Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the Unscripted SEO Podcast. I'm Jeremy Rivera, your host. I'm here with Jonathan Schussler.
Why don't you give yourself an introduction and focus on your bona fides, your experience that should make people trust you when you're talking about this subject.
[00:00:19] Speaker B: Hi. Yeah, I'm Jonathan. I come from a background of studying sports and mathematics, but, yeah, photographed on the side for a long time, and then I started doing wedding photography about 10 years ago.
And over this time I had to promote myself starting out, and then I switched to agency life about five years ago, and, yeah, got really, like, into the SEO stuff and, like, nerding about stuff. Think I kind of understand the basics of how algorithms work from my study of mathematics. And it's really interesting trying to figure out, like, how the stuff is evolving and seeing new stuff coming up.
Sometimes stuff that's not good for you in the long run, but kind of works as well, and just trying to get a feel for it, and it feels like everyone's trying to solve this puzzle. And I've been into puzzles all my life, so I really, really like SEO right now. And also, yeah, basically just building trust with your audience was like my main thing over the past few years, which kind of resonates with SEO as well, because you're really trying to gain trust with Google and LLMs now.
So. Yeah. Is that what you're asking for?
[00:01:40] Speaker A: Yeah, no, that's exactly right. Because I want people who listen to this podcast, you know, like, I try to get people on who are in the trenches, who are executing on this and not just just the frontman of an organization. And it's always different. SEO and how it's viewed or understood based off of whether you're in house, whether you're a freelancer, whether you're a fractional CMO or CFO or even a PPC person, they have different perspectives on it. And that's based off of, you know, the nature of interviews and conversation. Like, we're combining our shared experience on a shared topic, and it's going to come out with something new and weird. So I like to try to understand at the outset, like, where. Where have those experiences come from? Because if you haven't been at that agency life before and you've only done in house for somebody and you grew entirely in house that entire career, or if you've been freelance and you've never been in house on the opposite side, then you might not have as much clarity about, you know, the pressure to convince a boss to Execut on budget you might be scrapping for $80 a month for, for Ahrefs versus coming in as a consultant. And you know, you've got your tools of weapons and you can convince the client super easily. Oh yeah, we need this, this and this and this. And the in house guy is sitting there with slack jaw like can I get any of this money to do this stuff?
SEO is, is an interesting industry that's you know, has developed in the past 25ish years that didn't exist on the face of the planet before, you know, as the Internet gained its preeminence in our culture and discovery. So I'm curious, where are you at now with your career? I understand that you're doing freelance and how has that experience been different from you know, agency life and where you started learning SEO?
[00:03:45] Speaker B: Yeah, so in the agency we are basically a web based agency building new experiences for either existing companies or helping new companies come up in the space. And we've not only done SEO, we've built the whole brand basically. So we've done the socials, we've done the web design and that was really tough because I got to face a lot of yeah, basically gray old man that either had a re existing website from 2004 that looked exactly like Windows XP that had no sense of content on it to other companies barely just starting out and they were like we need to get on Google Page one. And I'm like, you have no domain, you have no backlinks, you have nothing to show for that we can work with basically. So we really had to start scrapping from each side and it was sometimes tough because it was in a smaller city in Germany. We had to do a lot of local SEO but some of the companies, they really wanted to go nationwide and they didn't really get what is needed to do that.
[00:05:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:05:06] Speaker B: And they didn't have a marketing team behind it. They maybe had like one person sitting there trying to gain some newsletter followers.
[00:05:15] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:05:17] Speaker B: Whereas as a freelancer now I can, I can myself not the boss of the gag agency who goes to someone being like yeah, we can do all that for you, we can get you on Google Page one, whatever. And then I have to deliver with a company that's not prepared to deliver. Like they don't have people sitting there knowing they don't have statistics that I can work with. Now as a freelancer I can approach companies and tell them this, this, this, this is what I need.
