Ep 240: How AI Search Is Changing SEO (and Why You Still Need Both) with Expert Colin Clapp

“When New Zealand won the America’s Cup, it wasn’t the biggest budget that won, it was one key question: Will it make the boat go faster?”

That same philosophy drives Colin Clapp’s content strategy in a world now ruled by AI-driven search. If you’ve been told that SEO is dead, buckle up because Colin is here to explain why that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Colin Clapp has been in the content trenches for years, helping creators and businesses grow visibility through smart, structured content strategies. From traditional SEO to adapting to the rise of AI search, he brings experience, clarity, and actionable frameworks, like his One Click Content Optimization approach, that get results.

WE ALSO TALKED ABOUT

• Why SEO is not dead—and what small business owners need to understand instead
• The “table stakes” every piece of content needs (hint: meta titles and descriptions still matter)
• How structure helps AI and traditional search engines find and rank your content
• Why internal linking is crucial—and how to avoid content cannibalization
• What schema is, and how it quietly powers discoverability (even if you’re not a developer)
• Colin’s “F1 car” analogy that makes optimization strategies finally make sense
• The rise of AI search—and what it means for your content’s future visibility
• Practical ways non-techies can improve their site’s structure and speed

CALL TO ACTION

Tune in to this episode and find out what still works—and what’s changed—when it comes to being found online.

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RESOURCES MENTIONED

• Colin’s Website:  Online Marketing Done 4 You
• Colin’s YouTube Video: The 5 Pillars Framework – How to Optimize Content for Traditional SEO & AI Search (AEO & GEO):
• Colin’s framework: One Click Content Optimization

My newsletter is for people who need a way to make money from home so they can build a better life for themselves and their families:
👉 https://onlinebusinessliftoff.com/newsletter

_____________

Trudy Rankin is the host of the Online Business Launchpad Podcast, Director of West Island Digital and the founder of the Online Business Lift-Off program.

Affiliate Disclaimer: If you click on links on this page and then make a purchase, I may earn a commission (at no extra cost to you).  I am a proud affiliate of these resources because I use them in my own life and business.

TRANSCRIPT

Episode 240: How AI Search Is Changing SEO (and Why You Still Need Both) with Expert Colin Clapp

 [00:00:00] 

Trudy Rankin: When New Zealand won the America’s Cup for the first time, it wasn’t because they spent more money. It was because they asked one simple question, will it make the boat go faster? Now that same philosophy drives how Colin clap approaches content optimization in today’s AI driven world. In this episode, we’re taking a look at the evolving world of SEO AI search and content strategy, and Colin explains why SEO isn’t dead and he breaks down what small business owners actually need to know about being found online today, including the must have table stakes for content, the role of schema and why structure still wins.

Now, Colin Clap has been in the trenches of content marketing for years, [00:01:00] and he’s adapted like a pro to every major shift, including the AI boom. He doesn’t just theorize, he builds frameworks like one click content optimization. He builds frameworks that help creators actually improve their ROI. So if you want some actionable advice from someone who walks the talk, then Colin’s your guy. 

Trudy Rankin: Welcome to the Online Business Launchpad podcast. I’m Trudy Rankin. And I help people who need a flexible work from home option grow the online side of their business so they can earn more stress less, and have greater freedom in how they live.

I’ve been talking with Colin off and on for quite a number of years now, and he originally, at least when I knew him, started out doing SEO and I was interested in [00:02:00] SEO and then the world’s changed and we’ve had so many people say, SEO’s dead, it’s dead. And the more I look into it, the more I realize, no, it’s not dead at all. It is actually fundamental to being found these days, but there’s an extra added layer to it now in terms of how do you get found on AI search?

And I was watching a video, it popped up in my feed actually. And I listened to it and Colin did a, there’s a YouTube video talking about kind of the pillars of this whole new world of being found on AI via AI search. And I thought, ah, I need Colin to come and talk to us about that.

And then as I was talking to Colin just before we got started, it’s even more than that. It’s about thinking about content as an asset and what do you have to do to continually make that content better, easier to create, more findable, all those things so that you’re getting a really great ROI on the time that you spend on creating this content.

