The Ultimate Blog Podcast - The State of SEO in 2025 with Casey Markee

Episode Date: June 10, 2025

If the world of SEO is feeling like the wild, wild west to you right now, you’re not alone. That’s why we are thrilled to welcome back SEO expert Casey Markee of MediaWyse on The Ultimate Blog Podcast to break down what’s really going on – and how bloggers can thrive despite the volatility of SEO. Tune in to hear the latest on Google’s updates, what types of blogs are most affected, and what you can do to improve your rankings.Whether you’re just getting started or have been blogging for years, this episode is packed with truth bombs, practical advice, and great encouragement to continue to adapt.📝 Contact Casey Markee💻 Schedule an SEO Site Audit with Casey🔗Start your blog today→ Join The Ultimate Blog Roadmap🔗Click here and check out the show notes for this episode!Do you love this podcast? Say thanks by leaving a positive review and/or rating!  

Welcome to the Ultimate Blog Podcast. This podcast is the podcast we wish we had when we started blogging. I'm Amy Reinicki. I'm Jennifer Draper. Our episodes dive deep into how to monetize your blog, sharing unique insights and practical tips. We bring you in-depth interviews with successful bloggers and experts who offer valuable, actionable advice.

Our mission is to educate, support, inspire, and empower you in your blogging business. Welcome to The Ultimate Blog Podcast. Welcome back to The Ultimate Blog Podcast. Today, we are so thankful that Casey Marquis reached out and said, Amy, Jennifer, I'm coming back on the show. We're like, yes, you are, Casey. You are coming back on. And you're going to send us all the updates that we need to know in regards to SEO and all the things, because right now it does kind of feel like the wild, wild west. And I think when we're feeling like a volatility, it's really, really important to know the facts. And so Casey is Casey is from media wise He founded and owns that company and he is here today to drop a lot of truth bombs and get us all just to kind of

Calm our jets a little bit. So welcome to the ultimate blog podcast Casey. We're so glad that you're back Ladies, thanks so much for having me. I appreciate you, you know finding time and you're incredibly busy schedule for me I wish I could have that direction being given to my wife and my kids as much. Like there's always something going on, good times. I just, you know, I, we were commenting early before we got on the call about how we just got back from a vacation, we went to Puerto Rico.

My wife had a legal conference there and I was commenting that I'm still about 40% proof from all the rum that we drink. I highly recommend going to a hotel, staying in a hotel with at least two swim up bars so that you can just rotate and swim back and forth between the swim up bars. That way you get a little bit of exercise while you're out there. It's my philosophy. We're just starting off with great advice here. Good times. This is hilarious. All good. I love it. I love it. Well, I am so thankful that you're back and mostly with us today to talk about this because it is a really overwhelming thing SEO is blogging can be. But what I appreciate is in our emails back and forth. You made sure to remind us. Hey

Bloggers are still killing it. Yeah, so today we want to really give you some hope as a blogger Whether you are just getting started whether you're wanting to get started or whether you have had a blog for a long time And so we are going to dive right in we had Casey on in 2024 you can go back and check out that episode. It was episode 116, talking a little bit more about technical SEO, which is just as important. And so I would encourage you to go back and check out that episode. But for today, where I wanna start is Casey, can you kind of give us an update

on the latest Google core update and like the AI overview and all of that and how that is impacting bloggers at this state in the game. Right, right. So since, well, since we visited last year, we've had about six core updates total. We've had a couple spam updates thrown in there. And the most recent core update was the March 2025 core update. And that was pretty dramatic. I know all quote core updates are supposed to be dramatic, but this one was exceptional because it changed

a lot of the features in the SERPs right now, the search engine ranking positions. Those features now consist of things like recipe carousel, increased recipe carousel. We also have a people also ask carousel. We have a new what people are saying carousel, and we have an enhanced video and an image carousel and we have an enhanced video and an image carousel and then we have this new people also ask for Carousel as well and what's happened with these carousels is they've dramatically changed mobile optimization and mobile appearance for most recipe travel and do-it-yourself bloggers now

We're finding that instead of you know, you have to scroll down Now we're finding that instead of, you know, you have to scroll down basically to the end of the page and click see more results to actually see the organic rankings anymore. So we're seeing a lot of feedback from bloggers saying, well, I'm going in and I don't understand what's going on. It seems like my recipe, you know, it seems like traffic is going down, but my impressions are still there. So yeah, your impressions are fine because you're getting those in the recipe gallery. It's your rich results. It's the search results that have changed considerably. They're being

moved to page number two. We also have this incredible introduction of AI overviews. Google really pumped up. Just since the March Core update, AI overviews were up about 116% total. Now, some of these AI overviews have been a noticeable improvement for users. And, you know, I know it's hard for a blogger to kind of understand that, but we should not necessarily have been optimizing for things like foods that start with A, or foods that are red, or here sites that go with pot roast. That's kind of the rank IQ approach that has been very popular over the last 18 months and a lot of bloggers who had been optimizing for those content

suggestions had their traffic devastated because those have all been uniformly replaced by AI overviews. And it makes sense because no one's going to click through when they can see that answer right there. And so we're getting, I'm getting more and more requests from bloggers, gosh, I don't understand why my traffic is down. And I'll go in and I'll say, well, it's because you're the content that you're writing for, you are writing for search engines, you never should have been writing for search engines, you should have been writing for the user. And that's something that we actually talked about during last year's presentation.

