Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera. I'm joined here by Michael Buzz Buzynski.
Why don't you go ahead and give yourself an introduction and tell us why we should trust you more than an AI search tool.
[00:00:15] Speaker B: Why you should trust me more than an AI search tool. That's a very vague question, so let's try to dissect that just a little bit. What are you trusting me with or what am I asking to trust you with?
[00:00:28] Speaker A: Well, I'm asking because in this day and age in SEO, people are turning to all kinds of sources for information about SEO, turning to different sources about information about marketing. And so a lot of people just open up Claude, type in their prompt and they'll get an answer. So I wanted to kind of explore the idea of your experience, your viewpoint, but from, from the perspective of what is the differentiator for you versus a response from a chatgpt.
[00:01:05] Speaker B: Gotcha. So we've been doing SEO since 2009 and so I come with 16 years of real life experience.
AI is a 6 year old toddler that knows all of the information in the world, but has no context in which it lives.
What I've been telling people is that because of AI, knowledge technically is no longer power, it's democratized.
But experience is irreplaceable.
And what people are paying for now is the wisdom, which is knowledge plus experience.
And so you're not going to trust me because I'm a great person, you're going to trust me over AI because I'm a human who understands the context of the world around me with the wisdom of 16 years of experience.
I love that wrapped up AI in any industry. It doesn't matter if it's SEO or anything. Well, I'd probably say math is a different story. Right. But anything that is in the soft sciences, communication in consulting and whatnot. And so one of the things that I've noticed that why I keep telling people is that if you are not an expert in, in a particular field and you go to chat, GPT or GROK or Gemini and start asking it questions, you're asking questions that a novice would ask. So you're going to get novice level answers because you don't know what you don't know, therefore you don't know what to ask or how to ask it.
Right.
[00:02:54] Speaker A: That reminds me of I was just teaching a board game in logic class at my daughter's homeschool co op and I was trying to, I was asking them, hey, how do you learn something? And they looked at me blankly. And I said, no, you don't know how to do this thing. They said words. I'm like, okay, but in what order?
It took them like three minutes to get to the point of saying, asking a question. And then I was pointing out, okay, but do you know what you even need to know to play this board game? And they're like, oh, I guess, you know, I don't need, I don't know what I need to know. And I was like, that's, that's, that's Socrates. Right? Right. Like the, the beginning of all wisdom is knowing that which you do not know.
[00:03:46] Speaker B: Right.
[00:03:47] Speaker A: And so we're coming at and using GPT and just throwing out these things of what we don't know, but we don't even know how to get to the knowledge. And I guess that is the experiential difference, right? Of like, like. And we're not going to up level that skill by having our hands held all the time.
[00:04:11] Speaker B: No, no. And the person or the entity holding your hand through AI is the blind leading the blind. If you're asking the wrong questions, yes.
[00:04:23] Speaker A: You won't know that it does. It also doesn't know because you're not going to be able to tell the difference between a hallucination with data.
I think the most common thing is seeing.
Oh, you're right, I was incorrect. Like, okay, it's nice that you have a feedback loop that will recognize if I call you out on something that I know through experience is something inappropriate or out of context or just straight up invented.
And I think that that is, it comes down to a misapprehension of how people understand what LLMs even do. I love Wolfram Alpha's article that he wrote explaining like the fundamentals, what is a LLM and how does it work in GPT? Like understanding that it's using math to guess the next word in the sentence. And sometimes that response is cannily similar to what a human might say, but it is not actual verified, fact checked, solidified information. It's just probably right.
[00:05:41] Speaker B: Unless you're using like their. The web search now in ChatGPT allows you to at least get the reference. So if you give AI the reference right, so they don't have to guess, they're not guessing at dates or not guessing at things. I would say that there are a couple like Claude.
We were using Claude for helping in copywriting and scripting and we found that, I mean it had a little more natural feel to it once you had it programmed, but then over time you have A project that it would just start regurgitating from the ever expanding library so you can actually experience what the world is seeing when it comes to AI content in your own space. Just go to something like Claude. Or you could do a GPT really quick in ChatGPT.
