Adrian Dahlin: The More SEO Changes The More It Stays The Same (Except Those Tactics!)

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted SEO podcast host. I'm here with Adrian Donlin. Why don't you give yourself an introduction focusing on what you've done in SEO. That should make us trust you as an expert. [00:00:17] Speaker B: Trust me, because I am relatively new to it, and so what's normal to me is what's current, and I'm not stuck doing it. A version from 10 years ago, that's fear. [00:00:29] Speaker A: Dinosaurs like me have a lot of baggage. It's interesting because for me, the more that it changes, the more it stays the same. But it's always a questioning periodically as the new shiny object comes out, you know. Oh, you know, mobile. Get in. Google is doing mobile first indexing. SEO is dead. Oh, it's voice search. You know, your iPhones are now the primary way that people are searching. SEO is dead. Google has integrated Burton LLMs. You know, SEO is that HCU came out and murdered, you know, just stabbed a bunch of producing sites, you know, topical sites of all qualities, and we can't figure out why we can't bring them back from the dead. SEO is dead. You know, so to have more of a fresh take into it, I think in some ways could be an advantage. I'm curious what field or practice or marketing discipline you came from before transitioning into SEO and what kind of prompted that change? [00:01:43] Speaker B: Yeah, first I'll say on your point about, like, as things change, they stay the same. I think I agree that the principles stay the same, but tactics kind of change. [00:01:57] Speaker A: Fair enough. [00:01:59] Speaker B: But anyway, yeah, I have a long standing marketing background. I'm really like a left brain and right brain creative and analytical type of person. Like, my best classes in school were English and math. I loved to write. I did very well at math. I am a marketer with a data science background. I got a master's degree in applied data science. But I also really love, like, fleshing out key messaging and like, developing a voice and a brand. Um, so, yeah, I think that actually made me a good fit for SEO, even though I'm like, just a little over three years into actually focusing on SEO. You know, it's. It's like I love words and numbers, and SEO is all about using data to help guide creative content projects. [00:02:53] Speaker A: I see. I can't help but notice that your bookshelves are organized by color behind you. So there's definitely an aspect of that Left brain, Right, right brain on display. But you're right, you're right. I have always seen SEO as, you know, part science, part art, you know, There is definitely a heavy data sciences aspect to it of, you know, looking at trends, looking at, you know, search volume data information, but also, you know, the artistic capability to understand the flaws in the data and understand the incredible multi layer, multi tiered black box that we're playing with for organic results. And now the ult the addition of LLM based oubliettes, you know, who knows what will come out of the box this time? Is it even the same within this, within the same person doing the same search at different points in the same day? It might not be, it probably isn't. And so all of those factors coming in means that you cannot project with hard science data protocols of confidence. You know, like if we're looking at, you know, AB testing, which I've done for, you know, a larger agency, the ability to get to those confidence levels out of those levels of clicks is just not available in SEO. So how is, how do you leaven your data side approach with that need for interpretation? [00:04:38] Speaker B: Oh, speaking of art, you just use the word leaven? [00:04:41] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, for sure. [00:04:42] Speaker B: Oh, beautiful, beautiful phrasing. The catalyst ingredient that makes the bread grow. Love that rise. Yeah. So I mean like the most basic thing is just you do your data analysis, you use your science to figure out what topics are most valuable for a website. But then to succeed at actually getting traffic to your content that targets those topics and to succeed at then converting that traffic into some type of value takes art, it takes storytelling. So I think that's like the simplest answer. [00:05:18] Speaker A: I love it. What is it about narrative and storytelling that is true today in the digital age? That was also true in the 19th century. What's the through line? [00:05:32] Speaker B: The 19th century you said? [00:05:34] Speaker C: Sure, yeah. [00:05:37] Speaker B: I'll start with Simon Sinek. So his TED talk, start with why was one of the very first things that started to form how I thought about marketing. So I was first having to learn marketing just out of necessity for my own startup in 2011. And I encountered that TED talk early on. And his main examples are Martin Luther King, Apple, particularly earlier Apple, and the Wright brothers about how like people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. And I think underneath that is a suggestion that the most effective persuasion, the most effective communication happens when your message. [00:06:17] Speaker C: Is it's a clear alignment with your personal and your values. So like people believe