This is my third talk with Ross Hudgens, an SEO expert who runs Siege Media. There's a tectonic shift in SEO in the last few years so I love talking to experts about what they're seeing.

I say "expert" because Ross does SEO work for Fortune 500 companies at a huge scale (90+ employees helping). Watch the interview here →​

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I take detailed notes on these interviews....here's my personal notes, visualized with some imagery. I hope you like this format (let me know if you do or don't)!

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(0:16) "When I started my first business in high school, the only way I could afford to get traffic with $0 is by dominating the search engine rankings."

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(0:49) In the last 3-5 years there’s been a TECTONIC SHIFT in SEO. It's always been shifting, but this is huge.

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(1:05) Ross says for smaller businesses SEO is harder, but for larger brands it’s not.

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(2:22) Percentage of queries Google shows AI results is surprisingly only 7% (at this moment).

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(3:15) I’ve been using Perplexity as my default search engine, and it’s like seeing the future of Google by doing an AI-first search. So I still click links in Perplexity, but it’s a bit different.

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(4:25) “Library Sites” are mostly endangered and some completely decimated. Basically any “What Is…” type of search is being gobbled up by AI.

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(6:34) Ross’ favorite test search term is “What Is An IRA” because it has an easy answer, and a very complicated long-tail answer.

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(9:30) Reddit is skyrocketing in their search results since Google introduced the “Forum” tab. It’s the best way to find the “real” reviews, however it’s starting to get manipulated as well like anything. It’s called “The Manipulation Curve.”

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(11:50) Engineering teams will train AI off content only made before 2023 because there was no AI content then.

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(12:30) Google’s whole existence has been a cat-and-mouse game of showing results, then preventing manipulation.

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(12:56) Ross very-late-in-the-interview intro!

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(13:30) SEO used to be: Write content → Then get people to link it. Is it still like that? Ross says links still matter to a degree but it’s changed massively. There’s fewer people blogging as more people go to social media. It’s much harder to “fake your way to the top” via getting links.

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(15:00) Big brands are winning in SEO because.

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(15:50) Social networks starting with TikTok have the opposite approach: You can have zero followers yet get 10m+ views. This never happens in SEO.

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(16:33) Google had to release some inside info and on-page time, click through rate, and brand signals seemed to be far more important than links. Links get you to the top 10, but brand signals keep you there.

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(17:29) How important are meta tags, description tags etc? Not as important anymore. It also DEPENDS, for example if your website is for rural farmers and they have slow internet connections, then “site speed” is a big factor.

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(19:05) Ross runs a big agency with 90+ people and the trends he’s seeing are: You want to rank high so you influence AI results. Doing “best of” roundup posts on blogs is actually working again (like Blog Carnivals from back in the day).

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(21:20) AI works by figuring out the next word of a sentence. If you have a lot of ranked content on the web you can train the AI to say your brand.

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(22:29) People aren’t blogging as much….BUT they are making a crap-top of content on social networks, which is kinda like blogging. But now you have to post on like TEN places rather than just a blog. A lot of content creation is repurposing a long form blog post.

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(25:28) To differentiate yourself from AI create more “First Party Data” where you’re doing surveys or gathering data and sharing that as a first source. A byproduct of that is then sharing that data across all social networks.

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(26:52) Do agency customers come to you asking for social content as well as SEO?

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(28:29) How the hell do you track where customers come from? It’s so hard now with privacy settings, that it’s seemingly impossible outside of asking people how they found you.

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(29:34) GA4 stinks now, Plausible Analytics is a lot easier to use.

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(33:50) I post my short videos on LinkedIn as well, and it’s always surprising how many people in my friend network see them.

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(34:44) LinkedIn vs X is different when it comes to hiring. LinkedIn is very sanitized, and X is hardcore, so it creates completely different vibes.

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(38:59) Top of Feed vs Top of Search. With Top of Feed the downside is you have to post A LOT.

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(40:09) A long form blog post is like a “house” for your content, and you can keep expanding or update it.

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(40:35) “Need to Update Content” has increased in it’s frequency. Like with AI the news is so fast it might be updated by the month or week. It used to be “Best Tips for 2026” now it’s “Best Tips of September 5th, 2026”

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(43:17) The biggest/longest article used to rank, now the top searches are far more concise (or “efficient”) articles. The length depends on the type of search people do.

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(45:05) What’s the deal with AI? Ross’ ideas on using AI and how they’re using it at his SEO agency. They use it for first draft editing, they use it to interpret large datasets. They don’t use it for spinning out full articles.

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(47:33) Can I just use ChatGPT to spin up 50,000 articles and rank really well?

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(48:49) As a person who runs a writing company, I see a lot of AI writing wins and fails. It’s being used for DIFFERENT things than we expected. Depending on the content, the connection to it being written (or mostly composed) by a human is stronger than expected.

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(51:28) AI is helping make content that wasn’t possible (or not worth it), like our podcast show notes have custom images for each note…this would’ve been incredibly time consuming and not worth it before, but with AI it’s feasible.

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(53:38) A guy in our Office Hours tests “evilness” of any companies privacy policy using AI. So many interesting use cases coming out.

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(55:15) In the 50’s they thought the killer app for computers was storing recipes. Turns out there’s soooo much more than that. Similarly, we think there’s cool AI use cases now, but there will be so many more cool uses we can’t think of now.

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(56:19) The biggest part of blogging is not writing, it’s researching. With AI you can do what used to take a full research team to do.

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(1:00:27) When we moved from KK to CC there was an 8 month gap where we lost all traffic, and we noticed very little happened. Unless the traffic was specific and targeted it was useless.

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​[See rest of the notes on the blog]​

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Follow Ross Hudgens​
🖥 Website: SiegeMedia.com​
❌ X: @RossHudgens
​💼 LinkedIn: @rosshudgens​

Hope you enjoyed this interview!​
​Sincerely,
Neville Medhora - A Curious Guy

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