Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted SEO podcast host. I'm here with Stefan of vibelogic. He's going to introduce himself and tell us why we should trust him as an SEO expert.
[00:00:13] Speaker B: Oh, that's a big promise. Okay, well, I'll start with It Depends.
Actually, I thought about starting a podcast called It Depends because that would be kind of awesome, but I'm Stefan Baggio. I am the CEO and co founder of a small, small agency called vibelogic.
My background stems about, well, let's see. I helped put some of the first e commerce sites on the Internet during the dot com boom bust. We'll talk about that. Because I'm getting a feeling that we're in that same bubble right now. So a lot of deja vu there.
I would later go into publishing and from there find my way into the link slinging business of SEO. At the beginning, a little company called Link Experts that would later turn into a larger company. I'd help become one of the original co founders of, called Conductor, some of you may know it, very large enterprise SEO platform. I helped build that business out for about 14 years.
After we were bought by WeWork, we bought ourselves back from WeWork. There's a whole, a lot of stuff that went on there. And then I decided I want to see how the other half lived. So I did the stint as a CMO because I'd been telling the CMOs how to do stuff for a while at the big companies and now it was time to like actually do it.
So that was another version of me. And then, and then finally started vibelogic, this, this, this passion project that's become an agency that is growing steadily and I'm excited about what's to come with AI and where we're at and all that good stuff. So if you trust me at your own risk, how's that?
[00:02:01] Speaker A: It sounds good.
Talking about deja vu all over again. There are multiple things where I keep, you know, because I started in 2007 and so what is old is new and what is new is old.
And it's infuriate, I think. What is it? We're on the seventh iteration of SEO is dead at this point.
[00:02:27] Speaker B: Seventh. I think we're on the 17th, to be honest. Like it's, I, I, I actually I did a, an article for Halloween about it where I just kept showing the zombies of all the different times people have cited SEO dying because it's just, it's, it's, it's a joke. Like it's a joke and it's also just very telling and sad that we keep having this over and over. But in all fairness, in all fairness, if you're an SEO out there, and how clean are we supposed to keep this?
[00:03:00] Speaker A: You can. I don't care.
[00:03:01] Speaker B: Okay, well, it's your fucking fault, guys. It's my fault too, okay?
I'd been doing this for two decades and part of my job at one point was to be the chief evangelist at Conductor. And believe it or not, that wasn't just evangelizing Conductor, that was evangelizing search. And the reality is that we've done a piss poor job of defining ourselves within organizations. We've let others define us for us. We've let others help. We still are in an argument right now about what we are aeo, geo aio. Like that's our fault. That's no one else's fault.
We're letting the others narrate what we do, and it's ridiculous.
And SEOs as an industry, who I love and have grown up with and feel like our. Honestly, some of the smartest people in the room at the companies they're at are acting like idiots when it comes to our actual industry because, like, we need to claim what it is, not let others tell us what it is.
[00:04:00] Speaker A: So stepping on your soapbox.
[00:04:03] Speaker B: But the soapbox is tall and we haven't even climbed to the first rung. Trust me.
[00:04:07] Speaker A: Tell me what, tell me what it is then.
What would you say as an SEO, you do here?
[00:04:13] Speaker B: I mean, it's simple. It's Stefan's employment opportunities, right?
SEO. No, no, it's. It's all kidding aside. The optimization part is what we do, okay? We take data, take content, and we look at opportunities to make whatever ingests that content and judge that content understand it better.
That's what we do at the core nexus of what we do now, we can complicate it with algorithms. We can complicate it with LLMs. We can complicate it with voice search and different kinds of mediums. We can add universal search on top of it. We can look at it through the context of. I can't understand anything through GA4 now because Universal used to be so easy. And all of the stuff, right? All the things that killed SEO and didn't let us do any of this stuff. We've been through all of that. And if you haven't been through it, by the way, kids, get ready. It's part of what being an SEO is. Optimization is we have to optimize ourselves, unfortunately, like, we are the keepers of this great data that lives within these organizations. Whether you're doing it as a third party consultant to help others, as an agency, or you're in house, your job is to look at the wisdom of this organization, the audience that needs that wisdom, and finding ways to connect those two.
Search engine's just the medium by which it's done.
[00:05:39] Speaker A: On the nosy. Absolutely.
[00:05:43] Speaker B: I've been doing this a really long time. Like, I have a lot of pain in me. And it comes from the lonely island that is every SEO feeling like they're on their own.
One palm tree with two coconut little islands that when they see another sao, they go, we're saved. But in reality they're still on a little island by themselves. And. And that doesn't get any better. By the way, when you go to big enterprise companies, the number of SEOs that exist there are myopic compared to what they're actually trying to accomplish. So the game's been rigged from the beginning in regards to the value prop of what this was supposed to be doing.
The worst thing that ever happened was that the channel held this amazing data set that was trapped and treated as a channel instead of as an information set that we should be using as marketers. Which is where I kind of have been preaching and pounding my fists against the table for years, even before LLMs came into the picture and have been saying like, hey, we know more about what a user's going to see, what ranks, supply and how they're going to look for it. Demand.
