← The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
From Google to Everywhere: How to Win in the New AI-Driven Search Era feat. Micheal Buckbee
00:46:02
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- [00:01]
Michael Buckbee
This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential? Let's get started.
- [00:15]
Matt Bertram
Howdy. Welcome back to another fun filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. As you can hear with the sound, I am remote this week, but trying to make it happen. I have a exciting guest for you today. Everybody's been talking about AI. Not a lot of the major tools tell you what's going on with the bots. I know everybody's feverishly working on it, but I thought I'd bring on an expert that has been operating and has a tool that can help you see what the other bots are seeing from a competitive intelligence standpoint with your competitor sites. So I have Michael Buckbee here, Michael, with noahtoa.com and I'm excited to have you on the show. I'm going to be learning just as much as everybody else here because this is definitely a new area of search and competitor analysis. So, Michael, it's great to have you on.
- [01:06]
Michael Buckbee
Well, thank you so much. This is a delight. You know, we got to meet at SEO Week in New York and you know, I was taken by just how much enthusiasm you have for the SEO industry and this is awesome. I really appreciate it.
- [01:20]
Matt Bertram
So, no, I'm, I'm, I'm excited. I, I think that the industry is changing and people are going to change with it or they're going to get left behind. I really think that it's an exciting time to be in our industry and I think everybody's starting at the same starting line, right? Like, I mean, like, if you're behind right now and you're listening, you're just a couple months behind the people that are doing the cutting edge stuff with the AI agents and, and everything like that. And so I'm excited to have you on because you're working on cutting edge tech that the industry needs. And thank you so much for coming on and being part of the show.
- [01:59]
Michael Buckbee
Yeah, awesome. I mean, you said a real interesting thing, which is that we are at this big time of change and you know, you don't want to be left behind. But this is like a hot take, but it's like a hot positive take, which is, I think this is a tremendous opportunity for SEOs. You know, so much of what SEO has been for the last two decades has been Google Optimization. You know, it hasn't been SEO really. It's been really, we're going to focus on Google and everything else and the number one Thing I see with AI is that it is just fracturing the search ecosystem. And what we're seeing is there's going to be search as a feature in tons and tons of different platforms, in tons of different ways that your prospects and customers are going to find out about your brand in all these different areas. And with that comes the responsibility of making sure all those different places they know your brand, making sure they actually the data is accurate and that you're ranking in the right way. And that's a ton of work and I think again, it's a ton of opportunities and value for SEOs.
- [02:59]
Matt Bertram
No, I agree. I think it's kind of SEOs growing up and we've already seen the term SEO start to fracture and like SEO and optimizing for different social media platforms and now it's just taking on this, this broader term. As you know, Mike was talking about relevancy engineering. I believe it's true. Like you have to grow into what your role is going to be and that's a lot more responsibility. And I think like SEOs are going to have more of a seat at the table because they're going to be guiding the brand experience about how your brand's found across the entire digital marketing ecosystem. So, yeah, I agree and I think that the positive angle is super important, is this is exciting. Like this is good stuff to sink your teeth into and learn and see where it's going. And I love to see people experimenting and finding out new things on social media and sharing. And I agree, it's a, it's a super exciting time.
- [04:01]
Michael Buckbee
There's been an interesting term that we've been talking about with a lot of like our agency customers, which is sightless SEO, which is almost, you know, to date. So much of what we focus on is like our site and we get the headlines right and you know, last contentful paint, you know, loading fast and stuff. And then it turns out people are actually just going to chat GPT and they ask a question, they get the answer and they never see our site or you know, one of our customers said to us like chat GPT is our most popular and least well trained representative of the company. Where every day people are asking it like every crazy question you can imagine about your company and depending upon the answer about that, maybe they don't go any further in the search journey. So like if you're like a SaaS and you do healthcare work and someone asks like, oh, are you HIPAA compliant? And they ask that in ChatGPT and it says no you're not even in the consideration. They never see your site, they don't see anything. So getting that sort of stuff right is not traditional SEO work. You know, it's just not. But it's incredibly important. It's incredibly bottom line. Like you will make or break a company on these things. And you know, again, a huge opportunity for SEOs to expand, be better for the business, you know, more budget, you know, all of that. So.