that the Wright brothers like and so firewood fire of their being about figuring out how to fly. And then Martin Luther King was incredibly authentic at his dream. And Apple, you know, probably the more complicated Example, but at least their first 20 years they were different. Right. [00:06:51] Speaker B: And so when then when all of these people and organizations go out into the world trying to sell things, people believe what you're saying because it's in alignment with who you are. So that's, I've always, I always come back to start with why I use that framework when I'm working on developing messaging with clients today. And I think that's basically a timeless idea that any kind of communication is going to be more effective and going to be more persuasive when it aligns with who you are and appeals to some, some core purpose. [00:07:22] Speaker A: I love that because there is in my mind always an inherent paradox of adopting authenticity as a marketing strategy. Because is it your authentic self if you're packaging it, you're writing it and following a template to authentically go out there and say something? You know, there's that inherent, like is it truly authentic if I'm in, I'm intentionally crafting this messaging. You know, there's like, there's a manufactured element to all marketing. Right. You know, like there's, there's messaging, there's, there's choice. So how do you deal with that inherent, you know, conundrum of the, the falseness of just participating in marketing versus the need for that true connection of authenticity? [00:08:17] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I guess the proof is in the pudding. It's like if it works probably it probably was. It's probably the best evidence that you, that you, that it's kind of like authentic enough that it actually appeals to an audience and it's durable too. It's like one thing to give people like a, a sugary snot kind of a message that like, you know, is, is appealing in the short term and like hits, hits some, some need of some kind of dopamine, you know, craving and that's different than the kind of message, even more even a self serve, ultimately a self serving serving marketing message that continues to resonate for like years or decades at a time. That's going to be good evidence that it probably is authentic if it just keeps working. [00:08:59] Speaker A: How do you think, you know, Google has made adjustments to its algorithm, has made steps that have made it clear, you know, particularly through the helpful content update, that it's not just the existence of the answer to the question. And you know, I've, I saw a site as an example of something that was hit by the helpful content update. They had done the research and had found every. People also ask about Naruto and, and then had created an alternate version of each of those answers and had built an entire site around Naruto and then plugged in a bunch of ads. And before HCU it was ranking, but it was, you know, it was not like a known brand. It wasn't like Wired, it wasn't like even something that's, you know, very popular. It was something that was crafted or created because it could give an answer to it. And Google obviously came along and was saying you don' actually you don't have a brand. People don't know you from Atom. You're not, you know, a Reddit, you're not a type of site that people know you're not Wookiepedia for Naruto. There's no genuine activity there. You've just have answered the question in a different way. Which, you know, 10 years ago, totally acceptable. You know. So Google has basically been saying you need to have, you know, provable brand based off of the what we can measure as signals. How does that line up with your request to be authentic, your quest to leverage good branding? How do those potentially come together for a positive outcome in your campaign? [00:10:46] Speaker B: Well, first off, part of being relatively new to SEO is I am not that well educated on the technical SEO on the algorithm of it all and I'm not that up to date on changes. I rely on two members of my team who are really more technical SEO experts. So I couldn't even really summarize for you well what the like helpful content update actually changed. Do you want to like describe it for me in the audience? [00:11:15] Speaker A: Yeah. So basically Google was being inundated about three or four years ago. It reached kind of a critical mass point of, you know, it was before the big GPT boom, but not marketers have been using GPT like tools since 2015. And so there was more and more sites that were programmatic in nature and more and more sites that were ranking that had a bunch of content. And there was more and more, you know, travel bloggers and recipe sites out there, you know, kind of answering the same question. And what really shifted is they, they launched their own LLM based portion of the search that was meant to combat first it was staged to combat other mass LLM content out there. But under the scope of hey, if your site has a bunch of unhelpful content then you actually get a negative penalty for the whole site and if you have a ton of it, it will drag it down a lot. And so it was the return of a site wide penalty but from a, a very oblique, very difficult to quantify is your content helpful or not? And