SEO Listener Q&A: AI Writing, Outbound Links, Ranking Without Backlinks, and Is SEO Still Worth It?

We're answering listener questions today. Got questions about using AI for SEO writing. What to do and what not to do. When to link out from your content and what content you should link out from, blog posts, conversion pages, a comment about ranking without backlinks. I really like that comment. And the last question is somebody asking if it's time to move on from SEO. So, this is going to be a good episode. First question from River Samso 5871 on yesterday's episode. Stop hoarding SEO authority. No follow links don't work the way you think. That was episode 1 of this show. And this person said, when do you recommend linking out in blog posts or anything else? So the refresher is Google recommends linking out. And SEO experiments have shown that pages where you link out can outperform pages where you don't link out. There was a test. All variables were equal. Five of the pages were linking out. They were all targeting the same keyword. Five of the pages were linking out. The other five were not. The five pages that were linking out all outperform the pages that were not linking out. I recommend linking out anywhere that you genuinely want to share something or if you are giving statistics or facts where people would expect or want the source for this. You might say something. If you're giving a fact or a stat that is very surprising, citing your source for that will make you more credible. This could also be, it's not just for blog posts. This could also be SEO sales pages where you are targeting a bottom offunnel keyword, explaining why you are the best fit for that keyword. And maybe when you are explaining why you are the best fit for this bottom offunnel keyword, you're also giving a surprising statistic or something similar. And if you're giving a statistic, you should cite your source. And if your page doesn't have a ton of existing outlinks already, then link out to this. Site your source with a link because that makes you more credible. Easy example, I recently shared how SEO landing pages and SEO product pages are some of the most cited content in chat. SEO landing pages are cited 15% of the time. SEO product pages are cited, I believe, 14.2% of the time, something like that. But I got to say where that research came from and that comes from PromptWatch. So I'm giving a surprising statistic and I'm citing my source. By the way, compact keywords is my SEO course thing on my shirt is entirely about making these SEO landing pages and SEO product pages that are doing so extraordinarily well. Getting cited in chat GPT worth checking out. Second question is on the episode episode 999. How to humanize AI content before it destroys your SEO. This comment is from 12T who said, "I agree with using humanlike wording to humanize the content, but I draw the line at using incorrect punctuation." So that episode was sharing Leila Hermosy's internal memo to Acquisition.com on not using AI to write memos within the company because she was sick of how inauthentic it was. She would have just rather had the notes that went into the prompt to make the memo than the AI written memo itself. So do you need to have incorrect punctuation or incorrect writing so that you don't sound like AI? Should you deliberately have your writing be worse so that you don't sound like grammatically worse so that you don't sound like AI? And my answer to that is no. Definitely no. It's just you should remove the biggest giveaways within AI writing. So that's m dashes, that's words like delve, popular chatpt writing formats where you have the first word, you have bullets and the first word of the bullet is bolded, there's a colon after it or it the not that chatpt likes to use this not that in its writing all the time. It's not theory, it's action. The thing is, even then, as long as you remove the biggest giveaways, you will reduce pogo sticking a good deal and stop the loss of trust that you might experience with having obvious AI writing. When you have obvious AI writing, it's more likely that searchers will leave immediately and go to a different result because they might not trust you. Or even if they stay on your page, if they suspect it's AI, they might not trust you enough to convert. You don't have to remove everything. You don't have to actually next comment is about this. So it's very complex said I hate that we can't use these words anymore. I have a deep and these are chachi pt buzzwords that it's very com that this commenter is referring to. I have a more formal writing style and I use a lot of the words on the list like insights, deep understanding, resonate, valuable, leverage, intricate, systemic, inherent, adhere. I use those words all the time. Honestly, I use those words too. I just don't overuse them. And at the end of the day, you can write how you want, but just learn AI giveaways to reduce the most egregious signs of AI writing. It's up to you. If you like to use M dashes, and you are aware that it might set off red flags with people, they might think that your writing is AI writing because you're using M dashes, but you're still going to use M dashes is you can do what you want. But the fact is, if you have the most obvious signs of AI writing, people are probably going to think it's AI writing. So, just learn what those signs are. You can learn that in that episode. You might already know if you're using chatpt all the time. You probably already know. And then don't use them a ton and that will be good enough. You can still use the words that you want to use. Just don't don't use them a ton. If you only see M dashes and you see a ton of M dashes in a in a piece of writing, that's obvious AI writing. If the opening paragraph starts with in the age of or we're going to delve into this or it's not theory, it's action. That's obvious AI writing. So yeah, learn the most egregious signs. Avoid them and you can still write how you want. Last comments comments questions. These were on episode 974. Google's new AI patent could replace your website. There's about two Google patents. The second one is about how Google uses random variance when it suspects that you are trying to game its algorithm with either relevance or backlinks. And so it will make you have worse rankings to see if your behavior changes. That was the second patent. I'll share the first patent in a minute. And for that second patent, commenter Daniel Mo 1689 said, "I remember Google testing rankings by pushing your site down 15 years ago. That was considered a great signal and we pushed harder for weeks and got even better rankings. That's