- [05:17]
Matt Bertram
So, Michael, like what I'm seeing with our clients is we're doing like webinars to educate our clients of what's happening because we've been training them so much to look at traffic. Right. And, and once you get somebody in the top three positions in Google, traffic actually goes down because they're probably qualifying for the people also ask and the AI overviews. And so as you move them up, traffic goes down. And so there's kind of this retrain of what's happening. And I'm talking to a lot of people as they move over to using the LLMs. They're not going back to Google. I'm almost seeing like AI overviews is trying to stem the tide. And then about two weeks ago, when Google released all the stuff that they're doing, it's going heavy into brand heavy into YouTube. And they're changing the whole way that search is done, which I think Google is going to probably become more and more like a LLM, because just people are not people. Like it's going to be the, what is it, legacy option to search the old way. Yeah, because I mean, it's just changing so much so quickly. And I think that people are not prepared and people are confused about what's going on. And so what I believe SEOs need to be doing is educating people on how search is changing and talking to their clients. That's one of the things that we're spending a lot of time doing is kind of reteaching our clients about what's important and what we need to focus on. One of the things that I recently learned was the bots don't look at anything that's over. Typically, like 90% of all the bots don't look at anything over 10 months old. Right. And so if you have content on your site that's a couple years old, it might not even be in consideration. And if the LLMs are at the top of the consideration or top of the funnel, then you know you're going to have a lot of trouble getting, getting in there because there's not a lot of calls Right, right. There's typically, if you're chat gbt, you only got maybe six links and a lot of times people aren't even clicking on because they're getting their answer. So.
- [07:28]
Michael Buckbee
Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, a couple different things in there. I, I certainly, I still find a lot of pushback from SEOs on like, well, yeah, and this is crazy. I talked to a lot of SEOs, almost to a person, they say, oh yeah, I use chat GPT all day, every day. But I don't think the average person is. I don't think the normal person is, but they do. And you know, when we look at the stats, you know, the stats look real weird because like, hey, Google is saying still have so many search queries every day. But the pattern we see is that when people are actually trying to research and discern and like, which of these, what should I do for this problem I have? They go to the LLM because you get such a better experience. And then when you get to the end and it has like, oh, here's six different brands, you then go over and you do a navigational search to those brands. And that's a Google search now. And so Google gets the credit. You know, we're really sort of blurring into attribution here. Noah Toa actually started because almost as a joke, I was talking with some at another startup on the cybersecurity space and I was talking to some founder friends and we put our names into chat GPT and what came out was just like kind of nonsense but kind of useful, not that great. So I made a little script that ran on my machine and just like pulled the data down out of OpenAI's API and I made it a CSV and I sent it to my for myself and for my friends who had their own sasses and I kind of forgot about it. But then a couple weeks later, one of them came back and said, hey, we've got this post attribution survey that we send to all our customers. And they keep saying they find us with ChatGPT. Could I get an update on that spreadsheet? And I'm like, yes, you can. And so that was the start of it. And still it's really interesting to me. We do a lot of business with sas and the ones that are doing that survey of just like, hey, you bought. How'd you find out about us? They show much higher rates of people indicating they found on both traditional and on AI search than any other analytics or statistics, you know, your gas would indicate. And so that's something we've been telling our agency partners. You need to get your customers doing this because it shows you in such a better light because, you know, so much of this is, you know, is dark data. You're never going to see in the attribution otherwise.
- [09:57]
Matt Bertram
No, I, I agree with you on that attribution. I. Lot of people are still going to the website, but it's in the selection phase and it's, it's a lot more branded search. This is what we're seeing is, is definitely moving up. I, I just think when people go across the chasm, which more and more people are, they're not coming back. That's, that's essentially what I'm seeing. And so it's, it's interesting how websites need to now because Google is still the corpus, right, of the, the rag of, of information. It's not generating the, the answer and then verifying. It's using Google as the corpus of information and being in. Yeah, whatever, to generate it and then it generates the answer. So I think the websites are really important to speak to the lms, but also from a user experience. Once you get them there, you got to convert them. That's what I'm seeing is a lot less traffic is going to the sites. So, so you, you know, you need to really be talking about CRO a lot more than SEO once you have the traffic.
- [11:00]
Michael Buckbee
Yeah, well, I was gonna say that's a great example of, like, conversion rate optimization is not an SEO task. I mean, traditionally, like, in the strictest sense of it, but it makes absolute sense that, like, hey, we're, we're in this to win, we're in this to drive revenue, and that is where we need to, you know, put our stake in the ground and make our mark. Yeah. So what I've been trying to talk to people about is really, like, intent. Like, you know, we've always talked about search intent. I think something where AI changes the game is you want to think a little bigger and you want to think in terms of task intent. So, you know, you know, it's not just like, what are you trying to find for this one particular niche, but like the bigger thing. And if you can provide that and if you can plug in in the right way, I, I think that's a big opportunity for brands. So.