And I can get into a conversation with their boss pretty much which is way easier than what it used to be in the agency. It was very like separated. You would always have just your one little project and you would maybe have. So I would maybe do like the SEO for the website and also do like some Instagram content where their target audience wasn't on Instagram but they wanted Instagram because Instagram is new and hip and cool and young.
[00:06:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:06:22] Speaker B: Which it already wasn't at the time anymore. So yeah, it's, it's been, it's been difficult and the switch up was different. But I'm mainly doing SEO for service based businesses now, which is very much closer to what I do in my, my own company as well. So that really helped me like focus down on, on a few certain spots and it's not that any client who walked through the door is just a fit for what I offer.
[00:06:54] Speaker A: I'm curious because I haven't had the opportunity to do local SEO in an international sense for another country.
Have you had cross country local SEO experience like doing something in America, Australia as well as Germany or Britain?
Have you seen is there a common line or is there a big difference between the local SEO game for service based businesses based off of the country you're in?
[00:07:24] Speaker B: I haven't done any cross international SEO work, but from what I've heard from different podcasts, the game is pretty similar in a lot of ways. So I've listened to this one Danish guy, I forgot his name right now, and also Edward Storm and they've talked a lot about different local SEO tactics that I kind of didn't know that I, I couldn't phrase the rule behind it, but that are also really acknowledged here.
So I really found. So for me, my other business is mainly wedding photography and videography.
So I'm like a specialist in doing both at the same time as one person.
[00:08:09] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:08:09] Speaker B: And so I'm not really, I'm kind of local, but I'm at the same time I'm region based like a plumber.
So I can travel two hours to a wedding, that's no problem.
So I have this like net of cities and I started I first time I heard of programmatic SEO I was like this is exactly what my programming background and my marketing knowledge where they come together.
So I was like, I moved cities, I moved like two and a half hours down south.
And I was like, I need to be present in that area without having any backlinks in that area without having any newspaper articles about me.
And the area that I'm in is very, very competitive because it's the best. We have the best wine region with the best, nicest venues for weddings around.
I was like, well, I can't target Hochset's photograph, Heidelberg, which is wedding photographer Heidelberg, because it has like a very high difficulty score.
So I was like, well, we have so many tiny cities around. So I literally targeted every city in two and a half hours of surroundings. So I have a list of 80 cities that I'm targeting and I'm ranking top four for 50 of them, which are the ones that no one's targeting because everyone, even the guys that live there, target my city.
[00:09:49] Speaker A: Yeah, there is that pressure of like if you're getting hired to do CEO in a competitive market, then it's like Nashville, I'm in Cookville here. You know, it's an hour away in a completely different market. And most people who live in the city like don't want to drive to Nashville. But if you are in this region, they're like, oh yeah, you need to to conquer the Nashville metro. And you're like, okay, well but there's hundreds of little cities and it, you're right. There is an inverse pressure of like, oh well, you know, our shop is in Franklin. It's you know, 15 miles from downtown. They don't want to rank in Franklin, want to rank in Nashville.
But you're right that there is an opportunity. I was talking with One of my SEO friends, Michael McDougald of Right Think Agency. Maybe you have some insight into this on that is Google used to, you know, and this may be ancient history to you. You know, in 2005-2012 they had a distinct. You can't have a doorway page.
You know, that is a region, you know, just the same thing for a different.
They crack down on it. But it really seems like that's the inverse of if you do want to rank locally, you need to actually like make multiple different, you know, service pages, location pages, service and location page hybrids to differentiate and even have a chance of generating local search.
[00:11:21] Speaker B: I have experienced that tiny bit.
There's definitely like a limit to this where they crack down on you.
But for some of the pages, they are so desperate finding someone to cater that keyword that they will allow it Anyways, so one of my favorite keywords, and I pretty sure your podcast listeners will not cross me on this one, I hope, is wedding photographer Kronberg. Kronberg is the most the richest area in Germany. It's like a tiny town near Frankfurt and all the high ass finance, they all live there and it has this magical castle that's been used for tons of Bridgerton level TV shows which is one of the most prestigious five star hotels in the world.
