SEO remains one of the most powerful ways to grow your business, but too many businesses—small and large—make avoidable mistakes that cost them rankings, traffic, and revenue. In this webinar, Emanuel Petrescu, SEO consultant and founder of How About Some Marketing?, breaks down the biggest SEO pitfalls and how to fix them with practical, real-world strategies.
What We Covered in This Webinar:
🔹 What SEO Really Is – A simple but effective definition that cuts through the noise
🔹 SEO’s Three Pillars – Content, Technical SEO, and Backlinks explained in plain terms
🔹 Google’s True Goal – Understanding why Google ranks websites and how to align your strategy
🔹 Common SEO Myths – Why SEO is not free, and why just “getting a green light” in Yoast isn’t enough
The Biggest SEO Mistakes & How to Fix Them:
❌ Falling for Misinformation – Why trusting the wrong SEO advice can be costly
❌ Ignoring Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) – The missing link in many failed SEO campaigns
❌ Overlooking EEAT (Expertise, Experience, Authority, Trust) – How Google measures credibility
❌ Technical Debt & Content Decay – Why outdated website structure can silently kill rankings
❌ Neglecting Local SEO – Why your Google Business Profile is critical for visibility
❌ Expecting Instant Results – Why SEO is a long-term game and what realistic timelines look like
🎯 Bonus Mistakes Discussed:
🔸 Not Embracing AI in SEO – Why AI won’t replace SEO but will transform how we do it
🔸 Not Leveraging Content Properly – How to optimize blogs, videos, and other assets for search rankings
Live Q&A Topics Answered:
❓ How do you convince management to invest in fixing SEO issues?
❓ What’s the #1 mistake photographers and videographers make with SEO?
❓ How do algorithm updates impact SEO, and how can businesses stay ahead?
❓ What’s the best way to repurpose content without hurting rankings?
❓ How much does SEO really cost, and how do you choose the right SEO consultant?
🔗 Full Blog Recap & Insights: https://emanuelp.com/common-seo-mistakes-businesses-make/
💡 Want to master SEO audits? Take Emanuel’s Udemy course:
🎓 SEO Audit Course – A Masterclass for Years to Come: https://www.udemy.com/course/seo-audit-course-a-masterclass-for-years-to-come/
Key Takeaways
In this insightful webinar hosted by Emanuel, an experienced SEO and digital marketing consultant from Toronto, viewers gain valuable knowledge about common SEO mistakes businesses make, regardless of their size. The session covers a wide range of topics, including the importance of SEO, understanding ideal customer profiles, tackling technical debt accumulation, and the strategic use of AI in marketing. Emmanuel emphasizes the long-term benefits of SEO, shares tips on avoiding misinformation, and provides actionable advice for enhancing website content and structure. The session concludes with a Q&A segment addressing practical issues and specific questions from participants. Attendees are encouraged to engage, subscribe, and utilize SEO resources effectively.
Show Notes
00:00 Introduction and Webinar Overview
01:07 About How Abouts Marketing
02:45 Starting the Presentation: Importance of SEO
04:38 Introduction to SEO and Common Mistakes
05:46 Defining SEO and Its Key Components
09:59 Top SEO Mistakes Businesses Make
15:41 Technical SEO Challenges for Large Enterprises
18:20 Understanding the Value of SEO
19:52 Leveraging E-A-T for Better SEO
22:51 Expecting Immediate Results and Long-Term SEO Strategy
25:54 Do All Businesses Need SEO?
27:10 Embracing AI in SEO and Marketing
28:06 AI in Content Creation: The Reality Check
28:56 Leveraging AI for Ideal Customer Profiles
29:57 Embracing AI as an Assistant
31:31 SEO and the Importance of Professional Help
32:40 Engaging with Clients for SEO Success
34:02 Q&A: SEO Mistakes and AI Impact
34:18 Q&A: SEO Strategies for Photographers and Videographers
36:26 Q&A: Convincing Management and AI’s Negative Impact
42:30 Q&A: SEO Costs and Content Repurposing
46:54 Q&A: Algorithm Updates and SEO Best Practices
49:16 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Episode Transcript
Hi everyone. And welcome to another webinar under the How About Some Marketing? Umbrella. Today, I’m your host and guest as well. My name is Emanuel and I’m an SEO and digital marketing consultant from Toronto, and I’m your guest and host for tonight on a webinar with a topic of common SEO Mistakes businesses, large or small, make when it comes to their SEO -search engine optimization.
