Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted SEO podcast host. I'm here with Jeremy Yang, founder of Digital Goliath.
Let's have you give yourself an introduction. Talking a little bit about some of your experience that's made you an expert in marketing.
[00:00:16] Speaker B: 100% man. So thanks for having me. First of all, I've started Digital Guide about seven years ago out of, like, absolute necessity because, you know, we.
Before that, I was working a few marketing places, and things were just moving very, very slowly when it comes to marketing. And I was very impatient. And the guy who recognized that and he said, you know what, dude? If you really want things to go fast, you got to go in the paid ad space.
So I went into there when followed a great mentor, and when she decided not to continue to build her agency, she worked out a deal with me. And, yeah, so digital life was born about seven years ago. Since then, I came from small business.
I work with a lot of small businesses, and probably a third of my business currently labeling for massive agencies who missing that part of their gig. And then a lot of my own clients. Yeah. So we're managing currently about $450,000 a month in ad spend, which is respectable, you know, so it was just great to be here where when, you know, you reached out, I was like, yeah, I would love to talk SEO, because I don't know enough about it. And I think it's always good to hear from the other side.
[00:01:22] Speaker A: Yeah, it's interesting to me that, you know, I've been doing this for 19 years personally and ever from the beginning, there is a divide between SEO and SEM.
What do you think maintains that divide? Why is it so often separate teams that don't communicate with each other?
[00:01:50] Speaker B: For me, I think that's a good question. I think for me, it's more on the ground intensity.
With SEO, it's like the certain rhythm right to it. You do something, you test it for ads, it's. The intensity is a lot higher.
Like when your clients are doing ads, the stakes feels higher. They're more demanding. You have to be like, hovering around the computer kind of thing. Things go wrong and things have to be fixed straight away.
And I feel like another divide. And I don't really treat it as a divide. Another reason is I feel like Google will give you all the information when it comes to ads. They want you to spend, they want you to do, you know, follow their whatever. And I know a lot of it is bs. It's all made up because they own the whole house. And they try to make each other bid against each other. Right. Like any intelligent person will see that, but at least they're telling you, like where you're ranking top, absolute top, you know, what are you doing wrong? How much? Like they used to give a lot more keyword data around that. You want, you want to search for something, you know, go. It's right here. The platform tells you the spreading bits. With SEO, I feel like you guys have a harder in the aspect where you guys are always like listening to what's out there, what's coming up, like what's testing, you know, you try to help each other out, like a community kind of thing. Whereas paid ads is just like, like guns for hire.
Like we, we, we're going to get this money, we're going to get this done, you know, so it's just how I feel about it.
[00:03:17] Speaker A: Yeah, that is true.
I have a friend, you know, she's in the paid ad space and we were just kind of riffing about, you know, oh, hey, she, she wants to do, you know, conversations about the role of AI in ads as a podcast series. And they're like, well, I'd love to talk to more ads people, but a lot of the people I know won't talk to me because they kind of want to keep their secrets safe. Really, you know?
Yeah, well, you know, because it makes sense.
Know, we were kind of talking it through of like, hey, if you're in the digital ad space and you know something, you want to get paid for that, you know, and that's like, and, and you can quickly apply it with somebody's budget versus with SEO, you have to prove it out, you know, you have to have really solid examples of, okay, I did X, Y and Z with this client over this amount of time and came out with this out output. And you know, for a long time in the SEO space, you know, publishing what you're working on was like the number one way to get clients, you know, so like the proof in the pudding versus somebody in the ad space. Well, they're going to run ads to get more people to sell ads to. So there is kind of that from my experience.
[00:04:40] Speaker B: So let's say you're interesting because from my experience, like from, from the ads people that I've dealt with and the people in my cohort, they can't wait to give it away because it's like they try to create courses, they try to create YouTube content. It's like they, because I feel like people is going to figure out anyway because ads there's Meta Ads Library, Google Transparency center, like the word and keyword. And from my experience, they can't wait to give it away to, you know, so it's so interesting listening from your, your side of town. Yeah, yeah.
[00:05:16] Speaker A: I'm curious.
I personally have dipped into, you know, small campaigns here and there for clients who, you know, they don't have that much budget or they don't want to hire a separate ads person. And can I please set it up or can you check out my, my system? And, you know, often I'll audit and be like, this is terrible. Who set this up? They're like, google set it up for me.
