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    • Neville

      Giant shifts in SEO industry with Ross Hudgens of Siege Media

      This is my third talk with Ross Hudgens, an SEO expert who runs Siege Media. There's a tectonic shift in SEO in the last few years so I love talking to experts about what they're seeing.

      I say "expert" because Ross does SEO work for Fortune 500 companies at a huge scale (90+ employees helping). Watch the interview here →

      I take detailed notes on these interviews....here's my personal notes, visualized with some imagery. I hope you like this format (let me know if you do or don't)!

       

      email.webp

      (0:16) When I started my first business in high school, the only way I could afford to get traffic with $0 is by dominating the search engine rankings.

      traffic-highschool-ai.jpg

      (0:49) In the last 3-5 years there’s been a TECTONIC SHIFT in SEO. 

      shift-in-seo-ai.jpg

      (1:05) Ross says for smaller businesses SEO is harder, but for larger brands it’s not. 

      big-seo-ai.jpg

      (2:22) Percentage of queries Google shows AI results is surprisingly only 7% (at this moment). 

      7percent-ai-results.jpg

      (3:15) I’ve been using Perplexity as my default search engine, and it’s like seeing the future of Google by doing an AI-first search. So I still click links in Perplexity, but it’s a bit different. 

      google-search-page.jpg

      (4:25) “Library Sites” are mostly endangered and some completely decimated. Basically any “What Is…” type of search is being gobbled up by AI.

      ai-search-image.jpg

      (6:34) Ross’ favorite test search term is “What Is An IRA” because it has an easy answer, and a very complicated long-tail answer.

      what-is-ira-ai.jpg

      ⬇ 

      (9:30) Reddit is skyrocketing in their search results since Google introduced the “Forum” tab. It’s the best way to find the “real” reviews, however it’s starting to get manipulated as well like anything. It’s called “The Manipulation Curve.”

      reddit-curve-ai-image.jpg

      (11:50) Engineering teams will train AI off content only made before 2023 because there was no AI content then. 

      2023-ai.jpg

      (12:30) Google’s whole existence has been a cat-and-mouse game of showing results, then preventing manipulation.

      cat-and-mouse-ai.jpg

      (12:56) Ross very-late-in-the-interview intro!

      late-interview-intro-ai.jpg

      ⬇ 

      (13:30) SEO used to be: Write content → Then get people to link it. Is it still like that? Ross says links still matter to a degree but it’s changed massively. There’s fewer people blogging as more people go to social media. It’s much harder to “fake your way to the top” via getting links.

      content-plus-link-ai.jpg

      (15:00) Big brands are winning in SEO because.
      big-brands-ai.jpg

      (15:50) Social networks starting with TikTok have the opposite approach: You can have zero followers yet get 10m+ views. This never happens in SEO.

      staring-at-screen-ai.jpg

      (16:33) Google had to release some inside info and on-page time, click through rate, and brand signals seemed to be far more important than links. Links get you to the top 10, but brand signals keep you there. 

      goolge-ai.jpg

      (17:29) How important are meta tags, description tags etc? Not as important anymore. It also DEPENDS, for example if your website is for rural farmers and they have slow internet connections, then “site speed” is a big factor. 

      tractor-webite-ai.jpg

      (19:05) Ross runs a big agency with 90+ people and the trends he’s seeing are: You want to rank high so you influence AI results. Doing “best of” roundup posts on blogs is actually working again (like Blog Carnivals from back in the day).  

      ai-seo-graph.jpg

      (21:20) AI works by figuring out the next word of a sentence. If you have a lot of ranked content on the web you can train the AI to say your brand.

      ai-writing-.jpg

      (22:29) People aren’t blogging as much….BUT they are making a crap-top of content on social networks, which is kinda like blogging. But now you have to post on like TEN places rather than just a blog. A lot of content creation is repurposing a long form blog post. 

      content-creator-social-media.jpg

      (25:28) To differentiate yourself from AI create more “First Party Data” where you’re doing surveys or gathering data and sharing that as a first source. A byproduct of that is then sharing that data across all social networks. 

      first-party-data.jpg

      (26:52) Do agency customers come to you asking for social content as well as SEO? 

