Hey there, folks will Reynolds here and I'm just reminding you to wake up. We have been in the answers business, a search professionals, our entire careers, but I think now more than ever, we really need to make that pivot. I've been standing on that hill. With my flag saying we are in the answers business. We are in the answers business. We are in the answers business for years, and this is actually a photo of me sleeping outside. I was looking forward to waking up. Um, because I sleep out once a year in November, I'll be sleeping out in a few days from today, not in San Diego, but in Philadelphia where it's gonna be a heck of a lot colder. To raise awareness and funds for homeless youth. If you got value from this presentation. There's a link in the presentation. You'll be able to go and make a donation. I don't care if it's $5 or 500. Um, I think we can all be a part of doing something about, uh, people that don't have the same opportunities that we do. So. Let's rock and roll. So it's interesting, right? Back in the days of blockbuster, their CEO was like these. Netflix's of the world. They're not even on our radar screen as competitors. Now we all look at that and we can laugh and have a laugh at the expense of that CEO and all their hubris. You know, I tend to boil most marketing down to friction. Late fees. We're friction. How many of us that are driving a blockbuster at the last minute, trying to drop it off or put it in the overnight box just in time. So we didn't get hit with late fees. How many of us loved having to rewind our videos before we sent them back? Or how many of us loved going to blockbuster? Just to find out that our top three favorite videos, none of them were in and we had to pick our fourth or fifth. None of these things were fun. They were all friction. But in spite of seeing that this CEO said. They're not even my competitors. No back in time, there was a land. There was a land of SEO people and they actually got together and did weird stuff like wear hats and hang out at bars. And the reason why I'm showing you this is because. We had no choice in the early days, but to get with each other, share our tests and what we were working on to try to figure this out together. And some people just sat like me early days and listen to other people talk. But we saw them bantering around ideas on how these things may work, how they might not work, what they had been testing. Okay. Keep that in mind, because I believe the search world has changed a good bit. So let's be honest about the great marketing data disappearing act. No matter what channel you're in. You have less data than you did. Just five or six years ago. And we are the OGs of losing data. Remember that whole not provided thing. Happy 13th birthday not provided 1% of my traffic. Yeah. Right. It was. So, you know, all that gray man, I'm not, I'm not as. I got a lot of gray, to be honest with you, but you know, what's great about gray haired people. Old people. We've been around for a long time. We have opinions about our industry and we have experienced, and I'm gonna explain to you why those things are so important. But mainly it's my experience that makes me bullish on AI search. It is not the data that I'm seeing and things of that nature. Although I will share some data. But I know there's conflicting data. I am extremely bullish on AI search for one simple reason. The friction. The lack of it. Full stop. That's it. And I'm not going to spend my time trying to explain to people that it's better. I think that's a wasted. I think that's a wasted effort. The idea of me trying to spend my time explaining to somebody why. Search is worse than chat. For answers. Well, let me at least show you all. So you can be armed with some of the same things that I'm seeing. So the reality is we don't get the questions our customers are entering in from Gemini chat should be to your perplexity. Although I read the perplexity pitch deck and it looks like in the future, they may actually give you questions. So if you're partnering with your paid team, you might want to jump on perplexity early, especially if they start giving you those questions in a world where Gemini and chat should be. The T won't and I know, I know, I know it's suboptimal. The answers on these platforms change all the time. You know, if you hit refresh, you might get a bunch of different answers. I get that, but we still have to progress and move forward. So the way I'm going to break this presentation down is I'm going to take a look at answers today and how good the 20, 24 SERP does that. Then I'm going to share with you the metrics, my own metrics that I'm seeing that are making me bullish. And then I'm going to lead with a bunch of ideas on what to do about it. Now, this presentation. I only have 45 minutes. I might be able to go in and actually do some steps at the end on what to do about it, to show it to your life. We'll see how the timing goes. All right. So let's start off with where I said I would. We're going to take an honest look at SEO. The problem, I think with the Google monopoly is that it's actually made our jobs a little too easy. Because what we basically have woke up to do for the last five or eight years for many of us is just what I call slightly better. SEO. You know, we look at everybody's content, right? And we copy them. We don't put a lot of original thoughts in what we're looking to do is instead look at semantic search telling us what words we need to use to look relevant so we can win on the search results. And you're going to see, I was optimizing for this word, SEO, RFP a while back, and I actually took a step back and I looked at all these different. Top rankings and they all basically sounded and acted the freaking same, you know, the same way to internally link the same way to do your H ones. And headers the same way to basically do every single thing. They were