No one's targeting this keyword.
It has like a 10, 10 clicks per month.
But those 10 clicks per month could like you could live off those 10 clicks in one month.
So it's crazy to me that no one's targeting this. I know people don't care because it's only like 10 clicks per month. But why not target it?
Why target a thousand clicks? Heidelberg if you're ranking place five and you get maybe like 10, 15 clicks.
So why not target the one where all the most expensive stuff is happening but there's not many clicks?
[00:13:02] Speaker A: I think that comes down to one of the weaknesses of the SEO industry when it comes to over reliance on data and over reliance and thinking that SEO is popping open semrush or ahrefs and just finding the highest volume term or city and just targeting sheerly based off of volume, you know and I've, I've been in consulting situations where like I have to show them hey, here's the search volumes but let's sort it based off of where do you actually make money the most? You know, like maybe it's not like maybe some of these smaller towns or this region where it's a lot cheaper, you know, working with a precast wall company right now, like there's much higher volume in Atlanta but their main center is in Florida. So the shipping cost is half.
You know, they can deliver locally for half of the cost. So they're winning three times as much business. And so I think, you know, making sure that you don't get shoved into a corner as an SEO, as a consultant of hey, can you come do SEO for our site? No, no, no, no, I don't do SEO for your site. I help develop your business's digital footprint SEO. Understand your cross channel. Are you trying to drive, you know, more conversions through your email? Well, your email list doesn't grow by itself. You have to do things and the best way to do that is with your website and figure out what offering what content you can put out and then that becomes a hybrid, you know, social media slash organic thing where the content you're putting out is maybe it ranks, maybe it doesn't, but it definitely you want to coordinate with the social media person if they exist and the email management person if they exist or it's you, you know, so, you know, I think definitely what I'm, I'm seeing and you can tell me this if this is true is that the bigger success for freelancers and SEO consultants lies in expressing domain experience of knowledge in SEO, but interacting with, coordinating with or literally executing non SEO items as well for the company.
[00:15:22] Speaker B: Yeah, it's we know that Google is growing to know way more than just our title H1 starting our first sentence and Altax, whatever they really start pulling everything together. Especially if you're doing local SEO. They have this great source of pulling all the data that your company gives out together which is in the Google business profile. If you're linking all your socials there, they will start understanding what your business is about, what kind of users are interacting with your business on those social accounts. Because since Instagram allowed their posts to be also indexed, I always had like, I increasingly saw that people got put that saw me on Instagram also found me on Google and the Same happened with TikTok because while Instagram got pressured because TikTok already did it, they were like yeah, take a. Take our content, get us more people on the site.
And so, and what really getting this immersive experience around. Sorry that I'm always talking about my wedding photography now.
[00:16:41] Speaker A: I love having a case study. It's fine. I'm not offended. Like if you're domain experience. I consulted for a poop scooping company and a lot of my examples for a while were around scooping poop. But it was, it was very actionable. It was funny because you know, like the poopy lessons apply elsewhere and you can but use the, you know, use the example that you have. Certainly I'm not going to turn up my nose at your photography example when my example is poop scooping.
[00:17:14] Speaker B: Yeah. So about five years ago I, I started watching some YouTube videos from this Canadian wedding photographer who started doing photo and video hybrid and in just one sentence on the side note, he was like yeah, when I was practicing video I started doing some videos about some wedding venues that I visited and he was already like he's huge. He has like 600,000 on YouTube. He's been around the block.
Kind of old for a wedding photographer because most of us, they can't deal with it at 40 anymore.
He's around like 45, 50 ish. And he said, he just said this and it sparked the idea. I was like yeah, I'm good at video.
I could show vetting venues to potential clients because I see a big market of couples that get married not in the same region where they live so. And they don't want it drive four Hours, every time to visit a venue.
