Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted podcast host. I'm here with Zach Ali who's going to introduce himself first by telling us why we should trust him as an expert in his niche and then introduce the company that he's working for right now. And what's so special about finder.com cool.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: Thanks Jeremy. Yeah. So a little bit about myself. I started in the SEO space in 2015. I actually had co founded a news company with my childhood best friend. It was called Rant.
We were, we grew up outside of D.C. so it was a news based political blog.
We had grown it to 100,000 readers or so, doing a lot of rapid response news type articles and long form think pieces and really sort of that was how we got our bearings.
Figuring out keyword research and following trends and how to sort of win organic visibility. Also doing some social as well.
At the end of that run we were or I was, my co founder still is in the new space but I was so exhausted with politics and I never wanted to hear anything about it ever again.
So I found a job listing for a financial comparison site, Finder, which I joined in 2018.
I really was aligned with their mission of trying to help people win out money.
They compare brokerage accounts and personal loans and mortgages and credit cards. Basically the whole gamut of financial products.
They were built heavily on organic search and so I thought this was a good place for me.
So I joined in as the publisher. So that's more of the SEO and business manager of their insurance niches.
Worked my way into their lending niches, eventually took on head of growth role where I was managing paid organic email CRM, basically the whole marketing suite. And then now I'm the general manager for Finder us where manage everything which is basically all the same marketing channels plus sales. But that's sort of of, that's kind of my career trajectory.
And again Finder's a comparison site. We compare products. We're very editorially independent so we make sure that our content is trustworthy.
Our ratings are all backed by a methodology from our expert editors and we're really just trying to get you the best deal for yourself. So much so that we actually have a new program called Finder Rewards where we take part of the commission we make from our affiliate links and we give it back to the user in the form of a Visa gift card. Are much juicier than the ones you sort of see on like Rakuten or maybe Capital One.
They are in the hundreds of dollars. So for Example, we've had them as high as $300 cash back and I think we have a current, some current offers that are all above $100 over $150.
So that is Finder and myself in a NutShell. That's my AI overview.
[00:02:55] Speaker A: Well, speaking to AI overviews, I have a question.
Maybe you can validate my hypothesis or some my viewpoint that I've developed over the past few interviews.
Spoke with Federico Fancinelli who does geo sonar and several other, you know, LLM experts, you know, Mason McCumber and others. And I've evolved to the point of view that SEO and LLM isn't an overlap on the sides of like on a Venn diagram of what they cover.
SEO is within LLMs and LLMs extend over the top and that LLM shell also cross covers social media and visibility on other sites.
Parasympathetically somewhere email happens in there, but through those other surfaces. Would you agree with that?
[00:03:54] Speaker B: Yeah, totally. I think LLM really is what took it from search engine optimization to search everywhere optimization as some folks call it.
So now it's really about being on every discoverable Surface. And so yeah, I would totally agree with that.
[00:04:09] Speaker A: Did you read AJ Cohn's newest article that he released this week? He called it Surface Optimization.
[00:04:17] Speaker B: I like it.
I agree with that wholeheartedly.
[00:04:21] Speaker A: And it is also like an iteration too of kind of honoring, you know, the evolution from 10 blue links and you know, hey everybody, almost everybody's on their desktop and they go to this one website and they find the thing.
It really there is a fracturing of people on their mobile and then going to a website. But now it's that Surface could be on a search engine on a tablet, but they're actually talking to it. But the talking part is going through ChatGPT first and then getting search bars. So it's like there's all these surfaces where we're showing up now digitally.
When it comes to considering the impact of these diverse channels, how do you, what is your mental map for approaching this diverse channel? Cross channel, you know, this digital ecosystem, I'll put it that way.
[00:05:26] Speaker B: So I have the, I guess privileged perspective to have been someone that began as an SEO and made their way into the executive suite.
