Nonprofit Nation with Julia Campbell

It’s The End Of The Web As We Know It with Rafi Norberg

• Julia Campbell • Season 2 • Episode 162

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The way we search the web is being transformed in huge ways, and nonprofits need to understand the changing landscape in order to reach their donors and their stakeholders online. 

In this episode, I sit down with Rafi Norberg to explore the latest development in search technology: Google’s AI Overviews. 

Rafi  serves as President and Founder of Nexus Marketing, a marketing agency that helps businesses and organizations generate revenue online in the mission-driven sector. Rafi has over a decade of digital marketing experience in mission-driven sectors and through his agency has worked with 200+ brands to build their inbound presence. Rafi's goal is to help organizations do more good by connecting them to high-quality information, resources, and tools. 

Google recently announced the broad rollout of AI Overviews, a generative AI tool designed to streamline the search experience by directly answering users’ queries and citing the content sources. 

Rafi shares his expert insights on what this means for the SEO world, the potential impact on clickthrough rates and website traffic, and strategies for businesses to adapt to this significant change.

Resources mentioned:

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>> Julia Campbell:

A massive transfer of wealth is right around the corner, and your constituent base is changing. Are your fundraising efforts ready? Well, Qgive surveyed donors of all ages to create the generational giving report, a, comprehensive guide to help you best connect with constituents of all generations. To learn how new generations want to support you, hear from you, and stay connected with you, head to jcsocialmarketing.com qgive to be notified when the report is released and to receive your copy. That is Jcsocial marketing Qgive QGIV to be notified when the report is released. I'm so excited to read the findings. And now on to the episode. Hello and welcome to Nonprofit Nation. I'm your host, Julia Campbell, and I'm going to sit down with nonprofit industry experts, fundraisers, marketers, and everyone in between to get real and discuss what it takes to build that movement that you've been dreaming of. I created the nonprofit nation podcast to share practical wisdom, and strategies to help you confidently find your voice, definitively grow your audience, and effectively build your movement. If you're a nonprofit newbie or an experienced professional who's looking to get more visibility, reach more people, and create even more impact, then you're in the right place. Let's get started. Hello. Welcome and or welcome back to Nonprofit Nation. I'm your host, Julia Campbell. I'm so thrilled to be with you. Today we're going to talk about search, search engine optimization, digital marketing, and the way that the entire Internet is going to be transformed in huge ways. And the reason we're discussing this is because nonprofits really need to understand this changing landscape if we're going to be able to continually reach our donors and our stakeholders online. So in this episode, I'm going to sit down with Rafi Norberg. And Rafi is the president and founder of Nexus Marketing, a, marketing agency that helps businesses and organizations generate revenue online in the mission driven sector. Rafi has over a decade of digital marketing experience in mission driven sectors and through his agency has worked with 200 plus brands to build their inbound presence. I have done so much work over the years with Nexus marketing, and I just highly recommend them and their fantastic work. So today we're going to discuss the recent announcement by Google. They announced the broad rollout of something called AI overviews, and we will discuss what this is and why we should care. But basically, it's a generative AI tool designed to streamline the search experience by directly answering users queries and citing the content sources. So we're going to talk about what this means for search engine optimization, what this means for website traffic, what are the potential impacts and sort of how we can adopt to these changes. So welcome, Rafi, to the podcast.

>> Rafi Norberg:

Thank you so much for having me, Julia. I'm excited to be here and chat through some AI and SEO.

>> Julia Campbell:

Yes, I know we're going to really nerd out today, but let's do the bigger picture overview. So Google recently, I mean, it probably is not surprising to people that work in, digital marketing, but they really had this announcement that kind of shook the broader Internet, the rollout of AI overviews. Can you walk us through a little bit about what that is and then we'll talk about why it is so significant.