We do not write for search engines, we write for our users. And that's also kind of a theme in my recent Search Engine Land article that was so popular in April, which covered all of these updates that happened. It covered specific strategies in the recipe travel and do-it-yourself niche that bloggers can use to better optimize for this introduction of AI mode, this incredible increase we've seen with AI overviews, and literally the fundamental shift that Google is going from a search engine to an answer engine. I mean, their goal is to keep as many of these clicks

on their side as possible. And I know that can be disconcerting for a lot of bloggers, but that's something that we've known was coming for a long time. We have a lot of bloggers that are killing it. I mentioned to this to you when we were talking off screen before we start the call. If you have if you're a sourdough blogger, you're doing great. Can't tell you how many people are still looking

for baked recipes these days. We also have bloggers who contact me and like, I just can't understand why my traffic is so low. And people have to understand that Easter was completely three weeks later than it was last year. And so that changed your traffic profile in March compared to April considerably. And so what you have to do year over year, when people do year over year examinations, they say, well, gosh, it looks like I'm done considerably. Well, it's because the traffic levels are not the same. You're not comparing apples to apples, so to speak.

But there's a lot that we can get into. The whole point about these core updates that have happened is, especially with the introduction of AI mode by Google, is Google is continuing to refine what they're showing for the user. There is a certain attention that they're giving to larger blocks. There's an attention that they're giving to larger blocks. There's an attention that they're giving to established brands. And of course you're seeing the increased amount of results from sites like Reddit, Quora, and other third parties. And of course the AI overviews. And we're gonna talk a little bit later about how we can

optimize for those AI overviews. But there is still plenty of traffic out there to be had. You just have to really understand how to optimize work correctly. And the article, and we'll share that in the notes as well, goes into detail about that. Yeah, I have to admit, seeing the AI overview, when I go in to type in a question, say I want to just know how long do I

have to cook my corn in the Instant Pot, and not having to click through multiple posts to be able to find the answer that makes the most sense. I can just read it right there in the overview. Like as a user, that's really beneficial. But as a blogger, it is a little bit scary because my gosh, I'm gonna have to really think about what I'm posting, what types of content I'm creating

so that it's not going to all end up being things that people aren't going to want to read in more detail, I would guess. So can you talk a little bit about, is this impacting any lifestyle or recipe bloggers more than others? And are there specific types of niches that are hurting the most from this type of AI overview? Because from a user perspective, like I said, it's great.

Yeah, I know a lot of people complain about these AI overviews and then we do a lot of user testing. We're using Hotjar, we're using third-party tools to track a lot of these AI overviews and we're seeing the same thing is that the people that are complaining about the AI overviews are usually the ones that are unfortunately writing a lot of their content for a query that does no longer exist for them. So when we're talking about what has specifically been affected, it's things like health-related queries, research queries, compare and contrast queries, anything that could be answered in

seconds with an AI overview, like your example about how long to cook corn, those are all going to be taken away from you by means of a zero click option, which is what's happening here is that Google is keeping those answers right there. And even though there are citations now, Google is providing citations for literally most of the AI overviews now, there's just no reason to click over if that AI overview is going to answer that question for you. So we've been seeing a lot of that. And I mentioned earlier that we have been seeing a huge down tick in people who have

been using rank IQ traditionally. They use rank IQ to optimize for foods that start with Q and foods that are red and side dishes that go with X and all those have been taken over by AI overviews. There's just no reason to write a post like that when Google is going to provide the answer that the user is looking for right there on their screen on mobile or desktop. So, I mean, you're asking, you know, what are some tips, what can bloggers do in light of this? And there is frankly a lot that can be done. Like I said, we'll share the article, but we have to stop writing this kind of content in the first place because we're not going to get that click to our website anymore.

Right. Okay, that is literally the epitome of I wrote, there's no one that ever wrote into you and says, hey, Emily, please write me a post having to do the foods and start with Q. No one ever wrote into you with a request like that. So that right away is an example of how maybe we shouldn't have formulated our content strategy around a tool telling us to do that because there wasn't a lot of competition per se on that. So we also want to double down on solid foundational SEO. This is not meant to be self-serving,

but get an audit from a professional. Our goal is to make your sites so algorithmically attractive to Google that they would be embarrassed not to rank it. And I cannot tell you how many times someone has come to me and says, I don't understand why my content's not ranking. Well, you have semantic content issues, you've got internal linking problems, you have internal redirects that have never been fixed, you've got hundreds and hundreds of broken links,

you incorrectly use schema on this page and this page. It goes on and on and on. And that's what a technical audit, that is what a common, simple, high quality SEO audit will do, which will surface all of these issues so that we can fix them at scale. I mean, our goal is to make it as easy as possible for Google to both understand semantically what our site is about, but also for users to find what they're looking for on mobile and desktop. So that's very important. We also really have to work on understanding how to write and create user-first content in an AI-first world now. You know, we have to provide something that provides a unique viewpoint or something novel. Something like

I was at a travel blogger the other day and I said, I just don't understand why this is not ranking. I'm like, well, we don't need another article on visiting Zay Watson Mayo than we already have. And we certainly don't need you to include an article where you took four photos of the same monument and popped it into the same post because that's needless scrolling. Our goal is to be useful in everything we do.

And you've probably heard some of this advice, especially with the Google Quality Reader Guidelines that were updated in January and there was also another update done just a couple of weeks ago. But one of the big takeaways from those updates in the Quality Reader Guidelines was please reduce needless scrolling and remove superfluous or fluff content. And that's kind of a, it cuts both ways. You know, what some person's fluff might be another person's personal anecdote or story.