[00:05:42] Speaker B: Google set up.
[00:05:43] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, that's the fox guarding the hen house right there. What is, what are some of the most egregious setup errors that you've seen coming into somebody's ads account that you fixed and turn things around for them.
[00:06:01] Speaker B: So if Google setting up, it says there's two different types of Google support email eyes, right? There's the offshore ones where they have agenda to switch everything to auto recommendation, you know, so it doesn't matter how to get you on the call, eventually the agenda will come up. I say, oh, you know, why don't you go here for a little while? You know, what about this box? You want to tick this box? It's like, no, dude, I don't want to tick that box. It's. I know what that box does.
If a client, if that's being set up, I think that that's going to have a lot of problems because they have a script and agenda. They're not looking at your ad account at all. So they're ticking boxes so they can quickly, you know, move on.
But the onshore ones, it only, only comes to you when you start spending a lot of money.
So when you're at a certain amount and they don't care anything about auto recommendation, they're pretty good. They're pretty good. They kind of know your business and they kind of know the industry. So they can bring you stats, et cetera, like general stats, not competitor stats, but general stats about, you know, how the bids are. But to answer your question, I think when they cram everything in one campaign, when they try to do it easy, you know, it's so nuanced. There's every single knob that's in there. There's a YouTube video on. You should turn it on as a YouTube on why you shouldn't turn it on. So it's like so situational and you can't just go and follow a script. It doesn't work. It just doesn't work. You have to do it slowly and really learn it, I think.
So there's too many, too many things to mention. Yeah.
[00:07:28] Speaker A: One, one thing that I would do and I don't know, maybe you can tell me if it's still Best practice is look to split your ad groups down to much smaller sets of keywords and have at least three ads for each of those small ad groups.
Is that somewhere around best practice or what is some of the best setup advice for businesses these days?
[00:07:57] Speaker B: I respect that setup, I do. But Google has favoring us moving on from that.
So it's more theme based. So you know how back in the days was exact match, phrase match, broad match. Right. So now everything is broadish. Doesn't matter how you set it.
Right. So if like just say you, you type in something to do with a specific service right now competitor brands can sneak in whereas that's never happened before just because they do that service as well. Right. So how crazy is that? Because before you used to have to type in like Jeremy Rivera SEO for that for the search to show up. But now if it goes SEO, you know your, your local town, like Jeremy stuff could come up too and they could trigger their ads. So how crazy is that? So Exact Match is no longer Exact Match. So as you probably know about Performance Max, you probably see a lot of that. That's where everything is pushing towards.
The good thing that Google's done recently is it's allowing negative lists again for Performance Max. Before it wasn't allowed so it was complete black box for about a year and a half.
Oh it's just crazy. Crazy. He's just putting money in. You have no idea. But to answer your question, I probably wouldn't segment it down like that granular level anymore. But if you do have E commerce accounts, that's when you treat the campaign level like the old ad group level.
Break down each ROAS group. So do it based on roas. Don't base it on like product name or anything based on ROAS levels.
And then that way you can because it's ROAS game. Right. So it's. So you're telling the machine to learn. You want to convert at 4x right. So if you have one product line that has 1.2x and 8x acceptable, that's not going to work because it's too scattered or have averages will kill you.
So you gotta go break it down to ROAS level. So that's the E commerce I think There's a game around splitting in terms of services businesses depends how much money they have. If they have a good amount of budget, I will still go search. If they don't, you probably have to rely on PMAX for a while.
[00:10:14] Speaker A: What's the reality around using the display ad network within Google these days? Because whenever I would approach campaigns for my clients, mostly because I was coming from the SEO side, I almost always turned that off and didn't push towards the display ad systems.
What is the best practices when you make that recommendation to combine both specific keyword searches and the display ad network augmenting? And is that based off of the return on investment? Is that based off of the profit margin that you you're looking for for that product or service? Or is it more about the nature of what it is that you're selling, where you expect your customer to potentially be browsing a whole bunch of different sites that you might catch their attention?
[00:11:14] Speaker B: Yeah. So for, for display ads, since I started seven years ago, I only believe display ads for remarketing.
[00:11:21] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:11:21] Speaker B: So I only business. I only believe it's because there's too many spammy sites. So back then there was a link where you can exclud like spammy sites. Right now you can still do it, but Google has make you jump through many hoops and people still put out these 20,000 website links. So you can quickly exclude and all that, but there's a trick to it so it's not an instant button anymore. And you definitely want to exclude those sites because it's spammy. They whatever, they're useless.