[00:03:00] And so, Colin, thank you so much for being on the podcast. It’s really great to have you here.

Colin Clapp: Good to be back. I’m not too sure how long ago it was since the last one, but I do remember it. It’s been a, it has actually been a while.

Trudy Rankin: I have to actually go back and just check it out and just find the number and stuff because it’s, it has been a while, but I thought, you know, it’s, the world’s changed since then and you are still around, you’re still doing what you do, what you’re good at, but you’ve evolved to match where we’re at and I just think it would be great if you could share with people just a little bit about what you did and how you have evolved, what you’ve done so people are clear about what it is that you do and how.

Colin Clapp: Yeah. I would say this concept of traditional SEO search platforms, Google, Bing that same traditional SEO didn’t exist a few years ago, but now that the AI platforms have search capability, that is the kind of polarization of content [00:04:00] optimization that people are seeing. Traditional search engines, and I’m being very careful in my words here. I’m not saying versus AI search engines, it’s, “and”. It’s traditional search engines and AI search engines. The evolution is that they coexist.

It’s not one or the other. I think I mentioned it in that video you brought up. A lot of people are seeing it as one or the other and they’re trying to invest in one, not realizing how they’re interlinked. So it’s the evolution of SEO and I mean, you’ve heard me talk about this before, like the library analogy of about content being found.

You know, you go back to cavemen and stone findings, the principles of how humans consume content hasn’t changed. Just the mechanisms of how we find it. The indexing systems are just very different. You know, you didn’t need an index system when you were carving [00:05:00] stone slabs, but then the library system was all about indexing and that made things more easily researchable and readable.

Well, if you think about Google, that’s all they did. They just built the world’s largest library of indexation. You know, that’s what really underpins their algorithm and everything that goes with it. And we all have to interpret that indexing system. And now we have new search platforms, but again, underneath that is some layer of indexation.

You know, search platforms don’t, AI search platforms don’t magically go, I’m just going to pluck this and I’m going to pluck that. Fundamentally, they’re still using an evolution of an indexing system. So if you can understand it in those very simple terms, then it just makes it a little bit more , shall we say doable when you’re thinking about how you’re going to improve your own content.

So does that answer your question?

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, so that gives a bit of a wider context around the topic. And [00:06:00] I’m curious as to, as you’ve made this… it’s not been a switch really. It’s been adding an extra layer on top of the SEO, the SEO that you were doing in the past.

Can you talk a little bit about your journey, you as a person and your business? How have you made that, that, I’ll call it an uplift, if you like, from how it used to be until what it is now? ’cause you haven’t thrown anything away from the past, but what have you done to make that leap?

Colin Clapp: That’s a really interesting question because on one level we could argue that we haven’t done anything because we were always applying the fundamentals of content structure, competitive data that a lot of people just simply weren’t doing. And that foundational structure has just really come to the fore now even more because when the AI platforms are looking for a way to surface whatever.[00:07:00] 

They need that structure even more than the traditional search engines. Now, there are technical nuances to what degree and how far you can keep going with it, but a lot of our content starting to rise and rise without us doing anything extra because we’d already come at it with a solid framework that, when there was more competition with just traditional, we were just a small player and I mean, we’re still a small player on some of our sites, but the numbers just keep growing. And you know, people, like you said earlier, people say SEO is dead. We’re not, our numbers are growing threefold on clicks, five fold in on impressions and this is just fundamental good structure.

Trudy Rankin: Do you want to talk about that? Just a little bit? So let’s just imagine for a moment that. There’s a small business owner [00:08:00] who’s been around for maybe a couple of years, long enough to come in right in the middle of all the helpful content update upsets and all of the, oh, woe is me, sEO is dead, and all the confusion and the chaos.

And they’ve thought about, you know, how are people going to find me? How do I make sure people can find me in the future? What kind of fundamental things should they have in place to make sure that people can actually find them?

Colin Clapp: So from a pure content point of view the structure is just a good hierarchical heading structure.

So I will assume that it’s a given, metadata and SEO titles, meta descriptions, those are like the sort of table stakes. Even if you write those sort of good things, as you mentioned earlier, helpful content, that’s just good old fashioned, interesting content. If you pick up a book and you’re bored by it, you’re going to put it down.

