Jesse Cunningham Ranks 12 AI SEO Tactics

0:00Most advice does not work. We're going to talk about it in this video, how to rank a website using AI SEO. We have 12 different things that a lot of people think works. But guess what? A lot of it will waste your time, and some of it will crush it that you probably did not expect. How do I know this? Because I have an agency where we help clients make money with this. Here's a case study. You can come to our website, check it out. And I have websites myself. I've tried all of these things.

0:26I've wasted tons of money doing some of these things and figured, "Okay, what works here and what doesn't?" Now, off the bat, we should explain the ranking system. We have S tier, A, B, C, and D. S tier is like the best tier. It's above A. It's like the elite of the elite. If you had to do anything, get these ones right off the bat. Now, like I said, I wasted a lot of money on some of these things to the right. I will zoom in.

0:48You'll see some of them here, such as AI snippet targeting, query-based frequently asked questions, entity optimization. Which one of these actually works, right? Which one of these kind of works, and which ones, in my opinion, are just a waste of time? So, the purpose of this video is to help you do better for yourself, your websites, your clients, whatever you have going on. This will be a useful video because I've been there, I've done that. I've spent the time and wasted the money, right? And figured out what works. So, off the bat, let's come here.

1:15I'll zoom in. AI snippet targeting. Now, for each of these, we're going to go into examples of what it means. So, AI snippet targeting, we're going to go over why it matters and how to do it, and then we will rank it over here. So, I can actually like click and drag and put it over here. See, like A tier. But let's just put it back here for a second. AI snippet targeting. So, what the heck is it? What does it matter? So, this matters for all these different things. So, AI overviews in Google. If I want to be Do you see it right here? AI

1:42overview. So, if I type in the best beaches in Hawaii up top, I want to rank to the right here somehow, some way. I want to be in the AI overview. This is a huge deal nowadays. This one's a big one, right? I think this is going to be B, A, or S tier. I'm not sure yet. AI overviews, huge. How do we rank here?

2:00And then we come down here, people also asks. How do we rank here? This is the tactic that usually does pretty darn well. And it kind of it helps with other things we'll talk about in a second. It's really, really good if you refresh content with this, too. So, if you want to rank in AI overviews, featured snippets, people also ask, voice search, all this stuff. How do you do it? You identify the actual questions. You provide a clear answer, a very tight answer. You are always writing for. So, if you have a website, you are always writing for people and algorithms. It

2:31used to be people and Google, but now it's people and a lot of different algorithms. And the algorithms really like tight sentences, right? So, we're going to structure it so that AI systems can extract it cleanly and reinforce it with semantic support below. So, I'm going to put AI snippet targeting at A tier. It's almost S tier. I think it's right there, but you have to know how to kind of do two things at once, right?

2:56So, if I come over here, this is from a previous video. If you look at for this one, how I ranked number one on Google using AI entities via n8n. We're going to get into this more, but you can use AI nowadays to take content, right? This took an article and it gave recommendations. It said, "Here's your existing article up here, the words you're using. Can you consider doing this right here?" It's tight, it's snippet-worthy, right? And it injects entities, which we're going to talk about in a bit. But right here, I think we're A tier solid. AI snippet targeted.

3:26In fact, this case study right here, largely how we got stuck from stuck to 6 million bucks. How we did this was largely semantic branching, which we'll talk about, and this snippet stuff, right? We want it to inject clean answers so people enjoy it, right? They like it, they can read it. But more importantly, the LLMs and Google and all these other platforms can read it and rank it. Okay, so next up is query-based frequently asked questions. This one is interesting. This one was very popular a little while ago. Does it work? And this is what it looks like. Let's say I have

4:00a cold plunge product page website. You can scrape, right? So, if I just come here, cold cold plunge. Let's come back over to Google. We come here. We type it in. Boom. Okay, if I come down here, cold plunge, right? have AI overview. I can extract different questions and statements out of here, and I can scroll down, and if I have frequently asked questions or people also ask, I can extract these. And what people do is they basically scrape this, and you can click this button, and it will generate more, right? Click this button, and it will generate more. So, you can do this

4:29for days, right? And what they'll do is they'll basically scrape, and you can do this with AI quickly, and then answer these on their website, right? Very interesting. Does it work? We have, "How cold should a cold plunge be?" And then you answer it with two or three sentences. Great. And you can do it in a concise way to appease the LLMs, the algorithms, and people. But does it work, right? So, for this one here, let's put this one I'd say C tier. I think it's fairly easy, but I think people get carried away with doing this. In other words,

