Happy Sunday. Reminder: If you're doing Costco pies for your clients next week, check your local store to see if they're limiting how many you can buy. (One of ours is, the other isn't.)

The Lead

• Hide and seek vanish. You may never be found for "near me" searches if you hide your address in your Google Business Profile. On YouTube, Joy Hawkins and Colan Nielsen unpack that and several other things that influence "near me" search results.
• Goodbye local pack? AI Overviews might replace Google's local pack one of these days. I was in a Google test last week and got a glimpse of what it could look like for "real estate agent in LOCATION" searches. See my LinkedIn post for a 30-second video.
• The 1%. Danny Goodwin at SEL reports on the latest study on how much traffic websites get from AI/LLMs. I guess I already gave it away: Across 10 industries, AI is responsible for 1% of all website traffic. ChatGPT sent 87% of that one percent.
• Not quite ready. Google recently released an AI tool called Pomelli that promises to help small businesses "easily generate scalable, on-brand social media campaigns." I kicked the tires a week or so ago, and while the idea seems cool, there's a reason this product is still just an experiment in Google Labs. You can try it here if you have access to Google Labs.
• PPC plot twist. You know I'm not a PPC guy, but Brad Geddes is, and his recent article caught my eye: Why a lower CTR might be better for your PPC campaigns.

Tip of the Week: The easiest way to rank your content in multiple locations

For years, the SEO industry has been saying Title tags should be somewhere around 60 characters long. SEO tools like Semrush and Ahrefs will even give you negative alerts if you go over that limit.

A Title tag can be as long as you want -- make it 200 characters, 300 characters, whatever! There's no penalty. There's nothing bad that will happen.

In fact, it's the easiest way to target secondary locations. For example, if you write a blog post and your Title tag is "Top 5 Curb Appeal Tips for Homes in Smith County," and the content is equally relevant to Jones County, you should copy that phrase word-for-word, change out the county name, and repeat it right in the Title tag. So the new version looks like this:

Top 5 Curb Appeal Tips for Homes in Smith County - Top 5 Curb Appeal Tips for Homes in Jones County

That will help your article rank for both counties (depending on all the other normal SEO factors). I've seen this happen countless times. It's how I often optimize content for multiple locations. Again, there's no penalty.

"But Matt, that's not user-friendly and you always say to optimize for users first!"

Yes, but users will never see your full Title tag. Google only shows about 60 characters in its search results, and it'll edit your Title tag to match what the person searched for. (If you did this with the visible headline on the article, THAT would be very user-unfriendly. Don't do that. Just do it in the Title tag.)

Your takeaway: There's no limit to how long a Title tag can be, no matter what your fave SEO tool tells you. Use your Title tags to optimize for multiple locations on pages where it would be a bad user-experience to force city and county names into the visible copy.

Deep Dive: One article or several articles for AI & SEO success?

In last week's Deep Dive on query fan-out, we talked about how AI (like ChatGPT, Google, etc.) takes a buyer's/seller's question and turns it into several questions to create an answer -- and how that needs to inform your content strategy and creation.

There's a natural question that should've come to mind after you read that last week: Does this mean I should write one really long article about a topic, or should I break it into several articles?

Let's answer that in this week's Deep Dive.

One article or several articles?

If the AI is "fanning out" and doing several searches from a single question, should you follow suit and do several articles? Or just one comprehensive article?

The answer is "yes." 😅

Sorry, I know that's ambiguous, but here's what I mean: Your north star in writing a blog post is to fully satisfy the searcher's intent.

Read that again. Especially the last five words. Fully satisfy the searcher's intent. What does the buyer or seller want and need to learn? That should guide your answer to the "one article or several articles" question.

An Example

I just heard the old Elvis Costello song, "Toledo," so let's say your next article is about retiring in Toledo. Your topic/keyword is

Is Toledo a good place to retire?