You know, our goal is to understand that we're optimizing not only for users, but also for AI consumption right now. And that means we do want to continue to answer common questions. We do want to label our content clearly with H2s and H3s when appropriate. But we also have to think of our content as modules. We want to go in, make a complete post,

and we want to make sure that those individual sections stand by themselves. So maybe you have a great section on substitutions, but that doesn't mean that if we're doing a post on pot roast and you've got these, you know, you got a whole section on substitutions, that doesn't mean that there should be 12 substitutions there. That's not a helpful example for the user. Maybe we just, maybe we limit that down. Maybe there's two or three. That would be best for the user. The days of writing these incredibly long

and detailed posts, especially in the recipe and travel niche, are over. It's been over for a while. Your goal always bottom line has to be, am I being useful? Have I provided something that allows me to stand out? Have I improved the readability and consumption of this content? Have I ensured that the individual parts of the post are helpful and can stand on their own? Or did I just regurgitate? A lot of bloggers make the mistake of going into Google and say, okay, I'm going to write a resource on this. So they use what's called the skyscraper method, which used to be very successful,

but is now a completely antiquated and outdated approach to content creation. The skyscraper method basically was the belief that you could go in, find everything that was written about this and put it all in your article and you're going to rank better. Completely not going to help you now because all you're doing is you're there's no unique viewpoint on that. You're literally taking and cannibalizing other articles and putting all the information in yours. There's no unique viewpoint. There's no unique way for your article to stand out. And first of all, no one needs to scroll through all that incredible amount of information in the first place.

So whenever we're putting together content, we have to really focus on what is it about my content? What is it about my recipe? What is it about my travel post that's different and unique? What insights do I and only I have the ability to impart to my audience through this content to get it to stand out. And that's honestly just part one. And part two, of course, is being able to understand how to put together a correct recipe post, how to put together a

correct travel post, how to put together a post that's going to resonate and not be overwhelmed by ads or pop-up interstitials or other things that will be jarring for both users and bots and lower the readability and indexability of the post considerably. So when someone is considering writing a post, but you know, there's obviously a lot of other people writing something like, let's use your example of pot roast. Obviously, there's a lot of pot roast recipes out there. And with that recommendation of like little fluff, is it just kind of like, what would be a recommendation

for them to get an understanding like how much fluff is too much, how much fluff is not enough, like you know what I mean? Like do you have any just like, hey, about a couple sentences here, because I can see that being like the biggest question there is, well, I didn't think it was fluffy, but it was. Well, and that's the problem.

And that's why an audit or just going with some third party is so important. And please, feel free to use ChatGPT. AI is not our enemy. You can type in, you can provide your URL into ChatGPT and says, I'm really trying to rank more competitively for this pot roast recipe. Here are the three top rake-eat recipes at Google for pot

roast. Can you do a simple compare and contrast based on what they're doing and what I'm doing? But also here are links to the Google Quality Rater guidelines. Here's a link to the Google Core updates page for site owners. Here's a recent article from Casey showing all the things that we should possibly be looking at doing when we're looking at a post. With those information and now provide me concrete recommendations based upon this corpus of information you have the ability to analyze. And bloggers are always shocked when they see what the printout is. And it's going to be boom, boom,

boom, boom. Here are concrete recommendations based upon what, you know, your information, here's what we think tailored to you. and then you can look at refining those by follow-up prompts as necessary. But personally, for me, our goal is to sell the user. We have to hook the user right at the top of the post. Maybe we have one or two paragraphs of teaser text where our goal is to sell the user, here's why this pot roast is better

than the million of others you've read. I added paprika, or I did a seance and a dance around the chuck, the ground chuck before I started this. Whatever you need to do to stand out, whatever devilish rites you'd like to partake in, totally fine, no judgements. And as you go down below your featured image, maybe you use that first section to highlight a comment. Maybe this is an update. Maybe you're going through your comments and saying,

oh, this is a really nice comment. This person here in Alabama said that she loved this because of this and this. I'm gonna highlight that comment right at the top so I can sell everyone who's never been on my site to know that this is customer approved. Or maybe I'm going to use the opportunity to showcase a personal anecdote of my own. Maybe a little story.

You know, I wasn't a big fan of part roast, but I got this recipe from so and so and I've made it my own by doing this and now my kids have it every Tuesday night and I know that your family is going to love it as well. Those are the kind of things that we need to do, but we just don't need four or five paragraphs on that. And then we get into the recipe. That's where we get into the to the recipe comment. I, I teach a template, people other other people teach a template, you can do whatever you need to do. But your goal is to get people invested first. So they can start down the page and trigger, of course, those all-important ads, which I hear occasionally that people want to have ads on their site. Totally okay. Nothing wrong with that.

Yeah. I know we did talk about ads the last time and you made some recommendations there. So if anybody has questions about that, they can definitely go back and listen. But yeah, ads are obviously a big help for us bloggers, but there are some, I guess you could talk really quickly about some of the negative aspects of not only ads, but just different things that people might put on their site, like pop-ups and things like that, that are trying to catch people's attention.

Can you just give us a quick overview of what to look for there and what to avoid? Well, the thing about ads is that I want you to monetize. The secret, in my audits, I cover ads and monetization considerably. I want people to run ads, but there are right ads and there are wrong ads. We don't run any above-the-fold ads. We do not run top-heavy ads. We want ads to load below the fold whenever possible, preferably below the first featured

image. We don't run skyscraper ads. We don't run Google Vignette ads, which are these ads that pop in and cover the whole page between pages. We also want to make sure that we limit ads in the recipe cards. Usually I say about three ads on desktop and maybe four to six on mobile. And we really want to be very cognitive of improving our readability, which means that we have to be aggressive in how we group our blocks by grouping our blocks we not our ad companies Control more where those ads pop in and we can improve the readability

I don't need to have two ads popping in in the middle of your ingredients I don't need to have two ads popping in and breaking up this really nice collage You've done on your individual step-by for your Sourco Discard, cinnamon rolls or whatever you're making right now. We want to control where those ads pop in and there had been some pushback by ad companies. They were literally ignoring the block groupings and I filmed it. I had a blogger the other day and she's with Raptive and like I don't understand what's going on here. Casey, you can see I grouped this and we just filmed it and had her send it into

the ad company. They're like, oh yeah, okay, we'll fix that. So they can clearly choose to ignore some of that grouping if they want. You just have to really be cognizant of understanding that that is happening and push back. Pull out your phones. You should be looking at the experience of your recipes in real time whenever you can. And then if you see an ad that you do not like, you're gonna take a screenshot of that, you're gonna send it in to your ad company,

you're gonna say, cut this out, and wow, next thing you know, the ad's gone. You just have to really be cognizant about that. Now with your parts to add. Yeah, it's still your site. Yeah, it's your site, it's your site. I'm glad that you're saying that, it's your site. And so you're in charge of the experience

that your user is getting. Like you've spent a lot of time designing your site, making sure that it's optimized to the best of your ability. So know that if you are on an ad company, you have that right to say, I don't want this on here. And I think that that is kind of a misconception. Like you can't say that, especially to people who might be new to having ads on their site.