It's a little harder to.
Well, now you can lock down GPT with your own personal library. So if you do that, just say, okay, we're only going to go off of these files that are in my Google Drive, right, For a per a specific folder. Okay, can do that now. And so with that you go, okay, you're only drawing from this. If you ask it to write things based on that stuff long enough, you will start seeing it regurgitate itself. And that's what's happening at mass around the world. There is, because LLMs are, are all pulling from a set of data. And it's the same set of data you have is the same set of data I have. Right. Unless I give it another set of data to consider specifically. And it's looking like you said at the least or the path of least resistance. It's guessing, guessing, guessing, and it's getting affirmations as it's guessing and it goes. And so then it, it, it goes down that road. Well, that's an algorithm that's being created at that moment. But that algorithm is just like in, in nature. If you have some water going over a mountain and there is a path of least resistance, the next gallon of water that comes over the edge is probably going to take the same space because it is the path of least resistance. Unless you tell it or dam the path of least resistance to then choose another path.
[00:08:05] Speaker A: Yeah, I've seen it. I was trying the other day to, to pull quotes from multiple different podcast interviews and giving the transcripts. And I was hitting the limit of what Claude could hold as far as even a context for a chat. And it was, you know, crossing wires and pulling information, inappropriate information from one perspective and saying that this person said that. I'm like, I know that that person.
That's not their expertise.
It was misattributing and mashing things together in a way that my dream was like, oh, hey, I'd love to be able to put in the database and say I'd like five different citations about link building from my interviews from five different experts.
I can't get that safely.
[00:09:06] Speaker B: GPT will do you better because you're asking for reference. Yeah, Quad is a cre is supposedly a creative platform. It is not a good research form Platform.
[00:09:19] Speaker A: All right, all right.
[00:09:21] Speaker B: Claude comes from something literary, I think. And so I've never actually trusted Claude. I've asked Claude some pretty basic stuff. Like I'm writing, maybe I'm writing a blog or something like that. And I've gotten it trained. I used to have IT trained to write blogs with me pretty quickly, but I found that, well one, you run out of prompts if you get, if you get elaborate with what you're asking it to do, right? You have to step it through each piece, which I think everybody, if you're using it to write things with you. And notice I said with you, not for you. People are trying to replace themselves with AI and you gotta human optimize it. I digress, but I'm finding that Claude is not keeping up.
I actually started working with GPT Pro and this morning I wrote a script for one of my upcoming episodes of my podcast. And the outlines that I get from GPT Pro are twice to three times better and more coherent. And it really helps me speed up the process of writing those scripts. Like I've got the basically a cheap. I have a GPT trained in Pro and so I still let it do small chunks because just like a six year old, it has a short attention span and that's when it goes off the rails or it'll cut you short. So if you're trying to say, hey, I want to get an outline for a whole book, don't do a whole book at a time, do each chapter or first get a chapter outline. Then from the chapters outline, take each chapter and say, okay, now let's create an outline for the chapters. Then it says, okay, here's your, here's your topics for the chapters. Now give me an outline for the subtopics of that chapter. Now give me what do I need to know to write on, blah blah, blah blah. Or you're starting to look at your research for each of those topics and then you put that all in there. It will not write the book for you, but it will get you so much further down the writing process. And that's for anything you gotta get be granular with it because it is a six year old with a short attention span and no context of the world around it.
[00:11:37] Speaker A: Reminds me, AJ Cohn once described Google as a blind 5 year old. In fact, that's the name of his blog, Blind 5 Year Old.
So it's a very.
[00:11:49] Speaker B: GPT is only a year older.
[00:11:51] Speaker A: That's it, technically a year older. Google has maintained the same age, but they both still have the same limitation, they don't truly have eyes, they can't truly see. They're using processes, multiple processes to come up with outputs that we don't quite understand or will never be able to truly know what went into the process to come up with that. And we can only do things as additional inputs to try to get different outputs.
