Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted SEO podcast host. I'm here with Bannas, who's going to introduce himself. He's a freelancer. Give us some of your background, some of your credentials and experience. That should make you trustworthy.
[00:00:17] Speaker B: Sure. So I'm Banaslanowicz from a small Lithuanian country in Europe, and I've been freelancing and doing SEO for the past, like, 10 years now. So kind of SEO is my bread and butter. I've sort of started with my own site, started with, like, some random articles, and then worked with, you know, large e commerce shops or SaaS companies, and kind of went full circle. And right now I'm actually transitioning from trying to be just a freelancer since I feel I. I've. I reached all of my limits to now building an actual marketing agency.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: Fantastic. Which niche do you enjoy the most?
I would say which you have the most experience in. But I know that just because you have a lot of experience optimizing one vertical doesn't mean that you enjoy it as much as another.
[00:01:11] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that is definitely true. So I am, for example, I worked with, for example, a lot of SaaS companies, but I found that working with them, although it's pretty interesting, it's pretty rewarding. Very limiting in terms of sort of my ability to scale. Like, they usually have a lot of teams, like the website. The product is very complicated. So the whole SEO strategy requires a lot of my time and effort. And although I can provide a lot of value to them, at the end of the day, I might only have like one or two clients like that per month, and then I cannot scale.
What I found is working with clients that I don't need to spend a huge amount of time, but can provide an outsized value. So, for example, right now I'm trying to target keynote speakers, book offers, and coaches as sort of the people that need SEO services.
[00:02:10] Speaker A: It's funny that, you know, often the cobbler has no shoes. You know, you know, if you're a tailor, your kids are running around in rags, and, you know, a lot of the coaches, a lot of the people that are out there, you know, out of the past, you know, five or six guests that. That I've had that have been keynote speakers or specifically business coaches, you know, I go to their site and it's not as robust or as thorough as it could be or should be when it comes to SEO. And I think that's just maybe a different skill set, Right?
[00:02:48] Speaker B: I suppose so, yeah. I mean, they, as far As I found, they don't really sort of care about that stuff. They don't really understand that stuff.
Especially like keynote speakers, you know, they're from another world of networking and you know, maybe even social media, maybe LinkedIn. This is what sort of gets them all of the leads and sales in my personal experience and website is usually an afterthought. Some people do optimize for that a bit better than others. But I mean honestly there is a huge opportunity for a lot of speakers and since they don't have a lot of optimization whenever I come in, it's pretty easy to provide some really great results for their websites, especially since the keywords they're targeting are not usually that difficult. So that's also a big benefit to.
[00:03:43] Speaker A: Swing back what you said about SaaS earlier, I kind of had a mid career jump up when I joined Raven Tools, which is a very large SEO SaaS, kind of a competitor to Moz in those early days and worked extensively with them. They got bought out by another company, ended up coming back and working again with that SaaS. And you're right, there is kind of this intricate dance for SEO and optimization because a lot of it relies on future releases that are coming out and being attuned to their product management, product marketing schedule. And many of them are mostly doing their marketing by doing feature releases and that can take a lot of management. I've done my own level of freelance consulting for a number of different SaaS companies and it is very hard to always get into the different teams and bring back the value and give that value add to a subscription based SaaS program that has specific goals, particularly if it's like a lower dollar subscription amount, almost has, has as many headaches as when you get into the enterprise level SaaS world. You know, it's still a big like at that level then it's an even bigger beast because then it's a lot of multi team work and working with multiple departments just to.
I even had scenarios where I had to submit Jira tickets to edit the website.
Like, come on, how hard is it to edit a meta description? Well, you gotta write a ticket, you gotta wait in the development queue and then wait, you know, not piss off the lead chief developer so that you actually get development time to do your 15, 20 meta titles. And it's like how can I deliver on, you know, an expensive monthly retainer when I'm limited to.
You can do, here's 15 tickets. Okay, you're doing five of them. Great. I'm just right here. I'LL be out here writing 10 times more SEO tickets than we have the bandwidth to implement.
[00:06:02] Speaker B: Right.
I had the same exact experience that you just described. And I mean they usually, in my experience, they also like, especially if they're in sort of their growth phase, they usually change a lot of things. So a lot of like new features then require a lot of homepage changes, then they change the copywriting, then they change how they actually like market themselves. This is not a good way for an SEO. If you're trying to build something long term, if you want to be known for a specific sort of in a specific niche or for specific keywords and then they change completely that now we're kind of shifting towards another direction.
I found it to be very difficult also. There are so many stakeholders that it's so difficult to please everyone.
