Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted podcast host. I'm here with Jason Berkowitz who's going to introduce himself and tell us why we should trust him as an expert.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Thank you, Jeremy. Trust me as an expert. I'm an SEO. I don't know if I can be trusted. You know those shady SEO folks.
But yeah, I'm Jason. I've been doing SEO since 2010. I'm the founder and SEO director of the SEO agency Break the Web.
We work with in house marketing teams of DTC B2C brands. Make SEO more measurable, accessible, really, especially nowadays, just a little bit less annoying in the hopes of making the world just and the Internet just more trustworthy at the same time. So it's definitely a journey that we're in right now. A lot of noise out there, but yeah, Break the Web is our agency.
[00:00:51] Speaker A: How do you make it more visible when we're seeing actions from Google that continue to obfuscate the available metrics and data?
[00:01:05] Speaker B: Yeah, Google is always trying to like kick SEOs in the face when it comes to like attribution to any sort of marketing activities.
The biggest wins that we've been seeing, especially as of late, is just pivoting, putting more effort into middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel type of URLs and pages instead of going super top of the funnel and informational which already had significantly less conversion value anyways. So at the end of the day, brands need to make money. That's like the whole goal. And try as much as possible to calculate roi.
But that's where you know, AI overviews as you've probably seen as well. Yeah, they're just destroying clicks primarily though from super informational queries. There are people weren't looking to spend money anyways. They're kind of just, hey, I have a question. Here's an answer I need.
And people weren't going to convert anyways. It's kind of like have you seen the, the HubSpot one from a few months back where everyone's like, oh, HubSpot lost all of their traffic, but they just did a nice pruning exercise of deleting all the pages. That just didn't help them drive revenue.
[00:02:10] Speaker A: Yeah, I saw Mike King's presentation, had two slides back to back. One was the drop off but the other was their profit which continued to go. Their revenue as a business continued to go up and to the right. And so yeah, I mean that, that's a solid story.
Of course it is not true of I Think I saw the article today on LinkedIn of Google didn't kill SEO. It's stabbing publishing in the back.
Because when you think about the biggest type of site that's being impacted when they're coming around, really ironically when you think about it, because they were saying when HCU initially came out, oh, we're attacking sites that are just trying to make money.
And now they're turned that around and said, well, you know, your content has to be part of a business to be worthwhile.
And it's like, which is it? Are you like you don't like sites that make money or you just don't you just want to steal all of the content that you can and not have to pay for it while killing the golden goose?
[00:03:33] Speaker B: I don't even think they know. Honestly. They probably don't have a clear answer to that. And yeah, it's been a hard one for, for publishers that rely on advertising for monetization now with like AI Mode and Google Discover getting changing like every other day now, it's, it's been a hard one.
I think it's all just still like nobody really knows what's happening, what's gonna happen. And I think all these platforms are still also in that mix. Like they don't know what's gonna happen, they don't know what direction they're heading, but they're all just trying to actively remain competitive and it's just making the Internet worse at the same time.
[00:04:12] Speaker A: It is, Yeah. I liked, I think it was A.J. cohn, he came out with an article like a year ago where he said, oh, these results are goog enough. You know, like it's, it's kind of relevant. Ish, you know, it's like a set of SERP results that doesn't really address what you want. And so you gotta like search again and then search again.
So if their goal is to keep people on their platform and frustrated and without answers, good job guys, because that's the majority. Like to add to that the now universal skepticism of, okay, now I'm being shown a result on your platform, but you just said that somebody that I know is 70 years old is a 2 year old or you know, there are these known incorrect facts.
So it used to be, oh, we want to present the world's organization or organize the world's information, and now they want to be the world's information, it seems, but are doing it in a way that doesn't solve what we know is problematic about LLMs and doesn't, you know, they've shown they're just as prone to hallucination as Chachi pt. And it's even more egregious because they are putting it out there in a form of authority of this is an answer. And they're giving answers about ketchup soup and macaroni and cheese recipes, including glue, because the LLMs don't understand sarcasm.
[00:05:58] Speaker B: Yeah, I think you nailed it, Jeremy. It's like not enough people are talking about what you just said. I think it is very crucial. Everyone's talking about it in our, our techosphere bubble that, that we're in. And we see things on LinkedIn and Twitter and like, oh, SEO is dead and marketing is changing forever. It's like, what happens to the everyday consumer who first is not Even aware of AI?