So I recorded those videos, put them on YouTube. Some of them outranked the location itself because they had so little, like, good material about their venue on their website.
[00:18:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:37] Speaker B: And I was like, this is Great. I get 500 views per video per year. They're never slowing down. They're not. They're never fast.
And then this year, I got the idea, well, might as well try repurposing them on TikTok.
[00:18:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:55] Speaker B: Out of nowhere, I got one and a half million views out of those videos.
And I linked those videos to the YouTube videos. So I get my 1.5 million people scrolling through my stuff. It's accounts, not views. Sorry, accounts.
Which is better, in my opinion. And it's all my target audience. It's all women between 20 and 35.
[00:19:20] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:22] Speaker B: So they click on my YouTube videos from my YouTube videos, they click on the blog to get a few more impressions. And then I have pages of those blogs in different cities, different styles. I have them organized.
And those hub pages sometimes outrank the locations now, or at least place 2, 3, 4 for some of the most prestigious wedding venues in Europe.
I have this one venue that I've never been to.
I don't have a video about it. It's in Tuscany. It's one of the, like, top 10 venues in Europe. And I'm ranking place four for that.
So.
And that helps me. And this is linking to my wedding photographer, Tuscany.
So I get. I have, like four clicks on it this year, and I have three inquiries for German couples, because I targeted the German keyword for the Italian place, which means because people, if they travel for their wedding, two countries apart from, well, they probably have a decent budget wedding. Right?
[00:20:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:20:36] Speaker B: They wouldn't do that if they didn't have budget. So I have four clicks, three inquiries, and one of the couples literally just. I saw the email pop up while we were recording.
They messaged me like, two months ago, being like, yeah, we really want you. We don't have the venue yet. There's two that we could do.
And now they're coming back and they found me on TikTok, moved over to YouTube, moved over to my blog, moved over to my wedding photographer, Tuscany.
[00:21:07] Speaker A: And you said you didn't have any international SEO experience. That's.
[00:21:11] Speaker B: Sorry, sorry, sorry that I forgot about that. Yeah. So I'm doing that for me and my brother. But that's German, though. That's not English.
I feel like that could be different.
[00:21:23] Speaker A: Well, I think it's interesting because, you know, as a Mono. Some people as monolinguists kind of forget or get biased. And when we're consulting and there is, you know, multi region and then there's crossover languages, you know, you know, trying to show up in Italian search or French search or Greek search for Tuscany is different than being an authority in Germany because you've tackled all of these similar venues. I love that development of thinking about the market and not directly just the one single thing. It's not just focusing on, oh, I'm going to say I'm a photographer in these 50 cities. But where do you do that photography? How, how does that tie in if you're, if you're, you know, doing, you know, if you've got a, a mobile photo, photo booth rental company, you should talk about the venues as much as you do about your own photography rental option. You know, and I think that SEOs kind of get so tied in and locked in just on their own specific service pages and they think, oh, I need to go top of funnel. So I'm just going to talk about, you know, photography in general, wedding stuff in general, that there are different categories and types of content to explore and create and craft that LLMs are going to, going to chew up. They're going to chew on that and spit you out and you can find citation, get traffic that way. So, you know, even though we know, you know, LLM based search is just 3.5ish percent of total.
[00:23:07] Speaker B: I think it might be 2 to 3 or something.
[00:23:09] Speaker A: Yeah, it's 2, 2 to 3ish, but it's huge on the mind of, of CEOs. You know, the messaging for the past six months has been SEO is dead again. But really when it comes to the fundamentals, it's just at SEO that's on the ropes, like the fundamentals are still there.
Creative marketing is still there. Understanding, you know, the business perspective and tying it into those values is still there. I'm curious, what's your take on what's the fast food right now in SEO? What's the junk food that's being sold versus, you know, the meat and potatoes that we've been talking about? What do you think will be giving us a stomachache very shortly? Mm.
