Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your host of the Unscripted SEO podcast. I'm here with the infamous, the famous, the incredibly busy but amazing still, Melissa Popp.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Hey everybody. It's good to be back.
[00:00:16] Speaker A: So last time we talked on a lot of wide ranging issues in SEO and I feel like the world has in some ways changed in SEO since our last conversation a few months ago. And I'm, I'm certain that a lot of other SEOs are feeling the same shift in gravity.
What is your take on just how much things have changed since December, how you and Rickety Roo and others are tackling these new challenges?
Let's start there because there's so much. There's so much. So let's just start there.
[00:01:02] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I feel like this has been the longest year of marketing. I think I felt like probably in a decade, like the amount of change not just in what Google is displaying in SERPs and that landscape, that's one part of it, right? As they're integrating AI mode and AI overviews and how terrible all that BS is because it doesn't really give you correct answers most of the time.
If anybody wants to see that, I'm sure you're already seeing that. Just go look at any of Lily Ray's social media and you'll see her calling out all the BS responses there. So we have that side of it, right? Like the SERP landscape is changing again, just like it did when they introduced featured snippets and people also ask and all sorts of other things more and more Google monopolization of Page one in particular.
So you have that whole facet that we're all trying to figure out. And then on the other side, we have every LLM under the sun that clients are now asking questions about how do we show up here?
ChatGPT in particular is starting to leverage UTM code. So you can now start seeing, seeing that in GA4 and other analytics tools. So now we have clients asking us, well, we show up in Google, where do we show up in LLMs? That's a whole other basket. That's a whole other like eight hours of us talking as well.
And so, you know, looking at both of these things coming back to AI, you know, we're at a place as an industry and as a company at Ricky Roo of figuring out, I don't care what we all want to call it. There's geo, there's still SEO. I think Darren Shaw is calling it Search Everywhere Optimization.
I don't know what acronym we're going to land on.
But you know, agencies big and small are trying to figure out what do we need to be doing differently, what is no longer relevant, what is new that we need to integrate into our best practices.
And I think there's two extremes there. You have people who are going off the deep end claiming XYZ for LLMs works and then you have the rest of us, myself included, who's like okay, we, we already have best practices that we know work in general.
What do we need to be doing to change those and to strengthen those that then also support showing up in LLMs? Because at the end of the day we still don't exactly know how any LLM is showing answers. And if you put 10 people side by side with the same query in an LLM, you're going to get 10 different answers.
So there's still a lot of unknown there and there, there's so many people just that are like jumping off the ship, changing everything. And I'm like no, no, no, this is where we need to actually step back critical think, stop asking ChatGPT and Claude what to do, put on our thinking caps and figure that out. And that's really on the content side of things. At Ricky Roo, you know, I've been very focused of where can we use AI to improve our efficiencies for our clients then how can we bake in the changes we're making to our best practices to support both showing up in Google and other search engines?
Well, as in LLMs, I agree.
[00:04:09] Speaker A: I listened to Mike King's recent episode where he says that SEO is deprecated and there's an aspect of that that I do agree with.
But the proposal which he replaced it with is seems very over engineered of. Well now we have to do query, fan out, model system and then pipe that into a semantic analysis system and then pipe that into this.
At the end of the day it really feels like just make more, more different content in more places.
When you boil it down, okay, so query fan out. That means that you take your original query and realize oh well that's actually composed of multiple smaller ones and then you need to create content for those and that content can exist on your site or off of your site.
So at the end of the day how is that different then really good practices at SEO of hey, I need to you know, build authority by getting links and placements of content elsewhere, bringing authority in and brand recognition and I need to have detailed, thorough, effective content on my site to support that, that those it's like it's SEO's deprecated, but we need to do SEO.
[00:05:54] Speaker B: Yeah, we love our acronyms and we love creating new products out of thin air. Listen, I think what Mike King puts out is incredible. His knowledge level of how search works and now how LLMs work is incredible. And I would absolutely encourage anybody in marketing, whatever skill level to look at what he's doing doing because you know, he's deep diving into concepts that most marketers have never heard of even with a marketing degree.
You know, we're getting into data science as part of this kind of investigatory rabbit hole.
This is where I get a little bit kind of ranty about our industry because I think there's two very clear divides here. You have the kind of the 10% of our industry that are working with clients, clients at a scale where figuring out this nuance like Query, fanout and all sorts of the other acronyms and terms you're hearing being thrown out there talking about these where I think it's absolutely valid that this type of deep dive and potential strategy for those much, you know, we're talking multimillion dollar enterprise owning SERPs kind of things, right. Where these companies don't necessarily need to be doing SEO at all to succeed because they're so big, but yet there's still market share out there in places they need to be seen. So I do think the deep dives into this that we're seeing could be much more applicable to that 10% whereas the rest of us in this industry are probably working with clients in this 90% that, you know, I'm going to use Rickety Roo working in the local space for we all know how crappy the content is in the local space. It ranks well because there's nothing better out there. Do I think that for a home service business, you know, in some outskirts of Cheyenne, Wyoming needs to be a whole strategy around query, fan out and exactly the nuance of how LLMs work. Absolutely not. I think other practices for them because of how small they are and who they're competing with, we don't necessarily need to dive down that rabbit hole for them.
