Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello. Welcome to the Unscripted SEO Podcast. I'm your host, Jeremy Rivera. I'm here with Nick Jain. Why don't you give yourself a quick introduction and then we'll get started.
[00:00:10] Speaker B: Sure. I'm Nick, the CEO of IdeaScale. We are the largest innovation software company on the planet. Been around about 15 years, served major companies and organizations like Pfizer, Doctors by The Borders, Comcast, U.S. post Office, Transportation Safety Authority, the guys in the blue shirts at the airport, and organizations all over the world. And our software basically helps them innovate much better and faster. And we're proud to have been doing it for a long time.
[00:00:33] Speaker A: So when it comes to the arena of search SEO, what's your experience there and what's your current approach to clients on that side?
[00:00:43] Speaker B: Sure. So we have some pretty cool stories to share about SEO. When I joined IdeaScale, we basically had no SEO presence whatsoever. Even though we'd been around 15 years and had built a multiple million dollar global business, we had no SEO presence from early 2023 through mid 2023, I think 15x our SEO traffic and today we have approximately 10 times more, or sorry, 8 times more organic web traffic than all of our 9 top 9 competitors combined. So extraordinary success on the SEO front. I can go into how we did that, but like, yes, we have a ton of experience at doing SEO and doing SEO well with great results here.
[00:01:19] Speaker A: So is it mostly like a content marketing strategy, link building? Like what's your.
[00:01:25] Speaker B: Sure. So we've done primarily on the content side. We haven't done much of the link building. And by the way, we did this entirely in house, so we didn't hire any agencies. We basically did it with 1, 1 full time employee plus like 0.2, you know, 20% of my time. And yeah, we didn't pay for any backlinks, no bot forms, none of that. Pretty much entirely through content.
[00:01:44] Speaker A: Is there a particular style or approach? Like are you doing listicles? Like what type of, what does your process look like? How do you approach the market from that side?
[00:01:54] Speaker B: Sure. Pretty much all of our content is put just on our company blog. Actually, I'll lay out a few elements of our strategy. Number one is we pretty much all of our content sits on the blog. Secondly, it is all genuine, valuable content, not what I call thinly veiled advertising. So if you go read an idea scale blog entry, our area of a domain expertise is innovation. So it'll have really cool articles on innovation and, and none of them will even mention IdeaScale. So it's not like advertising for us. It's literally if you want the best resource on how to do a Fishbone diagram or how to create an innovation culture, the Basically the top three resources on the Internet are IdeaScale, Wikipedia and Harvard Business Review. So we're always top three because we put out just amazing content. That's tier element number two. Element number three is almost all of the articles are. Sorry, number three is kind of the tools. The way our primary tool was SEMrush combined with some fancy Excel math that we did in order to take the SEMrush content and figure out which of it we should chase versus not when.
[00:02:54] Speaker A: It comes to creating that content. Are you like attributing individual authorship to those articles and trying to boost and create author profiles for the people that create that or do you attribute it or is authorship more of like a idea scale centric idea where you have like a generic profile?
[00:03:13] Speaker B: I think we have three different chunks of content of authorship. Firstly is generic idea scale content. Okay. Which is attributed to, for lack of a better word, a random idea scale employee who wants to own that piece of content. Second is actually attributed stuff. So if there's people at IdeaScale. Oh, sorry, this is still within IdeaScale. Second is idea scale employees who have a domain of expertise and want to talk about it, they do publish blog articles. So I've published like five or six blog articles under my own name that I'm proud of saying. Like, this is something that I, Nick, I'm an expert on and feel passionate enough to say talk about. When one is on product design, one is on what I call the three legged stool of innovation cultures. A couple other topics and then the third is our guest contributor program. So one of the things we've done is we have opened up our blog and said to external experts who have no affiliation with IdeaScale and said you can publish on IdeaScale's blog, which again has insane amount of traffic. So you get a lot of notoriety. You don't have to pay us anything for it. We're not gonna pay you anything for it. So there's no money changing hands. We only have two requirements. Number one, that it be a legit article and number two, it not be sorry it'd be on topic. So, you know, if you want to talk about, let's say whale fishing in Japan, we're not the right place to do that. If you want to talk about innovation, we're a great place to do it. And by good content I mean again, it can't be thinly veiled advertising. So we have Columbia Business School Professors, we have two CEOs, we have government officials, like senior government officials, all publishing great content under their own authorship and they can build on a profile. Again, we only have two standards. It's gotta be a legitimate article and it's gotta be on topic.
