← 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 SEO to Reputation: Owning the LLM Era With Ross Barefoot
01:12:53
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- [00:00]
A
You. 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. Howdy. Welcome to another fun filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I am your host, Matt Bertram. I am also Stephen still remote, so apologies for anything that comes up. I would just ask if you do get value from this podcast or anything that we've done in the past. It's very important. If you could share it, if you could like it, if you could engage with the content. We're going to be talking about LLMs today and kind of where search is going, and that is a big part of the new world and the new game that we're playing. And so I thought it would be great to bring another seasoned SEO on to get his perspective. That's also in the trenches doing this work so we can start to make sense of it all. There's a lot of new data coming up every day, so thank you all for tuning in. Ross Barefoot, welcome to the show.
- [01:16]
B
Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate the invite.
- [01:19]
A
Yeah, if you could just credentialize yourself a little bit. I know we were talking you've been doing SEO since 2002 and. And I just didn't know if there were any other accolades you wanted me to highlight. You're just a staple in the industry.
- [01:33]
B
Well, yeah, I've been around a long time. Of course, that can sometimes be as much a hindrance as an advantage. But, you know, we've seen lots of changes come and go. I started out as a web developer and programmer in about 1996 and, and then hung out my shingle in 2001 with a web development agency. Had a few employees, and immediately everybody who wanted a website started asking, well, how do I come up on these search engines? And at that time, people would ask me, what search engine do you use? And I'd say, google. And they'd say, what's that? So this is really prehistoric times, I'll tell you.
- [02:18]
A
Well, I'll tell you, our founder, Chris Burris, that was the exact same story, right? So we started off as E Web style, became E Web Results, started doing the SEO, and. And he was the host and co host of this podcast for. For a long time. I feel like, you know, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. We always hear that. Yeah, I'm hearing that. Like, what is perplexity, right? Like, you know, I mean, maybe people have heard of chat gbt, but what is grok or maybe I've heard of that now with some of the news, but I feel like there's a new cycle happening and everything's new. There's kind of new territory there. There's like, everything that I'm seeing is if you don't position yourself right now in these LLMs, and in, let's say 18 months, it's going to be 10x harder to, to position in them. And a lot of people are not paying attention to it. So I just feel like it's a new era of search. And I remember even when I would say the word SEO and people didn't really know what that was, but they're like, I know I need that. I feel the same thing with like AI and even LLM visibility or surfacing. I feel like that's, you know, it's, it's that the next chapter, really.
- [03:35]
B
Right, right, exactly. It's, as you say, history does repeat itself a little bit. What really strikes me is how some of the core fundamentals, if you've been doing, you know, really high quality SEO as you guys have, you know that some of the core fundamentals were obvious going back over a decade. I mean, we go back to 2011 when Google rolled out Panda and they gave us the guidelines, what constitutes quality content? You know, and they had the list of questions, and they're still using the same list of questions, you know, what constitutes quality content. Now, of course, that doesn't mean nothing has changed. It just means that there are some fundamentals that are really, really solid, you know, and what I was starting to say in the green room was that up until recently, we've really considered reputation management as kind of a subset of SEO of digital marketing, basically centered on reviews. I'm starting to change my own framing, mental framing. And I'm thinking it's all reputation management. And SEO becomes a subset of that. Because what you need is, okay, what's your reputation? Not necessarily in the minds of the consumers, although ultimately, yes, but what's your reputation with these large language models? You know, what are they going to say about you when people make the shift not just to saying something like, you know, foreign car repair near me, but instead they're saying, hey, I need a repair shop for my BMW. Who does that near me? And which one has the best reputation? And how do you compare them? And already getting into that now and, and the LLMs, the one thing that I've noticed that kind of works in our favor at the moment, LLMs are gullible. So we can craft that narrative. If we are paying attention, if we're trying to make our content basically get into the sphere of what they decide on, which is then another discussion.
- [05:50]
A
Let me speak to a couple of things that you said. First is the EAT framework is a very solid framework. When they added that experience component to that, I think that that was because you could synthesize a lot of the expertise through content generated by AI. And whether it be E commerce or whether it be whatever you had experience with, if you are in a picture of it, you're proving that you have experience with it and then you match that experience level. Okay, maybe you're not a doctor, but you've taken this product or you know, this product, like it gets, you know, it gets a little murky as far as your money, your life and like those channels you go down. But the EAT framework is a fantastic framework and I love what you're saying about the reputation management because yeah, it's about brand equity. It's kind of spread out all across the Internet. The LLMs are really like an intelligent human that's doing really in depth research and, and we just want to kind of shortcut it and that. And the shortcutting is the reviews of other people. Right. I forget exactly what that that term's called, but I agree with you. I think that there was a strategy for maybe, you know, overwhelming reviews to kind of push down bad reviews, or there was kind of tactics of reputation management. But now it's overall, you know, what are people doing, what are people saying? And, and, and to kind of bring it into the conversation of, of where it's at right now. Of. What I'm seeing is you were talking about the LMS being gullible and, and I think that that's the predominant issue. I've talked to a couple buddies that have gone to kind of some smaller SEO conferences and it's all about still tricking, like what's the next trick?
- [07:40]
B
Right, yeah, right.
- [07:42]
A
I mean, and so the thing that I see though, the reason they're gullible is they've just been exposed to real time data. Okay. They've been trained on data sets. And I've talked about this kind of, I don't know if it's a way to look at things. It's not really a framework or a thesis, but it's essentially there's like a land grab. Okay, that's happening. And why the land grab is happening today is because the LLMs aren't sure. Right, right. And I have seen, I was at a conference where Someone made up a fake city and kind of ranked the fake city as an example. And so, yeah, they are like, they only have the data that's fed to them, but over time and they're looking at what users are doing and how users are interacting. So like that fake city or restaurant or whatever you want to say, if there's no engagement or it loses engagement, it'll lose favor. You know what I mean? Like, so I think this gullibility component is really like the solidification of where these brands are going to sit in these LLMs and, and they're going to kind of, it's going to be a repetitive loop where it's going to kind of lock them in as the trusted source. So, so if you're not in there to knock out those incumbents, just like the top three positions in Google, you know, like, I've run up clients to position four and it'll just stay there. Right. For a certain period of time. And I don't know, that's kind of what I'm seeing. But I wanted to open it back up. I just, I felt like you were getting into something really quickly with the globalness of, of the LLMs. And I think that that's where, that's how a lot of people are looking at it in SEO today.