so it's been, you know, when it first came, it came out in two iterations, two different algorithm releases and then each periodic main core update to the algorithm has seen, you know, modifications to those sites that, you know, when there was a release they would tank or they'd jump up. And the majority of those that tanked have really never actually been able to recover. I think it's maybe one in a hundred have really come back. And many of those are even just partial. Many companies went down entirely. Many travel bloggers are no longer able to do their thing. A large swath of the, the, the content producing population, you know, really struggled with that. So that's, that's, that's developed at the same time, you know, that's, that's their release of it and saying hey, is there helpful content? Kind of also came at a time of like what are they using to really measure that is, is it how the content is written that says that it's helpful or, or not? Is, or is it actually more about the perception the use their site to confirm that they really are actually, you know, somewhere where people, as a destination that people are going to and verifying, you know, because for the longest time Google had lied and said, you know, click behavior isn't part of our, it doesn't affect rankings and you know, it's not a direct ranking factor. That word direct. Now one of my previous interviewees, Jason Bernard said that word direct in that sentence always gets you because you're, you know, you're, if you're newer to this, you might take Google's statements from even John Mew Ielts, eilish any of them that make public statements. Danny Sullivan there's, there's, there's a way that they speak and they talk about, you know, things in their algorithm that are, are obfuscating the truth and so they can say the truth. They're very, it's like fairies, you know, they, they, they say something that's true but say it in a way that believe something that's false. And you know, part of that is the echo game of you know, SEOs. [00:14:59] Speaker B: The facts are true but the narrative is false. [00:15:01] Speaker A: Yeah, it's like that because you know, saying oh, we don't use click behavior of how people interact with the serps and go through to your site. We don't use that directly as a, or it's not a direct ranking factor. But in reality the court documents that came out because Google got sued and the antitrust they had you know, it's not just, not just in the algorithm. It's one of the three major components of ranking. It's content, it's links and its behavior of how people interact with your brand as they do these searches which I think show up in a search. [00:15:39] Speaker B: What better evidence would they have the content is actually helpful and useful to people than looking at the behavior on the site? That seems like a very positive thing. [00:15:49] Speaker A: It seems. But again Google is very jealously, has been and will always be jealous, the most jealous, fearlessly guarding of its secrets of how, how it, how its algorithm actually works because there is such monetary interest. There are people that will take anything and everything that they can to try to, you know, benefit themselves by getting things ranking very quickly through whatever shady means possible. So it's always been that way. And so I think, you know, LLM based search tools kind of have, have this moment where they're coming onto the scene. They haven't been fighting with spammers for so long and so you know, they're kind of the new kid on the block. And their method of showing, you know, sampling it is inherently, you know, a lot more difficult to game out of the box and the way that it works. But we're still seeing, we are seeing right now a renaissance of you know, black hats leveraging LLM tactics to try to manipulate. And we're also seeing, you know, Google itself acknowledge, or I think it was GPT acknowledge that you know, with just 250 documents you can poison a pool of data towards, to bias towards a particular result. So it's kind of interesting to see the rapid development, rapid adoption, you know, the, the beta test culture, acceptance of LLM tools and the error margin of these answers. I tell you, if Google had tried to roll out anything like the error rate of an LLM based tool Even in 2010, 2011, their stock would have tanked, they would have been bankrupt. Because the public consumer culture, the business culture would not have accepted something that could come back to a life challenging answer of like far deep. Can you dive safely and get a wrong answer? That's just, that's, that's just so dangerous that it would have been business breaking. Am I right? [00:18:00] Speaker B: So I don't think so actually. I'm, I'm just to dive down that rabbit hole for a moment. I think it would have been a big PR problem. Certainly there would have been less tolerance in 2010 or 2011 for inaccuracy. And I think there's less tolerance toward Google than towards startups like OpenAI about accuracy but I, I don't think that would have tanked Google's business or, or their stock long term because of the power of their position in the market. And like, and like Google doesn't even have to be the best search engine. Google hasn't actually needed to be the best search engine for a long time just because