Friends of Search
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[00:00:00] All right y'all. It's 2018 and I'm standing on this stage in Amsterdam, and I'm showing you

this video. How many of you remember it? I mean, it's been a while. It's been seven years. But my point here was that don't celebrate your wins too early. And also as SEO's, launching content, getting rankings, getting links was just the beginning of the process. The goal is to score and get revenue, and I had reminded you all of this lovely quote from Geraldine de Reuter who said, wouldn't it be great if we decided to put out the content that we wish we found when we had problems?

Good point, Geraldine. I'm just checking my mic there. Third recording. All right. And then I talked about how, Hey guys, you know, back in 2011 I ranked for SEO Company and SEO Agency and SEO consultant and the top three globally and how that did nothing for my brand. And by the time I got in front of you all in 20 [00:01:00] 17, 18, I had lost those rankings.

And you would think, well will, if you lost those rankings, I bet you your company took a hit and I showed you my revenue chart and I said, no. Lost rankings, lost traffic, growing my revenue. So now it's 2025. I got some hair, it's got some gray in it. I got a sleeve, new will's back. My wife sometimes is like, it's almost like I got a new husband, but I'm here to say my SEO traffic's down.

My revenue's up guys. And I wanna remind you, all that data is disappearing like crazy. So we're gonna have to focus more on revenue than ever. You see, there's this great marketing data disappearing act happening and we're OGs we remember not provided, but a lot of these other folks and these other divs, they've only been at this for two or three years, trying to decipher what do I do when these platforms take away my data?

And what sucks even more. Gemini Chat, GPT Perplexity. They don't give you squat, they don't give you any data. So lemme give you your first thing that you should do. How many [00:02:00] people in this room have chat, chip T or AI in their dropdown of, how did you find us? I gotta clean this up too. I hate it. Podcast outreach, blah.

Nobody ever uses those, but somebody recently hit ChatGPT or ai. Now, if you've got it on your website, how quickly do you as a search professional. Call the people who fill out your lead form and ask them what their prompts were. I did it five minutes after this person submitted our lead form.

Look at how he described his problem. Notice he doesn't know words like attribution yet. And then he said, all right, well, what kind of person solves this problem? And then he said, well, I also need them to be technical enough to do this themselves. And then he ultimately says, are these roles available on an outsourced basis?

And if so, where could I find somebody? And boom, Seer Interactive showed up, woo-hoo, as one of the four options, and he filled out my lead form. This is the reality. Now, what I wanna remind all of you of is, how many of you out [00:03:00] there are taking your chat, GPT leads that you get from your form, calling them and asking them to send you their prompts?

Probably not many. Because if I'm being honest with how SEOs are doing things, we're just looking around at each other. Well, what words did you put on your page so I can put just the slightly different words or what's the semantic words you're missing out on In this tool that I have, that costs like 50 bucks a month because, uh, you know, if, if as long as you don't know that tool exists, then I, come on guys, get outta this Seer of sameness.

When I was at Friends of Search last time, I took this picture and if you stop and think about the titles of the people in the room, I. And then I'm gonna ask you, what are the titles of the people at South by Southwest? Which ones do you think have more diversity now, even though you're here today, I want you to go into a session that you would not normally go into.

I really, really do, and I want you to pay full attention. Don't like answer your email. Understand how someone else is tackling a problem. Why? Because I think for so long, when you start your career, you go [00:04:00] deep. You put those roots deep because you don't know anything. So you're trying so hard to show the company that you can be trusted and you know what you're talking about.

I'm telling you today that you may wanna start thinking about going wide. I've always gone wide, so as soon as I got deep enough, I stopped trying to get better at SEO technically. And I started saying, well, how do PR people solve this problem? How do people that do direct mail solve this problem? And what happens is you start connecting new dots.

This is how I think I'm ultimately gonna. This is how any of us have a chance to be better than ai. If I ask ai, how do I build a page for SEO? The deeper you go, the more it's gonna learn that stuff. It rarely then jumps out and says like, how could a paid person help? How could an analytics person help?

How could somebody in direct mail help? How could a CRO person help? How could a PR person help? They typically do not jump to those other areas, and I think that that's where all the inspiration comes from for you to not do your job the same way that everyone else does. So now, if I were to say to [00:05:00] you Ethical jeans, give me a brand of ethical jeans, I bet you most of you in here would not have thought Banana Republic.