I did prepare a couple of slides for tonight. And I’ll be sharing them with you shortly. Feel free to ask any questions at any time. We’ll have a Q and A session at the end. I have Sabrina who will help me in monitoring the chat and before we dive in, I just want to say a couple of words about How About Some Marketing? How About Some Marketing? essentially is a hub for people to come and become better at their marketing.
We do this through education and mindset reframing. I have brought up in the past experts that talk about branding mission, vision, values, storytelling, and also technical stuff, as in SEO tools, link building, and so forth. And I have prepared for 2025 and beyond an amazing rooster of guests that will be sharing their knowledge and their information.
Now, before anything else, and we, before we dive right in, as my friend chat GPT says, I wouldn’t be much of a marketer if I wouldn’t ask you to go to how about some marketing. com and subscribe to my newsletter, if you haven’t done so. On the same site, you’ll see past recordings.
This recording will be available in a couple of days as well, and future announcements, webinars, courses, and all the good stuff that we will be adding to the website. Okay. Now, a reminder about the chat. If you have any questions, feel free to drop them in there. Thank you so much, Sabrina, for putting the URL over there as well.
And without further ado, I will be sharing my screen and start today’s presentation. And the purpose of today’s presentation is to create awareness and education about SEO, search engine optimization, and its importance even today in the era of AI, chat GPT, Gemini. Claude and other LLMs. That being said please let me know if you, first of all, hear me okay.
And also if you see my screen that should be coming up right now.
Okay. Can I gain a thumbs if everything’s fine. I can see the screen as well. loud and clear. Thank you so much for confirming. So actually, before we start the presentation, I just want to give a shout out to our friends and collaborators who have been with us for a while. We’ll start with Aspiration Marketing, Joachim Koch.
He’s been a friend and a supporter of our efforts since the beginning, Organic Growth, Kevin Carney, Toronto Marketing Hub, Daniel and Pavlo, who’s been a supporter of this project as well. And they host events live in Toronto and I actually gave this presentation live in person, a lighter version of it sometime in late September.
And whoever subscribed to the newsletter, they’ve seen the slides. Or at least the preview. That being said, let’s start the presentation and start with top mistakes businesses make when it comes to their SEO.
But an introduction a little bit about myself, who am I? I’m an SEO and digital marketing consultant. I worked for some companies such as Yellow Pages, WPP Kantar, Divorce Marketing Group, which is a very niche agency. I’m a course creator. I created a course about SEO audits that’s available on Udemy.
And I always have a deal for my subscribers. So if you’re on my newsletter and you’re interested in this course, feel free to hit reply and let me know if you want to access it, I’m the founder of How About Some Marketing? We help small to medium sized businesses, and everyone to become better at their marketing and to become big businesses through education, coaching, and mindset reframing.
I’ve been featured in a couple of industry outlets. I’ve written some articles, contributed to expert leadership and so forth. That being said. Again, a big an announcement about How About Some Marketing?, my newsletter, the newsletter, and where you can when you can get yourself on board, that being said, SEO.
Okay. So let’s start with defining what SEO is. If you ask 10 SEO professionals, they’ll probably give you. 10 different, slightly different answers. My definition of SEO is figuring out how to be on top of the Google search results, also called SERPs, without giving money to Google through Google Ads.
A simple definition. Now, you might have noticed I chose my words carefully here. I didn’t say free. It’s a common misconception. SEO is many things, but free is not one of them. And we’ll see what I mean by that. Now, I often describe SEO as being a three legged stool. One of the legs being backlinks, which are essentially links from other websites that point to your site, acting like recommendation or votes, if you may.
And it helps the search engines, Google in this case, understand your site is trustworthy and valuable. And measuring these backlinks is what differentiated Google back in the day from the other more popular search engines at that time, Yahoo and AltaVista. Another leg of the stool is the website architecture.
