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This year, to grow my company (InboxDone.com<\/a>), we’re doing something old and something new.<\/p>\n The big change is we are moving budget away from paid ads to re-invest back into a\u00a0content marketing strategy<\/strong>.<\/p>\n This is not new. I started the business with a strategy that included articles, videos, podcasts and other forms of link building.<\/p>\n (You can learn\u00a0<\/em>my full growth strategy here<\/em><\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n The goal was to improve our rankings in Google.<\/p>\n I knew it would not be quick, but I had hopes it would eventually be effective.<\/p>\n It worked, Google has sent us customers every year and is responsible for millions of dollars of revenue.<\/p>\n However, a couple of years ago when we started to focus on paid ads, I began to neglect organic content.<\/p>\n While this didn’t kill our content strategy, I know our Google rankings were slowly dropping.<\/p>\n Then something new began to happen.<\/p>\n People started showing up for sales calls after finding us in ChatGPT, Grok and Perplexity.<\/p>\n AI based queries for products and services are growing rapidly, but still only account for just\u00a015% of the volume of search<\/strong>\u00a0compared to Google.<\/p>\n What’s especially interesting is this AI based search is not coming at the expense of Google.<\/p>\n Google search volume has plateaued, but even as AI based search doubles each year, it is not replacing Google search, it’s augmenting it.<\/p>\n AI should be seen as a new channel to tap into with a content strategy, while still leveraging Google as well.<\/p>\n Thankfully, when you execute a solid content strategy, you can bring in leads from Google and AI from the same content.<\/p>\n However, there are certain things you do specifically for AI search, which is what’s new with our content strategy for 2026.<\/p>\n Let me share with you some specific examples\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n The basic SEO strategy is simple in concept, but challenging to achieve primarily due to competition.<\/p>\n You publish articles targeting keywords and cover topics that will attract your target customer from Google searches.<\/p>\n Someone wants to solve a problem and they are willing to pay money for a solution. Your articles are designed to show up when they have the intention to purchase \u2014 that is why they are searching.<\/p>\n The hard part is ranking high enough to be considered.<\/p>\n Without authority that comes from years of building links back to your web pages from various sources, you have no chance.<\/p>\n Especially if there is money to be made in your industry, which means the competition is also working hard to get those top rankings.<\/p>\n The important thing is to put a strategy in place and continue to build your authority over time.<\/p>\n For my company, we did the following:<\/p>\n I’ll break down exactly how we do these two things in a moment, but first we need to consider the new variable\u2026<\/p>\n AI search.<\/strong><\/p>\n Specifically, people using AI chat when they want to purchase a solution to a problem.<\/p>\n Take for example what happened just yesterday as I write this.<\/p>\n A person booked a discovery call for later in the evening the same day.<\/p>\n They listed GPT as how they found us (ChatGPT).<\/p>\n During the call, this person told me they had a conversation with AI specifically about two problems they wanted to solve:<\/p>\n In short, they want help with email, admin, and the systems and processes (or lack of them) that manage everything they do as an entrepreneur online.<\/p>\n Unlike a search which returns links to websites, with AI a\u00a0conversation <\/em>leads to recommendations.<\/p>\n Conversations are more contextual, so you get more contextual recommendations.<\/p>\n AI also replies using natural language and acts as a research assistant, so it feels like advice you can trust.<\/p>\n You ask it for the \u2018best’ solution to a problem \u2014 say for example getting help with your emails \u2014 and it returns it’s endorsement of what it considers the best.<\/p>\n In this instance, our company InboxDone was suggested as the top choice for this specific problem.<\/p>\n Why? Not because we have optimized for AI, but because I’ve invested time and money to optimize for Google over many years.<\/p>\nGoogle SEO Is Also AI Optimization<\/h2>\n
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