[00:23:56] Speaker B: 100% overusing ChatGPT in, in your content.
So, so many. I come across so many people that are like, oh yeah, I can do my own website with lovable and I can do all the text with ChatGPT.
And it's just all plagiarized content, which kind of works sometimes because it's a Fresh date. Like even Google doesn't have like too much old data about you, so you're not getting flagged for like reusing content for yourself. But it's not great content. And I feel like the most important piece right now is getting stuff that actually like we have always been eat is important. We've always been make great content that serves the intent.
I feel like there's so much stuff being thrown out where people think it is good for the intent, but it's actually just like a 5 out of 10 maybe because ChatGPT doesn't give great answers. It gives good enough answers that it's not bad if it's not hallucinating, which it did so much. Like I, when I set up the page for, for all the different venues, that was like a year and a half ago, it sometimes like completely lied the whole way through and I was like, I've been at this venue, you can't get 300 people in this room. That's a 40 people venue. So what are you talking about? And even if I, if I say you're lying, it starts thinking, thinking, thought for two minutes still lies. Like what are you doing? And if you're spreading misinformation, I think that will in the long run always bite you. Especially for LLMs, if they keep learning, they will start to get better at differentiating what's actually good information, what's bad information.
And if you're bloating your site with so much bad information, that's gonna haunt you in the long run. I think because that's how I would make the algorithm. If your content, if 80% of your website is bad content, I wouldn't rate the other 20%.
[00:26:23] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean you're basically describing the knock on impact of the HCU. You know, Google leveraged LLMs and machine learning to, you know, redrop the Penguin bomb. You know like there was an age of SEOs where we didn't have a site wide penalty option. Panda and Penguin were no longer nuking sites left and right for content or scammy links. But then HCU comes back up and part of that was to address overuse of AI. Part of it was to address people overusing programmatic, but also to address the creep of sites that were literally just getting thrown up to throw up AdSense on them and didn't really add new unique content.
And that's just accelerated with you know, the, the popularity of GPT, the popularity of Claude, the popularity of these tools that they're like my dad, you can ask my dad, why did Slobodan Milosevic, you know, get ousted in Yugoslavia in the 90s? And they'll go on this, you know, 10 minute tirade about the, the impact of the Mongol invasion into the region.
And it sounds good, but then you dig into it, you're like, you made half of that up. Like, you don't actually know what you're talking about. You've connected A to B to C, but really, you know, it was kind of like A, but not really.
And I think it's just, I think the problem is the, the tool itself is based off of probability and it's, it's math, it's guessing what is most likely the right word that's going to kind of pass muster, you know, that's going to kind of be real. And so people are digesting and accepting output from GPT as fact. Like a human speaks it, but it's not a human, it's just from its Lexus, it's come from its knowledge base and from, you know, third party citations. And sometimes those citations get mutated as it tries to generate a sentence that, that makes sense. And you're right, there is a huge proclivity for lying.
And you know, like, I often, I always process my interviews with Claude afterwards, but there's an error rate of like 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 where I'll ask it, okay, just on a strict dialogue back and forth, not adding new content, I'll read through him like, we did not talk about that at all. This section of, of text back and forth, that is completely fictional. I never said that. He never replied that. In fact, we made the opposite points. And, and I'm like, okay, I gotta restart this over, like, strictly, don't add new words. Just act as a, a careful editor back and forth. And I know that a lot of shops, a lot of SEOs and a lot of that are using this tool are not, they're not going to be that careful. And certainly if they don't have a good knowledge base and didn't just come off of the conversation, maybe they didn't listen to the whole interview. Like, oh yeah, this, this looks like it's SEO gibberish. Yeah, that they totally said that.
[00:29:44] Speaker B: Yeah. And also like my brother, for example, he keeps asking, so we keep having this conversation where he has this new idea. He's like, yeah, I'm gonna ask ChatGPT about like, what should I do to improve my SEO? How, how can I climb in the ranks? And it will give him some answers that I'm like, but not really anymore. Or this could have worked maybe like 10 years ago, but it doesn't anymore.
