← The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
SEO Isn't Dying, Bad SEO Is With Krešimir Ćorluka
00:54:57
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- [00:03]
A
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 back to another fun filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, but better known as the best SEO Podcast. We're exploring LM visibility and moving into the era of AI. If you listen to the last podcast, I interviewed a former local SEO agency that kind of moved up to the northeast called Regex. Okay. So the name of their agency was Regex SEO. I now have Keonicle SEO. And now this is not as close. So he's all the way over there in Croatia. Peter, welcome to the show.
- [00:58]
B
Yeah, hi. Thank you very much for inviting me. For everyone listening, it's actually Kimir, but because it's easier for Matt to pronounce because Krasmir basically means Peter. So we'll go with Peter.
- [01:13]
A
Yeah, we're going to go with Peter. Just because everybody wants to understand who I'm talking to and what I'm talking about. And I'm a little dyslexic, everybody every once in a while. So apologies. But Peter, I, I love that you reached out. I'm talking to a lot of different agency owners about all the changes that are happening. We are talking about a lot of, well, internal changes that you're changing your playbook. People are working from a remote team. Since COVID there's. There's a lot of things on agency owners. There's a lot of agency owners that also listen to this podcast. But, man, I talked to a lot of different agency owners from different areas and everybody's focused on something different about what's going on with Google. And all the time on social media, there's new studies coming out that are contradicting past studies and things are changing and it's like a constant. Well, it's a constant moving target. And so I'm working on building a little news bot that's like bringing in all the news for me to tell me what's going on. Because I have clients all the time that are like, hey, did you see this study where, you know, it's now it was a semrush study, I think it was, and it's kind of surfaced a lot more recently. But this was like maybe a week or two ago, and they're like 27% of LLMs are picking up, like, data from things that are not getting indexed. Where is that coming from? And I was like, I don't know, like, I want to go look at that study. That's pretty interesting, right? And so things like this are constantly happening. I think that the LLMs were even following more, more or less when, when they introduced RAG to what Google was doing, they were kind of relying on Google. Hey, you've done this for a long time, we're going to lean on you. But now they're, they're not doing that. They're surfacing stuff from, you know, searches 21 and below a large amount of time. I don't have the exact statistic. So there's just all this data that, that, that's constantly, I guess, evolving. And so I would love to hear kind of, you set the table of kind of how, how you're viewing this, what you're looking at it, what are the things that are important to you and kind of how, how you're going to move forward with it. Sure.
- [03:45]
B
I mean, me personally, I'm kind of in the SEO is basically LLM EO or AEO or whatever you want to call it for certain, for LLMs optimization. But I'm not deaf, I'm not blind. I see things happening all the time. Maybe some things are even changing a little bit. But I think that the fundamentals stay the fundamentals and if we try to kind of pick up every little thing that's changing all the time, we're just going to get paralyzed by information, by choice. So I think that we should basically just look at the fundamentals and try to get away, away from them in a way where we can experiment a little bit, but base most of what we're doing on all of the things that worked before that still work. Like you said, a lot of the citations in LLMs come from like the 20th position, the 50 50th position, and so on. That is in part because those, those results explain the topic a bit better than the ones on the first place. Because someone who's in the first position can maybe have the best backlinks, maybe they can have a great, great content, maybe a great brand, but possibly they don't explain the product or the service or whatever the user is searching for in a complete way. And the LLM is pulling information from someone who maybe doesn't have all of those backlinks and branding and so on, but they do have like a really contextual product page or a service page or an information like a blog post or something with original info, insights, data, statistics and so on. I could really go deep into, into what I think the fundamentals are and that we should do and what we should do. But I think whoever is listening to this podcast probably knows what those are. I think like generative experience or whatever optimization or LLM optimization is basically good SEO and bad SEO is what people think is dying. Yeah. People are saying all the time like SEO is dying, and then they list what they think SEO is, and it's like cloaking Black hat. It's writing up like really stupid articles that are 2,000 plus words because of some reason and so on, and that is dying. And that has been dying for a long time. So good SEO, or whatever you want to call it is, is not dying. It's more alive than ever. We're seeing great results with, with all of our clients. We're seeing great results from other people in the space as well. Whoever's doing their job right gets listed in, in LLMs, so that's not an issue. But if you're trying to do the Black Hatty stuff and so on, that can work for a while, but not, not long term. So I don't know if you want me to get into something more specific about the fundamentals or the future or.