But I do agree that SEO is changing. I do not believe SEO is dead. And please, for any journalists who might be watching this, come up with a different way to say it. Stop saying SEO is dead. We've heard that before. We've heard that for 20 years.
Come on, you're supposed to be creative. Come up with something better or call me, I'll help you.
So I like the idea though. That it's evolving, it's changing, we have to grow as marketers. You know, like AI is not going away. And while we have all these, these big tools out there right now, you know, OpenAI and ChatGPT in particular, owning the majority of AI queries out there, you know, we do have to figure out as marketers how do we also help our clients show up there.
But we don't necessarily have to go off the deep end to do that. You know, I firmly believe, looking and like trying to trust me, I'm also nerding out a query, fan out and all chunking and all sorts of semantic similarities and all of those.
Do I think that I can build that into AI workflows that the client doesn't even have to ever understand that or that frankly my team even needs to understand that? Absolutely. And I think that kind of figuring out how that works for your agency, what you're comfortable with, what your generative AI policies are and what your workflows from start to finish and what the end deliverable is, I think we can build these things in where they make sense without over complicating them for our clients or frankly even for the people who are using the tools internally if we build good systems ourselves.
[00:09:33] Speaker A: I think that's, that's also the practical moment I think is for freelancers, for agencies to recognize the sea change happened six years ago. The sea change happened actually 10 years ago when you know, Jarvis LLMs, Jarvis was the first one of the first LLM tools that came out there.
You know, not two or three years ago when everybody got suddenly aware that Chachi PT existed and you know, it became the, the fad du jour of tech bros to stop thinking about bitcoins and turning JPEGs into money.
Instead now it's GPT. Oh yeah, GPT is going to solve all the world's problems.
We just happen to be attached in a way to that.
I think the real lesson that we need to grapple with is how to best integrate new workflows for SEO that allow us to do far more, you know, as an individual consultant, as an individual on a team.
The capability that we have is something that, you know, you would have to work very hard and very long to figure out, you know, in 2012, a chain of, you know, outsourcing to multiple, you know, low dollar content, creating countries to come up with a fraction of it in three or four times amount of the time. So I think a lot of SEOs have not adjusted to the power that they have in Their hands. And a lot of agencies still are charging, you know, three, four hundred dollars for, you know, their, their marketing plan is to put out four articles a month and you know, and still charging the same retainer amount.
And that's just simply not going to cut it. And so the heart, the, the rubber meeting, the road, it comes between our new capabilities, the new market opportunities and also the reduced opportunity of Google. Let's be honest, like we're seeing, we're being gaslit 24,7. In fact, search liaison is now deactivated on Twitter, not active at all. Whether or not that position still exists, I, you know, not really clear yet how, how that liaison position, whether it exists or not in the same capacity.
But certainly anybody that is, that is listening credibly to Google on its interview saying, oh, not only has search volume not decreased, but we're actually sending more clicks into the ecosystem.
Anybody that credibly swallows that should not be calling themselves an SEO professional. That's just like, we know we're being gaslit. We know that the, the clicks are not coming out of the new AI overviews. The, the organic click through rate tables are completely decimated.
You know, you, you get these insights where literally one, they're saying 1% organic click through on off of the SERP. If it shows an AI overview, if you have a blue clickable link in the AI overview, 1% like it's dramatically, drastically impacting, impacting us. And I think also taking the moment to step back and say, and that's on top of hcu, you know, that's on top of massive algorithmic shifts that already stabbed multiple content producers and production teams. We already had a huge shift and now this is on top of it.
It's, it is a different game.
It isn't not search. I just prefer to kind of step back and realize, okay, I have a role within the digital marketing service. Like I'm a digital marketer. Like I'm looking at myself more now, I, and less tagging. I don't care so much if we call it SEO or GI or AI SEO or like it's digital marketing.
And if we are, if, if we step back and realize, okay, well you know, our role as facilitators for this, you know, if we aren't pigeon, pigeonholing ourselves to be Google reverse engineers anymore because I would, I posit the argument that from 2010 to 2021, SEO was merely reverse engineering Google. That was it, that was our job. Like if we did that more successfully, we were more successful, we got more Traffic.
And that's not the game anymore. You know, we can't ignore other methods or other ways that search occurs. We can't ignore other ways that our efforts translate visitors into dollars.
So I propose that we stop focusing on whether to call it SEO and focus more on, hey, as an industry we need to do digital marketing as opposed to just being labeled as SEOs only. And I think this ties into our previous conversation too about multi channel, about understanding the secondary impacts of search, of understanding branding, understanding. You know, we always had this Google first interpretation of what, what search meant or its impacts or how we positioned our value.
