Expert Strategies for SEO and Traffic Success in 2024

Today I’m diving deep into the ever-evolving landscape of SEO and content creation. I’m thrilled to share with you a treasure trove of insights from my recent conversation with SEO expert and DJ, Lily Ray. If you are looking for successful SEO strategies for 2024, this is the episode for you!

The Quest for Diverse Income Streams

Let’s first talk about diversifying your income streams. Are you still tethered to traditional monetization methods like ads and affiliate links? It’s time to chart a new course with MiloTreeCart. With MiloTreeCart, you can sell unlimited memberships, digital downloads, workshops, coaching, and mini-courses in a snap. Our AI sales pages are a game-changer, and I’m here to guide you through crafting your personalized digital product strategy. Book a free 20-minute Zoom call with me at milotree.com and prepare to be amazed.

Show Notes:

• MiloTreeCart: Digital Product Sales Software
• Book Your FREE 20-Minute Strategy Call
• Lily Ray
• Blog Post Checklist FREEBIE
• MiloTree Pop-Up App
• Join My Blogger Genius Email List
• Become a Blogger Genius Facebook Group
• All Blogger Genius Podcast Episodes

Subscribe to the Blogger Genius Podcast:

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The SEO Landscape: Decoding Google’s Algorithm Updates

What are essential SEO strategies for success today in 2024? In this episode of The Blogger Genius Podcast, we delve into the recent Google algorithm updates that have sent shockwaves through the blogging community. Lily Ray, a seasoned SEO strategist, sheds light on what Google is seeking and how to adapt to these changes. We discuss the importance of expanding your digital footprint, embracing platforms like YouTube, and creating content that resonates with your audience and Google’s algorithms.

Deciphering Google’s Current Mindset

Google’s recent updates, particularly the Helpful Content Update. (HCU), have targeted specific types of content, emphasizing expertise, authority, and trust. Lily emphasizes the importance of understanding that these cycles of updates are not new and that recovery from such hits can take time. She encourages publishers to look beyond SEO and consider building a brand that engages with audiences across various platforms.

The Plight of Niche Bloggers

The impact of Google’s updates on niche bloggers can be devastating, as seen with a Trader Joe’s enthusiast who lost significant traffic overnight. Lily advises affected bloggers to diversify their content and presence, such as starting a YouTube channel, lean into food blogging, or exploring other social media platforms like Pinterest for traffic. This approach can help break free from the patterns that led to being grouped with negatively impacted sites.

Embracing AI in Content Creation

The rise of AI in content creation presents both opportunities and challenges. Lily cautions against mass auto-generating content, which goes against Google’s guidelines. Instead, she suggests using AI tools judiciously to enhance the content creation process while maintaining originality and value.

Final Thoughts and Resources

As we conclude our interview, I invite you to revisit the basics with my updated blog post checklist, designed to ensure your posts are thorough and engaging. Download it at milotree.com/blogpostchecklist and continue building the blog and business of your dreams.

Join me on this adventure as we navigate the tides of SEO, learn from the experts, and embrace new strategies to thrive in the digital world. Stay tuned for more insights and inspiration on the Blogger Genius podcast.

Other Related Blogger Genius Podcast episodes You’ll Enjoy:

• Master Google Updates: Essential Survival Guide for Niche Bloggers! with Steve Wiideman
• How to Make Money Blogging in 2024 (New Trends) with Jillian Leslie
• Boost Your Blog Pageviews with Pinterest Now with Kayla Watkins

MiloTreeCart, the Best Tool for Non-Techies to Sell Digital Products

I also want to introduce you to the MiloTreeCart, a tool designed for non-techies to sell digital products easily. It comes with features like fill-in-the-blank sales pages, check-out pages, a sales dashboard, upsells, and customer support. MiloTreeCart is currently available for a lifetime deal of $349 or three easy installments of $116.33.

Transcript: #330: Expert Strategies for SEO and Traffic Success

Jillian Leslie (00:00:00) – Hi, I’m Jillian, welcome to a brand new episode of the Blogger Genius Podcast. But before I launch in, let me pose a question to you. Have you started selling your knowledge and expertise directly to your audience, or are you still relying on traditional methods like ads and affiliate links to monetize? In today’s rapidly changing online landscape, relying solely on these methods is a risky strategy. You need multiple income streams, and this is exactly where MiloTreeCart shines. Imagine being able to sell unlimited memberships, digital downloads, workshops, coaching, and mini courses in less than five minutes. Yes, you heard that right. What used to take ten minutes is now even quicker. Thanks to our newly rolled out AI sales pages. They are simply magic. If this is piqued your interest, I encourage you to book a free 20 minute zoom call with me. In this call, I’ll help you craft your personalized digital product strategy and share best practices that have led others to success. We’ll explore exciting new ways to think about your business.

Jillian Leslie (00:01:13) – To book your call, visit MiloTree.com. Scroll down and you’ll see my calendar and prepare to have your mind blown. Schedule your free consultation today. Start diversifying your income streams. I’m excited to help you discover a whole new way to monetize.

Announcer (00:01:36) – Welcome to the Blogger Genius podcast, brought to you by MiloTree. Here’s your host, Gillian Leslie.

Jillian Leslie (00:01:44) – Hi. Welcome back. Today I am very excited to introduce my guest. My guest today is Lily Rae and I am one of her biggest fan girls. She is this awesome SEO and a DJ. I think by the end of this episode you will be a fangirl too. What we talk about is, of course, the recent Google algorithm updates that have left many of you feeling the sting. We’re unpacking what Google is really looking for today, and why perfectly good sites might be suffering collateral damage. More importantly, Lily shares her expert strategies on how to bounce back from these hits. So we’re going to talk about how to think about expanding your digital footprint, venturing into things like YouTube, creating more personalized content that resonates with your audience and that Google will reward you for.

Jillian Leslie (00:02:47) – So if you’ve noticed a dip in your traffic lately, or if you’re just keen to stay ahead of the curve in the SEO world, this is an episode you won’t want to miss. So, without further delay, here is my interview with Lily Rae. Lily, welcome to the Blogger Genius podcast.

Lily Ray (00:03:10) – Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Jillian Leslie (00:03:11) – You are one of these rare. I’m going to call you a unicorn. You are a female CEO. I’ve known about you for a while. I have followed you on Twitter and I have been wanting to get you on the show. I stumbled upon a YouTube video that you did, especially since all of these March updates, and I was like, okay, Jillian, reach out to her. And I did. And you said yes. So thank you so much for being here, first of all. And then my first question to you is, how did you get into this? Like, what is your background and what is it about SEO that lights you up?

Lily Ray (00:03:48) – Yeah.