Because Now I see SEOs struggling with trying to get buy in from that executive team about what SEO's role is, you know, and just saying, oh, it's supposed to assist conversions because, you know, now it's not necessarily being such a margin driver the way it used to be because of Zero click.
It's not usually enough. So you have to sort of be able to tell that story about what how SEO works in today's realm and how it actually can be a multiplier for your paid acquisition channels by building community, for giving you brand preference. All of that sort of unseen benefit that you can't put on a looker studio dashboard. Right. So that's the story I try to help folks tell when I co on these podcasts and whatnot is just sort of how SEOs can talk to their executives and shape that narrative that says, hey, SEO is still very important and here's why and here's how it's going to benefit our bottom line.
But that's, yeah, I guess that's the part that is, is tricky, right? Because it's no longer such a one to one.
You can't really draw a clear line from SEO to revenue the way you used to be able to in the past.
[00:06:45] Speaker A: It is a lot more muddy and it's, it's almost kind of freeing because there was a time where I got paid to edit like you know, 500 meta titles on a site.
And as exciting as that was, I'd much rather have Claude write those titles for me and check the work rather than like, yes, it's totally human curated and I totally did this by hand.
But there is so much of me that just wanted to copy and paste and there was so much of me, there's like, okay, I won't copy paste. I will be original this time. It's an about page. How can I.
Okay, right. So there is an aspect of the utility of the LLM tool where it's like, okay, there you should set the title based off these general parameters. But there's so few things like on just the checklist view of SEO that you know, it's whole systems that you're looking at versus like granular like oh hey, here's the 250 things that we do every month for SEO.
It has to evolve and be a lot more flexible.
[00:08:02] Speaker B: It's. You're so right about that. And I actually agree with you that what AI is doing is actually allowing us to put the customer first again. I think SEO became very hacky pre LLMs and I actually don't think slop only arose after LLMs. I think it's been here when we all started copying each other to try and rank Right, what's P1 doing and what's P2 doing and how can we do it? And so we all, all of our articles and content all looked very similar and homogeneous anyways. Right. And AI has just multiplied that until some folks have been like, actually wait, we need to add more of our personality into it and sort of throw out the old playbook to an extent of just being very like surgical about keywords and technical SEO and schemas and all of that. And now it's more like, okay, well, it's actually genuinely helpful for the user that's going to keep them on the page longer or be memorable. How do we capture them into our ecosystem and build membership? It's. It's actually forcing companies to deliver more. And so the customer actually wins, is probably winning now more than they were previously where it was just about, look, if I can get into that P1 spot, I have more or less a monopoly on the traffic for that keyword.
Yeah.
[00:09:17] Speaker A: What's an SEO strategy that has survived or that you're using from those prior times?
[00:09:27] Speaker B: So keyword research still exists as a directionally helpful tool. Right. Because people don't really search in keywords anymore. They actually just ask their question directly in the search bar.
So knowing the ICP and who your customer is, all of the basics of marketing have survived. I think technical SEO, schema, markup, speed, you know, all of that stuff still matters a lot.
But the parts that haven't survived, which I guess again, like we were saying earlier, SEO lives within search engine optimization, lives within surface optimization.
So all of that is still kind of ongoing, but we're attacking it from more angles now. Now it's not, it's much less about the written word being the end all, be all. But also how can we pivot this into a YouTube video and pivot that into, cut that up into shorts and reels? And so there's a lot more content waterfall techniques happening at Finder now than there ever were before, because you can't just coast off the one surface anymore. You need to be everywhere. And so I guess that's everything has sort of survived, but it's been enhanced and multiplied across other channels would be my answer there. Yeah.
[00:10:40] Speaker A: I think Adrian Nikolov said AI is the steroids that SEOs really needed to grow out of their lethargic state.
[00:10:50] Speaker B: Yes.
And for those of us who got crushed in the helpful content update, AI wasn't the thing that really sort of forced this awakening. It was the algorithm updates being so heavily preferenced towards brand and providers that sort of squeezed comparison sites and affiliate sites out.
