Welcome to Off the Grid, a podcast for artists and small business owners who want to make money online without relying on social media. Hello, and welcome to off the Grid, a podcast about leaving social media without losing all your clients. It's also a show about starting and running a creative business with radical generosity and energetic sovereignty. And this week, it's a podcast about the creative marketing tools, trends, and tactics that I think will work for all of us in 2026. I'm your host, Amelia Hruby, and I have been off of social media for almost five years now.

And let me tell you, friends, it does feel really good. But this is not just a show for folks who've left social media. We have a lot of social media users in our audience, and I welcome you to these critical conversations about how we can share our work and make money online without sacrificing our well-being to extractive algorithms, platform surveillance, and everything that makes the Internet feel so bad these days. This episode shares the first strategy in our creative marketing toolkit series, and I will be talking to Meg Casebolt all about SEO, AI, and blogging, specifically why blogging is so important in this era where SEO has been reshaped by AI. It's a really nuanced and interesting conversation, and I wanna tell you upfront that we really do sort of go deep.

Sometimes we get in the weeds. We pull back out. There is a lot that we uncover in less than an hour together. So I want you to know right now that if you listen to this episode and you're like, wow. How am I actually gonna put that into practice?

We do give some very practical tips, but I think that if you want to implement anything you hear on a podcast, whether it be off the grid or a different one, the best way to do that is with a community of other listeners. And luckily for all of us, we have that with the interweb. The interweb is our annual membership for artists, writers, healers, speakers, content creators, and small business owners. We host multiple live calls and classes a month. We have a rich resource library full of workshop recordings, templates, and discount codes.

And as of last fall, we have a community Slack work in play space where we gather every week to share what we're up to, problem solve the tricky sticky parts of online business, and also feel less alone in the existential dread that inevitably comes with doing this work on the Internet in these times. Doors to the interweb are open right now for this week only. So, again, if you listen to this episode and you're like, wow. I could really use some support to make this work in my business, Or you're like, wow. I'm starting a new business, and I really wanna set up my website for success.

Or maybe you're like, actually, I just need to ask Amelia if this actually applies to my work at all. All of those are things that you can do inside the interweb for the low, low cost of only $199 per year. So if you're interested in joining us, please head to the show notes or go to offthegrid.fun/interweb and learn more about what we're up to in the membership this year. I've got our full event calendar there for January through June, and we even have some stuff explicitly on SEO and websites if today's episode leaves you wanting more of that. So thank you so much for tuning in.

I'm so excited to share this conversation with you, and I hope to see you in the interweb this week. Now let me tell you a little bit about our guest before we dive into the conversation. Meg Casebolt is the founder of Love at First Search, an agency singularly devoted to helping online businesses get found in search results and turn those new readers into leads, subscribers, and sales. From 2021 to 2023, she hosted the Social Slow Down podcast, where she interviewed over 100 entrepreneurs about their relationship with social media, and then wrote a book called Social Slow Down: Market Your Business Without Sacrificing Your Mental Health. Now she co hosts a show called Aggressively Human with past Off the Grid podcast guest Jessica Lackey, where they talk about online business in the age of AI, algorithms, and automation.

Meg is also a romance writer under the pen name Bailey Seaborne and the cohost of the First Dates and Soulmates podcast. So she is a service provider. She is an artist. She is a content creator. And today, she is here to talk to us all about SEO, AI, and blogging.

I'm so grateful to Meg for joining me today and to you, dear listener, for tuning in. Now let's dive in to this conversation all about searching the new web. Hi, Meg. Welcome to Off the Grid.

Thank you. It is so nice to be here with you.

I am pretty sure that we recorded a conversation for your now defunct podcast.

Yeah. That I think I never posted because I was just so over talking about social media that I couldn't even have another conversation about leaving social media with somebody else who had left social media.

The social slowdown was definitely, like, off the grid before off the grid existed. And I think we had that conversation. It was, like, two or three years ago. It was quite a while ago. I stopped publishing that podcast in October 2023.

And I can't believe it's taken that long for me to get you on the show. So welcome, welcome. Thanks for being here.

I'm so glad to be here. I feel like a lifetime has occurred in that two plus years.

Yeah. Like, personally, politically, and, like, SEO. It's true. I feel you

like, when ChatGPT rolled out search and SGE is when, like, the Google AI overview started showing up at the top of the page. Like, the landscape has shifted dramatically in just the past two or three years.

Yeah. Absolutely. I'm always just amazed that, like, ChatGPT didn't launch until fall twenty twenty two. As we're recording this, like, it's only about three years old, and, yeah, it has changed everything or, like, fully transformed the landscape of online business. So that's what you and I are here to talk about today, specifically through the lens of your expertise, which is or has been SEO, but as we're gonna discuss, is kind of more like AIO now.

So could you define some of these terms for us? Like, what is or was SEO? What is AIO? What is GIO? And what language are you using these days to talk about search engine optimization?

Oh my god. I feel like I need a glossary of terms just to have a basic conversation nowadays. SEO, search engine optimization. So search engine, anything that's going to go search the Internet, crawl information, pull it back, and put it into results. So your Google, your Yahoo, your Bing, those are all search engines.

Technically, also a place like Amazon or Etsy or Pinterest, also search engines because you can search for information on them. So SEO used to be synonymous with search, with organic search. Search you don't have to pay for. Unlike paid ads, you know, if it was free and you could get results from people searching for you, it was SEO. And then in that sort of transition we were talking about that, like, 2021, twenty twenty three ish, as AI tools were starting to become more prevalent, starting to become more consumer facing, you know, Bing led this a lot.

Bing Copilot started adding more AI into its searches. Google started adding AI into its searches. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude all started having more search driven AI results. Instead of just being AI generation tools, they became also research tools that were going and getting the information for you, synthesizing that information, and then providing those citations, which is very similar to the ways that search engines work and also looking at many of the same criteria for credibility. So the new ways that the AI tools are searching is built upon the shoulders of what SEO was doing.

And now when you hear people talking about AEO, that's answer engine optimization, or I've heard l l m o l l l m e o, like, language model engine optimization. Like and all of these are just ways of saying, like, AI has entered the chat. The ways that Google used to just, like, go crawl the Internet, index things, rank them, and then give you a list is no longer the way that that information is being presented. Now it's going it's crawling that information, but it's also going, well, what are you looking for here? What's the intent of this search?