- [09:35]
B
Yeah. And of course you can approach it from a mindset of just trying to game them, but, you know, it was interesting because you touched on a number of these things. I listened to your conversation with Ray Giselhuber, if I'm saying that correctly. I like to say it like a drummer. It was interesting because, you know, you talked a lot about still the role that search plays and when it comes to that whole gullibility quotient, Google still, and I don't know for how much longer this is going to be, Google is still something of a gatekeeper because, you know, you pose a prompt to any of the models and what they're going to do is if they can answer it quickly from training data, they're going to do that. But the training date is out of date, as you guys discussed. Typically they're looking at and they're going to say, okay, is this prompt, does it require freshness? Like in the old days we had the query requires freshness, query requires diversity. They're going to say, does this require freshness or does it require local knowledge? Things like that. And increasingly their, whatever logic they've been, you know, conditioned with, whatever context they've been conditioned it with, they're going to go out and they're going to conduct a search and they're going to do retrieval augmented generation. Well, when they do that, you know, what are they doing? Basically they're looking at 10 blue links and they're, they're basically the ones, they're ignoring everything else that would have been on the surf if you were a human. But Google is the one responsible for moving those up in terms of relevance and authority. So if you're missing, if you're not in there, then LLMs are not even going to take a moment and evaluate you. I mean theoretically they could if you were in some other data set that they're looking at. But when it comes to their retrieval augmented generation, you're still going to have to pay attention to that.
- [11:42]
A
So what I'm seeing, and I want to get your opinion on this is so, so I think that as new data is surfacing, right, they're looking for the most current data I've seen data that said the last 10 months is really kind of the cutoff or like you could just say the last year for, for lms. But to your point, if you have deep expertise, it could be older if nothing has changed. But, but you're, you're trying to surface that, that information and I've seen a default from we did this deal like if we're talking chat GBT with Bing and that it shifted to more aligned with Google, which probably Google's search capabilities, well, we believe to be true, that's where most of the searches are and that becomes the default kind of, you know, this is, this is the trusted source that we're referencing. But here's something interesting that I'm seeing even recently and I wanted to get your opinion on this because this kind of dovetails into the reputation management. Now LLMs are going beyond that, right? So they're like, okay, this is the trusted source. Let's, let's lean on this and then like let's develop our own opinions of things. And it starts to look at social links which is starting to be incorporated the reputation management. Just how is your brand being mentioned?
- [12:59]
B
Right.
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A
Share a voice, all that. But this is what I'm seeing very recently the data's suggesting that the things that are getting surfaced in LLMs or are on average on the 10 blue links, 21 + so past page two, right. That are not written to tweak that search, that are really answering a question or those long tail key phrases. Like I've seen some of these older blogs, some of these SEO blogs for example are getting bought Up. Okay, but, but, but where you got the real. Not like AI generated, but humans talking about issues, talking about problems, solving real things that are just buried in the serps. But, but it's real information and really helpful. Like, I love going through those blogs and reading through them. Those are now the ones that are being surfaced in LLMs. So I feel like maybe LLMs are growing up. I don't know.
- [13:59]
B
That's very interesting. I had not seen that data and it conflicts with what my assumption had been, but I don't have any testing data to go on. And now that you say that, that does make a lot of sense because I don't know if you've done this, but as I guess a power searcher, when I'm trying to research a topic, often the first few links are going to be so heavily optimized that it depends on the query. Of course, sometimes I'll just drop to the bottom and I'll just dive into, like I'll click into page three or four or five because I figure it's going to be relevant but not as heavily optimized. And so like you say, maybe the LLMs are you know, being basically instructed to look for that kind of hidden authority, sort of like what's the Google Update, hidden gems update or whatever, where they're trying to surface stuff that's otherwise often overlooked.
- [15:04]
A
Well, yeah, I, I think that that's a lot of, kind of plays into the deal with Reddit, right. And you, you see, okay, what are people talking about? What it, what is relevant? And, and I'm seeing, okay, and then this is brand new, right? It's moving so quickly. Right. And that's why I want to get your opinion on this. I can see that like social mentions are becoming as important as backlinks. Like, I feel like they're kind of there, there's this turning point of, okay, here's all the information. Here's kind of the solidified authorities or entities that we're going to reference. And once those become solidified to validate, if they continue to stay in that authority position is, well, like comments, okay, it's like, are people commenting on it? Are people talking about it? Are people reviewing it? Because that's the only way to measure if this person's saying this thing and this person say this thing. What's more socially relevant today is, well, how does everybody else feel about it? I, I feel the same way. On social media, if someone with a huge following posts something and somebody with not a huge following post something, there are use cases if you know, you're using unique data and you know, people attach onto it. But I'm saying you post like, like what a day? Or you know, like people just post something like that or like I didn't mean it for it to go this way. And they post the picture. Yeah, person that has the social capital or equity gets the boost and the reshares and the, you know, like, like I guess Gary Vanderchuck is a perfect example. Like when he just posting like, you know, this or that, like there's this huge like outpouring of share falling comments because people want to attach to that authority and that becomes relevant versus somebody else maybe saying that. Again, I'm making inferences here because it's, it's all brand new. I'm just trying to synthesize this data on how to best position brands for the long haul. And the craziest thing that I'm getting, we did quarterlies recently. A number of clients were like, you know, LLMs are a small search, right? It's like 6% doubled like in the last year. But I'm not using them. You know, like optimizing Google is great. And I go, okay, we, we can do that. But like there's a, a concept of this future proofing of if you don't position yourself right today, it's going to be 10x harder. Like I don't know, in a year, two years when everybody jumps on this. And I don't know, I, I just, I feel like there's a s, like there's a, there's an urgency in this that I don't think people are following. But I, look, you've been in this game a long time and you've seen these cycles and there's probably a long tail on people getting involved in this. But I, I just project this out and go, okay, if agencies are doing the traditional things and LLMs are only showing one to six links, okay. And then those links, once they get established, stay there, right? And maybe the training data right now is, it will get to the point where it's updated continuously like Google, I'm sure of it. But, but for this period of time there's reasons why the same things are going to keep showing up. And so it's going to be a lion's share of the traffic going to a few of the serps. And so if anybody is generating business online, like if you're in that bottom threshold of people that are laggards in this, you're going to die on the vine. Like that, that's just kind of my opinion. And I could be. I could be wrong. I'm curious.