Gimme a name of somebody you would've thought of. Great. I think of Nudie. I'm wearing Nudies right now. They're ranked number 59 for the word ethical genes while Banana Republic is ranked number eight. Here's the Banana Republic page. It says ethically made genes at the top and look at the URL ethically made genes.

And then on every page, you know, it's like sustainability. Okay. It's a, I love how it's like a, a subnote. It's not the main thing they're leading in with, but sustainability's there. Okay. And then we got, ooh, we got all our related categories so we can make more low quality pages. They get us ranked for more stuff and then we gotta put our big block of text at the bottom that's probably written by chat, GPT.

'cause nobody in our company really cares that much about that, much, about ethically made genes. 'cause if they did, they'd work at nudity. So now when you go over to chat GPT [00:06:00] and you say, I'm looking for an ethical genes company, nudies number one, Claude has Nudie number two, Gemini 1.5, Nudie number two, Gemini two oh flash, Nudie number one.

Notice what you don't see anywhere around here is Banana Republic. That's just not the life they live. You see, when you walk into a nudity shop, they repair your jeans for free 'cause they don't want you buying new jeans. That sounds like an ethical company to me. When you go into their store, they have used jeans that they have cleaned and repaired, so you can wear at a massive discount because they wanna reduce waste.

It doesn't that feel like an ethical jeans company? I. See if AI can reward nudity, authenticity. Think about that they're getting a reward for being authentic to whom they are, and that's gonna cause them to show up for a bunch of things. What does that mean for Banana Republic and their SEO strategy?

That's been all built on algorithms and not humans. You see the reward for a bold [00:07:00] vision, an authentic journey, and an original story is I'm a fan of the brand.

The reward for doing the same thing like everyone else. That's pretty much what we do as SEOs. How do I do the same things as everybody else? Run some semantic tool and kick out lower quality content. That's kind of sounds like it's good, but it's not really done as fast as humanly possible. So I got the bright idea.

You know, you're gonna have to turn your back on what is normal in your industry to learn anything better than, than than ai. So I de optimize the page. But when I de optimized my page, I took a step back and I looked at everybody else's shit. Seven out of the top 10 results for this keyword had a table of contents, and that table of contents was spam.

The holy heaven, right? S-E-O-S-E. S-E-R-F-P-S-E-O-S-E-O-R-F-P. And then they had their internal pages and they all had shitty internal links. That all said the word SEO. God forbid you use the word SEO, somewhere on the page and not internally link it to a bunch of other low quality content. And they all had their lead [00:08:00] capture forms, and I took a step back and I'm like, this is whack.

There's nothing bold, authentic, or original about any of the people that are currently ranking. We built our own page to be a little bit more bold, a little bit more authentic, and a little bit more original, and that's a story for another day, but it's ranking. Now, some of us might think AI is going to save us, right?

Well, it's gonna give us better answers. So I said, I'm looking for an innovative SEO company. I want everybody in this room to think of one company that you're like, you know what? I like to read their blog. They're really smart.

And then tell me if it's one of these companies. So this is the answer that I got back for Innovative SEO agencies. How many of you in this room had one of them on your list? It's okay. It'd be helpful. Some of you said, you know what? When I think of my number one influential company in SEO, I think of Search Plume.

That's great. But for me, I don't even know who most of these companies are, if I'm being honest. I know Epix. I only know Smart Sites 'cause they bid on my brand. I don't know anyone at Ignite Visibility or Shore Oak or SEO Brand or [00:09:00] Straight North or Search Bloom. I don't know any of these folks, right? I'm not, that's not saying that they're not good companies.

What I'm saying is, is that none of us in this room, the wisdom of the crowd did not come up with any of these people. But yet, AI is off. So now with search GPT, when you search for an innovative company, you can click on the, uh, the sources and you're like, oh, snap. We got companies doing listicles. On their own website linking out or or mentioning other brands that those brands are linking to other or are mentioning them.

It's like reciprocal link exchange all over again. We're back to 2007 baby. Jesus. Alright, so listicles are working. The thing is, is I'm thinking personal brands do not for these queries help the company brand. I think that's a problem because what are we left with? Spam. It is like, Hey, why don't you just repeat yourself over and over and over again.

Now, imagine if I did a presentation where I just sat up here and just listed off the names of companies over and over again, and some chat [00:10:00] GPT average answers. You come to conferences to not get the average answer. Right. It gives you a competitive, uh, edge, but yet none of that's rewarding. These LLMs and it's working in Google.