Different AI platforms. They might know ChatGPT because of memes. They might know Gemini because of commercials. They know AI overviews because it's thrown in their face. But, like, what happens with the potential change in consumer behavior when they don't get the information they're looking for? The quality of results is bad. Does that leave a bad sour taste in their mouth that they just want to avoid all things AI because it's not a good experience? And do they revert back to their previous habits of making searches? I mean, I think that's going to be an interesting case study because the quality. Yeah, you like. I asked chatgpt, why are you gaslighting me? And it went to continue gaslighting me after that. And I didn't need to write that. It's just me being annoying.
[00:07:04] Speaker A: No, it's true. I. I read. I. I created an article, very complicated, in depth, and I asked it to include this section and I said, okay, done. And I looked at, like, you didn't add the section? Can you add it now? Yeah, okay, it's done. I'm like, okay. I gave it a fresh, like, okay, this is the text I want you to add.
Do it and then confirm and analyze. If you did both, didn't add it, checked if it was there, said it was and it wasn't. I said, why you lying? Like, I don't know, Like, I had to start a whole new chat session just to get that integrated. It's really insane sometimes.
[00:07:53] Speaker B: This is the threat to SEO, right? This is the threat to the entire marketing, user behavior, search landscape. I mean, like, beyond just Google and traditional SEO, but like, SEO is changing the world so much. Like, that's our threat.
Yes, men and gaslighting.
[00:08:12] Speaker A: Yeah. Oh, yes, man. That's what I wanted to address or bring up is there's an inherent bias to be a yes man built into LLMs that is extremely problematic when you.
The nature of copyright.
Copy editing, good copy editing is aggressive.
No?
And you're like, as an editor, it's almost like the inverse of like, you hate long content, fluffy content, you want it to be condensed, you want to cut out, you want to remove.
And the answer is by default, no. Or probably not. But LLMs seem to be calibrated in such a way that they, they want to please us.
That's problem.
[00:09:12] Speaker B: It's actually really refreshing to have this conversation with you because I've been on a lot of podcasts the last two weeks talking about AI and SEO and it's all about tell us what's really, what's going on with AI and what's really going on with SEO. And I'm like, yeah, things are changing, but like the foundations are still the same. There's no threat.
Like, yeah, just kind of like what you said. AI is not in any position at this point. AI LLMs are not in a position at this point to really cause much disruption or damage to everyone.
I mean that's, you're requiring like big user adoption from people outside of like again, that techosphere bubble because nobody knows what Claude or anthropic is like the everyday people, it's, it's everyone's fear marketing and they got something to sell and then you got GEO or aio, whatever you want to call it, optimization, which is, is a farce, you know, because it's all just good SEO because you can't do anything. Nobody has a proven framework of success on doing something you can audit.
[00:10:15] Speaker A: But yeah, yeah, I think the closest that I've seen is the Biscuit framework that Mike Buckbee came up with for no etoa, which was, it's kind of like, you know, check if there's a brand sentiment analysis that exists across multiple LLMs.
Check your crawling. You know, are you blocking yourself? Are you accessible?
You know, it basically breaks down to just kind of treating each LLM as an additional search console. Are you indexed? Are you there?
And if you ask it, where do you appear in citations?
Which is what we look for in, you know, in Google Search console, right? Like, you go down, you click on the link section, see, okay, these are the ones that show up, pull up third party tools and say, okay, this is where I actually am.
What are my clicks? Like, what's my general visibility?
So really it's like, it's not like I don't understand what the obsession is constantly about wanting to kill SEO. From the beginning it's just been, you know, it's just such a trope. All of us just sigh every time like, is SEO dead? Is SEO dead now since 2007? No, since the articles I learned on in 2007, Aaron Wall's SEO book referenced is SEO dead?
There were, I think the earliest SEO is dead article was like in 1999.
Like before like SEO was even understood to even be a thing.
[00:12:08] Speaker B: Like so search engines were abc.
[00:12:11] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean you had a hot, you had a hotbot and you had askg, ultravista Dogpile. Yeah, we, what it is honestly is there's a generation of SEOs who grew up in a golden age where SEO wasn't SEO. We were reverse Google engineers.
There was no Bing, there was no other playground. There was nothing else to do. You were not going to get organic traffic. You are not going to get a paycheck for what you did. You know, the backlinks that you were building were for Google. The content you were creating was for Google. You over optimized, you know, and created too many anchor texts on too many other sites for Google and then they slapped it down. So then you removed and changed the amount of stuff specific anchor text that you made for Google. You, you like all of the things that we did were for Google and that's what's changing. SEO isn't dead, but Google only optimization is leaving because the, the, the value proposition can no longer support itself. There are fewer. You have to as an agency, as a freelancer, it's becoming harder and harder and the air is less there and the ROI is harder and the timeline, the predictability is decreasing.