So [00:09:00] first things first, make your content helpful or interesting, or both, or you know, or entertain. That’s true of any kind of communication platform. You wouldn’t, if you got bored watching a show, you’d leave. You know, if the entertainer cannot engage you, then you are going to leave where the same applies with content.

So obviously in the modern era, people are more into bite size content, but that also comes in reading. And I’m a bit older and I probably pay a lot of attention to grammar and structure and stuff like that, but now you’ve got to write in shorter sentences and stuff like that.

Now I’m perhaps going a little bit ahead of myself, but if you, your question was about someone … first things first, don’t write for the search engines, whether you’re writing for AI platforms or traditional. Write with a view to entertain your audience, whoever that audience may be, [00:10:00] entertain, inform, inspire, whatever it is you are trying to link it to your goods and services.

And that means people will pass it on, et cetera, et cetera. But then if you come to the sort of nuances of trying to be found, then that’s when the structure comes, you know, break it up with headings, hierarchical, break it up with questions, break it up with images, so it’s more skimmable, things like that.

Trudy Rankin: So I want to I want to come back a little to what you said when you started to answer that question, and you said that some of the things that are there are just table stakes. However I’m thinking in the back of my head that if there are, and I know there are people out there who really, seriously have only just started in the last couple of years, and because they keep hearing this whole SEO is dead thing, they may be really confused as to about what those table stakes are.

Maybe you could just go through, yeah, that’s a good one. And [00:11:00] just maybe just talk about the table stakes. So things that you actually have to have no matter what.

Colin Clapp: Yeah, absolutely. So from a traditional SEO point of view, the URL, you want that to be informative. You want the SEO title, which could be the same as the title of the piece, but they don’t have to be.

You want that to be informative with or without keywords. It still needs to be informative, and then the description needs to be something compelling. And when we say the description, that’s the thing that you will see when you type in a phrase on a search engine, a traditional search engine, that’s the description of the link that would come up.

So I’m ignoring things like ads and sponsorship and stuff like that, but just how you are going to show up regardless of where you are going to show up. Your title needs to be close to whatever the search term is. Then the description needs to be that sort of compelling reason why [00:12:00] someone should click it. So when I say table stakes, a good thing to remember about the difference between the meta description…

so the title and the description is, the title is probably going to be used by the search engines. The description, not so much, but that’s for the reader. If the reader looks at the description and is still not compelled to click, and clicks are even harder to get now. So arguably, you want that description to be even more compelling.

So again, going back to the fundamentals of just being a speaker, being an entertainer, being a presenter, you are looking to be engaging. So what we’re saying there is don’t leave everything to default. Well, what I mean by that is if you press publish and you don’t overwrite the meta, which is the title and the description, you leave it at the mercy of the search engines to write that [00:13:00] description for you, and they may not use the language that you want them to use. They may pull something out that you don’t want them to use. Now, by the way, you can never stop them doing that anyway, but if you don’t try to control the narrative, they’ll do it for you.

So by putting in a title and an description, you are trying to control the narrative. You’re trying to control to within the constraints of what you have control of. You are trying to say For this given piece, this is how I’m trying to attract your attention, and this is why I think you should read it.

And then you’ve obviously got to back that up with content that matches. What you’ve said. Does that answer the question?

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I do want to touch on a couple of other things. And I know this is a little bit technical and I know that the fact that it is a little bit technical scares a lot of people.

But there are other things besides just the [00:14:00] content and the title and the description that you do need to think about. Especially when it comes to things like page speed, how fast it takes, how much does that matter these days? Especially with the AI search being added into the mix.

Colin Clapp: It depends who you speak to.

I think there’s a lot of self-serving interest around this, but there’ll be people who can prove it’s really important, and there’ll be others who can prove it’s not as important, but there will be a tipping point where it’s intolerable. So the people who really evangelize about that part of things, the technical side will try and force you into it has to be like nanoseconds and they will show you benchmarks and stuff like that.

But it is technical and most people can’t do it. And if you don’t have the resources to [00:15:00] employ someone to optimize to that level. Does that mean you give up? Does that mean you give in? So my answer to that is stick to proven platforms. You know, if you’re using WordPress, if you’re using Shopify or Wix or whatever, yes.