[00:04:50] Speaker A: Definitely makes sense. And it's also a good way to also, you know, like I was just talking with the previous interviewee about accessing audience and that in SEO we can kind of get narrowed down to looking at everybody else and everything else that ranks as competitors because it's, hey, there can be only one, you know, like there's 10, 10, you know, blue links. But really when you break it down like other people ranking other people have audience already. So what do you think about the idea of function of SEO being actually finding ways to access audience through participation through co marketing.
[00:05:31] Speaker B: So one of the reasons that's actively one of the reasons why we opened up kind of this external contributor program, there were two core reasons. Number one is apologies. Sorry, my battery just started going crazy. I just have to plug plug into a different charger. I apologize for that.
[00:05:45] Speaker A: No worries, it's an unscrewable show. Anything can happen.
[00:05:49] Speaker B: No, I'm plugged in, but I think my plug just died on me. Thankfully I always have a spare plug because I'm paranoid about electronics.
Okay, so the reason why we opened up an external contributor program is two reasons. Number one is we said we didn't want to be an echo chamber of our own great ideas about innovation. We know that there's people who have different approaches or different, maybe even fundamentally contradicting approaches. So content that we would not have put out ourselves either because we disagree with it or because we're not experts on that subdomain. That was reason number one. Reason number two was exactly what you said, accessing different audiences. So if a Columbia Business School professor is promoting the content that she's put on our on our blog, that's enabling us to get in front of a different audience that we may not have Otherwise. And again, 99% of the audience who comes to our blog reads it, consumes the free information we've given, and leave it has no interaction with ideascale, the company. But again, 1%, the 1% is what matters to us. They're the ones who eventually become prospects or customers. And we've been very successful.
[00:06:46] Speaker A: Yeah, it's kind of looking at that bottom of the funnel of for all of the search and value like I know you know at least three or four different sites where they get hundreds of thousands of visits, but really there's only a couple hundred or so search queries that drive conversions. So with that in mind, like that top of funnel, how do you approach architecture or driving people to places where they convert or grabbing their email, which is. What's your approach there as far as keeping that?
[00:07:18] Speaker B: Sure. So a couple of things, right. Firstly that same. I want to be careful. Yes. There's only a couple, you know, let's say 100 out of our 200,000 visitors every month, like 100 people out of 200,000 become active leads immediately. That's true. Right. The vast majority of them are end up being top of funnel. But there's some huge benefits to that. When again, when you search for the word innovation or anything related to innovation, whether it be in the French language, in Chinese, in English or any related keyword, you're going to come across us. So we have huge top of funnel presence. And that does make a difference. Because when anybody is trying to get educated on this topic or figure out what not just great software, what great process, what great consulting firms, they're going to run across us. And notice we are experts in this field, we are literally the best in the world at doing this area of human expertise. And that has value because when our sales, you know, when somebody's looking at our competitors, it's not just that they run across SEO. They realize, hey, these are the smartest guys in the room, at least we should talk to them. So we do have a huge benefit from top of Funnel. And then secondly is, you know, this gets into attribution analysis. It's often difficult to say, hey, those top of funnel, you know, non intense search based queries, how much value do they bring? And candidly, we don't go into the math of like trying to put value to that because that's a super complex mathematical task. We just don't. But we recognize that has value to us. Whether you call it branding value, whether you call it credibility value, that does have value to us. And we. So therefore we focus equivalently, I would say both on that top of funnel as well as bottom funnel. And then once they get to our website, the way we try and create value for ourselves from that marketing process is kind of two or threefold. Number one, we collect that data obviously, right. We know everyone, assuming the cookies are enabled, who's coming to our website and that gets logged into our CRM and then we keep track of them. Hey, and if They've engaged enough. Then we start sending them marketing content. Otherwise they're just an email that we don't bother because we don't want to spam. Number two is for people who have an active intent. We make it very easy for them to do two things that we want. Number one is we want them to talk to sales. Number two, we want them to use the free version of our software. And our software, by the way we intentionally, we're unique in our industry. We give away our software completely to free for small teams. So if you're literally at a billion dollar company and you want to try out our software, it takes you like three clicks and less than 30 seconds to get going. None of our competitors do that and that's great. We want you to get used to using our software and realize why it's awesome. Then the third is for people who are, we think, you know, we'll do the typical CRM thing if we capture someone's email even if they've not begun engaging aggressively right now, this is an opportunity for our sales team to say hey, John Snow went to IdeaScale's website, viewed these four blog articles. He never, he hasn't been back in like six months but it may still be worth reaching out via LinkedIn or via email or via phone and seeing if he's willing to have a call with you. And sometimes he's not, sometimes he is.