they're Google, because of their market share, they have, they have too much power, they're the aggregator of information on the Internet. And consumer behavior just changes very slowly. And people, people, Google is synonymous with search still. So I think, I think that like Google's threats are much more infrastructure fundamental long term changes. Nothing, not like brand or trust. Unfortunately. [00:19:08] Speaker A: I think the proof is in the pudding. The fact that they have rolled out LLM based answers to so many of their questions and they're not perfect but. [00:19:19] Speaker B: They'Re getting away with it. [00:19:21] Speaker A: I agree. But it does have a curious moment of some of the power monopoly power of Google has been pulled back to a degree, not entirely and I guess that changes based off of who you talk to. So how much do you think in reality has the coming onto the scene of GPT perplexity, Claude and others with LLM based search tools, how much has that changed the marketing game in terms of, you know, budget allocation? Is it more of just the narrative of SEO is dead again impacting CEOs who are then more willing to hear somebody say, well we've got an LLM AI SEO approach versus we're just doing SEO fundamentals? [00:20:16] Speaker B: I mean I have definitely have anecdotal support for that last point where so I kind of ironically made the decision to go all in on SEO pretty much exactly as ChatGPT was coming out before. 2022 is when I was designed to go from more generalist marketing consulting, fractional CMO stuff to fully SEO. Because I'd had a bunch of success with one client doing pretty traditional blog, like high, high volume blog output that was driving traffic and leads and like 55, 60% of their customers were coming from organic Google search. So I was pumped to like focus in on something. Then chatgpt with what was it, 3.5 that it launched with. Is that the model they started with that was like November? [00:21:05] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:21:05] Speaker B: Or something 2022. So I've been focused on SEO entirely in the AI era and it has been hard to sell SEO during this. [00:21:14] Speaker C: Period because of uncertainty, not because the fundamentals had changed. [00:21:18] Speaker A: Right. [00:21:19] Speaker B: Maybe the fundamentals are starting to change now, three years later, but certainly for the first two years, fundamentals did not change at all, but there was just fear and uncertainty and that made decision makers just want to invest in channels they had more faith in. So it's been hard to sell SEO. And as soon as I kind of made a shift in how I was presenting things and focusing more on AI in about July, so three months ago, and that was partly because I just felt like I had started to wrap my head around this growing quasi consensus about kind of how Geo works. And also I got excited about the basically like durability of an AI search offer that even as like how the LLMs actually choose their sources and generate their answers may change, the offer of helping brands get mentioned by AI chatbots is going to be relevant for a long time. So I made that shift in messaging. [00:22:24] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:22:25] Speaker B: And also started to shift services a little bit. Basically I learned about Reddit and started offer like Reddit Management and started to build partnerships with PR firms so that we could pull those in side by side to help brands get more mentions. Because we were hearing so much about how sites like Reddit, Quora, Flikipedia are driving citations and how brand mentions drive mentions. So I had this updated offer. While our actual delivery still has not changed very much, but I just got a lot more meetings, like from my existing audience. People wanted to follow up, former clients, people I've been in touch with a long time who had never bought from us. Just people in my audience, like booked meetings when they started hearing me talk about AI, really appreciated my help framing how things are changing and helping them wrap their heads around it. [00:23:24] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:23:25] Speaker B: And I think ultimately the greatest reason for that was just that it gave them more trust in me that I was able to talk relatively fluently about AI. And even if what we ended up working on was mostly traditional SEO website. [00:23:39] Speaker A: Content stuff, that's kind of what I'm seeing too, you know, the adoption of what should have been fantastic bedfellows all along of digital PR and SEO tradition. From my experience, this may be anecdotal and you can tell me if it's wrong, but I'd say that there is a pretty hard break between SEOs and digital PR folk. And only a thin sliver of, you know, the Patrick Stocks of the world of aahrefs would talk about, hey, you know, some of my best successes come from getting newspaper stories placed. And you'd hear, you know, the mike kings of the world at a conference talking about, you know, these fantastic wins while everybody else is focused on, oh, hey, can I get another guest blog placement? You know, can I find another place to, to do outreach to, to get a link. And it needs to be a doctor. 