If you want to compare them side by side, someone will pro prove one is better than the other, but to the average person, the average content creator, the average small business, the difference is so minuscule. Have you got the time, energy, and effort and skillset or resources and the funds to pay for it?

To try and get that tiny percent? I’ll show you something, Trudy. Over the years, I’ve become a fan of Formula One.

Trudy Rankin: Oh, yes. Yeah.

Colin Clapp: And I’m not a, I’m not a petrol head, but part of it, part [00:16:00] of the lure into that behind the scenes is I’ve come to really appreciate how small changes make a big difference to the, you know, they’re not going to win championships unless they make those tiny championships.

Trudy Rankin: And for those of you who, those of you who are listening, he’s holding up a model of a Formula One racing car.

Colin Clapp: Yeah, sorry. Bright red one. We’re a traveling family and I don’t have a lot of material possessions, but my family bought me Lego three Lego Formula One cars, so yes listeners, and I’ve made room for them in my traveling pack because it’s just a reminder of optimization.

Sorry. But the reason I’m telling that whole story is because Formula One is like at the pinnacle of of what it takes to win a world championship. Those guys have to optimize to the minuscule amount because if they don’t, they won’t be in the game. But that doesn’t mean all around the world, all the Carters and racers of different standards have stopped racing because they can’t [00:17:00] compete at Formula One level.

So we as content creators or website owners, sometimes I have to realize we, we are maybe not in the Formula One category, and maybe we can’t optimize our page speed for everything the gurus tell us we should, but can we still do well if we don’t do that? As long as we’re on a reasonable level and our evidence is you can with good content and structure and things like that, can you improve page speed? I mean, definitely things like could you shrink the size of your images? Most people can understand . Compress the size of your images before you upload them. And you can probably find a tool for do that. And you don’t have to think too technically about that. It just compresses them.

You file them and you upload them. That is doable to anyone. But when you’re talking about paint speed latency. For the small business person who’s just trying to sell their widgets or their services, they’re like, [00:18:00] what? Does that answer your question?

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, because it’s really about what can the average small business owner who’s maybe a one person band, or maybe they have a team of one or something, what can they do that’s actually doable in the time they have available or the money that they have available?

Colin Clapp: Yeah. And so if I, for your listeners, if I just repeat that point. If you look to a page speed report, it’s highly likely, most of it will be overwhelming. The language on a page speed report would have, it’s not plain English. It is very technical and you probably need expert help or you’d have to invest a lot of time to understand what exactly is your being asked to do to improve your page.

But if you went off to a site that does compression, where you just drag and drop your pictures out of your Dropbox folder into this [00:19:00] tool and it shrinks them and you drag ’em down into a new folder with smaller file size before you put that on your website. That’s very doable. You don’t need to understand too much about that.

I can just see this file was five meg. I dragged it up to this platform and it came down one meg. Alright. It’s smaller. Okay, that makes sense. And smaller will help page speed.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, okay. No, that, that makes a lot of sense. One of the other things that, that usually comes up in the technical too scary to do thing, is basically, and I’m not going to use the technical words for it, but it’s really basically a bit of a map of what’s on your website and you mentioned this at the beginning too, it’s about the structure of your content and how you’ve laid it out or whether, you know, is it a whole mess of.

You know, it’s like somebody’s taken a whole bunch of board games and thrown all the pieces onto the floor and mixed them all up and then said, okay, now go and find what you’re looking [00:20:00] for. Or is it very structured? Can you talk a little bit about how picky do you need to get or to what level of complexity do you need to get in terms of how you’ve laid out your website?

Colin Clapp: Yeah. We would argue that website… less is more, you know, plenty of white space, easy to navigate, but the navigation is key. And I don’t know whether that some people would whether that’s called technical or underpinning technical. But after I, I talked about the content structured, talking about hierarchy like a head, a single heading one, then heading two or threes, possibly heading fours.

But you probably shouldn’t need more than that and you should be able to see that quite easily. So it makes it skimmable images to support any text, et cetera, et cetera. But then internal [00:21:00] linking is massive now. Absolutely massive. So that’s where you are writing about one thing that’s related to something else, but you can’t assume someone is going to go to the related thing.