[00:10:03] Speaker A: I can definitely see the value of brand building. I've been having a couple conversations about, you know, as Siri is now hooked into Chat GPT. Chat GPT itself is now hooked into the Bing index. Gemini 2.0 just launched for Google Perplexity is entered the market with AI search. So how do you see the future of that top of funnel as a little bit more of your sandwich gets eaten by that that as a threat or is hey eat that up. Because if you are more aware of our content then that gets cited and then as they actually need something then I've got that presence like what's your thought or approach in a AI search that's going to be evolving over the next couple of years?
[00:10:52] Speaker B: I'll say two things. Firstly, there's an entirely new sub. Just like there was SEO as an emerging talent field, there's now this new emerging field called Geo A Gen A engine optimization. Candidly we have not explored too much into that. We're not great at it. We have, we eventually need to be as a data point by the way, our Gen AI, our Gen AI search engine traffic is growing about 30% per week without us doing anything. That's just because in general it's gen AI is taking market share from traditional search engines, whether that be Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. So that's probably just benefiting us because we are present specifically to generative AI based search engines. Let's go back to why search engines exist. Like why did Google take over the world back in the early 2000s? And it was because they everyone on the Internet wanted, not just everyone on the Internet. People want to be able to access information. Whether that be what's the newest restaurant, what business should I talk to? How do I start a business? People want to access information and search engines provided an easy and effective way to do so versus what we used to do, which is the Yellow Pages or the White Pages.
Search engines were a better way to do that. Now what generated it was just a better way to access, organize and find the relevant information Genesis, just the next iteration of that. There's not. I don't view gen AI as a downside in any way to search engines because search engines were just categorizing information for us. Gen AIs do that in a different format and in a better way. Like I don't pay for blue or for the blue sponsored links anyways. And do you really care if you are you know, in Google if you're on search page number 25 like that's not a valuable thing. You are only getting, getting value for being on those first couple page, first couple links of Google. And that's going to be true in Gen AI too. Generative is just give, you know, basically cutting out page 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 on Google. That's all it's practically doing. Which is fine because I'm on the page one anyways and anybody who's relevant is on page one anyways too.
[00:12:44] Speaker A: That's it. Yeah, it is kind of a scary prospect to think like literally we could.
[00:12:50] Speaker B: You are basically getting gen AI if you just cut off Google with pages 2 through 10.
[00:12:56] Speaker A: Fair enough.
[00:12:57] Speaker B: The actual algorithm like I'll get, I can get a little technical because I am a tech CEO and I'm a math guy so I understand how the, the, the gen algorithms work in practice. What they are specifically doing for search engines is two things. Number one is they are truncating the amount of data you get so they're cutting out pages two through ten and number two they are communicating it to you in a different presentation format. We're used to this, like here's link One, here's description, link one, here's link two. And they're just changing that to a paragraph format. Nothing else has really changed from a search engine format. Now there's other aspects of life where Genai is making a fundamental change. But for search, Gen AI is just a different website and that is presenting information to you in a different format, but it is not fundamentally changed search.
