← Everyday VOpreneur® with Marc Scott
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- [00:00]
A
All summer long on the Everyday Vopeneur podcast, I am giving everyday vopeneurs an opportunity to come on the show, ask me a question, get an answer, and fingers crossed. Hopefully it's a good one. Today I've got Cody Rock on the show. Glad to have you here, Cody. How you doing?
- [00:15]
B
Doing great, Mark. Thank you for having me.
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A
Tell me what your question is.
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B
My question is, what is the difference between SEO and geo? SEO being search engine optimization and GEO being generative experience optimization. And how can voice actors leverage these tools to get in front of more buyers?
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A
Right on. Very important question. I think that there are a lot of voice actors that have very strong feelings about AI for obvious reasons, but because of those strong feelings that they have for AI, they are just casting aside completely and they're missing out on some of the potential opportunities that AI brings and the GEO side of things. Generative engine optimization, which may or may not be the ultimately adopted term. I've heard so many different terms tossed around to describe it, but it's something that I think we need to be paying attention to because I think that the way that we search is changing. And so it's the difference between doing a search in Google and doing a search in an LLM. So, case in point, I've got a barbecue that's 10 years old and it is on its last legs, but I'm not ready to fully replace the barbecue yet. So yesterday I took a picture of the plate that's on the back of the barbecue that has model number make, all that sort of stuff, right? Took a picture of that, put it into ChatGPT said, here's my barbecue. I need to replace the grates. Find me some grates. Come back a few minutes later. ChatGPT has given me a list of these are the different grates. These are ones that I think will fit. These are ones I'm not sure about. It gave me a complete breakdown. You know, here's stainless steel ones and why you'd want to go that way. Here's cast iron. Why don't you go with that way? It gave me everything that I needed. Now I could have went into Google and I could have done a search for my model number of my barbecue and I could have tried to come up with, you know, know all of the search results from Google and tried to ultimately find what I was looking for. And I could have spent an hour doing it, but instead I gave it to AI and AI did it in 20 seconds. And it, it found everything for me and led me straight to the point where the greats are on the barbecue. Actually, before we did this interview, before we recorded this interview, I was outside doing the first burn and the season on the new grates. So like 24 hours from AI find me barbecue grates to new grates, around the barbecue to my wife is going out to the butcher while we are recording so that I can put something on the barbecue tonight. The way we search now is different and so the way that we need to be thinking about search on our websites needs to be different because we're not just building websites for Google anymore, we're building websites or we should be building our websites so that if somebody goes into chatgpt, Perplexity, Claude, whatever name the LLM that we're going to come up, right? How do you use, how do you do search?
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B
I mean I usually just, I've just, I'm an old school with Google, but I've also been messing around with Chat GPT just to kind of see where I rank with it. Right. So it's a. I do think it is worth our time and I agree with you. I think it's worth our time to figure out kind of how this technology works so, so that it can benefit us. One of the things that is in my mind is a way to sort of tailor the content on our websites, for example, to be easily summarized by these LLMs. And that really helps inform how we're going to show up in the LLMs, how we're going to show up in Google AI overview. Right? It's going to be. That seems like the way things are going. Like what do you, what do you, what's your, what are your thoughts on that?
