SEO and AEO Website Best Practices Overview

Today, guys, I'm really excited to be talking about a topic that has been super popular, you know, SEO and how it relates to AI. And so we're gonna be doing a bit of a deep dive. The idea here, guys, is I've put together basically a a new manual, a new checklist based on a project that I'm actually working on for myself as well. And so we are rebuilding the Real Estate Webmasters website for two thousand twenty six.

And so as part of that journey, we needed to go through and make sure we understood what our team needs to know, what are the best practices, what what should we be looking out for, all that kind of stuff. And so excited to share that with you today. These slides will cover different topics, but I'm gonna go ahead and get started with the basics. This is AEO and SEO website best practices.

What is Search Everywhere Optimization?

So first things first. We've been talking a lot about search everywhere optimization.

It's a newer term. I use it a lot, but it hasn't really gained traction yet. Right? So people like myself and Neil Patel and Rand Fishkin, etcetera, we've been trying to talk a lot about sort of this notion that the game has changed.

Right? Google is not the search engine, and traffic does not just belong with Google anymore. So it used to be this one trick pony, and you've heard me talk about this in other classes. The reality is content is far more distributed now.

The idea here is to try to figure out how do we get the biggest bang for our buck? How do we make sure we get the greatest return in terms of traffic, leads, branding, etcetera, without having to become an expert in absolutely everything?

And that is where the good news gets repeated again, and I've said this in past classes. The reality is is that I'm just gonna jump to the bottom slide. You do not need to pick one. AEO, answer engine optimization, and any other GEO, any concept you want to understand all still runs on the fundamentals of good search engine optimization.

And even before that, the fundamentals of good search engine optimization are simply based on good fundamentals, period. Is your site fast? Do you have good structure to your content? Is it accessible? Like, think about what a user would care about.

And if they get those things, that's a rewarding experience for them. Well, that's what search engines care about. And so when AI came along and said, well, we really wanna make sure that users have a good experience too, they very logically said, well, search engines have already done a lot of this work and figured out exactly what users like. And so so much of the fundamentals for answer engine optimization and all the other optimizations is just based on good structure, based on good usability.

K? So I'll take you through the points. SEO gets you found on search engines. AEO gets you found by answer engines and fundamentally LLMs as well.

So when we say AEO, we're talking about showing up in the answers portion of Google as well as we're talking about when you go to ChatGPT and you ask a much longer tail question. You might go to Google and you might type in best in an animal realtor. But you might go to ChatGPT and say, I'm looking for a realtor for my mom. She's not very techy, and, she gets easily intimidated by strong personalities.

Who should I use? Right? Very different conversations based on Google versus ChatGPT. The AEO fundamentally will help with both of those.

Okay?

AEO/SEO Fundamentals Overview

This is the point I was making. The fundamentals still win.

Every AI answer is retrieval from an index. They don't just go to Google anymore. So for instance, ChatGPT does have its own index as well. Think of ChatGPT having its own private Google. There's some new information that I only just learned as well, and that is ChatGPT is, reportedly heavily influenced by its Bing relationship.

So I'm not sure how many of you know the story from last year and the year before that, but Microsoft actually made a pretty significant investment in ChatGPT early on. Microsoft, of course, owns a pretty much defunct search engine called Bing. Nobody uses it. But all of a sudden, there's all these conversations happening about if you're in Bing, that will help you get indexed in the ChatGPT index.

So it's a pretty smart play. It's pretty forward thinking from Microsoft's perspective. And so the good news, again, is you're like, oh, no. I have to optimize for Bing now.

No. You don't. Because Bing took its queues from Google. So you get indexed in Bing by having good fundamentals, by having links pointing to your website that are already linked in Bing. Ironically, all the way through to webmaster tools, Bing has copied Google so much that when you go to bing dot com forward slash webmasters, which is the webmaster's equivalent of Search Console, it will literally just ask you, do you wanna import your profile from Google Search Console?

So you can literally have a Bing Search Console concept exactly like the Google Search Console concept. So if you already know how to do it for Google, you actually already know how to do it for Bing.

Yes. There's nuance. You can't expect to rank exactly the same in Google as Bing. Right?