So definitely display is remarketing only best practices have an offer on display just a bit like social media ads have offer on there, like to get them back or to, you know, some type of percentage of card abandonment in terms of audience. I think people are too focused on, you know, overlapping keywords with, you know, this and that audience. The stuff doesn't work. It all gets expanded. So all you're doing is giving Google initial signal, right. And then Google can do whatever you want. Same as meta these days.
So display. And I think last point I would make is that when we're doing Google Ads, what you want to do is you want to hit display, you want to hit YouTube, right. And you want to hit the discovery feed, but with very little money because the diminishing returns is very early on those platforms, if that makes sense. So you should hit it because people will be visible. Oh cool, there's a guy on video again. Oh, there's a guy on discovery feed. Oh, I see him on a news site. Okay, so he must be doing pretty well. But all you're doing is like 10, $20 display marketing remarketing.
I think there's value in that for sure.
[00:13:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
What are, what's the current economy like when it comes to choosing which ad platform to pursue? You know, you know, there's Meta, there's Google, Bing, Yahoo.
They have their ad platform, TikTok, there may be others.
So how do you go about talking through with the client, which of those platforms to use and why?
[00:13:40] Speaker B: So in terms of platforms, what I do is, you know, just say you're a client, I'm talking to you, right? And, and then what I'll look at is how good are you on video, right? What assets have you got? What power, what. What resources have you got to continually produce assets, right? Let's just say you are service business or E commerce business because Meta is about burnout.
So you got to re. You got to refill and replenish the tank. So we've got to look at that, right? So just say that you are a lawyer business, okay. And you don't want to be in front of camera. Okay, you know what? You don't have anyone in your office wants to be in front of camera.
Facebook, Instagram is useless to you because you probably already entire. So I'm hard on search, going hardcore on search. Probably 80% Google. Once that gets working, then 20% on Bing, right? So Bing's search volume. I know, I know. I've watched your podcast. You know, you're glad that Bean's coming back into the game and all that, but on the ads, dude, it's so little, like, so little interest.
And then the thing with their clients that you still got to set up all the tagging, tracking, everything else, right? And the reporting. So that's definitely that. In terms of.
Just say you have something a bit more novel, right? And you kind of like to. You don't mind promoting it or you don't mind getting some UGC stuff, then a lot of that money is going to go on Facebook, Instagram.
[00:15:04] Speaker A: Okay, that makes sense because so having. If you. It's basically your business marketing model and how much fuel you're willing to pour into fire, Right?
[00:15:17] Speaker B: Yeah. Feels a great. Yeah. So I call it how many bullets you go in the chamber, right? So you know what I mean? Like if you go, let's do this for three months and then you got like four assets. I'm like, where'd you get this four assets ago? We shot it a year ago and the guy's gone now. I said, oh, well, I don't know if you're gonna last for three months, you know.
[00:15:37] Speaker A: Yeah, that definitely makes sense.
When it comes to the service business side, what are some of the unique services that you've configured ads for that kind of stood out from your normal deployment, had some sort of kink or special feature that you had to adjust your campaign to address?
[00:16:06] Speaker B: Bubblegum Casting is a. Is a huge, huge children's modeling agency in Australia. It's the biggest in Australia. I was lucky to get that was through our referral.
I think that is a perfect example. And obviously this is unscripted. I didn't think about this before. So it's the perfect example of being fluid with the distribution of the budget between Google and Meta.
I think that's because when they're doing so search is a staple, right? People go, well, how to get my kids into modeling or modeling photo shoots or whatever, right? And that's on the search side, the bottom funnel, they're ready to go. But then there's the meta side where you're showing proof of people who've successful in the modeling in the past, which is massive.
So that, so that, that kind of like. And when they have their draws and their like lead magnets, their competitions, if their model searches, that's all dimension on the meta side, right? So that kind of had to move around. When it comes to service businesses, you really want to look for things that's a bit weird. So you don't want to just look for the caros and the physios and the lawyers because that's very competitive. $30 a click. People always get a heart attack when they hear a, you know, tow truck, $200 a click, credit cards, $150 a click, $150 a job is and $50 a click em.
So yeah, really hard. So if actually, you know, you know what, I would even love to talk to you, like just ask you how you deal with the smaller businesses because I know you came from a huge branding industry.