The same companies show up that are doing the same strategy. And what you do is you, you, you, you build a page that says, here's the top 10 local SEO agencies in 2025. And you list yourself number one, and then you list out your friends and you link to them, and then they link to you garbage. The other thing that we're seeing, just like in Banana Republic, especially in this B2B world, you're seeing companies like Forbes just writing average content and outranking people like myself.

So Forbes' page was written, my page was written. I'm a 25 year SEO vet. 26 years this year Forbes has Liron Horry and Rachel Williams who might be wonderful people with really great and smart ideas. How many of us in this room follow those people? I. That's what the freak I thought. So again, you, we think that, oh, [00:11:00] AI might save us from bad search results.

Like, no, they're both in the exact same boat. None of us mention those people's names as, as, as, as influential people in our space. But guess what? Guess what? Forbes does. All the companies trying to get as many leads as humanly possible, just so happened to be the advertisers. Which are the same people that are doing those other things that we see.

And now their brand name is being mentioned on a Forbes site, which is being used to power the LLM. That's how they're ranking. That last result showed a bunch of Forbes, uh, Forbes results. Lemme just go back and show you. Forbes. Forbes, Forbes. Forbes. Forbes, Forbes, Forbes. For For For, for, for For Forbes.

Okay. So you wanna show up for those kind of queries. Pay to be listed here along with these Jam Oaks. So in a world with no SEO, what value would that Forbes page have? None. Imagine if you could share that page in a private WhatsApp group. How many of you think you'd be thrown outta that group for posting some low quality shit like that?

Exactly. So when our reputations [00:12:00] are attached to content, we tend to recognize that in front of other humans we have to have a higher bar. I've already mentioned that search, the number of pixels. Given to the answer versus the ads is brutal. You type in innovative SEO companies, Google's got it wrong.

They've fallen for the same stuff. Chat t's got it wrong. Search is going down. Google's market shares dropping. Bing ain't never cracked 3% and they're dropping. But you know what's going up. Let's cheer us up here. You know what's going up? LinkedIn, Reddit, TikTok. Your clients, your potential clients are talking about you in the shadows.

They're in private Facebook groups, they're in private WhatsApp groups, they're in slacks. And now we have to start to think, well, how am I optimizing for them? Instead of an algorithm, Ooh, well will, I haven't studied that. Well, you might wanna go back and watch, watch my last 12 MozCon videos. 'cause there was always a thread of how do we better understand the humans behind the searches.

And you can see now that I've got ChatGPT as a [00:13:00] dropdown on my website, I'm getting to talk to people, what did you search for? Send me your prompts. And for, and so many of us are thinking, oh my God, AI search is gonna disrupt Google search. And you would be right, I believe. But you know what I think. Human answers are better than AI answers any day.

I think we would rather talk to a human personally. So the question is, is how much time did you invest in 2024? Turning your traffic into fans. It's okay. I know most of you didn't. And like I said before, our data shows we're dropping. So what do you do when you drop? You find a piece of content that's kind of atrophied over the last few years.

You update it, boo. Yeah, more traffic. Now we're on pace to get 20,000 more views. And when I looked at how many people signed up from our to our newsletter or took other steps that I deem as high value human targets, the answer was, eh, nobody. So now we spent time to improve a page that the humans, when they looked at it said, eh, it's good.

Thanks [00:14:00] for the answers here, but I'm not gonna become a fan of yours. Humans now have SEO repellent, right? It's like, eh, this is that. SEO crap. I don't need that. And now what we've got is a world where our SEO strategies are all about algorithms, and zero time is invested in fans. Well, you know what? When people move to a new platform, fans are new platform repellent.

When there's an algo update, fans are algo update repellent. When there's dark social fans are dark social repellent, zero click. Zero click. Repellent. Fans will travel with you like these crazy Eagles fans. And this is what I was talking about back in 2012 when I tried to give a wake up call to our industry is like guys, at some point.

We need to do real company shit. We need to actually do things that humans are going to love. And remember how my revenue grew at that time, because I had a unique, authentic, and original thought. I wasn't going out there and building listicles. I was out there interviewing humans back in [00:15:00] 2012. And now when I look at different data sets of my own data, homepage, traffic, it's the same.

It's not growing that much, but it's the same. There is some flux in there. Um, I've tried to take out over the years when we have job postings, but the direct traffic is up, that's people directly typing in. I wanna go to Seer Interactive for something. I'll take it. There was a bump we had in I think December that was like mad for fraudulent.