We know that stuff, we are aware of it. We have the data, we have an internal search to look at it. We have external search signals. We can look at what the serps look like. We have all this data, unfortunately, we've been treating it like a hammer with a nail. And our response is, I need to rank for that, I need to rank for that. I need to rank for that. And that has put us in a position where if you don't rank for that, you failed. But that's not true.
That's not the way the LLM interprets stuff. That's not the way search engines even interpret stuff anymore. They look at whether you're being cited and referenced and so forth. And the problem is the SEO is the most lowly position in a company, unfortunately, because they usually don't create the content and they don't do the dev.
So if either one of those people charged with those things aren't on board, let alone the executive that sets the brand messaging or whatever direction you're going in if those people aren't on board with your message or your direction, you're screwed. Doesn't matter how smart you are, you could be God's gift to SEO and literally have Larry Page call you on your cell phone, whisper three little nothings in your ear and tell you the secrets to the algorithm as if they existed. And you would still fail 100% of the time in that situation if those people don't go along with you. There's no other job like that that I know of.
So doesn't actually matter how smart you are, it matters how capable your organization is to actually accomplish the smarts you have.
[00:08:24] Speaker A: I agree. I've worked in a lot of enterprise scenarios.
So much red tape and a lot of SEOs have failed, you know, and, and I got stuck in a trap a couple of times, you know, in house with Raven tools and tap clicks and tap clicks organization.
You know, they basically were spending my entire salary having me create product marketing a dev task that they never had the budget to fulfill.
Product marketing dev tasks that end complete feature sets, everything ready to go, soup to nets, all done in Jira just like they wanted. And the meeting would come and resources go somewhere else. Resources go here, resources go there. So I've been in that trap and I think that's actually the most challenging part of an enterprise level SEO experience is navigating how to get buy in from different teams that are siloed, bringing them together and finding that, giving them the, the talk through. Hey, you can get more out of your email wins if we partner it by creating these resources on the site, which by the way, oh, hey, cmo, I can, you know, partner this channel and bring this traffic in. We should tie that in with paid ads and we should bring in, you know, our social media team and we can tie in the collateral that they're creating. They're getting 15 videos. All of those conversations don't happen.
When you're like, I am SEO, I use SEMrush, I look at keyword and Jeremy, can you optimize our site? We're going, it'll be launching in two weeks and you'll get to see it two weeks after that and then we can do SEO on it.
[00:10:16] Speaker B: Yeah, well, we'll SEO that for you. Absolutely.
It's a verb and we do it after the fact. Of course. Right. Like that's so.
I know that feeling. I know exactly what you're talking about. And it like it nerves me to no end. Because here's the thing, right?
If we go back in time.
What basically happens is search engines come aboard and people start recognizing the opportunity and they look around their orgs and they look for the person who knows how to code.
They're like, it's HTML, right? So let's get that person to do the SEO. A lot of times that's where that started. Right now, speaking tech and speaking exec are two different languages.
Literally two different languages.
And unfortunately a lot of us who only spoke tech. And I will say I do not speak tech as fluently as I do exec. Right. But I got enough bad eyesight and geeky toys behind me to want being one of these optimization geeks that we are in wanting to tinker. And you know, like, you'll find certain traits among it, like SEOs, right? You'll find. I found there's like two clusters of them, right? They're the tinkerers who like, love playing with cars, like actual cars and mechanic style SEOs. I've seen them because they like that sort of side of the house. And then you'll see the games, like board game, you know, Star wars, all of that fantasy. Yup. SEOs too. And that's not to say you have to fit in these two buckets in order to exist in our industry. But I'm just saying there are some common traits, right. We are not necessarily the best suited to go in front of the executives and convince people that care about and note you. I already talked about supply and demand. Why did I use that language?
Because those are. That's the linguistics of business, not the linguistics of canonical. I often say you want to see someone roll their eyes, say canonical in a meeting. It's going to raise more wristwatches than eyebrows. Like you're talking about technical stuff. And they're not. They don't care about that. Right. They really don't. They don't even care about the channel. That's the funny part. When I got to be a cmo, you would have thought, oh, SEO was my channel. No, it wasn't. I didn't care where the leads came from. I needed the leads. Someone's breathing down my neck and I could give a crap which channel's driving it. I just want to see results. Right.
So there is a different mindset there. And Jeremy, to your point, the.
And this is a bigger conversation that needs to be had, especially now in the AI, dare I say landscape, because that sounds like it's made up by an AI in the digital landscape. Whenever you see vast digital landscape, it's like ChatGPT wrote that I'm on. I look at it and say maybe the marketing departments are built wrong.
Like maybe the marketing of the future by channel is the incorrect way of doing it. That channel specificity in the way that we're doing it is actually incorrect. You can have specialties, but perhaps we should not be all KPI ing because the KPIs that people do in the silos that are a marketing department when you get to a mid size, let alone enterprise company are conflicting by nature.
And because of that, you won't necessarily like.
Let's use a very simple example.
One of the two Achilles heels that exists in an SEO's world is content.