35, 30X. You know, you know, hardcore focus on if it doesn't have a doctor, then it doesn't have any values. You know, I think that that thankfully has kind of shifted. But would you agree that till now digital PR and SEO have not been the best play pals? [00:24:51] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. And they are kind of being forced together now and, and that's probably a good thing. [00:24:58] Speaker A: I think it's interesting because I, I know, I know people like Rand Fishkin, formerly of Moz now with Spark Toro, has been, you know, banging the drum on unlinked citations and brand mentions since 20 2007, 2012 at least. What are some of those, you said, you know, what are some of the actual tactics, you know, that have changed? You know, strategy stays the same, but like boots on the ground. What some specific tactics that you've seen shift that have, you know, brought success for you or your clients? [00:25:35] Speaker B: Yeah. Two things come to mind. One is shifting the kinds of content that we focus on just away from the top of the funnel, which I can go deeper on. Another is just changing how we think about discovery online. And I use an analogy that AI is like a consultant working for your customer and you're trying to influence how that consultant thinks, which means that everything on the web is kind of relevant, I guess start with content. So I mean, this is, I think pretty like well known among SEO folks. But the old blog tactics where you'd like throw up an article defining an industry term which Ryan Law at Ahrefs called rehashed Wikipedia content, that was always kind of an awkward phenomenon where like all these like websites are competing to become encyclopedias just to get traffic. [00:26:33] Speaker C: When. [00:26:34] Speaker B: It'S a much better user experience for AI to just answer the question when someone's just asking for the definition of a term. So you know, it's much less helpful to have that top funnel higher volume keywords. What is blah, blah, blah jargon, that kind of blogging. And so much more focus on. [00:26:58] Speaker C: The. [00:26:59] Speaker B: Bottom of funnel stuff. Like all the searches related to people looking for a solution, mostly in B2B by the way. So definitely like more focus on really optimizing well for the high intent searches where people are looking for a solution. Plus on the educational side of things, the like sliver of educational content that remains part of our strategy is the more niche stuff where an LLM is trained on the Internet. It's going to do a Good job of synthesizing commonly available information. [00:27:29] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:27:30] Speaker B: But for people who are looking for a really niche subject where there isn't a lot of good content on the web, there's still an opportunity to kind of own that niche, own that long tail. Particularly if it's like highly technical. If it's like hard for an LLM to come up with an answer on without having lots of context to train on. [00:27:51] Speaker C: I was like, it's deeply technical in cybersecurity or I don't know, Dtech or. [00:27:57] Speaker B: Something. [00:27:59] Speaker C: Then LLMs are probably just going to want to like that source and, or, you know, mention. Basically use your answer in there, generate an answer, mention your brand. [00:28:08] Speaker A: Michael McDougall, the Bright Thing Agency said ChatGPT is your least trained customer service representative. [00:28:18] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:28:19] Speaker A: So it's detached from you and you kind of have to use a fax machine approach to get new information into it. So if you kind of treat it from that perspective of, you know, how can you. [00:28:32] Speaker B: I think about it differently so. Because if customer service agent is still paid by you and accountable to you, even if they're not trained and they're really bad at their job. [00:28:39] Speaker A: Right. [00:28:40] Speaker B: I actually, the analogy of a consultant works better for me. It really is working for the customer. You know, it's like people subscribe, maybe they don't pay, but they have their own chatgpt. Yeah. That's constantly updating more personalized context for them and giving them personalized answers and is really a tool for them as an assistant for all of these decision makers out there. And it's our job. The same way you would like as a, as a brand selling something within some niche industry, you would show up at a trade show to influence the way people think, knowing that there's like consultants and decision makers in that audience. It's now our job to help an AI that's using the Internet to educate itself to think about things our way. So we got to figure out where this consultant, this AI consultant is formulating its worldview and show up in those places around the web. So if it thinks our way, then it's more likely to recommend our solution. [00:29:40] Speaker A: It's fascinating because for a long time Google has said, don't write for search engines, don't write for robots, write for humans. But Matt Brooks of SEOT just pointed out the other day, you are now writing for robots, and in many cases you're using robots to write for robots to write for humans. So it's like this robot sandwich, you know, like you've got human over Here, human, over here. You're using Claude and GPT