be great on e-commerce sites, blogs, and in a lot of other instances as well. These hit all the right SEO notes—great for navigation, crawling, distributing link equity, and showing the relationship between pages.

Dealing with Long Breadcrumbs

Now, some site owners think, "What if my breadcrumb trail gets too long?" This can particularly be a problem on mobile, as it can push valuable content further below the fold. Wayfair has enacted a solution of a horizontal scroll.

4. Category Links

Our next example of a structural link is a category link. Here we are on Target's Christmas page, the overarching category. Then you can see subcategory links are included on the page, such as Christmas decorations, Advent calendars, Christmas trees, etc. These are very similar to breadcrumb links, fantastic for navigation, helping Google crawl and discover pages more regularly, and distribute link equity.

5. Sidebar Links

Our fourth example is sidebar links. So on this page from Blue Nile, I'm within their Educational Library, and I'm on the engagement ring guide. You can see right here that this guide is part of a larger set of pages meant to educate people.

Sidebar's Role in Education

I'm under the ring education section, which is also linked here, and then you've got sibling pages down below, as well as other categories like metal education, jewelry education, gemstone education. Wherever you are within this set of pages, you're going to see these sidebar links.

6. Related Links

And the final example—related links. So here on the Rasmussen blog, we're reading an article about early childhood education degrees. If I scroll down to the bottom, I can see the classic related links. These are a great way to encourage further navigation on your site and hit all those notes I mentioned before.

Conclusion

So those are five examples of structural internal links that can boost your SEO. I hope you found that useful. If you did, be sure to give me a like and a follow, and I'll see you in the next video.

From LinkedIn to Blog

Basically, I started with a LinkedIn post. I posted a video about a major update to Google Workspace and I thought this would be cool to put on my blog as well. So what I did was hopped over to Google Colab.

Setting Up the Environment

To get started, I did two things. Number one, go to runtime and change the runtime type to GPU. That's the first thing. Second, add this code and run it. You can pause the video to see what I typed in, or I will include it in the comments or description depending on what platform you're currently using. Give this about 30 to 60 seconds to run.

Uploading the Video File

Once that's done, what you're going to do is drag your raw video file over here to the left and just drop it in. You can't see mine right now because the Google Colab instance reset itself, and I don't want to drag it in again because the video actually takes a while to load in; it took probably 5 to seven minutes.

Running the Transcription

This is where you're going to drag your file. Once you've done that, you can reference it with this second bit of code right here. So you're going to drop this code in and run it. Here you can see I'm calling Whisper AI right here. You can see I'm referencing my raw video file on my computer, and then here I'm calling the transcription model I'm going to use. There are four or five different types you can use, and I used medium. I learned this on YouTube, and that was the recommendation.

Getting the Transcription Results

Now, after you run that, you will see your video transcription appear after a short time. You're also going to see some files appear on this left side below your raw video file name. The one I think you're going to be most interested in is the text file that's just got the text and it doesn't have any of these timestamps, so you know you won't have to clean things up in that way.

Final Formatting with ChatGPT

As you can see, this is kind of like sentence by sentence; it's not formatted, and I wanted to put this on my blog. So what I did next was just grabbed this and went over to ChatGPT. This prompt actually took me a few tries. Let me share this with you. I asked it to reformat this text in the following ways: group sentences into paragraphs, add relevant subheadings, and don't reword anything. That last one to me was the most important because ChatGPT often takes liberties if you don't tell it not to do that. After I entered that in with the transcript, that's exactly what I got. I got subheadings, I got paragraphs, and these are all my own words from the video.

Conclusion and Encouragement

Then I hopped over to my blog and added it in. Whisper did a great job here, and if you have been spending a lot of time making corrections to your video transcriptions, I suggest this process. It is a bit technical, and some of the steps did take a while like waiting for the file to upload here, but it's really not that bad. I found it to be a little bit easier than some of the other methods I've used in the past, and I wanted to share it with you today. So I hope you found that interesting, and if you enjoyed the video, give me a like, give me a follow, and I'll see you in the next one.