>> Rafi Norberg:

Absolutely. So what Google announced mid May of this year, 2024, is that they are going to be rolling out AI overviews across a wide swath of search results within the US and then in other countries over time. And what that means for most people is when you Google, what you'll often see is you'll see ten results that don't have the paid marker next to them. So right at the top of search, you usually have a few links that have paid indicators on there. You say they're sponsored. Below that you'll have usually ten organic results that Google has deemed to be the best answers for those different search queries. And what people have probably experienced over time is depending on what you search for, it may be those ten links and it may look slightly different. So in some cases, over the last few years, you would have seen maybe a knowledge box at the top that would have given you a short, succinct answer from a single site. In other cases, when we're talking about shopping queries or travel queries, Google may have pulled in information specifically relevant to that. So I know if I'm searching for a certain type of product that I need to buy, Google will often serve specific shopping links that you can scroll through. Sometimes they're sponsored, sometimes they're not. But what's really interesting and unique about the AI change is that what Google has done when they've pulled in different elements in the past is they're pulling in single elements from single sources. So for the knowledge box, which is the kind of, immediate answer at the top that has existed for multiple years in Google search, what it's always been is it's pulling the information from a website, a single website, and then just basically snippeting the text and including it up at the top of Google search, where AI overviews innovate on this is, they're pulling from multiple sites at once and creating a new answer that combines multiple sources with multiple sources cited. So it's in many ways an answer that's never existed before. And whereas before, if you were a, nonprofit or a business, maybe you were trying to optimize to be the one thing that was included within that single knowledge box. But now, since it's a new answer that is combining multiple sources, that's no longer as relevant of a strategy. So this idea of Google generating the answer themselves and not pulling it directly from a site is a really big change for search.

>> Julia Campbell:

Right. And just to sort of bring some levity to the situation, some of the more famous inquiries that I've seen, I'm sure you've heard of these are, if you type into Google, and this is obviously not the number one search question, how many rocks should I eat a day? So this is something that tech reporters were doing. They were typing in inquiries, and Google was pulling from either Reddit or the onion or other sources and creating this sort of answer that is an amalgamation of all of these sources. And I'm interested to know, what are you seeing with this tool as it's rolling out? What are some of the bugs, the challenges?

>> Rafi Norberg:

It's been really interesting to see the rollout of the AI overviews, because what occurred is as Google rolled it out in middle of May, you saw it popping up across a ton of different searches where they were testing different responses, and immediately what started coming through is the AI was pulling in bad answers of a bunch of different types. I think you brought up some of the funnier ones where the answers were nonsensical or silly, but there were problems across the board with the AI overview functionality. so what has occurred now is Google has pulled back on the number of responses that is showing up, and it has actually dropped by like 80% in the last 30 days. What number of searches AI is showing up for? So it seems like they've taken a slower rollout based on some of the initial feedback that they've received. But as far as what we're seeing on the searches, where it's specifically impacting it, because there are searches where you'll find it, and especially as we go through the rest of the year and next year, I think you'll see it rolling out much further than it is today. I think we're really at the beginning here, and that's important to point out when the AI overview rolls out, we do see a drop in search traffic to certain sites. If it's a really, really good answer for the search query, and it gets to what the user is looking for. So depending on what someone is looking for, a good example would be if someone is asking, a very specific question, how do I clean my carpet when I've spilled red wine on it? As a really obvious example there, rather than sending you to a page on tides website, Google can pull in a really great answer for that specific query with maybe multiple citations, with multiple solutions, not just using tide, which may be what tide recommends on their own site. so for that specific article, you're going to see a drop in search traffic through Google for that.

>> Julia Campbell:

So from what I've been reading and hearing, this is going to dramatically change the way the Internet even just functions, because the Internet is obviously, I mean, Google's the number one search engine, very driven by Google search results. And we've all been trying, hopefully, nonprofits out there to optimize our websites so that people can find us, and discover, us. So how is this going to impact digital marketers? How is this going to impact people that have websites, nonprofits that have websites that maybe rely on these queries or search traffic?