What's the intended outcome that you're trying to achieve with this? And then it's going to take that information. It's going to synthesize it into an answer, and it's going to say, I think this is the answer that you're looking for. And then you can get into dialogue with the tools. In a way that you couldn't get that into dialogue with Google, that would be like, oh, let me just try a different query versus, wait.

That wasn't exactly it. Can you go

find this instead? And so the way that people are searching has changed, but the way that we as creators can show up in those search answers is still relevant to us. I really appreciate the way you're explaining this and sort of setting it up because I can feel you doing a few things as you're talking about it. You're trying to, like, make everybody feel not afraid.

Reassure you, this happened very quietly, and nobody was talking about all these changes. And then all of a sudden, people's traffic tanked, and you're like, wait. What?

Why? What do I do now? How does it shift? You know, I think for myself, I think there are some really interesting possibilities that come up as we move into this era of AEO or AIO or whatever. But for so long, like, the way I was trained in SEO, which wasn't really training.

Like, when I went to workshops and got taught these sort of fundamental basic concepts in 2019, 2020, basically, what everyone said is, like, SEO is learning how to please Google. It's learning how to show up in Google searches because Google ran the show on SEO. And I think that something that is interesting to me is that as we move out of this era where Google is the only one running the show as ChatGPT and Perplexity and these other tools are now sort of, I don't know, like getting market share in search, to talk about it that way, it opens some possibilities. It's not just Google that we're all looking to. And at the same time, I have all these question marks because there is a party that's like, well, at least with Google, they, like, did release some guidelines.

They told people what they wanted, and now we're being told nothing. Like, as creators, we don't get to see any of how that conversation that, you know, an LLM is having in the process of search with a user. Like, we know nothing about how that works. So what do you think about this sort of, like, opening for new possibility, but also maybe even less transparency happening?

People used to say that Google had the algorithms, but, really, like, SEO is different for every single industry and every single keyword, and you sort of have to, like, adjust it based on your specifics. But with with LLMs, like, there is no set group of, oh, if you type this in, then you'll get that because all of it is predictive. All of it is created fresh every time. So we don't have the same you know, with SEO, we still do technically have Google Search Console. And that can still be helpful for help helping us know, like, what are the terms people are searching for.

But if they're not searching on Google, we're not gonna get that information from ChatGPT. And also to your point, like, the ways that that these tools are prioritizing what information they want to share is not being released in simple guideline things. It's being released to developers, and then the developers can look through it and be like, oh, these semantic clusters across the knowledge map are very close in the embedded structures. And, you know, like, it gets really jargony really quickly, and it's taken me two years to figure out what the jargon even means. You know?

And, like, I read Search Engine Journal, and I then I went and Googled the things, and then I went to ChatGPT. And I was like, okay. ELI five, what the hell does this mean? You know? Like, so sometimes even the people who are watching this really closely are like, really simplify this for me so that I can build my knowledge back up.

And so I feel like I've spent the better part of the last two years going, okay. But what does that mean? Okay. But how does that apply? And this isn't something that everyone has the time and the resources and the the emotional capacity to constantly poke the machine and be like, but why'd you do that?

Why does it work for this person and not this person? What's the thing that I need to do next? And so I've spent two years being like, okay. Well, what what are the things that that these machines care about? They care about many of the same things that Google does.

They just look at it differently. So expertise still matters. Experience still matters. Authority still matters. But they're no longer going, oh, this one page has six six hundred backlinks.

So that means that it has high page authority, and that means that we should talk about it. Because ChatGPT and these AI tools aren't looking page by page. They're looking at everything that everybody on the Internet is saying about you, that they can figure out it's about you. And so what they're doing now is this process instead of instead of it being like, this is Amelia's website. This is ameliaherbie.com, and everything goes back to that domain is sort of the way that Google organized it.

Now Amelia Herbie is an entity in a map. It's like a constellation, and Amelia Herbie is a star in that. You are a person entity in that constellation map. And then off the grid is a podcast entity. And you are in that constellation.

You're connected to that. And Softer Stounds is a business entity in that constellation. And we have to figure out what all of our different star entities are, how they're related to each other, how they're related to the other stars in the constellations, and how do we make it clear what that constellation is a picture of. And that's a very different conversation than if I say podcast on my website 2.5 times per paragraph, then I will show up for the word podcast. It's just a completely different structure of how to think about how to organize our information.

And, like, content architecture is totally changing, and nobody's talking about it, Amelia.

Even when I was trying to, like, do research to even learn myself to prepare to have this conversation with you, I was like, well, I'll get just to read Meg's website because nobody else has much to offer me, it seems.

It's so hard. It's so hard to make sense of this.

I agree with that. And also, I'm so intrigued though because the way you just explained it through, like, the constellation of different topics and entities and ways and places we're showing up online, I actually think that sort of, like, constellation model, that is the creative ecosystem building that I do with people all the time. Like, that is actually how we approach our work intuitively and strategically. Normally, when I work with people, right, we're mapping like, okay. This is your personal brand.

This is your podcast. This is your book that you wrote. This is the business you run. Like, though building those ecosystems and constellations is much more useful and intuitive to me than trying to rank for a keyword or keyword stuff anything I'm doing on my website. So there's a part of me that's like, okay.

I feel some relief, actually, that now I don't have to use keyword tools anymore. Maybe I don't have to care so much about some of the parts of SEO that always felt, honestly, yeah, icky and and, like, boring to me. Like, they just were never fun or creative. They were kind of basic and just done to, like, please daddy Google in a way that I never understood or got anything out of. So, like, I'm kinda relieved.

I can be like, yeah. Dear off the grid listeners, if you don't know what keyword exact keyword matching is, now you never have to.

Don't worry about it. Yeah. And, like, you have never ever had to get the green light on the Yoast plugin, but now it's it's not just not relevant. It's, like, irrelevant now. Stop worrying about what the colors the tools give you and especially the tools that are like, oh, we'll tell you what to write, and then we'll write it for you, and then you can just publish it.

No. That's complete garbage. AI hates that. AI hates AI generated content. It's so counterintuitive.