There are people that care about numbers, there are developers that care about the whole other thing. So it's just managing all of that, it's a tough process. That's why I kind of decided not to work with any other SaaS projects, as lucrative as they can be, they're very time consuming and I figured that my time can be better spent sort of solving some other clients problems or even just doing something that is way more scalable than this.
[00:07:29] Speaker A: Which of the three major domains do you gravitate towards in SEO? I kind of break it down towards technical SEO and infrastructure content focus, SEO, content marketing, on page strategy and then link building and off page strategy. Which of those three domains you know are you most attracted to?
[00:07:57] Speaker B: Personally, I don't know.
It did change sort of over time, so I believe right now it's probably more content side.
Like that's on page content side. That's the one that is probably the most useful in my line of work with the clients that I work for. Like these days link building seems to be, you know, kind of solved to a point where it's, I mean yes, you can come up with a very sort of unique ways of doing links, especially if you sort of, if you're doing that for a very high level and stuff. But to be honest, I don't, you know, that seems very basic to me these days. And technical aspect, although interesting, I also found that there are like limits to what my interests are. So again I worked with some very complicated technical SEO projects. But for me that also didn't really was not kind of my thing. So I think I landed in the middle here.
[00:09:03] Speaker A: Matt Brooks of Seoteric, a friend of mine, said ChatGPT is your most popular but least trained customer support representative.
How, when you're approaching that content question, how do you bake in the technical capabilities and scale probabilities of leveraging LLM based tools while not falling into that obvious pitfall of hallucination, lack of authority, lack of authenticity that can come out of over reliance on it in generating your marketing materials?
[00:09:50] Speaker B: Good question. So I'm very sort of still I don't use that much AI in sort of my workflow. I sort of try to always sort of add things little by little. I'm not the one sort of to jump in first and try things out because usually the first versions, the first things, you know, they change a lot, things break a lot. So I'm usually the one who steps back, looks at, sort of lets other people figure out some stuff and then sort of takes what works and sort of that's how I kind of implement into my workflow. So although I do use AI in some sense in some workflows, it's still like more like a brainstorming tool, more like a first draft tool that you take in to basically make some things quicker or something edits faster. But it's not the sort of at least right now in the way I see AI working for my workflow, it doesn't not yet provide sort of the end result that I can sort of copy, paste and implement. Maybe that will come later, but for now it's more on the basic side.
[00:11:06] Speaker A: Do you have any clients that are knocking on your door and talking about the opposite side of LLMs and AI overviews and saying hey, how do I gain visibility in these platforms? What, what can you do to make sure we show up in GPT perplexity and these various engines. And what's your common, you know, advice on that side?
[00:11:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean this is probably the most common questions from all the clients or potential clients that are coming up to me there. Everyone wants to now rank and be sort of on any type of AI overviews or AI search in general.
What I've found and what I see sort of working right now, we're still so the biggest problem with AI is probably tracking. So even though first thing I need to explain to our clients that there are some things we can do to actually improve your odds for you appearing on AI search. But the problem is that it's very difficult to track.
I feel that at some point ChatGPT might release something similar to Google Search Console where we will get some kind of clicks or impressions data as time goes on. It feels kind of inevitable at some point to have this sort of thing available to us. But for now, tracking is one of the major sort of problems to actually monitoring what is happening. Yes, there are tools out there, but I mean, probably half of them are not really providing you with any real tangible results based on the way AI works. So that's very difficult to track. So that's the first thing that I kind of explain clients and then as part of what actually works for now, it seems to be quite basic, as in like backlinks, PR mentions on social media. The more, for example, your name is out there, the more likely the AI is going to just catch it and then use it in their answers.
And it's, at least right now it seems to be kind of based on how Google worked like, you know, 10, 15 years ago, where like, if your site has one more backlink than your competitor, you're going to rank higher. It feels like, I mean, it's not as simple as that, but it feels like it's working in the same direction where if somebody's mentioned just more times, AI is more likely just to catch that and reference you in their answers without giving much thought for, like, further thought if that's, you know, sort of the right. And the right, like person or company to be mentioned.
[00:13:42] Speaker A: Yeah, I saw a study that looked at how frequently does ChatGPT perplexity Claude AI overviews actually provide the same answer to the query to different people.
And it's light 25% or less.
[00:14:05] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:14:06] Speaker A: So even if you do, you know, like, there's. That's such a different math than the predictability of, hey, with rankings, you know, it's, it may fluctuate to some small degree. But generally speaking, if you're ranking number three, you're generally ranking number three. It's not, you're not 60% of the time. It works every time from Anchorman.