- [18:55]
B
Well, at least you'll die if, if you're depending on traffic, you know, to be from Google search, to be your primary revenue generator.
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A
But most do, right? Most. Most. Most companies that I see when they come to us, they're spending an oversized portion of money on Google paid ads.
- [19:15]
B
Right?
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A
Right. Just. Just AdWords, not display, not YouTube, just AdWords. And then maybe they're doing SEO, but they're usually doing heavy paid and a little bit of SEO, but not really committing to it. And maybe some remarketing on Facebook like that is like, pretty much the standard deviation of what I've seen. Now, if it's B2B businesses, it's LinkedIn. But no one's taken this change seriously. Like, again, you know.
- [19:42]
B
You mean no one when you say no one, you mean if, like your clients.
- [19:46]
A
Yeah, yeah. I'm saying, I'm saying if the clients coming in, all they're seeing the big thing that I'm hearing as well. My impressions are up, maybe. Right. My lead flows similar or down, but my traffic's way down. My traffic's down. My traffic's down. And they're freaking out because we've trained them that that's a metric you need to look for. And also positioning, which there is a heavy correlation to where they rank. But I'm starting to see that shift. I'm starting to see that decouple a little bit. And so my, my biggest thing is to explain to clients and people that are concerned about this because there's some big brands and media companies. We, we've talked to some really huge companies recently that are like, what is going on? We don't understand it. And we need attribution. We need attribution. And I'm kind of like, ooh, I'm not.
- [20:42]
B
That's a tough one.
- [20:43]
A
Yeah.
- [20:45]
B
And it's getting harder all the time for a variety of reasons. We have always reported traffic to our clients. We've tried, though, not to hang our hat on it. Normally we've tried to push them towards using depending on the business model, but using conversion conversions is their asset test. And ultimately, of course, I think we're. We're drifting a little bit back to the days of, you know, Madison Avenue advertising in the sense that you've got this budget and you spread it around and you advertise on TV and radio and magazines and newspapers, and then you hope your sales go up, you know, because. Because it's really hard. Like for example, I'm uncertain really what the percentage of search is from the LLMs because often they don't pass refer data when they send a click to a website. So the website doesn't know it's coming from an LLM. It's not in the HTTP. And so. And sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. I mean if you go and you do an inspection on some of their links, it's basically sending that traffic as anonymized. And so it's. And I don't know if they're doing that strategically or just because they don't care or what it is.
- [22:13]
A
Well, people, there was a big upshot about that and probably three or four weeks ago when this will be released, it will be a couple weeks beyond that. There, there is an option and we've set that up in GA4 so you can start seeing more data than just anonymized brand data. And then we've been looking at log files so we built just hatch together tools to, to look at log flows so we just see what they're interested in. We don't necessarily know why. And I think that that's the problem that the industry's trying to solve right now. But I think to your point is if you do good branding, good marketing, build that reputation, okay, the LLMs are going to follow what good research looks like, right? So if you're on multiple platforms and there's the 7 11, 4 like 7 hours of content which we've seen LLMs really reference entities like podcasting's been really helpful and high quality content to reach that. And then you know, you look at an engagement rates, they want to see a brand 11 times on four different channels, right. So if you use that framework, which was I think 2003, right, 2003 from Google, what you should be doing like again it goes back to the basic principles if you're doing good marketing, right. SEO shouldn't be meant to cut corners. But I think a lot of people look at it like how do we get as much leverage as we can? But you know, you optimize bad content and it doesn't stick, right? Like you need really good original content and then you need to break through the noise because there's man since COVID everybody's online now. I saw a huge shift in paid ad campaigns not working as well and we've fanned out to spread that out on other platforms to give them a little bit more love. But you got to see your brand all over the place to break through that. So I think that that is in line with what. What you're saying and what you're seeing as well. I mean, what are some other comparisons of what you're seeing in the framework of reputation management of traditional SEO? Just like, fundamentals that are working today. I'm curious, what are some other comparisons?
- [24:39]
B
Fundamentals, traditional SEO fundamentals that are working when it comes to getting visibility and the AI enhanced?
- [24:46]
A
Well, and. And just like, ranking clients today, right? Like, I think that clients don't care if it's L or social media or, you know, traditional SEO. They're just like, maybe leads are down or visibility's down or, you know, rankings are down. Whatever it is, I just need more business. Is this working or not? And I feel like we're going through this shift and there's a lot of, like, uncertainty. So I'm having a lot more conversations. You know, I'm doing more webinars, like, with. With clients, because it just seems like there's a bifurcation that. That has started, and we've really seen that with the, with the drop in traffic to. To kind of signal, okay, I can't see what's working anymore. I'm assuming if we stay the course, we. We should be fine. But then there's a lot of people that are freaking out on how do I bridge this gap, Am I doing everything right? And I've seen people start to pivot and want to launch, like, different campaigns, and they're not giving it enough time to set. So I'm just seeing how people are responding to this. Be very interesting. Like, I don't even have ICP target Personas of who those people are of like. But I'm starting to see different buckets of. When I talk to. We get a lot of inbounds, like, what their problem is and what they're unhappy about. And I think that there's a lot of churn going on in the marketplace right now, and people are trying to find people that can figure it out. And it's kind of like, well, we're all trying to figure it out at the same time, and no one has, like, the answer.