You’ve got to tell the reader and the search engines, I just mentioned this, and then you put a link inside what’s called the anchor text. So the anchor text is the actual words on the page. So if you’re talking about red and it’s related to orange and yellow, then you’ve got articles on orange and yellow.

Then you would highlight yellow and link to yellow. You would highlight orange and link to orange. But this particular page is about red.

Trudy Rankin: Yep.

Colin Clapp: And then in that way, the search engines, when they’re skimming the site with their, what they call the robots, when they see mentions of yellow or orange, they don’t [00:22:00] confuse the current article with yellow and orange.

They know it’s related to red, but this article’s about red, and we’ll stick with red and these references to orange and yellow. We’ll follow down to the orange and yellow links, and now the reader and the search engines is being guided towards. If I need more about orange and yellow, I need to go to the orange and yellow.

And this is also very important to avoid what’s called content cannibalization, which I call the cancer of websites. I actually wrote a post about it just recently because it’s really difficult to find. But content cannibalization is when the search engines, so if you don’t do what I just said about the links to yellow and orange, you may have a really good post on yellow and a really good post on orange, but if the search engines don’t see it, they’ll see those references on the red page [00:23:00] and they will serve up the red page in the search results.

And then that’s not what you want. You specifically wrote your yellow post and your orange post to be found for yellow and orange, but the search engines are serving up red, so now you are cannibalizing. People are arriving on the red post looking for orange and yellow, and so they’re going to disappear.

Because they’re not finding the answers. I know I’m using a very basic example, but does that make sense?

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, it makes sense. And it’s actually a really good example. ’cause it’s easy to visualize. 

Colin Clapp: Yeah.

Trudy Rankin: And it, and just to understand what you mean, I want to take that question just a little bit further.

Because there’s some language that’s used in this world, it’s called Canonical.

Colin Clapp: Yes.

Trudy Rankin: Or the URL, the canonical URL. And I struggled for quite a while to actually understand what that meant until I finally had to deal with it and force myself to learn what it meant.

Can you talk a little [00:24:00] bit about what a canonical URL is and why does it actually matter when it comes to search?

Colin Clapp: Yeah, great question. The best example there would be… trying to pick one. If you imagine you’ve got an e-commerce store, and so you’ve got a range of products, but within those products, you have different variations like blue or different sizes different sizes, different colors, maybe different designs, but they’re all really a variation of the core product.

When you actually click on those variants, the URL changes, so the front part of the URL will remain, but the, I can’t remember what it’s called, but the longer tail version of it, which is invisible or fades in the search bar changes, but you can’t optimize for all of those variants without competing against yourself.

So what you really want to do is go, [00:25:00] well, what is the core thing that we’re offering? What is the core thing that people are searching for? So it might be dress style a, but they’re not searching for blue dress style a or red dress style a or dress style with a neck. So you take all of those variants and you canonize them to a single URL and that is going to make sure that all the variants, when people are searching for the main thing, are just being served up that one URL. Of course, when they’re on the site, you want to make it easy that they can choose the color or choose the size or choose whatever other variant may be possible. But if you don’t, if you don’t get them there in the first place, then they’re not even going to do that.

Does that make sense?

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, it makes sense. Definitely. And then I want to just expand it, the question even just a little bit further, [00:26:00] because one of the things that has been, it’s been changing for a while, but it’s become a lot more obvious recently, and that is, as we’ve already mentioned, you’ve got your traditional search and you’ve got your AI search.

And the AI search is a new way for people to find you. And so when I look at my analytics, which people should be doing on a regular basis you know, you look and see, and you can see that AI search, the numbers of people coming to my website anyway are increasing from AI search. But if you’ve, if you are just getting into the this side of things and you’re wanting to increase the visibility just on AI searches, and I’m assuming that we’ve already got a solid foundation around the SEO side of things.

So you’ve got those bits in place, but what would be some of the nuances to actually being visible to the AI search tools or platforms? So that and that’s two [00:27:00] questions. What do you have to do to be visible and what do you have to do for them to pick you, to show to people who are searching?