[00:11:11] Speaker A: Yeah.
I think of the helpful content update as a correction within Google once they realized that they had incentivized the creation of a layer of content for the Internet that was endlessly repetitious. Because at the end of the day, if we're honest with ourselves, how many plumbers do we need to write an article on how to fix a leaky leaky faucet as a DIY tip to like, you can only have so many. But we had, there had been created a system so that it. They unfortunately, you know, used the path of cowardice and hid their true objectives and said, we're trying to make, you know, we're, we're surfacing helpful content.
Well, it's helpful for you because you can sell ads on it. That's it, that's it, that's it.
[00:12:05] Speaker B: And honestly, I think the canary in the coal mine is when we started seeing the data come out about just how many people were adding Reddit to the end of their searches because they were so done with blog posts. They wanted real human results because they couldn't trust the same same all these random sites were pushing. And so I often used to run this experiment with my team, which is like, if you were building your own search engine, how would you build it? And you would a lot. Everyone sort of arrives on the same techniques that Google does is like, okay, well I don't have unlimited compute, so I probably used to need to use backlinks from credible sites. And okay, well we want people to have a good experience when they come. So okay, so dwell time. It probably matters so see if, when they go to that site how important it is. And so that was sort of the exercise we would do and eventually be like, okay, well that's probably the same stuff you need to optimize for on Google, but you can't. It's hard to do that when the prevailing wisdom in the SEO community is just do what the winning person is doing. But not everyone can be that, that, that person, not everyone has that ad budget for running commercials during football games and whatnot.
[00:13:12] Speaker A: Yeah, it is a much broader world.
I'm curious if the hype about how much benefit or how much traffic AI tools have as a channel has fully realized for you or if you see it as just a piece of the puzzle and not as its own individual channel.
[00:13:40] Speaker B: Definitely a piece of the puzzle.
So look, look at finder we are seeing at least in our US or we're seeing a lot of hockey stick graphs, right? But when you zoom out and see how much of a slice of the pie that is, it's, it's, it's not as meaningful as the golden ages of SEO, right, where, you know, basically had free traffic and money coming in.
So it is growing and it is definitely a piece of the pie. And I think it's very important, not only because of what it can lead to on the, on your bottom line, but because of the brand value it has. When you want, when you have someone searching best, whatever it is in your industry, you want to show up there because, hey, they may not convert. You may not get the direct attribution to ChatGPT or Claude or Copilot or whatever it is.
But if your name sticks out when they see you on Google or when they see your Facebook ad later that day, they know they're associating you with the best because that's what chatgpt said you were. So that's where I was saying, like, there's a lot of assisted conversions going around and it's very hard to track.
So the, there's the direct value, which is going to be a hard sell, but then there's the indirect value, which I think makes it worth pursuing. But no one really knows how to optimize for LLMs beyond just continuing to do what they were doing.
[00:14:51] Speaker A: I'm working with an oxygen monitoring company and they kind of brought a spotlight to something. And I'm curious, I think that it applies to Finder, which is that companies that deal with regulations actually have a secret backdoor to more search because there's a requirement to meet regulations which might not be as publicly accessible because the government is terrible at information distribution.
[00:15:27] Speaker B: Right.
So I don't know if there's like a backdoor thing. I know that because we're in a YMYL category. We, our standards have to be high from day one. And so maybe there's that indirect aspect of it.
[00:15:39] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, because like, you have to, you know, abide by certain regulations, but you also have to disclose that certain regulations exist. And so there's a lot of the things that you do that only exist because they, you're backed against the wall of a regulation and you either choose to just play along with it or you, you create articles that delineate this is why you know, and you, you have that, that potential of like the conversation aspect of like, hey, if you're understanding financial disclosure information, here's five reasons, you know, five ways to understand how this act impacts this financial aspect. And so there's like that additional education piece is, becomes a requirement versus like, you don't need like a whole lot of regulation information about ice cream.