Lily Ray (00:03:48) – So, I’ve actually been doing SEO as pretty much my only career for my whole adult life. I started doing SEO when I was in college, finishing up NYU, and I’ve been doing it ever since. I’ve been in the agency world now for, I guess, 12 years. SEO agency world. and have worked on. I don’t even know anymore. Hundreds of clients, maybe like 3 to 500 clients over 14 years. very focused on news and publisher clients lately. I grew up doing a lot of e-commerce, SEO, and, right now. I’ve. I guess I’ve made a name for myself as a person very focused on Google’s algorithm updates. There’s a few of us very focused on this type of work, and because Google’s algorithm updates, it’s not new that they’re big and brutal and scary and terrible for publishers. That’s been the case for a long time, but they’re affecting more and more people, I think. So, I have a lot of ideas and experience and insights around that, because I’ve worked on a lot of, I’ve worked on a lot of different Google updates over the years and helped companies recover from them.

Jillian Leslie (00:05:03) – Now, what is it about SEO that, as I said, lights you up? Because it tends to be. I find guys who want to grow it out, like who want to do lots of tests and who want to get into the numbers and who want to, I don’t know, try to figure kind of what you were saying. Figure out what Google’s doing. Like almost like reverse engineer it. What about this excites you?

Lily Ray (00:05:27) – Yeah, actually, everything you just described is probably my favorite aspect of it. my my role at my agency, I’m VP of SEO Strategy and research. So that actually involves, not all it’s not all client work. A lot of what I’m doing is exactly what you just described, trying to reverse engineer what Google is up to, but then also using a lot of data driven insights to inform client strategies and approaches. And all of that comes from analyzing data. So, the types of articles that I write and a lot of the insights that I share, our data driven in the sense that I like to look at how different websites are performing over time in terms of traffic and visibility and everything like this, and seeing if there’s any patterns that we can identify.

Lily Ray (00:06:07) – Very hard to reverse engineer Google’s algorithms, as you can imagine, because they have trillions and trillions of pages and sites that they look at. And we have a we can’t look at the same level of data that they can. But it’s pretty interesting when you do look at maybe a few thousand sites at a time, you can start to see some really interesting trends. so I like that. I like reporting on what I’m seeing with algorithm updates. And then I like to use, very much data driven approaches with, with the clients that we work on.

Jillian Leslie (00:06:32) – Okay. Given that you have this insight into Google, what is Google thinking right now? If we were to anthropomorphize Google? What has been going on? These updates started what at the end of 20 kind of October 2023, and I feel like all I read is people or talk to people getting hit, getting hit, getting hit, getting hit, and especially the recent updates in March. I get it as AI is coming or it’s here in Gemini.

Jillian Leslie (00:07:11) – Like what? Where? If you were to say here is where Google sits and how they’re seeing the world, what would you how would you describe it?

Lily Ray (00:07:21) – Yeah, so big disclaimer. I don’t work for them. Everything I talk about is my own experience, my own opinions and everything like that. So that being said, One thing that’s very interesting or very important to note, that I think a lot of people maybe don’t realize, because maybe they’ve only been doing blogging for four years, right? Maybe they’ve been doing it for one year. They’ve been doing it for six years. This cycle of algorithm updates is not new for Google and for SEOs. like we talk about this a lot in the SEO industry, but almost every professional SEO that you talk to has been affected by some major Google algorithm updates. So for me, I started my career with the Penguin update, which was so brutal at the time that it made The New York Times. The New York Times wrote about it because there were certain very, very, very big name publishers or companies rather, that got hit by the Penguin update.

Lily Ray (00:08:17) – So these things make the news. This is not new that Google has big algorithm updates. What to do about this one? I think the ones you’re referring to, like the helpful content update, is that sometimes Google seems to go after certain groups of sites, certain types of sites, or they won’t even tell you we’re targeting types of sites. That’s not the language that they use. They’ll just change their systems in a certain way where certain sites seem to be impacted. So to answer your question, what are they? What are they doing? I think, first of all, there’s a lot of moving pieces happening at the same time. So a lot of things can be true at the same time. Over the last 5 or 7 years, Google’s been very focused on what they call E8, like variance, expertise, authority and trust. This really ramped up actually during the pandemic for obvious reasons. If you type, anything related to medical treatments, anything related to Covid, even at the time, if you typed masks before the pandemic, you would see Halloween stores.

Lily Ray (00:09:17) – During the pandemic, you would obviously see the CDC and Mayo Clinic and things like this. So those initiatives are happening at Google elevating truth and, you know, reducing misinformation in the search results. Now we’re getting a new phenomenon, which seems to be that Google is very much elevating user generated content. So this is the reddits for TripAdvisor, that type of thing, and social media content that seems to be a big initiative that they’re doing as well. Now the algorithm updates are also happening concurrently. That’s where you start to see some sites that are losing visibility in really big ways. And another thing to keep in mind is like there’s only so many positions that you can compete for. So if you’re a travel blog, you’re competing against TripAdvisor, you’re competing against Booking.com, you’re competing against Google’s own travel properties. So even if you might actually get pushed to position 20 or 30 or 40, which to you feels terrible. But if you think about the grand scheme of how many people are actually competing against you, it could be a trillion different pages that are competing for that keyword.

Lily Ray (00:10:13) – So being 30 is actually very good, but Google has to make the decision about who gets to be number one. So there’s all these different moving pieces at Google. And I think what we’re seeing is they’re elevating user generated content because it feels more human. It feels less AI driven. So it’s a way for Google to differentiate their results because they have so much access to first hand experience. and I do think that there’s certain patterns of behaviors that people have used on their sites for a while, that Google is reducing the visibility of those types of sites because it’s not what Google wants its users to be seeing as much of.

Jillian Leslie (00:10:49) – What are these patterns?

Lily Ray (00:10:52) – So. with the helpful content update in particular. It’s it’s really, it’s especially hard for me to try to convey some of the things I’m trying to get across, because, number one, I understand how upset everybody is, like, I’m, you know, talking to communities of people that have lost their livelihoods. Like, I get it. Like I, I’ve never, ever trying to be unsympathetic because that sucks, you know? And what sucks even more is that a lot of these people had no idea that the things they were doing were in a gray area of what Google recommends to do or not do.

Lily Ray (00:11:24) – So I do feel like a lot of people were completely blindsided and that that really sucks. but there are Google guidelines about SEO, and there’s Google guidelines about, let’s say, earning links, buying links, how to structure your content, how to think, what’s considered spam, what’s not considered spam, what’s considered, let’s say, artificially refreshing your content so that you have what seems like a new date, but you didn’t change the content. That’s called artificial refreshing. Google has language about things that it would want site owners to do and not do as far as appearing well in Google’s results. So a lot of the tactics that I think a lot of bloggers in particular have been using over the last couple of years, actually, are things that were in Google’s grey area or directly against Google’s guidelines. And sometimes it takes Google a while to create new algorithm updates or adjustments to say, nope, we’re going after that. It’s over. You know, it’s squashed the whole thing. Okay.

Jillian Leslie (00:12:23) – So for example like this idea of backlinks, right.