So there are fewer.
Unless you're at this, at this end of opportunity where this is the amount of work and this is the amount of pay you get for it. Like specialized technical SEO for huge brands, major money there. But the insane like you have to win that position against incredible levels of talent and be prepared to make technical SEO decisions that can kill a business because that's the, that's the level of gameplay that Gus Pelogia of, you know, indeed is, is playing around with. You know, those are the decisions that, you know, the top level S tier speakers at conferences are being approached with sites that have millions of pages at the, at the baseline. You know, so if you're not in the, the ballpark of being able to handle like skill wise, talent wise, understanding wise, like what the technical ramifications are of canonicalization, multilingual you know, hreflang, you know, crawling decisions on fractal menus, JavaScript, spa crawling in analysis. Then the sandwich where you used to eat when it was just SEO, there's a lot less meat on that bone and there's a lot more people trying to eat the meat on that bone. Because there was a time where, you know, the panacea was there. You could just learn, you know, some fundamentals. There were tons of businesses making lots of money turning around and pouring it back into it. But those, those heady days are continuing to be, you know, each bite at the apple that Google has kicked us with of, oh well, featured snippets.
We're going to take part of your content and display it right in there. You know, that was the start of it and that was when the first real move, I think where Google, you know, industry wide started to claw back from SEOs. Now you can look way back to 2008 and look at an industry.
Google took over credit cards first, then they took over the travel niche and then they took over the booking niche. And recently they just took over emojis.
Yeah, you could. Now you don't have to go to the emoji dictionary or emojipedia. You can just click on a button and copy the command for an emoji.
But they've been conquering like if you look at the horizontal spread of, you know, these useful SERP features.
Google has always been parasitic and now it's just gotten to the point where maybe we start thinking about the fact that, you know, it's Google is a search engine.
That doesn't mean that it's search engine optimization. It's not the only search engine.
[00:17:03] Speaker B: Yeah, I think you bring up a great point. Like 2009 was awesome for SEO because things would happen very quick and you could spam. 2010 was horrible for SEO because pans are coming out and stuff. But also like, I'd love to get your thoughts, Jeremy, what do you think?
So we built an internal tracker with all the API platforms anthropic Claude, OpenAI Gemini to start tracking our clients mentions and citations for visibility. Because that's really the only thing you could do right now is just our tracking and thankfully we're getting a lot of mentions from our clients. And what happens when somebody stresses about a problem to one of these platforms and OpenAI or ChatGPT gives their result of solutions and one of them includes a brand but doesn't include a link that brand.
What is that person gonna do next?
Are they going to Ask for a link or are they gonna take that brand and go to Google and search for that brand?
So it's like, what is somebody gonna do if there is no easy access link as well?
[00:18:13] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:14] Speaker B: What do you think?
[00:18:14] Speaker A: So I think it's similar to, it's funny because it appears it's not just an SEO thing. Cause when you think about it, the same thing attribution problem has happened in social media. You know, like again going back to 2008, 2009 ages, you have Facebook pages that were pulling down organic traffic from within Facebook like bananas, like crazy awesome. Like you could invest, you know, have somebody on there engaging, talking to people, sharing content.
And then 2009, 2010, they locked it down and now it's 100% pay to play.
They changed the algorithm. You can't get diddly squat from engagement from anything aside from very obviously not American people who are just trying to DM you.
There are no real customers available that you can gain by posting to your Facebook pages. You have to pay. And that's, you know, in that echoed over to Instagram. It echoed over to TikTok. TikTok is almost clickless when it comes to like getting off of their platform to a thing. So you know, they'll, they, there's a lot of influencers who are getting paid to name drop because they know that in order to find that thing they're going to have to go and Google it.
You know, of course that leads to, you know, complicated scenarios. One was mentioned at SMX advance that I went to where they, they paid to promote these pink pants that they had, but they didn't check with the SEO guy and they actually, they ran out of pink pants out after the first day of the influencers. And so it went out of stock. Their page, their URL dropped off and their competitors sold a bunch of pink pants because they didn't have the, they didn't check beforehand.
And so like that's the crossover of, you know, the influencer marketing, which was, you know, a very smart play. But you gotta, you know, that's where the search optimization comes in in a unique way. You know, like being aware that hey, they're going to do a branded search or a try to find this thing outside of it.
And that's going to have an influence, going to have an impact.