[00:16:32] Speaker B: No no, like, does it taste good
[00:16:34] Speaker A: or not taste good? Does it taste a certain way, not taste a certain way? Like maybe you might get into the discussion of dinitroglycerides if you're like buyer's ice cream. But most ice cream makers just cover over the fact that they're mostly not milk and cream. They're other stuff but tastes good. So, yeah, there's no regulations that force them to disclose how much, you know, Red 5 is in their product.
[00:17:02] Speaker B: Yeah, we have to be super. You're right. So it's like baked in trust signals. Like we just can't avoid it or we risk lawsuits. And we have to be very transparent about how we rate, you know, how we rated providers, how we make money.
A lot of the providers even work with us, especially the banks are very compliance heavy. So there's disclaimers, you know, under their products and under the affiliate links. Um, so it's very, very hard to miss when you come onto a site like Finder or any financial comparison site to not know that there's an incentive component to some of this. Which is also why we have to be so in your face about our editorially independent. So that when people do come to our site, they can say, okay, they're not just recommending this product because they get, they pay them the most.
A good example of that, some of the regulations that financial comparison sites are up against is like mortgages, for example, in the US they have to be ordered in a very objective way.
You can't, you can't order by who pays you the most. Like by law there was lawsuits.
You have to respa. I think was the name of the thing where it's basically like, look, you have to be very objective and say you're ordering this by rate or you're ordering it alphabetically. That there can't be a subjective criteria here as to how you've ordered these, these products. So yeah, definitely seeing a lot of that.
[00:18:22] Speaker A: I very rarely have guests who would have a clear view of the differentiation between optimization when Google News is available and a viable channel and when Google Discover as a source of traffic is also potentially available.
How do you. What's your experience in that space?
What would. And give a tidbit of advice for anybody who potentially has those two as options.
[00:18:58] Speaker B: Yeah, so News is just about being first. Right to information that is. Has a short shelf life. That's how we saw success with Rant and at Finder. It's like, look, if Apple comes out in Australia, for example, they cover a lot of the mobile phone stuff. And so as soon as new plans release and those drop immediately writing articles about that and if you do qualify, if you, you know, you have an editorial standards page in your footer and all of that stuff, you can get into Google News used to be actually, used to actually be able to submit yourself into Google News. And it had its own portal which doesn't exist anymore. Now Google kind of just makes that determination themselves about who's Google News friendly and who's not. And maybe they've changed it since then, but that was the last I remember of that.
But then Discover is almost about entity optimization and entity SEO where it's understanding topics and the topics that branch off from those topics and being sort of relevant enough to show up there. But that also feels like a black box to me.
It's all sort of a black box, you know, as these algorithms are. That's why I always look at the guidance on the Google blog about what helpful content updates are like. I think those are causation, not correlation factors. When they're like right for people, blah, blah. But then you can also see the most AI obvious site you've ever seen ranking in P1. I think they're just saying we've noticed some,
[00:20:34] Speaker A: I, I, I've worked with several projects with Google Discover traffic. Is it as whimsical as a source of traffic as, as I've seen it because I consulted with NerdWallet in America and in UK and a couple other projects with large amount of Google Discover traffic. And it's like you, you're there and it's gone.
[00:21:03] Speaker B: It's very ephemeral.
[00:21:06] Speaker A: So then is the thinking about that that's, you know, like our niche, our current, we know it's almost like disposable marketing.
So the thought process then has to be very different for Evergreen and SEO projects, right?
[00:21:23] Speaker B: It does. And I think a key part of that is like, you know, I'm sure you've seen a lot of the news sites adding their ATAS as a preferred source, buttons showing up in their mastheads.
But also some folks like Axios, I'm not sure if you've heard of them as a news.
You can't even read their articles without giving them your email anymore, even for their free content, whatever.
So the folks who are playing in the Discover and news space, they're doing everything they can to capture that user so that, you know, maybe it's ephemeral in that moment, but they have a way to reach you again later.