Jillian Leslie (00:12:28) – And you’re right, like, hey, you’re you’re a food blogger. I’m a food blogger. We’re friends. How about if I link to your site here and you link to my site here with these keywords like is that copacetic? Is that not copacetic?

Lily Ray (00:12:42) – It’s completely against the guidelines. It’s been against the guidelines the whole time. It’s called reciprocal linking. It’s like a version of link building from a while back. Now listen, here’s the thing that’s tricky about all this. People love to debate me on this. There’s a lot of things that are against Google’s guidelines that work really well. Yes. And there’s a lot of things. There’s a lot of things that and people are very much up in arms about this. The big sites, the big players do these things, whether it’s behind closed doors, whether it’s secret relationships, whether there’s journalists that are being bribed. Like, I think we all know that that’s how things work. So I understand, like many things in the world, this is unjust, right.

Lily Ray (00:13:21) – And but I would not recommend saying because it’s site, one of the biggest sites does it, that you should assume that you’re going to be able to get away with it on your small site forever? And this is why people get mad at me, because it’s not fair. But like. Amazon, for example. It has every one of its like internal searches that you might do if you type something super, super long tail into Amazon, or I want to buy a green toothbrush with this and this and this. They have their site set up in such a way, or at least last time I checked where all of these pages are being indexed. And Google had somewhere in their guidelines. They don’t recommend doing this. So most small e-commerce players don’t do this right. Like they want to keep their sites clean. They don’t want every single way that people search to be indexed on Google. But Amazon does it and they make a lot of money doing it. So it’s like, well, Amazon does it.

Lily Ray (00:14:14) – It’s like Amazon. They get to do stuff that not every site can do. So I understand there’s different rules for different players then that sucks. But yeah what you just described, it’s very important to read Google’s guidelines because if you’re doing anything, especially with links that violates their guidelines, it usually catches up to you.

Jillian Leslie (00:14:32) – Where can people just Google SEO, Google guidelines.

Lily Ray (00:14:38) – Google Link spam guidelines, Google okay.

Jillian Leslie (00:14:41) – And is it ever though that something that they were okay with they then become not okay with? Or is it always as you’re saying it’s in the guidelines. You just somehow we didn’t police this or you know, you interpreted it differently. But we were always clear.

Lily Ray (00:15:01) – There are examples. And my friend who’s a wonderful CEO named Mike King, he just did a whole presentation about all the ways Google has lied to you over the years. That was actually the title of his presentation, and he gave a lot of examples of Google said one thing and later they kind of changed their mind. Now that’s happened, it is a thing that’s happened.

Lily Ray (00:15:20) – For example, with their new March core update and the March spam update, they have new guidance around expired domains. Now, it’s technically against Google’s spam guidelines to buy an expired domain and to publish a bunch of content about something different to drive SEO value to that site, because you’re leveraging the old history of the site. That’s that’s a new set of spam guidelines that Google has. And that’s an example of something Mike pointed to as for years they told us that that’s not spam, and now it’s suddenly spam. So there are some examples of that. people like me who are extremely risk averse with SEO. For good reason. We’ve been burned too many times, right? I don’t play those types of games usually, and that’s not. People see this. A lot of people, even clients, sometimes they’re like, really? Like, that’s what our competitors are doing and it’s working so well for them. It works extremely well until it goes to zero. And then when you go to zero, it’s very hard to recover.

Lily Ray (00:16:21) – So actually a lot of my job and our team’s job as SEO professionals is to advise against certain approaches that we think will get the site in trouble later. And time and time again, we end up being right.

Jillian Leslie (00:16:35) – That is such good advice. It’s you would kind of think, I’m going to buy an old domain and put new content on it. To be honest, that feels a little like cheating. So I get why Google comes back and goes, you know, it is cheating. We’re not going to let you do that anymore. I always feel like these opportunities show up, people rush in and then they close. I I’ve seen this over and over again in my own business. One thing that I was reading is that niche. There was this whole thing because, you know, I’m on Twitter and I’m in like a variety of like SEO or niche site communities, and it seemed like there was a gold rush that all of a sudden people started to learn from. I think, like the mom bloggers who figured out that, hey, I could monetize my blog, I could write a bunch of stuff, I could learn keyword research, I could niche down, I could get into mediavine attractive and make a good living.

Jillian Leslie (00:17:35) – And people said, wait a second, I want to do that too. So I’m going to reverse engineer how to do that. It’s not a passion of mine, but let’s say I’m into TVs. I can create an entire site about TVs, have have hundreds, if not thousands of pages where each page might be a review of another TV with affiliate links. And I’m going to go in all in on keyword research. I’m going to again figure out how to get my my site to rank, be an authority, and make get into one of these ad networks and make a ton of money and then rinse and repeat. Okay, it’s not TVs. Well, maybe it is toothbrushes, maybe it is. Who knows what it is. And this was a very big money grab and that Google has said, hey, we see you. This is not cool. You’re not a TV expert, you’re not a toothbrush expert. You’re trying to make a lot of money quickly. And by us taking your site down, we also took other sites down that we didn’t necessarily mean to penalize.

Jillian Leslie (00:18:46) – But it’s hard for Google with an algorithm change to be able to cherry pick which sites were authentic, where somebody had passion, where somebody was building up their domain, that kind of thing. What is your thought about that?

Lily Ray (00:19:02) – I first of all think everything you just said is the most accurate depiction. I have heard of the whole situation that I’m even sometimes afraid to say because people get really angry at me, but everything you just said is 100% accurate in my opinion. And it’s it’s a bit interesting to be, an SEO professional. And I work at an agency, so I work with a lot of big enterprise clients. I work with a lot of mid-sized companies, a lot of small businesses. I work with all kinds of different sites and companies. And, to me, you know, I’ve been doing SEO for 14 years. I know there’s always been the niche blog community of people doing SEO, that kind of thing. It feels actually to me like, because, again, this is my life, there’s this big wave of people that suddenly entered into the industry or the industry like Twitter and everything over the last 2 or 3 years, and they’re new like to me, we already had existing SEO players.

Lily Ray (00:19:56) – We all go to conferences with each other. We’ve been doing this for a long time. I feel like I’m still new in the industry because a lot of the people that I look up to are they’ve been doing this for 25 years, you know? So those are like the giants of SEO, but suddenly there’s this new community, the last 2 or 3 years of like people that are very, very loud, you know, these niche bloggers that are like coming out of nowhere with like, here’s all the ways to do. And they’re very loud about their techniques. You know, they go onto YouTube and they’re like, here’s how you use ChatGPT to mass auto generate thousands and thousands of blogs instead of just doing ten at a time because you’re writing it by hand. Right? And now now that’s it’s exponential because people are watching that and now they’re doing it. And now of course, if you’re Google, they’re like, shut it down. Like shut it down. Our users don’t like this. I know people don’t believe this.