- [11:47]
Matt Bertram
Well, I think really identifying that target Persona of who you're going after. Because everyone's search and even everyone's LLM is learning you and is learning your behaviors. Right. And so if you've searched things Previously. And so it's personalizing it. Right. And so it's going to give you an answer that's going to give somebody a different answer based upon their previous searches. And so if you really understand your customer and who you're going after and where the places they've been and where they're searching, I think that like, you know, what is it? Sparktoro, Right. Sparkturo has been a great tool to understand where they might be going, what podcast, what social media accounts, what are some of these areas that they're looking at to understand where we need to optimize for that area. And so I think that that is something that I don't see a lot of SEOs doing, to your point. And I found with a lot of, you know, people are hiring people for SEO as the line item. But essentially what I've found across the board, big companies, small companies, we want you to package up great candidates and deliver us to them with a bow on top. I mean, that's essentially what they're buying. And I have to continue to retrain my team and remind them that even though we have the top rankings, what's the lead count? Right. Have they closed any deals? What's the conversion? We're going further and further into the sales. I've done that so much, Michael, that I actually have another podcast that's called and we work a lot in the oil and gas energy space. Yeah, it's called, you know, very original oil and gas sales and marketing podcast.
- [13:31]
Michael Buckbee
You know, good SEO title, can't argue with that. Exact match podcast titles.
- [13:36]
Matt Bertram
So I have a 30 year veteran salesperson on Gaspace that talks sales and I talk marketing and we talk about that merger between that and like what happens like with comms and how that all works together and it can be applied to other industries. But I'm finding more and more to be effective to build that brand. We can't just stay in our lane and touch SEO.
- [14:04]
Michael Buckbee
Oh yes.
- [14:04]
Matt Bertram
There's so many other departments and verticals and skill sets that people have to have to have an effective campaign or funnel where someone's coming all the way through it. And then the shape of the funnels changing too. Like it's not this linear shape. So I know there's a lot there. So speak on it.
- [14:21]
Michael Buckbee
So I was gonna say, you know, I'm right there with you. Like I have a background in like I was demanding director at a big cyber security company, worked hand in hand with this huge, massive enterprise sales team. So I'm right there with you and something that we recommend people do and people listening can do this right now is go to your chat, GPT or cloud and ask it to describe a business that one of your clients or your own and see what it says, see what the business objections are, ask it those kind of things. And when, as soon as you start prodding that stuff, I think you find a lot of the information that is hidden in your company, you start to suddenly think, oh, this should really be in the LLM. I really wish ChatGPT knew this about our competitor versus because it would make a world of difference for this question. And so much of the traditional enterprise sales tools like your battle cards, you know, your, you know, here's our script, here's our, you know, objection, list that, and here's how we overcome it. All of that is not SEO material, but all of that is vital to trying to do the sales and marketing movement in the modern world. And people are less and less eager to talk to someone, you know, for this stuff and they want to do their own research online, especially in the enterprise space. And there's, you know, I won't say they've made a decision before they talk to you, but they have an opinion before they talk to you, you know, and positive or negative, and it's vital to be able to, you know, influence that in a positive way.
- [15:55]
Matt Bertram
So why don't you tell us a little bit about what you're working on and how people need to be thinking about competitive intelligence with these LLMs and just provide more of a window into what people are doing on the cutting edge of AI search.
- [16:13]
Michael Buckbee
Sure. So, you know, where I like to direct people to, to get started is we wrote something called the Biscuit Framework, which is, you know, I'm very hyped about AI stuff, you're very hyped about AI stuff, but there's still a lot of people using Google, there's still a lot of traffic in it and how do you start to carve out? Here's the strategy going. That doesn't get rid of all of that effort, that doesn't get rid of all that work and all that expertise that we built up as SEOs. And so that's what it's trying to do. So, you know, we recommend people do some basic technical things. You know, how the indexing bots crawl your site from all these AI services is a real different world than just making sure googlebot can reach your site. There's a lot of them that don't provide traffic back to you that I think it's very easy to think I can just block these. Like a big one is Creative Commons. Creative Commons is, is this like multi organization group that anybody can go and download just massive dumps of the Internet, terabyte text files of the Internet. And of course every AI company use that as the basis to get started.