[00:21:57] Speaker A: So then is the Play long term as an SEO to consider part of your role as audience acquisition, or not just SEO, but in general digital marketing strategy needs to become audience acquisition. You know, even if you're installing concrete walls in Florida, you know, capturing the contractors who are going out to check, you know, bids for the walls that their clients are asking to get installed. Like trying to put out industry materials that are helpful otherwise. But for the sake of creating a captive audience.
[00:22:38] Speaker B: 1,000%, yes.
The traffic you have today is as cheap as it's going to be. It's only going to get more expensive. So as much as you're getting now, you want to keep it, retain it. I think retention is almost the one of the. Should be a core KPI of every SEO available. It should be, you know, getting people in CRO and then the retention. So you want to convert them and you want to retain them and that's. It's like audience cultivation. I think you hit the nail on the head. I think that is the role of every SEO.
Or it's either that or digital pr. I was talking in a, in our Slack recently and I was like, look, there's two types of SEOs that exist today. There are the technical SEOs and there are SEOs who haven't realized yet that their job is digital PR and branding. And I think it's, you have to sort of steer into that and see where the writing is on the wall. And that's actually why I made a decision and sorry, I'm ranting a bit here.
Last May, yeah, last May I decided to kill the SEO team and just had a generalist marketing team. And it was a bit rough at the beginning to say, hey, you guys aren't SEOs anymore, you're growth marketers. Because they had spent so much of their time building that discipline. But it was like, look, you have to be able to attack every surface. So our editors are not also, you know, they had to change as well. They couldn't just be writer, you know, editing, writing. They had to be on you. They're also spokesperson. It's almost like you need to see yourself more as the niche messenger than just the editor of written content. And for the publisher, you're a marketer. At the end of the day, it's not just about trying to work Google to get traffic. It's about being wherever your customer is. Your job is to just be where they are and not think so isolated or linear. It's think about the whole landscape.
[00:24:26] Speaker A: Yeah, what's the interplay right now between the organic side of these systems and the paid side of these systems.
[00:24:36] Speaker B: So there's a lot of, there's still a lot. Like, how do they cross over in terms of responsibilities?
[00:24:41] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I'd say how would you. If somebody were, if you were advising somebody, how would you coach them to understand the relationship right now in our digital ecosystem between paid and organic?
[00:24:56] Speaker B: And.
[00:24:57] Speaker A: And that's across all surfaces.
[00:24:59] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:25:00] Speaker A: With that new mentality, I think you
[00:25:02] Speaker B: have to basically start from. I'm a big proponent or a booster of systems thinking. I think that's the sort of just the mental model that you need to keep through everything. It's definitely going to be important in how you use AI tools, but your customer is your customer. No matter where you reach them, they're going to have the same wants, the same needs, the same challenges, the same pain points. All of that is transferable across every surface. How you talk to them is transferable across every surface. So minimizing that part of it all, it's like you already know who you need to target and now how you go into different channels. Well, there's still things that are the same. There's a, there's so much of every doing. Every channel is the same. There's a bit more data heavy on the paid side. Right. Because you're having a lot more data. You're. You're controlling budgets, which you don't do on SEO. SEO is more of like a. You invest up front and then it compounds over time. Whereas paid is you invest and see the return right away or don't see the return right away. And that's sort of how you have to play it.
So, yeah, I don't know. There's, there's crossover in the key in the very general parts, but then what's good for an SEO article where you have to put the there is the there. One part where it does diverge is where SEO, there's a lot more informational, top of funnel, mid funnel stuff to acknowledge, whereas the paid customer sort of just wants you to show them options so they can click off and get what they want. And so it's almost like you have to make your job easier when you do the paid side. So strip out all the other stuff on the landing page except the merch and the releases sync descriptions. Whereas on the SEO side, you want to really come through for your customer with comprehensive content. And so there's not so much of that that's needed on paid.