If the content writer is being gauged or KPI'd on volume, which is horrendous. But let's just say it was. You have to do five blog posts a month, except I come back and tell you page 6, 7, 8 and 9 need optimizations, at least a paragraph or whatever more to them.
Have I actually helped you hit your KPI?
No, because this is not going to create net new content and that's not counted in your KPI. So what I've done is actually distract you from your KPI, which ultimately gets you the pat on the back or the bonus or the you're doing a great job or at least you're keeping up with what we're asking of you. Right? Those two things are at odds.
It is not the CMO's job. It should be, but the CMO is so focused on getting the vision out there and the numbers going in the right direction that they're not always looking operationally back. And it depends on what kind of CMO it is. By the way, you've got brand, brand, brand heavy, which is like messaging. And then you've got some that are really geeky that like the numbers and like to get into all the depth of stuff.
Again, I'm making generalizations, but those people aren't necessarily gonna come in and arbitrate the problems or conflicts of these things for you, right? So as an SEO, you're kind of trapped, right? And you really should be a center of excellence. In reality, that's what you are. You're a keeper of data and direction, but you're treated as a channel.
So I've always said the key, if you are dealing in multiple silos, the key is not to add 6, 7, 8, 9 to the to do list. It's to find out what the to do list of the person who's already doing the work.
What is their number one Number two, number three, number four on their list. And can you make it better?
I can go and I can find out that article you're writing for. Hey, here's three things you might want to add to it. That's going to make it perform better. And when it does perform better, I'm going to show you that performance so you can take the credit with your boss on it.
Okay, now we're working in the same direction as opposed to before we were conflicted.
[00:16:15] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:16:15] Speaker B: Yeah, that is doing the validity, naturally. And unfortunately.
Here's what sucks, guys. I know there's so many SEOs going out there going like, oh, what a luxury to be able to say that and not do it. It's so much harder in reality. Yeah, it is. That's kind of why our industry isn't where it needs to be right now. It's why the hourly rates and the things that we're hearing about are frankly, ridiculously low. And it's also why people are allowed to say our entire industry is dead just because AI showed up, let alone voice search, let alone Google, let alone all the things that came previously that were supposedly SEO killers. Right? Like, give me a break, guys. Like, if you want to play, play, but show up and do the stuff you have to. And being an SEO is harder than just telling people what to fix.
[00:17:05] Speaker A: I'm curious, what's your take on this quote from Chris Tweeden, a Space Bar collective? He said talented SEOs look forward to Google algorithm updates. Agree or disagree?
[00:17:20] Speaker B: That's a really interesting quote.
I think it depends on the type of SEO you are. I think my co founder, Trevor, who's the logic in Vibe. Logic, right. I'm more of the vibe. I'm less of a technical SEO. I'll be the first one to tell you that I don't get excited at an algo update because I'm not going to pick it apart. He's going to pick it apart because it's a floating math equation in the sky and he likes doing that and that gives him dopamine. Right? But I would say, like, when I look at it, I say, okay, that's one more aspect of how things are or aren't working. I look forward to it when I know we're doing the right stuff.
I would not be looking forward to it if I knew a client of mine was writing all AI content right now.
[00:18:08] Speaker A: Right.
[00:18:09] Speaker B: I would know that that was a very bad day that I would have to say I told you so rather than and they chose to go in that direction. Because I never would have wanted them to do it in the first place. Right. And I definitely am not the type, as you can tell, to shy away from shooting straight and tell you what I think. So for me, that might actually turn out great.
Yeah, awesome. Look, I was right. Not that I really want that to be the case, because I don't want you to drop, but maybe some of the spammer listicles, you know, that are out there just got out of the way. Right. And less nonsense is in the. Is in a syrup and it's getting cleaner. I hope so. But for me, that's not where I focus. I focus on go deeper and wider, go deeper into the content. Am I really answering it correctly? Have we really done a good job? I usually wear a T shirt that says, if you're not helping people, you're just selling stuff. And I actually believe that as a mantra for marketing. Like, I actually think you can give away a lot of stuff to someone and you'll earn their business. Like, you'll earn their trust.
You'll do that with the engines, you'll do that with the LLMs, and you'll do that with your audience. But you need to earn it first. So in order to do that, you need to not give some top level.
You know, I think someone. There's a great example I use.
Someone's bullet point is someone else's entire universe. So I was looking at, at a company who dealt in.
In healthcare and they were talking about change of life events and divorce is a change of life eventually where you're allowed to change your insurance.
Awesome. That was a bullet point.
Do you know what kind of a copy brief I wrote on divorce?
There are so many questions that people have when they get divorced. Can I keep my spouse on my insurance?
How long am I allowed to keep my spouse? Do I have to tell the insurance company about it? What if we're just separated? What if I don't want my spouse on my insurance? What if all of this stuff is actually helpful? Right. That's the stuff that matters, not the bullet point that says, this is a life event. Right. So while this company was gonna leave it at that level, done with it. Is that really helpful? Should that really rank?
Does that really solve the problem? Or is the knowledge of this company really in depth and should be shown to actually help people? Does that mean every person's gonna switch to that healthcare company because they gave them the answer?
