Let’s dig into the digital depths with Michael Fleischner, a seasoned SEO navigator, as he reveals how to keep agencies afloat amidst changing tides, from the surging waves of LLMs to the calm shores of client communication. Tune in for an episode brimming with actionable strategies, personal sea tales, and the undercurrents of agency life.

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

Boosting online visibility
Domain authority insights
Balance in agency growth
Content's role in SEO
Conversion optimization tips

Resources:

Connect with Michael Fleischner:

Connect with our hosts:

Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

22:47 - The problem is that today, and as you mentioned over the last year, people are going directly to ChatGPT to ask and answer questions. They're not going to Google, or at least not in the same way. And that's why Google's really, I think, sprinting to try to catch up with AI overviews and changing some of the results and how they're created. But you know, ultimately it's kind of like saying, oh, no one will ever unseat Facebook yet Facebook is unseating itself through Instagram, and TikTok is replacing Facebook. So we have these, these visions of grandeur around some of the typical search behaviors because we've operated that way for so long.
36:40 - And that's kind of the manic depressive nature of agency ownership. And it's not for everybody. You know, again, I've been around long enough to know that all you can do is continually focus on delivering quality results for your customers. And you can do that, and they may still leave, you may not do that, and they stay, but you really have to, again, from my perspective, make sure that you're delivering the best quality and you're engaging in this idea of fair exchange or abundance exchange on a regular basis. And that's it. There's really no more to it. But over time, you know, the good news is you do get accustomed to, it's kinda like Game of Thrones when you're kind of getting into the characters initially, you quickly realize don't get attached to any of the characters, right? Like it's kind of the same dynamic.
21:37 - I've been in the SEO business, but it's longer than most. And this one is different. And what I mean by that is, when I started out almost 20 years ago, the way that SEO was changing was more an evolution, not a sea change, which is happening here. The evolution was, oh, this is what you needed to do to rank, oh, this is what you need to do to rank differently. Oh, this is a different kind of ranking. You know, now we have images showing up in search, so on and so forth, right? So like there was all this evolution happening in the world of search and it created a really cool dynamic for us and our clients. It helped kind of expand content generation and creating different types of digital assets, building authority, doing all these fun, exciting projects for clients, really to get them to show up in search results.
30:40 - Because LLMs, right now, they're inherently lazy. At least that's my perspective. They're not going even though it says, you know, taking a minute to think longer or deep research or yeah, they're just scanning more websites. But AI, but Google does that through AI as well. So it's, it's nothing, quote unquote new, but it is an advancement in terms of search behavior and how these machines return information.
31:44 - Because we're now so used to, I remember like I had to, I took a course to learn how to use Google properly, how to properly think about crafting the search term or question or whatever it was down to get down to relevant results instead of thousands. And now a lot of that's gone away because you could just chat with GPT, and if you took a wrong turn, you naturally, as if you're talking to a person, ask the right question and get into that depth. What's becoming really interesting is once you get someone to your place, your site where wherever it is that you have them, that you want to have them learn more about your company and convert, they're still gonna have those same questions.

Mastering SEO and Conversion Tactics