So there's an SEO element to the use of GPT. And if we take the similar lessons of how do we work with this type of technology, you can extrapolate that and you can look at most SEO practices that are effective and say, we're kind of doing the same thing with our websites and we're creating and creating entries and prompts into Google to try to get an output on their SERP that fits what we want to come out.
[00:13:07] Speaker B: Right.
People talk about aeo, which is the answer engine optimization now. And people are, SEO is dead. I'm like, SEO's not dead. Google's not going anywhere. And in a commercial sense, people still. I mean, me, I've. I've replaced Google as my search engine in Chrome.
My search engine is now ChatGPT. So if I put anything in the address bar, it's actually just a question to ChatGPT directly. It's not, Yes, I don't have to go to GPT to ask GPT anything. Okay? I'm. Because most of what I use the search for is answers to questions. Not necessarily looking to read a bunch of blogs. I want the GPT to read a bunch of blogs and give me back the references and all that stuff. And if I see something that looks funny to me, I go, well, I can click right on where they got that information and read it myself. Right? So it's a good. It's a great research space there. And because of that, we know that it's acting just like a search engine because it's using the Internet like we would a search engine. It just happens to have its own bank that it's going off Right. When we look over to Google. Google is the middle person for us to. Everything's connected to the Internet.
[00:14:24] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:25] Speaker B: GPT is now the direct link, so I don't have to.
It is able to then decipher or, I'm sorry, synthesize all of the information in a blink of an eye and. And bring me back the most relevant too, based on the same principles as, like you were saying, E A T. Right? Expertise, experience, authority and trust. So why does GPT or Grok or even Gemini choose to reference any particular website? To give you the answer E E A T E E A T was created by Google to feed their search engine.
SEO ain't dead. It just got a different face.
[00:15:13] Speaker A: So I know there are, there's subreddits and there's people who will defend like it comes up every once in a while of oh, Danny Sullivan said that, you know, EEIT is not a ranking signal. EEIT is not a, a ranking factor. And they'll hold it up and they'll trumpet and say, see, Danny Sullivan said that it was not a ranking signal and it wasn't a ranking factor. And everybody that was talking about EEAT is a fraud. And I'm coming back to it and saying, okay, well they never said that it was. What they said is we're going to give to our quality team this criteria, you can call it EEAT as a framework to express these values and items that we want to be able to test the algorithm against. And we want this feedback to be able to say, okay, the results of the algorithm are this, based off of this rubric of eeat, does it match or does it fail? Because then that is an input to the machine learning back to the engineers for that version of the algorithm for them to tweak this, this dial. Then they'll turn up, oh, we need more anchor text distribution or we need to have something better that where we need more connection to the knowledge base for the authors or you know, they'll go back on the back end and the engineers will apply some fix or change or adjustment as a feedback system. So no, I never have said that EEAT is a ranking signal, a ranking factor. But if you're not looking at those concepts of expertise, authority, trust, then what are you even doing as an SEO?
Are you just like copying and pasting stuff from, from Semrush, you know, are you just coming up with a keyword.
[00:17:18] Speaker B: List like everybody uses eat like once Google said that that even existed. And let's go back to like the oh so and so from Google said that it's not a ranker. You know how many times we've heard that in the last 20 years?
[00:17:33] Speaker A: Yeah, didn't they say, oh gee, was it, wasn't it we don't use click data.
We couldn't possibly. There's no way that you guys are imagining things that click data and then a lawsuit comes out and there's a slide dec and a confirmation that they not only use it, but they use it extensively on multiple levels. And you know, like so I can.
[00:18:00] Speaker B: It to the fact that the people who are the naysayers of the fundamentals of search are the people who don't understand content marketing. Because if you're a content marketer and humans go off of basically E E A T, they listen to people who have expertise, experience in the field they're talking about, have authority. Because of that experience and expert experience and expertise, they now have authority, which then builds trust.
If you're not using it for the SEO purposes, use it for the marketability of the people you're writing for.