I’ve included here all the technicals, the frameworks, JavaScript, the user experience, the UI, indexing, crawling site speed, and all the good stuff that you hear when you do your research and try to learn about SEO. And arguably the most important part of SEO is content. Content in the form of optimized pages, blogs, videos, podcasts, webinars, case studies, interviews, and many other types of content.
Now we’ll see that in time everybody who’s been engaged in doing SEO or working with a company that help their business with their SEO see that not all legs are equal and that’s a reality. Now this Google is one of the world’s biggest companies and we figured out what it wants to do. I want you to remember two things from this webinar, if there’s two things I want you to remember, one of them is: that Google will always show its users the best possible answer for their query. So that’s what Google has been trying to do since day one and still does today. Their users, me, you, and everybody who’s doing a query will need to find what they’re looking for, because that’s how they will come back and use Google again, otherwise it won’t be any use, so it’s our job, if you’re a business owner, or my job as a campaign manager working for you to help Google understand that you are the best answer when it comes to somebody searching something that you’re offering a service, a product, and so forth. Excuse me for one second. I do need to take a sip of water.
The other thing that I would, I like you to remember is that SEO is more than getting a green light from Yoast. Yoast is a very popular SEO plugin for WordPress websites. And many people are still under the impression that all that SEO is getting that green check mark. As we’ll see, it’s more than that.
So two things, Google will always try to show their users the best possible answer for their query. And again, SEO is more than getting the green light from Yoast. And in my presentation, I’ve tried to include mistakes and other issues from both large or small companies, as I said. Now, mistake number one, can anybody guess?
I’m just going to give you 15 seconds. To see in the chat, if you can guess what’s the number one mistake that most businesses make, not all of them, but just a few don’t make this mistake.
I don’t see anything in the chat, but I’m going to assume that you are thinking about it I see here an omission statement the same. Yeah, that’s correct. That can be a mistake. But the first mistake that most businesses make is not hiring me as their SEO consultant. Okay. That’s a joke. Starting from the top.
One of the biggest mistakes is falling for misinformation. What do I mean by this? Have you ever spoke – you or the business you own or you are part of the business that hires your consultant or an agency, and you spoke with one of those overly enthusiastic sales person who will promise you the world to have you sign the contract and to put you on a monthly retainer.
And then once you do that, crickets, nothing they promised doing this or doing that, but they ended up doing nothing. Believe it or not, this is more common than it should be, unfortunately, even in 2025. Another thing is wasting resources and efforts on ineffective strategies, putting time and money into tactics that either don’t give results or you’re better off putting your effort into something else, for example, building a list of citations that may or your business may or may not need.
Now, I do want to make a note here that many businesses don’t really engage with their campaign managers. This is a topic for another conversation, but if you currently are a client of a SEO campaign, working with an agency I do recommend being as engaged as possible. From my own experience, I can tell you that the most successful campaigns were the ones that also had the client, the stakeholder involved and present, and giving feedback to me, the consultant for me to be able to create a more solid strategy that will eventually help his business make more money.
That’s the idea. It’s also good to check for credentials whenever you engage in hiring somebody for your SEO efforts. Mistake number two. This can apply for big or small businesses alike and is ignoring the ICP. ICP standing for Ideal Customer Profile. This can sound like corporate talk and it is up to a point, but not clearly defining who your ideal customer is you’re off to a bad start from the beginning.
Your SEO strategy will lack direction and identifying your target audience, their needs, their pain points is crucial in developing an effective SEO plan. Now, this theoretically should be simple because you already defined this. In your initial business plan, right? Unfortunately I know for sure that many businesses, small to medium size and to an extent, even some large enterprise ones don’t have it clearly defined.
My recommendation is to take a couple of not minutes, but an hour or so to sit by yourself or with your team. pen and paper and do this exercise. If you Google you’ll find a lot of templates that will help you ask all the right questions and identify that target persona that will help you construct the messaging and all of your marketing activities.
So that’s another tip: I highly recommend doing this exercise.