I'm like always fascinated that how is SEO going to survive? Because people not waiting around for six to nine months, even if they tell you they will wait for six, nine months, they're going to get, you know, antsy after like two, three months. You know, they say, well pay this money. I'm not seeing anything yet.
[00:18:02] Speaker A: Yeah, it is hard to do SEO campaigns for small businesses because there is a squeeze point of, you know, how much they're willing to Invest in the content and invest in the process, building links.
Usually the upside, the difference, the flip is that if you run out of ad budget, your campaign's over. But with SEO, you're building appreciable assets that are continuing to increase over time.
So, you know, there, there does come.
Usually, you know, it's about getting the momentum going so that, you know, that small business you can start, you know, increasing the number of, of calls and leads that they're getting, you know, taking those actionable steps, you know, supporting their content and pushing them, you know, and augmenting their other marketing content at the same time. Work with the ads guys so that, you know, if, if you guys have an expensive keyword that you can't afford to bid on, you can hit that with organic content, sometimes a little bit easier with a much smaller investment that's going to last much longer. So it's a, it's that trade off of, you know, yes, ads that starts, but then when you run out of that ad budget, you're not advertising anymore. So but with SEO, it does have this upscale effect. So it is a hard place to be as a consultant, as an agency, and sometimes you get squeezed out on the margins. And that's why as a freelancer or as an agency, there is a bit of a revolving door as you move from client to client, you know, or you, you know, I often do smaller consultation type freelancing where I'm advising, you know, you should be doing this and this and this for SEO, tackle this and then their team is handling it.
[00:20:08] Speaker B: Like you give my roadmap about the expertise because I know you, you are a huge pro in like local link building stuff. Right, like the community stuff. Yeah, that, that's massive. And then you also have, you guys, especially in SEO space, have to combat the cowboys who, you know, just sprouts any type of crap to get, you know, people got kids to feed, I guess, and they'll make up whatever they make up to. I mean, I know me and you, we both got kids to feed as well, but like, they'll make up whatever to get the gig.
So it does sound like me and using the same boat when it comes to filtering our clients.
So if there's too much education at the start, they've never done it before. It's, they have very small budget, very difficult to play that game.
[00:20:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
Something that is a hard lesson to learn for freelancers, for marketers is that.
And Dave Goulas, one of my previous guests, he said not every client is worth acquiring.
You Know, it may sound good on paper, but you know, oh, hey, I've got another client. Well, you know what? This client is going to take three to four times as much attention. The potential is very slim. There could be those difficulties, you know, being more, having more discretion, you know, and setting yourself up as a freelancer or setting yourself up within your agency.
I know there are, there's a number of, not even just the dodgy folk. Yeah, there's the cowboys, but there's also the agencies who over promise and yeah, they're going to deliver the same thing regardless. And they're expecting you to burn burnout within six months. And then they've got a sales guy flogging it and they get another person.
[00:21:51] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a game game.
[00:21:53] Speaker A: That's a hard thing to deal with too. It's a tough game.
[00:21:57] Speaker B: It's tough, tough game. And the way you guys have to sell like because it's on page, off page, link building. And then, you know, one guy, sometimes one person favors one side of SEO because that's what they. All they got is hammer. So everything looks like a nail. Right. They're like, well, let's, let's attack this, you know, and then they, and then the. To someone who's not really into the SEO game like most people aren't and they kind of expect everything to be finished. They go, aren't you link building too? Aren't you working on the website to do like I said, oh no, that's not, that's not our thing. And they kind of, you know, gets friction from there.
[00:22:31] Speaker A: Yeah, that's definitely true. And it reminds me of a quote from my friend Matt Brooks of Seoteric. He says ChatGPT is your most popular but least knowledgeable customer support representative.
[00:22:47] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay.
[00:22:48] Speaker A: And I say that to kind of bring up the top of one half of the AI picture, which is, hey, there's now AI overviews there. ChatGPT just released internal ads as a platform.
Have you had a chance to play around with that? Is that on the horizon? Are you excited or dreading adding another platform to the mix? What are your thoughts on that side of the AI picture?
[00:23:19] Speaker B: I was very excited.
Right. But then it's like I was very excited because I felt like I was really positioned well to capture that big jump or whatever. Right. But as I'm more going through the LinkedIn feels like there's thousands, thousands of people just like me who can't wait to, you know, add that as a service. And the way that the first set of ads that came out like two weeks ago. That was started. Beta test. Beta testing was.