They might not understand that they can do that, but you absolutely can. I think that's great. You know, I get pushed back all the time. Well, you know, they're the ad company. They should know what's best. I'm like, hey, that's true, but no, not true. And it's not true in that they make mistakes.

They're using algorithms, and these algorithms malfunction all of the time. So if you're telling me that you're never gonna push back against your ad company, and you're gonna run the maximum value of your ads on your site, and then you come to me for an audit, I am never gonna onboard you for an audit ever

because there's nothing I can do for you if you're not willing to understand that you never run the maximum value of ads on your site. I have never seen a site run the maximum value of ads and been able to overcome all the UX issues that'll happen by doing so. Or, you know, just say, you know, I'm just gonna run the max amount of ads I can

and, you know, everything else will take care of itself. I'm like, no, it's just gonna get worse. Don't care, you know, you're being gaslit. It's not Google gaslighting you in many cases. It's your ad company. Anyone who tells you that ads are not a disruptive experience has no idea what they're talking about. We have reduced ad density, we've removed pop-ups,

we've removed interstitials, and it's like taking the parking brake off sites. They will just spring forward. They will do better. It's a lot easier for Google to crawl and programmatically access the content when they don't have barriers. And we talked briefly about interstitials or pop-ups.

Email pop-ups are still very very popular here and frankly they're they're an outdated vehicle. If you're wanting to build your email list you should be using things like email embeds. You should be using things like print pass which is you know to Mediavine's credit one of the only things they've done right in the last 18 months. Print pass is a way for you to lock your recipe card and require people to give their email to access your recipe card. And let me tell you, they do it in droves. We've had bloggers increase their email signups 500% in a matter of days because of this.

And they might get one or two people pushing back or submitting a fake email. That is substantially less obtrusive than you putting an intrusive interstitial that activates every time on the first click from Google, which is literally against Google guidelines, but people continue to do on a daily basis. When you have an interstitial, when you have a pop-up on your site, let's say Google's coming to your site, they're crawling, they're crawling down, they're crawling down, boom, the pop-up activates. That is a very disruptive element. Google literally stops their

crawl. They'll leave. They'll come back and finish the crawl later. We've literally seen it in real time. So just understand that if you're thinking, I've got to do pop-ups because I really need to grow my email list, there are plenty of other less intrusive ways for you to build your email list and the benefits for your users and the benefits for your algorithmic attractiveness to Google by removing those intrusive elements will blow your mind. And I always recommend that. If you've been dreaming about starting a blog or you're stuck trying to grow the one you already have started, we have created something just for you.

It's called the Ultimate Blog Roadmap. This is our step-by-step membership plus course program that is designed to help you launch, grow, and actually build a sustainable blog based business that fits your life inside the roadmap. You're going to find everything you need from how to set up your site to creating content with confidence, to growing your email list, learning the basics of SEO, and also building a long-term strategy that does not lead to burnout. Plus, you're going to get access to live coaching

each and every month, a very supportive blogging community where you can network and collaborate with others who are on the journey, and real feedback along the way, because we believe firmly that you should not have to blog alone. If you're ready to stop treating your blog like a hobby and start building something real, we would love to walk the journey with you.

You can learn more and join us today at ultimateblogroadmap.com. We would love to help you build the blogging business of your dreams. I feel like that's been kind of the recommendation for a while, but one that I think that we even push back on, you know, is like, because of what you just said. I really need to grow this. We actually tried it lately.

Like we had, we normally don't do a pop-up. So I think it's so interesting that you're doing it. And to be honest, it performed terribly. We recently took it off and I was like, oh, glad that didn't perform so good because it wasn't helping anything. We actually weren't getting anybody to do it. It did not prove to be beneficial in any way. It surely did increase our traffic based on everything that you're saying too.

And so I think that sometimes if you're feeling the pushback, I think what I want you to hear Casey say here is look at the data. You have to understand your data and how it's performing too. And you have to know like it is against the Google guidelines. Yeah. And let's clarify. And that's important. Yeah.

You can absolutely use pop-ups. Just don't have them activate on the first click from Google and don't have them take up the entire screen. If I'm going to your site and there's a pop-up and it covers the entire screen and I'm having trouble finding the close button, I'm never coming back to your site. Oh, I hate that. I hate that so much. That happens at times.

You know, there'll be people there. There are plenty of competent people in the email space. Matt Mullen, good colleague of mine, he's very good at what he does. He and I disagree on that. He loves pop-ups. I've told him, yeah, I am never going to allow you to put a pop-up on my client without calling you out on it. If you want to do a pop-up, have it activate between pages, have it activate on a non-Google referral, but if you're ever using something

where, hey, this pop-up is activating on the first click from Google, it doesn't matter if there's a delay. It doesn't matter if I get all the way to the bottom of the post and then the pop-up activates. It's still activating on the first click from Google, which is a violation of intrusive interstitial guidelines with Google. And that's been the case for years. Since like 2017, that's how old the guidelines are. Crazy.

And as bloggers that are sitting here going, how can we do better? I think we have to take those things into account and not put up roadblocks that are sure to hurt us versus just taking the advice of doing things that are more helpful for our site. And then I think that leads me to wanting to talk about kind of circling back on the ads, the journey by Mediavine program is a way that new bloggers are excited to start monetizing their sites so much sooner, but I think you do have less control over the ads there.