- [17:18]
Matt Bertram
So you were talking about Creative Commons is when it, it froze out at me. So you said Creative Commons is a great place where they've scraped the Internet and that's where they got started with their like body of knowledge. Small.
- [17:31]
Michael Buckbee
It's common crawl, not Creative Commons though. They both start with C. But yeah, yeah, so common crawl, it's basically a crawler that anybody can get the access to the data. And there's a bunch of these where they do data collection on all these different sites. And you know, it's licensed anthropic or you know, whoever licenses this data. So it's important to be there. And you know, mapping that out and taking care of that is very useful. And then the rest of the framework is really about content strategy, how to move like further down funnel in your content strategy, as well as to try to address things. Like a crazy sort of thing is that, you know, having a chat is a lot more like having a conversation with someone. And the example I always bring up is Wells Fargo, which is, Wells Fargo had some really big fines from the Federal Trade Commission. And anytime you ask a question in chat GBT like, oh, should I use my local credit union? Or Wells Fargo, it's like, well, I guess you could use Wells Fargo. But just to let you know, you maybe do an ethical review of them first before you use them and all this stuff. And, and that's not what comes up in traditional search, which is very much, you know, hey, there's an ATM two blocks from you. Here's how you log into your checking account.
- [18:41]
Matt Bertram
So, so would you say that reputation management is spilling over into SEO with these. I mean, that's, that's what I heard from you is like Wells Fargo needs to do reputation management with the LLMs because there's some schema out there or, you know, there's a source somewhere that, that's pulling in that information that has high trust from maybe a news site or something like that. And they're, you know, they're, they're taken, they're taking that as preferential of the lead of what to share with the user.
- [19:17]
Michael Buckbee
Well, you know, you mentioned high trust. I, there's even less of that, I think, than in traditional search, which is that, you know, there isn't really the same notion of domain rating and, you know, page rank and all of that in LLM search as there is in traditional search. And so much of what is out there is really a consensus opinion based upon all of the data that was available. And so once you scrap scrape all the data, there's a lot of people saying, hey, Wells Fargo's maybe having some issues, maybe they're better. But, you know, so there's, you know, there's certainly reputation like, so.
- [19:55]
Matt Bertram
So, Michael, so are you saying that the number of pages that are created about a certain topic and maybe what people are comment on about social media as the LLMs, you know, scrape, scrape all those it. And then it's aggregating the data. Is that, Is that what's happening? Or can you talk a little bit more about.
- [20:17]
Michael Buckbee
So let's. A real challenge with all this is that there's both AI models, AI search services that are like, blended with other things and they call out to other services. So let's just talk like, strictly like, hey, we just made our own AI model, now we're going to train it. And if you do that and you consider it that way, you know, there's actually this technical term in the AI community, a bag of words, which is literally like, we just throw the words in there and then we shake it around and it goes in this particular order and then we pull them out in the right way, and that's what's happening. When Mike, you talk to ChatGPT at like a real basic level, there is not a built in, you know, thought of page rank. There is not a built in thought of like, oh, this is coming from the New York Times, and this is coming from Mike's Twitter account. One of these should be a lot more valuable. Now what happens is the New York Times post something. Everybody on social media talks about it, they retweet it, they put it back out. And so you can imagine the impact they have on what that particular opinion of the topic is, or just the pattern of the words is a lot bigger with that than it is the smaller one. But it's not strictly true to say, hey, the New York Times. And I said something different. The New York Times is just automatically going to win on like a trust score. The biggest ranking factor that we see in AI search is repetition, just repetition, repetition, repetition. And so, so much of what we recommend beyond content, you have to create the content, but then you have a distribution strategy. And that distribution strategy, to my mind, needs to start with There is not a duplicate content penalty, which is something SEO people just cling to. And so it is not a problem. You post something to your site, you post an article, great. You go to LinkedIn and maybe you post a link to it, maybe you post a summary. You could take that whole article, post it as an article to LinkedIn. You could take that whole article, make a video of someone reading it, put it on YouTube, and that still counts. That's not a duplicate content penalty, but it's a way of getting your message out there. And a real aspect of this is when you stop competing at the top of the funnel and you start trying to really, like, fill in the gaps and handle the lower part where people are trying to discern this. And like you said, you know how much content is out there saying, like, hey, we're the best for this reason. Here's our reviews, here's this great experience we had. You aren't competing with that. You're just publishing into like an open space. So much better. So much better for your company. And, you know, just 360 on the marketing.
