[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted podcast host. I'm here with Daniel Horowitz, who's going to introduce himself and tell us why we should trust him.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Hey there, Daniel Horowitz here. I a.m. a senior SEO manager at Informatica, which is an AI data management company. One reason why you should trust me is I've been in the SEO space for over a decade. Kind of gone through the shift of, you know, started out on the link building side, now I'm on the enterprise side. So yeah, just kind of have a lot of holistic experience, you know, kind of been riding this AI wave, you know, especially in enterprise environment. Has been pretty crazy. Things are all over the place. So, yeah, excited to kind of take you through that.
[00:00:42] Speaker A: That sounds awesome.
I live and breathe a lot of link building in different formats. I was wondering actually, what are some off the wall or unusual ways that you've done outreach based link building that either succeeded or failed spectacularly?
[00:01:02] Speaker B: So actually one of the big clients I worked on when I worked agency side was Shopify and we did a lot of outreach for them. Some of it was successful, some was not. But the big project we were working on was Shopify Exchange, which was kind of a place to like buy and sell domains.
And we kind of reached out to a lot of directories and you know, a lot of places are like, hey, like, you know, you should kind of use Shopify Exchange and like, here's why. And some of it worked, some of it didn't. I was surprised at how much it didn't work, honestly, given the big, you know, the largeness of the Shopify brand. But, you know, some of it was pretty successful. But a lot of it was like, you know, really, really at the tactical level. Right. So like they were looking at kind of like local businesses and things like that. So like looking at say like the Houston, you know, Houston domains for things that are for local businesses and things like that. So, you know, kind of trying to reach out at the local level. But yeah, I was surprised at how not receptive a lot of like local websites and publications were. But yeah, it was an interesting experiment for sure.
[00:02:10] Speaker A: Do you still have a big love for link building or is it kind of something where you kind of had to do it and you've been able to pivot? You said you moved into the enterprise level of operations. So is it still something you like or is it a hardened, a hardened part of your heart?
[00:02:31] Speaker B: I think I'll always have a soft spot for link building. I still think it's effective. But you know, I think in the AI era, as search engines have gotten smarter, you don't necessarily need tactical links on that level in the way that I think you used to.
Obviously rankings are still important and of course it influences that. I always think of link building as kind of like a flaw in the system where inherently there are problems with it and a lot of people will do gray hat or black hat tactics, but I always liken it to kind of like fixing the subway system in New York City where it's like you would have to really shut it down for a while in order to put new track down and things like that. So inherently link building will always be a part of the system. But I think digital PR has just become more and more important. I mean on the enterprise level we do a lot of that and not necessarily having to link things in a tactical way, but that semantic search is smart enough to kind of like get the context of what you're trying to do without creating that tactical level link, I think.
[00:03:39] Speaker A: So is that just a long winded way of saying that link. Link building is digital PR now and digital PR is link building?
[00:03:48] Speaker B: I think it's become more similar. I mean, look, you're always still going to be able to reach out to blogs, you know, local publications, industry things. Get a link on a page level, it'll still work. We still do it at Informatica. I don't want to say that it doesn't work, but just that digital pr, I think it's just a big, such a bigger part of the equation, you know, especially as we're moving forward into a world where we're going to be optimizing for agents, you know, AI in general.
[00:04:17] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think there is a lot of value in actually coupling your link building with a mentality about pr. And instead of this hyper niched focus of I need to get this specific anchor text and this distribution or this, this number, you know, has to have this metric on this platform, DA, Dr.
DZ, DBZ, whatever the metric is. Like forget about that for a minute and think instead. You know, like I did for my friend Michael McDougald at his, @ his agency, the Right Thing agency. The right Thing we did was actually did a trash cleanup in a local community where he was trying to promote his services.
And we got a bunch of people out to the beach, we coordinated with the county, we got links in local event sites, we got links. We were able to put out a press release which had his name, had backlinks, to it and actual people interacting with it, you know, and it was kind of interesting to see as that as I pushed that out to Reddit and Facebook groups, I just cross referenced, red referenced and asked in perplexity. I asked in before we started and after we started, hey, what are, are there any links or is there any events going on this weekend in Sarasota, Florida? I think it was.