      agency-customers-seo.jpg

      (28:29) How the hell do you track where customers come from? It’s so hard now with privacy settings, that it’s seemingly impossible outside of asking people how they found you. 

      track-people-ai.jpg

      (29:34) GA4 stinks now, Plausible Analytics is a lot easier to use.

      google-smells.jpg

      (31:07) Half the time people don’t know how they found me first, because they’ll see me on different platforms several times before it even registers. It’s very difficult to find out which channel people find you from first (unless one network vastly outweighs another for you).
      find-on-x-ai.jpg

      (33:50) I post my short videos on LinkedIn as well, and it’s always surprising how many people in my friend network see them. 

      shorts-posted-on-linkedin.jpg

      (34:44) LinkedIn vs X is different when it comes to hiring. LinkedIn is very sanitized, and X is hardcore, so it creates completely different vibes.

      linedin-vs-x-ai.jpg

      (36:32) I miss longform blogging. Now most content is micro-content. However I’m seeing a shift back to longform. It’s much harder to make a long blog post, but it has many big benefits. 
      long-form-blogging-ai.jpg

      (38:59) Top of Feed vs Top of Search. With Top of Feed the downside is you have to post A LOT. 

      top-of-feed-ai.jpg

      (40:09) A long form blog post is like a “house” for your content, and you can keep expanding or update it. 

      blog-house-ai.jpg

      (40:35) “Need to Update Content” has increased in it’s frequency. Like with AI the news is so fast it might be updated by the month or week. It used to be “Best Tips for 2026” now it’s “Best Tips of September 5th, 2026”

      best-tips-ai.jpg

      (43:17) The biggest/longest article used to rank, now the top searches are far more concise (or “efficient”) articles. The length depends on the type of search people do.

      top-of-search-ai.jpg

      (45:05) What’s the deal with AI? Ross’ ideas on using AI and how they’re using it at his SEO agency. They use it for first draft editing, they use it to interpret large datasets. They don’t use it for spinning out full articles. 

      ai-seo.jpg

      (47:33) Can I just use ChatGPT to spin up 50,000 articles and rank really well? 

      ai-ariticles-writing.jpg

      (48:49) As a person who runs a writing company, I see a lot of AI writing wins and fails. It’s being used for DIFFERENT things than we expected. Depending on the content, the connection to it being written (or mostly composed) by a human is stronger than expected. 

      fail-ai-image.jpg

      (51:28) AI is helping make content that wasn’t possible (or not worth it), like our podcast show notes have custom images for each note…this would’ve been incredibly time consuming and not worth it before, but with AI it’s feasible. 

      not-worth-my-time-image.jpg

      (53:38) A guy in our Office Hours tests “evilness” of any companies privacy policy using AI. So many interesting use cases coming out. 

      evil-privacy-reading-contract-image.jpg

      (55:15) In the 50’s they thought the killer app for computers was storing recipes. Turns out there’s soooo much more than that. Similarly, we think there’s cool AI use cases now, but there will be so many more cool uses we can’t think of now. 
      old-computer-ai-image.jpg

      (56:19) The biggest part of blogging is not writing, it’s researching. With AI you can do what used to take a full research team to do. 

      bloging-ai-image.jpg

      (57:46) The sauna research example, and you can really dig into the data much more than ten blue links.
      sauna-research-image-ai.jpg

      (59:10) What are the toolsets you use now at your agency in 2024/2025? Grammarly for AI editing. Key Search for keyword difficulty. Claude for AI writing. 
      ai-tool-box-image.jpg

      (1:00:27) When we moved from KK to CC there was an 8 month gap where we lost all traffic, and we noticed very little happened. Unless the traffic was specific and targeted it was useless.

      kk-to-cc-ai-image.jpg

      (1:03:05) Ross thinks Copywriting Course lost some of its fun when it changed the name, but the personal brand is strong and growing. There’s something about having either a name personal brand or vague name so you don’t put yourself in a box. Like “Siege Media” started out purely doing SEO, but now does so much more including consulting, and the name doesn’t box them in. 
      image-40.jpg

      Follow Ross Hudgens
      🖥 Website: SiegeMedia.com
      X: @RossHudgens
      💼 LinkedIn: @rosshudgens

       

      Hope you enjoyed this interview!
      Sincerely,
      Neville Medhora - A Curious Guy

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      User Feedback

      Recommended Comments



      I especially love the large font in your notes! Easy to read for those challenged with short distance vision 😄. Many news letters forget font size is IMPORTANT. 