to augment your marketing efforts to create content that's going to be digested by GPT and then given to the human end user. And there's this kind of cloying game of writing how the robot thinks, that humans want content to be written in a way that robots understand or can parse and can, you know. So it's kind of reverse engineering how these LLMs think that humans think versus actually writing truly for humans. [00:30:46] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it's a little dark. Well, I think one, one potential vision of the future is that like websites are gonna really go down in importance and influence and just the amount of time that humans spend looking at websites is gonna go way down. And you know, there's people, like I hear people in E commerce, which isn't really my world, talking about this, where they used to measure like, like a longer session was a good thing and there's actually now people thinking about a sort of shorter session as being a more optimal experience because it shows that they like they showed up with sufficient context already to make a quick decision. And the website did a good, good job of optimizing for that, that quick conversion. [00:31:36] Speaker A: I'm wondering if that's a good thing or a bad thing for, you know, startups or entrepreneurs like Nexon Powertrack, they're trying to disrupt systems with new products that don't exist. And so I'm wondering if LLMs are more flexible because I did that in 2012. This guy. It was not a space heater, it was a space cooler. And it took a year just to break in and get Google used to the idea that there was a product called a space cooler instead of like this juice product that was like cooler space. But, you know, we had to, you know, do adaptive marketing of like, it's not a swamp cooler, it's a space cooler. It's not a space heater, it's a space cooler. Do you think LLMs are more flexible when it comes to discovering new disruptive technology? Or is it more challenging because you can't control the inputs as well? [00:32:42] Speaker B: Like basically, to phrase it another way, like, how quickly can you introduce new ideas into these tools outputs? Is that what you're asking? [00:32:50] Speaker A: Yeah, kind of. Yeah, that's, that's a way to put it. [00:32:52] Speaker B: I don't know. I don't think I have the experience to answer that question. I think, I think, I mean, it's like I've seen quick wins in geo, particularly in less competitive spaces where you throw up a good article and, or like immediate and maybe supported with a media interview on a good authoritative site or something and then you just like dominate a niche chatgpt query. So I think my answer is probably temporal where it's easier now probably with influence AI and as the whole industry as, as basically marketing teams mature and adapt it's, it's going to get super optimized and in a few years, in a couple years it's going to be a lot harder to win in the same way that investment grew over time in SEO and it professionalized and became very competitive. And that will happen but there maybe will still be a little bit more randomness with AI and unpredictability overall the bigger budgets will do better but there will be maybe more exceptions and outliers. [00:34:06] Speaker A: I think that's a reasonable answer And I'm thinking of my interview with Jason Bernard of Kalicube of his view that you have kind of within Google and he's certain, you know, he proposed that LLM tools are developing this as well of you have the training data set, you have their knowledge graph and then you have the Internet of citations that they can tap into. And so they're more readily, it's more readily easy to get influence because they're much more apt to check for broader amounts of citations. Whereas the qualification to be you know, cited in Google or used as a Google reference or a backlink leading to something that's a much higher bar. [00:34:57] Speaker B: So I can give an example for this actually I myself I had been hearing the claim that ChatGPT to trap referral traffic to your website from ChatGPT was much more engaged and higher value, higher converting than other sources, particularly Google. And I wanted to, I've been like hearing that as a rumor. I wanted to go find actual large sample research showing that and I Googled that question like a kind of, you know, a long query, new new age style query in Google asking for research that showed this. And there was one case study, there was a blog with case study from I forget what relatively well known marketing agency that dominated the results. Like was this brand was directly mentioned in the overview. It was the number one citation of only like three citations. There was like three or four different ways that this, this brand and this article was showing up in the AI overview and, and the citations and you go and you click through to that article and it was a case study with one data point. This marketing agency wrote about the bump. [00:36:15] Speaker C: In engagement from ChatGPT referral traffic for one client. And so like that's not a good result. [00:36:23] Speaker B: Like we don't, we don't want to be forming our, our like sense of reality based on a sample of one. But Google gave, ascribed so much authority to this, to this one study. The cool