But the fundamentals are still sound. Good structure, good titles, well written, not spammy, fast, accessible, all the things. So add Bing to your consideration list, but don't add Bing to your effort list. Because if you do the right things for Google, you're already doing the right things for Bing.

Okay. Another one. Claude is my favorite tool and many developers' favorite tool. The thing we have to be careful of is preference does not equal volume.

The reality is Claude is still not searched very much, right, in terms of, like, the general public trying to find a realtor. That's not really gonna be a Claude question. That's generally gonna be a ChatGPT question, but it's important to understand Claude as well. And there's anecdotal evidence, which I think is maybe even stronger than anecdotal, that Claude is actually leveraging a different browser search engine.

It's called Brave Search. If anyone's familiar with Brave, it's very much like a a privacy based engine that's not so influenced by the dollars of Google and Microsoft, etcetera. And so while Claude does very much go to Google and do other searches and things of that nature, it also is influenced by this Brave search index. And so if you ever wanna have fun, just go to Brave dot com forward slash search, I think.

It's pretty easy to find. You can search it right from the home page. And it'll show you how you rank there or whether or not you're in the rankings there. And a bit of a pro tip for anyone who wants to know if they're in a search engine, all of the search engines use the same nomenclature.

It's site colon. So s I t colon Carly Carey dot com.

That will show you whether or not your pages are in an index or not. It's the easiest way to find it. Bing will work that way. Brave should work that way as well.

Okay. SEO is what gets you into those indexes. I said that hierarchy, accessibility, speed, improved behavior, all the things. And the point here is that the engines the search engines are how you measure it. AI will inherit it.

Measure Your Website Performance with Google PageSpeed

If you have good fundamentals, if you use Google Page Speed, which, by the way, for anyone who does not use it, go to Google right now, type in Google Page Speed, and make sure you bookmark this. These tools are also available in your search console, but you can search Google page speed to measure your performance right now.

And you need to do that because this is what's giving you your technical feedback. Right? Run your site through there. If you're a real estate webmasters customer, I can literally guarantee you your framework will score exceptionally well.

And I can tell you that if your website, which is on that framework, is not scoring exceptionally well, it's because of what's been implemented on top of it. If you put a slow video on your framework, it will penalize your score. Right? There are still best practices you need to follow as a user in order to make sure that your score stays high.

Right? So, like, if you upload a bunch of images and they're not properly optimized into WebP format or, you know, if you load a bunch of third party JavaScript for tracking and stuff in your footer, all of those kinds of things are going to impact your score. But, also, remember, AI is really good for this too. So if you're running into an issue and you don't understand it so let's say we won't use desktop because we're perfect on desktop, but let's say there's still five points I wanna get to here.

And I can see the largest Contentful Paint.

I can see that error, and down here, I can go and I probably if I'm a typical user, I probably don't know what any of this stuff means. The great thing about that, guys, is it doesn't matter. You can take this code.

You can go to Claude. You can go to Gemini. You can go to ChatGPT, and you can say, this is my website URL. This is the error I'm getting, or this is the report I'm getting. Please help me understand in plain language how to fix it.

So you no longer need to be a professional SEO. You no no longer need to be a professional programmer or designer. You have to be familiar enough with the language to be able to know to find this tool and know to ask this question. We wanna get good at understanding how to start the conversation.

But if you frame it the right way, if you explain your level of expertise and the level of feedback you need from your tool, your tool, whether that's Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Manus, it doesn't matter.

It will work with you to help you get to a higher level of understanding. Okay?

Alright.

Never Render Your Content in JavaScript

So this one is one that is not our problem. So if you're a real estate webmasters, you can completely ignore this. But if you are going out on your own and building your own stuff or you don't use real estate webmasters yet, you should be testing your site to make sure that your content is not being rendered using JavaScript.

This is a really important distinction because Google and other search engines are actually capable of rendering JavaScript. They're actually capable of reading what is in JavaScript. However, AI is not. The AI engines currently do not read anything that is served after the fact using JavaScript.

Okay? And for anyone who doesn't know what that means, JavaScript is just a programming language that's interactive on the browser. It's the thing that you use to use a chatbot or track Google Analytics, all that kind of stuff. It's like a programming layer that gets injected on top of your site, but you don't want your JavaScript injecting your content.