That obviously results in ineffective targeting, leading to lower return on investment or ROI. I’m going to give an example here that I’ve seen from a large tech company that was focusing on general terms, ranking for general terms, such as “software services”, where in fact, they should have focused on something like “enterprise cloud solutions” that will help them bringing the right visitors and get the right traffic. Now I’m going to say something against my industry, we all like to show an increase in organic traffic, keyword positioning, growth, and so forth. The stats are nice, but at the end of the day, my role, for example, as a consultant is to help the business make more money. So it’s important to identify and do the proper research at the beginning to identify all the important elements that you need to target in order to make more money for the business that you’re working on.
This is my strategy and my approach. Are there any questions so far? If you can drop them now or at the end moving along to mistake number three, this doesn’t apply to small to medium sized businesses, but large enterprises, even government websites often, face technical debt accumulation. And for those of you who don’t know who this is a gentleman from the United States. Dave Ramsey he’s really adamant when it comes to debt. He doesn’t like that at all. And we SEO consultants don’t really like technical debt a lot. What do I mean by that? Large companies with complex websites, especially that have been around for a while, for five, 10, 15, 20 years already have accumulated a lot of garbage, a lot of junk, a lot of code that’s useless over time, of course, unresolved issues, outdated code and stuff like that. This happens usually when a quick fix is made and we all know that those temporary fixes tend to become permanent and one little fix here, one little patch there, one on top of the other in time can accumulate in and have significant negative impact on how the crawlers, Google, the search engines see your site, or don’t see it in some cases because it blocks them.
It’s not uncommon, for example, for a large company to have multiple CMS’s the frameworks that the websites are built from, right? It’s a large, let’s say North American company. They want to start branching out – in Spain, they hire a local agency. They’ll build their websites on a different platform, subfolder or sub domain.
And these can become tricky and can become extremely confusing for the crawlers many times in preventing them showing up for those relevant queries. Something to be aware of, and this is when usually those technical audits come into play. If you’ve are learning about SEO or know a thing or two, inevitably you’ll discover this thing called SEO audits. I know a little bit more on the topic because I actually built a course. As I said at the beginning, not all websites do need such an in depth technical SEO audit. Most of these large enterprise sites do, and this is how the errors come up through cutting really deep.
And sometimes it hurts, but something to be aware of. That’s one of the things that I look at whenever I encounter a large website that’s been around for a while.
Mistake number four is Not understanding the value of SEO, focusing only on the cost of SEO without considering like the long term benefits can be, I consider a mistake.
The initial expense might seem high.
Missing out on significant growth opportunities can happen when businesses overlook the potential of effective SEO. And, I often tell people to look at the SEO as a long term investment that rather than just the cost the benefits I said, are for the long run and that’s it.
I see here that there’s some questions coming. I’m going to address that. at the end because I see it’s a little bit more in depth and I want to address the questions at the end with your permission, of course, if you’re all agree with that. Long story short, not understanding the value of SEO.
As said, SEO is not free. It costs money, but also before money, I would suggest looking at the investment of time and effort you actually put into it. Something to consider as well. Okay, mistake number five is not leveraging EEAT. Now, does anyone know what EEAT, E E A T stand for?
E E A T, it’s an abstract, if you want to say so, metric that Google uses when it choose to rank some websites as opposed to others. It stands for expertise, experience, authority, and trust. And essentially it started for the YMYL, your money or your life websites, medical and financial, but eventually has gone through almost everything.
And essentially Google looks at who is saying whatever it is in the search result. Why would I want to show that result to my users? And I give here an example for, from https://www.verywellhealth.com/, a very good website, just to give you an example of how you can leverage it, E E A T and that’s something that you can apply right away.
Let’s say if you have a blog. Many small businesses simply have the blog template without an author, without his credential. So essentially Google comes in and sees, let’s say your topic is about psychotherapy, about anxiety, how to treat anxiety, techniques to deal with anxiety, stuff like that. Why would Google Or let me put it this way, would Google show your website, which has a title and a good blog, but doesn’t have an author, doesn’t have a date, and doesn’t have all the other pieces of information that can make you an authority on the topic?