- [22:59]
Matt Bertram
Interesting that that opens up a whole new thought of different kind of strategies. It also makes me fearful that there's just going to be crazy amounts of spam content and content that's going to be generated. Like, how are people going to combat that?
- [23:16]
Michael Buckbee
Well, in a lot of ways, this is the reinvention of search and that, you know, Chat GPT is trying to become Google faster than Google can become Chat GPT. And, you know, I, I think eventually there will be a lot more in terms of maybe trust scores, maybe some of these other things. But, you know, there's also aspects of this where it's. I don't know, there, there are terrifying aspects of this. And I, I too worry about just like the black hat spam. Just repeat the same thing a million times. And even the old tricks of like, oh, well, the background on my page is white, so I made the font white on my text and put it at the bottom. Like, those were some of the original tricks, like some of the AI search people did, and they worked. But, you know, I think as an industry, we've also matured and, you know, for the areas where it makes a lot more sense, I think there is big reputational issues with doing that. Like, you can't just post the exact same message to LinkedIn a million times. Even Twitter is very strict about, like, you know, you can't publish the same message a lot. So there's limits to all these things as well, and new challenges.
- [24:32]
Matt Bertram
The last thing I'll say about that, I just got done with this, like, IBM training, like I said, and they were talking about making images and, and certainly you can put weights on, on different words. But it also was recommending, like, in the training, just repeat the word multiple times where you want, like, it to wait. And I was like, yeah, you know.
- [24:55]
Michael Buckbee
And it's like, red, red, red, red, red.
- [24:57]
Matt Bertram
Yeah, yeah. You're like, I want more red. It's a red, red, red, red, red. And it understands that. And then now I'm like going, oh, all text. And, and I'm just like, okay, this is all fresh. Right. This is all new and it's learning and it's, it's foundational and, and it's growing. I would love to move into some of the stuff that you're specifically doing. Sure. And, and what your. How you're looking at competitive analysis, because I think that that's a real need for people right now is I'm talking to a number of different kind of CMOs and they want to know all kinds of competitive information of how are they doing just as like a weighted metric versus everybody else. Like, how many webinars are they doing, how many emails are they sending, how are they, what is happening with everybody else to, to create a barometer internally to say, where do we fall? Right. And so I would love to hear from you looking at the competitive nature of, well, how many times are the bots going to that site? What pages are they going to, you know, what are they ranking for? That's what I think the burning question is on everybody's mind. And, and you're just so knowledgeable on that at SEO Week, and I would love to share that with, with anyone listening.
- [26:10]
Michael Buckbee
So, you know, at some level, what we're doing, you know, is, you know, an AI specific version of a rank tracker. And there's been rank trackers for a long time. I think what's different is that we are not strictly trying to track ranks just on a URL, that we do it off your URL, you can actually put in there technically, unlimited number of, like, product names.
- [26:35]
Matt Bertram
Are you tracking entities or brands? Or like, how. How are you? How are you?
- [26:39]
Michael Buckbee
The easiest way to consider is just strings that, you know, like, hey, like, because it can be so different what the responses are that, like, you know, the cybersecurity company I used to work at, they had, you know, a dozen different products and you could ask, like, hey, what's the top product? And, you know, this part it doesn't have a brand associated in the answer, it just says what the product name is. So we have to track all that. So as part of the competitiveness, we try to track both the domains, the actual name of the company, all the product names. You know, even if you wanted to, you could go as far as like key executives or spokespeople, because all of that comes out. And I think that's a real different thing. And so we track that against, you know, the. There's different types of searches, but the ones that we're most focused on are the competitive searches, which is like, what is the best in category and how you show up there. And you know, there's some tweaks you can do to how you call this stuff, but that is fairly stable. And it's very similar to the sort of ranking order of what you get out of traditional SEO or search. And it's influenced by a lot of the same factors, but there's enough nuance in it that when you look at the competitive side of this that you want to be doing more in terms of both what we call faceless content and face content. So the faceless content is what, like, gets the raw ranking in there and the face content is sort of the conversion part of it. So, you know, the faceless content is anything if you can read it and you can't, like, hear Matthew's voice in it, can't. You know, there's no point of view that. I think it's a lot more of a challenge where the face content is much more, you know, like, oh, there's a relationship and that it's converting on that basis. And I realized, I don't think I answered the competitiveness as much as you were hoping for in that.