>> Rafi Norberg:

That's a great question, and I think we're still in the early days for what we know is going to be the impact. But based on other changes that I've seen roll out over time, what I think is going to happen is you're going to find the most digitally savvy nonprofits and businesses are going to get an outsized benefit from these changes. And the ones that are choosing to not take any action based on these changes are going to be negatively impacted by it. So what I mean by that is that the way Google is choosing how to show information within the AI overview or pull in different citations into the AI responses, or your conversation with the AI is, it's looking at very similar factors to what it uses today to determine what those top ten links are. So these are things like the comprehensiveness of your answer. How much do you answer, what the user is looking for? How reputable is your organization or business within the broader sector of what you serve? We'll take animal shelters in Atlanta. Are you a well known animal shelter? When the local news does stories about adoption drives, are you the nonprofit that's mentioned when people are talking about adopting dogs in forums in the local Atlanta subreddit, is your nonprofit on that list? Things like that, that would just indicate that you're a reputable source on these subjects. Those are the types of responses that Google wants to bring into the AI overview, because ultimately it's going to be the best answer for what someone is looking for. If you have an organization where it's tough to read the website, it's not clear what the organization does. The only place the organization exists is on their own website. They're not cited anywhere else on the Internet. The website is set up in a way where if you are browsing with an accessible browser, you actually can't read the website because there's no alt text on anything. Or maybe the color of the website is set up in a way where if you have low visibility, you can't actually read the words because the colors clash too much. Those are the things that Google is going to look at and say, well, we don't want to pull this into any of our ARI responses, let's find a better substitute and use that. So I think it will only become more unequal between the nonprofits that are digitally savvy and the nonprofits that are not.

>> Julia Campbell:

I'm thinking for my own website and for my clients websites, what are some things we can do to not only maybe make them more searchable or findable, I should say, and how can we? Is there anything we can do to make them show up in these sort of AI overviews?

>> Rafi Norberg:

Yep, thats a great question. So I think to make your website just more findable in general, which I think should be the goal for most businesses and nonprofits because I think from my experience with a lot of folks, theyre trying to go from zero to one or one to two with their digital presence, not from 99 to 100, which I think opens up a whole new world of strategies for you. And I could talk about those too, but for your average website owner whos strapped on time and saying, I just dont want this to be a problem for me, what can I do about it? I would split it into three categories, categories of tactical practical advice. The first would be make sure your website is free of easy to resolve technical errors. So what I mean by that is there are two sets of tools that are easily accessible. One is Google's lighthouse tool, which is built into the Chrome browser where you can actually run it for free and see how Google is interpreting your website as a search engine and for the users. And it will give you specific feedback of things you can change about your website to improve that, along with instructions of how to do so. Perfect.

>> Julia Campbell:

I'll link to that in the show notes.

>> Rafi Norberg:

Yep. The other thing you can do is you can there are SEO, they're called SEO technical crawl tools. There's a bunch of them. There are free trials to many of them. Semrush Moz Ahrefs are all probably the most common. they offer some sort of free trial. You can type your website into those and get a really good understanding of the overall health score of your website and try to fix what you can and they'll provide you instructions for how to do that from an on site content standpoint. The biggest thing that I see both businesses and organizations do wrong is they're not selective and picky enough about what they choose to publish on their website. So if you look through their website, there will probably be 30 pages that they're really, really proud of and then they'll have 100 pages where they're like, oh, I just published something, but it's multiple years out of date, or this no longer applies. Or if I were to go do this again, I would actually make this content much, much better. Right now. It doesn't really provide enough information. What I recommend for most website owners is to go through and unpublish those one, hundred pages that are really low value or point them to a higher quality page on your website. So that if you're looking at your website and you see what are all the URL's that are accessible to Google, you feel confident that all those URL's are great representations of your brand and each provide unique information to the user. Because what Google is doing for both AI as well as non AI searches is they're scoring your website as a whole and they're taking everything together when they look at the website. So if you have a website with 30 amazing pages that go into an excruciating amount of detail about what you do as an organization, with images of you taking action in your community and that are well optimized for search because you've put in the time that website is going to outperform the 500 page website. Or maybe they actually have more content, but the average page is of a worse level of quality. So that focus and selectivity is really, really important. And the easiest thing most, most folks can do is just delete some of the content on their website and make it more exclusive with what they choose to publish and show to Google that they do.

>> Julia Campbell:

Wow. Yeah, this is blowing my mind. Oh, did you have a third thing?

>> Rafi Norberg:

One last thing I'll mention is that.

>> Julia Campbell:

And then I definitely wanted to go back into the quality over quantity, but.