Or somebody like Verywell, and this is a screenshot that’s written by Claire Burgos, for example, here, the author, and if you click, if you go on the website and you click, you will see that she has a bio, and it’s also have Fact check by another author, which usually is a it’s an MD. So somebody with high credentials that can confirm that this is something that you Google would want to rank for that specific query.
So small and big companies alike can take advantage of. E E A T with properly implementing it. And there’s plenty of resources on the internet. But again, if you are, have a subscribed to my newsletter, you’ll be able to ask me and I can point you to some places where you can learn more. But that’s something to be aware of.
And I hope if you didn’t know now, I see here some comments. I know that some of you actually know about this. It’s quite important.
Moving along to mistake number six and very common: expecting immediate results.
I used to say this in all my client calls at an agency and a colleague of mine actually made this graphic here because it was too common and inevitably I used to bring it up in all our client meetings and I didn’t come up with it, somebody else said it SEO is the gift that keeps on giving because if you establish the relationship with Google in a sense that he trusts your website to show it when it’s users perform certain queries, then you’ll keep having that traffic, that relevant traffic that inevitably will turn into business.
Mistake number seven continually, sorry is expecting immediate results. Of course, as you are done, right? I said, is the gift that keeps on giving it’s becoming more competitive. The search landscape is even more difficult. We all seen that. The results are not the same that they used to be, even three, four years ago, the map pack takes longer than it used to. The ads also take more of the real estate than it used to up until now. The so called traditionally 10 blue links are not as traditional anymore. That doesn’t mean that SEO cannot bring the relevant results that you need. And even if let’s say the user start asking, and we’ve seen more and more, even myself, I find myself asking ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini and all the LLMs about certain question, where do you think they take their information from?
Also from websites including yours. So you don’t want to make it difficult for them as well. Another common mistake here is to give up too soon because, as I said in SEO things don’t happen overnight. There’s a general rule of thumb that you should see results within six months and on.
So you shouldn’t expect many results within the first six months, but it all depends, you will hear this answer again in the SEO industry. It depends. It depends on your website. It depends on its history. It depends on the EEAT factors and many other things. The sooner you start, the better.
And again as a saying, famous saying goes, don’t believe everything you read on the internet. As said, SEO can be the foundation of a solid digital marketing strategy and is the gift that keeps on giving done right even today? Yes, in the era of AI, LLMs and so forth. Now, this common question, do all businesses need SEO?
The short answer is yes. Some more than others, and some, for example, can get results from other channels faster than from organic one. I’m usually transparent with my the people I work with. I’ll give you an example. Somebody with a nail salon asked me for some recommendation. I asked her budget and I told her that SEO can help her, of course, but for that specific business, I would, invest more into Meta, Instagram campaign will bring more of the relevant relevant audience for you. So in a sense that can also mean SEO. That said, I do have a couple of bonus mistakes and I’m looking to see here if anybody has I an idea of what I’m referring to. I’m going to give another 20 seconds until I refill my glass.
I’m assuming there’s a lag because previously also all the answers started coming after I revealed my next slide. But one of the biggest mistakes that you can make in 2025 and beyond is not embracing the use of AI. And this is not just for SEO but for your marketing efforts and in your business in general.
Make no mistake. This will make or break your business in the next year.
Now, there’s a common misconception that you’ll use AI to do your job. No, it won’t do your job. Kevin is asking me to define embracing. I would say accepting and incorporating it when it makes sense. And there’s plenty of instances where any business, small or big, can take advantage of AI.
Now, many people in my industry, for example, use AI, and many people are still under the impression that if you ask chat GPT to write you a blog about a certain topic, it will do it. And it won’t do the worst job. It will probably do it better than you. But it will still be crap. So just simply putting something in there, somebody said putting something in a small box and expecting it to give you a content that will rank and will bring you business is not realistic.
But if you learn how it can help you using it as an assistant, it can help you tremendously in your business. Somebody said it will help with the ICP and leads for sure it will help.