But if you hire, like, a content mill to create your content in order to have it on your website, and they use an AI generated tool without providing any of your experience, your expertise, your authority, anything that makes it seem like you or yourself are a human writing the content, AI is

just gonna completely gloss over it. And also, feel like this is something I've started saying to people, and I wanna know if if you would agree with this from an SEO perspective. But I just think that the types of informational and educational content that many of us were trained to create for SEO or even for social media at certain points, I feel like that is mostly obsolete at this point because it has just been fully, in my opinion, eaten by search engines and AI results. And so I just don't make that kind of content anymore. I might make tools like that.

I have lead magnets that are educational. I have podcast episodes or conversations even. But, like, I am not building that kind of content thinking it's gonna bring me more traffic. Or even if it does bring traffic, it doesn't bring people who wanna engage with my work.

And I think that's always been the problem with some of this. It's like if you are in this specifically for, like, I wanna get as many people to know that I exist as possible, then your quality is going to go down. And there are business models where that matters to say, I need to have this many page views. I need to have my CPM be this in order to get the advertisers to pay me this, and so I need to have volume, volume, volume. But for you, for me, for most people listening to this podcast, it's never been a volume game.

It's never been a traffic game. And so it's even less of a traffic game now because we don't need to be found by everyone. We don't need AI to recommend us us for everything. We need to get really, really specific about, like, this is the thing that I want to be found for, and then set up that architecture in a way that then AI is like, oh, if people want audio first, podcasting that does not have a social media component, but is very, like, feminist and values aligned, then they should go find softer sounds. Right?

And you can get that specific because we have all of those concepts in our constellation. And there are very few people who tap all of those stars in the constellation. So it's about being specific and also being able to say, yeah, but I'm not these people. I do the same thing as them, but here's how I'm differentiated. Instead.

And here are the values that I do have. And here are the concepts that I do embrace. And a lot of that differentiation can be done at a content level, which can be on your website. It can be on your podcast. It can be on any of the tools that you can control the messaging around.

But you can choose what that is, and then that will feed the information going into those LLS. So that way when people look for something like that, they'll they'll choose your name even if they're coming up with a list. If if, you know, if people go to ChatGPT and they're like, talk to me about podcast producers, you might not be on that list because it's gonna be the bigger ones. But if they're like, you know, woman led podcast studio, maybe we could get you there. Right?

And this is the same way that we were always thinking about SEO, which is what's the tightest niche that we can get for the right people that are looking for the services that we provide or the problems that we solve or the outcomes we can help them achieve? None of that is different. It's just the ways that we're organizing the information is less like, here's the phrase to shove into these 20 different places. And much more like, what are the questions in natural language that people are asking? Much more like, put FAQs at the bottom of every post so that way the people also ask and the AI really knows what it is that you're doing.

Make sure it's very clear who you are as an entity, what your experience is, what expertise you have. Like, all of this really has to come to the forefront. I'm, like, loving this as I

talk to you because I'm like, oh, this is great. Because those are also fundamental business skills. It's not just search skills. Like, I used to feel like SEO skills were, like, this thing I literally never used anywhere else in my life. But specificity and knowing exactly the questions that your people are asking, those are two things that will serve you well in every area of your business.

Right? Whether you are writing an email, writing a blog post, writing a sales page, you need to know the specifics of, like, who you are, what you're doing, who you're for, what you're about. And, also, you need to anticipate those questions. And this is something that I talk to a lot of creative business owners about because I don't think that we're always thinking about the problems that our work solves and the questions that people are asking. I think a lot of artists and creatives and, I mean, I love you, dear listener, but take this gently as feedback.

I think a lot of people are like, oh, my work is about this. You know? My work is about healing your inner child, or my work is about making podcasts, to use myself as an example here. But it's like, what are the actual problems people have that get us to that? This goes back to marketing frameworks.

Like, I find often people start at a very, like, solution aware place, and we need to build all the way back, like, before problem awareness. Like, what is the thing happening to someone that makes them even realize they have an inner child? What is the thing happening to someone that makes them realize they maybe want a podcast? And it's like, the more we can understand that, the easier it will be to sell, the better and more resilient our businesses will be. And now it sounds like the better they will show up in search, which was not always the case.

Like, just thinking about you using softer sounds as an example, like, I can look back in my own Google Search Console or my Squarespace stats and be like, I think approximately, like, three people have ever meaningfully found me from the search feminist podcast studio. Like, it is not a common search out there. It's not bringing people my way. I'm not seeing a lot of ChatGPT traffic yet either, but I can really imagine a world where somebody who has, like, pulled a lot of their feminist values and social justice work into ChatGPT is then searching for a podcast producer, and ChatGPT is aware through the constellation of their account that, like, these are the interests that come into play and, like, why I would be a good fit for them. And I have thoughts and feelings about ChatGPT itself and, like, them saving that and knowing that about people separately.

To go back, I would say, like, we absolutely need to know our customer journey. This is not about what I am creating. This is about what is the relationship that I'm going to have with the clients that I'm working with in order to help them achieve something. And in terms of that customer journey, completely agree with you that, like, we need to be more problem aware. We need to be more, like, forward about understanding the entire reason why people are coming to us.

One of the things I like to say, and I just started saying this, so this may be the first place where I'm saying this publicly on the air, is instead of thinking about AIO as, like, artificial intelligence optimization, think of it this way. If you're optimizing to show up in AI, think of it as audience intent and outcome. AIO, audience intent and outcome. So you're thinking about who is the audience that I am trying to reach with this content? What is the intent?

What are they searching for? What are they trying to achieve? And what is the outcome that they are trying to achieve with that search? So, you know, one of the first things that all of these tools, ChatGPT in particular, but ChatGPT taught me this, right, is instead of going, oh, what's the phrase that I'm trying to match? The question that it's sort of working through is, what is the intended outcome of this question?

If you can match whatever you're creating, your blog post, your podcast episode, your free guide, your whatever your messaging strategy is, match that to what are people trying to achieve by looking for this. What is the intent of this search? So it's not so much, I am a web designer, and I design websites. And you can get a website that I designed, and you can do it because I'll design it on WordPress or I'll design it on Squarespace. And all of that is very solution aware.