>> Rafi Norberg:

Yes, yeah, sorry, one last thing. So the last piece that Google's looking for is this idea of reputation and brand for both your organization and the authors within it. So Google has, an acronym called EaT, which I love that. Yeah. Expertise, authority, trustworthiness. So when you think about your organization's voice online, what you really want to make sure of is that you're both citing your expertise when you're choosing to contribute to conversations on your own website or off your website. So things where you may have won awards or you may have a number of years of experience or the number of families you've helped, those are all things that demonstrate some amount of expertise. Also, when other people are talking about you online, make sure they're linking back to you or at least mentioning your brand name. At the very least, even if it's not an actual link, just the mention of your name or your organization's name is going to be valuable in the eyes of a search engine. So trying to be thoughtful around that brand, both on your site and off your site, to represent yourself as the authority that you are on the subject that you're providing solutions around becoming that.

>> Julia Campbell:

thought leader and that go to resource is something that's so critical in both social media, but also website and email marketing. And I completely agree. So it's so interesting what you said about quality over quantity and less is more now, because what we were always taught is that you have to constantly have this stream of fresh content for Google. Maybe that was a few years ago, but I've always thought you should have a blog or a news and events section of your website. But what you're recommending is almost like pruning it and going back and seeing, okay, this content's not relevant anymore, this event already happened. This press release is out of date and really diving deep into making other pieces of maybe more evergreen content even better. Is that what you're saying?

>> Rafi Norberg:

Exactly. You got it. So what you want to make sure of is that every page that a search engine can read on your website does the absolute best job of representing your organization.

>> Julia Campbell:

Oh, my gosh, we're all having a nervous breakdown in my brain right now. I'm thinking, oh, my gosh, I got to go through my entire website. Okay, keep going.

>> Rafi Norberg:

Yeah. And making sure that for your most important things that you want to be known for. So, for instance, social media for nonprofit profits as a good example for your business, do we believe that we are doing the best job of representing your knowledge and expertise on a handful of core pages on the website? And if there are, let's say ten pages that each touch a single topic. You may be better served having those as a single page, that you pull everything together into a much more comprehensive resource than ten shorter pages. But again, I don't want to create a bunch of new work. For most folks, I think the easiest thing to do is just go through your website and say what's out of date, what's no longer relevant, what is just not good enough for who we are today as an organization or business and delete those things. And in a perfect world, you're redirecting them. But for most organizations, you don't even need to do that. I think just reducing the footprint to only put your best content forward is a great way to optimize yourself today and also in the future as AI overviews become more prevalent in search.

>> Julia Campbell:

Wow, this is really great. I think I see it like cleaning out your closet. These clothes don't fit you anymore. You haven't worn it since the nineties. And, you know, you want to make room for some even better quality clothing or you want to make room for something that better represents who you are now. And that's so important because especially for organizations who have been around for 60 years, 50 years, there is probably a lot of content on your site that's not very representative of, what you want to be known for now and what you're doing now. So trying to always stay relevant and timely and on top of, you know, on top of this, it's challenging and I already feel, completely overwhelmed. But I need to, I want to do a complete website overview myself. But I think as marketers and fundraisers, it's our responsibility to be learning about this and stay on top of this and to be found by as many people as possible, whether that's clients, whether that's donors or volunteers or stakeholders. So how. And maybe this is a question that is, maybe it's not going to affect Google Ad grants, but how are, these changes going to affect organizations that use Google Ad grants and that kind of rely on search traffic in that way?

>> Rafi Norberg:

That's a great question. So within the information that Google has put out around the AI overviews, there's nothing explicit about the interaction between paid search and either Google organic search in general or the AI specific elements that get served the AI overviews. But what has happened recently? Actually, in early June, Google had a big leak and this was directly after the AI overview information.

>> Julia Campbell:

Yeah, talk about this. This is interesting.