And I think that the true challenge isn't that the nature of what we do or changing an acronym is what's shifted as opposed to how we, what is our unique selling proposition as an industry?
And we can no longer viably say, hey, we're Google reverse engineers and we'll send you traffic, we'll understand the algorithms, we'll, you know, you'll make these changes to the site. You'll rank and get traffic and get money. You know, that game's gone. But those who have been doing this long enough know that that was a phase that wasn't, you know, 2000. In 2000, Google, Google did not have monopoly, you know, AltaVista, Hotbot, Ask Jeeves. Like there were other search engines. Bing and Microsoft became Bing. Yahoo was a player. Like we're, I don't, like there was this squeeze moment in history where we just kind of forgot anything other than Google. But there's more game to play. So I view it as, hey, we just have now, we now have more search engines using different, more advanced processes. I have more advanced tools than ever. I have more advanced capability. I have more scalability than ever.
So what do you think about the repositioning of ourselves higher in the ecosystem?
[00:17:31] Speaker B: I mean, I love it. I mean we should be more in the ecosystem, you know, like, like our ecosystem of what our job is and what tools we use are changing. So that should naturally shift how we see ourselves and how we position ourselves. And you know, you, you talked about what is our value, you know, and it's like our value could be so much more than Google. Why are we tying ourselves to Google? Search may work different on different channels, but the fundamentals are still there. And you know, I want to jump back real quick to talking about trusting Google because why would anybody trust them? Like, I don't understand.
They were a for profit company. Their mission is no longer to make the world better, it's to make as much money as possible. The CEO of Google stood behind during a presidential inauguration.
You know, and I'm not trying to get political here or anything, but this is the power and influence that Google and Apple and these big companies that control the narrative have. Now this is, this is where we're seeing them. Why would we trust what they're saying? You know, it doesn't make sense for them to help us. And frankly, they don't care who they hurt because it's making them money. And you know, the same could be said about OpenAI.
GPT5 just launch launched and you're seeing a whole division between people like me who've been using it. And I'm not having any issues with it. I. And you know, I'd like to say, you know, throw my ego aside, but you know, I think that's because of what I've built and how I've built it. It holds up to a changing model like this and changing of thinking, reasoning, you know, but you have a whole other set of people who are like, how dare OpenAI change this and how they took something away from us. And we have to remember OpenAI, what started as a nonprofit, it is no longer a nonprofit. It is for profit company.
And all these other LLMs also are for profit. So, you know, we're not only trying to figure out where is our place and our value in our industry now, but we are actively working against companies and organizations who don't care about what we're doing and don't care about the businesses that are helped or harmed by what we're doing or what they're doing.
So it's like we put all this stock into what Google says. And don't get me wrong, I mean, if I'm going to trust anybody at Google, it's John Mueller. Absolutely.
But beyond that, I take everything they say with a grain of salt, just like I take everything OpenAI says with a grain of salt.
And you know, we tie, we've tied our value, like you said, for so long to Google. And people seem to forget now that Google is a verb. And so part of our world culture of use and how many people use it every day and rely on all the tools within its own ecosystem. You know, we do forget that there's more out there. You know, you look at Bing and you know, a lot of people laugh about Bing, but Bing is baked in to Microsoft Edge and Windows systems, which the majority of world use, sorry, Mac users. It's true, a lot of people still use Windows. When you search for Something in Windows. You know, now depending on your experience, you're searching Bing from that search bar or you're going into copilot for it. So like we still have other places we should be thinking about. And you know, Bing is obviously much less sophisticated than Google. So a lot of the stuff we do for Google translates over. But search means so much more now than just Google. You know, you think about last year, last 15 months and the explosion of TikTok SEO and that whole product that people started creating right now. What happened there? You had 50, 50 split of some SEO singing, oh yeah, we should absolutely be figuring out se SEO for this. But then you had social media marketing folks saying no, no, no, no, this is our area.
When really if they both work together, clients and whatever they're working towards their goals on TikTok would have been much better for them. And you know, same thing you think of Amazon. Amazon SEO is a whole other can of worms, you know, and there's people who, they're marketing themselves of how to, to leverage what they know on Amazon to boost products, right? So like that's a whole untapped potential too that we don't think about. You know, if you're working with, with a client who would sell on Amazon or could sell on Amazon. So like search exists in so many different places, not just this myopic view we have that it's just Google that matters. And I think to tie this back to the, the idea of how we value ourselves, I think this is one of the ways our roles evolve, not just for what we do day to day, but for our clients. It's, you know, and to go back to multichannel marketing, it's like where else, you know, most of us do not just do SEO and exist in a vacuum.
You know, for most people who know me, my background is actually in content marketing. I've been doing content marketing for 20 years and I learned SEO along the way because I realized, holy cow, if, if I can figure out how SEO works for content and bake that into quality content, I'm winning from the start of a creation of a piece. I'm not having to go back and fix things or tweak things. It's already baked into my process.