But if the audience is, oh, I'm doing this for podcasters, and the intent is I want people to be able to listen to the podcast without needing to be on Substack, and the outcome is that they have more sales coming in through their podcast listeners, okay, that changes the type of content that we're going to create and the way that we're gonna speak to that audience. Audience, intent, outcome.

Yeah. I have so many thoughts on that, but I want to, in a certain sense, pull back and maybe get a little bit more practical. Practical because I can nerd out with you on the sort of, like, big picture constellations aspect of this, but I'm sure listeners are like, yes. But Megan Amelia, like, what does this mean for me in 2026? Right?

Like, what should I be doing? Outcome. Outcome, Amelia. Like, the audience is off the grid listeners. The intent is listening to this to figure out how to handle SEO in 2026.

So the outcome is, what would you say I kind of have two people in mind. There's like somebody who's never really set up for SEO, and they're like, I feel like I just gotta get started. What do they do? Versus like somebody who maybe already has a website, has some blog posts, like, should that business owner be doing? What would you recommend as some next steps?

We're gonna talk to the people who have existing content first, and then we can sort of backtrack it into if we need to create new or not. So if you already have an existing digital presence, whatever that is, even if you, you know, e what whatever that is. If you already have an existing digital presence, go search for yourself. Go do an ego surf. Right?

Go to Google. Search for what shows up in those search results. Take a look at it. Are they getting accurately what it is that you do? So put in your name.

Put in your business name. Put in whatever your industry is. If you're local, put in a, you know, this person near me or this offer or service near me. Right? Like, go do a competitive landscape and say, who else is showing up for this?

When when I Google my name, what else is showing up? Finally, I have all 10 of my own search results in Google, but for a long time, it was other people's podcasts showing up there. So it's like, okay. Who's talking about me that these tools are paying attention to? You know, when I Google my business name, it's my website, my YouTube channel, my LinkedIn.

Good. That's great. That means that it's clear to these tools that the same person is across all of these. And then I want you to go do the same thing in ChatGPT and in Perplexity. Those are my two favorite to do this with.

If you're like, oh, but I love Microsoft. Okay. Go to Bing. Right? Choose choose your poison.

Don't use Claude. Claude's not built for that. A lot of peep a lot of my people love Claude. Claude's great for writing. It is not a search AI.

Okay? And then they're like, Claude doesn't know who I am. I'm panicking. I'm like, Claude's not built for that. Okay, babe?

Claude's a co writer. Claude's not a searcher. But here's here's a perfect example. I googled myself, and, you know, Chad GPT wrote this great bio for me. Made me sound like a freaking genius.

Right? It makes totally makes you feel great about yourself if it gets even portions of it right. And then I went over to Perplexity, and it was like, oh, yeah. And Meg's the host of the Social Slowdown podcast. And I'm like, weird because I haven't put that out in nearly two years.

And I haven't updated my information about the old podcast. So then I went through on my website, on my brands, on the old Social Slow Down pages, and I wrote on there, I used to do this. Now I have a new podcast called Aggressively Human. And I made sure to update all of those places and to link through to the Aggressively Human podcast. Because as you know, and I should have said this first, it's not on my domain.

It's on Substack because Jessica and I cohost it together, and we didn't want it to be owned by either of us. So we created this new joint entity together, but Perplexity didn't know that the Meg Casebolt from Love at First Search was the same as the Meg Casebolt from Aggressively Human. There was not that connection between those two entities. And so the first thing that we can do, if you already have an online digital presence, is figure out what it knows about you, and maybe do a little bit of an audit of yourself about what might be missing from there.

Oh, this is so interesting. So what I heard you say was, if I already have a digital presence, if I have a website or a podcast or all these various things I may have online, the first thing I can and should do is just, like, search for them everywhere, search for myself everywhere. But also, I'm thinking, just go to my own sites and update everything and link through to everything else. Like, no more having projects that don't touch any of my other stuff. No more having a podcast that is not linked to my personal website.

It's like for me, this is funny because my homepage at ameliaforme.com for the past, like, four years has just been my old about page from the website, and it truly just links to everything I do on the Internet, which now suddenly explains why ChatGPT does know everything I do on the Internet.

Yes. Because you have that one hub, that single source of truth of who you are, and here's everything. And when you published the book, you went into amiyahukuri.com, and you were like, look. I wrote a book, and then you linked to the book. And hopefully, the book links to the podcast, links to the Softer Sounds, links to the the off the grid clubhouse.

Everything that is public facing can be linked. If it's behind a paywall, if it's on an email account, then it's not gonna see that. I like

this sort of, like, single source of truth. So my question then to the small business owners and creatives listening is, like, what is your single source of truth on the Internet? And how can it ideally be, like, a site you own? Not like your sub stack profile, not like Your Instagram bio, your your LinkedIn bio. Not a LinkedIn bio page, but, like, I think it's gonna become more important than ever to have your own website, even if it's just a one page site that aggregates everything you're doing online.

And this also supports for folks who are, like, maybe feel allergic to the techiness of that. This also supports everything that all of the cool creative people we talk to say about being multifaceted on the Internet, being yourself, not niching down. Like, all of that applies in this lane as well when you have a website that shares all of the different things that you do.

Yeah. I I have megcasebolt.com, which is like, okay. I run Lovett for Search, SEO agency. I don't know how I'm talking about it yet because SEO, who knows what we're gonna evolve that into? And then it's like, and here's the podcast I used to have.

Here's the book that came out of that podcast. Here's the new podcast that I'm running. All of that's on megcaseboldt.com. And then it's like, oh, also, I write romance novels, and I have a romance novel podcast because because I can. Right?

And I use my professional name in all of those places. Even in a place where I have a pen name, I still use my professional name. So it's like having one, again, single source of truth page, if that's what we're gonna call it, is helpful. That way, like, ChatGPT, Perplexity, they know. These knowledge graphs know that I'm the same person.

If I wanted to keep my, you know, my pen name separate from my business name, then I could. I just don't need to make those links. So we get to choose what's connected to each other. But then the other piece of this is once we have that very clear, here's all the things that I do. Here's who I do it for.

Here's where we do it. Have it, what I call I don't think that there's like an official phrase for this yet, but I call it an entity signal statement. It's a way of saying, I do this. Here's my name, my person entity with I the founder of my business entity. I help audience entity with outcome entity.