thing by the way was that they, I got the attention accidentally of the guy who wrote the article on Reddit and he immediately like added more client case, like they had more data and they added more client case studies to the article. [00:36:49] Speaker A: Well that's good, that's good. It's also, it's as good as it is scary of like, hey, he had more data to back it up. But yeah, no, I had heard those rumors as well. [00:37:02] Speaker B: This was a Google problem, to be clear, not the website's problem. [00:37:07] Speaker A: No, no, it's, it is kind of an artifact of the day of like, hey, one person said it about one thing and what would have been just treated as an anecdote because it gets cited in the LLM results in the AI overview, it's somehow now part of the accepted knowledge graph and it'll be very hard for anybody to challenge that going forward because now it'll be counterfactual, you know, pushing back against an established data. [00:37:39] Speaker B: And by the way, there are other studies that were at this point a month ago or so there were some other articles which I later found, people, people showed me that did have the same finding about ChatGPT referral traffic and were based on larger data sets and they didn't show up at all in that initial Google search. [00:38:01] Speaker A: So it is probably more true than less true that probably that traffic is more qualified. I mean you can follow the thread of the logic, but often, you know, just making presumptions, you know, that's not a scientific approach. It seems like we're becoming more prone to that as a culture of falling prey to a single data point. [00:38:27] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean maybe this gets into bigger picture, bigger picture challenges like just the amount of information we have access to and that none of us can handle vetting all those sources and figuring out what's credible. [00:38:41] Speaker A: Yeah, there's. It used to be very simple in 2005 to tell the difference between, you know, a crackpot site on GeoCities is not a good reference point versus, you know, MIT or Harvard. But now we have diluted authority so much. We have, you know, multiple inputs needed to get any particular data point out there. But also it's way easier to fake than ever. A bit of a downer note, but tell me what you're hopeful for as we kind of wrap this up. What are you looking forward to in marketing? Working with your clients or a success or something that you're kind of seeing that you're excited about? [00:39:34] Speaker B: I'm excited about AI. I mean it's an opportunity for the flexible, the adaptable to figure out what it means for them, figure out what it means for your world and learn and adapt. I'm excited to have the marketing have GEO as like a subfield mature and develop some clear playbooks. I still feel like it's so experimental. It's still experimental for the people who understand the very best and have access to lots of data, which means of course it's even more experimental for us small agencies. But I'm excited to see more studies come out and to see more hands on, see kind of more of these virtuous. [00:40:28] Speaker C: Mutually supporting programs of your traditional SEO and your like a Reddit engagement and your digital PR have seeing those things come together into like co programs and you see some of the like positive feedback loops that you can create among those tactics. [00:40:48] Speaker A: Awesome. Tell us a little bit about where people can find you, a little bit about your company. Is there a particular social channel you hang out on where people can see what you're thinking? [00:40:59] Speaker B: Yeah, Adrian Dahln is my name. My company is search to sale. SearchToSale IO is our website. In terms of social, I'm on LinkedIn the most. I co host a podcast that's not really focused on marketing or SEO, but it's called the Shift to Freedom, which is a podcast for small business owners and it's kind of oriented around mindset and strategy and personal growth. It's kind of like a holistic podcast for small business owners and managing themselves, managing their teams, managing their lives, managing their thoughts. We talk a lot about philosophy and core values and books and self improvement. That's called the Shift to Freedom podcast. Everywhere you get your podcasts and yeah, search to sale. We're B2B full service SEO Ngeo agency and we're particularly good at the data and strategy pieces of this puzzle. So we have our own proprietary software that pulls data from different sources, does your keyword research and helps both plan and monitor content on your site. And then, and then we're great at helping marketing teams then make decisions about like what is the next month's batch of content we're going to work on. And then planning pretty tactically page by page we go through a whole checklist of things including how to incorporate key messaging, how to optimize for answer engine optimization, AKA like snippetable content, optimize for conversion and stuff. And yeah, we're getting more into Reddit and digital PR and everything. [00:42:45] Speaker A: Fantastic. Thanks so much for the great conversation and your time. Make sure all those resources are linked in the show notes. Thanks for coming off. [00:42:52] Speaker B: Thank you very much.