So I think this is a similar way. We need to start looking about what we're doing is like, where do we bake in other parts of marketing into what we're doing not only to boost other channels, but potentially also to boost SEO, SEO and then by proxy boosting how clients show up in LLMs.
You know, I, I think it's almost like we're having a midlife identity crisis as marketers. Right?
And like, to me, it's like this thinking of who we are and what we offer.
AI has the potential to not only change what our workflows and our efficiency looks like, but also gives us more time to actually think, Think on the strategic side and be more creative and think outside that limited SEO box. So I think, yeah, like anybody watching this today, you should sit back, pull your journal out, however you take notes, think about that. What value do you actually bring beyond Google results?
[00:23:51] Speaker A: I'm reminded because I was just seeing the results from Meta's court case case.
They came out and they said they are facing monopoly concerns about their organic social practices.
Their argument in court legally before the judge was, we killed organic search only. Less than 4% of activity and clicks in Meta is now actually content of people interacting with content that their neighbors or peers created, that your friends created. So if you're on Facebook, you're on Meta, less than 4% of your interaction with anything in the Meta workspace. And in Meta, that's organic. That's what it has become. And so they pioneered the model of, hey, let's, let's social engineering. You connect with your friends and share your stuff. And, you know, the, the lawsuit comes of, hey, you're monopolistically controlling this. And like, well, not really, because we killed it. Like, there is no more organic search on Meta. Like, if you try to set up an organic business page on Facebook and try to use that as a viable marketing channel, like you could in 2008, like you could in 2010, like you could in 2005, it. It's gone, baby, gone. If you're not paying, if you're not creating content on, on Instagram instead, like, and mostly doing paid placements, like, that system's gone. And the reason that that came to me is because Google's kind of pretty much following in the same footprints of, like, well, they created an expectation, a path for us to, to consume information and had other people create it. And now they're so used to it that now they, they can monopolize and shunt people anywhere except the website.
And you don't get to play unless you pay.
[00:25:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:25:58] Speaker A: So it's time to put on the hat and realize, like, okay, well, let's take some, some real, you know, like, not everything has changed. Not 100 of every industry and everywhere is losing 100 of their traffic because AI overviews exist. And certainly the market Share of, you know, LLM based search tools is not, not incredibly higher than, you know, even Bing.
But to say that the market is a unchanged or the behavior is unchanged as untrue. So yeah, it's, it's time to get those journals out and have some reflection. Time to look at what we are as an industry, how we position ourselves. And there is a devaluing of less traffic from Google that there. It's definitely happening. But perhaps it's a good wake up call not to try to rebrand ourselves into, you know, geo, which is a terrible acronym because the geometro geology geography, like geodude, like come on, aren't we SEOs or what we went for, we went for the one acronym that's like already like hard coded. We shouldn't, somebody should have done their keyword research before they chose GEO as the acronym that they were going to try to replace SEO with.
[00:27:31] Speaker B: See, we're SEOs, we're not brand experts. Right. If we were brand experts and understood branding a little bit more, we wouldn't have come up with that acronym.
[00:27:46] Speaker A: Who came up with that? I want to say slap them.
I think the moment though is to look at how do we change our value proposition in that as freelancers, what do we say that we do and what is the objective and perspective that we communicate to clients in this economy.
As they say, we cannot go to the table with the same talking points that we did 10 years ago. That is true, but I think that that moment has come where we talk more about all of the value that we want to try to deliver of. Hey, I don't just work on your website.
I'm working with you, your brand, your digital, the understanding of your business online.
Like I am your concierge to traffic accessed or understood through digital mediums.
You know, like we are so much, we have so much more potential to open up here as digital marketers and we through the understanding of how search works through these lenses, we will have to adapt, we will have to understand more what tactical items we can adopt in our workflows to gain visibility in LLMs as well as the crossfire opportunity opportunity of okay, if we're, if I want to convince somebody to, to use me as a home reseller or as a home renovation service, here's what I need to do to convince that person once they get here, what in that process is going to help them get here? You know, do I need to think about creating articles and listicles elsewhere on other successful sites, collaborating, partnering, paid placement where other traffic is Going to generate. Maybe part of my link building budget goes to getting a listicle, getting at the top of a listicle and then getting that listicle ranked. You know, maybe my link building effort is not best spent on my own site anymore. Maybe it's, it's a combination. Maybe it's, you know, using my outreach budget and instead of myopically just cold spamming, trying to get people desperately to add links, maybe my outreach outreach budget goes to finding collaborators and co marketing opportunities and like opening those doors.
[00:30:47] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean I think the meta example and the lawsuit surrounding what was happening there and the data that came out from that, you know, it is very much a more cautionary tale than I think what's happening with Google right now. Like, you know, like the only reason, if my mom's watching this, I'm really sorry mom. The only reason I'm on Facebook is my mom still uses Facebook. Like I don't communicate with anyone except for a couple friends who send me reels all the time. That, that also sorry to those friends. I don't usually catch up on all those.