No. But does it mean that brand will be associated with having made that answer somewhere in someone's head? Along the way and may find its way back at some point.
Yeah, we gotta worry about that, not whether or not like the latest algo, just, you know, just bump me this way and that way. Like, that's not the future in my mind of where this all goes. Because if the SERPs change, if voice search is a thing, if AI were to take over in other ways, right. They still have to interpret.
So what are you giving them to interpret? That's the key, right?
That's the crux that they can't, they can't do it without the data.
So if you go back to the source and you deal in the data and you deal in better data and wisdom that exists in these organizations, and instead of putting a moat, like, you put it on the other side of the moat and you expose some of it in the ways that you can now, I think you're doing something awesome now. I think you have the opportunity to do some real good in the world and ultimately solve people's problems and earn the trust that these people end up getting in their businesses.
[00:21:57] Speaker A: So one of my quotes that I often use in interviews comes from Matt Brooks of Seoteric. He says ChatGPT is your most popular but least trained customer support representative.
So tying those two concepts together of, hey, as SEOs, we need to think about how we can help our end customer of the business.
[00:22:21] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:22:22] Speaker A: What is the process then of helping our human by talking to a bot. And in some case in a long time, we have been talking to the bottom already and now we have a bot, human sandwich. Where human is talking to bot goes, scrapes Google. And then you're on the other side.
[00:22:43] Speaker B: The snake is eating its tail, Jeremy. The snake is 1000%.
There's no question about that. Right? So here's three things I think that happened.
Let me pontificate. Not that I haven't already pontificated, but let me pontificate for a moment on this one. The real idea of authorship shows up. I think Google had it right and then they had it wrong.
They were right in their authorship. That whole concept of an author profile, I think that exists somewhere on the back end in Google, like in Googleplex, like, they know what you've produced. I think it's.
I think Mueller said this. John Mueller said, like, if you haven't produced 20 pieces of content about something, you're not an expert on it. Like, he might have said that in passing. And you know how this is like the cuts days where, you know, he would say something and everybody, whoa. But like, and the reality is, right, there's something about that which is you're going to have to show up as a human. We're going to have to know and put a human's name behind something. The team app does not count.
No longer are you allowed to do this anonymous nonsense where you're like, oh I posted it, therefore it is and my brand carries its value. Bullshit. Like I want a human to say I wrote this. Or if not supposedly now we're supposed to cite. I don't know if you noticed that recently in the schema when it's written by AI which I thought was quite funny that new feature because I'm like, oh, so this is a new disavow thing where you're expecting us to like essentially beat the bushes for you so that you can identify signals and help you know where AI is. Please give me a break.
[00:24:22] Speaker A: You remove not provided and I'll do that.
[00:24:24] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. That's never happening. Okay guys, I don't believe it. Anyone who's going to play, they'll give them some cred for doing it and then they'll take it away like they always do. So back to what I was saying. I think real idea of authorship is a huge thing and I think that's coming. I think we're.
[00:24:41] Speaker A: We.
[00:24:42] Speaker B: I think you need to go back and get your profiles, your about us. Your. Those things need to exist. They need to interlink. They need to show entities of who you are. It's knowledge graph. It's important and it's going to matter more in the future. I think the other thing I think that we need to really be thinking about in regards to the.
The hold on before I go, give me the question again in one second. It was.
Sorry, I lost it.
[00:25:13] Speaker A: Do you recall it was the chatgpt as the right.
[00:25:18] Speaker B: So understanding and the depth at which you understand your consumer is fundamental. I think this concept of a funnel is stupid. Like we.
We shot ourselves in the foot. Marketers did not just SEOs.
It is not a funnel, it's an hourglass and everything always ends up at the bottom. Unless you're in the business of selling something once to someone which I question. Weather tech by the way.
One, how the hell do they have enough money to keep running super bowl ads based on like laser measured like mats for cars. And how many times do you buy mats for cars? Especially if they last. Right. Like I don't understand it. They created a cup like an actual. I don't know if you saw that that was their next Their next thing was like a cup holder, I think or something. I don't know. It was a really piss poor attempt at a secondary product in my mind. But nonetheless, my point simply is you're usually not in the business and I came from SaaS, right, which is subscription.
So you're not in the business of selling something to someone once.
Therefore the experience they have post, quote unquote, purchase actually matters and that's gonna perpetuate its way back into referral. Whether or not I tell my friend Jeremy, you should consider this, you should look at that, that's a great product. All that stuff happens post, right?
So if I don't have the support, if I don't have the knowledge of that, somehow, by the way, SEO got stuck at some companies. Not all I know that like Samsung and Apple are great at this. They do focus on the post. They recognize that people are going to look up what's that blue thing? How come that happens? Why does that. And they know that there's disinformation out there that's going to show up in answer boxes and give the wrong answers and that's really negative to their brand. So they've made that investment to focus on that sort of stuff.
But there's. Most companies just leave it at I got you. And then when you start asking questions in addition, which by the way, find their way into the LLMs, when people put in prompts that aren't clean, little queries the way we've liked to have them, and measurable MSV bullshit, but little measurable msv, right?