[00:18:40] Speaker A: Yeah, there's a huge difference. I'm working with a brand save fry oil and they did an okay job and a good job of creating content you know, about. You know, hey, clean your dirty oil. And it was like, like a checklist. I'm like, okay. But there's no, there's no authenticity, there's no unique voice to this. There's like, if somebody might need an article to back up an idea of one, when should I change my fry oil? That's okay.
But at the end of the day, you're selling a machine that cleans oil. It's like a device that you want an entrepreneur to buy. You want the restaurant owner to buy this thing. So why don't you, you need a real conversation, you need an expert talking about what's happening in commercial kitchens to save cost, not lengthy articles about how to tell when your oil has been used too many times. Right?
[00:19:39] Speaker B: I mean that would be a subtopic or a sub blog or sub article on a website that would then link out to like say a tertiary page that doesn't, it doesn't have any other navigation except for that anchor text. So it's an internal pass through. So if anybody wants to geek out on it.
[00:19:59] Speaker A: Yeah, I definitely agree. And so it's, you know, you got to bring in an expert that can talk about the more complicated subject of, you know, restaurants and cost savings and have the experience of setting up a business, maybe even failing at a business to be a reference point.
[00:20:18] Speaker B: How about you're mixing that in with maybe the five top things that cost restaurants money, right? And so now you're mixing your solution in with all the other solutions. Now that might mean that they'll have to go, they'll go to the other solutions first. But if that article is proving to be right for every time that that happens and you put yours as the biggest saver, right? Or maybe the second or third saver, doesn't matter. But you're giving authority on something that works and you're backing that up with research Is what another thing you were, you were alluding to, you know, if you don't give context to what you're doing. Because, because people are like, well, I need a listicle. You need a listicle with context. And the context has to come from somebody with authority. The authority comes from their expertise and their experience in the field.
Yep. Nope, you're right. E A T has nothing to do with SEO.
[00:21:19] Speaker A: I can tell that you don't have an opinion about this.
[00:21:24] Speaker B: I have. No. I, you know, it's, you know, I just keep doing the old thing, the old same old thing. You know, people, people keep saying it's like, how do you keep up? I said I keep my fundamentals.
Fundamentals haven't changed. The tools have changed.
[00:21:37] Speaker A: Yes. I mean, we've become more efficient and.
[00:21:40] Speaker B: Now AI puts a lot of dirt in the water. So now we need a lot more filters to make us a beacon through the muddy waters for people to dive at.
[00:21:51] Speaker A: I remember in 2007, you know, everyone was like, content spinners are here.
[00:21:58] Speaker B: Oh my gosh. Yes, yes, yes. Oh, I mean, shoot. You had the, the list websites back in like, ought to three, you know, you know, probably actually that was even. I mean, then you had the directory spinners to where they would actually have, they would get a directory and then they would basically spin the directory itself onto another URL.
And so then that would create. So if you bought a backlink package, you got onto the directory and then they would spin the directory so many times to give you all of those backlinks from different URLs. That goes back to. Because before they had domain authority is another thing that they don't use.
[00:22:43] Speaker A: Yeah, let's get into domain authority because.
[00:22:47] Speaker B: Oh, it doesn't exist. What are you talking about? That's, that's, that is a product of Semrush and Ahrefs. You, you don't know what you're talking about. If you're talking about domain authority or domain ranking.
[00:23:00] Speaker A: There, there's, there's a balancing act there because, Because I think there's.
We have patents with Google who, who have said they use certain things like PageRank. The PageRank algorithm has not been depreciated, but we know that it is now part of a bigger, broader ecosystem. But it's still in there and the value is there. And also trust rank. You know, Bill Slosky is a legend, will always be a legend in the Google patent space.