And before we started, nothing.
After a couple event aggregators, nothing. But then I posted to Facebook and to Reddit and they're like, oh, within about half an hour actually it showed up. And in Bing's index, it showed up in Gemini after a few days too.
So there are ways for these new AI search portals to be influenced by something that you can also get old school links from and get pr, you know, because I did that again for a local asphalt company I'm working with, working with locally and just down Dogwood park here in Cookeville, I went to clean up myself and one of the guys that showed up, well, he needed his driveway replaced. So, you know, there's kind of layered value there of kind of taking back the Internet, right?
[00:06:39] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I think kind of doing these analog events where like, yeah, I mean it's, you know, being cited in social media platforms, that was not something previously that could really be crawled by Google, you know, had nothing really to do with like traditional SEO as we know it, but now, yeah, it's really important. And it's kind of almost where you're being cited is more important than how you're being cited.
[00:07:01] Speaker A: I think that's true. And I think I have big qualms with Google doing these maker sessions. Like last week they had a couple of people come out and they're like, you can't take any screenshots. You just have to report, relay what we say.
And the takeaway was we are an answer engine and we don't care about you and you're not getting your traffic back and it's because you made really long recipe posts.
[00:07:35] Speaker B: Yeah, unfortunately I have a lot of experience with having a website that was hit by the hcu. My wife actually is, she's a travel blogger and she owns alexonthemap.com, which was, you know, getting like, I would say like 50, 60,000 hits a month from Google at least. And then the HCU happened and then like overnight the traffic really tanked. And for that reason, you know, they're saying, oh, well, we incentivized a certain system. Like we allow, you know, well, we told you to write an article this way. You know, we told you to structure things this way and then all of a sudden we just decided it's different. So you know, that was a six figure business that was destroyed overnight.
[00:08:13] Speaker A: That's a rough case and it's not the only one. And we're, you know, coming back from the dead on those has been very few and far between.
I haven't really seen any anyone truly resurrect back to pre HCU levels on.
If anyone who's listening has, drop me a message in Twitter. I'd love even on dm, I'll give you NDA. I just, I just want to know that it could have happened somewhere for someone.
So what's, what's your, where's your heart at now? Like what do you, you said you moved from link building into working on enterprise level. What does that look like? And where, where is your love for SEO right now?
[00:09:03] Speaker B: So I would say the big thing that you know, I've really developed a love for in the last like two years of doing enterprise is the kind of evangelism aspect of really like going to an into an organization.
You know, at Informatica, I think SEO was not always a priority because especially on the enterprise level, you know, you have really long sales cycles, you're working with, you know, big enterprise clients. They're not necessarily influenced by like reading an article that comes up in Google, right. You know, like it's, it's a much longer process. But how can we really take that? How can we work cross functionally and you know, build that? You know, a big thing we've been focusing on is building topical authority. Right. So, you know, I'm sure all the listener of this podcast know what that is, but you know, people at Informatica don't. And you know, a lot of it is, you know, working with product marketing, you know, working with growth marketing, working with the web team to, you know, collaborate and make sure that SEO is seen as a priority at the organization. So I've really found that I love that because it's less connected to algorithm updates and it's more connected to building a team and pushing forward our strengths together.
[00:10:13] Speaker A: That sounds really familiar. I was interviewing Gus Pelogia, who's over at Indeed, and you know, he's facing some of those same challenges and it's about a lot of value and win is getting buy in, you know, and kind of trying to con, trying to connect the dots and bring the, find the other ways to bring forth the value from SEO instead of just focusing on, oh, hey, I did keyword research and there's volume here for these keywords.
Instead of turning to the teams and trying to figure out, okay, what are the pain points for them and how does that interact with the website, what type of content does that lend itself to, which, you know, depending on the size and type of organization, can lead to all kinds of unique content that otherwise wouldn't have been developed. You know, thinking about post onboarding, you know, for a SaaS like retention and deep, you know, that deeper cut of how to utilize their software tool in a specific way that's going to give them an advantage or, you know, make them want to stick around longer versus all of the front end fluffy stuff of trying to reach potential new demographics and get people, hook people in.
Isn't the same type of thing, you know, what you want to know about Ahrefs when you were searching for it is not what you want to search and find information about after you've had it for a year, right?