It basically says there's no argument. There's no other way. There's no reason any company should be doing this at this point. That's basically the consensus.

Okay.

Title Tags

So getting back to the fundamentals. For anyone who's doing SEO, these are the fundamentals that you need to revisit because they're as important, if not more important now, than they were in the past. So these are some of the basic SEO premises that I've been teaching for two decades now.

Your title tag. One unique descriptive title per tag. Right? Fifty to sixty characters. That's a display target, not a rule.

It's not like you get penalized if you have seventy five or whatever. You just don't want, you know, your words being cut off halfway through a long word or something. So if you can be succinct, great. But if you need extra characters, understand.

It's not a rule, and it might help you in AI as well. So if you can again, it doesn't this is not a hard and fast rule. But if you can match your h one tag to your title, that's gonna make sense to the user.

So let's just use that as an example. Let's say my title is real estate websites. When I go to my page, my h one tag should have real estate websites in it because I set a user's expectation when they did a Google search. Right?

They did a Google search. They saw real estate websites. Cool. This company seems to be about real estate websites.

If I click on it, if the main first large heading also says the thing that matches the expectation, that's gonna help me validate that I'm on the right site. Okay? Good and bad. Here's a good one.

Vancouver Island Waterfront Homes for sale. That is my primary objective for a thing. And then we put the brand afterwards, Carly Carey luxury realtor. Great.

I guess sneak in an extra keyword, but without being spammy.

Bad is these old school keyword keyword keyword keyword with this pipe delimited. Like, this has never really worked. It's always been spammy. Right?

And saying Austin, Austin, Austin, Austin does not help you. It it really doesn't. It actually just makes you look like an amateur. So, I only say homes for sale once.

I only say waterfront once. I only say Vancouver Island once. I don't need to repeat the thing over and over again.

I just by the virtue of it being in the title and being in my heading tag, I've told Google these are the most important things.

Okay?

Meta Description and Click Through Rates

Manage descriptions. These are still not a ranking factor. They never really have been, and they probably never will be. Understanding what a meta description is is important. Okay? So this text underneath here, that's your meta description.

Generally, Google sometimes does choose a different description if you don't have a good description. So the idea behind having a good description is that you control what gets seen so Google doesn't just randomly pick. But when they say this is not a ranking factor, what they mean is Google doesn't read it to determine what your site's about, but it improves something called click through rate, right, which is the amount of times when someone sees this, that's an impression. When it gets loaded, we've just made an impression.

If I click through to it, that is a click. And so the click through rate is out of every hundred times that this shows in Google, how many times what percentage did somebody click on it? That's what's called click through rate. And I think we can all agree that it is better to be seen in Google and clicked on than just seen in Google.

So even though it's not technically a ranking factor in terms of the words, it is a traffic factor in the sense that you can rank in the same position, and a better meta description will get you more traffic from Google than a poor meta description. So that's the point we wanna make with meta descriptions. They are still important. And, again, there is anecdotal evidence that AI will consider that meta description in their determination, okay, because they look at things a little bit differently.

Alright.

File Names and URLs

File names and URLs. Again, fundamentals still here, guys. Readable words, hyphens, not underscores. This should all be very, you know, table stakes for everyone.

So you don't want any, like, system generated URLs, page question mark equals blah blah blah. You want Vancouver Island Waterfront Homes. Okay? Now you note here there isn't a trailing slash at the end of the file, and I've made a note about this.

This does matter because there's a slight difference between having a trailing slash and not in terms of, confusing search engines. Just pick one. But you don't wanna have two versions of the same file. You don't want a file rendering with forward slash and without a forward slash.

And so if you're on a system that allows that or which it shouldn't, you wanna do what's called a three zero one redirect. And just whatever version you've chosen, make a rule to have that other version redirected.

K? So now we're getting into a little bit more technical stuff with three zero one redirects.

Page Structure

Page structure. Okay. So this comes down to journalism, comes down to writing good papers. When search engines decided on how they wanted to consider the architecture and what was most important in terms of the content in the page, which is and what is least important, they followed the fundamental principles of if it's higher on the page, it must have more prominence.