But you look at the shift of this kind of turning something that used to connect people into a place of buying power, you know, not so much Facebook in that way, but Instagram, if you know, there's a whole ecosystem within Instagram where you know you're, they retarget you, you can buy right from there, Boom, here you go. TikTok the same thing, right? And so Google similarly is trying to condense, which they were doing long before AI to keep you there. So you're clicking on PPC ads, right? You're not organically going to someone's homepage, you're clicking on their PPC ads.
Google gets their cut. They're all good.
I think we're going to see that more with platforms, especially when you think about the funnel and how you want to keep people interested to, to buy, purchase, fill out a form, whatever that is. And I think that's another area where SEOs can start thinking about because you know, it's like I start talking about funnels, which are my favorite thing in the world, and eyes just glaze over. You know, SEOs want to stay in their bubble of link building and on page and technical work, which is all important as well.
But the way we're looking at the funnel and the way it works is fundamentally changing. You know, dozens of people in our industry have talked about how the shift of what the top of the funnel was.
Honestly, I don't want to make like Any crazy predictions? But, like, the way Google is going, the way queries are changing of how people are interacting and talking to LLMs, I question whether we actually see the death of the top of the funnel. And it doesn't mean that that content isn't important and that website shouldn't be producing it. But we relied so much on top of the funnel to drive people in and then guide them to the right place on our websites. And we're losing that across multiple platforms, not just Google. We're losing that on social media, we're losing that in video platforms. Like, now that you can do one thing in one place, why would you go anywhere else? So, like, if you get, if you get a correct answer, I had to. I could have rolled my eyes so hard there, I would have fell over. If you can get a correct answer in AI mode or AI overviews with Google, right, why would you click on the link to begin with? You have your answer if you trust it and believe it, right? So why would you go read an informational article about that if that spits out what you need? And that's how people are turning to ChatGPT and perplexity and Clan and all these tools. They're getting the answers there. Whether it's right or not is a whole other point of debate. But we have to evolve with these ecosystems too, and the changes they're making. You know, I cannot remember the last time I recommended anybody to create a Facebook page for their business.
Facebook, if anything's dead, Facebook is pretty much dead.
And so, you know, it's like we have to figure out how do we take what we already do well and how do we, how do we change it, how do we grow, what do we depreciate that doesn't need to work anymore. And that's where our value comes from. It's how do we pivot from where we're at to being more.
And what we know about our industry is our industry does not like change. Our industry is incredibly scared of change because for so long, so many of the foundational things we do in SEO haven't actually changed that much.
You think of the helpful content update.
That's content.
Yes, you're optimizing that content, but the foundation there is content.
You look at many of the different ways the algorithm has changed and how eat has been incorporated into the systems behind the search engine, and the foundation is still content.
How do we support content that we still need need and that what type of content we need is changing? How do we support that with Changing our SEO tactics to keep up with the modern world.
And like, I see a lot of people claiming XYZ works for AI optimization.
How does anybody know?
Like, all these platforms are so radically different that we do not know the things we know about about Google's ranking system. Right. We know far more about what works on Google than we do what works on ChatGPT and other LLMs out there. So it's like we need to be trying things. You know, there's the whole debate about does schema work or does schema not work? And Ray Martinez posted a great article talking about what Archer has been doing with leveraging an LLM text file for crawling.
And I loved it because I'm like, okay, yeah, see, like, we're taking a big site and we're testing things and we're actually showing what's happening and talking about it. We're not just assuming that this is a one size fits all thing that works.
You know, same thing with schema. You know, it's like where I want to see more data, more case studies, you know, what worked, what didn't work before. We just claim, oh, this absolutely works. We gotta go ham to schema again everywhere. Which, frankly, you should already be putting schema on your pages anyway. So I don't know why anybody's playing catch up there.
That's already a good practice for you. And so it's like, I want to see more of what Ray is doing with this type of stuff. Let's talk about these things. Let's debate, let's test, let's multitest, and let's figure out what works. And again, that's another way we add value as we figure out what works on LLMs versus what works on search engines. Where's the crossover? Where's the differences?
And that's where we spend our time, you know, tweaking and evolving our workflows and our best practices to match that demand. And maybe we find out that, yes, GEO is a thing and it's its own thing. Maybe we do, right? I don't know. I don't know. This AI world is moving so much faster than I think we could. Any of us can keep up. You know, I'm personal, perfectly fine eating a shoe a year from now if GO is absolutely its own marketing discipline.
I don't think that's gonna happen. But. But I. I will literally eat a shoe on your podcast if that happens.
[00:37:28] Speaker A: No, I.
I think what occurs to me there.
Oh, okay, I have it.
And I lost it.
Wow. Totally lost my train of thought and it was a good one. It was the best thought that anybody has ever had on it. No, I, I think connecting these things together as far as best practices go, you know, I love Ray Martinez. I to have him on again, see what else he's been doing at, at Archer. I talked to him, you know, well over a year ago. So things have definitely changed.