[00:14:36] Speaker B: But you know the interesting part. So I mean, I do mention the same thing to the clients that, you know, even if, you know, you type in something and you appear doesn't mean that the next person in the next location with the next history is going to type in and you're going to appear. But they just, they say, I don't care. I still want to be there. Even if it's like 25% of the time, I still want to be there 25% of the times.
For in terms of clients, they look very like, you know, simply at this. Yeah, okay, that's a limitation. I still want to be, you know, appear in, you know, whatever times I can appear on the AI search.
[00:15:12] Speaker A: Yeah, an interesting challenge for that was somebody was saying, hey, all of these, the answers for this niche are all referencing government resources. You know, do I have any chance of showing up in it? And I said, well, it becomes a different game because, you know, this came up in my conversation with Alejandro Meerhans as we dug in on, you know, he's from GetMe Links.
And so if you understand that LLMs have like a training database, right, for basic queries, if they cannot get the answer from that, then they'll do a Google search and look at the list of sites as like a first tier, second tier. If they can't find it in the first tier of quality sites that are coming up in the citations, then they'll dig even deeper.
So it's really about trying to get your own stuff as well as other stuff, ranking for a set of queries and getting ranked and cited on sites and that are either A tier or B tier. So there's kind of a behind the scenes ranking game at play of like, hey, what if we focused as much on, you know, getting not just articles out into the wind, but then trying to get them ranked even though they're not on our site. Because if they, if this article ranks and you're the number one, you know, if it's a listicle and you're the number one resource for, you know, home suppliers or sunroom builders in Cookeville, and that's an article that's not on your site, when somebody's doing that research, it's more likely to use that third party citation as an augment.
And if that site, if you get it placed on a trusted site, then, you know, that's even better. So it's almost like thinking about digital visibility is less centric just to the website, but more towards the entity.
[00:17:32] Speaker B: Yeah, to be honest, I think we're moving into a world where it's probably, if the AI really takes off as it does, we're probably moving into a much different place where we might start to lose clicks, but impressions will start to matter a lot more. Basically kind of the same way it does on social media. If we take like Instagram and stuff like that, nobody really tracks, you know, you know, the amount of clicks that somebody goes to a website. It's more like, oh, I know that person and I will DM them from any means possible. And basically what people track is the amount of views or just impressions that they get on their profile. I feel that we might move to a world where with websites that might also become more of a reality, like direct traffic is going to increase a lot more since people are going to find you with all of these places, they might not actually click through, so you might not get any referrals and stuff like that. But if you're a brand, you might start seeing sort of a lot more direct traffic and talking about the LLMs and sort of what they look at like, funny thing is, but for example, in the keynote speaking business, like speaker bureaus and all of these different sort of speaker type articles where they have listicles, that is what ChatGPT and other AI searches seems to reference a lot. So for you to be on ChatGPT, you basically need to be on either the speaker bureau's websites or you need to be on those listicles because that seems to be sort of one of the primary sources. Well, in this particular niche, so you probably in every single niche you need to find what does ChatGPT reference the most, what does it trust? Is it a government website, is it some listicles?
What is the most common thing? And you need to insert yourself. But that does change how like we view link building, you know, so because now it's not necessarily like, as you said, it's like you want to place something somewhere, but then you also want that page ranked since that is how LLMs catched it and that's how you appear on AI search. So it does add some, that, you know, extra layer for the future of link building where it might be a bit more complicated than just getting a link on a certain site.
[00:19:57] Speaker A: I think the benefit though is you can just ask ChatGPT, what were your sources for this? Who did you cite? If you try to get that out of Google, they'll shoot you.
[00:20:09] Speaker B: Oh yeah. I mean, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's a cool little thing. You can basically ask AI anything and it will provide you with even now.
[00:20:18] Speaker A: Whether or not it's accurate.
[00:20:20] Speaker B: You know, I think it's gonna, you know, the more time passes, it's gonna get more and more accurate. So I think what we're playing with is the, probably the worst version it will ever be. So, you know, in that sense it feels like, I mean we might get, you know, winner, might not get there as like very fast and might be very small incremental like changes in terms of how good it is. But I feel like we're still kind of going upwards, not downwards, random.
[00:20:49] Speaker A: Do you think that you know somebody who's looking at SEO and would you recommend that they try freelancing in SEO These days, Like if they were.
[00:21:05] Speaker B: Oh yeah, yeah, I don't know, it's nowadays it's like, it's a very. Since SEO is like evolving and we're not sure where is, I mean like a year or two years ago there was a lot more fear about SEO is dead, AI is going to take over.
A few years past we've seen that. Okay. I mean that hype not really realized. And I mean it's still sort of kind of same old, same old, but a bit new.