Have you ever said to yourself: only if I could clone myself- to an extent AI can be that clone right now. There we all see on the internet, this thing about AI agents and what they can do and how they can do some tasks, so YOU won’t do them. It’s changing drastically. So my recommendation is if you haven’t done so, embrace it and don’t expect it to do your job because it won’t.
Use it as an assistant, use it to scale, use it to do more. For example, I often tell people That since AI, I’ve been working more, not less. I’ve been able to scale my business and take it to a different level, of course, but it’s not like I have done less. No, I did more. And that’s something all of my colleagues in the digital marketing space can confirm.
Another bonus mistake is: if you scan the QR code, it should take you to this page here, that’s on my website. I hope it does. I actually didn’t check that QR code, but you’ll see here an article, which is a summary of today’s presentation, but also I’ve included some quotes from other digital marketers who have been nice enough to respond to my request and share their, what they have discovered in their audits on, or within their work, some common mistakes that other businesses made. So again, if you go to my website and to the blog section, you’ll be able to see this article or also scanning this QR code.
Okay. Now my recommendation is always get help. If you are the business owner, and want to engage in SEO, get help. It’s important for you to know a thing or two about how SEO works, but I often describe this. Again, here’s the expert. I often describe SEO and marketing in general, like taxes.
Do you do your taxes yourself?
Do you fill out the form and submit it yourself or do you hire a tax expert? You can do it, of course, and there’s plenty of information, but you’ll never do it as good as a tax professional. I hire a tax professional myself. I am aware, of course, of what’s happening. He reports to me. He tells me you have this much to pay and you did this and you did that and so forth, but I’ll never be as good as that.
And most likely, you will never be able to bring the results that you need without some help. And remember what I said at the beginning, all of the campaigns that I have worked with and were extremely successful were the one who had the stakeholder, the client, the customer, the business owner engaged because he was able to pinpoint me to the dot what his customers are facing.
What is his problem? Even before my research would have bring that up. Sometimes a client can call me, you know what, for the past two weeks, we’ve been having so many things about so many service calls about this problem and this issue. And this is how you can address it. Bam. He gave me a couple of bullet points.
I’ve created a blog. Sooner than later it started ranking quite well, bringing a lot of traffic, bringing a lot of relevant leads as well, because it became an authority on that specific topic. So I highly recommend getting engaged. Now, if you need help, you can ask me at any time this is my email, this is my website.
And if you just, want to engage in an SEO campaign or want a second opinion or simply want to have a conversation, I prepare many things. But again, these were my couple of slides for tonight. They actually were 40 minutes. I was planning to do 30 minutes, but it ended up being 40. I hope you enjoy it.
Now the best part: questions and answers. I got answers. If you have questions. And are there any questions? Let’s start with the first one that I see on the screen here. What is the number one mistake with SEO with photography and video? That’s a good one. I’m assuming that you’re a photographer or a leveraging videos or images for SEO, because that’s another thing I would say.
If I would say, if you are a photographer and a videographer and you want to do it, I would say focus more obviously in creating the relevant content, but also you have, you will see more and more in the search results on Google results, such as videos and images as well.
So inevitably my recommendation would be create more of that type of content. There’s a way to wrap everything up in, in to make Google understand better and differentiate you from the competitors using schema, markup, and so forth.
But I would say do more video and follow content, but in this case video, if you are a photographer, I wouldn’t say that there’s a number one mistake for that specific industry. I would say leverage more than that. Obviously the approach would be more or less similar to any other industry. Do your research from the start.
And by research, keywords, competitors, the keywords, the geography where you’re operating in, right? Photography studio in Toronto, videographer in Toronto or New York, New Jersey, wherever you are. So we’re talking about keywords. We’re talking about local competitors. We’re talking about backlinks.
We’re talking about the industry and see what kind of results you get. That’s the foundation for anything. For photography, I would say I would say leverage more actually the photo and the video part. I see some questions coming in. Akshay is asking: how to convince management to focus on this technical debt, mostly when the management is not technically strong.
That’s a good question. And I often find myself in that position. It all depends. Some entities have been around and are so big that the fix is not that easy. So you also need to be aware of the implication and the cost of how fixing some of them might imply. You might need to build a website from the ground up, and that will be an additional cost.