It must be more important. So understand that content you put at the beginning of an article or the beginning of a page is given far more weight than content you put further down the page. Right? By the time you get to the footer, nothing matters.

And that's a journalism concept as well. In journalism, they will teach you when you write an article and you need to shorten it for some reason, you should still be able to chop from the bottom and not lose any of the substance. Right? So, fundamentally, the bottom doesn't matter.

So don't put your important stuff way down in the bottom of the page, and don't construct pages that have so much good stuff that it's somehow fighting for prominence, one main topic per page. And then the other thing that they looked at in terms of typography, we we hear about h one tags and h two tags. Those are called heading tags.

Naturally, h one is largest. H two is second largest. H three is third largest. So before search engines ever existed and we were just creating the fundamentals of HTML, when you wanted something to stand out the most, you chose h one.

It was the largest, just like it's at the top. And so the structures are very simple. You only have one h one as a best practice. It's not a rule.

It's just a best practice. Your site can really only truly be about one thing per page.

You can have subcategories. You can have real estate websites. That's what this is about. And I could have subcategories about agent real estate websites, brokerage real estate websites, team real estate websites.

Those could be subcategories. Right? Secondary headings. That's what an h two is for.

H threes only belong inside of h twos, so you would never mix and match. And this is a thing that people do mistakenly. They end up with a design whereby the headings are different sizes and different colors.

And so they start choosing headings based on the fact that they want the font to look a certain way. They're like, this is where I want the purple one. And so they'll put an h two because they know it's purple even though that's not where it belongs. So a design best practice, just so you know, is to not use your heading tags as design elements because then you'll be tempted to use them for aesthetics instead of for structure. And the other thing, guys, only ever put keywords in your headings if they make sense.

You know? Like, if you're writing an introduction paragraph about Austin, Texas, your heading tag would not be Austin homes for sale even if that's a keyword you care about. Your heading would be a little about Austin or about Austin, Texas. It should be descriptive to the content that immediately follows. Okay?

Alt Attributes and Images

Alright. Alt attributes and images. Images matter. Images matter in search engines. Images matter in terms of the totality of what a page is about, And this is where a lot of people don't put in the work.

They're very lazy. When you take a picture with your phone, right, or your your computer or whatever, what you tend to do is you tend to upload it in way too big of a format. You don't compress it properly. That's problem number one.

But then you don't take the extra step of renaming the file name. So if my picture is a picture of downtown Austin, Texas, my file name should be downtown dash Austin dash Texas dot web p because I'll also have optimized it. And then for accessibility and for best practices, I'll also go into the HTML of that image. I know it's extra work.

Right? I know it is. But I will go into the HTML of that page, and I will put alt tag equals, and I will match the exact file name text to the alt tag because my file name should be descriptive in my alts. Right? So downtown Austin, Texas. But in the alt tag, you don't use dashes or commas or anything. It's just the actual natural language.

So here's where you get to cheat. Because let's say most of us don't like having to switch to HTML mode and go find all of our images and then go tag each one of them afterwards. That sucks. That's a bunch of extra work. But if you do the first thing right, you can do the second thing for free, and here's how.

So I would make sure all of my images had the right file name because that just automatically gets inherited when you upload the images. Are you guys with me so far?

Okay. Now I can just go view source, grab the entire page, and I can go to Gemini or Claude or ChatGPT. And I can say, don't change any of the other code. But everywhere you see images, make an alt tag to match the file name.

Because if you did the file names correctly, it will go and it'll just create let's say there were thirty images on the page. It'll go create all thirty for you and very reliably. Then you just grab that output back, paste it, hit save, check the final output, and there you go. Instead of having to manually tag thirty different images, if you name the file name correctly and gave a good prompt to your AI, your AI will do it for you.

These are the hacks that we wanna start developing. These are the kinds of relationships we wanna understand about AI. Because remember, there's a lot more work to do things well, and there's even more work to try to satisfy all these other platforms. And so the offset, the promise of AI, and that's what we're doing at Real Estate Webmasters with our AI agency as well, is there might be ten times as much work, but we can do it a hundred times faster if we get good at AI.

Okay? AI is not doing the thinking, but AI is doing the repetitive things that take a long time and are prone to mistakes. And so if something gets done a hundred times faster, even though it has to deal with ten times more stuff, what's the factor that we just gained back? We just became ten times more efficient even though we're doing ten times more work.