It's not very promising the way it looks. It's like they were at the bottom of the Scroll Premium. People don't have it. CPMs are 60 to 80.
It's just not very exciting. Like it doesn't look like they want to make it like a nuanced platform like Google Ads or Facebook ads, because they're the parents of the ads world, right? Like Pinterest and everything else is just a cut down version of that. It feels like the Mode is like ChatGPT just wants like tell me what you want.
Okay, all right, cool. Well, we'll place it and then, you know, leave it with us. That's the feeling I'm getting. So where are you doing that? I mean, and they're testing with businesses that's gonna spend a million plus right at the moment. So it's like, whoa, what about the rest of us? There's no, there's no way to stick that in or whatever. And I know Google AI overviews, they try to, you know, put the game around there as well because they lost a lot of money from, you know, having to reshuffle.
So the questions also I'm interested in is how much inquiry are you getting?
But like how many, how much FOMO are you feeling on the market these days? Because they're like, man, I need to be on this overview crap, right?
This is the wild, wild west again.
[00:25:01] Speaker A: Yeah, it is very unsettled. There was a period, I'd say from August until December, it felt really hard to be in SEO.
Everything was like once again like SEO is dead again.
You know, like, oh, AI overviews is here and you know, people aren't, aren't using it. And you know, you got Chachi GPT, Claude, you know, everybody's on these platforms and you know, search has totally changed. Is it going to be AI, SEO, Geo, you know, AI.
There's this Alphabet soup moment of all of, all of these spammers trying to attention grab of SEO's dead. You gotta do this instead.
But the good news is around December, people like CEOs seem to start waking up of, you know, what all of these hype, you know, LinkedIn profile people.
You know, we still need a foundation in SEO. We just need our SEO to also address how to show up in basic visibility terms. No, like it there for publisher sites. It is, it is dire. There's 25 to 40% traffic loss on publisher sites. You know, working with a radio station network, even with Massive improvements in their SEO campaign. They're still seeing Google decrease the amount of traffic that they're sending over. So any. That's on top of what happened two to three years ago of the helpful content update, which was supposed to address spam, but largely just hit a bunch of content producers and publishers in different niches. So you have that double whammy effect, knocking down a bunch of industries, and then you get AI overviews over everything, starting to replace, you know, rich snippets. There's, there's now more of a balance of. It's no longer, hey, we need to abandon SEO for AI, you know, because people are figuring out, you know, that there's just not there yet. Like, there's a lot of promise in these tools and a lot of, you know, there's, there's a lot of fuel there and there are some people making out like bandits, but for the most part, it's, yeah, like trying to get, Trying to quantify, you know, how visible is even your brand is a really difficult task. With my last interview with Bennis, he was saying we were talking about how out of a hundred searches, you redo the same search 100 times. You only get the same answer about 20% of that time.
The other 80% of the time, it's giving you different, different answers. So if you're a brand and you're trying to show up in that search, maybe you'd be satisfied with, well, we've done the work and you'll show up 20% of the time.
[00:28:14] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. But there's no tool here, is there? Like a tool? Because Ahrefs and Semrush has always been like a stable. Good luck to them, you know, I mean, they built it that way. And there's other ones. But what's a tool for AI right now? There's so many. It's divergent.
[00:28:33] Speaker A: The problem is really that there is, There are, there are so many. And this is going to become.
It's like, what is that principle in science that to observe something is to change it?
And we have that problem with this.
So what's happening? What happened for a minute?
This is related. I'll come back to your direct question. What happened for a minute was that Google changed its platform and search result tools were no longer able to change the modifier to see the first 100 results.
[00:29:14] Speaker B: I remember that. I remember that day. That was like reckoning.
[00:29:17] Speaker A: Yeah, it was frightening. The outcome of it was that suddenly the level of impressions dropped by 20% across the board.
The reality, though, after A month or three, we realized that wasn't real traffic. Those impressions were search bots from SEO tools scraping results.
So the loss of that 20% had zero impact on clicks across the board.