[00:11:49] Speaker B: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think really, you know, for us it's really leveraging that expertise that's already there at the organizational level. So one thing, you know, we've implemented is like an SME interview series where we work with different people and products and say like, okay, what are the things you want people to know? How can we, instead of just talking about the product name, how can we leverage this into our use cases for our marketing?
So that extends beyond just SEO, but it's also like, how can we increase visibility around how people actually would use our product in different Personas? Things from like anyone from chief data officers to engineers.
[00:12:28] Speaker A: I love that. I love the interview format and drawing out that information.
It's like, it's annoying because they know this stuff so deeply, but they fear writing so much.
So the medium is just, hey, hit the record button on that meeting you're having with them where you just say, I'm a dumb SEO, I don't know what you do. Can you explain what value you bring to the organization and our clients?
Half an hour is 30,000 words. 30 to 40,000 words worth of content.
And anybody who is doing their job should be able to talk about it for at least 15, 30 minutes. If not, you probably need to hire somebody else.
[00:13:19] Speaker B: So true. Yeah. And I've just found we've been able to.
The amount of expertise and the amount I've learned about our products and services, just being involved in this interview series is huge.
For example, the previous SEO strategy we used was a very basic like head term based Strategy. So we would look at say like, what is master data management? And everything. You know, this was prior to me kind of, you know, coming on board. But the, basically the only metric that was used was our what is master data management Article hitting the first page of Google at least for one day of the quarter, you know, times eight head terms. That's not a strategy, that's just vanity. Right?
[00:14:01] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:01] Speaker B: So you know, we ted, we change it, say hey, like from a topical authority perspective, how can we dig deeper into this product? How can we say like, well, how are people looking for, you know, if somebody knows what master data management is, they're not just going to Google master data management, they're going to Google the different ways they could use it. So for example, a great topic we came up with is like, what are the use cases of generative AI for master data management? We have the expertise of the organization that can actually tell us that, that can actually create a great article around that. So you know, we've been doing that kind of times, you know, dozens and dozens of articles and it's been highly successful not just for our visibility in Google, but on AI as well.
[00:14:40] Speaker A: That makes sense. And that's also a solution for the, the pretty, the pretty puppy. Like if you're selling puppies for sale, it's like really easy to write and create content. But if you're like crime scene cleanup services, it's really difficult. But if you're going deeper with your SMEs, like that's the solve for that problem, right?
[00:15:03] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:15:05] Speaker A: I mean, because you can like, you get to geek out, right? I mean that, that's really what we're talking about is, is getting people on an interview to just geek out and give that deep cut, you know, and record it and then turn that into content. You know, whether that's an article.
I do have a question which came up recently. What is your thought about pivoting from creating blogs to creating resource pages or different types, intentionally stepping away and out of the blog format. It's almost the same content, but it's just not called a blog.
[00:15:48] Speaker B: Yeah, I think we're already starting to do that. I mean even just like launching our, you know, we have all these new, I think I mentioned like this use case marketing where we're trying to launch all these different use cases, all these different ways people can use our products.
Blogs can support that, right? Blogs can add additional contacts, we can internally link. But ultimately it's that use case that's going to get, you know, so someone can really understand, like, well how can I use MDM in my organization, for example? And like we know what's the business value of this, like what's the impact? So we can use a page that can kind of explain that and then build supporting content around it. But the blog itself is not going to cause the conversion. Right? You know, like we're an enterprise organization, we're not a publication. Like ultimately like more clicks is not more revenue for us.
In fact, I would say, you know, with AI search, like, you know, like most websites, we've lost a lot of traffic but are in conversation. Conversion rate has actually increased quite a bit because of the types of content we're putting out. And not just blog content, but that's also going to extend to video and podcasts and things like that. Webinars, all different touch points that we can have. Because this is an enterprise cycle. We need to be out there. We need to have a lot of touches with someone who's a decision maker at an organization before they'll even consider our products.
[00:17:08] Speaker A: That's interesting because it, I'm curious what your take is on this because there's an aspect of AI overviews in Google where they're definitely eating our lunch, you know, like they're pre digesting the folks who go there, you know, and they get to show them their ads because they want to be the answer engine.