Have you seen any data in regards to that? Is it good to go ahead and get started with monetization when you have lower traffic, or should you be waiting until you can get on one of the programs where you can have a little bit more control? Well, that's a good question. I understand that everyone wants to try to monetize as fast as we can, but Journey has recently lowered the barrier there to 1,000 sessions a month. That is all you have to have to qualify for Journey, and to me, that is just, that's

a recipe for disaster. Number one, if you're only doing 1,000 sessions a month, it's going to be very hard for you to build real traffic real fast by immediately adding ads to a site that's only getting 1,000 sessions a month. It's also worth noting that Journey is not a high quality ad network at all. Let's be completely honest about that. They are letting everyone in with the pulse. It is all auto approvals. It is flooded with AI swap. They have hired people. They have supposedly software using air quotes here that are supposed to be able to detect these AI generated sites and get them to remove. It's not happening.

I have story after story about bloggers who have submitted lists of AI generated sites into the Journey team. And it's just crickets. They're not getting removed. So I personally would not use Journey unless I was at least at some way close to qualifying for regular Mediavine, which is a superior and much more high

quality ad network. Journey is their AdSense clone. Their goal is to have Journey be the alternative to AdSense, which again, already a very low-quality ad network in that regard. So my advice for anyone who's on the fence, try to wait. I know it's tough. Consider alternative forms of income. Consider affiliate links. Consider working with an influencer agency. Consider

sponsored brand work. But don't go all in on journey because you're gonna find that it's gonna increase your ability to build traffic considerably. It's literally like you're putting the parking brake on your site when you decide to sign up for Journey at that early stage. I think that's good information to have for us as blog coaches because the information that we're getting from just to be completely transparent here is from Mediavine. Of course, of course. And so it's been touted as something to do and as a better thing than like Google AdSense.

Yeah, it's their AdSense clone. It's their AdSense clone. Do I think it's better? That's debatable. We do know that they're losing the fight on AI and that's why Raptive has been kicking the crap out of Mediavine for the last 12 months. I can't tell you how many bloggers I've had it on it with and I said, well, you know, here's your RPMs with Mediavine.

Why don't you go over and take a look? Raptive is providing RPM guarantees. It't you go over and take a look. Raptivist providing RPM guarantees. It costs you absolutely nothing to start a conversation, see what they can do. And next thing I know, I get a, oh my God, Casey, I wish I'd done this 12 months ago. Not only is their RPM noticeably larger, but it's larger even though they're making less traffic right now. Again, it's going to be unique for everyone, but as I tell everyone, this is a business. Do not think that you have, oh my gosh, I've going to be unique for everyone, but as I tell everyone, this is a business. Do not think that you have, oh my gosh, I've been with Mediavine for three years, so I'm

going to stay with them forever. That is silly. You're just leaving 15, 2,000, 2,500, who knows how much a month on the table if you don't at least go out and see, okay, hey, you're going to give me an RPM guarantee for this many months and this is what we can do. They're just going to tell you right up front, okay, based upon the level of ads you have, here's what we can do for you and I can just tell you all I have is baskets and baskets of gift baskets from bloggers who like, gosh, Casey, I wish I had done this 12 months ago.

And they're just like, I don't understand why. Again, it's a business. If I was terrible at what I did, you would never come back and use me, period. Or I wouldn't have the weight for audits I have. You really need to be thinking about what is better for you. Raptive is just leading the fight against AI. They're doing a fantastic job there. They have a lot more publisher tools.

Matt's course is free. They have plenty of other courses that Mediavine does not offer. There's lots of opportunity there. And again, I have plenty of bloggers who are on Mediavine and they're doing great. Good for them. But don't think that they're not also looking to see where the grass is greener because that's the world we live in. Traffic is going to get tougher, not easier. And so we need to make sure that we're monetizing as well and as highly ineffective as we can going forward, especially now before we get into the higher RPM seasons.

I think that's good advice in general, whether it be your ad network, whether it be SEO, whether it be this implementation of AI is knowing that this is very fluid. This is not a black and white business in any way, shape or form. And if you go into any one aspect of blogging with that black and white mentality, I think you're going to be just gravely disappointed because you just cannot stay there. I think living in that gray area a little bit, being willing to pivot, being willing to learn and open your mind a little bit is what is going to be

beneficial. So I kind of want to, I kind of want to use this gray area here to segue us into what we have talked a lot more about and what we have implemented more within our own business. And that is this use of AI and how bloggers can use it for, for their good, essentially. Um, you know, when it first came out, it had some negative connotations. It was like, Oh, it's going to take over all of our jobs, yada, yada, yada, yada.

But now what we're understanding is when we can use it smart and we can be smart with it, it can actually really, really help us. So Casey, how do you recommend that bloggers can implement AI in a way that can work for us and not work against us and how to like not be afraid of it? I would say that AI is like anything else, it's a tool. It is a tool in your toolkit. We wanna take that out as much as we can and use that. I have used AI every day.

I have been using tasks, which is relatively new. I've introduced in the last 90 days to automate a digest reading list that I get every morning. I use it to stay on top of my calendar. I use it to ping me and do auto responders to certain emails. I have everything through task. Previously, there was lots of other third party plugins

that I would use for that. I just got rid of them all and just set everything up through ChatGPT and it's worked incredibly well for me. But I teach clients how to use ChatGPT effectively during my audits. I will show them how to use tasks TCT effectively during my audits. I will show them how to use Tasks. There are 10 very specific ways I think I provided a link for you that you can add to this podcast, a kind of a sample AI workflow for bloggers,

you know, kind of 10 ways that you can use Tasks to help alleviate tasks on your menu every day. But I also use Tasks to teach bloggers how to do competitive compare and contrast SEO. We used an example earlier. You know, I can't understand why I'm not ranking for this pot rust. Here is my post. Here are the three posts that are not ranking.