4:59they think this is like a a thing that's going to move the needle huge, and they have every single page of their website with a frequently asked question. A better way to do it, right, is to also have schema. If you're going to do this, you better have schema. Now, we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's keep it rolling. Entity optimization is up next. Where is this going to fall? So, entity optimization is simply this. How AI thinks about the world is through associations. Associations through entities. An entity, right? I'll just give you an example, is a person, place, or thing that has other associations

5:33with other entities. That's a mouthful. What does this mean? So, if we come over here to let's say we have a pellet stove store, right? And we have a page called best pellet stove for home heating. That's a keyword. And let's say our content repeats pellet stoves or best pellet stove and affordable pellet stove. That's very surface level. That's very shallow. That's what most people do. So, if I come over here, best pellet stove for home heating, we have the AI overview, which we've sort of addressed.

5:58We have Reddit, which is a great conversation to talk about. But if we have Consumer Reports right now, which is kind of playing unfair because they have such a powerful website that they can crush most people. But you can still rank, right? But if you look at their page, how could they optimize better? Is it surface level? Is it, you know, truly optimized for, you know, entities?

6:17They're talking about tax credits over here. They're talking about energy efficiency ratings. Very interesting. So, coming back here, an entity-optimized version of a page, instead of just talking about pellet stoves, best pellet stoves, affordable pellet stoves, it might have, you know, different product entities. It has technical entities, such as BTU outputs. It has fuel entities, pellet moisture content, regulatory entities. All these different things, which is exactly what this tool does, right? Remember I told you this video right here, entity rank number one? That's exactly what I talk about. How do we use n8n to produce this? And if you want to watch that

6:54video, I encourage it. But quickly, all the blue things, I'll scroll in. All of the blue line items are entities that our AI system has recommended we put into our content. So, what it does, it can look at your website right now and say, "Hey, look, you're you're missing these entities. Put them in, right? Put them in." And that's kind of like the long and short of it. Where am I going to put this? I'm definitely going to put this S tier. Entity optimization is super strong. Now, this next one is programmatic SEO pages. I'm going to scroll in. Programmatic SEO pages. I

7:25talk a lot on this channel about microsites, which are programmatic websites. Programmatic. What does that mean? It basically means your hands off. You have AI build the copy, the words, well, the copy and the words are the same thing. The images, all of it, the structure. It works really well if you know what you're doing. What I'm afraid of with programmatic SEO pages is that people go hog wild, right? They go hog wild. They don't know when to stop. You ever heard that, you know, pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered type of thing, right? You have to know when to stop.

7:55So, you can't just throw 500 pages out tomorrow and expect Google to index it and do well. It does not work like that. I think, for my purposes and what I know, hmm, programmatic SEO pages, I'm going to put and I'm I'm fearful of doing this. I'm going to put it at A tier, so long as you can understand to stop when you're ahead, to chill out, to to pace yourself, right? Because if you just throw hundreds on your website, you can really just totally destroy your rankings. Okay, up next we have AI meta generation. AI meta generation, meta descriptions, right? So, often, if we

8:33come back over here to Google, let's come to Google if I can find it. Let's go back here. Often on Google, it gives you a preview of what the website's about. So, for instance, the one we looked at, best pellet stoves, blah, blah, blah. Down here is presumably a meta description. And what you can do is have AI go and optimize your meta descriptions.

8:51What do I think about this nowadays? Now, I'm going to tell you, I don't think it's that powerful because we have a lot of websites where we just omit meta descriptions. We don't even do meta descriptions cuz half the time, more than half the time, it seems Google's going to write their own meta descriptions nowadays. So, I'm going to put this in a D tier. Now, this next one, we have to be careful. It is internal link automation. I used to use tools that automate internal links. At least I've tried them. I've tested them.

9:20I've seen them work. I've seen them totally fail as well. But let's talk about what it is. If I come to a random website, you scroll down, you're going to see a blue link, right? Read the top sites on each island here. It's a website about Hawaii, right? We've all seen it. You click through here. It goes to goes to the next page. That's an internal link.

9:39Are internal links powerful? Absolutely. Some of the most powerful things you can do on a website is to properly internally link your money pages, your informational pages in the right way. But the problem I have, and the reason I'm going to put this into D tier, is that the automation aspect of it is really a double-edged sword. You can get yourself into a lot of trouble, right?

10:00So, shameless plug this year, if I come back here, this year, this is a book that I wrote about how to write content and how to properly internal link every piece of content very, very manually. That's the whole thing. Do it manually because it matters so much that I don't think the automation aspect of it is a wise choice because you can screw up your website so much, so quick. Now, I appreciate you watching to this point and another shameless plug is the Rank Expand Academy. This is my community that you can come and learn all of this stuff. We have so many courses in here.