You don’t want to lose what was there. Maybe there’s a user database that log in and do many things. So you can consider that when you’re talking with the management, another thing that I would say is showing the downside of it, showing the potential that fixing those errors can bring. Most SEO tools have a keyword monitoring tools, have an estimation, traffic estimation, or clicks if you improve rankings and so forth. So by being able to create a solid report and an argument that because we have this, we don’t gain that, and showing the competitors as well, because Google will show somebody there. It can either be you or your competitors. If it’s the competitors, you can make a case, make an argument with your management to say that we’re not there because of this. It worked in some instances. I hope that helps us. Akshay, you’re in a tough position.
Okay, can AI negatively impact SEO in any way from Delia? That’s a very good question. Yes, it can. What do I mean by that? Creating irrelevant content, creating fluff content, jock content that doesn’t bring any kind of value. One of the biggest problems with AI generated content, it, that, it hallucinates a lot.
So it imagines things and not just abstract things, but very important things. It can quote you something that doesn’t exist. It can even give you a URL from a source, a government website or an agency or something that’s truly credible that doesn’t exist and never existed. So this is a reality and if you’re working in some industries that can, let’s say mental health, definitely that can have a very negative impact.
First of all, from the user, and then Google will figure it out as well. Here, I would say this thing always have your user in mind when you create content or do any kind of efforts. Obviously, you’ll need to be aware of how the search engine operates as well, but Google likes it when you take care of the users.
And he’ll take care of you by showing it to its users. It’s a game that we need to play. Yes. AI can negatively impact SEO, especially in terms of content creation, when you do it at scale and you’re not reviewing it you’re simply trusting whatever it’s offered and I would say hallucination and giving the wrong information is at the top of the list.
Thank you so much for all your questions. They’re amazing. Amazing. Kevin is asking me, how do you use AI within your marketing efforts? In many ways, thank you so much for that question, Kevin. I clone myself. AI sometimes it’s that clone of myself that I wish I had since I was small.
In many ways. Just to give you a couple of examples. Initially, I started using it with SEO in analyzing competitors. I do research. I look at the keyword. I look at the top three results. Those results may take me one or two, or three hours to read and analyze. With chat GPTs and it’s likes I can do that in a matter of minutes. And for example, I can tell you, tell him what do all these competitors talk about, but what’s something that they miss. And how can I incorporate that thing into my content? That’s a tip i’m sharing with you tonight as well and how you can use that And within marketing efforts, of course, I use him on it use it him her it on a daily basis I consult with him I asked him to help me with the technical stuff as well.
So for example, in my role as SEO, I look at a lot of data. It’s not just content is the technical aspect as well. There’s fairly a huge number of spreadsheets that I review daily and some before, it used to take me a while, even keyword research. Let’s say we’re going into a very competitive market. We get a huge list of keywords.
How do you filter them? How do you determine them? How do you segment them? How do you cluster them together? It used to be a manual process. There were some tools that could help you up to a certain point, but right now I can do that, I wouldn’t say, still wouldn’t say in the matter of minutes, but significantly compress the amount of time I can do something.
So those are just two examples of how I use AI in my marketing efforts. Thank you so much for that question. And I hope I answered to your standard.
I have no idea how much hiring an expert costs. Can you give me an idea, Sammy? It depends on who you are and you, as you have seen in one of my slides. It can start from 20 bucks per hour or per month :).
Sometimes you get what you pay for. I would say that there are different pricing models when it comes to SEO, you can go on a monthly retainer with an agency and, there’s some good agencies out there that can really make a difference. There’s some highly specialized agencies that focus on a single single niche.
For example, I told you I worked for almost four years for a company called Divorce Marketing Group. So can you imagine? Who, what kind of businesses we were helping? Of course, divorce professionals from across North America, mostly from the United States. So there are some people that know this.
I cannot say exactly a price, but it’s fair to say that it starts from a hundred bucks an hour. And I don’t think you’ll find any good value for less than a thousand per month, something like that. That’s a reality. And again, it depends. Sometimes you, perhaps you can find cheaper with good quality as well, but I doubt something from North America that will actually bring you results.