That's a good buyer topic (especially in light of how our population is aging). So first, you have to think about what the buyer needs to learn from your article to answer their question. Then, you're going to write a single article that answers the sub-intents that come along with that question:

• cost of living, especially for seniors/retirees
• healthcare
• climate
• safety
• amenities
• things to do

Each of those should be written in clear sections using H2/H3 headers. When you're done, you'll find that you have an excellent resource for seniors thinking about retiring in Toledo, nicely wrapped together in a single article.

When to do separate articles

That's not to say you should only have one retiree-focused article on your blog! When you find sub-topics that have a separate or unique enough intent, and won't lead you to writing two versions of the same article, that's when a separate article makes sense.

So using this same example, "best neighborhoods in Toledo for retirees" qualifies as worthy of its own article. It has a different intent than your original article -- someone asking about best neighborhoods has probably already decided that it's a good place to retire. This article can rank independently and won't repeat the original article.

You might also find that some of the sub-intents (sub-topics) from your original article can be broken out into a separate and more comprehensive article. From that bullet list above, "cost of living" is a more specific intent and may deserve a more in-depth article focused on retirees. That article might go into things like taxes, housing prices, healthcare costs, utilities, and other things that you addressed only generally in the original article.

Does all that make sense? 🤔

How do you find the sub-intents/sub-topics?

You're probably already using ChatGPT or your favorite AI to help create outlines for your article topics, and that's good. You might want to rewrite your prompts to emphasize that you want your articles to focus on the specific intent of your topic/keyword -- in my experience, AI outlines can sometimes wander and go off into areas that don't really address the buyer's or seller's question.

Another idea: Use AlsoAsked.com. This is my favorite of those "find the questions people type into Google" tools. It's the only one that aggregates and shows the live "People Also Asked" questions that you see in Google's search results. It also maps the connections between questions, which makes it easier to spot the questions you should answer in an article.

Bonus AI tip

Once you've written your article, copy and paste the text into your favorite AI. Tell it to review the copy for completeness and how well it serves the search intent. Here's a sample prompt (that you can improve on):

Obviously, replace everything in CAPS with specifics to your article. In my experience, Perplexity is a little better at this than ChatGPT, especially the parts about discovering what's missing and developing FAQs to include. But really, use whatever AI you prefer.

Your takeaways: The goal of all this is to end up with a high-quality, human-written, AI-assisted article that fully answers the intent of the buyer's/seller's search. And that's where you draw the line on whether to write one article or several articles. The answer is "yes" -- keep writing one article until you've answered the searcher's intent. Then consider new articles that answer related-but-different intents. That's how you create content for this query fan-out concept.

Oh, and the good news is that answering search intent has always been a foundational part of SEO, so this helps you with Google, too -- not just its AI Overview and AI Mode, but also the regular organic rankings.

Know Your Numbers

The NAR just released its 2025 Profile of Buyers and Sellers. There's always some interesting data in there, including this chart showing how FSBO sales just hit an all-time low for the second straight year, while agent-assisted sales hit an all-time high.

You could should build a blog post around that graphic to show homeowners that an overwhelming majority of their peers didn't risk selling their home without an agent's help. Add it to your "Sellers" pillar page, too. And maybe find a spot for it in your listing presentation. Herd mentality and the bandwagon effect are two very strong cognitive biases.

Burning Question

An anonymous agent sent in this question: "Do I need to write new content every week, or can I just update old blog posts?"

Ideally, you're doing both! But if you're struggling to devote time to new content, then yes, you can still help yourself by updating old posts. Both Google and AI/LLMs like fresh content.

In fact, if you're on the VIP newsletter, that ChatGPT/Perplexity prompt I shared in today's Deep Dive could also be used to update older posts. Change the content enough and you can republish them as a "new" post with a current publish date.

Lastly, if "every week" is too often to do a new blog post, try every other week. Or try once a month. Doing something is better than doing nothing.

Thanks for the great question, anonymous agent!

(Have a question I can use in a future newsletter? Ask me here. I'm still low on questions!)

Marketing, Unlocked

Clear to Close

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Thanks in advance.

Closing Gift

You might need to be of a certain age for this one, but here's Kermit the Frog singing "Once In A Lifetime." 🎵🤣

Thanks for reading! I hope you have a great week.

Matt

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