Interlinking and Anchor Text

Okay. Interlinking and anchor text. Anchor text, if you don't know, it's the words that are the link.

So, basically, anytime you link one page to another from a navigation, the top navigation, the body content area, etcetera, you have choices. You can do things like click here, which is a bad link unless that is the exact instruction and nothing else makes sense, or you can make your anchor text far more descriptive. Right? Search engine optimization page.

Click hour space search engine optimization page is the anchor text. Search engines read that anchor text as the very first clue as to what the author says about their page. Just like in Google when you see the title and the meta description, that sets an expectation for the consumer of what they should expect to read about when they click through. It's no different on your own pages.

If you're pointing someone to a new page, the anchor text sets the first expectation. And so, logically, search engines are taking that as a vote.

This page has gotta be about search engine optimization because that keeps showing up in the anchor text. Never no follow your links. I don't think you're gonna do this, guys, but just don't do it. If you don't trust one of your own pages, that's a problem because no follow is something you apply to a page if you feel like you need to link to it, but you don't necessarily trust that later on, the quality of that page will still be the way it was when you started linking to it. You need to understand that once again priority matters. Search engines aren't stupid.

They know that navigation and footers are low value in terms of intent. They're used for design. They're used for main navigation. But if you put a link in a footer, it passes very little page rank, and it is given very little weight because the search engine goes, yep. I know I encountered this link in the footer. So that link doesn't really matter to the consumer that much, top to bottom.

So when you want your most important pages to get their strongest vote, you should be linking in context at the top of the page. So I'm gonna show you that. And I know it's a simple concept, but I just wanna make sure that I drive it home. Okay? And so let's say I'm gonna go to Brecken Hill or whatever.

This, by the way, is anchor text. And so if I wanted to link to Brecken Hill, let's say Brecken Hill wasn't the page I was on, I highlight it and I link it in context forward slash Brecken dash hill. Now here's the nice thing about having standards. I don't have to go look up that page because I know what the URL is because I stay consistent with my naming conventions. But you see how this is the very first content in the page, and I've linked something in the very first sentence?

That's me telling Google that this link not only is about brick Brecken Hill, but it's so important. I'm risking somebody clicking away from my page to go really right? It's clearly relevant.

So that's the context of anchor text. Okay?

How AI Actually Finds You

So here's a graphic about how AI actually finds you. The component number one, crawling. So same way as original search engines. You need to be out there getting citation.

You need other pages, other blogs, other social media, etcetera. They need to be linking to you. They need to be putting your URL out there. They need to be voting for you.

That's the original concept of PageRank. So a crawler goes to a page it already knows about, finds a new link that it hasn't discovered yet, and it goes to that page. That is how ChatGPT's index works. That is how Google's index works, etcetera.

Now the index, when I use that term, that's basically just their stored memory.

Right? The index is the stored memory of all the pages it's encountered. It remembers them. It's a cache. It's a database. It's anything like that.

Now here is a wonderful new concept that is likely gonna be new for everyone, and this is the concept of fanning out. And until recently, I did not know this either.

And so the concept of fanning out in AI is that when you ask it a question, let's say, who is the best realtor in Nanaimo? It does not just go and ask that question. What it does is it considers eight to fifteen different ways to ask that question, including popular ways. Right?

Who is the best luxury realtor in Nanaimo? What realtors are great in Nanaimo? Because it has unlimited resources, kind of. Right?

It has unlimited time. It does this stuff so fast. It goes and actually does that research, like, fifteen times, asking the question in different ways, and it compares the results.

So if there's a commonality, if you ask that question eight to fifteen different times in different ways and there seems to be same person coming up over and over again or the same or similar dataset, its confidence in giving the answer grows. So if Carly Carrie gets referenced every time you ask that question, no matter how you ask that question, it makes sense that Carrie has got to be the one that I recommend. Now from an answer perspective, like the Google answer, you'll only get one generally, and then you'll get the three most popular sources. So those answers are typically pulled from the very top of those pages because they've said, yep.