I've only seen a couple of people trying to surface, even close some of the value of patents I think Olaf Snoss has, has done an okay job bringing it up, but I think a lot of newer SEOs aren't, who didn't. Weren't around when Bill Slosky was diving into that piece of the puzzle of like, what are the patents, how could they be applied? And you know, going down that thought experiment. So I definitely know like there are aspects of like how many, you know, what is the transfer of authority from pages and sites and how does it work in the current system? Because it's the only explanation for why the clothing site that I just consulted with, their owner told me that they were doing link building and he went and bought a bunch of comment spam links.
But it worked. Like I wanted to be able to come back and say like, hey, there's there was no benefit to this but that that article, nothing else happened to it except it got links from articles that had comments and had links on them. So there is.
[00:24:45] Speaker B: So if they had an article and there were comments, that's not complete junk.
[00:24:51] Speaker A: It doesn't have to be complete junk. Right?
[00:24:53] Speaker B: Yeah.
It doesn't have to be from the best websites out there.
[00:24:58] Speaker A: Right.
[00:24:59] Speaker B: But if there's activity and that's something that's coming, has come up in conversation here most recently and they're talking about like the fact that your backlinks need to go to need to be coming from places where people actually click on things in either the article or the blog or whatever it is that you're backlinking to. Right. The pillar page of somebody else's website. Whatever it looks like there needs to be engagement on that page. If it's just a dead page somewhere, even if it has a high domain authority or page page ranking, they're saying that that's going to start having less of an impact on your trust score. Because backlinks are all trust.
[00:25:39] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:25:40] Speaker B: Which is just mob rule of like, well, how many people like you? Well, I have, I have 13,000 friends. How many friends do you have? Because that's all that backlink is, is that you say that's my friend and that's my friend and that's my friend and that's my friend and whoever has the most friends has the most rank. But it's the potential. And then I tell people though, but that's potential because you first, you have to get through what you have to get through your, your mobile first indexing to even say that they want to look at you and rank you.
[00:26:08] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:26:09] Speaker B: A lot of people forget that. They're like, oh yeah, that's dead. Because, you know, we have 5G. It's like, not everybody has 5G, and not everybody has.
And doesn't have 5G, doesn't have unlimited data and all that other stuff. And so the benchmarks for. Oh, now I can shoot. I don't even remember what it's called now. But there's the three benchmarks for mobile optimization, which has to do with speed Shift.
[00:26:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
Content shift, data to first byte and the size of the first byte.
[00:26:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
So it's first content load, then data shift and then. Yeah. Then that last one. And all of those are measured in milliseconds for rankings. Right. And so it's like people. So people are starting to get lazy on the technical SEO saying, well, it just has to do with. Because the AI doesn't care how fast it loads. I was like, if it doesn't load fast, people aren't going to it. People don't go to it and engage with it. The engagement is something that creates its trustworthiness, its authority, because people are using it if nobody's used it before. That's why it has no rank. That's why I tell people, traffic begets traffic.
[00:27:30] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I think Brody Clark, he. He had a case study where they were having significant problems with indexation, and he went to it and looked and said, oh, it's taking 25 seconds for these pages to load.
[00:27:51] Speaker B: These pages aren't being seen by anybody.
[00:27:54] Speaker A: Right. They're taking too long to load. So there are some fundamentals there. I had that issue with a car dealership, Major World, and they had a ridiculously long load time on what was their primary end inventory page. And I was like, guys, like, we need to do some work on this. Like, let's get rid of so many of these scripts. Like, you're.
They're like, oh, we'd like to be able to translate the page into different languages. I'm like, okay, well, let's put that into the body because it would like load. And then it pushed down.
And there's nothing more crazy making on mobile than it loads. I'm about to tap something and then it moves.
[00:28:37] Speaker B: That's why shift is one of the three biggest things that they look at. Right?
[00:28:40] Speaker A: Yeah. And it was a nightmare score on content ship. Like, let's fix that and make it much faster. And they increased their sales because that paid that inventory. Page was faster. People were able to search and use it more for more easily find the cars they wanted and get in touch without struggling on their phone.
[00:29:02] Speaker B: Because if you have to wait 10 seconds for every page to load. I mean, I remember the days of aol and that was just the thing, right?