[00:26:47] Speaker A: What's some tools, SEO or digital marketing or geo or whatever that you've been really in love with this season.
[00:26:59] Speaker B: I really love the Ahrefs mcp. So we've been moving everyone to cloud code in the US and so being able to work from our terminal interface, being able to call Ahrefs and get keywords and do large scale analysis has been really good.
All the Google workspace mcps as well.
But really like I still love the basics, I still love Keyword Planner and you know, we also have access to OpenAI ads where you can do a little bit of research there on some things.
But I guess that yeah, the landscape has been so flattened by this new technology that they're is no. 1 tool that's leading and everyone can build their own LLM tracker. Right. You just go on serp, you know, data. Oh, I forgot what the website has been called. Data for SEO.com or serpapa.com and you can get the free tier and you can track queries yourself if you want. You don't need to pay thousands of dollars for Profound or Otterly or any of these other tools. You can do that yourself with AI.
But it's also like that's one that's so one dimensional you can't really track a prompt because that's not how people use these tools. They don't just send one thing in and then click out. It's a who back and forth that none of these tools are ever going to be able to capture. And so it's almost like, you know, use these tools for directional, for direction.
But at the end of the day you just have to think very think like your customer and you'll do the things that attracts them.
That's been sort of my steer.
[00:28:28] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I mean there's even like open source SEO tools now. It's like open source.com so or open SEO. So it's everything, almost everything in Ahref is like $10.
[00:28:44] Speaker B: Right.
[00:28:45] Speaker A: It's like the democratization of this data.
And I love that SEO gets added in MCP because now like first of all they have a fantastic.
I love the fact that I don't have to go into GA4 anymore. I have a viable alternative where I don't have to suffer.
And they also added an mcp. So I've got my GA and GSC flowing through that and then I've got an MCP to open to. SEO gets and open SEO.
I'm living so much more in my Claude code terminal.
Is there anything that you're anything as far as a framework that you're giving to your team to unlock Their capability when it comes to leveraging Claude code in a terminal versus, you know, just dipping your toes in on Claude desktop.
[00:29:48] Speaker B: Yeah, oh, a hundred percent. So I run with someone else at the company weekly training sessions and the one I did last week with, it was about building your second brain with Obsidian and basically dumping your entire SEO knowledge process and creating your second brain so that when Fable goes away, you know, Opus and Sonnet, they can act just as good as Fable because it has all of your context, it has your decision log, your index MD and your, you know, basically what I did is I created a publisher essentially which was like, does the keyword research using AhrefsmCP, builds a customer profile, does the brief the content outline, does the competitor research, does the deep research for to be well cited, can do the internal linking, can do basically the end to end process and then eventually push into WordPress itself. And so you don't even have to leave your terminal to do your entire job. And once that agent's built, okay, well now you have like 20 sessions going at the same time. What's to stop you from building a hundred? You know, you don't want to get into the scaled content abuse realm, but that part of the job is mostly commoditized at this point. And my fear there was like, okay, so now that means you can spend more time creating awesome YouTube videos and guest blogging, creating more lifestyle pieces where there's no clear roi, but the community building is there and people are building trust with you and all of that.
[00:31:13] Speaker A: Yeah, I absolutely love that. And Obsidian, like I have an Obsidian database for all of my unscripted SEO podcasts.
[00:31:24] Speaker B: So good.
[00:31:25] Speaker A: With 116 SEO interviews to pull from. So I launched a little mini site, human-certified content.com for those lazy SEOs who can't manage to publish their own SEO articles. I have a source which will. I'll generate SEO content sourced from the experts.
So the cobbler no longer has to be without cobbler's kids, no longer has to be without shoes. Right, but all based off of what you just said of Obsidian, you know, going in and. But it doesn't lack from, you know, from the publishing side of it, the articles that I'm creating out of that are as good as those that I've spent hours poring over trying to remember. Oh yeah, I had that conversation, you know, and that tied in here because I added what my insight about these conversations.