>> Rafi Norberg:

Yeah. So Google's search API. So the way that they're basically serving data to others that plug in Google search into their own sites and products. There was documentation that was leaked and published for how the API works and all the factors that Google is using to weight the search experience and what gets shown it is a really, really big deal in the SEO community, I would go as far to say on equal footing with the AI stuff. It just gets way more into the weeds. So I think it's, if you're not in the world, it's not going to be something that's as accessible. But what we learned from this big leak is that Google uses user data to determine how they want to show different results in search. So that's always been something that they've talked about, but we haven't known the mechanism by which they do that. And in these leaks, it was discussed that the Chrome browser actually is the tool that Google is using to judge website engagement. So they're looking at all the Chrome users across the world and they're saying, what are those Chrome users doing? And then feeding that data back into search in order to change the search results. So the way they're getting user engagement data is by using the browser that they published, which makes sense, but was not confirmed until this leak. So going back to what you share, what you mentioned earlier around the Google Ad grant, and how does this play in? There's always been a theory in the SEO world where if you spend a ton on PPC, does that help your search? And what Google has said is, no, no, no, they're completely separate. And there was nothing in the lead.

>> Julia Campbell:

Pay per click ads.

>> Rafi Norberg:

Yes, yes, pay per click ads and Google Ad grants, are a form of the pay per click ads. There was nothing in the documentation to tie that explicit link. But what folks are interpreting this as is that if you spend a lot on pay per click or you're using the Google Ad grant, what that does is it exposes your website to a larger share of users, then you would be able to reach without those, which boosts your overall engagement data. Because Google can see via the Chrome browser that more people are interacting with your website than were before. It's because the traffic is paid, and there may be some devaluing to that paid traffic versus purely organic traffic, which Google can probably tell versus Chrome. But nonetheless, the overall engagement with sites is going to be higher because the people are coming to you through the advertising. So for nonprofits with the Google Ad, granted, my recommendation would be, especially since it's free money that Google is giving you, every nonprofit should use the Google Ad grant, because if nothing else, it's going to be a new way that people are exposed to you and can play a positive role. In search for businesses. It's a little bit more of a trade off because there is that amount you're having to spend in order to get people on the site. Like you're choosing to do something versus something else by spending that money. But with the nonprofits and it being free, I think the Google Ad grant can probably play a positive role in your overall search results, even if it's a minor one based. And what we've learned about how Chrome sends signals to Google for how to show different search results for various queries.

>> Julia Campbell:

And you recommend that brands that mission driven organizations follow some SEO search engine optimization best practices. Can you give us some? Like just maybe a handful?

>> Rafi Norberg:

I'm sure there's a ton, so I'll give you maybe three. That would be kind of my go tos here. So I think the first one is try to put yourself in the position of your donors or the communities that you're helping or your target customers. And when you're on the page, ask yourself, am I doing a good job in educating this person? I'm trying to reach with what's on the website. And that tip right there, I think does 80% of the lifting with SEO is the best sites are the ones that do the best job answering what people are looking for. So as an organization, you don't need to know anything about technical SEO or anything like that. But if you think you're doing a good job and you're being comprehensive, that's a great place to start. And if you're not doing that, none of the other technical stuff is going to make a big difference.

>> Julia Campbell:

Right?

>> Rafi Norberg:

The second piece is, I would make sure your website has no broken links on it. I think that's a good one. Where especially you'll see organizations or businesses sometimes that have three of the pages in their top navigation broken. And by broken, I mean you click on it and it doesn't go anywhere. It's a really bad experience for an end user. So making sure that when someone clicks on something on your website, are they taken to the place that you want them to be taken to? The last thing I'll say is when you go out and do things in the community or you get press, keep an eye on that and make sure that you're reaching out to the people that you're interacting with, who are talking about your organization or your business off your website, and ask them to mention your organization by name. Mention an executive at the organization by name. Link to you if possible, and those things are really going to be beneficial to you over time.

>> Julia Campbell:

I, love that. I agree completely. Focus on the end user, focus on the person that you're targeting, and you talk about another best way. We talked about content strategy, but content strategy focused on your most relevant audiences. What if a nonprofit has multiple audiences they're trying to communicate with?