all basically the same. And I don't know how many of you in this room? Would have seen my sea of sameness posts, but that was the catalyst. It was me actually doing SEO as an SME with all this gray hair in 25 years of experience and going, why am I going to allow. Some semantic SEO tool to dictate to me. Based on whoever's ranking above meal. What's the best way to pick a search agency. Come on man. No freaking way. So, what I also started to realize here is this Google monopoly. It took us away from our roots as SEO people. People don't test any more. We don't innovate. We don't try new things. We just looked for the checklist. Right and do it slightly better than someone else. And what I learned from this SEO RFP example is when I flushed my rankings and said, you know what? I want to write the content from my perspective. And not from some semantic tool telling me the words I need to use. I was willing to sacrifice my rankings. That's a test. And what was interesting is then we went back to the top after losing our rankings, because I believe in part information gain had a big, uh, amount to do with it. So sometimes we forget how much friction there is with search. And I'm going to remind you of it right now. So when you buy a car, Think about all the different things that you're thinking of when you buy a car. Okay. Now. Imagine all the searches you'd have to do to find them. It's kind of a pain to have to do 20 or 30 searches. And then, you know, let's say you have two different things. You're thinking of SUV, 60,003 rows. When you get the websites, you've got cookie pop-ups blocking the content. You have companies trying to get you to sign up for an account, sign up for an account. Y I want to buy a car like once every eight years, man. Like, no, thank you. I don't want to sign up, but notice how that sign up is over the content and the answer that is friction. My friends. And then when I get the answers of the top five, three of the top five, while they were under 60,000, did not have a third row. Tell me it talked to me about hallucinations, my ass. It's it's a bad answer, period. Right? So then if you look at paid. You can see you at Radian defender Volkswagen Cadillac, right. We'll reveal one has three rows, but it's 77,000. That's pretty far over my target. Right? And then the defender is actually under 60,000. But the minute you add a third row, it's almost 70. So this to me is all friction. And all I did was put in two things that I cared about. Not all the things. Two. Could not get a good answer. And I think everybody's starting to realize this and the sharks are starting to swirl. Around Google's dominance in search. And I think we got to be honest. We actually are starting to realize that these results. Aren't that good. The people that are searching are like, eh, I'm not getting what I used to. Mehta who uses Google and being the power parts of its part of its websites to kind of fill in gaps for customers is thinking. We're going to work on an AI powered search engine and get rid of you. We obviously know all about search GPT or chat GPT with search or whatever it's called. And then I also think we all need to be thinking about. Apple has the ability to change all these devices instantly. So thinking about what content. Traffic trends start to degrade the day after apple does an update. It's something I think we should all be thinking about. And Microsoft they're putting copilot buttons. On keyboards. So everybody's kind of circling and of course, we've got perplexity here. Now I went to Bing. Cause remember being, going to be the savior, you know, they're going to be the rag backend for a chat GPT. At least for now. And I did a search. For something related to CRM and Excel. So I'm looking to build a CRM and Excel. The first three answers have nothing to do with what I asked. So they're not answers. At least I can kind of see my screen. Something that's an organic answer, but man, Microsoft has made it really hard to see the difference between the paid results. And the organic. Especially on mobile. So I clicked on the first result. Nothing about Excel, second result, nothing about Excel. I hit the back button. God forbid I do that because now what they've done is given me two sets of site links, which means I can't even see the answers that I thought I was going to get back to. Nothing about Excel, nothing about Excel, nothing about Excel. Then let's just say I didn't get all the answers I needed on the first couple of results organically, because I can't even tell that these bottom results are ads anymore. I'm going to click on HubSpot tech, co Alfia or whatever the heck it is. And they were all wrong. So doesn't that feel a lot, like what I said earlier about blockbuster, I mean, I'm just getting wrong answers. Yeah, it was like welcome to search in 2024. God forbid you can actually find what the heck it is. You're actually looking for. When I looked at bang. Look how little real estate they leave for the, for, for where the answer could actually be first CRM in Excel. And Google, I must say is a little bit better, but. Let's be honest outside. If I had to included the AI results here, AI overview. Which was suspect, um, the behalf. With being, it looks to me about like 80% of the pixels. Are not answering my question with Google. It's about 40 to 50%, depending on how you look at it. And I think this is true. We wake up, we follow checkboxes more than ever, and we actually loved it. I think it's time for us to fall back in love with testing and trying new things because it's in our roots. You see if Google were a person I'm like, I feel like it would be like the used car salesman. You know, it's somebody that you don't feel like you can trust. It doesn't feel like somebody you can trust your incentives are not aligned. If you ever shop for a Tesla? It's more aligned. I can go on the online, put in my deposit. I