And you know, they're saying they literally came out and said you don't deserve our traffic. You haven't done anything to deserve traffic from us. We don't feel obligated to send it to you.
But there's also kind of your point of well, our conversion rate is better because the people that do find us are much more qualified.
How do you rectify and justify larger and larger content marketing spends to spend to create higher quality content based off of these interview, in the interview process, for example, you know, that's not something you're going to do off of Fiverr. It's not something that you're even going to off a text broker.
It's going to take a little more effort. How do you sell those metrics to your boss, to the powers that be, to the stakeholders who are coming to you, who you're talking about in SEO who are going point to these statistics and say Google is sending less traffic and you know like 25, 35, 50% less traffic when there's an AI overview for a query.
How do you have that conversation and what metrics do you point to to justify, you know, that that through Throughput.
[00:19:00] Speaker B: Yeah. So ultimately I think a lot of it surrounds conversion. You know, ultimately like kind of that middle of the funnel purchase decision content has higher conversion potential. It's not necessarily going to be downloading an ebook. Right. It's not necessarily going to be giving your email and you know, then we have that conversation. But we actually set up like a customized chatbot that people can discuss. So if somebody's coming into the website and they're already in a purchase mindset, say they're doing product comparisons, say they're doing, you know, deeper research that an AI overview can provide, they're much more likely to engage with that chatbot we have on the website. So you know, I'll definitely thank the web team for implementing that. But we can actually look on the page by page level and say like hey, our what is master data management article. Sure. I mean that's, we've seen a big drop on that. But that never had the conversion potential that this kind of middle of the funnel purchase decision content has had. So I think we can, we can take a look at that and that's where we can, you know, ask for the budget to scale based on the idea that hey, the conversion rate is pretty good on these, you know. Sure. I mean in an ideal world we wouldn't be losing any traffic or we'd be losing very little traffic and Google would be providing, you know, click through rates to AI overviews. But they're not going to do that as you said, like you know, they're, they've been pretty clear that okay, we already stole all your top of funnel content, we've amalgamated it from these sources and you know, it is what it is. Like there's nothing you can do to get that back.
You know, Informatica, obviously like any other enterprise website has lost quite a bit of traffic and it's like we just have to be realistic and clear eyed that we're not going to get that back and maybe that traffic is not correlative to success in SEO and I think the way that it historically was.
[00:20:49] Speaker A: Yeah, I think, I think it's true. It's kind of a view of like, you know, we can't with shrinking search volume numbers. We're going to have to go back to, to go back and re evaluate the value transfer process and how much of that though is thinking about cross channel and other promotion methods to bring visitors and viewing optimization of your site not solely through the lens of whether or not it can, can rank, but viewing your site and content as far as being Optimized. As optimized as possible for conversion. For profit. For profit.
[00:21:39] Speaker B: Yeah. I think there's been a lot more to our point where we're talking about link building before and social media being a big aspect of that. I think there's a lot more you could do about sentiment analysis.
One thing I've been doing a lot is working on a lot more with both the paid and organic social teams, seeing what's being promoted there. Maybe that's not stuff that you would make for traditional SEO. Right. But it's stuff that people are caring about. There's sentiment analysis around it. We have to kind of create on, as Rand Fishkin has said, rented land platforms.
We have to create for LinkedIn, we have to create for YouTube, we have to even have things that work on Reddit.
Those are not things that I think were really considered within the confines of SEO. You know, I think SEO obviously became synonymous with Google because Google was the monopolistic player. And now, not to say Google's not important, it's really important, but you know, even like Apple a couple days ago announcing like we're going to have an AI search first experience in Safari. Well, what does that do with their default, you know, deal with Google where you know, they've been showing, you know, do people really have love for Google or has it just been the default? You know, Google's not Apple. People are actively making the choice to buy iPhones because they like iPhones. People are using Google because it's just there, you know.
[00:22:57] Speaker A: Yeah. And that's part of their anti competitive lawsuit that they're part of that they got that they forced that monopoly.
Still waiting to see the judge pry apart, you know, Chrome or probably really any part of the, of the Alphabet soup apart.