They don't come so clean in prompts. So now all of a sudden all this other content stuff's going to find its way into LLMs and, and you're going to have an executive going like, hey Jeremy, how come these guys are talking about our pricing? Or how come these guys are saying that we have a bad review? Or how come it's because all we cared about was getting in front of them in order to make them buy something. It wasn't going back to the chat logs and figuring out what are the most asked questions that we get.
What are people most concerned about? How have we solved that problem?
Right. So an issue of a thousand years ago in your business is still coming up as if it's new.
That's a problem.
Who I might have lost you.
[00:28:21] Speaker A: It was somewhere else, a little glitch.
I'm back mid diatribe. Oh, we're back, baby.
[00:28:31] Speaker B: I was basically saying somewhere, somewhere along the way, right? You need to be Going back to your chat log, seeing what people are asking, understanding the most asked questions, the most plaguing problems. Maybe it's a problem we already solved, by the way, and it's a misconception in the industry.
Like, there used to be a time where conductor couldn't do global rankings. It was a million, million years ago. But then I'd have, like, someone who'd had a sales call with us a year ago still think that, right? We solved that problem like six months before.
So their preconceived notion, or whatever the moment in which they interacted with your brand was, is where you left them. If nothing else is going to confirm or deny that to them for the future, then, like, they're left with whatever they were left with. And so you're not doing, you're doing a disservice if all you're doing is being a demand gen engine rather than a, than a brand continuity, like, you know, guardian of the brand.
I know that's a weird thing to say, but, like, you know, and I know that doesn't fall cleanly in anyone's roi, guys, so I'm well aware of what I'm saying here.
[00:29:42] Speaker A: I get that. But I think it goes back to some new best practices that I've developed, which is actually, I don't know, speaking to your client.
Do an interview. Oh, my goodness. I scheduled an interview with the precast concrete wall guy and talked to the guy that actually installs it and asks, hey, when you're bringing it to the site, what are the questions that they need answered? Oh, do we have space for this? Oh, we need a cleared pad. Oh, we need these measurements to be measured three times. Because it's concrete, it's not going to change dimension. If it's the wrong measurement the first time, then it's going to be delivered at that measurement ain't going to change it.
[00:30:22] Speaker B: Hallelujah. Jeremy.
Preach, preach, preach.
[00:30:27] Speaker A: Like you interviewed.
You know, it comes from an extension of finally doing these podcasts. But I realized, you know what, this conversation right here, this is the best goddamn keyword research that you could ask for. Get two experts riffing on a subject, they'll bring up the most cogent pain points. They will address elephants in the room. That's what you turn your marketing on. If you want to find out what's happening in home improvement, talk to a home improvement guy. Like, get them on the phone. Don't go to ahrefs. Don't start SEO with your SEMrush tool. I don't care how good your tools are.
They are tools, and they should support some sort of process to deliver X, Y, or Z. But that's not. You're not an AHREFS executor. You're an SEO. You're optimizing. Use your tools. But it's just.
I don't. I know there was somewhere where we got lost in the weeds. I think it was just so easy to get, you know, traffic from Google between 2010 and 2020, where that's all you could do.
You could survive by just, you know, optimizing keywords on blog posts. Like, and you could just stay in ahrefs. You look up your data, come up with the headlines. Never speaking. I had done this at Agent. I will cop to it. I worked at an agency, and I never actually spoke to anybody within that company ever, but produced dozens of articles in collaboration with our content team, who also never spoke with the customer.
[00:32:11] Speaker B: Right. That's the other thing.
[00:32:12] Speaker A: All interaction was done through a customer support representative who I also never talked to.
He saw my notes, they talked to him. We see his notes, and we did our thing in a silo and separate. And we wonder why we're disconnected from our appliance.
[00:32:29] Speaker B: Okay, so let's take exactly what you put there and let's put this into actionable practice right now. I'm going to turn this into an actionable practice. First and foremost, guys, LLMs, you're using them wrong.
You're seeing them as a channel to rank in. That's because you've been trained to believe that ranks first of all.
There is no rank in an LLM, okay? We don't even know whether or not relevancy is highest to lowest. They make up results.
Like, it's not.
This is not the droids you're looking for. Like, you're not. You're not in the right place. What you need to be thinking about is, in my mind, is how easy it is with the tools we have today to transcribe. So to your point, if I have, you already called it, the installer's a great person, but am I going to do a great job interviewing?
No. The first thing I should probably do is go to an LLM and ask what are the most frequent questions I should ask an installer of concrete into my home? Okay, so now I have a good basis off which to start my questions.
Next thing, I might go to a semrush or an href to see if there's any additional questions I can find that are frequently asked. Okay. It might not be for the installer, it might be for the salesperson, whatever. Okay, I've got a good set of questions now. Now I go with whatever your choose your favorite, whether it's teams, Google, Google, meet, whatever, right?