Lily Ray (00:20:46) – And to your point, there are a lot of innocent bloggers, actually, who did produce really great content that got roped into the whole thing. That absolutely happened. But. Google obviously had to quash a problem. That was something that was a problem for them. For whatever reason. We don’t know why, but Google’s a business. This represented a problem for them and they took care of it. And I’m sorry. You know, I don’t mean to be insensitive, but there’s now it’s really tricky for the people that have unfortunately been caught in the crossfire to say, well. What can I do as a business or as a content producer? To not be part of this problem. Problem Google has, right? I’m not saying it’s a problem. I’m saying maybe Google determines it is one. But, this is where things get tricky because now it’s like, how do I build a brand that does more than just niche blogging?

Jillian Leslie (00:21:38) – So let’s talk about what okay, so let’s say I am that person.

Jillian Leslie (00:21:41) – I was talking to a guy who loves Trader Joe’s, and he started a blog ten years ago where he would just review the coolest Trader Joe’s products. That’s it? Yes. No. I don’t even think like you can’t do affiliate links to Trader Joe’s products. He’s just actually providing a service. He loves Trader Joe’s. Every week he goes and buys the new stuff. He reviews it. The end. He grew his traffic. And all of a sudden, overnight in March, he lost 80% of it. And he’s like, he has a day job as well. He’s like, I think I’m going to get out of this. Is there a way for somebody like that to recover, to get their traffic back? I know Google, they say don’t do anything for a month, let things settle. Google a lot of times comes back and and tries to fine tune its algorithm updates. But you’re that guy. Or I’ve talked to other food bloggers again traffic down 50, 60, 70%. What do you do? How do you get out of bed the next day?

Lily Ray (00:22:51) – Yeah, yeah.

Lily Ray (00:22:53) – so there are, believe it or not, people don’t believe this because there’s this new narrative brewing that every niche blogger on the internet has been impacted. Google’s evil and they don’t want bloggers to exist. There’s these new narratives that are being created and I understand why people feel that way. I’ve been pretty obsessed, especially in the last few weeks, with sites that are niche bloggers. They are independent publishers that are doing okay now. Number one, being hit by the September Helpful content update feels a bit like a curse right now, because we’re not seeing any examples of sites that have recovered yet. that’s not unprecedented for Google updates. If the big, big, big updates in 2010 2012, the Panda and Penguin updates, we got hit by the ones I mentioned before.

Jillian Leslie (00:23:41) – We got hit by Panda.

Lily Ray (00:23:42) – Yeah. Did you recover? We did. Did you recover your site? We did. How long did it take?

Jillian Leslie (00:23:47) – Years. Two years.

Lily Ray (00:23:51) – Yes. So, everyone’s up in arms because it’s been six months.

Lily Ray (00:23:55) – It’s been seven months and nothing’s happened, as you literally just said. it might take longer than that. I’m sorry. Or it might take bigger moves than what people have been doing to change their sites. So how do you get out of bed in the morning? Okay, there’s there are sites that are still okay. There are sites that are succeeding. I’m working on some of them right now. They. It sucks if you’ve been grouped into a group of, of, sites that have been hit and you actually are doing great content, believe it or not, I am talking with Google all the time. Sharing examples of like, that was unfair. It shouldn’t have gone that far. And they’re looking into this. So I think that’s another important note is like sometimes your point they tweak it, they get it wrong. They change things whatever. but you have to break free from the patterns that got you grouped into that group of sites in the first place. So, if you’re a Trader Joe’s enthusiast, can you start a YouTube channel? Believe me, I didn’t even want to start a YouTube channel.

Lily Ray (00:24:51) – But I knew that there’s a there’s an audience there, and that I might get my point across better on YouTube. So I know somebody that reviews diamonds. He goes to the place and takes a video of himself reviewing diamonds, and the videos do great, and now you can embed those on the site that shows that you’re doing the work, and you start to build an audience somewhere. And maybe that’s leading to more links leading to more social signals. So maybe you can also share it on TikTok. Maybe you can, like start a cookbook from Trader Joe’s recipes. Right? You’re doing something that’s not so SEO reliant or not. Google search reliant. And believe it or not, Google’s algorithms see these things. So they make connections that this is a real brand doing a lot of real things that aren’t just niche blogging.

Jillian Leslie (00:25:35) – I want to interrupt for just a second to say that I have just updated our blog post checklist. This is designed to ensure that your blog posts are thorough, engaging, personalized, and ready to make a great impression.

Jillian Leslie (00:25:53) – So whether you’re a seasoned blogger or you’re just starting out, you want to get my new and improved blog post checklist just to make sure you’re covering all your bases. To download this freebie, go to milotree.com/blogpostchecklist. That’s milotree.com/blogpostchecklist all one word. We’re going back to the basics so that you can build the blog and the business you’ve always dreamed of. And now back to the show. So what? I hear you. I wouldn’t have thought of it this way. I would have thought, well, maybe get rid of some links that seem kind of not great or high quality, but that’s hard, because if somebody is linking to like that, that seems difficult. Maybe on your site you’ve got some bad links or bad structure or site speed or that’s where I would go. But what you’re saying is. Think much more about serving your audience, which is what I always think. It’s so hypocritical, the idea that I’m supposed to think about my end user and the user experience while also focusing on keywords, because those are different.

Lily Ray (00:27:17) – I know, I know, I know.

Jillian Leslie (00:27:19) – I know that no, no, no, don’t worry about keywords. Are you crazy? Like you need keywords and you also need to be thinking about the user experience. And I think everybody was saying no user experience first, user experience first. And I’m like, that’s not true. It’s always keyword first. What is your thought about that?

Lily Ray (00:27:37) – Well, it’s it is until it isn’t. It is until everybody is using the exact same keyword research tools to create. I mean, I can’t even tell you. I’ve looked at so many sites hit by the helpful content update that even me, I’m like another site that’s writing 70 Best Quotes about Father’s Day in 2024. I’ve already read this 18 times, right? And I get it. There’s a lot of search traffic, but that’s the point. You’re just sourcing quotes that everybody else has already sourced, and Google doesn’t have enough room to serve all the sites, right? So you have to really double down on adding original value and not just through blogging, because unfortunately, blogging has been contaminated by AI.

Jillian Leslie (00:28:22) – And that’s the next thing I want to talk about with you. Yes, yes. So could we talk about AI? What do you mean by that? And my second part of this question is how is Google thinking about this and how will this impact these small publishers and bloggers?

Lily Ray (00:28:44) – So this was another example of and I literally tweeted this. I wrote about this when it came out and Google put out its official guidance about how it feels about AI content. My first reaction was. They’re not being entirely truthful. And I’m sorry if Google is listening. I don’t mean to say you’re lying. I just mean to say I don’t think the the documentation that they shared went far enough to explain to people what they mean by auto mass auto generating content, because mass auto generating content is something that’s been against Google’s guidelines since the Panda days. That’s what Panda was about, right? The difference is, now everybody has access to ChatGPT and Cloud and Gemini and these tools. So it’s much easier to do. And Google is launching its own AI products.