- [28:34]
Matt Bertram
Well, you gave me another question too. Okay. And my question is, like, predictions, right? Yeah. Do you think that there's going to be more of a draw towards communities and people wanting to trust people? Because, like, everybody, like a lot of the online stuff that's coming, like, I already see it, it's online boss bots or it's faceless YouTube pages or whatever it is. Do you think that there's going to be a gravity towards, like a human being or an individual, which, you know, they're leveraging AI, whatever, they're making themselves more productive, but it's. There's still a human being at the core of it that someone can know like, and trust, and it starts to move more towards, like, what are people in this community saying? What is this individual saying versus you know, just a faceless brand. Like I, I've kind of seen that with spokesperson, like spokespeople, but now you got influencers saying stuff. So you're like, do they even really believe what they're saying? Like, I, I just think that it's very noisy right now. And I'm just curious, as you're working with clients, you know, where do you project the ball going like, where's the puck headed to right now with what's going on, like when it all shakes out? I'm just curious.
- [29:56]
Michael Buckbee
So I think, at least in my mental model of this is that the face content is the multiplier for the faceless content, which is, you know, like the same. We're talking about the New York Times. They publish something, it goes all over the place versus, you know, much smaller footprint.
- [30:11]
Matt Bertram
Let's, let's go back to the competitive component of kind of what, what you're doing and how you're viewing that with your company.
- [30:20]
Michael Buckbee
Yeah. So like on the strictest case, we want people to focus on, you know, a small number of high value competitive searches, most of which take the form of like, what is the best in my category, who is the most trustworthy, those kind of things. And you want to make sure you show up in there. And those are not the end all be all of tracking competitiveness. Because that's sort of like the tip of the pyramid. There's a tremendous amount of knowledge that you need underneath this in order to get those influenced, which is all the parts of the rest of the search journey, which is that, you know, people start with like, I'm having this problem, how do I get the solution? And then it eventually trickles down to, okay, now that I understand the right terms and the way of this, tell me what to do. And you know, depending upon how you phrase that and how aggressive you get with the LLMs, they will tell you like, oh, you should get the Ford, you know, truck over the Chevy. And that's very persuasive to go through that. And that is where we're trying to get people to influence is not all of the bits leading up to making that final question of like, what should I buy, who should I go with, who should I give my money to?
- [31:31]
Matt Bertram
So right at the bottom of the funnel, all those kind of transactional terms and by, by related terms. Very interesting. Can you share some case studies of maybe utilizing these tools and what you've done to influence the results and the impact that it had?
- [31:52]
Michael Buckbee
Sure. I was going to say something we do when you put your site in, we do what we call a deep classification of it. So this goes through all the existing keywords that your site ranks for and we try to then pull out the intent of those along with some information with your site. And we sort of build that funnel out of all your words and say like, well, these are the informational, these are the ones that are looking for stuff. And then at the bottom of it we have those very, you know, the business terms and what we've seen our most successful customers do is do that content strategy shift. And with that, at the very least they feel more effective, you know, in terms of, in terms of actually influencing sales. You know, the attribution is still a bit of a dark art, but certainly they haven't seen sales go down. And in a couple cases we've seen very much like competitor brands. Like one of the first people started using this was like a podcast hosting network and that's pretty much a commodity. It is also very strictly what is the best podcast host to use. And they were able to rank much better in ChatGPT and Cloud and all these other systems than they were in traditional search in large part because they did a lot more user generated content and they did a lot more with being active on Reddit and they did a lot more with really hitting these bottom of the funnel terms in part because, you know, they started seeing what the content strategy shifts were.
- [33:25]
Matt Bertram
So yeah, I would love to go back to your, your full on framework of kind of how you look at search. If, if you'd be willing to, to go through that, I would love to. Yeah, sure, break that down.