Switch on whatever your note taker is, Fireflies, whoever you're using, Otter, you name it. And what used to be, oh my God, I got to pay a transcription service and blah, blah, look how fast that turned into something we now snap our fingers with. Okay, so like we're like, we don't even realize. An entire industry of transcription, by the way, just got like wiped out by version of these little features, right? So there's a lot of really cool shit you should be doing, but what do we do with that data? So now we take that data and we think through a few different things, right?
What are the pain points of installation?
What are the considerations? What are some things you're going to want to do in order to actually get this thing to happen? Well, because you know that if someone comes in to install concrete and it's not ready and it's not capable, there's friction, right? And you could actually maybe even measure that friction. So that might be some interesting things. When you're trying to figure out the ROI of this, you might want to say, hey, have you guys ever seen how many times you had to go back to a site to redo because it wasn't ready the first time? If that's a metric they've calculated somewhere, you need to get your hands on that. Now what are we going to do with this data? Well, we're going to look at whether or not we can create a calculator out of it. Some things that are on and off, if they go yes, then that's okay. If they go no, that's a problem. And we're going to maybe do a calculator with certain things that you're supposed to check off, check on. Maybe it's a checklist, it's digital.
And guess what, if you don't know how to do a lick of code, throw it to Claude and then QA the hell out of it. Okay, like now I've got a piece of. This is where AI is helping you, right? It's not having to get five devs, time and effort to come and help you. No vibe, code the shit out of that and go and try and get something that actually helps. Now is that going to be on the website? Maybe. Is that going to rank?
Probably not. Is that going to be a useful asset that you've now created that could actually go and actually sit on the site that someone can send from the customer service team before the installer comes in and says, make sure you follow these steps. Once that happens, we'll get an email that says, you've done this, you're good to go. Right? And now it's almost like the unwritten written contract. They went through the process, they did the stuff, they checked the stuff off.
So now if they say they did it, but they didn't do it, you kind of can lay the blame where it belongs. But the really cool part there is you don't just leave it there.
You put the question bubbles that are going to come along with some of these things and that leads to the content you just created.
Now you can have content on the website.
Now you can have answers and questions, right? FAQs and so forth that came directly from your interview, right. That have been edited down to be those pieces that now live somewhere on the site that can be exposed to the engines that are your way to answer that prove that you know what you're talking about and help your customer so they can find it either in their process or when they're searching on the web. The intention wasn't just to build content so it could be found through the model by which you want it to be found, right? That is the flawed logic that existed in SEO is that we believed the search engine was supposed to be the only source and if it doesn't come through the search engine, it has no value.
But the search engine was just a way for us to understand supply and demand. The better we got at that, I could create something that gets absolutely zero organic visits and still be one of the most valuable pieces of content. If it ends up being your number one newsletter piece or it's a blog post that is linked to as a modal on your homepage and all of your prospects see it Like I was told what to write about because I looked through the data, whether that was in Semrush Ahref or I did my sourcing like Jeremy was telling you. I found the pain points, I understood them and I built the content.
When that happens, that's valuable content, not because of the channel that drives it, but because it's valuable content, because this does the job it's supposed to. After that, how it gets to.
I'm going to be honest with you.
I don't care. I really don't care. Number one email piece, I don't care. As long as it. As long as it helps and you can tie some ROI to that. Like the fact that anyone is just reporting on organic traffic only to a piece of content they've created. And don't show the direct to it, don't show the referral to it, don't show the other channels to it, is insane.
It's insane. It didn't exist until I told you to build it.
Now you built it, but I'm only gonna take credit for a fraction of that because it has to fall cleanly within my channel, otherwise. Oh my God. Right, that's. Again, guys, you remember what I said at the beginning of this conversation? We shot ourselves in the foot, we acted stupidly. We haven't set ourselves up for success.
Soapbox.
[00:39:07] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:39:08] Speaker B: I told you there were a lot more rungs on the soapbox.
[00:39:15] Speaker A: I think you tied that up magnificently. That's where I was going to go next.
So just tell me a little bit more about what you're doing now.
You had an adventure with Conductor and you came back to your own agency. That's curious. Why is that a passion project for you now?
And what does that look like on a. On a tactical basis? Like, what do you like? Are you working in a specific niche that you're in love with? Is it just the challenge of, you know, speaking to that throughput value?
And, you know, agency life has its particular challenges. It's different from optimizing in house and different from optimizing as a solopreneur freelancer, consultant position. So what is it about that agency life that you're attracted to?
[00:40:13] Speaker B: Right, sure, that's a great question. It's got a lot of pieces, so I'll try and break it down.
I had the luxury and the privilege at Conductor of building out our professional services team. I started with two kids straight out of school who didn't know keyword research.
But since the product required keywords and it was crap in, crap out, like you needed to know what keywords to put in.
So that actually turned into a team, believe it or not, of seven people who full time were doing keyword research. Like, we got that down to a science. It was kind of awesome. Like, we built separate tools just to help that team that weren't exposed to, like, you know, didn't need to be enterprise grade, but that would help people do that. Right. And as I built out this team, it ended up being 65 global SEOs that were working on managed services and migrations for some of the world's largest companies and all sorts of awesome stuff. So I got to live that on Someone else's dime. To be honest right now, one thing that was my passion back then, which was again, much of what I've said today, which is the SEO was probably one of the smartest people in the room, but unfortunately it was not in the right rooms.