Lily Ray (00:29:34) – Google’s literally like one of the leaders of this whole AI revolution. So for them to say use Gemini, but don’t use Gemini to create content, it’s like they’re in a weird place communications wise, right? But. But using ChatGPT to automate content creation and press a button and scale it to a thousand posts. And yeah, maybe you tweaked three things. I’m sorry. That goes against Google’s guidelines. Read the guidelines that goes against their guidelines. So just because they told you I content is okay and we don’t care how the content was created, that what I just described is against the guidelines, regardless of whether it’s AI, whether it’s great box, whether it’s article spinners. We’ve had this technology forever like in the SEO space. So they I don’t know that Google was clear enough that it should have been a warning that like that actually is against the guidelines, but people like me and my team were like, this is not going to work forever. It’s not.

Jillian Leslie (00:30:33) – So here’s the here’s my question, because initially it was like, don’t use it at all.

Jillian Leslie (00:30:37) – And everybody was kind of secret. I realized everybody was secretly using it like, Jasper for bloggers, but so, so then so then it sounded like Google said, no, no, no, you can use it. But like you were saying, you can’t like automate it and be spammy with it. So for my audience, can I use ChatGPT to say, hey, can I want to do a post about this? Can you come up with an outline for me? Can you? Or here’s my post. Can you tell me what I’ve missed? Or can you give me a list of keywords that would help this rank? Like at what point? This is? I have a daughter, she’s 17, and the whole AI thing is messed up because what is okay and what’s not okay like her school is like no ChatGPT. And I’m like, okay, first of all, everybody I think is using it. But what like, is it okay to go to ChatGPT and go, hey, I need I’m coming up with like help me do the research, help me do the brainstorming.

Jillian Leslie (00:31:37) – Help me write the paper. Write the paper like it’s got a it’s not like it’s not binary. You use it, you don’t use it. So if I am a publisher and the thing about it is, I know I’m competing with all these other people who are using it. What would you say is the right way to use it?

Lily Ray (00:31:58) – Yeah. No. Fantastic question. And everything you described as your question as to like, is this okay, is this okay. Like having it review the content, having it look for gaps in the content, having it look for maybe keywords that you want to think about as long as you understand what it’s doing. For example, when you use, Ahrefs or SEMrush on one of these tools, the whole nature of these tools is they have data about how frequently people search per month for a keyword. GPT will pretend that it has that data. It’ll hallucinate numbers, but it’s not. It’s not. It’s doing a disservice to actual keyword research tools that have that data.

Lily Ray (00:32:35) – They’re collecting that data from somewhere. So as long as you understand the limitations, if you don’t say, oh, ChatGPT told me it has this many searches per month, so it must have this many searches per month like logs to understand how it works. Everything you just described, I would 100% recommend that people do. I use ChatGPT and Claude and I guess Gemini sometimes. Not really, but personally I’m using a lot more ChatGPT and Claude, all day, every day lately to do exactly the things that you’re describing. Google would never and could never come after someone for saying, okay, I have this really great article that I’ve written about top ten toothbrushes, and I ran it through ChatGPT, and I asked it to help me with the grammar, help me think about what I haven’t considered. helped me think about Google’s criteria for good at maybe like you give it the questions to consider and it says, oh, maybe you think about adding some more examples as is. That’s like a writing assistant. And that’s what I is incredible at doing.

Lily Ray (00:33:34) – And that would never, never cause your site to get penalized. Google would never know that that happened. What’s different? And I think like as human beings were starting to see this happen, let alone what algorithms and Google’s machine learning can identify. Right? I’m now posting on LinkedIn and 18 people are leaving chat responses. They didn’t tell me their ChatGPT responses. I just know. So would you feel good about doing that on your blog? No, right? I mean, most writers wouldn’t want that type of like obvious AI content unless they’ve been very clear, which we’re using AI here. So the the main issue I think is when you’re being deceptive. Right. Because publishing something that ChatGPT wrote as if it was written by a human is slight, a slight form of deception. And users, Google users could just go to ChatGPT, right? See?

Jillian Leslie (00:34:25) – That’s okay. I was on the phone with a food blogger. She’s been doing it for ten years and we start talking about AI, and I tell her that the world is changing and she does not want to hear this.

Jillian Leslie (00:34:37) – And she’s not using AI very much at all because she thinks she’s being pure. And I said, you’re not being pure. You’re going to be you’re falling behind. And as I’m telling her this, I’m watching her face change and she’s getting sadder and sadder. And I said to her, you know, we’re moving into a world where people go to ChatGPT and say, give me a recipe. And she said, no, they would never do that because it’s a machine. And then, like the next day I’m talking to two friends who say, oh my God, I go to ChatGPT for recipes. And I said to her, not everybody’s going to do that. Other people will go to Pinterest and click on a Pin or Google it, or whatever, or Google. And I want to talk about Google’s SGP, which we’ll get into, but it’s like, yes, a people will and are going to ChatGPT for this information. So then you say, well, I’m a food blogger, why do they need to if I’m doing if I’m putting the AI recipe up on my blog, but somebody can go to cloud or ChatGPT to get the recipe.

Jillian Leslie (00:35:36) – Why did they need me? Like, you know, if I’m just stating the same stuff?

Lily Ray (00:35:42) – Yes. So. Yes. and that’s, that’s the real question that any publisher needs to ask themselves, because I don’t think it’s necessarily all doom and gloom, and I don’t see a world in which everybody goes to ChatGPT to get their recipes right. that would be weird. Like, there’s a lot of cooking enthusiasts who quite legitimately follow recipe and food bloggers because they like their style, they like their brand, they like the, you know, ethnic like cuisine that they write about or that they have experience in or whatever it is. ChatGPT doesn’t have that. It’s going to tell you. Yeah, this is how you hard boil an egg, but like, it’s not going to tell you. And I’m actually even seeing with this updated update, they’re actually recipe sites that are doing extremely well with this update. There’s a handful that I found that are shooting up really high, and I’m digging into it. Now is a brand new information.

Lily Ray (00:36:36) – It’s not it’s not all doom and gloom. So far. What I’ve found for these sites that I think is a pattern is that they’re doing a lot more than just recipe blogging, like they’re either a magazine where they talk about local ingredients in the region, or they offer cooking courses, even online cooking courses. They have cookbooks, they have a podcast. They’re a family that talks about how to, ethically raise chickens. Whatever it is. It’s like not just a run of the mill food blogger that looks like all the other food bloggers. They’re really building an audience and building a brand. Maybe they have a e-commerce store where you can buy kitchenware and mugs and stuff like this, right? So it’s getting harder and harder. But yeah, you have to think about you have to think about the ways to diversify your traffic sources and build your brand. And in the process, you’re probably going to benefit from SEO because Google looks at all.