So that is a real world statement of observing something changes the nature of it. So we're going to, or having that, going to have that same moment with the attempt to monitor or predict or come out with some sort of measurement because you're going to have these third party tools buying GPT accounts, putting in queries to try to measure how visible is it which then contaminates the pool of genuine interest. How many people genuinely are asking about it and how much is the LLM then adding to its database of information versus, you know, these tools that are, you know, there's a very different influx. If LLMs learn and they, they, they add to their database based off of the queries that they're given. If it's a genuine human pool putting in queries, that's going to be one process. But if then we, we add in machine tools directed at scale by companies to try to measure these brands, then that's going to change the way that the LLMs learn and add to their knowledge pool and database about it. So it's not clear at this point how robust the LLM functionality is going to be towards that reality of hey, there's tons of programs now inputting queries, how much is that going to impact the output of an LLM and how much do they want it to impact that output? Because they might not be able to tell the difference between a genuine GPT user and a GPT user that's fed by an API that's intentionally being set up just to fuel these tools.
So it's a very murky space. There's, I don't know how to explain.
[00:31:52] Speaker B: To me that's really interesting. I never had explained to me that way.
But if you look at the SEO or ads game or whatever, like there has to be, when we're working for bigger businesses, there has to be an authority report. Right. People are like, well based on this, you know, your ranking's gone up by six points or whatever.
[00:32:11] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:32:11] Speaker B: So would you guys especially still have to come up with that, say hey, you know, we're based on this tool. Yeah. So but is everyone trying to create that tool?
[00:32:21] Speaker A: Yeah, everybody's creating tool those tools. I know Ahrefs has some sort of metric like that. Semrush folded it in SE rankings has one.
[00:32:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:32:32] Speaker A: You know, I know Noah Toa, my friend Michael Buckbee, Made one, actually, I think I have three friends, PO friends who have made some sort of AI visibility tool, either vibe coded or actually paid for. You know, some are legit, you know, and trying to fold in other things. It's this weird moment of.
[00:32:54] Speaker B: It is a weird moment. You're right. It's a very weird moment right now for this. I still think I put the notes here as you were talking about as well. I think that, you know, CEOs should recognize that there has to be a central. SEO is a central game now. It's not even optional anymore. Right. They shouldn't come up today. Goes well, this person, whoever we get, has to be able to build the scope of AEO SEO. They can't be working silos. He's got to be a communicator, right. And he should be talking to my ads people, whatever, and then try to figure this whole thing out together.
Because one, one of the things I have firm belief in is the, you know, how people always try to figure out the customer journey, like with all these tools and all these fancy tools. I've never believed in that because I don't think it's accurate. I think we should look at everything as a blended roas, you know, like, how much do we spend on ads altogether? What about this email thing is like. And then just work out, you know, did it elevate or didn't it elevate?
[00:33:54] Speaker A: Yeah, I think, I think that's true. It does have to come down to better integration of an SEO rule across it because, you know, if you need materials to, to kick off a meta ad campaign, if you're only, you know, running that ad for like three weeks and then that video is burnt.
[00:34:19] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:34:19] Speaker A: Then that's a huge expense. But if I had, you know, if I was in that position, I move that video over and put it into a blog post and then I, you know, talk to the email person and have them feature that video over here and make it a much more robust system that, that isn't so much, you know, depleting or, you know, disposable ad content. You know, you can repurpose, reuse it, refold it, you know, combine those videos together. Yeah. There's so many clever things that you could do with that if you were positioned. Well, had somebody positioned with that knowledge of how to, you know, take that asset and reuse it somewhere else, you know.
[00:35:07] Speaker B: Yeah. And in terms of content, you are big on that as well because I think you do do the content still. You just do the old school keyword research, find the gaps. Little bit of keyword cramming. You still do a little bit of that?
[00:35:18] Speaker A: I do, I do. I have two processes now.
So one process is, is along those lines of like, hey, I've got, I mean, I made a tool on seoarcade.com of like, you put in your primary qu at the top 10 ranking URLs for that keyword, then looks at the top 100 keywords for those pages and gives you a cluster of overlapping and then sorts it by how many of those pages ranked for the same phrase.
Which is an interesting way to kind of define, hey, this is how Google understands it now. There's positives and negatives to that. There's positives of knowing what's the, the, what are the odd ducks, like, you know, what are the non sequiturs? What are the things that, that don't fit, that Google thinks are the same thing. That's great to hand over to an ad person because then you can add that to the negative list.
[00:36:17] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:36:18] Speaker A: At the same time it's great because you can sort and see, oh, you know what all 10 of these pages, they say, you know, Cookeville sunrooms, they don't talk about some room additions.