Somebody ran a bot against our site, social traffic. Way up, way up. And I also made a little change to LinkedIn that caused a lot more people to sign up for our newsletter instantly, and it's been sticking every since. I'll tell you that one when we get together. But I got serious about LinkedIn. You know what the honest truth is, is that when I had no one left on the marketing team, zero people, we started growing our following because I was running it and I said, things have got to be at a certain level for me to put it out there.

Whether it's on the company side or my side. And then I started getting that feedback loop from humans of [00:16:00] what they liked, what they didn't like, et cetera, et cetera. And like I said, revenue's up. Now you might be thinking, Hey, will, I'm a fan of yours, but that's not SEO. My job title says I gotta do SEO.

I'd say you're right. It's not SEO, it's winning, it's revenue driving, it's insurance. And I think that today being at a search conference, your roots are deep in search. I want you to try to go to some other conferences this year where other people are trying to solve the exact same problem All of our roots ladder up to more sales.

Go a little more broad and start today. Find a speaker you never heard of. Find somebody doing something totally different and try to connect what you do on SEO or or AI or whatever it is to what they're doing. Alright, so. Now I wanna walk you through my playbook and things that I'm doing. So if you notice, the beauty of this presentation is it's not a bunch of like client stuff.

I can't tell you. I'm like, this is my data, this is my trends, these are my strategies to improve my rankings. And LLMs, I'm playing long game on this too. FYI. So first of [00:17:00] all, if I came up here and read you a listicle, would I build any fans? No. Right? So I ain't doing that. You wouldn't even want me back.

Fans are instant distribution. First thing, so start thinking of your job as doing search in SEO. Tons of people are still searching, but your job is also to say when they land there, how am I improving, turning those people into fans and not with some low quality popup? Get your, get your information, get a free report.

Shit, I mean, on some real, you want to sign up for more of my information. Shit. Because what you start to look for are different metrics. I like tracking how many people came from Microsoft Teams. I like seeing how many authoritative publishers in my space have started to link to a post calendar.google.com.

I had I think 10 people to this one post. Click have a referral of calendar.google.com. People had meetings about this shit, y'all, this blog post, people had meetings [00:18:00] about so dope. And then, I'm not even counting these metrics, but we gotta start to count these metrics. What's an impression of our brand worth?

What's the number of people that we reach worth? What's the number of clicks worth? And let me tell you what happens when you start winning over humans. You have a whole different flywheel, right? Look at all these names. All those names are associated with a LinkedIn URL. So now what I do is go, how could I use that data to better connect with humans?

So 827 people engaged with that 86 commented. Wouldn't you like to know their names and enrich them and find out their industries and all that stuff? Yeah. Cool. You just use Phantom Buster and what it'll do is it'll get every single post of mine and every single liker and give me their profile, URL. I can then put that into Clay, find out what their uh, industries are, find out all kinds of stuff, and enrich them.

So now what happens is when we do outreach or when somebody fills out our lead form, we know the things they liked. Before they felt out the lead form, which means our first [00:19:00] call is gonna be stronger. I don't know if this is SEO y'all, but it's winning. We're using phantom buster. This person like this, this person, like that.

This is what they clicked on. Great. Now how do we use that to influence how we have our first chats with them? You know? And with this data disappearing thing, you're gonna have to start to just have faith. The faith, the faith. Ah right. Who's gonna have faith? The fans are the future. Fans have always been where we should have been focused.

Algorithms helped us get more visibility. But now after years of visibility, did you use any of those years to create fans or are you gonna start just today? And I'm telling you, my friends, do the best you can to extract out of the SMEs in your company, their knowledge use your AI skills, and all the things you're gonna learn from the other speakers about AI and content to interview SMEs and not at scale.

Just get better at interviewing because company LinkedIn pages are toast, so you're not gonna grow a fan base using your company's LinkedIn page. And if you're looking on where you get started, here's a basic report you [00:20:00] can build. I like to take organic search, organic social, and ai. Let me walk you through three examples on how I interpret this.

The first one, how to create an XML site map. 18,000 visits, no one shared on social. We are getting some referrals on that one from ChatGPT, which means it must be showing somewhere, or ai, it's showing a link somewhere. Our Google Partners page, same thing. Little bit more visibility on chat, GPT and ai. So that's good.

So how do I keep that page up to date? That means that, ah, for some reason the AI bots are like, you know what? We should probably either run a Google search, we should run a search on Bing and then get that data and get those links and then link out because you might want to click deeper and learn more.

But then you look at something like the how to fix the HT TP not secure error. 8,000 sessions in, in a year, zero shares on social, and the AI is like, we got this answer. We don't need to [00:21:00] link out. Linking out to your site doesn't add any value for this searcher, so we're not gonna do it. Okay. But then the other thing that's so much fun.