Jillian Leslie (00:37:27) – So it’s so interesting. I just released my podcast episode that just went live yesterday, and it’s all about how to make money as a blogger in 2024.

Jillian Leslie (00:37:37) – And what I’m saying is, you need to open the aperture of your business so that you are not just a blogger. Now you need to. I said, diversify your traffic sources and diversify your income and sell. What you’re selling now is not your content which is becoming commoditized. What you are selling is your vibe. So like Lily, I like your vibe. I want to learn SEO from you. Whereas I could go to Google or like learn like the basics of SEO, but it’s like, ooh, I feel like I connect with you and so you become more valuable. But for niche bloggers or bloggers in general who’ve learned to hide behind their blogs, to go, now it’s you, now it’s you at the grocery store talking about the new Deca pons, which are these really good citrusy things that I just discovered. It’s you being you and saying, hey, you know, or I’m a busy mom or I’m a, I don’t know, I live in New York or whatever it is, like, follow along with me because I’m providing value to you.

Jillian Leslie (00:38:45) – Like, I’m not Kim Kardashian, but I, I hopefully have something of value for you. So what you’re saying is exactly what I’m saying. Why this food blogger almost started crying? Because the world is changing. And what I hear you saying is, if you got hit, do not think you’re going to go to hire some SEO off of Upwork. Who’s going to fix your site traffic or optimize your images or do something like that? It’s rethinking what you’re saying. To me, at least, this is what I’m hearing is it’s rethinking your business.

Lily Ray (00:39:24) – Yeah. And listen, optimizing your images, having good technical SEO. Those are the things that I work on with my team day in and day out for many different companies. That’s part of the SEO process right now. What we are talking about is not normal SEO. This is not a normal SEO situation. This is a situation where thousands of sites have been hit by a very specific algorithm update, and we’re talking about how to maybe try to recover over time from that.

Lily Ray (00:39:58) – Like if you are a big brand, if you’re let’s say I don’t want to say any names, any big clothing e-commerce company or whatever store you might see at the at the mall, they’re not getting hit by the helpful content update. Okay. So for them we need to focus on image optimization. We need to focus on Google’s crawl budget and things like this, because they need to compete with all their other competitors. And every little adjustment and optimization helps. Right. And I’m not saying that small niche bloggers shouldn’t think about image optimization, shouldn’t think about technical SEO. What I am saying that anybody that anybody that’s selling you recovery services right now and is focusing on page speed for a WordPress website, or they’re focusing on crawl budget for a WordPress website. That’s not going to be the type of change that you need to recover from this particular situation.

Jillian Leslie (00:40:48) – That is so helpful. That is so helpful. Okay. Two things I want to talk about. And then we can we can wrap up. One is SGA and what that means, what Google’s thinking, what the future entails.

Jillian Leslie (00:41:02) – Like are people not going to be going to your website? And then the other thing I want to talk about is tools. And if people should be using tools or not be using tools.

Lily Ray (00:41:13) – Yeah. Okay. SGE is a funny one. I and it’s searched generative.

Jillian Leslie (00:41:19) – What is it? Experience.

Lily Ray (00:41:20) – Experience. Search. Generative experience. Terrible name. Yeah. Terrible name. I’m so. I still have friends to this day. They call it GSC. And I’m like, guys, it’s SGA. It’s like I can’t even remember the three letter acronym. It’s so bad. I’m sorry. Google. it’s a terrible name. Anyway, Google started hinting at this product, let’s say February or March of last year, which was three months after ChatGPT came out. And suddenly they’re like, we’re gonna build this cool thing that does this, like, ChatGPT esque answer at the top of the search results. And if you were paying attention back then or whoever’s paying attention, I was very much paying attention. the way that it linked to publishers was so, like minimal.

Lily Ray (00:42:07) – Yeah. It was like three different thumbnail links. And I was up in arms the minute that this came out at Google, I o in May of last year was when they really kind of publicly announced this as a thing. We’re going to be doing it. There’s going to be this beta version that you can test in. Google labs, myself and some others are making a very big stink about the lack of links in SGE, especially compared to Bing’s copilot, what used to be called bank chat. Now it’s called copilot. from day one of bank’s equivalent product, they’ve had links and annotations throughout the answers. In a way that is, I think, much more rewarding for publishers.

Jillian Leslie (00:42:41) – So you could be a food blogger, show up in SGP, they’re taking your blog post or your recipe, displaying it, and then having a tiny link to you.

Lily Ray (00:42:53) – Yes, but when they first launched it, those tiny links were hardly there. It was like 3 or 4 carousel links. I made a frickin public stink for months, and it was like, I don’t know, June of last year that Google was like, we’re gonna put more links in SGE.

Lily Ray (00:43:11) – So now you see the little carrot and you can expand and click on more links. I still think they have a long way to go, to be fair to publishers, and I think they need to be doing more, actual links within the answers to link to where they got that information from. I hope they go further. I will continue putting pressure on them. So it’s changing all the time. Still in beta. They’re they’re rolling out a new public limited version to some users. So far, the only thing I know is they vary. Schwartz from Search Engine Roundtable said that Google’s doing that, and now we have some anecdotes from users who have seen it and said, how do I turn this thing off? Which I think is hilarious, but I don’t talk about SGE as much anymore because we don’t know what’s going to happen. And there’s a lot of different opinions about what’s going to happen. And just yesterday there’s this new update from Google that said, Google is thinking about new ways to monetize its AI products, or almost like a maybe a subscriber model or a paid feature where it didn’t say specifically, but it didn’t not say SE.

Lily Ray (00:44:12) – It said Google’s new AI products might cost the user money to see some of these features, which to me feels like a big admission that this is not profitable for them at all, and they’re going to lose a lot of money on it. That’s what I find it interesting.

Jillian Leslie (00:44:28) – Okay, so the people who are freaking out about SGE, what would you say to them right now?

Lily Ray (00:44:34) – I would say that it’s unclear how Google would be able to launch SGE in a way that isn’t extremely detrimental to its own main source of revenue, which is Google Ads. We don’t have a lot of evidence that they’ve solved for that yet. And now this new development where they’re saying we might charge users to use it, is unprecedented for Google search. So this is why a lot of us are like, we’re gonna wait to focus on that. Because here’s another thing. Every time Google talks about SGA and SGA updates, its stock price goes up. So people like this idea that Google is doing something with AI and they are they’re doing Gemini, they’re doing all these great things.

Lily Ray (00:45:16) – I just think they’re in a really challenging place. Because how do you launch a product that summarizes all the search results, and nobody clicks on anything, including ads like it’s not, and it costs them what is 100 times more. It costs 100 times more to generate an SGE result than a standard organic search result.

Jillian Leslie (00:45:33) – That’s good. Okay, I feel like Google is, from what I’ve been reading, you know, facing some headwind and some existential threats, and I read something that you said about being.

