@tjrobertson52

As search engines are getting taken over by AI responses, there are now more and more things you need to do to show up in the results. And I have a bunch of other videos going over those things. In this video, I wanna talk about the things that you can stop doing because the only way you're gonna make room to do all these new things is if you stop doing some of the old things that don't work anymore or never worked in the first place.

First of all, stop taking technical audits seriously. If you run essentially any website online through a technical audit like hrefs or Semrush, you're gonna find a ton of errors. The thing is, 95% of these errors aren't an issue at all, or at least not issues worth addressing.

When determining whether a technical issue is worth addressing, ask yourself these two questions. One, is this having a significant impact on the people visiting my website? And 2, is this preventing Google from finding or indexing any important pages on my website?

Anything else that matters will be taken care of by doing normal on page optimization. Second thing you can stop doing is obsessing over structure data or schema. Unless that schema is necessary for showing up in a specific feature on Google search results, it's not doing anything for you.

It's not helping you rank better. It's not improving your visibility in AI search. So yes, you need schema to show up in Google's shopping results, you need product schema, you need job listing schema to show up in the job boards, video schema to show up in video carousels, event schema to show up in event calendars, and perhaps same as schema on your about page to link your social media profile.

But again, this is only because it's necessary for placement in those Google search features. It's not improving your rankin

our social media profile. But again, this is only because it's necessary for placement in those Google search features. It's not improving your rankings and large numbers models are treating it like any other text on your page.

The third thing you can stop doing is adding your business to every directory online. Now there's one exception to this rule. If you're a new business with a brand new website, then I do think there's some value in getting what are called foundational links.

So using a tool like Bright Local to submit yourself to a bunch of directories for a very low cost is often worth it just to help you get into Google's index. But if you're an established business, you're already ranking for some of your main search terms, these low quality directory links are not gonna help you.

If you look at the directories that are actually ranking in Google and being cited by large language models in your industry, you'll find there's rarely more than 12 and typically only one to three that really matter. For some industries, directories aren't important at all.