In the episode, Lindsay Halsey from Pathfinder SEO delves at the ways artificial intelligence is changing search behavior and the implications for website owners, particularly those creating online training programs or e-learning platforms.

She explains that with the rise of AI-generated search results such as Google’s AI Overviews and conversational modes users often get direct answers without clicking through to a website. Because of this change, websites find it more difficult to become visible using traditional SEO alone. However, Lindsay emphasizes that this is merely a new challenge and not the end for content providers.

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She highlights the ongoing importance of human connection, pointing out that when people wish to learn a lot or make an investment in something worthwhile, they still look for reliable professionals. Lindsay suggests producing very specialized, long-tail content that is suited to certain audiences and situations in order to remain competitive. She advises going narrow and answering specific search inquiries that represent issues and objectives in the actual world rather than focusing on broad, fiercely competitive keywords.

Lindsay suggests producing very specialized, long-tail content that is suited to certain audiences and situations in order to remain competitive. She advises going narrow and answering specific search inquiries that represent issues and objectives in the actual world rather than focusing on broad, fiercely competitive keywords.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a special guest, she’s back on the show. It’s Lindsay Halsey from Pathfinder, SEO. You can find her and pathfinder@pathfinderseo.com. We’re gonna get into all topics, SEO, and AI, and getting found on the internet. But first, welcome to the show, Lindsay.

Lindsay Halsey: Thanks so much, Chris. I’m excited to be here. 

Chris Badgett: Let’s just jump right in and the big question I know a lot of people have, if you’re building a website or an e-learning website is how is [00:01:00 ] AI changing the behavior of people that are, going to their laptop or their phone or their computer to search for stuff Like what’s happened in the past four years?

Lindsay Halsey: A lot’s happening and things are evolving reasonably quickly. And really AI is starting to reshape the way we think about search and search engine optimization and and some of the kind of behavior changes. And we can dig into a few of these in more detail. The first is that there is the opportunity for essentially like generative responses directly on, on Google, Yahoo, Bing, right?

So when you go on Google and you type in your search query, you get a new row called AI overviews, and in there you get a generated response that has sites or citations and some links to the websites that sort of trained up the ai. But that you may, in this case, one of the things changing is you may decide as a, as the end user not to click through to a website for information, but rather to just receive the response directly from Google.

And [00:02:00 ] then as Google often sees do another Google search and and you can have that more conversational nature. If you’re in the US right now there’s AI mode which allows you to take that that conversation further and have and continue on almost like you would with chat GPT.

So that’s just one of the things that we’re seeing happen right now is in some ways people feel like the search engines continue to make it harder to get traffic to your website. Because Google is answering things directly in the search results. So it’s the people also ask boxes that used to pop up where you could just see the results or you put in something like movie Showtimes near me and it just tells you the showtimes.

You never go to a website. You can think of AI overviews and AI mode as being in that similar vein of changing user behavior. But on the flip side, the more optimistic piece of this all is that it really is an opportunity for your brand, for your business, for your training, for your expertise to get [00:03:00 ] shown directly on Google to build brand awareness and to educate, which I know a lot of your audience is all about education and training and, and so I, I see the positive side of these changes. But in the short run, one of the things a lot of businesses are experiencing is a decrease in sessions or traffic from organic search 

Chris Badgett: before we zoom in, like on a macro level. At what point, like we often still want to get the visitor to our website to buy the movie tickets or t