Lily Ray (00:45:50) – Yeah. Yeah. Bing is the it’s the underdog. It’s so big on the dog for a while.

Jillian Leslie (00:45:55) – So what. What is that. Like everybody would laugh at bing. Like whatever. Bing. I’d always go like not anymore around. Is it still around. And what is your information about being.

Lily Ray (00:46:08) – Oh my goodness. It’s so funny because I actually speak at conferences with Bing a lot. Like my first ever SEO conference presentation. I was on a panel with being like, they’re they’re always there.

Lily Ray (00:46:20) – Like they’re always much more, like present and wanting to share it conferences and wanting to engage. They even said one time at SEO conference, like they did the keynote and they were like, we need all of you guys. Like, we need the SEO community to interact with us and help us. And it’s really helpful. We like being here. We like answering questions. They’re very transparent. They’re a lot more transparent than Google is interesting. and they’re really they really do seem to want to help publishers. there’s a man named Fabrice Canal. He’s the representative of that thing. And he’s always, like, excited about copilot because he’s seeing the data that indicates that it leads more people to search. You know, people use copilot. They get the answers they need, and then they go search. Or maybe they they click on something from copilot because they really like the information they got. And then they go back into the publisher’s website. He’s seeing the early data that indicates that people actually they still like going to websites, they still like using search, but this is a new tool that they have, right? So I think Bing’s ahead of the curve with this I products for sure.

Jillian Leslie (00:47:20) – So people want to two things. Explore Bing just type in bing.com and do that. And do you optimize post for being any differently than you might for Google?

Lily Ray (00:47:35) – People have asked that forever in the SEO space, and I still don’t have a good answer. I mean, there’s Bing Webmaster Tools, that’s the version of Google Search Console. You should look at that. You should set that up. They have, Microsoft Clarity, which is another great tool that they give SEOs. There’s things like index now which can help with indexation of more content. I, I don’t I can’t really speak to anything in particular that we’ve done differently for publishers to appear in Google or Bing differently, other than index. Now that might be the only one. but look at the data there because maybe you’ll notice some insights from big webmaster tools. But, yeah, the fact that they’ve grown 2%. Sounds like nothing. But it’s not nothing. It’s a big deal.

Jillian Leslie (00:48:14) – Interesting. So keep so that that is a a way to just be thinking about the fact that diversifying your traffic is important.

Lily Ray (00:48:24) – Yeah. And also, the sites that are in the, the worse off, the ones that got hit by manual actions this time around, which I do understand, they’re actually I have spoken to some people that, got removed from Google’s index because they were affiliated with other people that were doing spammy things. That sucks, right? There are some examples of people that got penalties that like, really didn’t know that they were that was going to happen. They might still be getting a lot of organic traffic on Bing. You know, if you’re removed from Google search, you’re not necessarily removed from Bing search. So that might be a situation where you really want to go into your bank data and see what works there.

Jillian Leslie (00:49:00) – And Pinterest, if you’re willing to put the effort in, still drives traffic. And I’m even hearing Facebook now if you can get, interaction. So it’s not like an SEO play. But if you can build community, get people talking, Facebook will reward you.

Lily Ray (00:49:24) – Probably I. We have a separate social team at my agency.

Lily Ray (00:49:27) – They work on that I don’t. Right. But these are the things that are like.

Jillian Leslie (00:49:32) – Percolating up that I’m hearing in the. Yeah. Because bloggers tend to be smart and they tend to be creative and they’ve got their fingers in a lot of pots. So I’m just hearing where people are going, oh, you know what I’m noticing? I’m noticing Facebook or I’m noticing if I still am consistent with Pinterest. And that Pinterest kind of has come back now to its earlier roots of we are a visual search engine. We are trying to beat Instagram, we’re trying to be TikTok. And like that didn’t work. And now they’re like, okay, let’s lean back into search.

Lily Ray (00:50:06) – Yeah. And what’s what’s funny about these conversations, first of all. Yes. Do all these things, you know, if you can like get build an audience and build traffic from all these different sources. Again, it’s going to pay for itself and SEO performance later. Google won’t they don’t they don’t they don’t admit or they don’t they don’t confirm.

Lily Ray (00:50:26) – In fact, they, they say that social signals are not a ranking matter. This is what they’ve said for years. Right? I was on a panel with Gary. Eesh. From Google. Literally. I swear to God, I couldn’t even believe this happened. But it was a panel public, and someone was like, you know, what’s the best way to get traffic to this thing? And he’s like, get it shared on social media because we look at that, oh, like he said it, not me. But it’s true. I have data to support this time and time again. There’s a tool called Buzzsumo. Yep. And it allows you to see on the page level, on the article level, how many social engagements something had. I like to correlate that with SEO performance and Google Discover performance. And yeah, whenever something takes off on Twitter or whatever, it leads to good SEO and discover performance for our content, for sure.

Jillian Leslie (00:51:14) – That is so fascinating. Okay, I’m a blogger.

Jillian Leslie (00:51:16) – Let’s say maybe I got hit a little bit. I try to abide by all the rules. I’m not talking to my girlfriend saying, let’s share links. should I be using these SEO tools? So key search, rank, IQ, whatever will get, you know, Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, SEMrush. What what is your thought about these tools?

Lily Ray (00:51:45) – Well, different tools do different things. I use probably 40 different SEO tools.

Jillian Leslie (00:51:50) – 4040.

Lily Ray (00:51:51) – Daily.

Speaker 4 (00:51:53) – Yeah. Okay.

Lily Ray (00:51:54) – Again, I have I oversee a 35 person team with hundreds of clients. So we we have a budget for a lot of tools. so tools are not inherently good or bad. The tools that I think get into dangerous territory are the I generated, the ones that either enhance the content with AI or the ones that look for they scrape the top search result and then they tell you, you didn’t talk about this, this, this because the other big publisher talked about this, that actually used to be really effective a few years ago. I think the problem now is like this notion of just copying what’s already performing.

Lily Ray (00:52:31) – It’s not the right way to think about things. So if you take the information and you say, oh yeah, we didn’t talk about this in this section, but then you can add that information in a way that’s truly helpful and unique. I think that’s fine. But what I would advise against is letting the tools do the work for you. Right. You need to use them in a smart way.

Jillian Leslie (00:52:53) – So it’s not being prescriptive because you get this list of keywords and you’re trying and it could be something like the keyword. I mean, you can see this in certain tools. It’s something like saying plus one and you’re like, how do I add the words plus one? Because somehow in my post about toothbrushes, they’re telling me to add, like, you know, these words that make no sense but somehow don’t need to figure out plus one into my post in order to get it to give me like an A rating.

Lily Ray (00:53:32) – That’s that’s the stuff that frustrates me so much about SEO tools, because what if it’s seeing plus one? Because the ten pages that are ranking, say, follow us on YouTube plus one, and now it’s the tool is not smart enough to know that that’s not a thing that you need in your content.