- [04:12]
A
So with SEO, the strategy was to choose some keywords and try to build content on your page that optimized for those keywords. So if somebody goes into Google and types in whatever the keyword is that you've chosen to be optimized for, ideally you show up in page one and you're going to pull traffic to your website. The problem with that strategy now is if you go into Google and you've probably noticed this right now the top third of the page is an AI summary and then below the AI summary is a bunch of sponsored posts and then below that it starts getting into all of the results. And so it's becoming harder and harder and harder from an SEO standpoint to, you know, get page one and get found. You said something that is so key though. It's about the summaries where SEO worked on keywords, geo we'll call it for now, it seems to be the term du jour works on context. And so that's the difference. You could go in and try to optimize your page for best documentary narrator or male documentary narrator or whatever. You know, pick the. Choose the keywords that, that you were going to try to get your website optimized for, and you could place those keywords strategically all throughout your website. And to be clear, I do think that stuff still matters. I think we still need to be thinking about the SEO side of. But now we need to be thinking about, okay, if somebody's doing a search, they're going into ChatGPT and writing who are some of the. Who are some documentary narrators for science and history content? And that's the question that they're asking. And so do you have content on your page that fits into that context of that question so that the LLM is pulling from your page and using your page as a reference? And one of the big developments that's happened in a lot of these LLMs now is they are giving context and links. So before ChatGPT would just spit out an answer, these are the five best voice actors for documentary, blah, blah, blah. Now it's actually saying, here are the five, here are their websites, here's why I think this based on what content I pulled from their website, et cetera. So you're able to do more and more right, from within the LLM. And so part of the what? And just to be clear, I am still very much learning all of this, right? I am not an expert in this subject matter by any stretch of the imagination, but I have started creating content on my website, trying to adapt for these strategies. Part of what I think we need to be thinking about now is what are the questions that people would. What kind of questions would somebody be typing into ChatGPT or Gemini that I could have the answer for or be the answer for, or be the result for? So again, it's the difference between science documentary narrator, which somebody might type into Google and you might pull up on those keywords, versus who are some documentary narrators specializing in science and history content, which might be a question that somebody would go into the LLM and ask. And so what we need to be thinking about are what are some of those things? What are some of the questions that we want to be able to be found for if somebody was trying to find you? I keep saying documentary just because that's what I'm trying to optimize for. It could be automotive, it could be telephony, it could be commercial, it could be a particular kind of commercial. It could be commercial in a very specific jurisdiction. Right? You could have an entire page that talks about your local area and being a voice for commercial in your local area. Are you looking to register a new domain to set up your voiceover website on or are you looking for a reliable place where you can host your voiceover website? Itrust upperlevelhosting.com it's where I get my domains, it's where I get my hosting because it works. Check it out for yourself and get signed up at upper level hosting dot com. Now back to our show. I think part of this now as well is going to become about. And again, I could be wrong on this, but it feels like he who has the most content wins. If you just have a one page website and it lists your demos and it's got a small about you section and it's got some information about your studio and it's got the list of clients that you've worked with and whatever, which is what most of us have traditionally had in the past. There's not a whole lot of content there for the LLMs to draw context from to be able to reference back to you. And so now what you gotta be thinking about more than ever. And this is something I've talked about for years. I talk about creating genre specific pages from an SEO standpoint. There was value in that. Well, now you need to be creating genre specific pages from a GEO standpoint. So if you've got a promo demo, you want to have a dedicated promo page that talks about your work in promo and the types of promo that you do. And you know, again, thinking about what are questions that somebody might ask for promo that I would want to be found for. And if you do radio imaging, you're going to want to have not just a radio imaging page, but you're going to want to have a page, a radio imaging page. Plus maybe you're going to have one that's specific for your country imaging and maybe you're going to have one that's specific for your rock imaging and maybe you're going to have one that's specific for your pop imaging or whatever the formats are, right? So you might end up building out 10 different pages and optimizing 10 different pages for that. And so this is where there's an opportunity to niche down and create content around all of that as well. So it could be not just that you're creating a page for automotive, but you're creating a page specifically for trucks because you're a truck guy or whatever it is, right? You, you could be creating pages because you've got, you know, maybe you've got like a blue collar Southern thing going on, right? And you could literally build a page around that so that if somebody goes in and says, hey, I need a, need a voice actor who sounds like a blue collar worker with a southern accent. And then ChatGPT pulls it up, is like, oh, here's a page that, you know, that specifically matched that. And so that in and of itself probably sounds really overwhelming. You're like, oh, great, let's just go and create a hundred web pages. Fantastic. That's right.
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B
That's what blogs are for.
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A
But what I have been doing is I have been using AI to build the pages for me.
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B
Interesting.
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A
And so I've created probably 50 or 60 new pages on my website in the last few months that have all been built by AI, but built with that specific purpose. And then to take it a step further, giving away all the secrets, now, I have literally been feeding AI my Google Analytics data and my Google search console data and saying, okay, you know what, the end goal is this, right? And we've built pages to accomplish that end goal. Here's my raw Google Analytics data. Here's my raw Google search console data. Is it working? What do we need to be doing differently? And so I'm constantly re evaluating the strategies. And so I was just actually talking with Patrick Kirchner about this about an hour ago. We were texting on Facebook because we were talking about this a little bit. I said that I'd actually built about 40 pages around a strategy. And then after about three or four months, I fed AI my analytics and search console data and said, okay, you know, this was the strategy we're working towards. Is it working? And the AI comes back and says, here's what's working and why, here's what's not working and how we can fix it. And so then I was able to say, okay, well go rebuild all those pages and fix all the things that we need to change. And so now I've got all of this happening automatically in the background, and I can see now where I'm starting to pop up in AI searches for some of the things that I want to be found for. Now, the trick with all of this, which it was the same with SEO. You couldn't optimize SEO. Well, it would be really hard to optimize your SEO on your website for 50 different keywords. Unless you were building out a ton of content. Right. You would have to build a ton of pages. So what you had to do was you had to think about what are. What are the three or four things that I really most want to be found for and try to build an optimization strategy around that. Now you got to take it a step further and start thinking about what are all the different questions that somebody might be doing a search for where I could be found.