I've looked at all the pages. The ones that consistently have this at the top, the ones that I didn't have to consistently consider what they were saying, but they just gave it like, AI loves straight to the point. If AI can get a direct answer and you answered that question exactly and it was given priority, AI is going to think that you are the authority.

Okay?

Structuring Content for Answer Engines

So getting deeper into the weeds of answer engine optimization. We mentioned in the previous slide that AI just just loves for it to be on the nodes. Right? If you are literally asking the question that other people are asking and you have a great answer, they're not gonna distrust that answer and go look for something else. They're gonna trust an answer.

And so here's a suggested structure for you. Again, at the top of your your most important stuff is at the top of your page. So your h one tag, your main heading, which is going to be your largest, that is not an answer to the question. That is a statement about what the page is about.

Your first h two, where it makes sense to be a question should be a question. Here I am. Vancouver Island Waterfront homes for sale. That's what my page is about.

But maybe as a user, what does Waterfront mean to me? Maybe I wanna know what types of Waterfront are on Vancouver Island. Great. That may be a question. And you need to answer it and then add extra description. This is a critical component.

Don't get fluffy and don't get commission breath and don't get anything promoting on the beginning of the response. The answer has to be the answer. And then if you wanna add a hook at the end or then you wanna add some explanation at the end, you do that after. So the absolute answer, if I wanted to answer the question is there's three. There's low bank, there's walk on, and there's beach access. Those are the answers.

Now I can talk more about that, but do you see the difference? Right? I'm not expanding on the first one before I get into the second one. I answer the types in a short and succinct manner possible, and then I expand on it afterwards. That is the critical piece of information you need for answer engine optimization. Make it easy on AI, and AI will reward you.

Leveraging FAQ Sections for Authority

FAQs. Hopefully, everybody is using them. It is a default snippet in real estate webmasters. So here's an article on Noray, our Netflix of real estate.

You should always have frequently asked questions on every single page that you can.

Because once again, even if it's not really competitive and it's not your primary answer, if you can ask the exact question and it's topic specific and it's on an article, answer the question.

And so this is the very standard format, but this is where you get to the more obscure questions. They get asked a little less often, so they're not as competitive. So they don't have to be at the top of the page. But if you give them the exact answer, they're gonna reward you for it. There's just absolutely no reason not to use FAQs at this point. It's literally table stakes.

And think about why.

If you get to the bottom of an article and you're still left with questions that are unresolved, don't you wanna serve that consumer the best way possible? You don't wanna leave any unresolved tension unless it's the kind of tension that causes them to reach out. But if you need to build extra confidence, if you wanna build extra authority, credibility, that sort of thing, if you wanna show them that you understand who they are, what their questions and concerns are, then put FAQs on there. Because every time you give a fulsome answer that's high value, you get perceived as an authority.

It's one more checkbox by that buyer to say, yep. I'm really glad I've hired this realtor. Your content is not any different when it's online. It's your ability to communicate your expertise to them even when you're not there.

AI Content Freshness and Visibility Stats

Okay. So this is from a couple of studies. The main one was done by Ahrefs, which is a really big search engine marketing sort of analytics platform. And so I'll explain some of these stats just so you know.

So twenty six percent. So AI prefers newer content. Right? So it's twenty six percent newer.

The content that's being surfaced in AI is twenty six percent newer on average based on the publication date than, the same content that's being surfaced in search results. Okay? So it does matter to both. Google cares about freshness of content.

AI cares about freshness of content twenty six percent more.

Now this one is great news for anyone who has never been able to compete in SEO because maybe they're in a big market and Zillow dominates and authority is such a factor in Google.

Only twelve percent of cited URLs, meaning the URLs that show up in AI, also show up in the top ten organic results. Meaning, you do not have to rank in the top ten for SEO in order to be the first recommended site in AI. That's a critical thing because a lot of people have given up on SEO because it's too competitive. It's too hard.

And that's a function of how Google works. Right? Google values all of this stuff we're talking about plus something called authority And big websites like realtor dot com and Zillow and REMAX, etcetera, they just dominate the authority space. So it becomes really hard other than long tail keywords to compete in SEO for the first page.

But in AI, it's the great leveler, at least for right now.

There's no evidence that suggests that you have to rank in the top ten or have to have a lot of authority to rank or to be recommended through AI. So that's good news for anyone who's new or anyone who's in a really competitive market. This is now blue sky for you again. You can now start and win before those things change.