[00:13:43] Speaker A: I think that's fair enough. Yeah. As far as on the user side, for a practitioner side, I think for.
[00:13:51] Speaker B: Practitioners, it's actually the same quality ranking algorithm. Again, we can get very technical, but the way Genai ranks quality, like what should be at the top of your search query when you ask ChatGPT or Gemini is actually mathematically not that different from Google's ranking algorithm.
So if you are good enough to be at the top of traditional search, you're still going to be at the top of Gen AI for the most part. There's some tweaks and hacks you can do, but the algorithm underlying how those rankings are done is basically the same as and it is not going to change for the next five or 10 years because it's based on literally the same matrix math.
[00:14:26] Speaker A: That's an interesting thought.
[00:14:28] Speaker B: Again, we can go into the math of this, but you can.
[00:14:30] Speaker A: I'd love the math on it. If you're ready to go down that rabbit hole. Let's talk.
[00:14:34] Speaker B: We are like all of search is basically, you know, if you go back to what's called a page rank algorithm, which is what Google originally became famous with, it's basically some fancy matrix math. It's like, how do you have a very, very big block of numbers in a square format that's got a whole bunch of zeros? And that block is not so big, it's not so such a big chunk of data. It's called a sparse matrix. That math. That matrix is the exact same whether you're talking about Google, whether you're talking about nowadays Yahoo, whether you're talking about Gemini, chatgpt perplexity. They are just taking that big block of data and serving it to human as a human being, as an end user in a slightly different format. It's like giving you ice cream that's yellow versus blue. Who cares if the flavor is the same?
[00:15:19] Speaker A: So there's like a lot of work on SEO side of trying to understand and evaluate like the depth and value of links, linking this, links to that and that links to that and, you know, trying to unravel or extrapolate, you know, those transfers of authority are Those the similar structures and systems like that Perplexity or GPT uses as a proxy for authority because that's really what it is like when, when someone is making a recommendation and sorting out, hey, these 10 entities are similar. It's the reputation behind them. In like in real life, I did business with that person and they were terrible or I did business with them and they were good. The proxy for that up until now has been links, both in terms of the anchor text as well as how many links does that guy have? Is that reputable? Do you think that there's that same depth of attention to towards the link algorithm that's fueling AI powered search results or is there more of a substitution towards relevance because they have this language learning model?
[00:16:24] Speaker B: So for the current version of commercial AIs that are out there, whether we're talking Gemini Chatgpt, I don't know as much about perplexities, but definitely Gemini anthropic chatgpt, they are fundamentally, they are not thinking AIs in the sense that they are still ranking things based on some combination of relevance or how they evaluate keywords as being important. Fundamentally that's what these algorithms do. They are what's called predict next step algorithms. They predict the next word in sequence. And that's true for all three Gemini Anthropic and chatgpt. Now I want to distinguish this from the next generation of algorithms which will be thinking algorithms. They will be able to ascertain value as is this a valuable thing? Right. At a more fundamental kind of human level, like is this right or wrong? Is this ethical or not ethical? We're not there today. So the current set of GPTs that are out there are still from, at least from a search perspective. I'm not talking about video generation or there's other aspects where they're phenomenal, they're fundamentally different. But for search specifically, the way these algorithms work is not actually that different from traditional Google type searches today. Until that next generation. I don't mean GPT3. It has to be fundamentally a thinking algorithm. And we don't have those yet.
[00:17:40] Speaker A: No, definitely. There's always like the misnomer or the just calling it AI powered kind of makes people think of data from Star Trek.
[00:17:48] Speaker B: And it's definitely no, these are not thinking machines. It's not artificial intelligence. Like candidly, AI is a great marketing term. We don't have artificial intelligence. We just have a better algorithm than we did three years ago. So language generating content, whether that be language content or video content, we have not Generated AI in any true sense of the word at all.
[00:18:08] Speaker A: Yet as a species I definitely agree with that.
[00:18:12] Speaker B: Marketing buzz aside.