The practical hands on element of being researchers at the front end testing these systems is made more complicated. This was the thought GPT just changed from 4 to 5 and Claude moved from, you know, Sonic to Sonic the Hedgehog to, to Knuckles, you know, like and, and then you know, the iterations of these engines are coming out so quickly that even if we did, you know, like it took us years to reverse engineer exactly what it was within Google's algorithm that we were pretty sure worked this particular way. And like we have had a long game of cat and mouse with Google as far as what works in their algorithm.
How many bad actors went after one particular thing, came back, moved, move the needle back again.
We have yet to see clearly how bad actors are influencing LLM's decisions.
You know, I have not seen as much information coming out from you know, Black Hat World or you know, Ninja Forum or what have you crowing about their latest mass LLM exploit. But rest assured that if they think that there's money there, there's people that are trying to, to, to exploit it.
I feel like that is going to be interesting to see how that plays out because those negative forces, like you know, there are forces for good within our industry and we also have those who.
It's like sitting down with a sith. You know, I went to Pubcon like in 2015 and sat down next to a guy and it was like I sat next down next to Palpatine where, where he explains that the Jedi are evil and that you know, his mass inject into thousands of websites to create these pages was actually the only ultimate good because it's forcing Google to evolve and address all the problems in its algorithm that it refuses to do. And you know, if, if Google was truly so concerned about its users then it would take steps in the algorithm to counter such blatant things. So I'm really helping. And so there, there are Palpatines, there are people who are willing to burn a thousand domain names to make $10,000 worth of profit.
So I don't know what impact that factor is going to play in LLMs as they, as we, as they disclose their soft underbelly. I mean like LLMs seem pretty ripe for novel outputs because you know, even the engineers that are creating these things don't exactly have one to one maps of why it's behaving a particular way.
So it's a little bit of a tangent, but it applies the same. So we, we need to have, have an arms race ourselves as far as capabilities, understanding what it is that that does work, but also understanding our, you know, how we need, need to adjust our own rule. Yeah, like the top of the funnel, I think. Mike Buckbee in a previous interview of Noah Toa he said Chat GPT is now your most popular and least knowledgeable customer service representative.
[00:42:13] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:42:14] Speaker A: So retooling how you approach content to be so much more thorough about what it is that you do reading your content with much more of an expectation of I need to thoroughly commit to what my USP is and be far more explicit and I'm sorry but new sites that are just like what we do or like, you know, like it's the classic what would you say you do here problem. It just got 10 times worse because you're communicating not just now, not just with humans, but with bots.
Bots asked by other humans. So there's like a double bot sandwich between human sense of bot and we have used bots to create more content on our site and they interact in their interface and exchange information and then come back and connect the two of us.
So you know, there's this bot sandwich between the two of capabilities between the two of us.
You know that's going to change as you know, more explicitly. You know, I just saw a snapshot from Rusty Brick somebody saying is this new of click to have AI call where an AI goes and contacts the business and arranges conversation or around arranges a quote that that means that your site needs to be able to connect with whatever ecosystem that is. And if Google's putting that forward, then Bing's going to put that forward. GPT is going to have a version of that.
LLMs, you know, browsers, all of these things are going to take that next step of agentic.
Big scary word of where it. But I mean for the moment most agents are simply just multiple text files.
This agent does this. This is a text file that describes what it does.
Not agentic. It's just multiple text files in a chain telling it what to do slightly differently. But if you don't even have that skill set, I mean if you're not learning how to use N8 and to daisy chain multiple commands if you're still stuck in the mode of I need to log in and edit this WordPress post, you're probably going to lose in the arms race.
[00:44:45] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean it's oh, so many things I could say. You know, the thing I want to add on to talking about just kind of how we're interacting and how these AIs are interacting for us. You know, the one part of this I really don't hear anybody talking about as we're trying to figure out where we fit into this is, you know, the personally personalization aspect of AIs and LLMs. You know, anybody out there that's using ChatGPT, Claude Perplexity, any of these platforms that you want to count on, you're, they say they don't keep your search history and you can turn off memories and all that stuff.
That is not true. I, I've watched it happen multiple times. Like this is, you know, it's true to an extent but like I see things pop up in the things I ask. Things like rabbit holes I go down. Then I'm like how did it know that? Why did it say that like, like it had to have got that connection elsewhere. So that's a whole other aspect we can't necessarily optimize for is that personalization aspect. And I mean, you know that people are using these platforms to, you know, find a home services vendor, but then also, you know, probably asking it not safe for work type queries too in the same place. Whereas in Google they would go and open an incognito window, you'd hope so that it didn't mess with their search results. Right. So we still don't quite understand how that works for these platforms. And that's one area that we may not be able to combat against. Right. And the other part of it too is the bias of these models. You know, this is like the telephone game. They're trained by people that, yes, are trying to be as objective as possible for all sorts of. And I'm not even talking about the big topics out there like religion and politics and things like that, but the nuances of just how those bias are explicitly in these AI LLMs. How does that impact if someone's asking a question what it returns? You know, so it's like now we can't optimize or write content that addresses that. But there are so many other factors and nuances here to what we have to figure out and what our approaches should be. And it just, it boggles my mind. You know, you brought up kind of the black hat world. Right?
