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Local SEO expert Darrin Wong talks about the latest Google updates for A.I. and how they will or will not affect the traffic of the average small business website.

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Sean Corbett:
Hello everybody, it’s Sean Corbett here@websites.ca marketing. This month we’re going to talk about everybody’s favorite topic as usual: SEO. I brought in an SEO expert, and we’re also going to dive into some recent Google changes, so you guys are getting the most up-to-date information on what’s happening online. So yeah, I’d like to welcome Darrin Wong from Hyper SEO. Darren, thanks for being here.

Darrin Wong:
Thank you, Sean. I’m happy to be here. So just a little bit about my background. I came from the programmatic advertising industry and was in there for four years, kind of helping the company broker deals between the DSPs, SSPs and exchanges over into the publishing side. And I saw a lot of activity happening within that space, and I felt that maybe the advertising space was a little bit too large and too all encompassing, and I wanted to get into a little bit more specific kind of help for small business. And that’s how I kind of got over into SEO because I saw that I could provide more value into SEO. So I don’t know if, I hope that’s enough background about my experience.

Sean Corbett:
That’s interesting. Well, I was going to follow up on that then. So did you go general SEO or did you nail down a niche and also were you across several industries or did you focus on just one industry?

Darrin Wong:
That’s a great question, Sean. So I started off in local SEO. I guess I wet my feet a little bit in the Google business profile part of SEO and how it ties into local pages and how to locally rank small businesses. And after I realized that there wasn’t too much that I could offer in terms of additional services, I went more for the organic side of SEO where I could expand my horizons, do more research and offer more unique services to my clients. So mixing both together, the Google business profile with the local pages, the local rankings in tandem with kind of the national Organic SEO is basically what I do in my business now.

Sean Corbett:
Oh, nice. That’s a great combination and definitely relevant for our audience. I wanted to clarify too, when you’re saying organic stuff, you mean things like content, blog posts, stuff like that?

Darrin Wong:
Man, this is going to lead down a bit of a rabbit hole.

Sean Corbett:
Oh, okay. Yeah, so the short version, absolutely

Darrin Wong:
For sure. The content. So content is king. It always has been king. It’s something that’s very important for ranking pages and engaging the visitors who come by the page and want to engage with the website and then get them to inquire a little bit more about the service or the product that the client is trying to pitch. So yes, content is king. We want to try and get our clients to become topic authorities because if they become a topic authority, then they ultimately become the go-to resource for people coming to the website. And then by more engagement, that’s the increasing visitors they get. They’ll just automatically become ranked higher in the service.

Sean Corbett:
Nice. Yeah, that makes sense. Of course. Okay. So yeah, I didn’t want to go too far down the general rabbit hole because obviously we have a topical thing to discuss. So before we hopped on the call today, you had mentioned to me that you were excited to talk to the audience about some recent changes using on their SGE, which is their search generative experience, and that’s their AI engine. So it works differently. The results come up differently. So if you go in there manually turn it on, you will see results that kind of fill the page. And previously it would’ve been search engine optimization, would’ve filled everything ERP wise and ranked a certain way. Well, now things don’t rank the way they used to. If you used to be at the top before, you may very well not even be on the first page anymore.
So this is how profound we’re talking, it’s just major, right? So with this new engine that they’re trying to focus on when they launch it next year in 2024 as kind of the defacto search AI search engine, does that mean that SEO is going to disappear? Maybe not, but maybe it’s just so hard to tell. We don’t know what they’re going to do because it was so unexpected and so sudden. It’s not like the cookie deprecation, which took years, and I don’t even know if it’s happening. It probably hasn’t, but this is just so sudden. So in their fight to try and gain market share because of chat JBT, I think they’ve done probably more damage than good, to be honest. And so now our company is making headway into how to rank for SGE, and it’s probably something that people should be looking to try and rank for. And it’s not easy because there’s no set formula out there. There’s kind of a best practice pattern type way to do this, and as we move forward, we’ll try and score for this.
Yeah, the impression I’m getting from you, just from our brief talk is things are still in fluxx, and maybe they’re paving the groundwork for more changes next year. So people might not want to panic too soon because even you guys, the experts might need to get a better lay of the land in Q1, Q2, 2024 before you have a hard and fast prescription. Am I right there?

Darrin Wong:
Absolutely, 100%. I mean, this may just kind of disappear in terms of the impact it’s had. Maybe it’ll be like, it never happened. Tomorrow, we’ll turn on the computer and go, oh, well, this was never a thing. Who knows? I dunno.

Sean Corbett:
Interesting. Okay. Yeah, yeah, that’s good. So people should just hold their horses and calm down a bit, which is a message I like to put out at the beginning of the year just as you were talking. And some of these questions may be the wrong questions to ask. You can tell me, but the concerns that you’re bringing up, it seems to me have a lot of effect, obviously, on content-based SERPs. But you said you were also into the local signals and Google business page and stuff. Have you seen that part of things be as initially affected as the content-based searches or no?