can go and visit the studio. The price is always the same. I don't get a bunch of BS. Right. Now let's, let's be honest. Look at search it's full of friction, whether you like it or not. And that friction has a chance to lead people to not wanting those answers. Now let's take an honest look at AI. Look at the prompt. Just take a look at the prompt. This is what we sound like. And think about it. We're able to speak in our natural language, right. Most of the real estate is actually for my answer. It's not people also ask, it's not related searches. It's not rich snippets. It's not, um, site links, none of those things. Are the things that I'm looking at anymore. They're not there. I just get an answer. And then what I also love is how easy it is to do the followup searches. And I have an example about banana Republic that I'll show you in a little bit. One of the things that I love is that it also gives me like a little nudges. To keep going. Search doesn't do that. I click on a page once I'm on the page, the only thing they want to nudge me for is to sign up for their newsletter. Here they're saying, Hey, there might be more here that we can help you with. And instead of you having to write some long query, I'm like, I'd like for you to do all three of those, thank you very much. Right. And then our follow ups, we speak in a different language when we talk to these, right. So then I get more answers and more answers. So who the heck wants to go back to this? All right. Cause I'm recording this. I get to do certain things live. So I typed in the word ethical genes. Okay. You see how banana Republic is here? Now I want you to really think when you thought of, when you think of the brand banana Republic, do you think of ethical? Jeans ethical practices with jeans. I know I don't. Um, and that's not a knock. It's just not their brand. All right. So now look at this lovely stuff we've got here. Right? We've got these weird, uh, related categories. Gotta do that for the search engines, right? And we're going to put it in this paragraph, a crap down here. When an actuality. This is not what banana Republic is about. So it's to me, I mean, it's a hallucination. It must be honest. It's SEOs have been able to use high power domains for a long time to make a website seem like they're about something they're really not about. Now when I go over to chat chippy tea, and I say, I am looking for an ethically minded. Gene's company. Look at all these lovely answers, right? I'm a big fan of Nudie. Um, But look at all these answers, right. Notice how banana Republic's not in these. And I don't think banana Republic is ever going to be in these, you know, why. Cause they ain't about that life. It is okay. That they're not about that life. I'm not making judgements here. But I think in an SEO world, many of us used to get traffic from things like this. That as our customers, if they choose to start to come over to chat GBT and other places, they are not going to see those big brands that were maybe were kind of getting away with things that we. Overstepped a little bit. All right, let's get back to the presentation. Alright, now this is being trend over the last 15 years. 15 years. They were at about three and a half here, three and a half now, after a big fall off and maybe they'll come back, maybe they'll just keep going up from like, they happen in 2001. But for the most part, I buying it being as had a chance to. At a 15 year chance to do this right. And they have not been able to break out a three and a half percent in 15 years. And I'm gonna tell you why that's important because now we're seeing all these headlines about how, like Bing. Plus chat. CBT search is how things are going to go. And I'm thinking. I'm not so sure. I'm like, I got some really good examples of why, so of being and Chacha. P T being the rag function is the future. I think we got some problems. Now let's take an honest look at social. Because social's the thing that's growing LinkedIn, Reddit Tech-Talk WhatsApp. How many of us were in WhatsApp groups? Private WhatsApp groups with B2B business people asking questions and sharing information. So for so long, we use robots and algorithms to try to understand people's reputations. And, you know, what. Deep down. We prefer humans. Humans carry reputations better than websites. Do. You know, when Dale post something 81 people, humans. Decided they were going to like, they left comments. Some of them re posted it. And I then by commenting, make his posts more visible, which means I'm transferring parts of my reputation to my followers. To him. I like the reputation map better than the, uh, the reputation graph. A lot more than the link graph. And, you know, some sites like wikiHow can rank for all kinds of weird words, like Riz lines, if you're trying to flirt on text or whatever the heck these kids do, but it's interesting how WikiHouse the kind of brand that we all know is kind of not great. Right. You don't ran comments on one of my blogs and gets half of the amount of likes that I got online. Right. And how did those relationships happen? I think it's part of what happens here when we get in person. And this is a picture of Rand holding my child when my child. Hold on a flight where I was working on a slide deck and he finished and my kid was being cranky and I needed to, uh, continue to work. Relationships people getting out there, coming to events like these creating relationships with people will matter in a social growth world. You can hack your way to getting people to follow you. I'd rather just be a good human and, uh, see how that takes me. So. Chat I believe is better than Google by far. But what I really believe is that humans are better than chat. So I'm optimizing for chat and humans at the same time, which is what I've been doing back when it was Google and humans. I was always trying to thread that needle. Because fans are hard to disrupt you guys. That's the thing. Fans can move from channel to channel, to channel, to channel. But if they're fans, they're still going to remember my brand. So now I'm going to get into the metrics. So I've made my case. Hopefully I've made it started to make my case for the current state. Now I'm going to show you my metrics. So in September, 1.3% of all my traffic was search. Or it's AI search? 