And usually within this money, it comes a package that’s included a couple of pages optimized, a couple of blog posts, some ideas, some technical fixes. The reports reporting is a very important part of SEO as well. I’m right now realizing I haven’t included in all of my slides. So I’ll do it for the next time.
What gets measured gets managed and many people don’t even have the basics installed. So they have no idea what their traffic is, where it’s coming from, what brings in the traffic, what keywords. and all this stuff. That was a long answer. The short version will be, I would say around 100$ an hour and up it can, I know people who charge even 500 and up. It depends, a small business or enterprise, different type of approaches and monthly retainer, for about a thousand dollars and up a minimum, but I would, I’m inclined more in the end up part, to be honest. I hope that answer your question.
Oh, a lot of questions and good questions.
Good questions.
Alison, if you plan to take content from your website and repurpose it for a third party media site. What degree of difference does it need to have in order for Google not to lower the search ranking? That’s a very good question. I dealt with this when I used to work for a publisher website.
They had a couple of publishing websites and they had a couple of websites in the same domain. And inevitably some of the things were overlapping as in the same article was present on more than just one site. Short answer is there’s this thing called canonical URL. So there’s a way of telling the search engine that this article here that’s sitting on X website was initially published on the Y website and vice versa. So that’s one thing. Your site doesn’t get penalized. There’s a common misconception about this, but again, it won’t show in rankings. So the easy fix is to use the canonical. And I have seen from my own experience, I have seen not both ranking, but both showing up for different type of queries in the search results.
Case in point, we discussed earlier about EEAT, where we always prefer to show the site with a higher authority for that specific query, but if you want to repurpose it, you can use the canonical URL and point it back to the main site where it was originally published. I hope that answered your question as well.
Kalyani is asking, how do algorithm updates impact SEO mistakes and how we can stay ahead? That’s a good question as well. And whoever follows the SEO industry or have a website , and is monitoring the organic traffic have seen for the past couple of years, already significant fluctuations up and down the so called algorithm updates are essentially tweaks in the algorithm that in some cases can completely wipe out websites.
We can write a PhD thesis and probably many have on why this happens. One common thing that any SEO consultant will tell you is that if you focus on quality, creating the best possible content that you can create for your website, for your niche, and for your business, for your entity, then that’s the way to stay ahead.
Yes. You might get hit every once in a while, but usually they if that was a mistake, because you are included in a bucket with other, let’s say bad websites. That tends to be fixed. If there’s a technical error and you discover it, and unfortunately this happens only when a significant traffic drop is happening. And then, the company has an external auditor. He does the audit and he didn’t, he identifies the technical issues. And after a while, the traffic is back, those are other things, but if you have the best in mind from the start and always try to go along with the best practices and create the best content and develop that relationship that Google should trust you when it comes to showing your website for its users when they perform queries, then you should be safe and not impacted by these algorithm updates, but as an SEO consultant, every time I hear about something’s happening I’m getting that many sleepless nights anymore, but it’s not pleasant and it happens to everyone and sometimes, businesses who have done everything right, simply. get hit.
Okay. Let’s see. Anything else? That’s all the questions from the chat as of now. Thank you so much everyone for for, first of all, for attending and for signing up. Thank you for being present for an entire hour. Almost. Can you believe it is 7 55. It’s been a pleasure. It’s been a privilege to present to you my knowledge that I’ve developed in terms of SEO.
Thank you again for being here. I wouldn’t be again, much of a marketer if I wouldn’t remind you to go to howaboutsomarketing.com you have the website here, and, subscribe to the newsletter. You’ll see the recordings, for the past webinars, this webinars recording and ways to contact. And if you have any questions for me, emanuelp.com and, feel free to ask anything, get ready to hear a lot of it depends, but be open minded. And don’t forget that SEO is the gift that keeps on giving and is still relevant even in 2025 and will still be, many years to come. It has changed significantly. The paradigm has changed. The metrics tend to change.
I enjoyed this part, but it’s something to consider for your business still. Thank you so much. That being said, I’m going to end the stream and watch for the recordings. Thank you so much for being here.