It has been very fascinating how quiet they've been. It's very, I mean, they're one of the loudest groups out there. And frankly, you know, I may not jump into the black hat area of marketing myself. I have in the past, I've never denied that.
You know, I do like to read their forums and the things they share publicly because it does. It's kind of like going back to our dark side, light side, example, example.
Sometimes I feel like I'm in the gray area there because you do learn an awful lot from the things that they're doing, whether you agree with them or not. And I think you're going to start the same thing. I will be absolutely curious when they do start sharing things. What are they sharing, what have they been trying, what's working, what's not working?
And because we've learned a lot about Google search, like you said, from the things that they've done that they claim, claim are good, that we may not see as good.
There has been changes that have happened there and that we've learned from and integrated in where we morally stand with how we do our work. So I think we're going to learn the same thing once we start hearing more from that side of the marketing industry. And it'll be very fascinating because, you know, we're in this new and emerging technology and everyone's trying to race to the top and not just us as marketers, but countries competing against one another. You know, you look at what China is doing comparatively to what we're building here in America, and sometimes what they're doing is light years ahead of what we're doing. And then what do we not know that they're building. Right. So like, the implications here aren't just on like who we are as marketers, but it's like how people search is fundamentally changing whether they realize it or not. And we live in such a small, tiny world of that thinking. We're so mighty and important because we're marketers and we know how this works. It's such a small application of how people are actually using this. You know, and I think that's important for us to think about as well, is that people aren't just turning to AI to buy something or to find, you know, a company to do business with. This is becoming something that's integrating into their lives. People are, you know, anybody who watched the GPT5 announcement, you know, saw the couple that works there that the, the wife had been diagnosed with cancer and used ChatGPT to help understand the diagnosis Before I believe she even talked to her oncologist.
And if you, I would encourage everybody to go watch this part of it because you know, I'm not saying people should or shouldn't upload medical data to any of these platforms, but there are so many other ways people are using them that we are ignoring.
How these people are searching is changing and how do we meet them with how that is changing. And I think that's something I've been thinking about for months as I think about how do I build content workflows that address, you know, it's no longer too threat 3, 4 word query anymore.
You know, it's a 30, 40 word query and question that people are putting in, how do we address those changes? Because they're not just, it's not just about SEO anymore. It's about the whole world is changing how they're getting information and we have to meet people there, not just in marketing.
[00:50:23] Speaker A: I know that you're trying to positively change the world yourself.
And if you want to talk about that, I'm curious if there's anything that you're specifically planning to try and approach visibility for your charity efforts and how you think these changes to search, to LLMs, everything might impact how those grants are written to non profits on the basis of, hey, you're supposed to reach people.
You know, we're giving you money as a ngo.
You know, you, you don't have a product to sell at the end, but we need to get our mission out there. How do, how does everything that we've talked about impact that game?
[00:51:15] Speaker B: Well, I mean this comes back to branding, multi channel marketing and distribution. You know, it's any business, not just in the nonprofit world, but any kind of organization out there. You know, you think of news websites, you think of video game and other fandom based informational sites that are, you know, relying on ad revenue to drive. Right. They're not necessarily looking for people to fill out a form or pick up a phone. You know, you have to look at where you're at, meeting your audience, audience where you're at. And your audience isn't always customers. Your audience are sometimes people that you're trying to turn into fans in the nonprofit world. You're trying to solicit donations and other support.
And there's different approaches to that, but the fundamentals stay the same. You know, these websites still need solid content that matches where people and their audience are. You know, we don't have any data yet to see how, you know, there's, there's a handful of people in our industry that work solely with nonprofits. You know, I'd be curious what they're explicitly doing. You know, I did mention Ray Martinez earlier, sharing. But beyond him, you know, who else out there is trying to figure out how to not only show up, but get people to go from an LLM to their website to click that donate button. And I'm sure at some point there will be an agent that lets you do that, and they'll figure all that out.
But, you know, this is, this. This is the perfect example, though, of. Of an industry that has to look at branding and multichannel marketing. And they can't just, you know, they need to be on TikTok. They can't just be focusing on LLMs and Google. They need to be on TikTok and Instagram and, you know, gosh, maybe Facebook, depending on the age demographic that they're going after, you know, email marketing for those lists. You know, my. My best friend actually works for a nonprofit. And, you know, it's fascinating that, you know, they're not only dealing with the changes to marketing, but they're also dealing with the changes of how funding in America is impacting the work they're doing. And so donations have become even more important for American nonprofits because of what's happening in the political climate of America. Right. So, like, for a lot of nonprofits in this country, you know, they're not as concerned about, oh, we need to show up in AI. They're concerned more about, are we going to have enough money to continue doing the good work we're doing. Right. And so they have to continue, like I said, to go where people who might donate will be. And you've seen there's been some incredible advertising and retargeting, in particular from the Human Rights Campaign, the aclu, Planned Parenthood, you know. You know, and I'm sure, just to be fair to the other side of that equation, I don't make my political beliefs a surprise to anybody. I'm sure there are examples on the other side of these issues as well, of good marketing examples. I do not, unfortunately, have those off the top of my head. But I do want to be fair that both sides, you know, are trying to figure out the same things of connecting with their audiences, where they're at. And so I think, like I said, multichannel is more important than ever. Get on the. Get on the truck, everybody.