But it's funny that you mentioned like LinkedIn and LinkedIn polls, you know, because it's, there's rental space there. Like I was talking to Matt Brooks from seoteric the other week of like, you know what, if you, if you have a successful article then you should also have a repost of it promoting it or a different take of it on your LinkedIn pulse on, you know, on substack on medium. There's like a dozen, you know, different barnacles, you know now where you can post up and they're kind of quasi social posts, content slash author social process there. But there's you know, even like this interview I'm going to take, take a version of it afterwards and put it up on LinkedIn polls because it performs well. It also Shows up in Google search. Exactly.
[00:24:07] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:24:08] Speaker A: So if I can catch a little bit of extra, it kind of makes perhaps an argument that SEOs need to diversify their viewpoint from search being how my one website performs to how am I discovered online through all search mediums.
[00:24:32] Speaker B: Absolutely, yeah. And I think that's, it's honestly a really exciting time to be an SEO. I mean, I found personally, you know, doing link building campaigns for seven years, you know, it became kind of boring, kind of stale. Like it's the same thing, you know, the same basic formula you're trying to discover. But now it's certainly a challenging time, but also an exciting time. I think there's a lot of time for opportunity, you know, especially if you're an SEO who works with businesses. You know, look, I think with the HCU and everything, the SEO content model I think is dead.
I don't think that's coming back. You know, like you're saying, well, yeah, maybe some sites have had some recovery from the hcu, but if you're a volume based site, I don't think it can work. You know, like with my wife's travel site, you know, we were doing a lot of content like you know, best places to stay near Glacier national park or things like that where, you know, there's affiliate potential. But like now if an AI overview can summarize that, well, why click through to website at all? I mean the only, the only place that I think creators are doing well on is YouTube right now. Because you know, Google has, they want to keep people within their own ecosystem. Right. So you know, they'll promote videos in the SERPs, but how long will that even last? You know, are they going to bring in AI over? I've already seen rumblings of them bringing an AI overview version to YouTube. So you know, maybe that's not, maybe that'll work for the next six months. But you know, is that a long term strategy either?
[00:25:58] Speaker A: Yeah, I do kind of worry for our creators who had created, who had benefited from search traffic and you know, Google coming around and saying, oh well, that long form content that was, was so interesting that we rewarded you for. We don't think people want that anymore. Well, we don't want to show you for that. We want to show our long form content from our AI overview for that.
It's kind of like a stab in the back. At the same time though, it's like, oh, we don't want to hear about that.
That experience you had, you know, finding those blueberries at your grandmother's house. We just want the recipe.
[00:26:41] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:42] Speaker A: Is the front statement. But they also turn around and say, but you're the superstar. People want to follow you, they want to hear about you. Like those two things can't be true at the same time. Like people can't want just the short answers, but also your personality really matters.
[00:27:02] Speaker B: Yeah. I think a lot of the advice they've given to creators has been really incongruous with what's written really happening. You know, look, if there were a lot of click through rates coming through, AI overviews and things like that, they would share the data. Right.
Like it's. Because there isn't.
[00:27:17] Speaker A: That's. I, I think that's true.
So it sounds like if you're a content creator, you just really probably need to start looking harder at more different social channels and additional ways to.
I think it's, Ross Simmons is always talking about create once and redistribute forever and you know, finding different ways to take your same content elsewhere with the intent of finding, you know, there, you know, there's a lot of shake up around this because there's, you know, there's money. There was money there, you know, and now, you know, I know of three different people myself who, they can't make money, you know, do doing travel blogging anymore or they can't. Like a lot of foodie bloggers are, are kind of hurting. But at the same time there's also like ridiculous levels of success on TikTok, you know.
[00:28:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:28:20] Speaker A: And like finding ways to monetize as an influencer is something that didn't exist, you know, 20 years ago at all outside of like Hollywood celebrity. Like Hollywood celebrities knew that and they could cash in on that. But now there's kind of micro influencer sub communities and processes kind of coming to play.
[00:28:45] Speaker B: Definitely. Yeah. I mean I will say on the other side of that, you know, building social channels, it's hard because you know, of course you don't control the algorithm, but you don't even control the platform. Like even with your website there was more you could do to differentiate yourself from other websites. You could work on your content strategy, you could work on your interlinking, you could work on your site speed, you could work on your UX. Whereas all TikTok platforms are the same and really those algorithms I think are a lot more of a black box than Google ever was.