Yeah. It's just that was the Internet back then. I mean, you're at, you know, 56K and that was as fast as things went. And we didn't have a lot of graphics. We didn't. God forbid you put a picture on a, on a, on a website. That would take forever. Right. 30 second load times were already there. Now 30 second load times means that nobody sees that content because it has to be 3 seconds or less for the entire page.
And that's where people talk about, well, how much content is, is too much content on one page depends on how long, how long it takes to load or if you're creating priority loading or lazy loading or any of those other strategies. Right. And understanding. And I think that what you're touching on here is really a fundamental of user experience.
[00:29:55] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:29:56] Speaker B: And the user interface. Yes. UX UI is part of the landscape when it comes to SEO. I was just doing some consulting yesterday with a health care CRM and they have like 11 pillar pages, but they have three top key, top topics that there's SEO is trying to, to get in there, like Healthcare CRM. Right. And healthcare scheduling automation and nurse triage. Right. Three big things separate. They're not necessarily related to each other, so they kind of have their, each of their own content strategies for them. But out of the 11, the healthcare M wasn't even part of the list. It was a separate piece. So it wasn't even identified as one of their pillar pages.
And then when you clicked on it, it then said service overview instead of Healthcare CRM.
[00:30:59] Speaker A: It's. It happens.
[00:31:01] Speaker B: So as a user experience, I said, as an SEO, you are now missing an H1.
[00:31:06] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:31:07] Speaker B: But as a user experience, I'm also going, did I go to the right page?
[00:31:11] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:31:15] Speaker B: Nothing in the header. And their, and their H1 was like 15 words long, God forbid. And I was like, so why don't we make it like the H1B Healthcare CRM. Right. And then they have an app, the software platform was. And they had some text above the H1. I was like, I'm okay with you leaving that text up there. But instead of product overview, why don't you just call it the product? It is.
[00:31:40] Speaker A: Yes. Oh my God.
[00:31:41] Speaker B: Right? And then leave it as text. That's fine. Because really we want the H1 to say healthcare CRM. And then now your, your subheading, your H2 can be. And they had this small under those 15 words that were like 72 points on huge on the screen. And then they had this like 11 point font underneath it that actually had the keywords that supported the anchor. H1. I was like, not up here. And now that whole 15 words that you had, that is now your supporting text. It could even be technically part of your meta description.
[00:32:20] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I think people just don't.
[00:32:23] Speaker B: They try to overthink it.
[00:32:24] Speaker A: I think I was, you know, this came up, you know, UX as part of the ranking experience or the ranking consideration when I was Talking to Jesse McDonald from Siege Media or Siege and they we got talking about how even in that process some decisions of like throwing up a specific image at the top can stop somebody from going further in reading the rest of the page, consuming the rest of the content. And you know that's going to have an impact of like you're talking about the wrong image at the top and people are confused. Then you get clickback and you get pogo because the intent of what they want to do, you didn't match it. And so the signal at scale for that page is off. And so just literally making a better choice for the image can make a difference. So it's about that user experience worth.
[00:33:28] Speaker B: A thousand words, right?
[00:33:30] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:33:30] Speaker B: So you throw a thousand words that don't make sense to you of what you were expecting right at the top, your brain goes, what? And that confusion. Humans don't like confusion. We walk away from confusion. Doesn't make sense. I don't want it. That's just one of our defense mechanisms. Yeah. And so I think that words you choose, like a lot of people, they'll go SEO first. And I say, nah, you have to write your copy for humans, you optimize its order for bots.
[00:34:05] Speaker A: And I think this is where, you know, bring up the example. You know, I was looking at doing SEO for the mind and body med spot and I came across this weird site that was ranking and it had just two backlinks and it was almost all Lorem Ipsum except for the H1s, H2s and. And then every 12 or 20 or 15 words would be a relevant term.
[00:34:38] Speaker B: That aligns and they're semantic keywords.