Right? All of these like, we can take this to in location entity for you know, through this approach entity, and I wrote this book entity. Right? All of those could be a two to three sentence statement that then can live in various forms. It doesn't have to be word for word.

We're not stuffing anything. But that can be your LinkedIn bio, and that can be your Instagram bio, and that can be, you know, your Yelp profile. It can be all of those places that your your Google Business profile. Very important if you're running local business to have all of your entities listed on your Google Business profile. So that way it goes, oh, that Amelia in that town is the same as the Amelia who's in that town.

Oh, that's the same Amelia. Same Amelia. Right?

Yeah. I I'm really intrigued by this. It sort of feels like again, it goes back to what said at the beginning. There are ways that I find this, like, more freeing than I felt in some things on the Internet, and then there are ways that I feel even more surveilled than I ever have on the Internet. And, yeah, I'm just grappling with that.

I have one AI question for you in relationship to this before we move back to telling what those beginners what to do. But I feel the need at this point in the conversation to admit to the people that I don't use these tools. Like, I don't have a Perplexity account. I've never used it. I have used ChatGPT occasionally, but I'm a pretty big AI skeptic.

Now I am like a business pragmatist at times, and so I'm not ignoring that the landscape is shifting. And I invited you here, Meg, to know the things about it and to tell the people if they're interested. But part of me is definitely listening for like, okay. How can I learn about how this will impact my business knowing that I'm personally not really gonna go in there and try to make changes to it? I just wanna be aware even if I do largely choose to opt out.

And I still continue to sit in the both end of this. Right? Like I said, three or four times now, like, feeling excited by how expansive and interesting and novel and smart it all feels, and also feeling deeply skeptical and critical of it, and also feeling, like, feeling that sense of, like, I can push back, and also, it is gonna happen to my business whether or not I consent. So how do I hold all of this together?

I think you like, you can choose this is like Fight Club, Project Mayhem. You choose your own level of involvement. Right? But there is inevitability to this. And I'm in the same boat where it was like I tried to say, like, how can we and and I mean, Jessica and I have a literal podcast called, like, how to keep things human.

How to prevent this, like, sludge of AI generated slop from becoming the norm. How do we keep ourselves in the human space, whether it's through content generation, through human conversations, through relationship building, through the ways that we're running our businesses so that we're not we can automate, but we don't need to, like, over automate. Like, there's so many interesting ways to approach the conversation. But we can also acknowledge that, like, this is not a blip. This is not a trend.

This is the new normal of the ecosystem. And if we ignore it entirely, it's not gonna stop it from happening.

Yeah. Like, you can't keep ChatGPT from sending people to your website. Even if you're not optimizing anything for it, even if you're not trying to show up there, like, I looked at my stats, and it's like, you know, I have done nothing in ChatGPT to try to appear there, but I have gotten, apparently, 28 views from it this year on my personal website. So it's happening anyway. You can't stop ChatGPT from sending traffic your way.

You're right. Or you can. You can turn off your website. Right? You can turn off the crawlers.

You can go off the grid chat GBT. However, that also impacts your ability to be found by new people. And if you're not also thinking at least a little bit about, like, what does my profile look like? What's the language that I'm using? What am I creating to attract new people?

Whether they're finding me in ChatGPT or through referrals or through social or through whatever the the acquisition method is of choice. Right? Like, it doesn't have to be that you're building it exclusively for ChatGPT. But if you're not thinking about the ways that you're presenting yourself to this population of people who are searching, then you may not show up for things that you are actually qualified to have people find you for. And they may go find somebody else because you're not showing up in those search results.

So that's a potential lost opportunity. Right? And that's okay if that's part of your strategy, and you have an alternative way that people can find you. Fantastic. Right?

But we cannot just expect technology not to evolve because we don't want it to.

Yeah. I think for me, I don't think of it as, like, not wanting the technology to evolve. I think of it as a refusal of the really problematic practices by all of these companies that own these tools. Because the same things that we're all, like, railing at Meta for doing now, OpenAI is doing it. Anthropic is doing it.

Like, they are all, you know, in my language, operating these, like, extremely colonial ways of capturing and commodifying the Internet. Like, they are doing that. So do I wish there eventually, like, will be smaller language models that have much more consent and, like, frankly, interesting to me development methods? Yes. I would love that.

That to me is, like, the way I want tech to evolve. But this isn't quite a tech ethics conversation. So going back to these tools, what I'm loving about the way we're talking about this is one, for off the grid listeners who are like, Amelia, I have been wanting to get into AI, and you have not been talking about it. Meg has arrived to be excited with you. For listeners who are like, Amelia, I will never be using AI.

Why are you talking about it? What I'm hearing for that person in this is like, there are things you can do that will just benefit your business that will also ensure that you are probably showing up in better and more holistic and appropriate ways in these AI search tools. And those are things like claim your constellation, link to everything that you're doing, be really specific,

and think about that audience intent outcome. Link between the things you're doing too. So if you have multiple podcasts on a specific thing, link to them so that way they create cluster. Don't let things be in silos. And let me also point out that I have not said go to AI and say, this blog post for me.

Go to AI and generate content for me. Go to AI and have it write my website for me. Because in my opinion, that is not the best use of AI because it's just going to take things that are already on the Internet, aggregate them, and make you sound like everyone else. The way that you can stand out in AI is the same way that, you know, if you were on social media, which neither of us are, then the way that you can stand out in your podcast is to have a unique perspective, to share your experience, to share your authority, to let that shine through. That's not something that these AI generated content tools can do for you.

The thing that you can do right now is, yes, you can do these, you know, linking and entity optimization and stuff. But the other thing that you can do is to just be, like, uniquely yourself and have your own perspective, and that will also help you in AI. And it might help you on AI better than, like, produce more garbage faster.

The advice I'm hearing from you is, like, don't try to be more like a robot because you think it will please AI. In fact, actually be way less like a robot because it doesn't want you to be like it. And the more you can be yourself and continue to show up online in those ways, perhaps the, like, better all of this will perform for you. The other piece of what you said that I really like because I've been trying to get more precise in how I talk about AI tools and use in business is that what I'm hearing you say is like, you can think about AI search and optimizing your web presence to show up in chat, dbt, or perplexity in certain ways without ever using generative AI. You can actually refuse to use generative AI and still think about these AI tools that other people are using and how they're having conversations and you're showing up in those conversations.