And this was an interesting one. From a social media citation perspective, right, in terms of what AI said mattered to it, AI actually listens to Reddit up to fifteen times more than any content that it runs into on other social platforms. And I could have Facebook on here as well, but Instagram, TikTok, etcetera. So Reddit is people's opinions, very unfiltered, and Reddit is very popular in terms of the citation source for all of the AI engines.

Freshness is a tiebreaker. It's just the best practice. Keep your stuff current. Okay?

Ranking's not a requirement. And this is one that you all need to go fix right now, and I know I do too.

AI really cares about consistency across your brand.

So your Google business profile, your Facebook profile, your Instagram profile, your Reddit profile, your website, everything needs to match. Like, I can't be Morgan Carey on one, Morgan David Carey on the other. It does not like that. I can't advertise Morgan at r e w on one profile and Morgan at real estate webmasters dot com on another profile.

Those inconsistencies at this point seem to matter almost as much as anything else to AI right now, so brand consistency is quite critical. Authorship is quite critical. Go check your profiles. And, again, if you're good with AI, you'll write yourself a skill to go find everywhere you're mentioned and find all of the inconsistencies.

And then you can work with it to decide what your main or primary phone number is, your main or primary address, etcetera. And then you can have it help you create a checklist. And if you're really, really good, you'll teach it how to log in to those things and go change everything for you. Right?

So that's for another class. But okay.

Implementing LLMS.TXT Guidelines

LLMS dot TXT. If you're a Googler, you will know that right now, this is a recommendation, not a ranking factor.

Many platforms, ChatGPT, Claude, etcetera, they have talked about it as a potential future tool. They don't admit today that they use l l l m s dot t x t, which is interesting. But what's even more interesting to me is that Google, and some of you have probably already seen this, Google has added a new category.

They did this very quietly called agentic browsing. Okay? Think about this. These are the five things at the very top of Search Console.

And my experience with Google tells me that if Google is going to put something at the very top of one of their tools, that probably means it's either important to Google and they haven't shared it yet, or it's about to become very important to Google.

And look at this. The LLMS dot TXT, they are starting to audit. Not only do you have one, but does it follow the best practices as recommended through the guidelines?

Okay? And by the way, those guidelines are available.

Click through. Go read the Lighthouse guidelines, etcetera.

So there's absolutely no reason to not have one of these. And, again, if you're a real estate webmasters customer, this is built in for you. You can go ahead and generate an LMS dot TXT. It's built in.

It's right in the back end. Just go to, I don't know. Where do you go? Settings, AI.

Oh, I was already on it. LMS dot TXT. Boom. Make one. Don't know how to make one?

Ask AI.

Don't know how to use AI? Hire real estate webmasters. We'll do it for you. But it takes five seconds. Okay. Moving on from l m s dot t x t.

Leveraging JSON-LD with AI

This is super complex, guys. This is JSON. It's like an output language. Right? And the way JSON works is there's all these different categories.

Right? Real estate agent, organization, breadcrumbs, video objects, articles. Okay. This is incredibly intimidating to most people because they say, I don't know what any of these things mean.

I don't know how to write this language. And this is the thing, guys. I'm going to tell you what you need to have and how to put it on your page. You don't need to write any of this.

Your AI does it for you. So you say, hey. Here's Morgan's article on JSON.

Please just go do the thing. And you literally just copy paste the thing. It will give you all of this code back. You don't know how to write it.

You don't need to know how to write it. It doesn't matter. All you need to do is make sure that you put it on your page. So I point it to my FAQs, and I say, give me my FAQ JSON.

I copy it. Let's say I was on a page, and I needed to put my JSON. I go have my AI write it. You should read it, make sure it looks accurate, but the accuracy part is easy.

Right? Go to your content. Go find the page that has the FAQ, whatever, and you just paste it right here in this head section. Boom.

We're done. Hit save.

So the circle would have been I would have taken this page, and it would have sent it to my AI and said, hey. This is my page. Make all the appropriate JSON for me for this page and go. And it will just go write it for you.