[00:18:14] Speaker A: Yeah, the marketing buzz is always, always grabbing onto that edge and you know, the more the mid journey prompts of all of the robots going on, everything everywhere. But yeah, it is just another interpretation of the algorithm and certainly has its challenges. But the more things change, the more they stay the same. You need reputation, you need brand exposure and you need authority carried by the quality of the content you create. Right.
[00:18:41] Speaker B: So actually there is one thing I will say that's a little bit different. That is the amount of compute power that is going into GPT or into training these generative AI models means they're consuming more data than Google than Google's traditional search did. And what that means is it is getting more and more difficult for SEO or geo engineers to hack. Right. The whole point of SEO as a field was how do we hack or optimize the weaknesses in Google's algorithm. And obviously you have to change that every couple of months when Google changes its search algorithm. That is more difficult with GPTs because they are trained on a larger corpus or body of data which means that there are fewer weaknesses for SEO or geo experts to exploit. So that's going to make it a little, the field is going to just get harder because these are less exploitable or less vulnerable models.
[00:19:31] Speaker A: I think I do object a little bit to be being called a hacker. There is definitely that aspect.
[00:19:38] Speaker B: I'm not, I'm not judging you. We do this too. To be clear, there's no judgment. Right.
[00:19:41] Speaker A: I think it is, I think though it is more of like a maturity too of the industry as well, you know, of looking at how, you know, because we did, you know, as an industry, in my opinion we became very myopically focused on, okay, this is the page and I can add these, move, add the header, move this thing around and optimize, optimize a specific page. But I think pulling back and looking at the bigger system, not just beyond the page but beyond the site itself. And looking at the process of search engine optimization being entity optimization, how well is your brand understood, how well is your company understood and how what is its positioning in the market becomes a much larger game. As you're right, like there's, there is going to be less visibility as we change the marketplace as these third party tools start entering. Google's already evolving, they rush to the market to get their own AI products quickly into the SERP and they're going to continue to have to Evolve because just last week ChatGPT added map results for queries showing locations on a map of where a business was located. And if you know anything about Google, they've treated their map search as kind of a redheaded stepchild. And it's gotten a fraction of a fraction of the attention, you know, is Google places and Google my business and you know, Google this. And it's always been shunted to the side and. But if they're going to come for that marketplace, they're going to come for that capability, then Google's going to respond and the game's going to change either directly or indirectly. So that creates more of a need for SEOs and experts to be, to mature out of, hey, I need to add title tags and internal links.
[00:21:33] Speaker B: Everyone's got title and meta tags down, right?
[00:21:35] Speaker A: Yeah, like, like you can go, like you can use ChatGPT and say, hey, here's the content. Give me a good meta title. And just.
[00:21:43] Speaker B: Which, by the way, we do right when I said we are, we use all the SEO hacks too, literally. Once we do the content, we ask, you know, generative AI to not only optimize the content, but then, then give us all the meta tags and all the keyword stuff or the keywords as well.
[00:21:58] Speaker A: So.
[00:21:59] Speaker B: Right.
[00:21:59] Speaker A: The levers that we're going to need to pull is more about audience acquisition. Looking at, you know, those strategic partnerships where, where is search going that we can tap into in some ways, whether that's getting content placed somewhere else, having a podcast that's talking to other people, exchanging those values and having those conversations. Where do you see those type of processes in the next year?
[00:22:23] Speaker B: Sure. So I'll go back to that generational shift of. Not generational, that broader arc of information, people wanting to access better, higher quality information more quickly, which is going from yellow pages to AltaVista to Google to Now Generative AI. What that arc has meant over time is people get access to, or people consume less but higher quality information on average. Okay, so if you think back to, you know, reading an Encyclopedia Britannica in the 90s, you had to read a lot of paragraphs to find that interesting piece of information. Then you went to Google, then Wikipedia showed up, and now, you know, ChatGPT will give you just that precise answer that you want. If you want to know what was the capital of turkey in the 1740s. I don't have to read the entire history of the country, Turkey, to figure that out. What that's meant is if this arc continues, and I believe it will is that there will be less junk information that will ever show up or get put in front of you. So the demand will be to produce incredibly high quality information that is part of the, that is part of what is served up to the end users. Kind of equivalent to Google snippets, but on steroids because the information will be summarized, reduced and truncated in increasingly more aggressive manner so that the user gets surgically relevant information. Surgically meaning not only relevant to their query, but relevant to the person behind the query. Because these generative AIs are learning about us as individual users.