And so what would happen is they would be at the tail end of decisions, that they would come back into the meeting room and try and tell everyone, like, hold on.
But all the decisions have already been made for months, the train's been rolling, and all of a sudden you show up being like, stop the presses. We need to go back.
That's not really a great position to be in. So I spent a lot of time doing that and I said to myself, I need to first. I found an awesome partner. Like Trevor Stolber is my business partner. We met during COVID We actually physically didn't meet, but we met on a meetup through Hook Agency. Great guy, Tim. Tim Brown connected us on one of these meetup, drink up things. And we just like. I hate to say we vibed, but we vibed. And it's before I named the company Vibe Logic, which is funny cause I'm the vibe and Trevor's the logic. Trevor's a guy who won't introduce himself in the way he should. And Trevor is a Doogie Howser, if you know the reference. Graduated high school at 12, two point shy of Mensa. Has like 17 pending patents to his name. Like absolute technical genius when it comes to search. Has been doing it for. On the side for like 26 years. So before Google was a thing. Right.
He's awesome at that.
Me, I'm all about the vibe, right? So I like thinking through what are the crazy ideas, what are the ways people should be thinking about content. Kind of like we just did now, how do we turn this into something more valuable, how do we shape it, and so forth.
So with that in mind and knowing where AI seems to be coming in, which, by the way, I think is, like I said, distracting a lot of executives over to this world right now.
I said, let's start building some product, but let's build an agency first to fund it.
So we've been building out our agency and we have everything From Enterprise, clients, $3 billion company over here, that's not what we make.
And small little therapy clinic over here, we run the gamut. Honestly, we're kind of starting to get our ICP down, I think, which is more B2B focused.
I think we're probably stronger there. I think we're more in the growth space of like let's say anywhere between. And this is a pretty broad space, but revenue between 10 million up to probably $100 million is probably where we should sit and really going and solving their problems, of which SEO is part of it. But it's really a visibility issue.
So the way that I'm looking at the problem is what we call web presence intelligence.
I used to call it search presence intelligence, but I changed that because search presence intelligence was to search. And this is really web presence intelligence. So what do we do? We look at actually the supply side. We say, hey, you know what, LLMs are going to show these results to you, and search results, search engines are going to show these results to you. Is your response to treat it as a ranking opportunity or is your response to recognize the multichannel opportunity of influence and of getting in front of that audience?
So we start to think of multichannel approaches around topics that make sense to go after that audience's visibility. We say, beware, decisions are formed, not made formed. Right? You form an opinion on Reddit, you form an opinion reading an article, you form an opinion on a partner site. Potentially these are places where, unfortunately, because we're so siloed in our approach of KPI and marketing, the display person isn't going to recognize that opportunity, nor is the social person going to recognize that opportunity, nor is. And we can keep going right in terms of demand gen groups and performance marketing that don't see these opportunities that way because they're looking at it this way and we look at it horizontally. We look at it the way the consumer moves, what is put in front of the consumer to influence the consumer. If we understand that better, then we as marketers optimize.
We use what's at our disposal from a marketing perspective and we apply that against the audience.
We've created some product that allows us to see where those are, those opportunities are. I like to think of it very much like a roulette board, right, A roulette wheel.
We try to help you decide where to place the bets according to the visibility you're trying to achieve. The highest probability of getting in front of this audience is.
And then we help you figure out where to put those bets. That is one of the things we do on top of obviously, SEO. And a lot of the time, by the way, when we walk into an engagement, one of the first things we do before we even tell them, oh yeah, here's a, you know, here's a, a retainer for X, Y and Z. We used to go in and tell them, well, this is what you need.
We do a diagnosis where we let them diagnose themselves.
And what's really cool about that diagnosis is we come up with a few quick things that usually are dissonance.
So the CMO believes this, whereas the head of product believes that, oh well, this is a conversation that's not naturally going to happen in their company. So if I can help facilitate that, right. I'm not doing SEO at this point.
I'm showing them the dissonance and then in the next meeting we give them a roadmap. And that roadmap is like, hey, listen, if you want to go without us, go.
This is prioritized as to what we would do if we were in your situation based on what we heard from you. So it's a self diagnosis that we told you. And it's very much like the doctor coming in and saying, like, if you want the home remedy, you can go home and do this. Or if you want to take on the ongoing treatment that's going to take this and allow us to do that and we might find other things over time that you're going to need.
That's the other option. So we're very much like not trying to force services on people. We're trying to let companies recognize the needs because then you're working with them, not against them. Too many companies you go into as a consultant or an agency, you're taking someone else's budget or there's politics involved.
And so it's adversarial by nature of where it starts versus if they come to their own conclusion of why you're needed with their own answers.
It opens you up to being able to solve for them rather than just search for them, so to speak.
[00:48:27] Speaker A: I love that concept of positioning yourself as a solution. After they answer the question of do I need a solution and what is my problem?
