COLLINSEO

Breaking news! You can now see what your ecommerce customes search in Google AI..

It's basically impossible to see what people search in Google AI.. But if you have an ecommerce you now can!

To find it, go to Google Merchant Center, open Analytics, then Products, and under AI Performance you'll see the keywords.

If you don't know it, Google Merchant Center is Google's main ecommerce tool. It's how you make sure your products show up in Google and in the Shopping tab, and it's completely free. So if you have an ecommerce store and you don't have Merchant Center yet, forget about the topic of this video. That alone is a big win. Go and create it.

But here's the problem. It's not out for everyone yet. I have a huge client in Merchant Center, went to Products, and it's not there. And I need it.

The good news is Google already created a help page for it, which means it's coming soon. It specifically says you'll see keyword performance from AI Mode and AI Overviews. Hopefully they give us the actual prompts people use too, but I doubt it.

#SEO #DigitalMarketing

I broke it down in this video. Check it out: youtube.com/shorts/h-yg09im5b...

14 hours ago | [YT] | 1

COLLINSEO

Breaking news! Google just made AI Overviews it's default mode..

That means your SEO links are not showing at all.. and everyone is freaking out!

You search a keyword, scroll down and down, and that's it. Just the AI answer. No more results.

Google says they are only doing this for keywords where they think the AI answer is enough, which is insane. We know Google loves doing this kind of thing, but honestly I was a bit surprised. AI Overviews has already killed a lot of traffic to websites, but at least Google made some effort to cite sites and make the links bigger so people click on them. This goes completely against that. It basically says we're not even going to show websites.

You can imagine the debate this is creating in the SEO world. And this is the important part. If Google keeps taking more and more traffic from websites, sites won't be incentivized to create pages anymore. And then AI won't have anywhere to get the information from.

So as a marketer, you have two options. You can complain, and yes, it's annoying. Or you can work on showing up in the AI answers instead.

#SEO #DigitalMarketing

I broke it down in this video. Check it out: youtube.com/shorts/QholqhaSTj...

1 day ago | [YT] | 2

COLLINSEO

If you want to track yor AI citations it will cost you 7,000 dollars a year..

But somehow.. I found a tool that does it for free!

An AI citation is basically when someone searches for something in ChatGPT or another AI tool and your business gets mentioned. Sometimes you get mentioned with a link, sometimes without one.

And before you say nobody clicks those links, one of my clients went from zero to more than 500 people a month coming to their website from AI traffic.

And the interesting part is that this traffic is seriously engaged. People coming from AI are actually showing stronger buying intent than the SEO traffic we used to think was the gold standard.

But first, you need to know if you're actually being cited. And more importantly, you need to know whether your competitors are being cited instead.

Doing this manually would take forever. That's why I started using this free Chrome extension.

You just add your website, your business name, and your competitors' websites. Then you add the prompts you think your customers are searching in AI and let it run.

It automatically tracks the answers and tells you how often your business was mentioned, how often your competitors were mentioned, and which other websites are getting cited.

And this last part is actually one of my favorite features.

It can uncover competitors you didn't even know existed. One of my clients had a website showing up as an AI competitor that I had never seen in the traditional SEO space.

AI search is still so new that we're discovering these things as we go.

#SEO #DigitalMarketing

I broke it down in this video. Check it out: youtube.com/shorts/IoaLR34F2b...

4 days ago | [YT] | 4

COLLINSEO

Google is leaking the prompts your customers use when they chat with AI Overviews..

WTF honestly.. But these prompts are gold for your business. And you easily get them.. for now!

When Google launched the new AI report, people were excited. Then everyone immediately asked the same question: where are the keywords?

But then people started noticing something strange in the classic Search Console queries report. Some of the "keywords" didn't look like keywords at all. They looked like actual conversations.

And that's when it got interesting.

It started looking like Google was showing us some of the prompts people use when interacting with AI, whether they're typing or using voice.

And if you're a marketer, these are incredibly valuable because your customers aren't just giving the AI a keyword. They're giving it context, questions, problems, and the exact way they're thinking about what they need.

The good thing is that you can pull this data out yourself. Export your Google Search Console data as a CSV, drop it into the tool I use, and look for the conversational data.