- [26:28]
B
Right, right, right. Well, you know, it's very difficult to answer the question because, as you indicated, things are moving so fast that it's hard to even pause and take a beat on anything. The one thing that I. There's a couple of things, though, that seem to be fairly clear, and that is, it's really. We're getting a lot more visibility from big content. So about a Year ago we started pushing our clients towards more extensive content and to lean heavier on eeat. And so as we've been helping them craft pieces and you know, or instead of like in the old days, oh, make sure it's at least 200 words. Well, now we're wanting, you know, 1500 or 2000 words, very, very heavily researched. We created strategically based on semantic topic research, you know, which is basically what keyword research is nowadays so that it, it fulfills some sort of need. Those pieces of content tend to perform much better. Plus for our clients we've been going through and we've been really aggressively trying to identify off topic content, thin content, get it off the site. That sometimes is a challenge because sometimes clients, they just, you know, they want to hold on to certain pieces of content for whatever reason. You know, like for example, one of our customers is a regional bank. They've got about 40 branches. So they've got a lot of where they've, you know, have.
- [28:09]
A
Where you templated it out. Huh.
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B
Well, and it's all this meet the team stuff, you know, where you visit somebody and look at their horses and what they do in their spare time. And, and so what we'll do is we'll identify stuff that maybe we can't remove, but we do no index it. And so we are trying to, and, and it has been useful and, and helping most clients where we're paring down the less relevant content in order to kind of scope the relevance of the site more to what its mission is in the eyes of, you know, Google or whatever Google et al. The other thing is for our E commerce clients it's to lean really heavily on Merchant center, you know, because it's still that it's the areas where I see that are less impacted are local search and E commerce search just in the sense that, you know, that data is more structured. But we want, we make sure that we, you know, always optimize their feed in Merchant center differently than their pages in search. And that seems to be continuing to succeed and much more visibility and more clicks in Merchant center which is kind of undergirding the fact that for our e commerce clients their traffic is way down, but their sales are not. And there again we see some of this and one of the things we've been working to educate our clients on is that not all traffic is created equal. And in this, these days you're losing a lot of crap traffic that you didn't need anyway.
- [29:56]
A
Man, you hit on something that I haven't talked about a lot. I've been doing a lot of internal trainings on it though. I need to kind of push those out publicly. There's kind of a lag time of training internally, teaching clients and then pushing it out publicly. Pruning websites. Right, right. I think LLMs can sniff out templated content really quickly and they're trying to identify are you authority entity in this geographic area. And if you're using templated content, that really hurts or if there's like outliers. And so there's some really interesting stuff where you can plug data in and you can get like a visual graph and you can show the clients, hey, this is an outlier. And this topic about horses is sending mixed signals. So we need to archive it or do that. Like we found that like pruning, well, anything that gets unindexed is a big signal. Right. That this is not relevant or helpful and trying to force that back into getting indexed. It's really to ask the question why? Why is that happening? Right. And so the, the concept of pruning, I kind of treat it like let's make the website more aerodynamic with the edges. And you know, if we have like wind drag on rankings or whatever is going to be the future metric, we need to sharpen that. And if there's. Yes, you know, if there's keywords that. I see a lot of websites that. One of the first things we tend to do is with a lot of clients is make sure they're like indexed in the right category like there are sometimes Google doesn't understand what it is as an entity and when those keywords fan out, it's all over the place. And so once you get it into those grooves and if you trim off that to kind of send the signals a little bit more, it starts to kind of move faster in that direction. It's a lot of like pushing a snowball down a hill and if you decrease all the drag, it will start, start, start moving faster. I, I think that's a really good concept you brought up that I don't think a lot of people I see with clients. Well, when we have like the menu structure conversation, the navigation structure conversation with bigger clients becomes quite challenging because you have different stakeholders and you're like, oh, it comes. Yeah. So I think. And then just really quickly on the E commerce, I think you're dead on. Right. E Commerce, I think Google's doubling down on from what I've seen from their presentations, that's really where it's at. And local. We've been really Focused on local because that's one thing we know we can control. They haven't updated that algorithm. We can impact that. And there's some crazy strategies that we've started develop that are 100% like by Google guidelines where we can get a lot bigger footprint. It takes some additional work to do. But that's one thing that hasn't changed and I don't think it's going to change. I thought at one point that might go away. But geographically defining the entity from that kind of subset GNB gives you the biggest trust of like this is in a geographic area, location and those reviews and the frequency of those reviews are super important.
- [33:38]
B
Oh I think, I think those profiles are important even when the business is not local just because it's another foothold, you know, because like we're seeing that with some of our B2B clients that are not geographically centered that still we optimize their profile. I mean we don't make it the main focus, but we make sure that that is a touch point. And you can see information from the profile optimization coming up. When you go to a like chatgpt and ask them what can you tell me about this company? Which is great.
- [34:13]
A
It references the reviews, right?
- [34:15]
B
Like it will reference the reviews. Sometimes they'll reference things that might be in services in Google Business profile. And so it's like the whole thing with large language models and generative AI and all this is just massive amounts of data and they keep trying to scale that up. So we're thinking, and this is not empirical, but we're thinking it just basically intuitively we want to give them as much relevant data as possible. So that means even though nobody ever clicks on a post in gbp, even though maybe they don't consult the frequently asked questions, even though maybe they don't read the description for the services, all of that is part of the data. So if it's done well and is on topic, my belief is that's like you say is positioning for the future, its positioning to, to give a really rich kind of structure, not just a footprint but a rich footprint to, to these models and you know, we'll see. I hope it works. Well, no, in a couple of years.
- [35:33]
A
So, so let me ask you, when you're, when you're approaching a new client today or you just get a consultation with a client and you're doing a discovery call with them, what are the things that you're looking for and that you feel are the biggest impact? I'm starting to create a survey here of what SEO experts think is most important and then try to map that too with some data and overlay that. And I'm curious how, how you're looking at maybe like what are the five things, if you will, that, that you are, are looking for or assessing when, when you're looking at a new client coming in?