      Link to comment
      • Administrator
      Neville

      Posted

      I totally agree! I think it's easy to just scroll with this style of:
      [HEADLINE]
      [IMAGE]

      So glad you liked!

      Link to comment

      I've been subscribed for years and I'm loving this new summary format.

      Link to comment
      • Administrator
      Neville

      Posted

      Thanks so much Michael! We're trying to hone in on an easy-to-read way to make shownotes, this one is closing in on it 🙂 

      Link to comment

      I really read this whole email! Good stuff. 

      AI for the images?

      Link to comment
      • Administrator
      Neville

      Posted

      Thanks Brenmar! Yeah hopefully this format makes it easier to skim the episode without having to watch the video (but then optionally jumping into whatever part of the video interests you). 

      And yes all AI images 🙂 

      Link to comment
      • Administrator
      Neville

      Posted

      Thanks so much Andrew, super informative right! I like talking to Ross since he does SEO at such a scale that he HAS to be good at it. He's an actual practitioner with results not just a theoretical person.

      Link to comment

      💚 Great interview! Thank you for the great insights. I love the summary format with the images. What do you use to generate images with such good quality text? I find Midjourney does not generate good text in images.

      Link to comment

      Ok, I must say I love this new format of showing pictures with notes!

      Link to comment
      • Administrator
      Neville

      Posted

      Thanks Hazel, I like it too, makes the shownotes so much more fun to read!

      Link to comment

      Banger epi. Maybe this epi resonates more with me because I am an SEO myself.

      Remember my last email I said I did not like the AI images. I was thinking about this, how can I use your content in social? This epi inspired me to repurpose some of your show notes. I copied some of your show notes with the images and scheduled them with buffer for the next 1-12 days (of course with credits to you). 

      I'll let you know how they performed on X & LinkedIn next week.

      Link to comment
      • Administrator
      Neville

      Posted

      Thank you man! If you re-purpose these, plz make sure to credit each time 🙂 

      Link to comment

      Those images are amazing. Nice job!! Wow! How did you do it? What tool?

      Link to comment
      • Administrator
      Neville

      Posted

      These are all ChatGPT and Grok!

      Link to comment

      Fantastic format of the notes! Both the text and the images were relevant and captivating. How did you make them?

      Thanks thanks thanks a lot for all the hard work and heart you put in, Neville.

      Link to comment
      • Administrator
      Neville

      Posted

      Much appreciated Ishan!

      Link to comment
      • Administrator
      Neville

      Posted

      Thanks so much Jeff!

      Link to comment

      Neville - I LOVE THESE NOTES! So awesome. That is a brilliant case study for AI use best practices. Thank you.

      Also, can I use screenshots and share the insights with people I do SEO presentations with (business groups and students)? I will, of course, source and link to you and Ross. 

      If you say yes and have a preferred citation structure, send it my way. Also, I am happy to add a QRC image to my decks that links to your CC sales page. I think the CC will be loved by some of the audience members I meet with.

      Link to comment
      • Administrator
      Neville

      Posted

      Thank you so much Michelle! You can link stuff so long as proper credit is given!

      Thanks so much for sharing and glad you liked these!

      Link to comment

      “Let me know if you do or don’t”

      I didn’t get any benefit from the added images to each note. The images aren’t clarifying or expanding the concept from the note. They’re just filler.

      If you get other responses, I’d be curious to know what other readers think!

       

      Link to comment
      • Administrator
      Neville

      Posted

      On this particular set of notes with this formatting, you were actually the only one to say they didn't like it! 98% of people LOVED these! 

      The last set I did with different formatting, 60% of people said they liked, 40% not.

      Link to comment
      • Administrator
      Neville

      Posted

      Thanks so much Wean!!

      Link to comment



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