[00:34:41] Speaker A: They're semantic keywords. The title is good. The meta description was good. The H1, H2 and then the semantic keywords were sprinkled at alternating distances between it. The stupid thing ranks.
Yeah.
[00:34:57] Speaker B: If it's local.
[00:34:59] Speaker A: Yeah. In a local market.
[00:35:01] Speaker B: Or it's a low, low competition keyword.
The keyword difficulty is low, so it's.
[00:35:08] Speaker A: Kind of a reinforcement of. From a relevance side of things.
Using words that match up with what is expected topically. It's something that Google's looking at. It's not, you're not in a poetry and prose competition with your, with these other pages.
So it's a balancing act of you want the page to give as satisfying experience to the users as possible and then come through and have that view of like, okay, did you actually say what you do here? And let's replace all of these generic texts. Like the best customer service. Like really, like you can't come up with something more appropriate? Of like we do killer driveways. Like nobody thinks about customer service when they want their driveway repairs. They want cracks filled, they want a.
[00:36:08] Speaker B: Smooth black surface or great driveways with a smile.
[00:36:13] Speaker A: Yeah, say the same. Say the, say the thing, but say the, the term. The phrase connected to. And like so much salesiness. Like this fear of actually saying what you do is really weird in sales.
[00:36:28] Speaker B: Culture of like it's getting, it's coming around though. People are tired of the jargon. They want it. You know, people talk about, well, you need to write your copy to a sixth grade level. And and I'm like, if you're selling to people with sixth grade reading level.
Okay, no, and, and this is not. It's not a dig on people. It's that if you're selling bubble gum, you're selling bubble gum to six year olds.
Right? Like I don't care how old you are, it's your six year old self that's chewing the bubble gum.
Right. Adults don't just all of a sudden like, I don't chew bu. I don't chew gum. I wasn't a big gum tutor as a child, but I have friends who've chewed gum ever since I've known them as small children. They still do. That's where they get the habit. Yeah, right. So if I'm doing bubble yum gum, it. That's why it's all cutesy. Right? But say you are a large data center and you're selling stuff like there. Do you write at a PhD level? No, but you write at the level that the people who will understand what you have to offer will. Will actually appreciate. Right? So a lot of people says take it to Hemingway and make sure that it's a sixth grade level or something like that. Or 12th grade level and below for most things. B2C. Yes. But business to business. If you have something complex, you need to be able to and you want to sell to the people who know and you don't want to talk to people who don't know, then you need.
[00:37:56] Speaker A: To talk at them, not down to them.
[00:37:58] Speaker B: Yeah, you talk to the people you want to connect with, not at the people who don't. Won't understand.
[00:38:04] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:38:05] Speaker B: Well, and that's what'll happen is if it goes over their head and they don't get it, then the people that. That's basically self filtering the people or disqualifying the people who don't need to be talking to you. I was sitting in a webinar yesterday and there. And there is a data analytics thing that allows you to do comprehensive audits on culture and employee satisfaction, all this other stuff. And the funny thing was, is that they had like 175 people on this webinar. Right.
But they never said how big of a company the software would be good for.
So I had this thing running in the background because somebody said I should go check it out because it's, you know, because we have a consultancy, right? And it was supposed to be on strategy and the way that they titled it, it lent to. Well, we could use this as leverage in our overarching marketing strategy and hierarchical targeting of problems within an organization when it comes to communication. Okay, that's a mouthful, right? So I'm like, okay, cool, so I'll check it out. So they start talking, they start talking hr, they start talking all this other stuff. And I'm like, why am I in this thing? So I finally asked. I was like, how big of an organization do you need to be that? Does the. Yeah, does the target need to be for this to even work? Something they never asked, right? And if they just said, hey, this is, this, this software is perfect for xyz.
Your rhetoric can do that. If you don't are not willing to say it outright, it's coming back full circle to what we were talking about, right? So you can be dead on with people by just being you. If that's how you talk, then talk you when talk about authenticity. The buzzword of the freaking last decade, right? It's so cliche now. Authenticity. I don't even want to say the word. But it's true. It's. The problem is that people are being inauthentically authentic.