- [36:23]
B
Well, that's a good question. And it's actually I have to, you know, full transparency. I have not had an aggressive onboarding process or sales process because I've had so little churn and I've tended to operate with a few large clients over a long period of time. But we are now, you know, considering these same questions that you're talking about. And of course we've, over the years we've onboarded a lot of clients, but we haven't had, we've never developed our own icp. You know, and I was thinking about this just this morning because I was thinking, you know, guy we, we work with, you know, we've got a client that's a financial institution, we've got a client that's a Hundred million dollar B2B in E commerce and then we've got a small ski shop in Aspen. I mean the very diverse, it's not like we have a niche that we really go after and that we do well with. And so I thought, you know, that my ideal client profile is mainly to talk to the client and find out if they're willing to communicate and to do any work on their own. So more than what business they're in because it's, I mean, you know, this, it's now we're having to look at so such a broader territory. You know, it's been kicked around here, the whole search everywhere optimization, you know, instead of search engine optimization. And although I'm not crazy about using that for the acronym, it is relatively true in the sense you've got so many touch points that unless the client is just willing to open up their wallet and say take whatever you need, they're going to have to do some of it. You know, whether it's maybe the social media or reputation augmentation or you know, work on certain aspects of their website. So if we like we've got a client right now, it's our one Fortune 500 client and I just wish I was in a position that I could fire them at the moment because their revenue is nice but they are so non responsive that I realize, you know, they're just, they're basically shooting themselves in the foot because they're so distracted and so non responsive.
- [38:51]
A
So, man. Okay, you brought up something that I want to bring up. And I wish I had my pen in front of me because you. I want to. I know something else you said where I want to take the conversation. I do want to also make sure.
- [39:03]
B
If only this was recorded.
- [39:05]
A
Yeah, I know. Oh my gosh. Yeah. So one of the things I definitely want to go back to is how you're viewing about reputation management. Because I think that that is the right way to think about things. Not SEO. I can tell you that what I'm seeing, and I have case studies I need to publish on these things where a client is expanding and wants to expand too quickly and doesn't have the authority either geographically or in different verticals, right? So it's like we do a lot of oil and gas and so people are like, oh, we're, we're in medical, we're in agriculture, we want to do oil and gas and let's just jump in and do it. And I'm like, okay. And, and I've even seen this and I've been thinking about this. This is something that's been on my mind recently is we work with clients because everything we gets inbound from all different industries. I was on a call with a publicly traded crypto company two days ago, but we, you know, brought on some hundred million dollar manufacturing and logistic companies because there's a bunch of stuff coming from Mexico. Like we're all over the place, right? I got healthcare companies calling me and I'm like, I've wanted to dive down and specialize, right? And it's been hard when great clients come and the fundamentals of SDO are the same. And I go, okay, can I compete nationally with some very large companies in the SEO space? Like, right. Like people can. There's a lot of consolidation. People are just throwing money at some of these keywords and adwords. And I'm like, do I want to do that? And I see how the LLMs are going. I go, okay, where do I want to specialize? What do I want to specialize in? And then I have to be really, I'm thinking through how many different categories do I think I can own? When you're looking at the lms and I try to tell clients that, and I used to tell them like, we had some financial centers in New York that were expanding across the United States. And they're like, we want to set up offices here, here, here. And I go, based on your budget. Based on your budget. I don't think we can go after each one of them and then sometimes, you know, they'll lean on my account managers, we'll do it and then I'll have to come in and we'll have to walk it back and say we spread ourselves too thin, we've dropped in the rankings. Like, we need to focus and we need new, new capital to go after this, if that's what you want to go after. And I'm seeing again that same story being applied potentially to the LLMs on the, on the depth of expertise that are going to get surfaced when you look at that. And, and so I agree with you. Clients that don't communicate back to you. We have a couple clients that, you know, big clients, they won't get back to us to prove approve the content. And so it's like all there, it's sitting there, it's waiting and we know we're going to get measured on performance and it's like, hey, like we're getting backed up here. Like we need, we need some time. Even like creating social. That, that's one of the big things I want to get your opinion on is we've just now started kind of an information architecture social media strategy that we've opened up. Like we wanted to just focus on maybe search engine marketing, paid ads and SEO. And I just never saw social media as like, hey, other people can do that better than us. Right? Like, there's like, that's a whole that needs to be an agency in itself. I even carved off our videography component during COVID of that because that, that kind of no one would meet in person. And now I'm looking at that going, we need to bring all that back. That's probably now more important or equally as important. I feel like it's a one, two punch of attacking this market from the reputation standpoint. What is your opinion on that? Because it seems like social is part of the mix.
- [43:16]
B
Well, it seems like you're like I'm a mirror image of you or you're a mirror image of me. Because we've done the exact same thing. We focused on SEO and paid search and I have deliberately steered away from social media. Now we'll do some social media work, but only if somebody puts a gun.
- [43:38]
A
To our head and it's existing client. Right. It's not.
- [43:41]
B
Yeah, exactly.
- [43:42]
A
It's not a lead product or anything. Yeah.
- [43:44]
B
And now I'm seeing that it's absolutely impossible to ignore social media. I mean, we've got to also. Either we have to partner with somebody or we have to. And right now I'm bringing on board somebody who's a seasoned social media person, particularly for one of the brands that I work with. And I'm telling them this is going to be a huge part of it going forward because they're going to be looking at it and then. But when you say social media, well, what are you saying?
- [44:18]
A
Yeah, what does that mean? Like, there's a couple.
- [44:20]
B
What does that mean? You know, so you've got, you've got this, this pretty broad landscape. I mean, it comes back to me over and over. And I hate saying this, you know, coming from a small business background, but it just seems like to cover all these bases is going to require more budget and it's probably going to be more the realm of larger companies that are also enlightened enough to see this is where they've got to be spending their money. But I think a lot of companies are not going to see that or they're not going to see it until it's that 10x harder to get into as you're, you know, talking about. So a big part of it is the communication and education of the client. And I can tell you guys do that sort of like us, but to do that, you've got to have a client who's willing to be educated well.
- [45:13]
A
You know, so I do, I do coaching for a number of SEO companies and digital marketing companies. And what's interesting is, you know, when I bring them on, I think it's going to be like, okay, I'm going to teach you all this SEO. It goes back to like, most of the questions are client communication questions and I have to just share examples. Like I have two examples right now of where I know the way to not do stuff. Right? Like, I've learned the hard way. Here's something. Recently, talking about the videos, a lead that we, we had on a drip came back, wanted a, a big video production for a conference that's coming up, I think in November. And I'm like, I don't have any video people in house. I don't want to deter the focus of all this stuff that's going on with the LLMs. I don't want to project manage it essentially right. So I basically, she was like, ready to go. This sounds good. I like it. Everything, whatever. I gave her the referral to the person that did all her work that I had in house. Email, introduction, referral, right? No, she didn't want it. She was like, oh my gosh, like, now I have to start over. I wanted to go with you guys. I'm like, no, this is the person that we're in my whole department. Like, so you don't like, I'm not going to mark it up, but she wanted me or my team to product manage it and if I would have just, if I would have just done it as a subcontract, like a double margin thing and just handed her to it, like under the brand, like gave him an email, it would have been fine. But because I referred it out, she totally lost it on me. And I was shocked by that personally.