Colin Clapp: Yeah, so the, it’s a great question and, Trudy talked about at the beginning, these five pillars that we’ve talked about. Well, pillar one is the content structure, and I’ve talked about that, so I won’t repeat about that. Pillar two is about the cross platform authority building, and you can circle back to that one, Trudy.

But the underlying one of this the answer to the question you just asked would be pillar three, which is the technical foundations. Now, this unfortunately is. I’ll, I mean, it’s technical. I’m not going to try and skirt around this because unfortunately this isn’t something the layman will naturally get quickly.

Doesn’t mean they can’t get it doesn’t necessarily mean they have to get a developer, but there is a little bit more of a learning curve involved in this one. And [00:28:00] the, without trying to get too technical. I’m going to just use the word schema. Now, I’m not a developer, but Schema is just a website. I don’t even know if I want to call it a language, but it’s a structure underneath websites that makes certain parts of your website more easier to understand by the search engines, not by the readers.

It’s got nothing to do with readers. It’s purely for the search engines. And I’ll say, unfortunately, the AI platforms need that more than the traditional search engines because they’re not as fa, the AI search engines aren’t as familiar with the content, so they haven’t been able to index the structure, sorry.

They haven’t been able to index the content. They’re relying on Google and the other search engines to help them out as they find their own [00:29:00] way. But the schema is a kind of style underneath that they can relate to. So as I say, this is more technical, but there’ll be schema for questions.

There’ll be schema for products. There’ll be schema for contact. There’ll be schema for organization. And what that means is let’s say you have a contact page. Anyone can open up a WordPress page or whatever, a Wix page, and they could say, this is how you contact us. You know, this is the name of our company.

This is our address. This is our telephone number. These are our email addresses. These are our YouTube these are our social media channels. You can just write that in pure plain text and that will be helpful. But underneath there is, depending on what platform you use, this will all be in the backend.

There will be [00:30:00] admin panels that say, structure it like this and so instead of you writing it as a text, it may be that you open up a widget on your website where it has first name, last name, address. It’s already, if you fill that in, when it gets published on your page it’s structured so that a search engine can see.

This is a company name. This is a first name. This is an email address. And so that’s helping it understand rather than just pure letters. Does that make sense?

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. It’s almost, I’m using an analogy that might resonate with people. It’s almost like using a template.

Colin Clapp: Yes. That’s a more layman’s, yeah.

Schema is a form of templates, templatizing elements of your website.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. Yeah.

Colin Clapp: So if we, if I circle back to that e-commerce [00:31:00] example, even a site like Shopify. I’m, and by the way, I’m not a Shopify expert, so I certainly could get proven wrong here, but we’ve done some audits on the schema behind some e-commerce, and it looks like the, you know, there are still some room for improvement of schema on sites like Shopify. So you would expect, for example, Shopify to be strong in its own product scheme. You know, when you load a product onto Shopify, it’s you’d expect in the modern day it’s got product schema, like a product template. But what it might not have is an FAQ schema within that product schema or.

Because not everyone might want to use FAQ around a product. Some people will, some people won’t. But if you could imagine that analogy, let’s say a particular product would benefit [00:32:00] from some specific FAQs about that product only. Well, wouldn’t it be great if there was a template that sat below the product description with the FAQs and it’s loaded up in that template style so that when.

Any kind of search engine is, you know, doing the technical scanning of billions and billions of URLs, it can clearly see product A, questions asked about that, answers provided. Oh, I understand that. I’ll surface that quicker than I would surface some text because I don’t understand the text that’s written for humans.

It’s not written for me. Does that make sense? As much as we would love it to be. Yeah. Search engines aren’t they’re scanning they’re robots. They’re not reading the words. They’re looking for the structure. And so the schema is the schema, the template of how that, how those words are put together can help them.

And if they, and if we can help [00:33:00] them, then they will help us.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. I guess the question that I think some listeners would be asking is, yeah, that we understand the concept of a schema or kind of like the, in more layman’s terms a templated way of describing what’s on a page.

What do people do who might not necessarily be a developer? What do you do to make sure that’s going to be optimized for so that AI search engines can pick it up?