[00:23:46] Speaker A: So there's always kind of been an unspoken exchange between publishers and site owners of you're going to steal my stuff and in exchange you're going to send me people, you know, like with AI and the growth of zero click results, you know, hey, they're going to eat your sandwich. Do you think that that's, that's fair or we should just cry about it for a bit and then figure out, you know, that kills, that kills jobs. Like there's a whole corner of white collar content creators, freelance writers, businesses, you know, programmatic SEOs, you know, people creating content at scale that are no longer going to be employed because AI is going to come in and do that. So is that just, that's just changing over from the horse and buggy industry to having cars all over the place? I think it's definitely an age is gone.
[00:24:43] Speaker B: Yeah. So I'll, I'll say two things. Firstly, you said there was this exchange between content publishers and content creators. Right. It was an obviously uneasy or forced exchange. Right. For the first 10 years of the Internet, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal were perfectly fine with Google, you know, driving content to their website to start showing search results. And then these media companies started suing Google saying like you're basically no one's clicking on us because they just read the summary of the article that you show and they don't even come to our website. So it's never been a healthy relationship and has been a healthy. There's a reason why one of them is a trillion dollar company and one of them are like billion dollar companies. Because it has never been an equal or symbiotic relationship. It's very much been parasitic. And the tech companies have won out on as the propagators or owners of the information, far more so than the content creators. And this will, this I think is going to continue. And you're absolutely right. Certain jobs are just not going to exist. And we've already seen that happening even before GPTs, right? That once upon a time having a lot of content was valuable. And then we and you a large, large organizations had in house content creators. Then those jobs started shifting to freelance agencies such as the Fivers of the World. And then as other parts of the world had gained better English language competency and better Internet access, some of those jobs started shifting overseas. So there's great content producers sitting in Ukraine or Japan or India that are producing content for western companies in English or French or German or whatever westernized language there are. And now we're moving in an additional way where ChatGPT can generate just great content. Like I know nothing about video editing. Last night I made a 30 second video that looked better than probably the average college kid could do and took me 30 seconds. Why would I pay somebody 300? Yeah, it may not be exactly perfect, but it's at zero the cost.
And so yes, jobs are going to go away and that is kind of, you use the term horse and buggy, but technology necessarily destroys some jobs, right? Jobs. Horse car drivers are just not a job anymore because we invented the car and you know, unfortunately taxi drivers and truck drivers is, that is the next iteration on the car driving side where we're moving to autonomous vehicles. That same transition where technology eliminates certain jobs is going to continue in our respective industries as well.
[00:26:51] Speaker A: So then the response to that is showing the true humanity, you know, because the one thing that AI, that generative AI truly won't be able to do is replicate genuine human experience. At least not for, not, not for.
[00:27:06] Speaker B: Another like couple generations, one to one to 10 years. We're, we're not that far away.
[00:27:10] Speaker A: Right?
[00:27:10] Speaker B: But you're right and that's like at a fundamental level and I'm probably far more aggressive as a futurist here. Gen AI at some point again, when these properly thinking machines come out and we're not there yet, they're going to take away what's been special about humanity throughout all of history. That we are thinking, feeling, you know, wet biological machines. And that has huge economic implications for us as a society and that has huge spiritual implications for a society. Because I'm not special. As the only like living creature on this planet that can think. That's basically what differentiates me versus a monkey. Now that a machine can think or feel, how am I special? What purpose do I have in life? Hey, do I have a job? Like there's, that's why these things are very serious concerns about at the spiritual and economic level. That's why ideas such as universal basic income are being tossed around because they are going to become relevant when people don't have a job, they can do that a machine can't do for a millionth the cost.