- [47:03]
B
Yeah, I mean, I can see why you're shocked, but it doesn't surprise me. You know, I've, I, I've been going through this thought process of what is my unique selling proposition. And it's not results and it's not activities. It's that when I'm in a call with clients, they trust me as the authority and they've worked with me enough that they trust also my integrity. I'm not going to lie to them so forth. So it's more about just who's in front of them.
- [47:35]
A
Yeah.
- [47:36]
B
So when you step away and suddenly you're no longer in front of them, it's like taking a blankie away from a little kid.
- [47:45]
A
This is new to me. Right. Like I, yeah, look, I've done, I've, I've learned a lot, I've done a lot of stuff, but I'm still making mistakes. And this was, you know, this was probably a good size video project. They had quite a bit of budget. I even tried to kind of come back and like refer other people for them to look at, you know, and I was just shocked, I was just shocked that the brand of who you are, they connect with you, they want to work with you. There, there's a lot to be said to that as we go back to the reputation. And they wanted my eyes on it, they wanted to pay me, made sure I was watching it.
- [48:21]
B
And so tough though because, you know, scaling, scaling, it's hard to scale yourself, you know.
- [48:28]
A
Well, okay, another, I'm just gonna like this is, this is, what is it called? I'm going through therapy, like live for everybody. Like, I wanna, like here, here's, here's something else that I'm dealing with. So like other people that, that listen, that are going through this thing, I'm going into a big meeting with one of our largest clients next week. Okay. And it's going to be like a half day meeting. All the, you know, different stakeholders, people that I kind of have talked to or known. And we're going to look at all their strategy. Okay. And the real reality is they're. They've been doing whatever they've been doing, which I, I'm under NDA, so I got to be a little cryptic. Sure, sure. But I like, this is really. I only have a couple clients. I have NDA and or. But this is one of them. But yeah, essentially they're spending a lot of money and they've been doing something for a long time. Okay. And it used to work and it's not working on the paid and it's not working on the SEO. They brought us in. Like we've done the stuff. We've got them ranking in the top two, three positions. Okay. One, two, three positions. We're getting them in the AI overviews. We're doing everything they asked us to do, but it's not working like it used to. Okay. And so I'm having this conversation about the reputation, about the LLMs, but we're kind of going against the grain of saying this is where it's going to go. I need it to work now. And so I'm preparing my presentation, right. And I'm like, oh, okay. This is one of the stressful things of my job. I always get called in when it's not going right for an account and it's not by any SEO. Like I have testimonials like, this is great. Based on the data, I could build a bunch of case studies on this stuff. Whatever. This is what I'm going in to say. This is what I'm leading with. Tell me, because I don't know. But they are much bigger than, than we are as agency as far as like revenue and what they're doing. I'm spending. Okay. On, on time, effort, like all this. Like, if I'm equate, I like to treat our brand like a client and have, have our team treat it like that. So I have kind of cost of goods sold and I kind of know what, what's going on. And, and we have a couple entities or brands that, that we're building. I'm spending 3 to 4x effort. Okay. On them. And I'm just like, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to say, do you understand how important this is? And you're spending, you've just upped your paid media budget. That's not working, but you're just blowing crazy X more than you're spending on SEO. And I'm just going to show you based on you know, our revenue and you how much more I'm spending and this is what I'm doing because I know that they trust me and so I just don't think people get it. That's, that's just where my, that's where I'm at right now is even like social media posts. I post stuff, very little engagement on stuff that's like frontier, right? I, I feel like my crypto knowledge from three or four years ago, whatever, 20, 22, whatever the last cycle was 21, I now have, when I'm in meetings now, people are asking me like how to move crypto from wallet to wallet. Like I'll pay you to get, I'll get some friends together, you can train us. And I was like, I thought that, that like the tail on this thing, I, I thought that like that's common knowledge now four years later or you know, even further back and I'm going now it's just starting to come to people's minds. So I think all this stuff we're talking about, only a few people are going to get it and then yeah, in a couple years people are going to be like oh, like that would be easier. And I don't know if it's 10x I'm just kind of, I'm just saying it's going to be way harder Once these LLMs solidify who they trust. And I think that it goes back to the pruning that you need to get deep expertise in the areas that you want to own and you've got to be really strategic about what you're going to do because I mean Google rolled out AI search. If these things continue to move, I don't know how long it will take but I just think it's going to get a lot harder. And I think to your point, these budgets are going to need to get much, much bigger. And what is that going to do for the small businesses? How are they going to be able to compete then? That goes back to me. Well, okay, if you're E commerce brand, I think you're okay. I think if you're a local business you can double down on local and you're still going to win on that. That game hasn't changed. But I'm seeing a lot of national brands or brands I haven't seen before move into these local areas because their authority is so, so strong. And I've even started to see spillover from regional brands internationally. Right. Like, and it's just becoming a big, it's going to be very competitive. I Just see it's going to be very competitive.
- [53:34]
B
Well, there's a lot to unpack there as the saying goes. And yes, it's, it's very competitive. I agree with you. The majority won't get it. But when it comes to clients, businesses, let's say even SEO agencies, a lot of them are not going to get it until it's too late. But when it comes to businesses and what we do, SEO, I think the majority of them have not got it all along.
- [54:09]
A
That's a fair point.
- [54:10]
B
Yeah. And, and so they sort of want to adopt the role of here's some money, make things better and that's the rare find the person, the company. And maybe this is why we've had so little churn is because we've just lucked into the, the type of company that is busy working on their business and once they've developed that trust, it's sort of like the LLMs. Once they've developed that trust then they want to go and focus on something else and just basically let us. And when I try to explain to them, because I'm an over explainer.
- [54:50]
A
Me too.
- [54:51]
B
Yeah. So I put together, I put together this great presentation, great on AI enhanced search and how it's going to affect their business and so on and so forth.