so funny. This was in the context of link building. Now with technical SEO, we do no back links on 90% of our clients and we outrank people with strong link profiles. And I love that comment because the thing about search engine optimization is it's so much about relevance and topical authority and clear site architecture so that the SEO your your SEO link juices flowing to important SEO pages. These things are basic and anybody can do them or pruning a bloated site. And honestly relevance and pruning and reducing pogo sticking and niching down so you have topical authority. All these things are so much easier than securing an ultra authoritative backlink profile. All the things I just described are so much easier than securing the best backlinks. The best backlinks are on pages that are indexed that pass a lot of referral traffic on relevant pages. It's the referral traffic is relevant on authoritative domains. Optimizing your site and your content for relevance and a clear site architecture is so much easier than that. And so [clears throat] I like this comment because the person said, "We do no backlinks on 90% of our strong link profiles." By the way, a lot of what I share in compact keywords is finding super high intent keywords that you don't really need backlinks for. You'll need a to have a minimum backlink profile. You can't just have a site that has zero backlinks. But if you're a regular business doing regular marketing, there's a good chance you have sufficient links already. So that first patent in the episode was about how Google could be using AI to alter your site for relevance to a keyword. This means it might add in things like chat bots. It might change your H1. It might add in AI annotations. It could just completely change the look of your page or create a new page. And so at Lewis O agency commented and said, "Edward, do you think it's time for us SEOs to move on? Why even use or market on Google anymore if it's basically getting rid of web pages? I might as well make videos which has higher BTOC sales conversions like YouTube, Tik Tok, and some B2B." Well, one I was just going to pause there and say if you are doing SEO for your site and you are selling stuff, you should also be making videos targeting the same keywords that you are targeting with your website. It is a no-brainer to do that because videos across all platforms are doing so phenomenally well in SEO right now. You can get so much coverage in a SER by having a page on your site that targets a keyword and videos that targets the same keyword. And so Louiso Agency continued and said, "I've been marinating since this news, but haven't formalized my final opinion. If Google will be just AI slop text posts, most users might as well use better alternatives with more features than Google search." By the way, this is an honest question, not trying to dog our SEO profession or you. I love your channel. Thank you. Thank you, Louis. So one these AI generated pages or enhanced pages to start it's likely that this will just be for paid ads paid ads within Google. It's possible that this might roll out to organic search but you know Google doesn't use patents all the time. There's there's patents that it has that it won't use. Even if they use this patent the people who understand SEO will still benefit a lot from this patent. Honestly, it's not that different from making sure that you have a lot of documentation, that you have positive reviews out there for AI search and for consumers, that you are making your site relevant to the use cases and the bottom ofunnel searches that will bring you customers, that will bring you users, that will bring you warm leads. It's not that different from doing normal SEO. The people who understand patent. Is it time to leave SEO? Here's the thing. SEO is still the only marketing channel where you can specifically target people looking to buy what you sell and they are looking right now to buy what you sell and you can target these people for free with no ad spend. SEO is the only channel where you can do that. So SEO is my favorite marketing channel. There's a lot of people who who used to love SEO who don't like SEO as much anymore and a lot of these people are bloggers. The thing is if you are just doing top offunnel publishing and you are trying to monetize through affiliate revenue or AdSense, you are going to have a much harder time and Google will not be kind to you. You will you're targeting keywords where clicks are going to AI overviews or people aren't leaving chat GPT. And even then, if you're not doing things completely by the book, you still might get hit, like what happened with Google's helpful content update. There's this comment that I found from the famous indie hacker Peter Levelvels about just how bad AdSense is. Somebody asked him, "Peter, have you tried running AdSense/Miavine ads on your programmatic SEO pages?" And Peter said AdSense is incredibly low amounts of money. Photo AI, that's his AI, photo, SAS. Actually, I cover photo how to do SEO for photo AI. I cover that in compact keywords. And he says photo AI would make $150 a month with $156,000 visitors, $1 CPM. Now it makes instead of $150 a month, it makes $110,000 a month with subscriptions instead. So about $700 times more. So, if you are trying to monetize with AdSense or even affiliate, it could be a lot harder than if you figure out your own product that you can sell. I I can't stress this enough. You can use cloud code, you can use replet, you can use Google's anti-gravity and you can spin up a SAS in a couple of days that is relevant to your niche and do bottom offunnel SEO for it and you already have the topical authority and then you are going to if you are one of these top offunnel publishers, you are going to go, "Wow, SEO is the best marketing channel. I can't believe I didn't do this sooner. My advice is if you want to learn SEO or if you're doing SEO and you don't have something to sell, please, please find something to sell and find something to sell that you can do SEO for and you will be so much happier and SEO will be so much more fun. So, thank you to all the commenters for these questions and I got many more. I'm going to I'm going to answer more comments, more comments and questions in in future episodes. I like doing this. We got more guests coming up. Great guests coming up. Oh my gosh, more awesome topics. And that is everything that I wanted to share with you on today's episode. This is 1,04 days in a row doing this podcast. Episode 1004. If you watch us on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening. And I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye now.