77% was Google search. So you might think will, so you're trying to double down on Google. You would be absolutely wrong. Because it's not about the percent of traffic, it's about the slope of the growth. And really, I think for so many people, there's so much hype right now that the real two questions that I just need to answer are, are my customers there. And how quickly are they moving? Those are the only two questions we really got to answer. Right. And in the sun also rises. I find this quote is just so powerful because what it's basically reminding us. Is people go bankrupt gradually then suddenly a bunch of small things. They overlook small little decisions and then one day something happens and they fall off a cliff. I believe that social has been the gradual thing where humans are trying to find places to get answers from other humans. And we have been ignoring that trend. And now AI is the sudden part that's going to cause everything to kind of fall over. But. I think we need to pay attention to social. And you might hear that searches up. Ran has a couple of posts saying like, man, like the search is doing just fine guys. Like, let's be careful about running too quickly on that. And he's right. He's got the research. He's got the data. But for me, and with my website, 50% of my year to date AI traffic came in the month of September alone. And this is how November's looking. Perplexity drove me 25 visits in January. You throw out the drift, drive me 150 in November. Chiechi PT 14 in January 300 in November. And remember. That new search GPT, whatever that just launched. I think this is going to grow exponentially. So, this is a great time to use. Chat GP T oh one. With all the reasoning to see the steps it's going through to see how long it's going to take. Four. The trend that you have to be a meaningful amount of your traffic. But I went through oh one preview. They did some math. I don't understand. I do. I said it's 22 months before it's 10,000 visits. Oh, okay. It gives me about two years before this is a meaningful piece of traffic coming to my business. Now I've been tracking by MQL. And at one point. Uh, third in one month. A third of my MQL. That said they found me. So like the chatbot BT AI, and I made sure it wasn't the top answer. You. And I wanted to check from it to be my MQL is not just my leads. And that's meaningful now it's back down this month. I think that like 10 or 12. But I had a spike in one month where it was 30. And when we think of this zero click trend. That is that that ran talking about Amanda talking about right. I'm also leaning into that as well. So I'm not, I'm getting a lot of. Recognition in these platforms where I'm not getting the traffic back to my website. I just saw a ran, present this, and I'm like, man, he presented this ages ago and I never copied it. I think we all should copy it. He has a set of metrics that he is tracking. That I think all of us. Should be tracking. You know, rankings and traffic used to be a really good leading indicator for how my business was going to do in terms of revenue. It is no longer the case. I have other leading indicators that I believe are much more aligned and I'd look at the correlations. Between them. With my revenue in my leads. So when SEO dropped 41% for me, I did what we would all do. I'd go and try to get more traffic. So, what I would do is I would find blog posts and we'd optimize them. And in this instance, we increase the number of visitors to this post by about 20,000 people, which seems like a massive win, right. 20,000 extra people to your website is a massive win. But in terms of building fans, the seats were empty. Y'all. I looked at this content, this one piece, that's just an example of one. Zero social shares, zero newsletter signups from that post in spite of getting 38,000 people to it in a year. Okay. But then when I looked at my revenue, I started realizing in my leads that might. The traffic to my homepage was a better indicator. This lining is much more correlated to my revenue, which you're about to see. And then when I think about what my homepage ranks, for sure, I have an occasional ranking, like interactive agency, Philadelphia, most of my clients aren't in Philly. So those keywords really don't do anything for me. It's. My homepage pretty much ranked for Sierra interactive. And who won. Who's going to Google that. Salespeople who are trying to do research on the business. People looking for jobs potentially. Although, I think they would probably type in careers or something, which would drop them on a different page. And people looking for a company, those are the only three reasons why you should really end up. To have to hire, um, those are the only three reasons why you should really end up on my site. And in spite of my traffic being down 41%, when I compare the timeframe over the other timeframe, leads were flat. Revenue is actually starting to come up. And it was, it was me rolling up my sleeves and managing my own market. And it helped me to see that those metrics were not serving me. Mind you when I had a whole big team. I was looking at traffic metrics. The minute I had to do this work myself, I started instantly realizing those were the wrong metrics to look at. And that's why I wrote this post. Now that post. Creates value. Right. So that, that pose where we optimize it does create value. I'm not saying the value is zero, but let's just say I'm like, ah, it's a, how to post. Um, it's