- [55:03]
A
Now I want to see it.
- [55:05]
B
Yeah, I'd be glad to share it but I, I, and then I customize it for our biggest clients. One of the clients I put together because they, this is the Fortune 500 company they just won't get, they keep paying us but they don't, you know, engage. So I, I created a loom video of the presentation and I sent it off to them and I reminded them, and I reminded especially the key decision maker who's the CMO and never bothered to look at a 10 minute presentation. You know, so what do you do with that level of non engagement now?
- [55:51]
A
So again I'm going to share one more thing just to let everybody know how transparent I am. We lost, we lost a 12 year client that left us before, came back, did some things and then goes okay, we need to use you. I actually it was a family owned business that we had to resell the kids that took over. Yeah. And, and there was this solid relationship there and the, the two founders were, well, not founders I guess. The kids that took over were married, had a kid. Okay. And we were sending them loom videos, emails, we would respond to all their messages but we used to have regular calls with them. Okay. Right. And we could see that they had. Weren't watching the loom videos. We were tracking what to do about it. We were sending them text. We were like, look at this information. We're trying to communicate something to you of what's going on. And it was kind of like a managed service. We've been working with them for so long. Called us up. Well, called me up. Hey, Matt, we need to talk to you. I said, all right. They said, we're leaving. And I said, really? Why? You know, we've been trying to get a hold of you. You haven't communicated with us in six months. And, and we've already hired another agency and all this kind of stuff. And, and, yeah, and, and we were like, we. I showed them all the things. They didn't watch any of the videos. Like, we were trying to get a hold of. We couldn't get a hold of them. So then that opened up, okay, we're debriefing. Why do we lose this client? What happened? And we, we really were looking at the metrics and we've determined, okay, so again, this is like, not an SEO thing, but this is like a client relationship, right?
- [57:45]
B
Exactly.
- [57:46]
A
We are now rolling out slack for all clients on communication as the main channel because we think people are getting death by email. And, like, and we're setting text triggers to make sure that they're getting the information, because it used to be email was the main form of communication, but we're not even convinced they're getting it. They're not watching the videos. And, and so that, that's, like, changing how we're doing everything. Like, I got an implementer, we're rolling it out, and we're going to say, this is the main form. And now everybody can see that those client interactions, these are the kind of issues. It's not their rank, their rankings were through the roof. Like, I was shocked that they were leaving after so long without even kind of like escalation and everything they asked us to do, rebuild, go. After that, we did it all. But it's, But I, I think that communication in the eyes of the client and, and that relationship is so critical. And that doesn't have anything to do with SEO. No, but, but it's. It, it has a lot to do with running an agency, and it has a lot to do with the time that we're in that everybody's overloaded with information. And, you know, I mean, I, I, you know, my email, this is my.
- [59:07]
B
Hobby horse is the overwhelm, you know, because I'm overwhelmed, but everybody's overwhelmed. And so the, the kind of, the accumulation of all that overwhelm is just this type of miscommunication. I should say. Missed communication.
- [59:22]
A
Yeah. Missed community.
- [59:23]
B
Yeah, yeah. And, and you're trying to get their attention. I feel sometimes it's like in social media, I feel like, you know, I'm trackside at the Indy 500 and there's somebody way up in the stands and I'm trying to scream and yell and get their attention. The noise is just too great. There are too many people. You know, they're going to be lucky if they see me. And so, you know, I don't have a solution for it. All I can do is I can commiserate that that's part of the problem. This is again, why for us, you know, sometimes you got to take on clients because you got to pay the bills and you got to pay the staff and everything. But ideally, what to look for in a client is not their business model or where they're trying to compete or any of that. It's, it's. Are they willing to communicate and do they know when you talk to them, do you get a feel for that? You know, and, and they're, they're practically worth a discounted rate to have somebody like that.
- [60:24]
A
Oh, I hear you. I, I've also, I have to, I've found that when I go meet them in person, and if the client's big enough, it will warrant that if they're not local, makes a huge difference. And I've had a lot of clients tell me, oh, we're going to communicate. We're going to get back to you. Like, you know, especially when we're like, building a website, like, we need feedback and, and, and I feel like there's a project management call cost that is huge that, that eats into, you know, any, any kind of margin. And you have to consider that we've started to do a, a new line item for that, which clients don't love. But I'm like, hey, like, if they don't respond, like, I have to add that.
- [61:08]
B
Yeah, yeah, you know, well, I will be interested in hearing how you, how slack works out for you at some point in the future. This has gone by too fast.
- [61:18]
A
No, I hear you. Well, let's, let's start to bring it back and kind of wrap up with some viewpoints on how you are looking at the market from a reputation management standpoint. And then maybe some of the unknown secrets of Internet marketing that you have been implementing and working for a number of years to share with people. Maybe some Best practices.
- [61:43]
B
Yeah, I would say from the standpoint of reputation management is what we're looking at is although the Google reviews is extremely important, we see them pulling in reviews from all sorts of platforms. So whereas we had kind of given up on citation building as part of local SEO, we're now reviving that and looking at okay, what alternative platforms can we work with? And also how can we, you know, use. Because we have like we use in our shop Bright Local for, you know, trying to boost reviews. And so now it's coming back and saying, okay, how can we work with them in order to help them put in place a review outreach program, but then not have it exclusively focused on Google and then also making sure that we make good use of the LLMs themselves when it comes to figuring out exactly what next steps are like with some of our clients. You know, we'll do, we'll go and we'll say, okay, who's a good, whatever it is, who's a good company in this area for this particular type of service? And our client won't be mentioned. And so we'll say, why did you not mention? And often they'll give you pretty specific information. Well, oh yes, they have a good reputation and they'll describe the client and everything that they'll, that they'll say, however, the reason we didn't mention them, then they'll give it to you. And often, although you can't trust an LLM obviously, but often they will give you stuff that as soon as you see it you can say intuitively, oh yeah, that's true. You know, we don't have as rich a variety or we don't have as many positives. But then also to view reputation is not just a factor in reviews. Now we have not implemented this because yet because just of time and it's so time consuming. But another place where they will get your reputation is for example, Reddit is the big one. But then they'll look at discussions on other. They're looking even at stuff like Quora that's pretty low quality. And so here again it's either coaching the client or asking them for enough budget to be able to interact with all these various points of presence and then going back to the reputation side of things to focus on content. And we're at the beginning edge of this to focus on content that is very much, for example, client interviews that also would have a video embedded that also would speak to, you know, why did you have a good experience with our company? Because they're still looking at your website as an authority. Authority about you. So we can't just say, oh, let's ignore the website because they're looking at everything else. But, but that's what I mean when I say, and I think this is the, it's not really a secret nor is it unknown, but that the LLMs are pretty gullible if you tell them about yourself in a way that is believable. And I don't advocate of course ever saying anything that's not true. But. But if you take your strong points, you look at them and you see that you've not been talking about those strong points on your website, you're depriving yourself of a very good reputation management source right there. And so that's a good starting point.