Colin Clapp: It’s certainly easier than it was. So, I mean, we primarily just work with WordPress sites, so we’re not highly experienced with the other ones.

But as an example, most website most WordPress sites now it’s drag and drop of elements or click to add X, Y, Z, and so. You know, even if you are in experience, you might just go click new paragraph and [00:34:00] write name, address, contact details, but just with a little slow down, you click plus and you search FAQ and WordPress will probably have a module within your theme that pulls up a little.

Widget for FAQs and now you just fill in the widget instead of type in the text. Does that answer the question?

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. No, that, that makes sense. Basically, use what your, whatever tool you use to create your website, it should have the ability for you to be able to use what it has and it will create that schema underneath.

Colin Clapp: Yeah. You just need to, you just need to have enough presence to realize could I… this comes back to what I said right at the beginning, continuous and never ending improvement. If you start out and you know that you’ve got a context, a contact page, and it’s just [00:35:00] filled out with your text, and you learn that it could be structured behind the scenes differently.

Put aside a few minutes just to log into the backend, see if you can find some kind of. Widget or module, you know, Google, what is the name of a a structured template for contact details or what’s the name of a structured template for addresses? Addresses would be a very good one. FAQs, et cetera, et cetera.

Is there a way I could do that better? You know, Google it and before you know it, there’ll someone have said it’s called this in WordPress. Okay? So now I just click that I look for that. That arrives on my screen and I fill it out rather than writing free form. And that to me is that’s, you deserve results for that because you took the few minutes to try to improve [00:36:00] the, you know, can you make your car go faster?

I mentioned to Trudy earlier, we’ve talked about a philosophy we now have about. One click content optimization, but it was founded on the New Zealand America’s Cup team winning the America’s Cup. America’s Cup for the first time where they had a philosophy, will it make the boat go faster?

And they never invested anything in that boat unless they believed it would make the boat go faster and they could win the cup. So I have a lot of time for people who are just willing to stop for a second and ask that question. Will it make the boat go faster? Will it make the car go faster? Will it improve content r-I-R-O-I. So in some cases, that invisible template, that invisible schema will make a difference. And that’s the thing, it’s invisible to the layman, but it’s going to help you show up to the people who need, which is in this case, the AI search platforms and the traditional ones they, you know, that schema [00:37:00] for certain things like products, FAQs, addresses, contact details, organization details. Authors is another one. So we talked about cross platform or authority being pillar two. We haven’t talked about that much, but there is a schema for author, so that would get your first name right, your second name, your, it may have your reviews about you or it may have this. So it’s, rather than you writing about yourself. You structure it in author schema so that when search engines are trying to link relationships, they know that this entity, Trudy, Colin, oh, that is the same person.

Trudy Rankin: That’s a really good point.

I hadn’t thought about using an author schema. That’s something to definitely to think about. Colin, it’s been fantastic talking with you about this. We could talk about this for a long time, but and we haven’t even gotten, gotten deep into some of the other bits that we, we could have cross platform authority building, but.

I would recommend, I highly recommend to [00:38:00] people that you go and watch that same video that I did. I’ll put a link in the show notes so that you can go and listen and watch and just get a better sense about where things are today in terms of how can you build off of your traditional SEO work that you’ve done, and what do you need to do to be able to be visible in this new context.

That’s not, it’s not getting rid of the old, it’s just widening out. You know, what you have to work on and how to do it so that you can be found. And Colin, if people were interested in finding out more about you or what you do or how to even get in touch with you, if they’d like your help, where would they go?

Colin Clapp: Onlinemarketingdone4you.com with a digit four as opposed to FOR or you can go to the Growth Enablers YouTube channel, but all those links are, I take it, you’ll put in the description, Trudy. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, I’ll put those in the description. Yeah. But once again, thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Colin Clapp: My pleasure. Great to be here.

Trudy Rankin: And that’s it for today’s episode with Colin Clap.

From the [00:39:00] structure of your headings to the invisible schema that powers AI search, we covered a lot of ground and without the jargon overload at least as much as possible. So hopefully it left you thinking about how to make your content work smarter, not harder. And if you got value from this episode, subscribe to the podcast and leave a review.

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