You'll start seeing the actual prompts people are using inside AI Overviews and other AI experiences.

You can even pivot the data to uncover more of them.

For a business owner, this can tell you a lot about what your customers actually care about. It can help you spot product ideas, variations, pain points, and questions you probably wouldn't have thought of yourself.

And for marketers, it's basically a new source of content ideas straight from the customer's mouth.

I just created a full YouTube tutorial showing exactly how I pull this data and how to get around the 1,000-keyword limit in Google Search Console.

#SEO #DigitalMarketing

I broke it down in this video. Check it out: youtube.com/shorts/ddAzeBIkB2...

5 days ago | [YT] | 5

COLLINSEO

This site just went from 3K to 21K traffic coming from AI..

And I'm going to show you exactly what they did.. Because you can do it too!

When I looked at the traffic, there was this massive spike. It looked scary. I added a filter to only show AI traffic, and that's where it got interesting.

They built their content around the entire customer journey. First, they created top-of-the-funnel content for people who were just getting into the sport.

Then they moved into middle-of-the-funnel topics for people who already understood football and wanted to learn more.

And finally, they went all the way down to bottom-of-the-funnel searches like "soccer academy in Europe," where people are actually ready to spend money.

But in my opinion, that's not even the most interesting part.

When you open one of their pages, it looks like a normal blog at first. Then you scroll down and see all these specific questions.

At first, I thought, "Hmm, this looks like keyword stuffing. How many questions are too many?"

But when you actually look at them, every question is targeting a different intent.

And the important part is that they answer each question immediately in the first few lines instead of hiding the answer somewhere inside a huge block of text.

If you've been following me for a while, you'll know this is actually one of my clients. And I'm going to tell you something I wasn't even planning on sharing.

When I started working with them, I didn't find 1,000 keywords, I found 200,000.

And that is what finally gave me enough data to understand what content we should actually create.

200,000 sounds like a ridiculous number. But when you have that much data, you stop guessing what people want and start seeing the patterns.

#SEO #DigitalMarketing

I broke it down in this video. Check it out: youtube.com/shorts/d4u4MVvcDm...

1 week ago | [YT] | 3

COLLINSEO

Breaking news! Google AI is citing itself rather than your business..

What a joke. But if you do this, you'll force it so cite you!

When people search for a business or service, Google may mention your business but link to your Google Business Profile instead of your website.

If you run an e-commerce business, it may mention your products but link to your Merchant Center listings.

So, you could argue that having these profiles properly set up is becoming even more important. If your information is not there,

Google has less structured information about what you offer. The good thing is that setting them up is free and takes very little time.

For e-commerce businesses, create a Google Merchant Center account and add your products. You can also add products directly to your Google Business Profile if that setup makes sense for your business.

For service businesses, it is even simpler. Create your Google Business Profile, go to Services, and add exactly what you offer using the main categories and relevant subcategories.

And there is one more thing you can do if you want to go a step further: add schema markup to your website. It is a little more technical, but it gives search engines structured information about your business, products, or services.

Google already knows who you are. The question is where you are making it easiest for Google to find, understand, and cite the information about your business.

#SEO #DigitalMarketing

I broke it down in this video. Check it out: youtube.com/shorts/1JuAupw3GU...

1 week ago | [YT] | 5

COLLINSEO

Breaking news! ChatGPT and Yelp are partnering, and it affects you business big time..

Because if you do this, AI's will recommend you before your competitors!

I was just scanning the news when I saw it. At first, I thought, “Nah, whatever.” Then I saw the word reviews and had to look into it.

ChatGPT can use Yelp reviews when recommending businesses. And there may even be special buttons or actions connected to Yelp, but only if your business has a Yelp profile.

So if you don't have a Yelp account, I would honestly create one. It's free, takes a few minutes, and you also get a backlink to your website. I already created one for my client.

These are the small things that can make a real difference when you're trying to improve your visibility in AI search. For one of my clients, we are now showing up for highly targeted keywords and being mentioned alongside Barcelona and Real Madrid.