[00:28:02] Speaker A: Yeah, and we just got.
[00:28:04] Speaker B: And that's true for all, not just, you know, SEO industry, for a lot of white collar industries. We're getting there rapidly and it is on the horizon for our in within our lifetimes.
[00:28:14] Speaker A: I've thought that. Personally, I haven't yet talked to someone else who had that same idea.
[00:28:20] Speaker B: And it's not a matter of whether we like it. By the way, I don't like this, but it is where we are headed. It is kind of the culmination of our, you know, technological prowess or technological ego at some point, Whether it be one years or 20 years, I have no idea.
[00:28:34] Speaker A: Well, stepping back from the heady edge of what could be a very pessimistic concept, the implications of that are probably worth hours worth of discussion argument, you know, ethical considerations all concern. But let's pare it back to maybe, you know, as we kind of wrap up here, what would be like two solid action items? Maybe they're things you're already working on with your team. As we look at this changing landscape of potentially moving from just LLM based AI to the next phase as well as the change of search, what are you doing to future proof at your organization? And what would SEOs who are listening to this heady conversation about the death of humanity in the future want to think about? As far as implementation, I'll give two pieces of advice.
[00:29:25] Speaker B: One is I think a lot of SEO experts again get caught up into the hacks. And I don't mean this in a pejorative sense, but it's like all the little things like how do you optimize your meta tags? At the end of the day, what all the search engines, whether they be traditional search engines or the LLMs in the world, are doing is they're trying to serve relevant content to the end user and they're going to get smarter and better doing that. So they're going to undo your hacks. The best way to do well in SEO or GEO is to have great relevant content that is relevant to the end user. You can't hack your way around that. Even if you can for like a day or a week. When the algorithm gets updated, you fundamentally they're going to break your hack. You need to have great content. So that's number one. Like hacks will not change the fact that these engines are Their fundamental purpose is to give the user what he or she is asking for. And the best way to win as a company, as an organization, as a SEO person, is to actually generate that content. That's number one. Number two is the. There's a broader macro trend that is separate from search, is where are human beings spending their time. If you look, and I'll give a quick historical, like 200 years ago, we spent a lot of time as a species reading and watching plays because guess what, we didn't have tv, we didn't have Internet, we didn't have video games, we didn't have movies. Theater started dying in the early 1900s. Why? Because all of a sudden that's really expensive to produce a theater filled with 300 people. You create one movie, you film it once, and all of a sudden you can reach 100 million people. So the golden age of cinema. Right. And then, you know, when we think about the Internet, first there was a lot of text. The Internet, if you think, if you're old enough to remember what Usenet groups are, in the 80s or 70s, that was just text email chains. Then starting in the late 90s, we started having images because our data compression technology and our Internet bandwidth got big enough for data. Okay, today where are we moving audio and video? And that's. So in terms of future proofing our own organization, yes, we're still producing content in the traditional graphical and text. We still are investing behind our blogs and great content there, but we've started investing over the last few months a lot more into the video side of things. So content platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, shorts on Instagram, because a lot more people, including business professionals, by the way, our customers are businesses, not teenagers, are spent consuming more and more content in the form of video and audio. And so we are emphasizing both producing great content there, but as well doing kind of the SEO optimization game on those types of content rather than the text based content.
[00:31:46] Speaker A: That's fantastic advice. Yeah, I mean, the humans are going to continue to be more valued in certain ways as we're less valued in other ways. Thanks so much for your time. Where can people find you if they want to see you content?
[00:32:02] Speaker B: Three places. Number one, if you want to get in touch with me, best ways through my LinkedIn account, NickJane. Secondly, if you want to see just random cool projects I'm working on, my personal website is nickjane.com I built a cool version of Flappy Birds that's super addictive. If people want to play that totally free and Then thirdly for IdeaScale, our website is IdeaScale.com and our software is completely free for teams or organizations less than 100, literally no strings attached, so encourage people to use it.
[00:32:26] Speaker A: Thanks so much for your time. Nick.
[00:32:28] Speaker B: Thank you so much. Jeremy.