So it's really just getting the stuff that it heard most about, which is usually the stuff that's not used anymore.
[00:30:29] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a big problem because you also have, you have an oblivious eye to the under the modus operandi. Why did this content get created in the first place?
And so in SEO there was an incentive From I'll say 2002 to 2012, a very pure like culture driven, hey, we're figuring this out. I'm publishing as I go, I'm digging in deep. You know, this is what I figured out. But after 2012 there came a really big change as Google rewarded less of who was actually doing the publishing in SEO and it moved more towards just the SaaS companies who had a big enough budget to keep publishing and fewer individual blogs, blogs and bloggers and SEOs and hardcore enthusiasts. And they moved off to forums and then to slack channels. And really the best discussions were on Twitter. Twitter went down the tubes and so now there's a ghost of the ghost in the shell effect of like the people that are creating the most content about SEO are not are the teams of famous SEOs but not actually written by the SEOs anymore. It's just a content. It became a content mill production for SEO agencies and for SaaS companies. And so the quality, the depth, the care, the really niche like weird bizarre abstracts or it's, it's not there anymore. Anything true like that is in, you know, in the big SEO, not subreddit because the subreddit spammed out now, but the Slack channel for big SEO on Reddit or you know, a back Slack channel or Discord or you know, and that's where the true experimentation is happening and people really discussing real stuff because there's. If you have a true powerful thing in SEO that can make you a bunch of money, why are you going.
[00:32:30] Speaker B: To blog about that?
[00:32:32] Speaker A: Yeah, what, what is the incentive for you to put out that insanely brilliant approach strategy tactic like only if you can harvest that, turn that into enough organic traffic to turn around to get clients to make it worthwhile, then you've got an incentive to publish it. But otherw, you know, the drive behind creating that content.
I mean that may be specific to SEO, but I think that that does apply to other industries as well of like insights, industry secrets. Like why would they put their industry secrets out there if there's not, you know, adsense money enough? And with, you know, Sites getting choked off by hcu. Now you know, what's the incentive to publish? It's diminishing, especially as the competition comes up from LLMs. And why would they, why would anyone search for that? Because they can just get their answer from the AI overviews.
[00:33:25] Speaker B: 100%. I feel like that's in a lot of different categories. It's not just SEO. But in SEO we have the problem that if you publish something, it goes viral.
There's so many developers that are like, yeah, this is not intended, let's patch that by tomorrow.
So that's a huge problem in SEO. It's a bit less of a problem in other categories. But I still feel like we started off the Internet being like, yeah, we can share everything. And it's becoming a bit more. Yeah, gatekeeping is definitely a thing, especially on social media. Unless you have like, I'm not sure if you have the saying as well, but if you can't do it, teach it.
[00:34:14] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, we have that same.
[00:34:16] Speaker B: Yeah, I definitely feel that is the case in photography as well and in social media marketing. 100%.
Like the guys that are talking on social media about like, this is how you get views, this is how you hook people.
They just repeat what they've learned somewhere else and it's not always working.
[00:34:36] Speaker A: Well.
[00:34:36] Speaker B: It's definitely not working most of the time.
[00:34:39] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:34:41] Speaker B: They only get the views because they're talking about how to get more views. And that's a pretty big topic on social media because it's somehow this like self sustaining machine of people thinking, I can do this better.
[00:34:54] Speaker A: Yes.
Yeah, there is, there is the entropy. The. I believe it was AJ Cohn's Cohn who said it's the insidification of Google results.
[00:35:08] Speaker B: Sorry, I don't know that vocab, uh.
[00:35:11] Speaker A: It'S, it's, it's changing the word. It's good enough to, it's goog enough. Like Google will just accept, you know, this level of things and you know that's, it's. I was mentioning this in another interview of like this acceptance of, wow, this AI overview just told me to pour gasoline on my sandwich.