Lily Ray (00:53:50) – But now you have bloggers that are blindly listening and oh, I need to add plus one. And it’s like, that’s what Google has issue with. You need to think critically about like, okay, if it told you you should be talking about fluoride toothpaste, you’re like, oh yeah, that makes sense. I can do that in a way that makes sense for the user. That’s a great observation. But if it’s telling you something dumb and then you’re like, try to like work around and really dumb recommendation. That’s how we end up with silly SEO focused articles.

Jillian Leslie (00:54:19) – So if though let’s say it is the toothbrush blog post and you and I are using the same tool and it’s giving me the same keywords as you because it’s not saying, only 50 people get to do this and then we’re shutting it down. Right? So you have those keywords, I have those keywords. 4000 other people have the same keywords, and we’re all putting them into our posts. You’re saying that’s where we get in trouble, especially if I’m not adding photos.

Jillian Leslie (00:54:46) – Maybe then I go, you know what? This should be about brushing my dog’s teeth. You know, so I got like a different angle rather than all these 4000 other people using the exact same keywords. And let’s say we’re smart enough to know, don’t worry about adding plus one as your text. But you know, we’re talking. It’s telling us to talk about fluoride and soft bristles and electric toothbrushes and tartar and whatever that. by all of us doing that and being smart about it, you’re saying that’s the where we get into trouble and that if you could put that spin on it of going, no, this is for dogs. All of a sudden well changes it.

Lily Ray (00:55:29) – I think what I would recommend doing. First of all, and I even spoke at one point to a bunch of recipe bloggers about this. If you’re going to write, ten best whatever for my kitchen, you know, ten best slow cookers or whatever. Don’t write that unless you truly have very strong opinions about all ten that you want to share.

Lily Ray (00:55:52) – Write instead. You should write. These are the six essential tools that I use every day that I make dinner. Right? Because you actually literally like have opinions about that, right? I’m a DJ. Like, I’m I can tell you all my experience is a DJ that’s going to come from me knowing stuff. So start with that. Like, don’t start with what has the highest affiliate commissions. Don’t start with the SEO keyword research told you to do right what you know. Then you put it into an SEO analysis or whatever, and it’s gonna say, hey, Lilly, you didn’t think about writing about whatever this pioneer, this in this console. I will only write about that if I’m like, I do have thoughts about that. I’m gonna add a section about that. But I will not do that to get to a green light, because I’m using all the same words as everybody else. You have to write what you know and what you have opinions about.

Jillian Leslie (00:56:41) – And Google will know the difference.

Jillian Leslie (00:56:44) – They really will. Yes.

Lily Ray (00:56:45) – yes. Yes. There’s a patent called, Or there’s part of the Google patent called information gain. This is finally becoming common knowledge in the SEO space. the late, great Bill Lasky used to talk about this a lot. And this is in their patents. It’s the idea, if you boil it down, that you have two pages that are saying the exact same thing, one of them has a piece of information that the other one doesn’t have. It’s like a net new piece of information. The more net new pieces of information that you have, the better your article generally will do because you’re adding unique value. That’s why Google likes user generated content, because if you’re a TripAdvisor page, it’s all information game. It’s all user generated original ideas. Right.

Jillian Leslie (00:57:26) – Wow that okay. You have been I would say. validating. You’ve given me a lot, and hopefully my audience a lot to think about. I think you have validated this idea of opening the aperture of your business.

Jillian Leslie (00:57:44) – You are not just your blog and that there aren’t quick fixes. That’s like the sad story. I wish you could have told me the five things to check, and one of them would be image size, and all I have to do is like change the size, believe me. Like I was hoping for that, Lily. But what you’re saying is, you know, but you’re saying it’s really thinking about your business in a new way. Hopefully that excites you and gives you that competitive edge where it’s not about the tools. The competitive edge is not the tools.

Lily Ray (00:58:21) – And personal brand. It’s about the not even personal brand. It’s about the brand. Who is the brand? What is the brand do? Can we stand behind it and how are we going to? It’s not about showing Google, it’s about how are we going to build a legitimate audience, because that legitimate audience will feed into your SEO performance over time.

Jillian Leslie (00:58:39) – I will say in the world, that is very weird right now. And feels a little, kind of nuts.

Jillian Leslie (00:58:49) – And especially with I. Like, what is I going to, you know, or we all, you know, is I taking over and we’re all going to be paperclips. What you’re saying to me that actually makes me feel good is people matter. I matter because I’m Jillian and I have my perspectives and my opinions and your Lily. And you’ve got yours. And it is your vibe, and that stuff matters.

Lily Ray (00:59:15) – Yeah. That that’s that’s the way that search engines add value over time because everybody will have access to AI. Not everybody will have access to real, original human ideas and opinions, which is what people usually like to read on the internet.

Jillian Leslie (00:59:33) – Wow. So. Well, I just.

Lily Ray (00:59:35) – Okay, those.

Jillian Leslie (00:59:36) – Lily, if people want to reach out to you, see what you do. Follow you. Where should they go?

Lily Ray (00:59:45) – still very active on Twitter X. My username is Billy Ray NYC. But I also. And it’s.

Jillian Leslie (00:59:52) – Lily. Wait, Lily. Okay, so you also use the LIRR, okay.

Jillian Leslie (00:59:59) – And you’re also on LinkedIn.

Lily Ray (01:00:00) – And then if you Google me, if you Google Lily Ray, you can take your pick. I am also a DJ, so I have a lot of music stuff as well. But yeah, any of those sites are fine to reach out to me.

Jillian Leslie (01:00:09) – Awesome. Well, I just have to say I’ve so enjoyed meeting you. I love your vibe and you’ve given me a lot to think about. So I want to say thank you so much for coming on the show.

Lily Ray (01:00:21) – You’re very welcome. Thanks for having me. I hope it was helpful.

Jillian Leslie (01:00:24) – I hope you guys liked this episode. I am such as I said, a big Lilly Ray fan. In fact, if you are not following her on Twitter or on YouTube, I recommend you start. For me, my biggest takeaway is that we need to move away from optimizing our posts for keywords for Google, and start growing our businesses to serve real people. The tricks are no longer working. What is working is diversifying your traffic sources and diversifying the ways you make money.

Jillian Leslie (01:01:06) – If you’re ready to start selling digital products, go to Milotree.com. Purchase MiloTree, which we are currently selling for a lifetime deal of 349. Go buy it. We offer a 30 day, no questions asked money back guarantee. And the best part? You could be selling your first digital product, let’s say an e-book in five minutes, no joke. So again, go to Milotree.com, see all the cool stuff you can sell with our software. Also on our home page you can book a 20 minute call with me. I’m here to help you make money in new ways. If you like this episode, please share it. Please rate me on iTunes. I would be delighted and I will see you here again next week.