[00:29:17] Speaker A: Oh, that's true. That's so true. And then you have, along comes the legislators. Like TikTok is dying or not dying or it's being sold it's not being sold. You can't have it, you won't have it. It's gone, it's back, it might stay.
So that's.
It feels really chaotic.
Like, well, you know, it was the bulwark of like, well, you could definitely own your site and you can own the traffic coming to it. But now without that mainstay of monetization, you know, that's really complicated.
[00:29:54] Speaker B: Yeah, I know a lot of people tried to switch to Pinterest and things like that, but it's not a replacement for Google traffic. I mean there's, I don't think even five different sources are a replacement for the, you know, the kind of the golden age of Google traffic.
[00:30:10] Speaker A: And this is the part where we make our suicide pact.
[00:30:14] Speaker B: There we go.
[00:30:16] Speaker A: Hey, while we're at it, let's talk about the coming apocalypse of AI.
Yeah, I don't know what it is because we see these impacts and we see these telegraphs.
You and I are early adopters.
I used a Chat, basically a ChatGPT type system, an LLM in 2014.
So it's not, it's like a decade old technology plus.
But the rate of change in the.
[00:30:49] Speaker B: Last year has been insane, absolutely insane. I mean, even the concept that you're sooner rather than later, you're going to be creating at least for some level of AI agent traffic, I think is still hard to wrap your head around. You know, it's like, what does that really mean? You know, well, okay, fine, like you need to structure the data in a different way, you know, provide the answer earlier.
Sure. But like beyond that, what does that really mean? I think nobody really knows yet. I think there's been this kind of doubling down in the SEO community of optimizing for AI is just SEO. I don't think that's true. I don't think that's true. I don't think that's true. Whether you're a creator or, or you know, working with local small businesses or you're the enterprise level, I just think the answer is nobody quite knows yet. I think there's a lot of theories and speculation, but there's no formula to do. If there was a formula to do it, people would be doing it already.
[00:31:44] Speaker A: That's true. There's, there's a whole lot of spaghetti. I think, I think the pushback, I think the pushback on there is more of like, oh, SEO is dead, now it's geo, now it's aieo, AI, AI, eeo.
Come on. Like, we just need a new acronym.
So from that perspective, that's the reaction that us old school SEOs have. Like, okay, SEO's dead again.
But it also, you know.
[00:32:22] Speaker B: I don't.
[00:32:22] Speaker A: Like to use that phrase because it just comes up so often, it's annoying.
I think that's really the pushback of like, it's still SEO, but it, it really, you really do have to grapple, come to terms with and grapple with, okay, I have to deal with the outcome and input, outcome and capability of AI. Now I need to account for and understand generally and probably much more specifically how these LLMs function. You know, Gemini understand how Bing is now an actual player positioned itself incredibly well because if you, you know, do a chat GPT or based search, you can get a map request result. Well, how does that happen? It turns out that you have to. Most of those entries are valid Bing listings and they rank in Bing in the top one to five.
And so you have a separate ecosystem developing where it has nothing to do with Google. I think they see a correlation, a possible correlation between the number of Google ranking Google reviews, but the other factors are coming from the Bing index. And so, you know, maybe we just reclaim our, the hats that we hung up when Jeeves was laid to rest. The, the old school search engines, AltaVista, you know, like there was a day in time, 1998 to 2005, where they were real entities. Traffic came through those alternate sources.
I think we just got SEO became shorthand for Google search experts. And we need to, need to diversify, brah.
[00:34:24] Speaker B: Absolutely. And I think if anything, it'll be an expansion of our industry, not a contraction as more and more people say, hey, I need to show up here, I need to show up, show up there. It's not just Google anymore. It's not just like, oh, I'm going to look at this one keyword and like, see how I can optimize for this keyword. But like, you know, how can I be every, Everywhere, everywhere, all at once? You know.
[00:34:46] Speaker A: Which is hard.