Here are what the other third party resources that I would like you to review, compare and contrast what they're doing and what I'm doing, and then ask what I'm missing based upon these other third-party resources. And bloggers are always stunned at the feedback they get. And we also want to use AI as much as we can in our regular lives. I have taught my son Blake, who just finished his junior year at Cal State San Marcos here, how to use AI to do incredibly detailed outlines for all of his his finals and he was very pleased

with it. He talked about it relentlessly. His last final was yesterday at two o'clock and he said that the the outline was better than anything he could have ever put together and it's the same thing with also was projected quizzes. You know he's able to load in a chapter, tell it to summarize the chapter and then provide sample quiz questions. And he says that seven out of 10 times it nailed the questions that were on the quiz. It's a very high conversion rate. My wife is a celebrated immigration and adoption attorney. She uses Chat TV all the time to summarize legal pleadings, provide the main points so

that she can go ahead and have that at her fingertips when she's meeting with clients on specific case law that she needs to process quickly. I've taught her how to use it as a counselor. I have a lot of colleagues who use ChatGP as kind of a health counselor. Basically, they just talk to it on a daily basis, why I've got this meeting that's coming up and I'm really nervous about it. They have it trained and it provides exceptional advice on, you know, that they can take. The sky is the limit with this

and it's only going to get better. But you really have to learn how to do detailed and change prompts. You have to tell it, you know, we wanna talk to it conversationally but there are specific ways to go. Like if I want it to analyze a patent, I am going to set it up saying

you're an experienced patent expert with this many years and you have certifications from here and here and here are ways to analyze a patent and I want you to take a look at this patent and provide answers to these specific questions for me and oh by the way here's another resource that covered this. I want you to compare and contrast your answer with this answer and let you know what was missed. And then, oh, by the way, I want you to spit it out as if it was in Old English. So there's lots of things that you can do with this. I mean, I've used it. My wife and I play a lot of pickleball. And so she had, for Valentine's Day, I actually kind of custom pickleball card for her and I literally used chat to be to make me a funny poem About her strengths and my strengths and my weaknesses for pickleball and it it literally spit it out in seconds

What would have taken me an entire weekend to do? So again, those are the kind of things that we want to do We do not be scared of AI and it's just like, you know, I like Raptor But just like with mediavine they do things they shouldn't doing. And one of the things that Raptor is really big about is blocking AI. We don't block AI bots. When you block AI bots, you're 100% setting yourself up as a competitive disadvantage to all the many tens or hundreds of thousands of food bloggers who are not blocking AI. And I hate to break it to you, but we know now from the recent Google versus DOJ lawsuit all the leaks that have happened over the last couple weeks

Literally, there was a leak on Friday last Friday where Google literally said that hey, even though you might be blocking Google extended It doesn't matter. We're still gonna use all of your information to train our for machine learning Yeah, so good times. So I get it. I I understand that you might be You know very hesitant to use AI, but blocking is not the way to go. We really want to lean into it. That's why you have all the citations in ChatGPT. Now that's why we have the citations in Gemini. That's why we're having perplexities really rolling those out. But you know, if you really want to make sure that you're optimizing for AI, read my article in Search Engine Land. Don't block AI. Make sure that you're optimizing for AI, read my article in Search Angel land. Don't block AI. Make sure that you're using things

like index now, which by the way, for most everyone on the call who's using Yoast that's already built in so you're good. Make sure that you have you know that you're looking at the the output that's in being that you're looking at your at what you're seeing in Google and that everything is as it should be. You know, we can feed that we can we can feed it just like with other children. We can feed it just like we feed other children. We can feed AI what we want it to feed. You just have to be really

cognizant about that. That's why I publish content as much as I do. I want that to be tied to me from a verified source. If you have the ability to participate in Quora, if you have the ability to participate in Reddit, we know that those are two big channels for those inputs with regards to machine learning. For what we're talking about, RAG, which is Retrieval Augmented Generation, when that's what we're using to get this information that is then training these LLMs, they're getting that

by literally crawling all of these forums, by crawling your sites, by crawling everything that's publicly available. We want to control as much of that intake as we can. What it's making me think about is when people are now going to chat GPT though and saying, hey, can you create a meal plan and give me five recipes? It's putting it right into chat GPT and people are never clicking over to a website. So when we're optimizing and chat GPT is picking up this information and sharing it that way it's obviously reducing people clicking through to our site reducing our traffic. Yeah that's true. Like what is the benefit to making sure that we're optimizing so that that is being shown in chat GPT? Well the thing

it realizes that in your example, there are citations now in any of those that'll say, hey, here are some citations for you on where these recipes come from. Or, you know, I'm looking to put together a meal plan, here are some suggestions for you, and then at many times it'll provide citations, especially Gemini.

But our goal, of course, is we know that this is not going away. And so the best thing you could do is optimize for it as much as you can. Have those bill plans ready to go on your site. Be the answer that these users are looking for. You know, make sure that you're leaning into that as much as you can. One of the things Reaptives was working on was setting up custom, basically, chat to TIs for their bigger Illuminary clients.