[00:48:38] Speaker B: I think that's really also the big one, right? Like if I go in and let's say I went in and I told you I'm going to give you this many copy briefs a month. I've done this before. You're going to get this many copy briefs a month. Here's the problem.
Everything they do when it comes to creating content has to go through one writer and that one writer is tied to about 700 other things and, and does not have the capability to do it. I can keep giving them copy brief after copy brief after copy brief to go execute, but have I actually helped them by the end of the contract? I've fulfilled right. But did the needle move? No, because I gave them the wrong stuff because it didn't map back to their capability.
So it's like you can do the right stuff in providing your client the answers, but if you don't know their ability to execute. And that's more than just honestly, that's more than just a one conversation, you know, really good discovery call. Like, you have to get in there and understand the pain points of their organization to understand where you can help the most. That's how you make a real partnership. Vendorships are a dime a dozen. Anybody can be a vendor. If you're like snake oil salesman, guy who comes in, guarantees ranks, guarantees this, that, and the other. Sorry, guys, you're not my SEO and you're not my guy like or girl. That's not for me. I'm in the business of creating partnerships where people are going to refer me want more. More people like us want to know other people. If we can't take on their business, we can turn to people who can. We want to be trusted advisors. Right? Like, the problem I have in a company is I have to hold myself back because I want to help you with everything.
Like, I want to get in there and fractional cmo. And you should be, by the way, if you're hiring for one of these positions, that's what you should be looking for.
If you're a good SEO, you want to do all of that. Like, you are so passionate about what you do and the business you're helping that like, you just want to. Like, you can't help yourself. It's what I call shower thoughts. Right? Like you're thinking about them in the shower.
[00:50:36] Speaker A: You should do this in the most.
[00:50:38] Speaker B: In the most. In the most appropriate way. Of course, guys.
But like, you're thinking about them, right? These are the things they don't. It's not plaguing you, it's passioning you. It's like getting into your head because you can't help it because there's a problem to be solved. And by the way, that trait, when I hire, that's what I look for. I can't. Anyone can teach you aspects of search.
I can't teach you passion. If you have a passion. A true desire to help Jeremy, the fact that you thought about going and doing that with your client and asking those questions, even though it wasn't the modus operandi you had done up until now, is a testament to exactly that. Passion. Passion doesn't show up the same way. Notice Jeremy's not going to emote the same way I emote. But recognizing when and how that passion comes out in the people you're around is really important to do.
Because if you had just poo pooed what he did, you'd be squashing his passion.
So, like, the reality is you took active steps to get out there and figure out what the client really needed. You didn't do that because you got paid more for it. You did it because it was part of what you felt should be done. And that's usually driven by passion. So that is the number one. If someone says, what's the number one trait? That's what it is. Because algorithms are gonna change.
LLMs are gonna come in, blow up your shit. Executives are gonna go off on wild goose chases, right?
[00:52:08] Speaker A: Shinies, new shinies.
[00:52:10] Speaker B: Devs are not going to go along for the ride and ask you to validate your shit 10 ways to Sunday. And content writers are going to say, you're achieving their brand. But the reality is that passion carries you through. And that's why I'm still here 20 years later, still messing around in search, right? An industry that's dead and dying and whatever. And yet I'm doubling down here, building an agency in it when everyone's like, oh, what are you doing? What are you doing? No, it's not an SEO agency, it's a visibility agency. And it's all about search, about LLMs and AI and any surface in which people are looking for solutions.
I want to help companies with. That's it.
[00:52:51] Speaker A: Love it. Tell people where you're visible, where they can have more of this conversation with someone.
[00:52:56] Speaker B: Absolutely, absolutely. So by all means, hit me up on LinkedIn. It is my, like, drug of choice.
Though it's been souring a little bit. That algo's acting a little bit strange these days. It's hard to get a. Hard to get a like. But yeah, definitely. Check me out. Stefan Baggio. S T E P H A N B A J A I o that's on LinkedIn.
Vibelogic.v I B E L O L O G I C dot com.
I didn't say I was good at spelling and hit the.com, you can always hit us up there. Check us out on LinkedIn. That tends to be where we're at.
I love just honestly spitballing, so I can't say I have tons of time to do it, but if you have a problem and no one else can help, maybe you can call now.
Sorry, that reference is only good for certain people that are old enough to know it, but I'm always happy to help. It's kind of my thing. I get real dopamine off of doing it when I can.
So if you're running up against a business problem or a search problem or even a communications problem where you just don't know how to get that across to the exec who doesn't get it, I've been the cool uncle. I know how to do that. So, you know, let me know. I'm more than happy to help.
[00:54:18] Speaker A: Who are you going to call? It's Stefan.
[00:54:21] Speaker B: I don't know about that. I'm no Ghostbuster, but I'll do the best I can. So know that this industry is worth more than we're giving it credit for, and I'm still proud to be a part of it.
And I'm happy to keep pushing, and I hope we all do, because there's a lot more good stuff on the other side of fear. We just need to get over it.
[00:54:42] Speaker A: Amen. Thanks, Stefan.