[00:54:28] Speaker A: I think so, Yeah. I think the.
The true story is that the value in SEO is no longer the click.
It is the.
The capture of that User. And I think we as an industry need to become more disciplined and conversant in shepherding that through to the end. You know, we've always had issues with SEOs. Oh, my conversion rate is great.
Pay me money, please.
Like, you know, I ranked, I got a click and they converted.
Well, yeah, except, you know, your tree guy gives you feedback that your four leads were in different states.
So, yeah, 100% conversion rate off of four users. Zero percent revenue. Zero revenue.
So, you know, that is true now. As true now as it was then. And we also have to be conversant in, hey, just because they came here, they left, but that doesn't mean that they're gone. If we capture their email and we can read Target to them, then that's another content flow. Or we captured that instead of like a top of the funnel article. Objective thinking, magically. Okay, well, they're going to read this and then they're going buy my thing. No, they're going to read this. We're going to give them a resource. They will become an email and they. Then we'll introduce them and then we'll feed them content and then six months later they'll buy. You know, like we need to, you know, be more conversant in those alternative, you know, client acquisition conversion models and how we play a role in those ecosystems.
You know, that's as. That's also true on social buying influencers. Yes, you can get an influencer to promote pink pants and get a whole bunch of influencers to wear a set of pink pants, but if you're not coordinated with your e commerce manager and that particular type of pink pants sells out and you drop from your number one ranking to nothing.
At the start of your pink pants influencer campaign, you just sold 10,000 units of pants for somebody else.
[00:56:50] Speaker B: Yeah, that's the Shark Tank effect, right? You go on Shark Tank whether you get a deal or not. You see the stories all the time after Shark Tank episode airs where they run out of inventory because they didn't realize that whether they get a deal or not doesn't impact how many people are going on their website. Absolutely. You know, and I do think the needle is moving of what our end goal is here. You know, for so long it was a click and now I think that's changing too. And you know, SEOs don't want to let go of their impressions and clicks, you know, especially when the impressions aren't driving the clicks.
[00:57:25] Speaker A: Yeah, it is the struggle for metrics. It's in. The struggle for metrics is to define, find those definable elements, which is pressure from C CMOs CFOs to say, hey, you know, define your outcome in six months. You're, I'm going to give you a budget of X to do what? And prove it with math of how much this is going to make with the business.
That is quite frankly not possible anymore. Like I could confidently say in 2015 something like, well, here's the marketplace, here's the forecast. This is an organic CTR estimate. This is about how much traffic, here's what our organic traffic conversion rate is, our sales conversion rate, conversion rate, actual revenue.
If we increase it, you know, if we target this market with that, this represents this and this particular monetary output. I don't think you can confidently do that same thing now.
[00:58:28] Speaker B: Agreed.
[00:58:28] Speaker A: Which is a shame because I, which is a shame because I have a tool that does part of that, my Sea Ark tool kind of forecast it that. But it's not complete anymore because AI overviews change the organic click through rate process.
You know, LLMs change the nature of the queries and people are arriving there differently.
So it's not, it's not as easy to say to, to use those metrics as solidly before they still exist. They can still in, they're still, they're still useful directionally, but we have to kind of adapt.
So give a little bit information about Rickety Roo. I know that you're promoting a charity effort.
Drop a little hint name, drop what you're doing there and we'll come back and have another, another conversation once things change after a couple months.
[00:59:30] Speaker B: Oh yeah, we'll have to make this like a quarterly event now.
We'll get T shirts and everything.
So in September, I know a lot of people follow me on social media. I'm participating in local SEO for good with Bright Local and a bunch of other speakers who we've all picked charities that mean a great deal to us that we're raising funds for. And I'm raising funds for the Human Rights Campaign. It's an organization that supports LGBTQ folks all over the country and especially not a surprise to anybody either. As a member of that community, you know that this cause is very close to my heart. So I have that coming up.
And then I will also be speaking at Women in Tech Fest in Philadelphia in October and I will be giving away my entire AI workflow of how to write content in your own voice.
So if you haven't gotten a ticket for that, please do come see us. I will be sharing all that afterwards. As well. I'm gonna give away all of my secrets because, frankly, nothing we're doing with AI Is proprietary. So I don't know why we're keeping secrets from one another, but that's a little bit of. Kind of where I'm at and what I'm up to right now.
[01:00:47] Speaker A: Fantastic. It's always great to have you. Thanks for coming on.
[01:00:51] Speaker B: Thanks for having me.