[00:35:34] Speaker B: Like that was a great time when those like shitty Reddit posts start surfacing.
That's so funny.
[00:35:43] Speaker A: Yeah, but we would have, culturally, you know, in my opinion, you know, a lot of the companies that have put forward this type of product that, you know, for Microsoft 2010, if they had released something that would have gotten a diver killed because the data was inaccurate about how deep you could go, that would not just Been, you know, that would have been a scandal. It would have been, you know, news cycles. It would have damaged their, you know, they wouldn't have gone to market with what is essentially a live beta test. We're living in the age where they're. So for some reason the appetite for this AI capability is so I don't know whether it's a C suite, whether it's investors, whether it's cultural or programmers or developers or there's such an interest in it that there's a live beta test happening right now.
Every new version that we release is a new live mass cultural beta test of these programs and it's accepted and the error rate is just accepted. And what would be a accompanying destroying disaster is, you know, maybe it's a few headlines that are not great, but who even believes the headlines they're AI generated too.
[00:37:00] Speaker B: True, true.
[00:37:02] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:37:02] Speaker B: Everything right now, every. So I've been to a few like entrepreneur like summits in the area and everything is AI, AI, AI, AI. And I feel like every company wants to use AI and everyone is interested in what's the newest AI. It's just the biggest, most talked about topic ever right now and it's been for a while and it's only getting bigger. I'm not sure it will definitely slow down at some point I think. And so many companies that are starting that are GPT rappers. I've heard this interview with Altman and it was like if you're building something that is really, really cool with GPT5, but it's not getting better every time there's a new version coming out, you're gonna, your, your company is instantly just gonna drop at some point when the new version comes out, it will be so much better than the previous one. But if you're building something. And I think the example he used was if you're building something like a tutoring program that with GPT4 it was able to teach like one to three class year one to three students. And with GPT5 it might be doing one to five.
With GPT6 it could do up to like ninth grade and then maybe GPT7 or eight you will be able to do your full high school degree being tutored by this chatbot, whatever GPT wrapper you're building. And this is the kind of company that you should be starting to build right now. If you were interested in AI, you really. But what is really important right now is same as an SEO, you really, really, really need to find your niche. Like before it was good to Have a niche and branch out a little. But with AI, you need to find like the AI to help with doing your bookings as a plumber, something like this.
[00:39:07] Speaker A: Right.
[00:39:07] Speaker B: So super niched out pretty maybe a bit similar to what I said about like all the little towns that I'm targeting with my, my pages.
Whereas I just when you.
No, I'll say this after.
And you need to really, really find your niche that is has a proper market fit. And if you have that proper market fit, you will automatically gain a little bit of traction and. And you will need to surround it by a proper like repurposed content structure that helps you generate this like this stream where Google really wants you to branch out and have like a, like a bigger company. They really what I feel like is beforehand you. I could have only an Instagram, an active Instagram and it would be fine because I'm a photographer. They think, okay, it's a. And maybe a Pinterest. I have these two channels that are mainly photo related so that's fine. So I'm gonna be like, okay, that's cool. But now it feels like, okay, I need some press releases, I need some LinkedIn posts, I need like a whole bunch of stuff because that's what a bigger company would do.
So we put more trust in him if we think he's more like a good company. We know. Whereas before it would only be the one channel that's been, Sorry, probably doing a lot of loud sounds with my microphone by hitting it.
But I move a lot when I'm thinking, no, that's fine.
And I feel like comparing yourself to the biggest company in your niche really helps figuring out like what you should be doing.
[00:40:57] Speaker A: Yeah, I think Matt Brooks of seoteric and I were talking about this. Like you need to understand are you the 800 pound gorilla in your industry or are there a bunch of 800 pound gorillas? And you need to find out how to survive.