- [33:38]
Michael Buckbee
Yeah, so, you know, like I said, there's things you should do today that are easy technical things. You know, make check your robots txt, if you're not familiar with how to interpret it, copy it out, put it in a chat GPT. It will tell you what you've done, you know, you know, we have an active checker, make sure that you can be indexed by all the sites and then from there start to think about, you know, your business intelligence, which is all of the sales sort of things we talked about. Start to think about how it is considered with respect to, you know, the sentiment about your company. There's a lot of easy questions you can ask like, hey, is my company trustworthy? Like that's a great thing to ask. That's a great thing to track. Ask those kind of questions and then start to track the questions of like the direct competitive ones. Are we the best in the category who is the best, who is considered better or worse and track all that. And you know, once all of that is done, you know, you can then start to actually do the content shifts. And what we see is then once you have that, you can look at how it changes over time, the responses and then reflect back what the latest output is. So chat GPT, again, like, we do a lot of work with SaaS, so it's very like, here's the key features. Like the older versions of ChatGPT, you would say, who's the best? They would just give you a list of 10 names and now they literally break it out. Like, here's the key features and here is Best for like, those are titles like each three subheads in the markdown of the response. And so our customers are now, they're like, great, this is just gold. I'm going to go write an article that's like, why are we the best for this category? Here are our key features. Very explicitly. These are much better. And this is what differentiates us from our competitors. Put that out there. And that's of course just catnip to, you know, Chat GPT and it's a little bit different for Claude and it's a little bit different for Gemini. But that's the, the strategy is to, you know, reflect back the, the end results we see out of it.
- [35:43]
Matt Bertram
What I'm seeing off page is a lot of people are talking about how to incorporate from a vector standpoint your brand with like whatever service or term that you're offering. And there's been a lot of people talking about in the traditional sense, how to utilize like entity SEO really. And I really like your take on how you need to better define these associations and what you want people to know about you. I'm hearing a lot of, of like interview style. You need to ask Chat GBT or Claude or whatever platform you're using what they think about you and then take that into consideration of the kind of content you need to give them. I mean, it even goes back in my mind to when you think about GMB or gdp, how you don't even, A lot of companies don't even put their terms or, sorry, their, their hourly operation, like the hours that they're open on their website. Right. And so this becomes like the, the standard and it's like, well, it, it wants to check it, like for trust. From a trust standpoint to your website. You really need to include those things on your website. And a lot of people get upset if they don't update like on A holiday weekend or something like that, if they say that the stores up open and it's not right or the business is open. And so it's really interesting to me just about how everything is evolving. I mean how Michael because a lot of SEOs listen to this as well as web developers and a lot of this stuff just keeps putting put on the back of their shoulders. How do SEOs need to better communicate this to, to leadership or clients of like what you're asking for is now 10x more work to you know, all these fractured platforms, to rank and to do all these things which I think that that's going to translate into well, larger retainers and higher paid SEOs and I think that that's a good thing over time. But in the medium term there's going to be a lot of frustration across the board of how do we do these things? And just loading up SEOs with additional work that is really outside their scope. And it's just like a lot of companies can't afford the amount of work like so it's like the leverage that LLMs give you on the productivity side outpacing the amount of work that you have to do. Like yeah, I haven't seen a chart yet that someone shows you where that break even point is, but I think that that's essentially what, what's happening.
- [38:28]
Michael Buckbee
Yeah, I think it's going to look a lot like social. You know, like social has a lot of the same issues where like you have to make a decision on every platform of like well do we start a TikTok channel for my, my enterprise, you know, farming equipment, you know, you know, like maybe or you know, is there a way to be better with distribution? Is there a way, you know, to handle some of these things in a better way? But I do think there's a lot to be learned from you know, our friends social side of things where they have very messy attribution, they have a lot of you know, metrics that are they vanity metrics? Is this audience metrics? Is this, you know, what exactly is there? And you know a lot of the same troubles with attribution. And you know I, I, you know I mentioned before the, the more post purchase attribution you can do and surveys and stuff like that's proven to be a real win and a very bottom line win as far as like putting people in a good light. And I think there's just going to be you know, a lot more of that unfortunately where analytics is just going to get worse and worse and we're going to need more and more, you know, elements outside of that to compensate. So.
- [39:40]
Matt Bertram
I agree. Interesting. You say social. That's one of the things that we're working on internally at EWR is to, to build a really robust social team to complement the SEO team. Not because we think it's nice to have, because we think it's need to have today.