>> Rafi Norberg:

That's a great question. I think the, in a perfect world, the most successful nonprofits are going to do a great job at talking to multiple audiences at the ones they will have figured out through trial and error and testing the way to best represent the different things that they do on their website, and do a good job of answering what the different audiences are looking for. At a top level, though, once you get the basics down of just, we have a page on our website for each of the audiences who were talking to. I think you've got a triage and pick. If we had to pick one of our audiences that we want to communicate with, which one is the one we want to start with, and just go down that route of comprehensiveness and take it to a place where you feel like you've done the best job that's available online of educating this audience on what your nonprofit does, how you can help them, how you might interact with them, and then move to your next audience. So when we ask ourselves, what's the level of quality we're trying to get to here, I think what most organizations and businesses want to shoot for is the resource on my website, the best resource on the Internet about this topic. And if it's not the best, then we're going to struggle to be successful from a search standpoint, which is where search becomes hard.

>> Julia Campbell:

I think about that a lot, and there's definitely a lot that I could do with my own website. But for, you know, nonprofits trying thinking about this, it doesn't have to be the best resource on food insecurity internationally. If you run a local food bank, it just has to be the best resource around your community food bank on the Internet. So when people are getting overwhelmed thinking, oh, I work for a homeless shelter, I can't write the best blog post on eradicating homelessness in the world. No, it just has to be relevant to the audience that is searching for how to eradicate homelessness in Beverly, Massachusetts, or what are five ways that we can help people experiencing homelessness, or five ways that we can contribute, you know, give back to the shelter in our, in our community. So I think nonprofits tend to catastrophize a little bit and think, oh, well, I can't write the best post on this ever internationally, but not focusing on, like you said, the relevant audience, the people that are really going to be resonating with it and caring about it. So we don't have to be the New York Times 100%, we just have to be like, you know, take the place of our, our local newspapers. That the decline in publishing. I think there are so many implications here. But in the long term, how do you foresee all of these changes in search, along with AI overviews, influencing sort of the broader landscape of, digital marketing?

>> Rafi Norberg:

That's a great question. So I think we're going to see the impact of AI applied differently based on the sector that we're in. I think for nonprofits, the best thing to do is to provide highly educational information to your specific audience. And I think your community example is actually perfect because I was doing this for myself, right before we got on this podcast. This is if I search how to adopt a dog, for instance, what comes up, and there's a lot out there about adoption, but what Google is trying to show is because that's a localized search, people are adopting animals within their local city. They're showing resources from Atlanta based animal shelters. So if you're that shelter, just having that resource sets you up nicely for the future. So when we think about the donors experience, most donors are not googling something, coming across a website they've never seen before that they have no relationship with, and making a donation. what they're trying to do is learn about how to affect change in their local community and get connected with a great organization. And then over time, they form a relationship with that organization and they're donating to them. So I think for most nonprofits, where I would probably stay really focused is around that education piece of just continuing to, really be the best resource for education in your local community, around what you do. Because to your point, Julia, the average newspaper is not publishing very much about how to adopt a dog in my local city. So it's really on the nonprofit who serves that mission to be the publisher of record when it comes to solving for that specific use case. So I think for nonprofits, just continuing to really focus in on how are they serving as the best possible educational resource for what theyre doing, I think sets them up nicely to be the resource that either gets pulled into AI or as different AI answers are being served at once be at least one of the sources that gets pulled into that response where people can click in to have more information. For businesses, I think it gets a little bit more complex. I think what were going to see is a lot of the companies that are overly reliant on highly informational searches or just traffic in general as like your highest volume search because they're really top of the funnel terms like the first term that someone's searching for when they're thinking about something. So a great example would be like fundraising ideas. I think that Google over time is going to create really good ideation answers. So if you want a bunch of ideas on a specific subject, a piece of content that is static is not the best way to answer for that. But a programmatic AI generated answer that's pulling in multiple sources I think is going to give you a better experience when we talk about deeper questions. So I'm a animal shelter and I'm looking for a donor database that will let me do X, Y and Z and has worked with animal shelters before. And you're thinking about that buying process of actual software. I think it's going to be tougher for AI to replicate it. I think that's where having the best content on your website still will be really, really relevant. So I think what we'll see over the next year is that disruption of the informational searches. And as we get into transactional searches, I don't think we'll see as much of an impact. And then looking out five to ten years down the line, it's just too tough to say. I don't think a year ago we would have been saying or two years ago, oh, AI is going to be the big thing of the moment. If we rewind five years ago was voice search, which didn't really pick up that much. I think it was over promised and under delivered.