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B
Right.
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A
And that's the tricky part. But one of the things that I think that you can use as a clue for that is what are the questions that your clients are asking you on a regular basis?
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B
That's an interesting point. I. And this is all just text, right? Too. Like, this is all just purely tech. I'm seeing more and more.
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A
And the.
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B
And the reason I bring that up is because I'm seeing more and more on things like YouTube, like, they have AI summaries of videos. So maybe that's. How much do you think that plays into it? Because I'm starting to think that that plays into how it's not just you're. Not just how you're found in. Not just how you're found in large language models, but also how much you're found in, you know, classic search engines like Google, like YouTube, like any search engine in any. Any social media site now, right. Is that. Do you think? Have you seen that? Like, what. Have you. What have your thoughts on that?
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A
So I'm creating these docu short videos, and I've probably, at this point, I've created, I don't know, 60 of them maybe. And initially the videos themselves didn't really do anything for me from a background standpoint because AI couldn't watch or recognize the videos or anything like that. So I was building pages with text. That was part of the strategy to create the content that the AI could read. And then the video was embedded so that if a person found it, they could ultimately watch the video. Now there are. And again, I'm not an expert on this, but there's what's called schema text that you can put in for your video. And it puts in, you know, what's the video, who's the narrator of the video, what's the content or the concept of the video, et cetera, et cetera. And so even though AI can't watch and disseminate the actual video itself, it can recognize all of that schema text. And so then it can use. It can start using that stuff, that type. It can start using your video Content as a reference source. And so I've seen that starting to happen a little bit as well. And again, the only reason why I know any of this is because I'm actually using AI to help me do it. I would love to be able to go out and pay somebody to do this for me, but I just don't happen to have several thousand dollars sitting around to be able to make that investment. Right. And so I'm using AI to help me do this. And, you know, it's trial and error. I've been working on the strategy for, I don't know, six or eight months at this point. Had to rebuild pages a couple of times, had to go back and change content out a couple of times with trial and error. But when I was initially doing this, I had AI helping me to come up with the text and everything that I needed for the WordPress page. And then I would have to go in and build the WordPress page and do everything manually. Now I've got Cloud Cowork doing it all for me automatically. I don't even have to do anything anymore. I don't even have to go into WordPress. Like, it's literally building the pages and everything. That's how far the technology is going. And, and I know there's going to be some people that are going to be like, you know, some people are going to be creeped out by that, some people are going to be pissed off by that, and that's fine too.
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B
Right.
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A
But I'm just trying to like, if this technology is going to disrupt my industry, which, to be clear, it has massively, it's had a massive impact on my business. I've lost work because of it. If this, if this technology is going to be a thing that's going to take me out in certain areas, then I'm at least going to use it to my advantage in other areas where there's still opportunity. And I do think that search is one of those things. There's a statistic I shared in a class that I taught earlier this year and it said about 50% of consumers are now using AI powered search. And 40 to 40%, 4% of those users prefer it over traditional search and traditional search insights, right? Google Blue links, clicking from one to the next to the next to the next to try to find the thing that you wanted versus getting everything summarized for you neatly and compactly in one quick little chat window. Like, this is where search is going, right? Some of the best voiceover websites that are ranking from an SEO standpoint Most of those sites are sites that have been around for a really long time that have a lot of content and they've been able to build up domain authority over the years.
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B
Right.
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A
It's hard for somebody starting out to compete against somebody who's already been doing this thing for 20 years. If you're going to start with an SEO strategy on Google. It's hard when you've got a brand new website. Not impossible, it's just hard. They got a head start, right?
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B
Yeah.
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A
This is a ground floor opportunity on the geo. Right. We're all starting at square one on GEO right now. Nobody really has a head start at this point because we're all trying to figure it out at the same time and not even. We're all. Because there's a lot of people who won't. Right. There's a lot of people who will not adopt it, who will not embrace it. And so I do think that for the voice actor who's willing to go down that road, I definitely think that there are going to be some opportunities there to get in early and get a head start.
