Jesse Cunningham’s AI Workflow for Website SEO

0:00If you want to make money right now with a website, you have to watch this video because things are totally different. Look here. I was thinking about three different titles for this video. How to actually rank a website in 26. How to actually make money with a website in 26. But I think this third one is what we're going to do here. How to compete against AI. We have to compete against AI nowadays. AI overviews mainly with Google and LLMs eating your lunch in 2026. Everybody's lunch seems to be getting eaten. What do I mean by this?

0:29Even if you have a good website and you think you are ranking well, your visitors, the traffic to the website is declining. Why? Well, because AI. So we have to compete against that. Now, check this out. This is one case study. This is a specific website. One website right here. This is one of their pages. So what we did, this is very interesting because we did one very particular tactic and it worked over and over and over again. This is right now. This is right now.

0:57And this is an e-com website. So let's come over here. Here's another page. You can see, okay, traffic up. That's great. And they're making money off these pages. These are money pages. Here's another one. That one's eh, it's okay. But you can see traffic is significant. And here's another one. So the question becomes, how do we make money with a website right now, despite having AI eating everyone's lunch? Now we're going to go over three steps in this video with two bonuses, right? Two bonuses. Everyone likes bonuses. Let's talk about bonuses. And these are the things, if you do all the steps, right? And the bonuses can be the things that make all the difference.

1:29You'll find that this is just a big competition. So what is step number one? Well, instead of just telling you, I'm going to show you. So let's go to Google. Let's go to lawyers in San Diego. Do you see up here, lawyers in San Diego, a big money term. And we're also going to do best e-bike for trails. Do you see up here? Another big money term. What I'm going to do, I'm going to come back down here, past sponsored results. And now I'm into the map pack. My question to you, I'm going to click on this one right here. You have sevens legal. I don't know these people.

1:59This is just a random website. We're doing this live, right? We're doing it off the cuff. My question to you is very simple. On this website, what are the most important pages? So you have to ask yourself, what are your most important pages on your website? If you can't answer that, then you've already lost, right? So let's come over here. Let's do the same idea. So we're going to scroll down here, past sponsored products, which is a whole different game. Let's come right here. This is called electric bike report.com. They kind of have an EMD, which is an exact match

2:29domain. My question to you, let's come to the homepage as yet again, if it ever loads, which one of these pages are most important to this company? So whenever you have a website, Google perceives different pages on your website as important and less important. Now, just for a quick little fun thing here, let's come over to GBT as likely perceived by Google, which of these URLs are most important, right? And what I'm going to do, I'm going to copy and paste the sitemap for that law firm. So if you go to any website, you can typically grab their sitemap, which is every

3:03page of the website. So what I want the LLM to do is tell me, what do you think? What do you think the most important pages are here? Now, the slug structure of a website usually helps to dictate this. You can see slash this thing, criminal attorney slash this thing. If you have a URL close to the root domain, so whatever.com slash whatever comes next right there is pretty close to the root domain that matters. Now, if we had slash criminal attorney slash a location, well, guess what? That page is less important. So it's saying, here's the example, right? CA slash these

3:38are less important. These are tier two location hubs, very important. And then here we go. You can see this is three times removed from the root URL. The slugs really dictate what pages Google perceives as important. So I'm telling you this because if you have a money page or a page that needs to rank high, you should probably have it pretty darn close to the root URL. Now check this out. Some things I cannot say on YouTube. That's just a fact because if I give you some strategies here and listen, I'm going to go into the weeds in this video we just started, right? It's going

4:11to be a bigger video. But if you want to know like the actual strategies down into the weeds, if you want to get down into it, this is where you need to be. It's the Rake Expand Academy. This is one of the fastest growing school communities, hundreds of people here. Check this out. Pretty proud of this. This is Sean, the co-founder of the Rake Expand Academy. This is Alex from Ozy Sam Ovens. We won the school games with this community. In other words, it's one of the fastest growing communities on the whole platform. Hundreds of people learning how to do SEO, AI, make money