You know, like there is space but you still have to make a name for yourself, you know. So you need to understand the market that you're playing in and your role in it and the potential. So that comes back to again, you know, understanding bigger markets view and not just add H1 edit meta title, include internal links like there's fundamentals but there's also, you know, there's more value by connecting both cross channel and understanding the bigger, you know, market picture. So love this conversation. Let's go ahead and wrap it up with what's your hottest take right now? Like what's your Spicy take for the SEO industry.
What's a big win? What's a big loss? What's happening?
[00:42:07] Speaker B: Yeah, so one thing that I heard the other day that really caught me off guard was this guy. I can't remember where I heard it, but it was like 30 minute videos might be the next best thing because as soon as LLMs start tracking the whole transcripts of YouTube videos, right now the only people doing 30 minute videos are like huge companies that have the time and money to invest in very long form content.
And this might get put out as the next like most influential eat type content.
Which is crazy to me because it's exactly counterintuitive to what people are focusing on right now with short form content.
[00:42:59] Speaker A: I think you're right. And that's where my heart is.
My brand deal Arcade is focused on podcast as an SEO service because I realized this interview, you know, it's 45, 46 minutes now, that's 4,000 to 6,000 words of written content.
And that's easily, you know, you can break that easily into. We've dove into three or four very specific niche conversations. That's three or four specialty blog posts with direct quotes that aren't pulling from LLMs between two subject matter experts. And then you can you get the links out of the ecosystem for publishing it on podcast, publish it elsewhere, you know, put it on your subreddit, post it on LinkedIn Pulse, which Lily Rae was like complaining the other month. Hey, content. I take from my site and post to LinkedIn Pulse. Google is ranking the LinkedIn Pulse above the exact same content on my own site. Like there's some weird distortions going on, but if you have, you know, that subject matter expertise.
Yeah, it makes sense that a company that can do longer form content can do interviews.
LLMs, you know, there's llama or whatever that purports to create, you know, podcasts. But you can feel it like I've listened to a podcast that was made by him. Like, this is that weird uncanny valley experience, you know, like watching, you know, CGI from 2003 and you're like, that's not how a body moves. That's, that's not how a conversation works. It's like a little too chipper, a little too on the nose. There's not enough detours. So. Yeah, no, I totally agree with you. Let's, let's go. I see in a value, the respect, the rush to the 5 second attention span, but the value, you're right. Of like, maybe some of that is snippets off of the bigger. You know those are bites off of the elephant.
[00:45:00] Speaker B: That's literally like.
That's what I was going to say because it offers you so much potential to clipping like right now in streaming, clipping is the biggest thing and the most underrated and good earning job.
If you, if you have bigger streamers and you're clipping them, if you're a professional clipper, you can make bank.
But this could also, you could use this for, for your company. If you're, if you're doing a podcast and you're. Well, you have your podcast, you get your blogs out of it, you get your LinkedIn posts out of it and you get your clips to send to to everything to Shorts to like the shorts might outrank your LinkedIn posts as well. Yeah, Google loves the shorts.
I'm literally just re releasing like I know my TikToks are ranking really high right now, but I'm re releasing everything on shorts this winter. Like I will sit down for like two weeks and I'll plan out and I'll have all my content re released on shorts.
It's great.
It's so fun.
[00:46:09] Speaker A: Awesome. I appreciate the conversation. Shout out where people can find you the name of your site, pick you up on the freelance side, you know, a couple of your handles. I'll include all of it in the show notes but let people know where they can find you.
[00:46:24] Speaker B: Yeah, cool. So you can find me mainly on Instagram. That's like my main platform. I have Jonathan Schisler as my wedding photography and then I have Schisler which you'll find in the show notes. It's tough to spell and you will have me on LinkedIn. I am starting to post there right now. Haven't really used it much and my websites are the same as my Instagram handles.
[00:46:48] Speaker A: Awesome. Thanks so much for your time.
[00:46:51] Speaker B: Thank you so much for having me.