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B
Okay, well that's, well, I think that's, that's, you know, that's wise to at least look into it because these are, these are conversations that need to be had. Right. I think it's, there's, there's some. I'm. The more and more I dig into it, the more nuance I'm seeing in it. Right. Because it's not just about, it's not just about AI voices, it's not just about whatever else, not just about text to speech. However you feel about that is how you feel about that and that's perfectly valid.
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A
Yep.
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B
I think you're making an, I think the important distinction that you, you're making, and hopefully this conversation will yield is how we are found and how we get in front of more people and what technology they are using so that we show up in their search. Yeah, that's if that's what it is.
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A
If the stats say that 50% of people are using AI search now, like, how can you not embrace that thing?
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B
Right. Yeah.
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A
Are, are you willing to sacrifice potentially 50% of your audience? Right. And, and that potential audience. Yeah. And that stat is not going to probably get any smaller. Like, I don't think a year from now we're going to be like, oh, only 20% of people are using AI search now. No, I think a year from now it's going to be 70% of people are using AI search. And so if you're not optimized and ready for that. I just think that you're, you're probably going to miss out on some opportunities. And I think the AI tools give us the ability to help make some of this happen where it may not have been possible. Not everybody's got the ability to sit down and build three or four new web pages every single week and write all the content and put it all into proper context and whatever. Right. I'm able to then go into an LLM and say, okay, this is, this is what I want to be found for. This is the, you know, the context of what I'm trying to be found for. Can we build a page around that and adjust it accordingly? And then as I mentioned earlier, every once in a while, you know, maybe every month, feeding it my analytics data, I can assess and say, is it working or isn't it working? Because I don't know anything about Google Analytics. I mean, I look at that and it tells me like, I can't interpret that in any way. I don't know anything about it, but AI can. And it can say, well, here's what, here's the story that's being told. Okay, great, I want to tell the story this way. Okay, here's what we need to tweak in order to tell the story that way.
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B
Sure. No, and that's, and that's the, Another important distinction is being able to tell that story, is being able to not only tell that story, but make sure that story is, like you said earlier, summarizable and for lack of a better phrase, and it's not the only thing AI is going to do. Right? It's not, it's going to be there, There are things that I do think that it could be used for that can not just in the LLM search side of AI, but because there's, there are several kinds of things that are marketed as AI that maybe, maybe some people would be less hesitant to and less afraid of if they were, if it was explained, you know, X, Y, Z way. Right. But that's, that's a whole other, that's a whole other thing. One thing that, one thing that I do want to kind of nail down if I can, if, if it's at all possible. Right? Is, is something like domain authority. Right? Because what are the. It just, that is a real all encompassing number that you can use in SEO to kind of measure your impact online. Right? Is there a, because I don't know much about this. Is there like a number or a metric that you can use to measure your geo footprint. Like, do you know of anything like that?
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A
I don't know that there's anything specifically yet, but what I can tell you is when I was asking six months ago, when I was asking ChatGPT, am I being found? ChatGPT couldn't expressly say yes you are or no, you aren't. There wasn't really a metric for that and there wasn't really anything in Google that specifically stated that as far as from a search analytics standpoint.
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B
Right.
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A
But today when I'm asking Claude, Claude is actually giving me complete summaries of here's what I know about you based on I've searched my own, I've searched my own system.
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B
Right.
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A
And here's what I found and here's what's working and here's what's not working. And there are, there is a metric in Google Analytics and I'm, I can't remember what it is specifically. There's a metric in Google Analytics now that according to Claude and chatgpt, it's not a direct, there's not a direct correlation that this is how many people found you via LLM search, but that number is connected to LLM search. So it's an indicator that this may be how people are finding you. So I don't know off the top of my head, again, I'm still trying to learn all of this stuff myself. I don't know that there's a specific metric that you can measure like, oh, you had, you came up in 20 searches in ChatGPT this week or whatever that I'm not specifically sure of.
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B
Right.
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A
But you know, you mentioned domain authority and I think that's a big part of it because these LLMs are, they're pulling their content from reputable sources as much as possible, they're pulling it from reputable sources. And one of the ways that you can build the domain authority is by having content which is continuously refreshed. Right. And so if Your website is 5 years old and you haven't put anything new on your website in five years old, that's not going to pull the same level of authority from an LLM necessarily as a, as a website that's a year old, but they're publishing new content, content two or three times a week.
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B
Right.