You know, you know, there, it's not addition services, it's not renovations.
You know, like you can sort out and see, okay, well, this is how these sites co rank for this and that's probably how Google best understands it. So that's one approach.
The other side is, is this having con genuine conversation with another person in the industry or nation, doing an interview with an expert or having two experts talk about it, whatever they talk about. If you then turn that over to Claude and say, what are the major themes?
Then you can extract keyword intent. You can extract topics, challenges, friction points.
So the other side is turning it on its head. Like one is going for the data, the other is trying to get the data out of hooking up and having a subject matter expert talk to another subject matter expert. Like, if you wanted to know what was going on in SEO, right now, have an interview between two SEOers going at it. They're going to talk on the hot button issues, they're going to talk about the friction points. If you want to know about what's happening in the renovation space, I was at my karate dojo and I was listening to two plumbers sitting next to each other.
[00:37:53] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:37:53] Speaker A: And they were talking about their business. And I learned so much about, you know, using this tile and avoiding mold. And they face like the expert to expert conversation.
[00:38:07] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:38:08] Speaker A: Is the other side of it where you can get so much value and learn so much more about the targeting versus just the raw number and volume side.
If you marry those two processes, then you're going to be sitting pretty.
[00:38:23] Speaker B: That's interesting. But the second part, the talking part, I mean, having a genuine organic coming out of that, like, that's. I'm just thinking commercially, that's harder to convince a client. Right. That's harder to orchestrate.
[00:38:36] Speaker A: It's a little harder to orchestrate, but you can achieve it in a couple of different ways. It doesn't have to be external. It can be an internal conversation where you arrange and say, hey, I need the, the.
I need the C suite person in charge of this aspect. I need to interview the sales guy for one of my clients. They, they do precast walls. I just interviewed the guy that does the installation process and talked to him. How does this actually work? When you call up to the site, what. How does this lay out? Like on the ground, you know, you've got these massive walls. What'd you start with? Oh, well, we need this much space. The trucks pull in, we put in the piers. We have to measure. We have them measure three times.
And out of that was a document, I turned it into a transcript. Then I turned that into three or four articles just focused on, hey, here's how we do installations. The next was talking about. We talked about materials and how important it is to measure three times and setting up the site being before, you know, that type of information is the type of things that, you know, oh, hey, we need this permit, this permit and this permit from the city. Like, you didn't say that anywhere on your site, but somebody thinking about putting these massive walls around their data center or around their hoa, they're going to have these questions. They're going to be googling that. Yeah, you put that as content out there so it can be an internal conversation. I've also owned up a white legal service to.
[00:40:18] Speaker B: I'm learning a lot from this. Yeah.
[00:40:21] Speaker A: To actually set up a podcast like I did one for a commercial restaurant space. I had two chefs talk to each other about entrepreneurship and launching new restaurants because they were just doing articles about, you know, how to change your fry oil.
[00:40:39] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:40:40] Speaker A: But that's going to go to a. That's going to go to a line cook who just wants to know how to change it. What you need to have is a conversation between two entrepreneurs about sports, smart purchasing decisions for their restaurant.
[00:40:53] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:40:54] Speaker A: That's the conversation. Those are people.
[00:40:57] Speaker B: Yeah. That's commercially viable. There's people with money reading that stuff. Right. And now it's like moving down the line. Yeah, that's very smart. I think you got to go there, man. Like, I haven't, I haven't touched it a. But yeah, it's really, really smart way to doing it. Yeah. Cool. Very interesting, man. Very knowledgeable on that topic. We've thought about this a lot.
[00:41:16] Speaker A: I, I have. I kind of flip flipped the interview onto myself. But no, no, it's good.
[00:41:22] Speaker B: I'm really interested in also because I've been writing articles about just my own thoughts, not like research or keyword, whatever. And one of the things that always fascinated me was about people go, AI writing for AI. Right. So now you're just writing stuff AI and then where's it go? Like, where's a human thing? Because people want to fight. Bullet points, little snippets, a quick FAQs.
That's the game now. Right. And then what's your view on that?
[00:41:47] Speaker A: My view is it's, it's a human bot sandwich. All right, so you, at the end of the day, bots don't have money.
[00:41:56] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:41:56] Speaker A: Bots don't buy anything.
