For those in the SEO industry, for years it’s been said come up with long form text and information and “evergreen” content, but for local small business customers, the truth, is they never read it and don’t care. So now with AI we’re still being told that content matters most but to come up with content people actually want. But what content do they want? For us, we want to come up with different examples of customers our clients can work with which act as short, bite size answers to questions people might search in Google or ChatGPT or Claude or Grok. But it’s a question I’m going to continue to ask myself as time goes on because I think whoever masters figuring out content customers actually want to see will do the best in SEO.

Everyone knows the future is AI search and because of that Google is experimenting with sometimes having AI mode be the default when people type keywords into regular Google search. I think this is going to happen more and more and making sure your website “ranks” as well as possible in the AI overview and in Google Gemini is now more important than ever.

Google and other search engines still get the vast majority of website traffic but according to a recent study done by Shopify, their results showed that AI traffic converted more than twice as well as the search traffic. Which would make the AI traffic more valuable.

When AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, etc list websites for people looking for local businesses, the AI will usually make recommendations on who to go with. So the key is to add as much specific content to the website as possible because this data is able to equip the AI with information on how it can persuade customers to contact you.

Happy to announce that Customwave is now building websites that include click to text message buttons for mobile devices that make it super easy for customers to contact our clients via text message.

Most of the time when people talk about hitting a home run in SEO they’re talking about technical aspects or some secret. But increasingly, I’m seeing big value in being creative with what words you target and go after. And particularly if you can spot trends in your industry on words that marketers don’t really compete for but customers are increasingly using in searches.

More and more clients are going out of their way and telling me it’s becoming more common to ask a caller or customer how they found them and the reply is, they were found off Chat or Claude or some other AI app.

Having a differentiator between your website and your competition’s websites is the single biggest thing. Someday everyone will be using these AI tools so you need to be doing something different that’s effective.

I talk about what I see as the 3 biggest changes to SEO going into next year which is how AI is changing how content is done, also changing link building and how to build social proof and also how AI agents will be changing things.

The period we’re in right now really reminds me of the early days of Google when almost everybody has heard of the name and people are starting to experiment with it and use it. And just like in the early days of Google, the sooner you start trying to get your website in there, the better. It will only get harder down the road.