And there's two things, two factors to each podcast that are super valuable. So one is information gain and that's when the guest brings like a factoid or a tactic that's new and can discuss that but as equal to humans in value is the anecdotes.
Because LLMs don't have experiences. They don't experience the world that we we do. And at best they can poorly copy somebody else's stated anecdote and how it connects. I don't have to tell you the value of yeah, I can just say Peter and the Wolf, you know, or Dharmak and Jalada Tanagra.
[00:33:03] Speaker B: Yep, yep.
[00:33:04] Speaker A: And there's like five different slices of meta information that came along that. But it's experiential and it's, it's. You can cite it, you can reference it and you can kind of train LLMs to understand it a little bit, but it can't generate new ones.
Only humans so far can have genuine experiences. So don't forget that piece of when you're, you know, having that conversation with a salesperson to also pull out and extract and save a layer of anecdotes and ask an obsidian to store the anecdotes and connect them topically.
How does this anecdote connect theoretically to other quotes.
[00:33:50] Speaker B: That is so smart. And I love the TNG reference.
That's one of my favorite episodes.
You're so right. And another way almost to look at it is if you don't have that stuff stored already, SEO or AI automation buys you that time to go find that those anecdotes and that you know, to create or create that killer graphic on your own or to build that calculator that just gives your piece just a little bit extra oomph that your competitors won't have. And you're sort of because it for the. And you also have to think realistically for the user. They don't necessarily care if a human or a robot told them the answer to what is a credit card. As long as they got the answer. They kind of just want to get on with their day. But they are going to care if, you know, CEO of this company was able to give you commentary or if there's a video walkthrough on how to use that platform or whatever. You know, I think that's the part that makes the content really shine.
[00:34:49] Speaker A: I have a segment where I allow my guest to ask a question of the next SEO expert an intractable problem. Something you've been mulling over. Could be theoretical or practical, but if you could pose that as a challenge for my next SEO guest.
[00:35:07] Speaker B: Yep.
So my theory right now is that the next abstraction of marketing is going to be personal brands within companies.
So having like your SEO director going off and doing a lot of podcasts and becoming more of a LinkedIn personality or influencer and having, you know, I like to think about lovable. I always see Elena Verna on LinkedIn giving great advice. Or all of the anthropic teams like Boris, Charney and Kat and all of them talking about their product on X and LinkedIn all the time, building community.
And so I would like to ask the next person if they also feel that the era of the faceless brand is no longer going to be as powerful a form of marketing as it was in the past.
[00:36:03] Speaker A: I think I agree.
And I'll certainly ask that of the next because it kind of ties into some of the conversations I've had about the supercharging of those human conversations. And it's, it's that Dharma, a lot of tanagra convert like redux, because that's something, you know, again, the value is human to human. And as we add more AI, we are sensitive to, like, how poorly AI can do do that. But there's also like a layer of suspicion, right? Like my, my wife and her best friend making fun of the AI flyers that are going up on the digital billboard. Like, that's GPT.
It's funny because it's like the most advanced, you know, the hugest advancement in technology.
And we're making fun of it because it's so sloppy, you know, it's so beta testing on our entire culture that it's backfiring, you know, and we don't hold it in the awe and reverence that, you know, our science fiction writers spent the past 40, 60 years preparing us and saying, this is going to be awesome and amazing. And it comes out and it's like a.
Oh, like, oh, it's a machine that can fart. Like, I can fart way better than that. Like, it's not even like a good impression of a human fart.
[00:37:26] Speaker B: It's funny you say that because I've been building an agent and I'm calling it lore, which you'll, I guess, appreciate as a tng person where I'm giving it very. I'm giving it human flaws, right? I'm like, I want you to start every chat overly confident in your ability to do things. And when you get, when you come up to roadblocks, I want you to get depressed and then overcorrect and, you know, start approaching it from that problem. So I'm giving it this roller coaster of emotions. Hopefully it doesn't become actual lore because I don't think that would be good for humanity. But it's been interesting to see how those results compare to the, you know, the even keeled, you know, Zoloft claude that we all start with.