And I think that's really important for folks who are thinking about, especially in 2026, like, how do I want to use AI or not? You're not saying go use a bunch of generative AI to write your stuff, and you're just saying, actually, you write all your stuff, but maybe think about how you are connecting and presenting it more.

Yeah. Or, I mean, maybe there's some middle ground here, and this is up to you and your ethical standards and how you wanna use these tools. The way that I do it isn't AI generated. It's AI assisted. So I write the first draft of everything that I write.

The first draft always comes from me. Sometimes it's just like a voice idea written into a Google Doc, which I can then, you know, sort of send the idea and the the outline that I've created, and I send it through AI. And I'm like, what are the most important parts that I need to emphasize here? What isn't clear? What are the opportunities that I'm missing?

How can I make this easier for you as an AI tool to parse? Right? And just, like, thinking through the structure and the architecture of it without any of the ideas being pushed in from AI. All of the ideas are yours. And then you can use AI to make it easier to read, easier to be formatted in a way that more people can read it more easily.

If there are concepts that are really complicated, it can help you break it down a little bit. And then, you know, that way, it's all still out of your head.

Yeah. Yeah. Getting out of your head, getting feedback from a different place, and speaking to your ideal reader, listener, client, customer.

Because we we have the curse of knowledge. We are the experts, so we don't necessarily know the questions that people are asking because they feel obvious to us. So we can go look look at what the questions are, answer the questions, show up to those people, and then answer the 10 questions they didn't know they had yet. And there comes that customer journey piece of knowing where people are in the process before they get to you, so that way you can show up at the moment they need you. Okay.

With all of

that in mind, I have two more things that I wanna get to before we wrap up today. One is I wanna go back to the beginner, and for somebody who really doesn't have much of a web presence, where do they start? And the second is I wanna talk about blogs. So let's do the beginner first. Where do they begin?

Somebody I'm I'm guessing this would be a person who maybe, like, had a social media profile or maybe built a website that's kind of, like, inactive or out of date, but is not has not been creating content, not been doing a lot online. Where should they start if they wanna think about SEO and AIO in 2026?

The place that I like to start is some of those same queries. You So can still go look for yourself, see if you do have any sort of digital footprint, but then you can go into some of those more industry specific queries. Go Google who who does this near me? Right? Not this.

Whatever your industry is. Whatever your outcome is. And then you have the benefit of not needing to go back into years of content and retroactively do this stuff. You have the benefit of building it from scratch very intentionally. So, Amelia, if you were starting a podcast studio tomorrow from scratch with nothing else, I would be like, okay, what are your values?

Who are you trying to attract? What are the problems that they solve? And then create like 10 blog posts that talk through what are all of the questions that those people are going to ask. Think through the customer journey of what are the problems. Maybe three or four of those are problems.

Which of these recording tools should I record on? And then some of the solutions, should I hire a podcast editor, or should I do it myself? Should I use AI for editing my podcast, or should I have a person? What's the cost of hiring a person? All of those.

And then we're slowly moving towards conversion with these posts. And so we're linking between all of those 10 posts. I'm just making up the number 10. 10 to 12, maybe. That might be all you need.

If you are super, super hyper specific of I I only do podcast editing for real estate agents in Kansas. Then every real estate agent in Kansas can be your client, and you might have enough business for the rest of your life, you know, then you don't need to create for every podcaster or every real estate agent or people in Nebraska. Right? Like, you if you can get and I've I've said this for years. If you can get hyper specific and really own your market, then you don't necessarily need to go broad if you can go deep.

And AI rewards depth more so than breadth. It it rewards topical authority. And the more you can prove, yes, I know what I'm talking about. Here's the experience that I have. Maybe you tell some client stories in those blog posts about who you've worked with before.

Maybe you try to get some endorsements or authority posts from other people who are like, oh, Amelia did my podcast, it was great. And then they link to the case study. They link to your website. They talk about how great you are. They send those entity signals your way.

You don't need to make everything in order to have your specific space that you own.

And in a certain sense, that doesn't feel that different from previous SEO advice to me. I mean, that is actually what I did when I started Softer Sounds. So I put up the website. I said it was a podcast studio for entrepreneurs and creatives. I wrote our about page with a lot of the values and everything there and different commitments to make signal that and make it very clear.

And then I made a free resources blog where I just made I think it was about eight or 10 blog posts in my first year of business where I just put together, these are the actual questions I'm getting over and over again. And back then, I attempted to do more keyword research to try to build that in. But what I discovered in that instance was it was a little bit pointless because all of the podcast hosting companies were, like, sitting on top of all of the first page results. And I was never going to rank against Buzzsprout, no matter how great I was for, like, how to start your podcast. Like, that was never gonna happen.

So I had a few things that were much more niche that did okay in search, but the key I I tried to learn keywords, and it only half worked anyway. And now what I'm hearing is, like, that's perhaps less important, and creating that really strong content and building in the authority signals, those client stories, the case studies, the getting linked to real people's websites, not the sort of backlinking of days yonder, which was just like, Yeah.

Like the spam farms. What was that? Why was that a thing? That was ridiculous. I'm so glad that all those old, like, really nasty black hat SEO, Google was like, you guys are idiots.

Why would we write why would people want this?

So weird, and I don't like it. But also, now I can stop saying things like, yeah. I'll give you a backlink, it'll benefit you. I mean, it still does.

It still does. Even I mention an Entity Signal, but we don't just want it to be like, Meg came on the podcast today. It should be like, Meg Casebolt, comma, SEO specialist at Love It for Search, comma, came on the podcast to talk about AI optimization for creatives. That is valuable. It's more valuable for you to say that in your show notes than to give a link that's just like, love it for search.

You know? Like, here's the domain. We are always going to be broadcasting these signals, and the more we can those those mentions, especially because you're in the podcast space. If if someone else were talking about my podcast and they weren't in the podcast space, it wouldn't mean as much. Right?

So we wanna get same thing as we used to say in backlinks, high authority, relevance, all of those still matter. But it also matters what you say, how you say it, how you're connected. All of that is just as important. It may be more important than, I put in a link. It's it's a no follow link with a sponsor.

No. I'm so sick of that crap.