10:34We have weekly calls with the community. There's hundreds of people in here that are learning this stuff. If you have a question, guess what? Now you have a community to answer you. Okay, next up is schema expansion strategy. What the heck is schema? Let's do a little digging here. So, what I'm going to do, I'm going to take this website's URL, right? I'm going to copy it. I'm going to come over to schema.org and I'm going to validate this specific URL and push it here. It's going to make sense in a second. So, this is schema.org and it's going to tell us the schema on this

11:04page. And what is schema? Well, here it is right in front of you. And this is just one schema of many. This is the article schema and it shows you, okay, here's keywords, here's article sections, here's the URL, here's the name, here's all these things. Like it's the publisher type of organization, person, same as, okay, this is their website. This schema is kind of, eh, you could do much better. And the question is whether or not doing much better with schema right here actually matters. Does it actually move the needle? Because we have AI tools that can just do schema

11:33for us nowadays, no problem. In the Rank Expand Academy, we have tons of conversations going on about schema. Super, super powerful if you do it right, if you have the right business. What is the right business to do this with? I think it really moves the needle with two. Local businesses, think of like a lawyer down the street or a plumber or whatever, and then e-com businesses. Super strong. Two different sets of schema, right? Two different sets of schema, but super, super powerful. I'm going to put it into a solid A tier. Now, next up is something that's been around a long time, content

12:07clustering. But, we can use AI nowadays to do things that we were never able to do in the past. But, where does it fall in this ranking system? So, coming over here, this is the website that we're looking at previously. So, if I come back over here, this is just this website, a random blog about Hawaii. Great. You can come to their site map.

12:25You just type in {slash} sitemap.xml and then you can go to every, quite literally, every blog post that they have. And I can click into any of these. These are blog posts. Great. Take it over to ChatGPT and say, "What am I missing?" And so, all of a sudden you can see, "Oh, we're missing here major content clusters. You're missing traveling with kids, authority hub, big opportunity." This is great. And this is what most people do, but they're missing one critical piece of information, which is data. You actually need to understand what your website ranks for. This is just a list of your content. ChatGPT

12:59does not know the actual data. It doesn't know which ones you're doing well or bad with because what you do with a proper content cluster is you take the good stuff and you build around it and you build a moat and you build a castle and you build an empire around the things your website actually does well with. Now, with that said, I have to put content clustering into S tier because it's just foundational. If you have a website, you have to be doing this. But, using AI the right way, not what I just showed you, that's step one, right? The right way to do this is to

13:27come over here, Rank Expand Academy, gear up and there's a bunch of ways to do this. But, we have what is called your SEO assistant. So, what we do in GPT is we connect it to a data, an API data source, which is data for SEO. So, instead of just kind of shooting in the dark, you can get data about your website instead of using expensive tools like Ahrefs, which still works, is still great, you can use data to make refined decisions. Now, we have four more right here. Let's scroll in. SERP pattern analysis. We have content gap automation. We have content refreshing

14:00and semantic mapping. Now, I'm going to tell you off the bat, semantic mapping is S tier. This is how we have this case study, if it ever loads, from stuck to $6 million, how we built up a website. This is a YMYL website. In other words, your money, your life. Think of lawyers, think of financial guys. You can make a lot of money if you know what you're doing, right? This works really well and it ties together a lot of the strategies we talked about here, but I'll have a link in the description on this case study. I don't want to talk about it

14:27here. We're going to do lightning round now, right? We have SERP pattern analysis. So, this right here is to figure out what is ranking on Google, right? We're going to say A tier. So, I come over and I study Google. AI tools can do this. What is ranking right now? What is their titles? What content do they have? Very important. Content gap automation. I'm scared of it. I'm going to give it a B tier. Content gap, let's put it B tier if it can fall there. What this means is we can figure out what our website is missing. So, if I come over

14:55to Ahrefs and say content gap, it can show us some content gap. But, what you can do, right? You can put your competitors here. What you can do is give the reins to AI and say, "Hey, look, AI, just go build all this stuff." And that's programmatic. It gets scary. I'm going to give it a B tier. Now, content refreshing, I think, is super slept on. I'm going to give it S tier right now. I keep on putting it in B tier. Where did it go? Content refreshing. Right there. Boom. And that is the score. That is everything. We have content refreshing in S tier

15:24because when you go into a website that is a good website and you refresh content over and over again. Not every day, not even every month, but to know a good cadence, right? What is Google's expectations? This can really matter.