[00:38:06] Speaker A: Did see an interesting framing of anytime that you have a. A challenging Claude that it's useful to add in a layer of.
Now flip your position entirely, argue against all of the premises and then create a new after you. After you argues, review both of your initial arguments and create a third one not arguing either side, but a third that integrates both and also explores avenues neither side produced. Yeah, so the three person, the. The three view framework. I also like the creating a council of five and asking, hey, invent five different personalities and have them art present and argue five different viewpoints without defining what those personalities need to be. It's always interesting to see what Personas it comes up with. And then the cross arguing and sniping at each other at itself is fascinating to watch, but it's, it's. It's so educational.
And I think it also changes based off of the temperature. Temperature because if you do that in Claude code, you get that a very different output than if you did on Claude desktop and very different from Claude web.
So just knowing that you can gauge and use those surfaces for alternate temperatures of creativity or tolerance for hallucination can impact greatly the outcome of what you
[00:39:48] Speaker B: set up a thousand percent.
I've been building entire AI Org charts at this point. So I have the Robinhood MCP because they've released that. And I was like, okay, well it's pretty secure. It's confined to that one account. And So I threw $500 in there and I was like, okay, well I have a day trader and that day trader actually has a boss that it has to report into that reviews its work. And that boss has to report into my chief of staff agent, which actually is across all of my side hustle projects that I have running right now that I'm working on. And the results are just getting better and better. And I will say one thing, if there's some practical advice for anyone who's. I know people are joining for SEO, but if they are into the AI stuff, to have a judgment ledger as part of your second brain to where you see it makes judgments and having to close the feedback loop when those judgments don't pan out the way that they thought they would has been such a massive growth loop for making the AI perform better and better.
As time goes on.
[00:40:43] Speaker A: Yeah, going to have to darn rename this her show from Unscripted SEO to Unscripted Everything. Unscripted Surfaces.
I was, I was hoping it wouldn't happen in the time when it was like, is it a AI SEO? Is it deo?
Is there a useful distinction? But I'm hoping that we can just change the S from Search Engine Optimization to Search Everywhere Optimization and just keep the same acronym and just grow a little bit in the role. So I'm going to push hard on socials to rebrand SEO into SEO versus adopting a different acronym. But.
[00:41:26] Speaker B: Right.
Although if there are executives out there who have shiny object syndrome. So if you want to charge 2x your rate, just call it AEO or GEO services.
[00:41:37] Speaker A: No doubt it's.
I don't have my. I should have back here. I think I'm going to get a white hat and a black hat and just hang them up and then I'll just subtly point. Well for your doorway pages.
Right.
[00:41:54] Speaker B: Oh, that's great.
[00:41:56] Speaker A: Kind of wrapping up. Just remind people where they can find you. What's your top offer? I'll make sure that these links exist in the show notes. You've brought so much value to this conversation. I'm looking forward to running this through Claude and generating some articles based off of it. But be sure to name drop some links. Any particular resources you want to highlight I'll add into the show notes. And thanks so much for your time.
[00:42:20] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks Jeremy. It was a pleasure. Finder.com, if you go to Google and type in Finder or Finder Rewards, you should see us. We will pay you to make good financial decisions.
[00:42:31] Speaker A: Love that. Well, thanks for tuning in everybody for Unscripted SEO. As you can tell, I usually don't do an outro. I'm trying something new, folks. This is the outro. Find more episodes of the SEO experts that you want to hear more from on unscriptedseo. Com. If you want a taste of small business advice, unscripted Small business. Com. And if you're a product manager or managing a SaaS, check out Unscriptedsas.
[00:43:00] Speaker B: Com.
[00:43:01] Speaker A: Thanks folks.