You know, they're trying to paint the picture of what they think they should look like or be or sound. And I was like. But then when it comes in and the salesperson's trying to mimic that and then the onboarding team is like another step away from that. And then your success management team is even three steps behind that. And then the people who are actually doing the work are like, what are you talking about? Yeah, talk about cognitive dissonance. This is why your retention rate sucks. Cause you're selling one thing and delivering another. And culture. I don't care what you say. Culture is what creates retention. If you're. If your marketing has the same culture as your product delivery, you're going to have a much better time with the people you serve. But so many people want to get all of the business, not understanding that they can't even. There is no company in the world that has all of the business in any industry.
[00:41:05] Speaker A: Yes, that's true.
[00:41:06] Speaker B: Zero.
So why do you think you need to have the entire industry stop selling to the entire industry and start selling to the culture in which you want to work through? You will have. And. And this comes right down to SEO, right?
[00:41:21] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:41:22] Speaker B: I mean, it's just. It seems weird that people are like, we're talking about SEO and you guys are talking about culture.
[00:41:28] Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's like I would ask them.
[00:41:31] Speaker B: Culture.
[00:41:32] Speaker A: Yeah, I'd ask, you know, okay, here's the search volume. But who do you want to reach? Like, oh, I just want to reach hundreds of people. I mean, no, like, who, who do you.
[00:41:41] Speaker B: Yeah, just give me which hundred. Like, I'd be happy with that.
[00:41:45] Speaker A: Let's bucket it down.
People who have. Do want to reach people who are interested, who have money. Oh, well, yes. Okay. Well, out of the people who have the money, ones that are ready to buy. Oh, yeah. Okay. Well, now you have a useful distinction.
[00:42:02] Speaker B: And which problem, which problem do they have that your product or service solves?
And is it the right tool for their problem?
[00:42:12] Speaker A: Right at that. At that time.
[00:42:14] Speaker B: Right at that time. And I tell people all the time, it's like your total addressable market out of all of your total adjustable market. And most people try to get a total addressable market of over 119,000 is like the minimum total total adjustable market. If you're really niching down right in the United States and I tell them, I say, listen, 3% of the. That total adjustable market is even in the commercial or transactional state.
[00:42:36] Speaker A: Right?
[00:42:37] Speaker B: Only 3%?
[00:42:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:42:39] Speaker B: Right. And so a lot of people's like, well, I got all this traffic and we had time on page was high and page views was high, and we actually had people coming back and like, yes, you were, you were getting people that are either in the commercial or informational intent.
And now you need to figure out a way to get them into your ecosystem so your marketing operating system can then nurture them until they become one of your 3%.
See, people try to get the click, but they forget to get the conversion.
[00:43:11] Speaker A: Gotta get the conversion. This has been such a good conversation. I know you got a sprint, so why don't you tell us where they can connect with you. What your podcast is if you're. Which social media platform you hang out on is now apparently there's. There's probably 12 different Slack channels. You might be in some subreddit or.
[00:43:34] Speaker B: I'm not. I'm not a. I haven't hit Reddit yet but. And Slack is my enemy. So it's for our podcast is the Buzzworthy Marketing Podcast for those with B2B. Professional service based Businesses is a great monologue solo podcast that I host. Um, I do have some, some business celebrities on. Every once in a while we get into these type of conversations like me and Jeremy just had. And that's Buzzworthy Marketing show. You can check that out there. If you want to check out what we do at Buzzworthy Marketing, go to Buzzworthy Biz.
And if you want to check out my book, we talk a little bit about SEO, but it's all about doubling your revenue through your website. Get your free copy at Rule of 26 and my social media LinkedIn. Come on, it's B2B Day.
[00:44:22] Speaker A: Awesome. Thanks so much. I'll make sure that everything gets in the show notes and thanks for your time.
[00:44:27] Speaker B: Thanks for having me.