And I know that they're working on rolling that on, I think for smaller sites as well. Basically it's your own AI agent that you would have on your site. So that's something that might, I suggest will probably be pretty popular pretty soon. We'll see a lot more of that. Now there's lots of third parties that do that kind of stuff,

but our goal of course is just to not, trying to think of a good history about, you know, how, well, remember DVDs or remember, what was the format? Remember that we had Blu-ray versus DVD HD? Who won the fight? Blu-ray ended up winning. And now Blu-ray is basically gone. And now we just have digital. It's going to be the same thing with these evolutions that continue to happen. There will be a new norm and we're hearing that. We're entering the age of just answer engines

where we really need to focus on kind of establishing our own communities and taking advantage of these. What people talk about, I've gotta form a moat around my content castle and protect all my stuff. That only works so far. And most bloggers on this call are not big enough to have a moat that's going to be effective. Now, based upon what we're seeing with the litigation that's going on out there, I think some licensing agreements will probably be in the work, but probably won't be this year, probably be in the future. But we've had some chat TV's doing a really good job

with some licensing agreements in some of the larger organizations. But I would tell you that our goal really doesn't change. We have to really focus on not writing content for search engines, but write content for our users, and get those users to continue to be vocal fans for us. And because those brand mentions that we generate, all externally, are also inputs that the AIs are using

to export in all these LLMs. If you go in and type in Casey Markey in a chat, there's this whole long thing about who Casey Markey is. And you can feed things into that. And that's what I did for years so that I could kind of control a little bit of the content that's come out of that. But I'm always amazed that when I look at that, there are things in there that I have

no idea where I got it from. And I'll know immediately that it's spam if it says, I like vegan or I have a pet iguana or something like that. I'll know and I can flag those things and we can get rid of them. But those are, we really want to focus, lean into brand building as things and we can get rid of them. But those are, we really wanna focus, lean into brand building as much as we can, lean into making sure that we're optimizing. And it's just, it's the new reality we live in.

We want to make AI our friend, supposedly. We don't wanna take this torch, the torches and pitchforks to AI, it's not gonna help us. I don't know, remember, that's why I always say please and thank you when I'm using an LLM because you never know what's going to happen in the future. You know, I want to be kind to our robot overlords if they're holding me by the hand and dropping me into a flaming pit and they're going to say, oh, I remember him. He said please and thank you every time, so we're going to spare him. Better safe than sorry. Good advice. There's so many things, Casey, I feel like we could just continue to have this

go on forever and ever and ever. But what would you say to somebody who is thinking about starting a blog today? What would be two things that you would want them to take away from this or take into their blogging journey in regards to just the change of what we think the blogging used to be versus what it actually is today? How would you encourage a new blogger to press on? And I think it's a rehash of kind of what we've discussed today is we don't need to be creating content for search engines, especially for younger bloggers. We really need to be focusing on building that community.

If you have, I always tell people, I know there's so many social platforms out there, find three that you think that you can establish a community and focus on those three. Maybe three is too much, lower it down to two, but focus on trying to build those signals. We know based upon the API leak from Google, the API warehouse leak from Google that was about 18 months ago now, and we know from the recent DOJ case that we know Google uses those signals. They're using all these third party signals. We know that things like click depth and CTR and POGO sticking and bounce back from the search results, those are all things that they're using to determine user action. We basically we call this the ABCs of linking in Google.

You have the ABC, which is the anchor text. This is what the web page, what the web says about the page. And then we have the B, which is the body of the content. That's what the document says about itself. So that'd be our recipe. And then we have the C, which is the clicks. And those are things like dwell time, what users say about the content.

And that also includes things like shares. If someone's not sharing your content, if someone isn't going in and interacting on the page while leaving a comment, if someone's not using the save this or other interactive elements, then maybe that's a signal that Google has access to all of that by means of Chrome. You'd be shocked at how much information Chrome is correcting from all of you on a daily basis.

It'd blow your mind. But they have all that data, and they can use that as feedback to determine what can rank and what cannot. And that's where we get things like, we have things like Twiddlers, which many are, it's a funny term that how Google basically determines how things rank after they've made it onto the front of the site. And we've also got all these things like we got RankBrain. And we've got these other little things that Google is using, like NavBoost.

NavBoost is kind of their big ranking engine, kind of how they're determining what's going to show and where. And then they use these Twiddlers to kind of refine the output at the front end before the user sees it. But this is all coming out in the Google versus DOG core filing. So if this is news to anyone who's listening to this,

please go over and take a look. They're all over Twitter. You can read all the pleadings. You can read all this stuff from Sergey Brain and everyone else at Google, where they've had to come out and admit all of this stuff that they've been keeping hidden for years, where they're literally gaslining bloggers and even SEOs for years, where we thought, oh, this has to be a ranking factor.

No, no, no, it's not a ranking factor. Well, now we know that it in many ways is. And so there's just a lot of really cool analysis that you can go and take a look at. But again, back kind of to the initial root of this question, if you're a small or a medium blogger who's just starting out, really focus on building up your community.

Implement print pass on your recipe cards. Let's get that email list as high as possible. medium blogger who's just starting out, really focus on building up your community. Implement print pass on your recipe cards. Let's get that email list as high as possible. Make sure that we're writing recipes that our users want, not because I used a tool that told me this is possibly ranked better in Google. Really focus on getting your site technically sound. Use a quality theme. Understand what a byline looks like.

Understand last modified and published dates. Understand how to byline looks like. Understand last modified and published dates. Understand how to correctly set up a recipe card. You know, understand how to correctly size your images. You know, understand what a broken link checker and how to run it. Understand internal linking. Really focus on understanding that your category pages are basically kind of like the main topic clusters of your site. What can I do to optimize these category pages so they can rank? You are never going to rank for breakfast recipes ever. But you could possibly rank for quick and easy breakfast recipes or maybe killer breakfast

recipes or maybe some other long-tail breakfast specific keyword and then build your content hubs around those long-tail keywords right away so we can start getting traffic. And then just understand that no one needs, now that's probably a bad example because sourdough is killing it, but maybe no one needs another sourdough discord pizza dough recipe right now. So unless you can really do something that allows you to set yourself apart, that might not be the best use of your time and resources. I feel like overall, I think this should feel like good news to bloggers because it is back

to like building a community and getting to know your readers and getting to know the people that are coming to you for information and being able to find that balance of, yeah, creating things that have keyword searches, but also creating things that people are asking for, things that people want. I just want everyone to feel excited about all the changes coming up in blogging. It's just about being mindful, staying aware of what's going on,

and making sure that your site is set up correctly so that you're not hurting yourself unintentionally. We can't stress that enough. We know that it's tough out there, but this is a business. And you have to determine, am I going to take this hobby from a hobby to a business? I tell that to all bloggers whenever they decide, okay, I'm gonna invest in my shelf.