[00:41:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:41:58] Speaker A: Right. So you still have a seller and have a buyer. You got two humans, but in between you have layers of bots. It could be one, two or three or maybe four layers because you've got, you know, the buyer uses ChatGPT. ChatGPT uses Google. Google uses bots to access the website. The website is partially made by LLM content by the marketing company.
And so you have this sandwich of stuff. But remember that each of those bots, Google and ChatGPT, are designed with rules about content that they want you to make. Content for humans.
[00:42:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:42:43] Speaker A: Not for bots. So think about Google. They have UX UI rules, they have content writing rules, an algorithm that rewards, you know, expertise, experience, authority, trust.
So the content that is rewarded, that shows up that marketers and LLM tools are designed to write like, look at why Claude is better than GPT.
It's because it writes more naturally and writes better and more thoroughly based off of the sources than GPT's hackneyed writing.
So even though there are bots in between, they are rewarded for the more human, human sounding and the more human relatable the content can be. So, yes, there is a downside to overusing LLMs and there will be an ororbo effect of the snake eating its own tail at some point. It's already, already happening to A certain degree. But the reality is that these, in the human bot sandwich, the bots are still incentivized to reward content that's made for humans. And so that's why my default to like refer.
Creating systems around genuine conversations.
Creating systems based off of podcasts. Creating systems based off of interviews and subject matter. Expertise cannot come out of LLM tools.
[00:44:15] Speaker B: Yeah, okay.
[00:44:16] Speaker A: You can get baseline information, but it's always a general pool and you have to enrich it to make it unique.
[00:44:24] Speaker B: Yeah, got you, got you. Yeah, no, I, I didn't even have a follow up there. It's just very, very interesting the way, the way you are, like the way you broke it down. And that's to go back to the first thing you said, which was like, bots don't have money to spend.
Do you know what I mean? Like, if you want something that's happened, you still gotta make sure it works for the last person who's gonna be in the chain. Yeah, I'm gonna have to think about that later.
I think about that one later. Yeah, cool. Amazing.
[00:44:51] Speaker A: Yeah.
Let's kind of wrap up the interview.
Last question is, what are you preparing for in the next six months to a year as you try to go to market, as you work with your clients, what are you thinking about that horizon? How are you future proofing campaigns or battening down the hatches, improving processes as we live in unprecedented times?
[00:45:21] Speaker B: For sure, I haven't thought about this fully, but I feel like in the last six months what I've been doing is bolstering up my playbook.
Like using AI is a wide variety available now. Right. Just like, you know how you do a little bit ads when people can't afford it. So we use what we know to do the little bit of SEO stuff for them. Like I say, hey, you know, if you wanted to, we can help you do some research around keywords about what to write, for example, Right. Which we've never done before. And things around, tracking things around, competitor analysis, things around.
If you want to build a YouTube clip now we've got AI, we can analyze someone else's YouTube channel. Channel, right. And figure out exactly like what is it they're making, how are they making it, whatever. So if you want to be one, one of the big boys, this is probably you could start trying something like this. So all these services, all these playbooks, it really helps because if you look at seven years ago, all it was just button clicking, spamming. I call it playing Street Fighter. Right? Oh, you know, build a campaign like this for four ads and add 10% every day. Like, how'd you know it was 10%? How'd you know it wasn't 12%? Do you know what I mean? So you know it's algorithm whisperers. That's what I call them. Like, you're not working on Facebook. How'd you know it was 10%? But I guess they did whatever they did. But now we've completely moved away from that model. No one's talking like that anymore. Right. So now I'm just bolstering my playbook to make sure that the clients are getting more out of the same engagement. So that way, and for me, I am not a somebody who hides behind emails.
I want to be there, like talking to them about stuff and then that differentiates me. And then when they see that it's harder to lose the churn. The churn is very hard.
So becomes a lot less churn. That's my differentiator, I guess, and that's why I'm trying to double down on that.
[00:47:14] Speaker A: So, yeah, fantastic. Well, give a shout out again to your company and anything that's coming out as a kind of wrap up here.
[00:47:22] Speaker B: Yeah, sure thing. So, Jeremy Digital Glass Marketing, digitalglass.com that I use the website and currently I'm just talking to people. So if you have podcasts, podcast to do with small business marketing in general. Would love to be more part of that. Yeah, that's the go. Thanks for having me, man.
[00:47:37] Speaker A: Thanks for your time.
[00:47:38] Speaker B: Cool. Cheers.
