The SEO Game for Websites & Business HAS CHANGED!
For years, digital marketing was simple: SEO is king. We were taught to meticulously stuff websites with keywords, install powerful tools like Yoast or RankMath, and hire experts who promised that holy grail: Google Rank Number One. But what if that conventional wisdom, which dominated the last 5 to 15 years, is now, frankly, the “old way” of doing things? Today, as Artificial Intelligence (AI) rapidly integrates into every aspect of information consumption, simply chasing Google’s top spot is no longer enough. Are you ready to admit that your current marketing strategy, heavily reliant on old-school SEO, is holding your business back from truly connecting with the modern consumer?
Why Reliance on Keywords-Only SEO is Now a Dangerous Strategy
The foundational principle of traditional SEO was simple: insert enough relevant keywords so that when someone searched Google or another engine, they would hopefully be led to your site for an answer. This led to common practices like keyword stuffing—a notorious example being the year 2000, when “Britney Spears” was frequently found on websites totally unrelated to the star, purely for traffic generation.
However, today, solely relying on basic SEO—installing a tool, generating keywords, and adding the Google Tag Manager or Facebook Pixel—is considered a “really, really bad thing to do”. While SEO basics 101 still involves things like sticking advertisements on a WordPress site to monetize traffic or hoping a customer likes what they see and hires you, the overall impact has waned. Many companies still hire SEO experts who claim they will get you to page one, often relying on sponsored adverts. But savvy users, like many of us, tend to “dodge sponsored adverts” and look for items genuinely ranking in the top five. More importantly, even reaching the top five doesn’t guarantee a conversion unless the user genuinely likes the substance and personality they find. The core problem? Keywords alone do not build the necessary trust or brand presence in the modern digital landscape.
The Great Shift: Video Marketing as the New Storytelling Cornerstone
The real shift in focus away from mere keywords was driven by the rise of video marketing. Over the last two to three years, platforms like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Insta reels, and video content on Twitter and LinkedIn have taken off, fundamentally changing how businesses engage.
Video marketing isn’t about the hard sell—it’s not just about “buy this, you’re going to make loads of money”. Instead, the impactful strategy centres on storytelling and building your personal brand alongside your business brand. This requires authenticity: sharing the journey, the struggles, the good, the bad, and the ugly. People crave genuine connection.
“People love real people, real stories… normal people attract normal people because really you want normal people to be buying from you.”
When utilizing video, you transition from being a simple content creator to a recognized expert or guru. Instead of just selling, you share advice and tips. If you’re a landscaper, share a tip on the correct lawnmower setting for the current weather. If you run concerts, discuss guitar tuning. By sharing expert advice, you subtly demonstrate your expertise without explicitly saying it. This engagement—communicating and conversing with people—is what leads users to trust you, go to your website, and ultimately buy a product or hire you.
An unexpected bonus: If you still care about SEO, you don’t have to choose between video and text. You can use free tools like CapCut to generate captions, stick those captions into ChatGPT, and prompt the AI to “Maintain my voice the way I speak and turn this into a blog post”. This clever workflow provides both the necessary video content and an SEO-friendly blog post.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO): The New Frontier Driven by AI
We are rapidly moving into the era of Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), which is being hailed as the “new big thing” you must take seriously. AEO targets the new wave of Artificial Intelligence platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and Perplexity.
Why the shift? Many consumers now use these AI tools to perform deep research. If you want to research a holiday, find a new car, or look up coding snippets, AI provides immediate, customized answers. Previously, you might have gone to Google and read “blog post after blog post after blog post” or comparison sites. With AI, users can prompt for continuous refinement: “Tell me about holidays that are less than 3 hours air travel time… but it must have a hot tub”. AI provides a tailored answer immediately.
The critical question for businesses is: How do I get AI to start recommending to me?. It’s not about sending ChatGPT a postcard; it relies on influencing the data AI scrapes.
The surprising role of Bing: While Google dominates search, AI platforms like ChatGPT are “scraping off the internet,” primarily from Bing. This means businesses can no longer afford to ignore Bing Search Console submissions and basic web practices geared toward Bing.
FAQs: The Strategic Weapon to Influence AI Recommendations
Influencing AI platforms to recommend your business requires blending basic SEO practices with targeted AEO strategies. This means regular blogging and ensuring your content is always current.
However, the most impactful, yet frequently overlooked, tactical step is the comprehensive use of FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions).
FAQs on your website are a powerful way for AI to discover and categorize your information. Merely having an accordion FAQ on one page isn’t enough; you must think strategically. You need to:
- Increase FAQ Volume: Ensure you have enough FAQs to cover a broad range of user questions.
- Regular Refreshing: FAQs must be refreshed and updated regularly to appeal to AI, which “is going to love people who are current”.
- Targeted Placement: Consider if you need relevant FAQs across multiple pages, not just confined to one specific section.
By doing this foundational work, you are effectively giving the AI exactly the structured, question-and-answer data it needs to recommend your site when a user prompts it with a query.
A Final Caution: Beware of AEO Scams
As AEO becomes the new buzzword, be highly cautious. The market is already seeing “experts lining up to sign you up to their AEO plan” and charging for services that promise to get you into the AI engines and page one Google.
Do not fall for it. While strategic work is required, much of the foundational legwork can be made easier or done for free with the right tools. The core strategy remains: do not ignore basic SEO, do not ignore video marketing, and urgently implement a robust AEO strategy centred on relevant, current, and frequent content.
FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)
Q: What exactly does AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) mean?
AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization. It is the practice of optimizing content specifically so that Artificial Intelligence platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok can easily find, scrape, and use your information to formulate answers to user queries.
Q: Do I really need to worry about Bing if Google is still dominant?
Yes, you need to worry about Bing. Sources indicate that AI platforms like ChatGPT primarily scrape information from Bing. If you want your website to be found by these AI answer engines, you should submit to the Bing Search Console and ensure your basic SEO practices appeal to Bing as well as Google.
Q: Can I turn my video content into SEO-friendly blog posts easily?
Absolutely. You can use free apps like CapCut to generate video captions. These captions can then be fed into ChatGPT with a prompt to maintain your voice and structure the text into a full blog post, effectively generating two high-value content pieces (video and text) for one effort.
Q: Is traditional SEO completely useless now?
No, basic SEO should not be ignored. AI relies on scraping the internet, so you still need foundational SEO (keywords, quality content, structure) to ensure your content is locatable by the AI platforms in the first place. However, relying only on SEO is a bad strategy.
Future Outlook: The Convergence of Strategy
The landscape has irrevocably changed. The future of digital visibility is a powerful convergence of three pillars: robust basic SEO (ensuring content exists for scraping), consistent, authentic video marketing (building brand trust and sharing expertise), and strategic AEO (specifically structuring content, particularly FAQs, to appeal to powerful AI platforms). Ignoring any one of these pillars risks obsolescence.
The real competitive edge will belong to those who realize that AI is simply a new intermediary, requiring a shift in how we structure our answers, not just our keywords.
Are you treating AI as just another search engine, or are you actively structuring your information to ensure AI recommends you as the definitive answer?