It's always hard to be the jack of all trades and master of none, but it's also, you know, it's the niche of information service. You know, it's not, it's not that at any point anybody has been able to spend a day, a month, a year listening to podcasts, reading blog posts, creating websites and being able to do SEO. You really can, like, you can learn and like, but it's like the plumber who came out and spent five minutes and tapped one nail into the wall, fix the problem and wants to charge $100. Like you hit one nail into the wall. Yeah. But I knew which nail, where to put it, how did he, how deep to put it? You know, so, like, there's, there's almost a perverse, like, increase in the need for explainer folk of people who can whisper into the system and have the answer whisper, which, you know, it's going to have the, the dreaded side effect of snake oil salesmen coming out of the woodwork. Woodwork. Promising the world to poor, burned, overwhelmed small business owners who are going to get even more jaded because now they don't have just SEO. They also have AI now to worry about and very little, very little ways to test the validity of what people say.
[00:36:20] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. I mean, even the idea of, you know, kind of changing the name just for semantic reasons is kind of a snake oil thing. It's, it's still search, it's still. You're trying to influence how people are, what's showing up when people are finding information. Doesn't necessarily matter if it's Google, if it's, you know, through the Bing platform, you know, through ChatGPT or wherever. You know.
[00:36:45] Speaker A: Let'S give the folks some, some red meat here at the end of the interview. What's, what's something you've seen that's been really successful, something that they can, after this podcast, do either this afternoon or in the next week if they know what they need to do? What, what are you seeing as a tactic or strategy that leads to success in this easy AI SEO. AI SEO world?
[00:37:13] Speaker B: Honestly, it's so basic that it's ridiculous, but internal linking is so important.
I think, you know, creating that semantic relevance between pages on your website.
I'm shocked at how many businesses just don't do it and like, don't consider it and don't consider how things relate to each other on the website. Website. So, you know, not, not just in your navigation, but even, you know, we're talking about the importance of blog content and things like that. Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's the only thing that matters. And I think, you know, just that one format might matter a little less, but using that to build that authority, you know, to show that trust, you know, even, like, you know, there's always been the joke of, like, what's building authority? Oh, author pages. Well, it's more than just that. Right. But that, that's your, that's your start. You know, like you said, you know, putting links out on LinkedIn post, putting links out at medium you know, linking that all together into your website, you know, creating that, you know, unified ecosystem so that, you know, whoever's crawling, you know, your information is, is able to easily find it. And for AI, I think that's a huge, huge thing.
[00:38:21] Speaker A: Yeah, I think there's, there's, we're still in the Wild west in the frontier of AI and how they are finding documents that are related to each other. And I know that there's a lot of people trying to manipulate that and they're going to have some success and then we'll see how these platforms respond to those attempted manipulations. Because we know how Google responded to it.
[00:38:50] Speaker B: Absolutely. And you know, even the black hat tactics of like, you know, doing Those kind of LinkedIn Pulse articles that are completely fake, I don't.
Look, I think it'll always work to some extent, but not to the extent that it's been working long term.
[00:39:05] Speaker A: But I like your advice. Internal linking is always something even, you know, like bread and butter size, like your commercial real estate, you know, like, hey, you, you have a silo of a section that's about a particular, particular type of business that you're trying to sell. Well, you should be linking to your about page, you should be linking to your testimonial, you should be linking to the other types of businesses that you can also sell and also link up to, you know, your commercial, how to close a commercial sale link down to, you know, you know, and look at that funnel of how people in this article are going to behave and don't miss out. Like if you put good content onto a page and they're engaged with it, like don't force the click of them to go somewhere else. Give them a next navigation item, like put that into the context where they're reading. So they are going to have it and that's the same as a search engine or an LLM engine. It's going to consume that, find the relation and so you can drive people and search where you want to do go. Absolutely brilliant. Where are you at online?
Where do you hang out? Where if people want to at you.
[00:40:20] Speaker B: So primarily you can find me on LinkedIn
[email protected] horowitzrights Do a little bit of X, but I would say primarily LinkedIn these days.
You know, my personal website. I'm not blogging much these days due to, you know, the hcu. But yeah, I would say, you know, definitely feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.
[00:40:41] Speaker A: Awesome. Well, I'll see you around, Daniel.
[00:40:44] Speaker B: All right, thanks, Jeremy. Have a good one.