pretty basic. It's pretty, entry-level the person that would be typing that in. Probably doesn't have the budget to be able to, uh, they don't have budget authority. Okay. So I'm going to value visitors to that page at a certain amount and with 39,408 visits this year. I'm going to value that at nine grand, not bad. But now we're going to pivot into the social metrics. So that's the search metrics. Now let's pivot into the social metrics. I remember how LinkedIn's growing. Facebook groups are growing. WhatsApp is growing. Slack is growing. Reddit is growing. Tik. TOK is going. Remember that? In those places, humans share with other humans for the most part. And anywhere a human shares with Sheriff's things with other humans, you're attaching your name and reputation with that. So I was able to 10 X, the traffic that I got from LinkedIn text. In spite of my marketing budget being cut by 93% after the pandemic. And the only thing I can point back to is I started getting really serious in December about LinkedIn. And just writing again for so long. I didn't. Right mob my thoughts down. I didn't write great blog posts. I decided to get serious about that. And you can see, I went from getting about 200 followers. Uh, in the month of December to, uh, November, so far. Yeah, November so far, I'm already at 800 and something added. Which means I could almost five X my followers from when I started taking it seriously. It'll now. I also want you all to keep an eye on Ms. Teams. At least for me, if you're in B2B, this is an enterprise. It's an enterprise thing. Right. So I'm looking consistently at Ms. Teams and who sharing links to my business from Ms. Teams. I'm going to go into that a little bit deeper. Now, some of you might be mad and saying, will you're talking a lot about social. A little bit about AI. But you're not talking about SEO and I'd say. Yeah, Alan, no, I'm looking to get people answers. I've really never been in the SEO business. I've always been in the answers business. I'm willing to lose traffic. If I'm gaining attention and trust. My goal is to build fans. Because when I have fans, I have distribution. So this post has great value. Sure. But I wrote content. That had fans. It got 92% less visitors in the post. I optimized from an SEO standpoint. So now we're talking about social content. It doesn't rank for nothing. Right? So we got a lot less visitors, but it created two and a half times the value. I took those low amounts of visits. I put my value per visitor on it. But then I looked at the newsletter signups that I was able to get. And I had a very different value. So for me, when I compare. Optimized how to content? Can I get more traffic? Yes. Does it build me, fans know. So therefore I'll take a hit on the traffic and not go for 38,000 visits a year. I might go for 5,000 visits a year with something that creates fans, but there is a problem with these fans is they give us hangovers. And interesting. Well, well, what do you mean by hangovers? It's that you, you have a spike. You do well in the CIT, just doesn't sustain. So then you're back down in the doldrums again, trying to come up with another one. But let's remember, there's a lot more value and we all are going to have to consistently, while we're people are moving, in my opinion. From search to, um, To, uh, Chat-based search a little bit more. We're going to have to make sure that we are articulating our value at every point in squeezing every piece of value. So in this instance, do I rank for some keywords for that post? Yes, I do. We'll talk about it later, but real the real traffic is coming from people sharing it. And then when I look at the refers, I start to see things to this post. Like Microsoft teams, enterprises are sharing it. That that's why I'm valuing those visitors at a lot more than hit this piece of content. Then my, how to find an XML site map. I'm getting PR value. I'm building community. People even had meetings about this piece of content, somebody somewhere linked to it in Google calendar, and a bunch of people clicked on it. Not a bunch, maybe like five. But then what happens with these old gray head people that had been on stage forever? We have built in distribution. I'm gonna talk to you guys about that a bit later, too. So then when I write something I'm going to probably push and promote it because I'm passionate about it. For a long time, things were being written on my blog. And the Sierra blog that I was just like, not that passionate about it's okay. But I wasn't going to share it. And fortunately, or unfortunately I have massive ability to distribute content. And remember that piece of content I shared where the value was 20 grand. That's actually undervaluing the content and I know it. I didn't count anything for any of the impressions we got 81,000. I didn't count the fact that 583 people. I liked it. I didn't count the comments and the reposts. I should be adding all those onto that 20,000. It would probably be worth even more because there's actual, real people behind these things. Right. I can't tell you how many times I've ranked for what is query. And realize it's a 13 year old doing a fricking book report. So the thing I love is that like ranking on Google means, you know, how to trick Google. And I'm not saying that that doesn't, there's not an algorithm at LinkedIn because there is obviously. But, you know what. The humans are the humans. And we're just going to have to start to rely on some of this experience. As data disappears and it gets harder and harder to attract people. We still have to do marketing. We're still gonna need to, to, to have a gut feeling about what's going to happen. And that means we're gonna have to have faith debate. Right. To me fans are the future. I'm going to take the people I'm getting from SEO and try my ass off to turn them into fans. And I think SMEs are going to crush content