Episode #1: Coffee Chats with Ana

Google’s New Search + Health Content

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the very first episode of the RWS: Content + Strategy Vlog. YouTube is brand new to me, but I know that video is really important and so I’m going to take a stab at it. So. My name is Ana Reisdorf, I am a registered dietitian and I am the founder of RWS Content and Strategy, a health marketing agency made up entirely of registered dietitians.

We focus on creating content for health and wellness brands, doing content strategy, SEO work, food, photography, recipe development, and all sorts of fun things like that. Anything related to health and wellness. So I am going to put together this little weekly Vlog where every week I’m going to share a couple of updates of things that are happening in the SEO world, AI world, marketing world, and content creation world. It is all happening quickly. Right now, there is a lot going on every single week. And then talk a little bit about ways that you as a health professional can make money being a content creator.

So it kind of is a way for me to connect with my audience of registered dietitians as well as potential customers who are looking for content creation made by experts.

Google Search Updates

The big news this week was that Google had their big developer conference sometime last week, like Wednesday or Thursday. And during that conference, they demonstrated their brand new search that includes AI. And it’s pretty cool if you watch their promo video. If you look at their promo video, you’ll see that it could be really useful.

So an example that they use is, let’s say you want to go on vacation and you have three kids and a dog and you say, I’m from Nashville, Tennessee, so what are the best places to go with three kids and a dog outside of Nashville, Tennessee? They will give you recommendations and compare places and even put together an itinerary. But what I thought was really cool, the AI chatbot will give you all that information. But on the side, there are going to be additional resources for you to look at. So not just video, I mean, not just website content, but even video, photos, social media posts, all of that.

So what I gleaned from this, from that promo video really is that search is going to change dramatically in the next, let’s say three months, six months. So the SEO that we’re used to and the amount of traffic that we’re used to getting from being on those top few spots of Google search is probably going to decrease significantly, even for that person. That’s number one because a lot of people will not be clicking through to get to the website. I don’t think anybody really knows how that’s going to change in terms of ad revenue and that sort of stuff that people rely on when others visit their website.

I think that’s still a big question mark. The one thing that I did find very interesting is that for now, health content will not be included in that. So if you run a health and wellness website, you still have an opportunity to get at the top of the search and not get your site traffic taken away by the AI search bot. I think that that puts health-related content creators in a different position and those who run big health websites in a little bit of a different position because you will still be able to rank, at least for the time being, if you’re in the top few positions in search.

So let me tell you what my team is doing right now.

Strategy Adjustments for AI

We are leaning heavily into video. A video of one of my registered dietitian team members is one of the first things that pops up in addition to that search result. So that’s the direction that we’re going in. Tiktoks, Reels, influencers, all of that is still going to be a thing. So maybe even bigger than before because they are going to be promoting more and more video content from some of those platforms.  And if you’re not doing video, maybe you should think about it.

Is Freelance Writing Dead?

So a big question that I get all the time because I teach other dietitians how to be content writers. And even customers of mine ask these questions. So is writing dead? So is it no longer feasible to be a content writer? Based on what I just said about Google’s new search, health content is currently not being impacted by that. But I think that almost all of the others.

Writing is going to be impacted by that. If you’re not getting the ad revenue for content that could easily be created by the AI because the traffic is just down, you’re not going to keep creating that content.

So I don’t know. The other question that came up is whether the AI scrapes the internet of existing content and then puts it into the AI. And so how is it going to find content if no one’s creating content anymore? So it’s just going to start scraping its own content that was created by the AI? I don’t think anybody has the answer to how all that’s going to flush out. But I think that if you’re a health writer or you are a health professional who wants to create content, video, writing, any of that, I think that that is very much still a feasible path because Google is going to prioritize what they call EEAT, and that’s Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trust for health-related content. Even if your clients or wellness brands decide to use more AI-generated content, they’re still going to need a health professional to sign off on that.

Because Google is still going to want to see that type of content. As of right now. The AI does lie and makes stuff up. It isn’t really great for fact-checking and those types of things.

So we are still going to need the expertise and experience of the registered dietitian. Those are some of my quick thoughts about what’s happening this week in the AI world.

If you are looking for somebody to help with your content strategy, video, food photography, or any of those things, be sure to reach out to us at RWS: Content + Strategy and I’ll put the link in the comments as well. If you are a registered dietitian who wants to learn more about how to be a content writer and a content creator, come join my free Facebook group called RDs Who Write. And I share a ton of information over there about how to do that as a registered dietitian and make yourself the expert. So I look forward to talking to you guys every week on this new channel and maybe having some of my team members come on and that thing. So let me know if you have any questions that I could answer about content, being a health writer, and creating content for brands. And I look forward to seeing where this goes.