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A
And so there, and, and obviously it's looking at the value of the content, the, the direct correlation between the content and what the, what the person is searching for. Right. And so I, the context matters, which we talked about at the very beginning. Right. Like that's one of the big differences. It's not just about keywords, it's about. It's about context. So that's where I come back to. If you were trying to get started going down this GEO road, I think the first thing I would be thinking about are what are, what are the most common questions that my clients and that my voice buyers are asking me? And I think any voice actor can sit down and probably come up with 10 or 15 questions pretty quick that, you know, these ones consistently come up when somebody's sending me an email or when somebody's, you know, asking for a quote or asking for an audition or whatever. So those are questions that you could start and build pages or build content around, because that's also probably the kind of question that somebody's going into ChatGPT and asking. ChatGPT. And so if they go in ChatGPT and ask that question or they go into perplexity and ask that question, and you have a page on your website that answers that question specifically, you become a reference point in that answer that the LLM is feeding back. So I think that's where you start. And then I think the next place that you look at is what are the things that you want to be found and known for. Right. So the genres, the niches, whatever. I'm building this massive strategy right now around documentary and docu series, because that's what I want to be. That's where I want to go. That's the genre that I really want to go into. And so I'm going full bore into that. Video content creation, text content creation. Like I'm doing all of those things to try to create authority around that genre so that if anybody goes into an LLM and starts asking questions about that, hopefully I'm going to get to a point where I'm going to be the reference that comes up. Right.
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B
Yeah. Mark Scott will come up when you see documentary and docu series. And that's. Yeah, I think that's a great. I think that's a great thing. I actually. It's funny you mentioned that. I just, you know, brief sidebar. I just built out my TV narration page on my website. Shout out to Tom Pinto. Excellent, man. I love Tom.
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A
I love Tom.
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B
Amazing. But. But, yeah, and, and it's optimization. You keep using that word. Because that's the strategy, not the. That's the intent. The intention is the genre. The strategy is optimization.
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A
Yeah, strategies. To be clear, I don't think that this is like the end of SEO. I think they're all, I think the SEO and geo, the two things just go hand in hand. I think they just needed to come up with a way to describe. Because it's almost like a branding thing really. Right. Like if I say SEO, you instinctively think Google search.
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B
Right.
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A
Like we instantly associate SEO with Google. Now it affects every other search engine, but name me five other search engines. Right. Nobody knows because it's just Google. Right. Google is search and SEO is Google.
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B
I don't remember the last time I binged something.
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A
Yeah, exactly, exactly. And so now that we're talking about a new form of search, it's like they needed to come up with a new term to describe it. And so that's where, you know, we've heard AI SEO and then geo generative engine optimization is kind of what, you know, like. So I think it's a branding thing more than anything, but I still think those two SEO geo go together. But it's really just about putting yourself, I think, to a degree, it's about putting yourself in the mind of the buyer, figuring out what are the questions that they're going to be asking. How can you have content on your website that gives you credibility and authority to answer those questions and become a reference when the LLM is spitting out the answer?
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B
And what can help is feeding that LLM, the content, the text, the video, what have you?
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A
Yep.
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B
Right. In that regard. Yeah. That's a very smart way to, way to do that. And it's a. That can be. I can see why that would be intimidating. Right. Because just like, that's just a lot of butt in the seat time, just like click, clacking away, doing your thing. Right.
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A
Honestly, it's not even that much now because AI can do so much of it for you. So really what you have to do is just ask the AI the right questions and get it the right answers, prompt it in the right way, and then it can do a lot of this for you. And so really it's just a matter of the commitment to do the thing. Right.
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B
Right. You've been saying it for a long time. I've been a viewer of yours for a while, so yeah, I've heard Do the thing a lot on this show.
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A
Well, there you go. So now you know what you got to do. You got to go do the thing.
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B
We gotta go do the thing.
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A
Start there. Start with what are the questions that people are asking that you, that you know, you can answer because they're, you're being asked. And then what are the things that I would like to be found for if somebody was doing a query in an LLM, what are some of those niches or specific things? And start building out some pages just around that stuff. And I mean, you're already going to be ahead of a lot of other voice actors who are still not doing it or ignoring it or not even putting the effort in at this point. And so that's how you get the head start on a ground floor opportunity.
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B
Right on.
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A
Okay.
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B
Love it.
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A
Hope that's been helpful.
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B
It has been. Thank you, Mark.
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A
Great to talk to you. Cody, thanks for coming on the show.
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B
Absolutely. Thanks for having me.