marketers in the future. So I wrote this post SEO KPIs. Why they won't work in 2024. And Forbes is outranking me shocker, right? Fricking Forbes. Now let's look at their experience. Reminds you a lot of that. Friction from Google. Done it. Big ad, no answer yet. Nothing to think about. We got Lee, Ron, who are you? And Rachel Williams, anybody following them, anybody know them. They're beating me with all my vans, right? All my 24 years experience, I'm getting beat by them because they are on a strong ass domain and they do a lot of semantic SEO to put all the right things in the right places, into internally linked and to do their table of contents. But then as you scroll down, you're like, oh, this is just lead gen. Which is fine. But like, where's my answer. I'm trying to figure out my KPI's where's my answer. Give me something that's gonna make me think. We're not going to give you that first. We got to put our shit in the way first. And the only play for Forbes is SEO. Because there is no winning fans with that content. Who in here would share that content with somebody. But what's crazy is Forbes has more high quality links than I do to their post. Shocker. I thought. That they were going to have less. Let me go ahead and walk you through it. So here are my friends at Forbes. Here's my post. I'm going to take the Forbes post. And I'm going to drop it in. Now I'm a hypothesis. When I first on this was that I was going to. Just, I was going to crush them because I had all those human signals that there's doesn't have. So I thought. All right. So they got 20 backlinks. I was like, they got 20 backlinks cause I had 38. So I'm like, yeah, I'm crushing. Y'all. Right. But then when I looked at the quality of those back links, It told me a slightly different story. If I sort it by the page, I believe page value. You could see market be. As CEO round table buzz Sumo. And I'm like, how the heck did BuzzSumo obviously respect the heck out of BuzzSumo? I'm like, how the heck did they get. Oh, this person that writes for Forbes also writes her BuzzSumo and is just linking out to all of her Forbes. I wonder if Forbes. Is incentivizing Lee, Ron Henry. Two. Uh, put her content up in different places or to create certain types of, um, Uh, relationships. You know, DM news, et cetera. I was like, man, that kinda, I kinda stinks. Cause I got my one link from search engine land. But as you can see after that, it's just a bunch of mostly people that have copied stuff or, you know, it's pretty low. Low hitting. Value, you know, a lot of zeroes look at all those zeros, people just copying my stuff and whatnot. Right. So technically they've got better links than I do and more than I do. But as I dug in, there was a whole lot of like, oh, this person. Uh, God, pop-ups. Has written these pieces of content and we're going to let them link over to them. So. I don't know where the links are, but they were there at some point. I think there are these ones over here. Yeah. They link out to her Forbes articles. Right? So over and over and over again, she was promoting it that way. So I'm going, help me figure this out. Right. I got people having meetings about my content. It's being shared. It's on search engine land. It's in teams. It is being shared in real places with real humans. How are they beating me? It's getting real submissions. People are spending real time on this page. Those metrics just don't matter as much on Google. They got the bigger domain. Maybe there's doing something right. Semantically and I got beat. Well, you know what? I'd rather these numbers than whatever the heck they got, but this whole process calls me to do a pretty deep reflection on Google. And the state of things. And now they're sort of looking at clients and client results. I started saying, man, look at this page with all these top rankings from Forbes. All these number one, number one, number ones with this page and I'm going, nobody would share that. That doesn't create links. It doesn't create fans. I'm up in my name next to that. And sending it out on social or email or teams or groups that I'm in or slacks or a Reddit. I'm not doing that. And that's where I'm starting to say, okay. So that's not going to earn me fans. But we still have this like AI concept that I want to get back to. Sorry. Cut that part out. The saturates about SEO versus social or AI versus social. Is that what we love is that we can optimize a post one time and it just oftentimes ranks and ranks and ranks. It's the gift that keeps on giving. If traffic is your goal. Whereas this stuff, socks is harder. You're trying to win over humans. But creating this trajectory is telling me that we're creating fans. The other thing that's playing to our favor, I believe in terms of you growing your network. Is that company? LinkedIn pages are toast. Right. So anytime you grow your personal following, you're bringing an asset. To the organization that you're going to. You know, when I look at when Sears share something, it has no distribution versus me. I think that's why it's good for you as an SEO to start to expand the groups that you're in and the networks that you're in. And especially if they're in your vertical. Oh, if you're an in-house SEO and you start to join groups that are in your vertical. I think your SEO capability, plus your ability to understand the industry could be a real bonus. Let's talk about the first steps that we're going to take to start to turn these things around. So one, you got to get in groups. But if you're saying well, we'll okay. I'm an SEO today. Where do I go to start to bridge these things? Well, you're going to have to start to fight against the hype of AI. But not in a way that so many people are doing it. I want you to fight to defend your current value today. That's why I think it's so important for you to listen to people like Dana DiTomaso because what she's realizing