SEO

This is how Google is busting local businesses. Google is asking, does this business offer rewards in exchange for reviews?

Reviews are extremely important to the success of a local business. Lots of business owners are constantly strategizing new ways to get reviews.

Offering rewards is a very common way. But this is what Google says about it.

We do not allow merchants to offer incentives such as payment discounts, free goods and/or services in exchange for posting any review or revision or removal of a negativ...

The most effective way of getting recommended in AI search is to optimize and create new content on your website. This makes up about 70% of the work we do at our agency, and I like to think we've gotten pretty good at it.

However, sometimes when I explain this to prospective clients, they have one of two responses. They'll either say, oh, AI could never write our content.

We need to write it ourselves. Or they'll say, oh, you're just having AI write the content, right?

We can do that with ChatGPT. I'd like to t...

plete understanding of your company, and it doesn't have that tacit knowledge you get from experience. And so, of course, you need to give that knowledge to the AI.

You need a knowledge base. This is the first thing we do for every client.

We call it their brand ambassador, and we create this for them. It's typically about a dozen markdown files, but it might also include Pdfs or spreadsheets.

You want to provide comprehensive information on your company, on each of your products and your services, your unique v...

f the puzzle. The other half, to get an AI to write high quality content for you, are the instructions.

And nowadays, those instructions take the form of Claud Skills. First skill we use generates an article brief.

For this, we give it the topic and any other information we have. So perhaps the client has given us some notes or a voice memo, or they've done a video on this topic, and we can use the transcript.

Other times, we just have the topic. Whatever we have, we dump it in there, we give it the skill, and w...

as access to that knowledge base. That knowledge base is also helping it match the tone of voice for this specific brand.

And then once that draft is complete, we're giving it to our first revision skill. First revision compares the article to all content guidelines we created for this brand.

And those guidelines come from all previous content we reviewed and provided feedback on. Anytime we or the client had feedback on an article, all of that is getting fed back into this document.

Part of their knowledge base...

Google is launching AI performance reports in Search Console. (This is huge) Google Search Console will soon have dedicated Search Generative AI performance reports that allow you to track how often your website's pages appear as cited sources in AI-generated search results.

This data was previously folded into aggregate organic search metrics, but it is now split into two specialized reports: one for Google Search (covering AI Mode and AI Overviews) and one for Google Discover. Because AI search fundamentally c...