Darrin Wong:
No, I haven’t. I have not seen that. So the local based stuff is working as it should, and it’s performing as it should. And as a matter of fact, there is something that the kind of clients that we take on haven’t been affected as some of the other blog pages and affiliate pages that used to rank. Okay,

Sean Corbett:
Okay.

Darrin Wong:
Yeah, I think there are certain industries that Google made sure not to hit. And so we fortunately weren’t hit by that.

Sean Corbett:
It’s like, and I might be hazy on my memory here, but it’s kind of like when Penguin hit and everyone freaked out, it really didn’t tend to affect the small businesses as much as it affect the bloggers and SEO people. Right?

Darrin Wong:
Exactly. So I mean, Google is, I mean, there is a pattern to what they’re trying to do is, I dunno, weed out the fluff and hopefully get all of the businesses who are trying to score to maintain their relevance, I guess.

Sean Corbett:
Interesting. Okay. So I’m going to put aside my marketer hat for a second, and any tech considerations that I’m just going to ask a question based as a simple searcher who uses Google to research and find products and find people who are interesting and things like that. What I’ve noticed in the last couple of years is, I guess because I was on the inside of some things, helping people write blog posts and so on for a little while, we had a list of what you call the, earlier in this call, we had a list of best practices that we would do. So I sort of saw a little bit behind the curtain, but what I noticed over the last two years is when I would search for anything, let’s use recipes as an example or a historical question or anything like that, I would find the top of the search results.
The first 10 results were these giant labyrinthine blog posts that very obviously were there just to rank, right? They had lists of questions and tables of contents and a picture every 400 words and all this kind of stuff. And I had to scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll to find my damn answer. And it occurred to me, wow, Google’s now either rewarded the people who do this or the people who have figured it out. And so I can’t get any good answers anymore on Google. And then of course, then AI came along and the various ais, your mileage will vary, obviously, but it suddenly became much faster just to search for answers that way. Maybe on forums, maybe on Reddit, whatever. I understand what you’re saying that Google’s got a product to promote, and they’re now in fierce competition with other people who have a similar product. So that makes sense that they would be rolling out updates to that effect, and possibly in the short term, hurting the effectiveness of their search, let’s say, if that’s a fair way to summarize it. But do you think also some of these changes are in response to the complaints that I just laid out as a user?

Darrin Wong:
Absolutely. I mean, Google’s entire model serve the visitor to make it easier to find information and to make the information as easy to get as possible. There are certain considerations, I’m sure Google is working toward in the background, meaning the advertiser model. Let’s try and get a mixture of maybe advertiser and organic together and maybe offer services that allow a little bit more better performance on an advertising, paid advertising so that if you mix the two together, you can get an optimal result. So I think there are whispers of that model being targeted, which is the advertiser model, but at the same time, yes, 100%, I believe that Google is trying to make it easier for everybody to access actual truthful information as quickly as possible.

Sean Corbett:
Nice. Oh, that’s a good outlook then. Well, yeah. Well, then we should land the plane. Can we maybe give the listeners again, who are mostly small business owners, perhaps one thing to hang on to, or one tip that they should use to either do or at least put themselves in the right mindset for SEO in 2024?

Darrin Wong:
Sure. I don’t think your users will have to worry as much as some of the other blog posters affiliate type pages, because it’s going to be your small businesses who are out there to sell a product or to sell a service. And when they’re creating websites, if they put out blogs or information based on their particular product or service or anything related to that, I think they’re going to do fine. Because we’ve seen across the board on our client base that they’re not being hit very hard. I mean, there’s a slight ever so slight drop in visitors, but the rankings are still there. In fact, we’re still able to rank highly on a lot of the keywords that we’ve been trying to rank for. So I think it’s maybe the type of business that would probably have to worry not yours. So keep doing what you’re doing, put the content out there, make sure the content is quality, make sure it’s engaging because content is king, and make it easily accessible and answer the questions that your visitors are asking succinctly and clearly, and you will maintain your relevance.

Sean Corbett:
Perfect. And my little tip is don’t make me scroll for five minutes to find my answer. So Darren, I’m sure a lot of people out there could use some help, maybe a little audit, maybe they’ll help with their content, their local search results, if they need that help, how can they get in touch with you? What does that process look like?

Darrin Wong:
Absolutely. They can get in touch with me. If there’s a contact page at HYPR r.ca, that’s piper ca, I’m available as much as possible. My team is available all the time, so we are there to help you. We’ll give you an audit and basically let you know what we can do for you. I mean, obviously there are some types of businesses that we cannot do very much for, but there are a lot of businesses that we can do a lot as well.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, it doesn’t hurt, at least to have an expert check under your hood, and if things look good, you could have that peace of mind. And obviously if you guys catch something that you could help them with, then they have the option to do that as well.

Darrin Wong:
Absolutely.

Sean Corbett:
Well, last word goes to you, Darren. Anything else you want to say on the topic of SEO in the coming year?

Darrin Wong:
Yeah, don’t lose hope. Everything’s going to be all right. Things change all the time, and we’re there for the changes and we’re there to help you navigate through those changes. So yeah,

Sean Corbett:
Thanks so much for coming on.

Darrin Wong:
Alright, thank you so much, Sean.