Seeing my client in the same AI answer as those two was honestly crazy. And it's exactly why I pay attention to partnerships like this.

#SEO #DigitalMarketing

I broke it down in this video. Check it out: youtube.com/shorts/qmPoxJE8me...

1 week ago | [YT] | 6

COLLINSEO

Breaking news! Your site might start blocking AIs from September 15th..

And if you block them, you won't show up in AI answers. The good thing? It takes a sec to unblock!

This setting is inside Cloudflare. You might not even know your website uses Cloudflare because it works in the background as a CDN, helping your website load faster. If you check your website using the tools I mention, you can find out whether Cloudflare is being used on your site.

Cloudflare seems to have taken this step because of how AI companies are crawling websites, and honestly, I don't completely disagree with the reason behind it. But having AI crawlers automatically blocked from September 15 could be a problem if you want your business to appear in AI answers.

The setting is inside Security Settings. Look for the AI crawler control and make sure it is set to allow rather than block.

This is especially important if AI visibility is part of your strategy. With one of my clients, we went from zero to around 500 visitors from AI traffic in two months. And what I did was exactly what I explained in the video.

If your AI crawlers are blocked, you're potentially closing the door on that traffic before it even has a chance to reach you.

#SEO #DigitalMarketing

I broke it down in this video. Check it out: youtube.com/shorts/pQA3p5pNZQ...

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 4

COLLINSEO

You almost rank for this, and you don't even know it..

You're literally 5 clicks away from showing up when your customers wanna spend money on you! So do this

Go into Google Search Console and use the new AI filter. Ask it to show you bottom-of-the-funnel transactional queries. You'll see the searches where the commercial intent is already there.

And honestly, this matters even more now. AI is taking away a lot of the top-of-the-funnel informational traffic. But when someone is ready to spend money, Google still needs to show actual businesses and pages that solve that need.

Then turn on average position and filter for queries where your position is greater than five. These are keywords where you are not ranking particularly well, but I would sort them by clicks. If Google is already sending you traffic for a keyword, that's a strong signal that it already likes your page. You might just need to improve the page enough to move higher.

Find a relevant keyword, click into it, and then check the Pages tab. This shows you the exact page Google currently thinks is relevant.

But this is what most people miss. Copy that page URL, go back to your original transactional query filter, and then filter the data by that exact page.

Now you can see all the transactional keywords that Google likes for that specific page. These are not random keyword ideas. These are commercial searches where Google already associates your page with the topic.

For one of my client's pages, I found a keyword where the page doesn't even mention the word "program." If I simply add that topic in a useful way and give people real value around it, that's an incredibly easy opportunity to improve the ranking.

That's the kind of low-hanging fruit I would be looking for before creating more content.

#SEO #DigitalMarketing

I broke it down in this video. Check it out: youtube.com/shorts/X3VC4Ks6Or...

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 6

COLLINSEO

Right now journalists are looking for you to help them..

And if you, do you'll get a life-changing backlink to your site!

I found a Yahoo journalist looking for a roundup of matching clothes and pajamas. If you sell those products, that's a pretty simple opportunity. You just open the request, see what they're looking for, and contact them.

Sometimes the opportunity takes you to a website where you can reach the journalist. Other times, they'll give you their Twitter account so you can contact them there.

The logic is pretty simple. Journalists need interesting things to write about, and if you run a business, you probably know a lot about your industry. They need experts and sources, and you need the exposure and backlink. When the publication is a large website, that backlink can be extremely valuable.

The tool I'm using is free and lets you contact journalists directly. There's also a section called Questions, where journalists post more detailed requests. I actually prefer these because you know exactly what they're looking for, which makes it easier to give them a useful answer.

You can even respond directly inside the tool, although the free plan limits how many answers you can send each month.

And instead of scrolling through hundreds of random requests, use the categories. If your client is in nutrition, for example, filter for nutrition and you'll only see requests that are actually relevant to them.

This is one of those link-building strategies that doesn't require you to beg websites for backlinks.

Find a journalist who already needs what you know, help them, and let the backlink come naturally.

#SEO #DigitalMarketing

I broke it down in this video. Check it out: youtube.com/shorts/HR2HSCh9og...

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 5