>> Julia Campbell:

Oh, it's also horrible if you use Siri or use Google Voice search.

>> Rafi Norberg:

Yeah. With our clients and just in the advice I'm giving to people, I try to really stay focused on what does the next twelve months look like? How can we prepare for what's directly in front of us and then let's see what comes. But I think so long as we've got websites that are well designed for users that answer what people are looking for and demonstrate expertise based on what others are saying in our community, those are kind of three golden rules that will always protect you and help you be really successful in search.

>> Julia Campbell:

Fantastic. This has been absolutely wonderful because you are the experts. Can you tell me a little bit about how your team at, Nexus has been preparing for this big shift.

>> Rafi Norberg:

Absolutely. So I think there's a couple things that we're talking a lot about to try to help our clients and help people. We're talking to be prepared for AI. The one that is the most important that I would recommend anyone do is this idea of getting more focused on topics that you want to be known for than over optimizing on specific keywords. So I think if you rewind SEO ten years ago, it was all about how many times could you use the individual keyword in your page? And that's how you would rank. Semantic understanding of topics has gotten so good and will get only better. So it's keywords are still something you want to be thinking about, but just making sure your website is well represented on the overall topic that you want to be an expert on is the best way to show up in a variety of different searches related to AI queries. So instead of saying, how do I rank for donor database or something or donor management software, how do I have a website that is well covered on all topics related to donor management and not just the software term, but the software terms included there. What that sets you up nicely for is if someone has a variation on the searches, Google knows that your website covers that information and can pull you into the AI, ah, related searches. The other piece that I think we're trying to focus on is really expertise and authority. So making sure that for each organization that you're working with, that we're doing the best to cite the best statistics that are out there, linked to what experts are saying. Have an expert that is the representative of the organization we're working with, so that Google can look at the content that we're publishing as a trusted source that is differentiated from a lot of what else is out there, which doesn't appear as trusted because they're not going as far as to think about how am I backing up what I'm saying with actual data versus just making a claim.

>> Julia Campbell:

Wow, this has been so helpful. I've been taking notes and I, can't wait to go back and relisten. I've been getting such great information that's so helpful. I do feel like for a lot of marketers and a lot of nonprofits, because we don't have that background, you know, we don't have the expertise necessarily. If you're a fundraiser, you don't necessarily have digital marketing expertise or SEO expertise. We've been operating with the rules from five to ten years ago, and we need to know that they're constantly changing and shifting and that this can dramatically affect our ability to be found by our stakeholders, by the people that we want to find us. so, Rafi, thank you so much. Where can people find you and get in touch and, get in touch with you and nexus marketing?

>> Rafi Norberg:

Absolutely. And I appreciate you bringing me on. So people can get in touch on our website, nexusmarketing.com, or follow us on LinkedIn. We try to post, updates about, SEO related news and the implications for our sector as much as we can via LinkedIn and also share it out via our email list. So if someone is interested and really enjoyed this podcast, get in touch with us on LinkedIn or our website and, subscribe to our email list and you'll be receiving those updates as we publish them, right?

>> Julia Campbell:

And that was actually how we got connected. We have been connected. But I read recent email newsletter that you sent out about the Google AI overviews and implications, and I thought it was just such a great topic for the show and helpful for my listeners. So thank you again so much. Thanks for being here.

>> Rafi Norberg:

Of course, yeah, thank you so much for having us.

>> Julia Campbell:

Well, hey there. I wanted to say thank you for tuning into my show and for listening all the way to the end. If you really enjoyed today's conversation, make sure to subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast app and you'll get new episodes downloaded as soon as they come out. I would love if you left me a rating or a review because this tells other people that my podcast is worth listening to, and then me and my guests can reach even more earbuds and create even more impact. So that's pretty much it. I'll be back soon with a brand new episode, but until then, you can find me on Instagram. Uliac Campbell 77 keep changing the world, you nonprofit unicorn.