So the other thing that's so much fun are these ones that I've highlighted, low organic sessions, high social. Every time I see one of these, I know I'm winning. Humans. Look at the ratio of organic to ai. Are AI sites like ChatGPT sending you traffic? 44 AI visits? I'll take it. 'cause now I'm starting to be able to see and sort.

Which types of content does chat, GPT believe that it's still worth sending the customer potentially or the searcher off to a website. So now I can focus on the ones where that's more likely to happen than less.

I,

I want you all to find your own version of the Seer of sameness. Take a step back from all the semantic bullshit and look at something where everything looks the same. And optimize it based on what you believe. Find an internal influencer, find an SME internally, scan Reddit. Find something where [00:22:00] you rank or you wish you ranked where Reddit ranks.

And every week just hit print screen, save as PD, F, and save all the comments. And then recursively, look back at what you wrote and say, given what people are asking, how can I make this thing better? How can I use this? And turn this into questions for an SME to answer. And Andy Cress is a great follow, um, because he's really good at creating prompts to generate questions for you so that when you get in front of these SMEs with very little time, you can interview them in five or 10 minutes and get all the content you need for piece after piece after piece.

The other thing I like to do is look at what pages is ChatGPT driving to. If it's driving to my work pages, then those are things where people are probably looking for a paid media agency or an SEO agency. Now, my SEO division is larger than my paid media division, but for some reason my paid media page gets more visibility from chat GPT than my SEO page.

That's a testing opportunity for me. Okay. So the sad reality of optimizing [00:23:00] for ChatGPT, my friends, is that this crap works. Look at that lovely dolly image, right? You know, we're gonna have to put in today's online landscape. This is beating me out for a page that I wanna rank for. Our approach to digital marketing for banks and every H one digital marketing for banks.

Just for banks. That for banks, and then some people have, Hey, here are the best SEO agencies for banks, and they link out to them. They list themselves first and link out to other companies like Session Interactive and Victorious, which you've seen in this like ongoing link exchange. And that's beating me today.

Ooh, how community bank, how community bank, digital marketing services can help you. It's like, man, let's just take out the word and paste in the new word, right? That's what's winning. Grow your clientele with innovative strategies. Guess what? If you're in banking and you're a community bank, you think of them as, uh, customers.

You think of them as not clientele. Right. [00:24:00] It's like you and I don't wanna grow my clientele with innovative strategies, which is a fucking word, vomit. I wanna grow my account opens, I wanna grow. My funded account opens. And I know to use language like that because we're actually deep in the banking sector.

Ugh. And speaking at this conference ain't gonna do shit, but getting an a listicle will and I'm not doing it. You notice how on our page for banking, this is our banking page, and I'm testing this. I went and interviewed people who worked on banking projects internally. How long did it take for you to get this word approved?

Gimme a win. Oh my God. It took us forever to get a 3 0 1 redirect, and I'm trying to win on LLMs by saying, I understand this business swell. I'm using words that other people might not use. Now, of course they can go ahead and do the same thing. The difference is when they get the lead, the client's gonna be like, your page sounded cool, but you actually don't know shit about what we do because you ultimately just ended up putting this all together.

Um, because you ultimately just put this [00:25:00] together as an AI exercise, you're not really about that life. This is my Nudie jeans moment. I will lose the rankings and visibility today to stay true to who we are and build pages that actually are true. But what am I doing? I'm speaking at banking conferences.

That's a bigger moat than I got the keyword on the page and I build a bunch of pages that sound like it. I'm making sure that I'm being mentioned around other speakers who have words like this in their name. We did a press release for the first time, and that got picked up by some banking sites. So my friends, I think we're entering a phase of real company shit 2.0.

It's like, there's like a, there's like an opportunity. Either you can say, Hey, will, I saw all those listicles, and I'm excited by that. I want to test that and I wanna figure that out so I can show up. And if that's the case, go for it. But for me, I'm gonna do what I've been doing since 2012. How do I balance winning on search and making sure that these humans, when they land on these pages.

Actually get something that makes them become [00:26:00] fans of my clients, because fans are so much more valuable than traffic. So when everybody continues to go deep today, I hope I've inspired you to maybe just go a little bit wider because that my friends is where you will start to get the new ideas. You'll start to learn about building fans and you will have what I consider to be career insurance on all the changes that are gonna happen on platforms and on Google.

It just won't matter that much if. If you actually know how to market to freaking humans, peace.