- [39:57]
Michael Buckbee
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. No, that makes 100% sense to me. Just that both owning your own distribution platform as well as your own content platform, the need for siteless SEO, the need to succeed in these other areas. And I think the great benefit of it is that. But as far as selling this to upper management, what you're selling is more effective marketing in general, even if it's not exactly search. Like, you know, it's really hard to. It's all directionally positive, you know, saying, hey CMO, let's mix up our LinkedIn or Instagram and talk more about the company. How we're great in these specific ways, like yes, that's going to benefit this, you know, search we're trying to optimize for. Also that's just great content that is just, you know, straight down the middle, good content for us to have anyway. There's no risk there, you know, so that's very different than, you know, I think a lot of people have like set aside AI stuff. Is this like new kooky too technical thing? And I think a lot of this just comes back to being really understanding your customers, really speaking their language, really trying to reach them where they're at. And as a benefit, if you do all that in the right ways and the right framing, you're going to just really do well on AI search as well.
- [41:15]
Matt Bertram
Awesome. Well, Michael, I've learned so much already and it's really got me thinking of some of the things that we might want to firm up even more that we're currently doing. Is there anything else that like we haven't covered in your conversation, our conversation that you think might be valuable to anyone listening if they're trying to wrap their head around all this?
- [41:36]
Michael Buckbee
Yeah, you know, I think there is a, a big trend that's happening that is like guaranteed to be occurring. And it has a funny name, which is agentic search, which is just means search with agents. And even that I feel like is too highfalutin, you know, it's too like fancy a term for it because it's really just like almost a bot doing some of the googling for you. And if you take that term for it, you Know, there's a lot of tools that are doing this. Google's AI mode is the biggest one, which is kind of like a light version of their deep research stuff, which is, you know, it goes out, it finds 10 links, it looks at the content of those 10 links and then it brings it back to you with a little bit of a summary and a recommendation. And that's an agent. It made some decisions for you. It is custom to you. It's not the generic answer everyone gets. It's got a little more discernment and rationale in it. And we're going to see more and more systems like that even just holding in your mind that pattern that like, oh, I need to write this page on my site that describes what we do in a way that the bot can read it, understand it, and then when it weighs us versus our competitor, it recommends us to the user that's ultimately going to see this in a summary. And that's something real different than trying to write just the right headline for it or doing these different pieces. And I think in some places it's going to be different content, that there's more like a human version of it and more a face and faceless version of it. So awesome.
- [43:11]
Matt Bertram
I think that that's a great unknown secret of Internet marketing right there is, would you say out of everything you talked about, what is the one thing that you want people to take away and take action on? That's the most important thing that needs to be happening right now. I heard Word create content about your brand and put it out there to make sure you're answering the questions that people might be asking across multiple platforms. That's, that's what I, what my.
- [43:43]
Michael Buckbee
Yeah, you know, I think there's an even easier one which is, and this is self serving but you know, we're marketers, you know, like on our site we have a, we call it like an AI search console and it really does. It runs through like 24 different bots that are indexing your site. And we have so many people find out issues from this that are just the basic stuff, like because you can write stuff but if it's not being indexed, doesn't matter, you know, like, and so it's free, it's super easy to try out. Like just start there at least to get your foot in the door and to start thinking about like, hey, you know, these are important. This is something we want to influence and get started there.
- [44:23]
Matt Bertram
So, so noahtoa.com that's no a t o a.com or is it AI? Sorry. Okay.
- [44:30]
Michael Buckbee
I want to make sure we got the dot com.
- [44:33]
Matt Bertram
We're doing it for real. Awesome. So, Michael, if someone enjoyed this conversation. I know I have. And they want to hear more about what you're doing. I know you're active on LinkedIn.
- [44:43]
Michael Buckbee
Yeah.
- [44:43]
Matt Bertram
How do people find you? What? What? Where should people be searching?
- [44:48]
Michael Buckbee
Yeah, go, go to noah toe.com. it is a free sign up. It gets you like a couple questions that you can ask from chat GPT. You can put them in yourself, like whatever you want to know. We'll track those for you for free to just see what the reports are. We will check for the bots and you'll get our newsletter. And the newsletter, if you heard me today, it is very much written in my voice. It is a face content version of this that I write every week that has, you know, an interpretation of like what's happening and things, not just sort of a regurgitation. So trying to be helpful and add value to people. So. Yeah.
- [45:24]
Matt Bertram
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the Unknown Secrets. I'm going to go do it after this myself. I know I was looking at it and I'm super excited. Thank you so much for coming and sharing some valuable knowledge with everyone here.
- [45:40]
Michael Buckbee
Well, thank you so much for having me. Honestly, it was great meeting you in New York. It was great talking to you now and great. Have a good week. Bye.
- [45:47]
Matt Bertram
All right, until the next time, everyone. My name is Matt Bertram. Bye bye for now. It's not.