4:39online, right? We have basic courses, advanced courses, AI tools and workflows. It goes on. So if you want to get the strategies that I'm just not able to share with you on YouTube because that's just the nature of it, right? If I share everything on YouTube, I've learned that certain strategies, ideas will just blow up because everyone will do it then. So if you want to join here, I'm in here daily. The Rake Expand Academy is open. I'll have a link in the description. Okay, so back at it. Step one is what? To prioritize. So you have to prioritize your

5:06website. Remember, we have electric bikes. We have this law firm. If I go back here, how do we figure out what pages are prioritized? Well, you should know this about your own website, but if you don't know this, you can see what Google perceives, right? We'll get into this a bit more. Now, what is step number two? What we're going to do, step number two is this. We're going to go to Ahrefs. You don't need Ahrefs. In fact, I recommend using Google Search Console. If you have it, it's kind of better for this next step, but I don't have access to their Google Search Console. So this

5:34website right here, let's just take a look. It has a DR of 62. This means that the website's pretty darn powerful. So it can kind of throw its weight around, right? When you have a DR 50 plus, an e-com, man, you can throw your weight around. No joke. But what I want to know is what is their top pages right now? And you can see over here, right? If I go right here to the right, you can see that their traffic actually got hit by the December 25 core update. What are we going to do about this? Well, I can give some suggestions, but it's kind of outside the scope of this video,

6:05but I'll hit on it a bit. So coming down here, what is their number one page? It's this one right here. Best Electric Bikes 2026. Very strong keyword. Awesome. And what I want to know, look here, first off, there's a disparity between 25 and 26. So they got to update this featured image, but that's minor. But for CRO, conversion rate optimization, they should probably do it. Now, what I want to do in this next step is just rely on data. I don't want to do the fluffy stuff of images, this, that, and another. I want data. Data is what rules SEOs. Still, I just want data. So

6:39what we're going to do is we're going to focus on this particular page. And all we do, I mean, this is pretty simple at this point, is we want to know what organic keywords this thing ranks for. There's a hundred different ways, a hundred different tools. You can do this. I do think Google Search Console is the best. It's free. It's like direct to the source. You can see what queries you rank for, but we have Ahrefs right now. We're going to use it. This page right here, like their money page, we call it a money page because guess what? They make money off of this

7:06page. This is what they rank for. So people literally type in this keyword right here, electric bike or best electric bikes or electric bikes for adults. So what are we going to do? Well, I'm just going to copy the darn thing, right? It's like I said, I don't want to be fluffy. I don't want to do the things that are like, oh, let's, let's think about the images. I just want data. Give me, give me the words because what I can do is I can come over here and I can just drop it, right? I can control V and just drop all my keywords in the GBT. I can do other things, but

7:37at the very core, I need to know what exact keywords does this page rank for right now. Now step number two, we're into it right now. We're halfway through. It is keywords. We have to figure out the keywords and what else. This is where so many people screw up. If you don't get this one right, might as well pack it in, right? Yeah, you can get your keywords. Congratulations, but you have to get this next part right and this is what it looks like. So let's come back over here.

8:03Where is it? This one right here. Look, if we come to electric bike keyword, let's just pause here for a second. We can see the volume is a lot. Comparatively, it's a lot. I mean a lot, a lot, almost half a million traffic per month, but here's a problem. It's a huge problem. The position. Do you see this row right here is 33. In other words, this website, this page ranks on page three of Google. It's invisible for the most part for the keyword electric bike. So you can pull down your keywords and that's cool, right? Pull down your keywords, but you have to prioritize

8:37your keywords. You have to see which ones are on the doorstep of success. What does that mean? Well, look at position and if you see something on page one such as this one, here's position 7.4, which effectively is like page two nowadays because AI overviews, but if we get this 7.4 up to say two or three or one even, well, is that within the realm of possibility? Can we take a position seven, right? Position seven can boost to position two or three or one that is possible.