is where analytics helps you tell your case and where with cookie cookie deletion ad blocking, et cetera. Where you can't exactly. I mean, I think it's so important for us to listen to what she has to say. No for the presentation, I'm going to clean this slide up, but I wanted to get my recording done. So, um, if you're starting off today, We look at your homepage, traffic. Compare it to your revenue. Okay. Look at your direct traffic. Fine posts. With link value. So do the old SEO stuff. If people are actually linking to a post that creates value, remember because my post. The one that I showed. Here. It's got a couple links in here from, uh, a few folks. And one of them is on search engine land. Right. Look at my referrals this year, you know, I got tons of referrals from places like HubSpot. If I drill into this quarter spark Toro, right? So it's really important to be looking at those links and then deepen those relationships with people who already thought enough of you to link to your stuff. But that relationship connection. That's to me is more about growing your social influence than just growing your SEO influence. The next thing I want you to do is to find something that's ranking well that you and I know is content marketer. Crap. It is. Semantic crap. It is not. I know this. Industry wealth stuff. It is sea of sameness. I'm kind of doing like I'm trying to beat up the other content. Marketers. I want everybody in this room to pick one piece of content, flush it. And then go and talk to people in your company or in your industry about their opinions on it. Find those internal influencers. And I'm gonna show you later how to find them and how to extract information from them. Go to Reddit. Look at the top Reddit's ranking in your industry. Copy out some of those threads. And paste them into chat UBT, and have it help you come up with really good questions for experts. Check out Andy Crestodina is, um, I'm gonna link out to it, but check out his, uh, post. Around prompts for asking great questions. It's really, really, really strong. And again, I'm going to fix these slides. I just had to record this before I got on the plane. Uh, because I won't have my. My good setup. I didn't feel like bringing all my lights and shit. All right. So, um, now what you can do is I. Chad should be T advanced voice mode and Claude's ability to let somebody talk for 10 minutes. If I were you, once you get those great questions, I'm going to move from a content marketer thinks in terms of semantics. To a content marketer that thinks in terms of how do I ask strategic questions and then how do I get those questions to people who are SMEs and know the space? And can I load them into chat should be T and T go for a walk. Just talk into it. I've been using some tools like vapi, which I'll share with you. Um, it's not great, but what it lets me do is create a system prompt that then guides the user to answers that I want. So let's just say, you're trying to write content built for a CMO audience. And you ask somebody a bunch of questions. The problem is, is they may not be. If you explicitly say, oh, well, what would the CMO do? Uh, you know, they might trip up on that. What chat should be T is so great at is the creativity of when people get answers. If you're telling it, Hey, this is where I want that person to land. You ultimately it'll ultimately say, Hey, that's a great answer. You just gave me what are three ways that a CMO might So they'll try to guide the person to the end state of a content that you want. And if you give it the right prompts, I'm going to give you a bunch of them, of my own. It'll keep them from accepting bad answers, which will mean they'll keep trying to get that person to get to where you want to get them to. But I would take Otter loom, MP3 exports. I don't care what it is. I just want. Subject matter experts talking in their own voice and giving me their own opinions. So that's also why it's so important for you to be in industry groups, because you'll start to see where people in the industry may not district may not agree. And those might be great things for you to prompt and ask questions to somebody. You can get content out of people while they're walking their dog. And your job as a content marketer to get these various opinions and bring them in. Turn them into content. So when somebody gets it back, they're like, yeah, I'm approving this because it sounds like something I would say versus stuffing a bunch of words in there and have them be like, you can't put my name on this. This is horrible, which then means you don't get their distribution. So for me, one of the things that I'm doing is I'm verticalizing my content a ton. I'm just starting this. So. I'm starting to verticalize my content, because if you look at how the AI bots are, if you look at their prompting documentation, you'll see how they're training people to prompt them. Okay. And I think that if you look at that close enough, you realize like I am a CMO of a blank kind of company. So I think it's going to become more important than ever, especially in B2B. Um, Two. Take content that has performed and find ways to chunk it down so that you are sending some signal that this content is specific for this type of use case. I think that's going to be important. All right. So now you're saying, all right, well, there's a couple of ideas you just had there for the S for the. For the SEO and, and using AI to help me on the SEO side. Where do I go from an AI side? First thing is just benchmark where you are. Right. So what we like to do at sear with our AI tracker is we'll take a bunch of questions on people's minds. And we're not just looking for whether or not the brand has mentioned what I actually love that our team did when they built this. Is for one of our clients in the auto manufacturing space, you can see that affordability. Of the questions that