Gemini will, Cloud will, ChadGPT will. There's no executable code. You're not giving yourselves any vulnerabilities. You're just pasting JSON in the head.

So that's how you do it. K? And if you have any technical issues at all, go to the forums or just call your account manager and ask them to show you how to do it. They'll show you how to do it for free.

It's fine. We're here to teach you. Okay?

Alright. So, again, it looks really technical. It looks really scary. The process itself is really easy.

Now what you need to understand again about JSON, JSON is not technically a ranking factor. What it does is it provides a much easier digestible format. It's already in the very head section of your site, which, by the way, comes even before your content. So as a machine, if for any reason anything was gonna get truncated, your content is already up in the first in a very machine readable way.

You need to understand, though, that you can never have JSON that does not represent the content of your page. That will actually harm you a lot. And so if you had FAQ JSON but no FAQs on your page, you look spammy. It looks like you're trying to sneak something in that machines can read that humans can't.

So JSON always has to happen after your content, never before and never without the content.

K?

There's two different concepts you need to understand. Some JSON should be site wide, and some should be per page. So things like breadcrumbs, articles, FAQs, video objects, those are all things that happen on one page, and they must be unique per page.

Things like the JSON that represents your entire organization, you can actually put that site wide, and you should for consistency. That one, I am gonna show you very quickly. Go to tools.

Okay? So let's say you're taking your organization JSON. You go to tools. You go to conversion tracking.

Go down to the bottom to where it says global tracking scripts. After the comment section of after whatever you've got in there, just paste it afterwards and hit save. When you put it in global, that puts it in the head tag of every single page, which is great. That's what you want for the site wide ones.

There's an article coming out on this that will give you all the FAQs, and so we'll reserve any questions for that because the article will explain it all. Where else do we need to go?

Authorship and E-E-A-T

This, I think, I wish I had an entire hour to talk about, but I have talked about it before. Experience, expertise, authority, and trust.

You need to look real. You need to be real. And when you use AI to create content, which you are absolutely allowed to do, it must be informed by your experience and your expertise. If it's not unique, if it does not represent a perspective, if it does not represent lived experience, etcetera, it will not be valued.

We are realtors. We need to show that we know what the heck we're talking about and that our level of knowledge and our approach is different and better than anybody else's. That's what this is about. Okay?

And, interestingly, some of you may have seen the y m y l, your money, your life. Our trust signals the fact that we put realtor like, even the fact that we are a realtor will outrank a regular news site for real estate content because it understands that we have a license and we have compliance and we have experience. Right? So that does matter.

Here's what I was saying about AI.

Google Guidelines When Using AI

These are Google guidelines explicitly. Google does not say it's against the rules to produce content using AI. That's not against the rules.

What Google says is if you just spin up a bunch of crap using AI or even a bunch of the same good stuff that everyone else has also published and there's nothing unique, there's no perspective, that's not valuable because you have not added any unique value. So use AI for structure. Go fast. Totally fine.

H one, h two, structure. Then go in and add your specific heart, your specific mind, your specific experience. That'll be critical.

Nore, this is an amazing tool to achieve exactly what I was just saying. When you create a video or even the transcript from this, by the way this would make an amazing article from a NORE perspective. When you're talking, you're not AI generating. Your ums, your ahs, they're valuable. Your mistakes, your mispronunciations, everything that makes you you comes out in a video, and it comes out in a completely unique way. But, yeah, get NORE.

Final SEO and AEO Checklist

Your checklist is simple. Your fundamentals are your title tags, meta descriptions, file names, your hierarchy, your old attributes, your anchor text, your structure. Make sure your content goes into HTML. Not a problem for real estate webmasters. Focus on those content pillars.

Make sure you have breadcrumbs. Make sure you have bylines for your markup. You have site wide JSON as well as per page JSON, FAQ markup videos, AI content. We wanna have those LMMS dot TXT is done.

Questions in the heading, you need to get FAQs, keep it fresh, try to produce a video every week is my recommendation, and then use Noray to output the transcript. Last thoughts here, guys, is great AEO is great SEO. The fundamentals are what will get you there. If you need help, join the forums. Attend coaching like this for free. And, of course, if you just hate this stuff but you know it's valuable, we're pretty good at it, so you can always just hire us to take care of this for you.