But still we are moving through some kind of search engine transition and I'm not sure where that's going to land. So in a sense it's very difficult to suggest because it might be one of the best times to jump in.
If you jump in and you start learning LLM and in 5, 6, 7 years time we see that AI search is now we are able to optimize it for the same way we sort of used to do for Google, and you can provide results to your clients, then this might be the perfect time to jump in. But I mean the future is a bit uncertain.
Me and you, we've been in this industry for decades now, so probably a lot easier for us since we have established case studies and we have established like clients and we know sort of what works in terms of the usual SEO. But if you're just jumping in, I don't know, I would be cautious recommending somebody to jump in like at this point because it's a lot riskier than doing something else. Because on the other hand, if, let's say AI works in a way where it does delete some part of search engine optimization and you cannot really optimize beyond certain limit for AI search, then you're learning a skill that is probably going to be very difficult to then make money from freelancing. So it's a very tough one.
[00:23:04] Speaker A: What are some common traps and mistakes that you see your consultees running into in the past, say five years?
[00:23:22] Speaker B: Mistakes? I don't know, it's just, I don't think I have any specific mistakes that they kind of make. It feels like just that they majority of them don't really haven't done any sort of SEO at all. Like it's like a lot of people that come to me, it's either people that know SEO existed, they had their site for like a decade or something and they wrote articles and it just naturally accumulated a lot of sort of backlinks and the like accidentally sort of wrote a lot of articles and now everything just needs to Be like optimized in a very sort of simple terms. And that sort of produces an outstanding result because you already have a very strong website. You just don't know it and don't know what to do with it. So it's kind of, in most cases it's just not knowing what to do or you don't have time to deal with that. So that's why it's sort of the, you want somebody else to sort of take care of it. So it's mostly like, like a lot of little details that they don't care about on their website that actually make a huge difference. That makes sense.
[00:24:38] Speaker A: What would you say is your go to element that you're going to be fixing first, you know, somebody comes on board with you, what aspect of their campaign are you, are you prioritizing as we kind of wrap up this interview?
[00:24:57] Speaker B: Yeah.
So for, I'm going to talk from the perspective of keynote speakers since this is the ones that I kind of now focus on. Because if we take different websites, you approach E commerce site way differently than you approach SaaS and or you approach like a personal branding site. So first thing, usually what I found is probably the, the biggest one is all of the titles, meta titles of the website. Usually people don't even have them. If they have them, they don't have their name, they don't have their main. Like imagine you are like a speaker that sort of wants to target keywords such as leadership. Keynote speaker. They don't even have leadership anywhere mentioned on their website because they want to differentiate themselves and it's like own your mind or you don't have the keyword. So although for somebody that does SEO, that sounds like the most basic thing ever. This is why I kind of in a certain way enjoy working with keynote speakers since you do most basic SEO stuff and it works instantly and then it provides them really good results and they start ranking for some keywords. So the first thing I look at is just do you actually mention the keywords in the titles and the text? I mean we don't need a lot but like if you want to rank for this keyword, we need to have a landing page for that keyword and we need to have it, you know, on your homepage and just a bit more branding in terms of it. So that's the first thing. That's probably the highest ROI thing that I do for my clients. Whenever, sort of they come on.
[00:26:38] Speaker A: Fundamentals. Fundamentals, Fundamentals. No, if you're learning karate and boxing, it's footwork. If it's SEO, then it's headers, title tags, and did you actually say what you do? And I could see the trap too of, oh, you know, I'm not just another keynote speaker re envisioning your mind space for 2026. You know, they want to. It's the age. It's kind of like an age old battle of, you know, fighting with designers and salespeople to get the text on the homepage. You know, they want to emphasize, oh, you know, the customer support's fantastic and we, you know, we really deliver results. You're like, dude, that's the same sales catchphrase from a trash delivery truck to a major restaurant brand.
So like, if you're saying the same thing, you're not saying anything.
[00:27:36] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it's just having this sort of fundamentals done is what makes what can produce some good results for sure.
[00:27:46] Speaker A: Well, thanks for your time. I know you're freelance consulting, working on setting up that agency. Is there a particular social network people can find you on? Is it LinkedIn?
[00:27:56] Speaker B: I'm guessing it's either LinkedIn or YouTube. So I mean, on LinkedIn it's more sort of professional, geared towards sort of keynote speakers and case studies and all of that stuff.
YouTube, it's more relaxed. I talk about my freelancing journey, I talk about how I'm building an agency. So just a lot of freelancing, entrepreneurship and agency type of content. So whatever sort of is your pick. That's the social media. You can go.
[00:28:23] Speaker A: All right, thanks for stopping by.
[00:28:25] Speaker B: Okay, thanks for having me.