- [65:26]
A
I love that. Now, is there anything else that we, we haven't covered that you think is, is super valuable to call out? And then Ross, how do people find you, follow you, engage you in services? Like what would you like to share? And we'll definitely put that in the show notes as well.
- [65:44]
B
Sure. Someone who wants to contact me can just email me. Ross Eep for Extreme Exposure Promotions, SEO.com and that's the website address as well. I'm also active with search engine academy.com which is the SEO training group. Haven't been as active with that lately because of the time trying to keep up. And so the last thing that we didn't cover that is more of insider baseball. You like me probably get, you know, I feel like I'm selling Ginzoo knives. You like me get newsletters just every day full of content that you should be reading and you may already do what I'm going to suggest here, but what I've taken to because it's absolutely impossible for me to keep up with everything. So like for example, I, I got a Alita Solis's very fine newsletter. She's always got like a thousand and one articles in there.
- [66:47]
A
She's posting on LinkedIn. Like I can't even keep.
- [66:49]
B
Yeah, it's crazy. So I'll open often like 10 links from her email. I just add them all to Notebook lm. Are you using Notebook ln Internally, I.
- [67:03]
A
I have been playing around with it. We haven't put it into the workflow. No.
- [67:06]
B
So I've got an extension on my Chrome browser that'll add in bulk tabs and I can go down, tick all the tabs. I add them all into an area and then I've shared this with each of my team. You can just go and query across the sources. You can do that with YouTube videos as well. And it's been very useful because what I'll do is I'll feed a bunch of newsletters in and then I can go in once a week and I can say what are the top level updates that you see in these newsletters in the state range? And it'll give me a really good list.
- [67:45]
A
So Ross, you just gave me an idea and I'm going to, I'm going to build a little tool. I've been taking this Harvard AI course and I've been pulling a lot of things internally into kind of LLM to synthesize data and to bring together all these different data sources. And I haven't thought about aggregating all this. All these feeds and RSS feeds that I'm getting and all these emails. Like I, I am overloaded with the amount of new information that that's coming. And every time I open up any social media I'm like, I gotta save everything. Like I, I, this is, it's too much.
- [68:26]
B
And I'm like, it's anxiety inducing.
- [68:29]
A
Yeah, it really is. And I'm like, I don't want to open it up because then I'll miss the this and I got to start, you know, and, and I need to, I need to have a system to, to pull all that together and I like what you're doing and, and maybe we can have an offline discussion, but I'm going to build that in, to, to automation and then have it kind of synthesize that data to, to really aggregate. There was a, a newsletter when I was heavy on the sales side of things that I couldn't keep up with all the sports. And I think it was called Skinny something. I think it was for women actually. It was a newsletter that talked about all the sports so you could have like surface level discussion on it.
- [69:07]
B
Oh, okay.
- [69:08]
A
Yeah, right. And, and so I could at least have conversations with, with, you know, sports fans on, on sales calls. And so I, that was part of my routine. Every day when I was going to see accounts, I would know what's going on so I could talk about it. And I feel like that would be really helpful today. I think one of the most valuable things my team tells me is we have an internal SEO chat. And I just, when I find things that are interesting, I like publishing them in that and that's definitely becomes like kind of inside baseball. I think people like the value of that. I think you're doing something similar. I think you have a better system though. Than I have. So, so awesome.
- [69:48]
B
Yeah, that's, that's been, that's my one hope for some way through this jungle that we've wandered into is, you know, because getting a guide, that's tough.
- [70:02]
A
You know, I think what, I think that that's the most important thing that I want to say and, and end on for everybody is most businesses feel like they, well, they, somebody internally just needs to be the person dedicated to keeping up to date with all this stuff and, and, and making sure it's being implemented. If it's not a inside person, a third party that you can go to. And I think the value in the strategy and in the information is, is, is worth it. Right? Is worth it to know what you should be doing, what, what's valuable, what's not. Because you only have so many resources and you, if you line those up and point them in the right direction and, and I think that today more than ever, because everything's new, that that's a, that's something that people should be looking for and have that trusted source on, on who to follow. And then I would encourage other freelancers and agencies to become that person. Right. But then it becomes a full time job synthesizing all that information and sharing it and, and building that audience that.
- [71:10]
B
So yeah, even with, even with tools and shortcuts, it's still a full time job.
- [71:15]
A
It's. I mean we are entering in a jungle and I'm starting to see a lot of kind of collaboration happening where different people are doing different things and there's just so much to cover that that you got to be stay tuned. So I do appreciate everybody that's listening. I am actually trying to turn this into a dedicated team and a source and we need to fund that. And one of the things that you can do is well, follow and like and share is something you could do for free as establish currency to help let us know what, what you want to hear about and what you want to focus on. And I am building a team, but we're not building any revenue off this. This is just kind of a community benefit and also a way for, for me to stay up to date with what's going on and connect with great people like yourself, Ross. So thank you so much for being on everybody. If you like this conversation, let us know. I'll be sharing all Ross's links in the show notes and we'll be making some, some little clips and shorts for this. We are straddling YouTube right now, best SEO podcast, but we're moving over to Internet Marketing Secrets. So look for us there. I know a lot of you listen on itunes and Spotify, so thank you. And until the next time, this is Matt Bertram. This is Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. Bye bye for now.
- [72:40]
B
Thank you, Matt. It's been a pleasure, enjoyed it.