I'm gonna get an audit with Casey. I've heard about it for years. I'm finally saving the money. I'm gonna get an audit. I tell people, do not get an audit with me unless you've made that transition from being a hobby blogger to a business blogger because They are incredibly detailed. There is a lot of information covered there It will take you months sometimes years to implement everything that we discuss. It is not for everyone But our goal of course is to make again your site and your brand interlinked. And we want both of them to be so

algorithmically attractive to Google that they'd be embarrassed not to give you the rankings you deserve. But you cannot do that in a vacuum. You cannot do that. Just listening to this podcast, and you certainly can't do it if you're just taking advice from your ad company, not going to happen. You're going to find that you're going to reach a level where you just can't grow. Or you're like, oh my gosh, I've been doing this for a couple of years and I'm still at this level and I'm still at this RPM and I'm still at this monthly level

of traffic. What do I need to do? And that's where the breakthroughs happen. Is you understanding, okay, it's time for me to get out of my comfort zone and go in and work with an expert, whether it's an email expert, an SEO expert, a UX expert, or someone who can actually take a dispassioned look at your site through a third-party lens and tell you, here's what you're doing right, here's what you're doing wrong, and here's what we can do to get you the 10-time traffic increases you need.

Yep. And I think the takeaway there is just having an open mind. It is. And just this is just just you kind of have to take the emotion out of it. And especially if you're wanting to go from hobby to business, if that's where you're at, making some of those decisions, be unemotional about it. Don't take it personal. Anything that's been said that like maybe you're doing, maybe you have a pop-up on your site, something like that. Like it's not personal. It's not a personal attack. Take it off. on your site, something like that. It's not personal.

It's not a personal attack. Yeah. Take it off. Take it off. See what it does. Yeah. If you're with Mediavine, I don't know. Maybe you have questions that you want to ask.

Yeah, exactly. You know, it's not like we're not talking like Bible here, but we're talking just have an open mind. And I think that when you're willing to look outside of the box sometimes is when that's when we can find the growth. And something else that I think is really important that you've mentioned more towards the end of this that we stress often is the importance of community. You cannot build this alone.

And you can sure try, but I find that those who are surrounded with a community in some form or fashion, and they have the support and the resources that they need, those are the ones that are able to find the success that they're looking for, and the success that they started this business for. So get plugged into a community. We have a community available, the Ultimate Blog Roadmap. We'd love to have you in there and support you.

Consider an audit with Casey. Get plugged in, meet some other bloggers, find ways that you can network and grow and learn from one another, collaborate together. I think that's super important. Now more than ever, you know, we've been doing this for a long time as well. And I think now more than ever, we really do need to lean into that aspect of working together to build the industry as a whole. So yeah, absolutely. Casey, can you please let people know where they can learn more from you? We are going to put that

search engine land article in the show notes so look for that but I know that you've mentioned an audit several times and people might be curious how they can do that and so if you'll let them know how they can. Absolutely so you can find me on my site MediaWise that's M-E-D-I-A-W-Y as in yellow, S-E dot com. And just go to the contact me page, there's some information there. You can click on the SEO audit page, there's lots of information there. Please find me on Facebook, I'm always at Food Blogger Central or in the Foodie Pro group or I'm also the on staff SEO expert for Food Blogger Pro.

So you can find me in the forums there. You can take a look at many of the podcasts I've done there. But I am on Facebook most of the time answering questions as needed. So feel free to tag me at Food Blogger Central or any of the other groups and I'll usually see it. If I can help you, I certainly will. And I'm excited for you.

I mean, this is a really interesting time to be a blogger and Again, it's a lot of people say they get frustrated by it as I mentioned I have 600 plus sites in my Google Search Console and there are hundreds and hundreds of bloggers killing it Okay, there there's there's plenty of room for success there the bloggers that are doing the best have taken a multifaceted approach They are working to make sure that their site is technically sound for success there. The bloggers that are doing the best have taken a multifaceted approach. They are working to make sure that their site is technically sound, that their content is as to the point and as high quality as can be, and that they're focusing on building up that brand and that external community as much as they can through email, products,

PDFs, whatever's necessary for them to provide a way to push their expertise, both outside of their community and of course into their own private groups as much as possible. And I'm excited. I think it's going to be a very interesting rest of 2025. I know that there will be more fireworks. I'm very interested to see how the DOG thing ends up. We know that there are more AI mode is still basically in its infancy But we're gonna see a big increase on that in the next couple of months, but there's lots that can be done and Please do a search for KC Marquis read my articles. They are up to date. No fluff. No nonsense I just I've been doing this a long time. I was here. What are we were talking about? I was literally here when we were doing SEO for Dogpile and Lycos and Goto.com.

And I was telling you ladies how we could literally put these whole block of keywords at the bottom of posts and literally rank number one overnight. Oh, good times. That was in the good old days. Yeah, you've seen it all. No more of that. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Casey.

It's always great to just talk to you. Oh, good times. Those are the good old days. Yeah. No more of that. No more of that. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Casey. It's always great to just talk to you, pick your brain a little bit and being willing just to share what you're learning. It's very appreciated for you to get back to the blogging community. We appreciate you very, very much.

So thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to pour into our community. That means so much to us. So together we can all grow. Thank you very much, ladies. It's always a pleasure. Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to the Ultimate Blog Podcast. If you'd like to learn more about building your blog, visit theultimateblogpodcast.com backslash newsletter to get signed up for our email newsletter. If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love for you to share it with a friend, subscribe and leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. Thanks for tuning in today and we'll see you next time.