Yeah. It's like the people who know know and the people who don't don't have to know anymore. That's great for them.

I release you from learning that.

Okay. So the last thing I wanted to talk about today is blogging. Now blogs have already come up multiple times in this. We've talked about different, you know, reasons that we've written blog posts or blog posts, like examples that we've used in this conversation. But you yourself wrote a great blog post last fall that was about why you were returning to blogging after years of kind of not.

You kinda had moved into podcasting and other things, but you were kinda you were showing and telling us that blogs are back, and we should be blogging in 2026. So can you tell the listeners why they should start a blog? And also tell me, Amelia, why the Off the Grid website needs a blog? Because I don't have I have show notes, but I don't have a blog on that website, and I felt very called in by your post. So please educate all of us.

I'm so glad it was helpful. I'm glad it struck a nerve to an extent. That's not to say I have not created content in three years. You know? I have been creating two podcasts a week for three years, and they all had show notes.

They all had written information. But here's the thing about show notes. Even if you have time stamps, and you have an author bio, and you have a guest bio, and you have a transcript, and you have a great title, it's just not parsed in the same way that blog is. So when you have a really great blog post, it's very clearly organized. Here's the section heading.

Here's it's almost like do you remember, like, learning how to write an essay in, like, fourth or fifth grade? It was like, here's your thesis statement at the end of the first paragraph, and then you're gonna have your three body paragraphs, and then you're gonna have your conclusion statement that restates your thesis. Like, we wanna have that same level of structure in our blog posts. Our blog posts are not creative outlets. They are not a place to be like, look at this beautiful work I can do.

It's meant to solve a problem. And blog posts in the case of the blog post you're referencing where I'm like, I came back to blogging, it was because I have yeah. I can create show notes all day. But I have ideas that I want to make very clear that they're organized in a way that these AI tools, whether that's Google, which is now an AI tool, or ChatGPT, Perplexity, any of the kind of standalone AI tools, I want them to be able to not just read the information, but recognize the origin point of that information is me, comma, person, entity, Meg Casebolt, comma, company, entity, loveitforsearch.com. Right?

Like, I want if somebody is asking these questions in search, I want them to pull from my website, not from a conversation that I had with you where I said, oh, here's this new framework I'm working on, Amelia. And then it pulls it from the show notes, which may be in the transcript, but it may attribute it to you instead of me because your name is on the podcast because it's your podcast. And, like, how does it know who said it when the transcript can get really messed up? And, you know, like, it's really hard to attribute sources to audio, even video, even with time stamps. Right?

Like, written context is the way that these AIs parse, which is to say, like, organize information, to read information, and be able to figure out what most important parts are. And it also gives a timestamp. So if I put up a blog post, let's say this AIO post that I'm if I write that and I post it in December 2025, and then you link to it from your show notes in December 2026, and the dates on your show notes say January, and the dates on my post say twenty December, then it's like, oh, Meg had the idea first. Right? It creates that paper trail.

It creates that timestamp, and blogs do a great job of this. You can do this on your Substack too. You can do it you know, you can have that sort of timestamped information. But when it comes to copyright, when it comes to intellectual property, you have to publish your ideas to be able to protect your ideas. Even if you're not like, oh, I'm gonna go file a copyright for everything that I do.

Just by publishing something on your blog, you now have a copyright to that publication. I'm not an intellectual property lawyer. I feel like I should have said that first and foremost. But then other people can cite you. These AI tools can cite you.

If and then if you're linking between other ideas so I I already have six or seven blog posts that I've written since that initial blog post in October where I'm like, oh, and here's my manifesto of how I think we should be thinking about SEO, and here's what's changed in 2025 and into 2026 in SEO, and here's my blog post about entity optimization and about, you know, the semantic clustering. And all of these blog posts are now linked to each other. And it's not just so that way if you to one blog post, if Amelia shares this blog post with you, you can go, oh, look. Meg wrote this too. It's because this is a topic that I want to be the expert in.

I want to be the cited authoritative expert in. And this is the way that the tools understand information. They love structured, organized, long form, trusted, human, honest, opinionated content. Those are

all great words. I'm gonna put that in the show notes. Okay. I really appreciate that clarity and that pep talk, and I'm taking away a few key things, which is that if we want any of these search tools to recognize that our ideas are ours, they need to be in written form, easily citable on the Internet, which means blog posts, really. Like, they need to be on blogs.

Ideally, on a blog that

you own. Yes. A blog that you own, so not Substack.

I am planning to take some of these posts that I've been writing and republish them on Substack. And, Amelia, I might even do, like, re Meg reads her blog post as an audio that I put out to the social slowdown feed because I still have 1,500 people who are subscribed to it even though I haven't touched it in two years. But sort of like taking that intellectual property, making it omnichannel. Omnichannel's also very important for AI. We didn't talk about that.

But be having multiple places where the same information is coming, you know, it is a verification tool that we are actually who we say we are. But I publish on my own website first. You can publish in multiple places. There's not a duplicate penalty. There really never has been if you publish it correctly.

So you can still use your sub stack as a distribution tool, but own the content on your own first. Okay. Disclaimer over. You may continue with your takeaways.

Yes. No. I I love this disclaimer. I mean, I'm always here for an own channel, so I will just say that over and over again. But, yes.

Okay. So if you want search tools to associate your ideas with you, you need to be putting them in written form on your website. And so I'm definitely taking that away, and the people of the Off the Grid podcast can look forward to an Off the Grid website blog in 2026. It will happen. Because I think that there are so many core ideas from the show that are not written anywhere and not quote, unquote, owned in that way.

I mean, there are transcripts with all of our show notes. Dear listener, there are transcripts. Shout out to Morgan who edits all of our transcripts and makes them look great. But it's still not enough because they're not put into that format that makes them easily just, like, scannable or crawlable by search. And so I'm really hearing that from you.

The other thing that I will add in as a forever podcaster and lover of podcasts is that I'm starting to kind of sort different marketing efforts into different buckets of, like, is this for the boss of the Internet, or is this for other humans? Because I do think that there will be a real benefit of having something like a podcast or, you know, a video channel in the upcoming years where it's really apparent that, like, you are showing up there. You are visible or hearable. And I think that there's something about, like, the way that search or AI remembers information that is different than the way people do. And so it's like something I've learned about having off the grid is like, because of all of the wonderful beloved listeners who talk about the show a lot, if they're in a class or a course or a meeting or something, and somebody's like, oh, I wanna leave social media, they will bring up the podcast, and they will mention it, and they will bring it into the room.