9:05So what I'm going to do, I'm going to say that one's possible. This one's possible 7.9 and I'm just looking for positions right now, right? I'm just looking for positions. If something's on page two or three, if one of your keywords, like you're ranking for it technically, you have impressions kind of, but you're on page two or three, I mean, unless you're starting your website, okay, that could be forgivable, but there's probably lower hanging fruit and that has to do with position right here. So right here I have one, two, three, four, five different keywords. I'm going to copy these and that's what we're going to work with. Now for step number three, I need to take us back

9:39to these images right here. So this is a real client. This is somebody who is in the Rank Expand Academy. They figured this out, right? They figured it out. They wanted us to do it for them. That's fine. We'll do it for you, but this is how we're going to boost a domain right now. These are different pages on a specific domain. So in other words, if you look at that e-bike case study, just pretend this was one of their pages, right? And we started with them around here and then we boost them up, right? So come over here, start around here and then boost them up. And the idea

10:07is what? Well, if you have an e-com store, sell more stuff. If you have a local business, sell your services. It's very simple, right? How did we do this? And this is where it comes into play. And if I were to come over here, I'll come right back to this sheet by the way. If we come over to step number three, it's links baby. I'm going to say links baby. That's what it is. Back links. Back links. Do they work? Absolutely. And remember, I have two bonuses for you. I have two bonuses we're going to talk about after this, but links. What does this look like? Well, I obviously

10:36stripped out the URLs we use for this, but here's how many links that we bought, right? 48 of them. And here's the DRs, right? This client, they like to talk about DA, DRDA, domain rating, domain authority, apples, you know, I was going to say apples, tomatoes. That doesn't make sense. Tomato, tomato, right? DRDA. So you can see DRDA over here. You can see the traffic domain of the backlink.

11:00So a backlink is what? If I have this website right here, right? Best electric bikes 2025. We've already determined what are the best keywords that potentially ranks for that are on the doorstep, right? Coming back here, keywords with potential. Well, we know those now and I wrote them over here. So guess what? When I go to get backlinks from other websites, guest blogs, call it what you want. I'm going to pepper in these keywords rather throughout the article. One time per article, it's not terribly complicated. And then we start to see success like this. This is exactly how this happens, right? It's not magic. It's not magic backlinks. They still work, right? And I think

11:41they still work even better than they used to work. But there are some bonus things we need to talk about. Now the bonuses are hinged on understanding some basic concepts. If you don't know the basics to all this, come to the Rank Expand Academy. You'll see we have basic courses for you right here. Now in the advanced courses right here, strategic link builder, and I go to course, you will see I have one, two, three, four, five modules here to teach you exactly what I do, exactly how I build these links so you can save money and just do it yourself. I prefer you do

12:09it yourself. I prefer you do it yourself. Join the academy. You will learn how to do this. Now, let's talk about the bonuses, right? The bonuses are very simple. If we have to compete against what? We have to compete against our competitors, right, on Google. Obvious. It's been like that forever. But we also have to compete against AI nowadays too, which kind of stinks. But it is what it is. So if I come back over here and I come back to Google, if I can backtrack, right, is there anything here that kind of says, oh, interesting. Well, sponsored products, that's always interesting

12:41to me because if you can do ads well, you can make a lot of money. YouTube is interesting, but this one is most interesting to me right here. Reddit, right? You've heard it before. I'm doing this actively. You have to be able to understand that AI needs its material from somewhere. It needs to draw upon some inspiration to give an explanation to the end user and Reddit is probably the number one source of that. So if I had a brand, I would be on Reddit everywhere peppering my brand throughout articles, right? That's bonus number one. I have a module in the Rank Expand Academy explaining

13:19exactly how I do this. I've had a lot of success about it. Now, number two, I'm going to keep it simple, is press releases. If you don't know how to do a press release, fairly simple. But if you combine all these things we talked about in this video, it's exactly how I am ranking websites and making money online right now.