we have for affordability, their share of voice is only 20%, but for reliability, they're 45%. For fuel efficiency. They're 45%. So, what I'm able to do is what we're using AI to do is to take all of our questions we're putting in theme, those questions in a set of, of defined beams. And then seeing how we perform across different themes. I think this is going to be the way. Imagine if my client says, Hey, well, why aren't we showing up as much? And, uh, AI search for affordability type. Keywords. And we can do the analysis and say, Hey, you know what, maybe we need to talk more about that in the public. We need to get the word affordability and affordability kind of similar kind of words, closer to our brand because across multiple. Generative AI engines. Those things are distance. This is like that banana Republic example. If the banana Republic CEO comes to me or CMO comes to me and goes, why are we winning on eco-friendly anymore? We used to, and it's like, well, that's not really what your brand is putting out there. And it's press releases in its commercials in its programmatic buys and it's mass media. So it's going to be hard for us to do that from an SEO standpoint. Without those things. The other thing I think that you should be looking at from an AI standpoint is what pages are people landing? Again, if you're, if I'm getting most of my traffic from Chacha P T to my homepage, that's good. Because people come to my homepage for jobs or to sell me. Yeah, because they're looking for an agency. I like seeing it go to my work pages and my case study pages. That's different than when it goes to a blog post. I'm not saying I don't want that content from the blog post or that traffic, but what I really want are the times where I am being recommended as an agency. So imagine over time, I don't care how small these numbers are compared to Google. I want to see how does my work pages grow over time? How does my homepage grow over time? Now, if you've got PPC data, my friends. Ooh. We're in code. What you can do is you see search terms were converted, put them into SEO. No. All the people dumped them into. The folks out there. Love it. There's change or, and probably blah. Explain to me. AI work on that. You. I need to know, to learn. And I'll. But I got goals. I got food. I got caught on my neck. About probable blah. I kept temperature Y and Olin up. And I'm going to handle it to run a budget through. You're answering them and how it is showing up. It will improve up here, but I'm not going to, and not a clients today. Why I have a video, how you can do yourself. No. Reddit pages, all the terms that, and say I'm taking search terms. Reddit was in the. And I'm seeing all my search that for each. And they've gone from about 20 to about. Um, including one, how much there's. On it went from about 13. 25 that's doubled and you know what trip, the percentage converse words, right? Series. That money, 23, 6% all of search term convert or 6% search terms where 10, we are almost 18% a year. This is the. Okay. What's being at threads. My brand being because Reddit training is very, very much models are off of this. Protheses it part with. With, if they're our partners. Friends. Those influence in the store comes back to getting you in the now let's actually talk for AI. Sad truth. It feels like it's nice all over again. The reason PressReader. B T. Let's use our good objection to SEL. Hyrum. Harold G2, Greg, that's gotta be. Then with the web. It me. It gave answers, but looking on the left T agencies, agencies, TAVI, I'm like, uh, You know what it is here. We got PPC as being, you know, you look at CCF. At that Google's wrinkles rankings. Because the rag end up with this C M is going to here's. Great agencies surprise. And then you're going to get all, you're going to get that on and get that on maple web effects. Now you can go one 10. I CA approach. So shout out to them. You can go right back. I can do 20 PPC. I can now be in sources, insights. Um, because I have a brand that I'm not right, right. The level, all that. Do a lot about Vulcan, just get SRO and tone. I'm going to be a great thing when I say listening to that recommendation or how to prompt. So interestingly. Visit analyze our financials versus CFO of a plenty. Plenty. Board meeting. It was deep, significantly better. Let me to know how mending that now maybe. You with some social? I think that's so short-term threats. AI is a shake. But as a feedback. 800 liking something in eight. What am I going to do other than like value one? That's a good start. We. I use the tools. Sort of bring answered everyone who come. God, give me all their files and their car. Then I can posts when they make posts those posts to determine people to help them. Or if we have contacts with them. But also when people film. We actually are able. So people were know either email it, get there. And see things. things. they may have that we have passed or that. The much stronger station where there, it feels like you've been, man. It's like things you. Like this social, I don't believe to do that. Oh, I know they're in I'm that's a good store. Know what that. in hit me up, like. So, this is like. now amazing how to go fish, social pie. Get this data, have a pin by people with strong beliefs. We in XP distri, wait til maybe five. My HubSpot. Let's doing shit human. I'm using that comeback loop about. Google, and then I'm going to share it. It's not going. People will tell her dark social I'm finding, slap on a slack group, something with them on it. Profile a slack group UTM to now have you then go back. I shouldn't names. I've done that for an areas. Through this Microsoft teeny huge traffic from better jewel blog. Well, I don't WhatsApp yet. Gram the. For things that all version of their app be able to get some that way back pages or people. And what do they. So. For content that wins a lot more fun. Also