And, like, I don't need written stuff to do that. In fact, probably, if this whole show was just a 100 blog posts, they wouldn't be bringing it into the room in the same way. They wouldn't care. They wouldn't read a 100 blog posts. So I'm doing one thing to get the people to get the word-of-mouth going, and I'm doing another thing to show up in, like, the world of search on the Internet.

And instead of being like, oh, that's so much, I can just embrace and enjoy that. Like, it's okay to have different strategies for different reasons and to know where you're putting your focus at different times. That's a lot of what I'm taking away here. And it's okay to have those strategies overlap,

but not have everything you need to do every single task for you. So maybe you have a blog post that's like, you know, how to get off social media in 2026, and you link to 10 of your podcast episodes, and you have a playlist just for that sort of, like, category of your podcast, and you tell the story, and almost, like, create a narrative that threads the needle of first you do this, then you do this, then you do this, because AI still loves a step by step guide that hasn't gone away.

So do humans. Humans love that too.

Exactly. You know? But you can still do that internal linking. You don't need every single page to be perfect, to be like, what is worth connection? What is this cluster of ideas where I can create some sort of authority content, but not every single piece of that has to be, like, perfectly optimized with an FAQ and all these answer first questions.

And, like, not everything has to be the you cannot have everything be perfect. This is still the eighty twenty rule in effect because we are still humans with limited time and capacity and skills and time and resources and knowledge and blah blah blah blah. Right? Pick your battles. Choose the top things that you wanna be found for.

Optimize the shit out of those. You don't have to go back through every old blog post or every old podcast you've ever created and be like, well, now I need to create a blog post for every show notes to make it parsible. No. No. Please, dear god, no.

Who has time for that? Who has time for that? And, like, it's not all relevant anymore. And even if it is, like, maybe there's 10 of them that are, like, the top cream rising to the top. Everybody looks at these.

Yeah. Let's turn it into some sort of resource hub.

Yes. It's like, if you already have a body of work and you wanna think about showing up in search and things like this, take the things that already resonated with the most people, the things that people loved, and start by creating that in new forms. This is also literally, like, we're talking about search strategy and all of this, but also that's just like a good creative art practice. Don't know where to go next? Return to something you did that you loved and the people loved and remix it.

Show it up. Have it like, create it in a different form. Make it for different people. Like, all of that applies here as well. So I am choosing to feel liberated and inspired by the fact that now I get to create a blog of my most successful podcast episodes instead of feeling, like, exhausted or upset that, like, the work I have done isn't gonna show up in search in the same way.

Like, think I it's just an invitation to revisit and remix, which is to me what the Internet has kind of always been. Show up, share it, see what lands, make it again, remake it, go again. Like, we're all just in the creative process.

I like the word remix you just used. Like, this is just finding a different playlist of the same good things that you've already done.

Yeah. Exactly. Well, Meg, this has been wonderful. I'm feeling super inspired. If other folks listening are realizing they want a need to create a blog this year, I will link to your post or the show notes about this, but also, like, come hang out with me in the interweb where I will be live blogging my blogging experience.

Yes. I love a behind the scenes, like, work in progress, let's do this together vibe to things.

Oh, Yes. You can be sure that, like, every Monday check-in in our Slack workspace is gonna be like, what blog post am I making this week? I'm gonna show up and tell the people. I'm gonna show them what I have it. Accountability works.

It really does, and we've built some great versions of it in the Interweb Slack channel, which shocked me because I historically hated Slack, now I love it. But do you have any final pep talk for folks who are thinking about SEO in 2026? And then how can they go deeper with you and your work?

If you have already done SEO and you have seen changes in your traffic behavior, that does not mean that you have to cut it all, burn it down, start over from scratch. There's a pretty good chance that we can revitalize and revolutionize what you've already done. It just might need some content architecture. You might need, like, basically the pillars underneath your house to be, like, reinforced. Okay.

This doesn't need to be a full overhaul for most businesses that I'm working with on this process. It's very much a refresh, not a full rebrand. Or the the recognition of where some of these gaps are that we can open up space. So this is not a time to feel like, oh, you know, people are like, SEO is dead. SEO is dead.

No. The rules change. The game is still going on. And you can choose whether or not you want that to be part of your marketing strategy, but it doesn't have to be from scratch. Oh, that's such a good

point too. Like, if your business has never run on search, you don't have to suddenly decide that search is important to you just because we had this conversation. Like, you can continue running a business without caring about search. And if it has run on search, you I love what you said. Like, you can build in some new foundations.

You can shore up the foundation of your house. You don't have to burn the whole house down and move to a new neighborhood. In fact, like, don't burn your whole website down and move it because that won't help your search anywhere. So and all of these tools know what

we did five years ago anyway. You're not you're not destroying the digital fingerprint. You're just making it harder

for them to understand the process and the progress. Yes. Exactly. So where can folks find you this year, and how can they connect with your work?

Sure. You can find us over at love@firstsearch.com. We have a brand new AI findability library that I'm pulling together now that has a couple free workbooks and playbooks that you can learn more about this process of, you know, what are the things that you can do to optimize your content, to improve your entity optimization. You know, I explain what all of that means on the actual website. So go on over and find us at love@firstsearch.com.

Beautiful. That will be linked in the show notes along with all of your entities mentioned and a few of the specific blog posts that I found really helpful to go through. So thank you so much again, Meg, for being here and for teaching us all so much, myself included. And thank you listeners for coming along for the ride. There are gonna be three more episodes in your 2026 marketing toolkit coming your way this week.

So stay tuned, and until next time, we will see you off the grid. Okay. That was an abridged version of social media by Surfer Boy and Rectangle. To hear the entire song, find Surfer Boy on Spotify or head to the link in the show notes. Thanks so much to them for sharing the song with us, as well as to Melissa Caitlin Carter who sings our theme song that you hear at the start of every show.

I'm your host, Amelia Ruby. And if you enjoyed this episode, I hope you will download the free leading social media toolkit at offthegrid.fun/toolkit. Until next time, I will see you

off

the grid.