So yeah, I think at first people might, you know, see that brand and bring it over to Google, but I bet that it's going to like. Yeah, no, it's going to have to because like what are you going to do if like you're in, you're in Claude and it says this brand, you know, does this and you ask it for the URL. Like I don't know what the, I don't know what the website is.
So you know, like it's not.
[00:21:27] Speaker B: SEO is also like to your, to your point has always been in this weird little silo all by itself like the SEO department and not working with other marketing teams and they should all be collaborating together. I mean SEO can help fuel other marketing initiatives, just like other marketing initiatives could help fuel SEO. I mean PPC data is gold for SEO. You know, what's converting, what's not. The fact that sometimes brands aren't convenient. Communicating interdepartmentally with that I think is a huge, I mean it's, it's kind of like, oh, it's already too late. SEO's like just leave them in the corner to do their own little weird, weird stuff. But it shouldn't be like that. And you bring up the great point where influencer marketing should very much. Hey, what are the implications of supply chain issues or we go out of stock, you know.
[00:22:15] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.
So kind of rounding off the interview here, what's your top action item when somebody comes on board with y', all, like what are you, what's your hyper focus point to bring value in this valueless attribution list page?
Like what do you, where, where's your home?
[00:22:35] Speaker B: I mean there's still, I still think there's tons of value even in just traditional SEO. Like SEO is definitely not dead. Maybe super informational content, you're getting less clicks. But I mean if you have a query that gets tons of hundreds of thousands of searches a month and you're cited in the AI over, you're getting clicks. And now also AIO reviews are like getting tested below like three or four organic results. So who knows what's gonna happen with ctr. But we're still, you know, doing everything as we have. We, you know, have a different mindset maybe, but we aim to show some quick wins within the first month, which could be usually the easy, low hanging fruit. Sometimes adding internal links, sometimes adding a key page to the menu and the foot and the footer, you know, some of those things.
But then of course traditional on page SEO, you know, just helping match pages to what somebody's looking for in search.
Good off page SEO, digital PR link building, having good first party data that journalists will eat up, connecting with other publications that maybe have content gaps. Whatever it is, it's still working. It's still working well. Top of the funnel traffic is down, but organic revenue is up for just about all of our clients that are in the E comm space that you could attribute as best as possible. There's always these weird attribution stuff, but we're still doing things.
[00:23:57] Speaker A: Even with less attribution capability, we still have capability and we can turn it around and use the capability of LLMs to our advantage. Like looking at. Hey, what's my library of content? I just did this today.
Give me five topics that these articles line up into. Okay, you've got 15 articles. I want a checklist type article that walks through like the values and hyperlink to these articles from it. So that way when I post that checklist it backdate it to like the beginning of the year but I'm going to get internal links to all of that on a non category page instead. It's topically relevant and a little chunk of information.
So you know, it's on hydrant.com and it's linking to all these IV hydration therapy checklist guide but it links to all the articles. But I don't have to go in and create a category page with all of the WordPress nonsense and all the extra Rigida rack ita but I just got a chance to you know, send all of these internal links out and so of course then I'm going to find some easy win external links to send there so I can then pass that indexation so that we don't keep losing pages out of the index.
Like yeah, use, use LLMs to your, to your availability. Because that analysis of like looking through X number of blog posts to find a theme that, that would have taken a couple hours and then like writing it up would have been another hour or two or exporting it out. But I just got that done in like half an hour.
[00:25:37] Speaker B: I mean it's a great SEO assistant. Absolutely. It can't take the strategy because that's like sometimes critical thinking and getting creative with how you implement SEO in a way that doesn't go against the brand, brand messaging, brand voice. But yeah, I mean the things that you can do now, things that used to take us five, six hours of research, like sometimes an hour and then even small little things of like copy paste, copy paste, just like automated.
That's where I think it's like a cool time to be alive because you're getting more done in a short amount of time.
[00:26:09] Speaker A: Absolutely love it. Shout out again where people can find you if you're on like LinkedIn or on Bluesky or Twitter specifically.
Where can people interact with you, get more nuggets of wisdom?
[00:26:22] Speaker B: Yeah, primarily on LinkedIn. Jason Berkowitz, you can find our agency at Jason Picktheweb Agency. You can Google Break. The web will come up.
But I primarily hang out on LinkedIn. But also to a point, because there's a lot of shininess out there. That's just.
You know what I mean.
[00:26:39] Speaker A: Yeah, I know what you mean.
All right, thanks for the great conversation.
[00:26:44] Speaker B: Thank you, Jeremy.