- [07:40]
A
Yeah, so I, I really like that the, the headline that I'm walking away from is, and I think you put it perfectly, bad SEO is dying. Right. And I think that understanding, like the vocabulary that everybody's working from is really important because I think a lot of people don't have a good handle on what SEO is. And I think you have to have a handle on what SEO is to understand, like the, the, the future of search and where it's going now. I think that there's other things you have to consider as well. So I think you have to have a strong, fundamental SEO background to understand what these changes are or, or how they adapt. But you also have to have different skill sets as well. So the, the areas that I think are important is customer journey, like how people are searching online. The user experience is completely changing. Right. Like CRO. Like how people are buying. Okay. People are leaving Google and they're finding stuff other places. What is it? 58.5% of traffic has left go. Google has gone other places. At least where they're starting the search. Google's still growing. It's debatable where that is, what that is, but it, but it does keep growing. I think it's in parallel to. Right. So I think people are still using Google, but they're also using these other search engines and platforms to, to do that as well. And I think really understanding that's important the other Area where I've really dived into myself and spent probably the last six months in heavy, heavy education on is understanding how LLMs work, how they're trained, how the transistors work. There was a big article, the attention is everything. Attention is everything. Understanding the fundamental shifts in machine learning, why LLMs are doing what they're doing, how RAG works to like you gotta have a basis in that as well as SEO. So there's like different sides or different surfaces that you have to think about on how these all roll together. And I do agree with you, good SEO tends to work. But also understanding why it works and also understanding that the LLMs are really searching like a very intelligent person, like they're surfacing reviews on third party sites that you've never heard of before. Yeah, right. AI, if you're running ads, which I'm branching out here, just kind of giving some use cases. I've seen ad campaigns like there's a lot of spam that's on the rise and you can use with AI. Well, guess what? Like there's a lot of black hat strategies where people are getting frustrated and attacking other people. We've been attacked. Like even if someone's running an ad and people start spamming the ad, then it starts to optimize for spam. So there's a lot of things that you have to consider. There's a lot more, I guess guardrails to know. You gotta go, okay, is this long term data? Is this like, okay, it's constantly changing now. Chat gbt, if that's what you're using, is constantly citing citations now, right? To make sure it's grounded because there is still 27% of the callbacks or hallucinations. Like there's a lot of things I think you have to consider in addition to good SEO. Now if all you know how to do is good SEO, you still can win. But I think also there's reasons why you're winning, that you just know that you're going to win by doing this. But I'm like, I guess the person that wants to understand why, right? And like really neural networks and like Google's just one big, you know, LLM, like, right, it's trying to organize information, it's trying to give you a call back to a certain degree. And so the better you can understand this stuff and how it works. Once you have this fundamental framework of SEO, you can start plugging this stuff in. But, but I, I talked to a lot of people and we're, we're launching like a certification soon. But it's like if you have a big bucket like you, you got to get the water to a certain line before you can even have any of these conversations. Because if you tell somebody to do this one thing, but, but they don't understand how it fits in the bigger piece of it. They don't know why that that plugs in there and what it does. They just know they need to do that. And then it gets down to a checklist. Because I've been hiring some SEOs that really know how to do certain things really good, but they don't have a framework or a philosophy around what they're doing. So if you get off that track or you get off optimizing with that tool, like, it's like they've just jumped into the. The deep ocean. You know what I mean? And I'm like, no, you've been doing SEO for seven years. Like, you should understand why this works. I guess. I. I don't know. That's. That's just my.
- [13:01]
B
Yeah, I agree. I mean, SEO was always kind of anachronism for me. It was a, like a evolution from webmasters in the early 2000s, late 90s, 90s, where you didn't just do, like, on site, you were trying to do whatever you could so your website is known about, so people can access it, use it, and so on. So SEO has always been more granular to me than maybe some of the people who've been coming into it. Like, okay, I just need to know SEO. And that's, that's it. You got to know how PPC works. You got to know how PR works. Conversion rate optimization, like, whatever. Just recently, we're trying to employ a person for digital pr. That's something which I think we do really well. And it's a specific skill set. You can't just ask Chad GPT. I mean, it can help a bit, but all of those AIs just pull up, pull all of the campaigns which have been done before. And we're trying to find someone who can get creative with it. And we really did have some creative campaigns. We ended up on the, on the new national news. We, we made a little fight between hospitals, the biggest hospitals in the country as well, and so on. And we were trying to find a person for that. And a lot of people applied because, oh, yeah, I know SEO. I know how to write articles. I know how to collect data and analyze data and so on. But when we tested those people, they basically just wrote really boring blog posts. No one, no one wants to read. They didn't understand why people read content, what they want to read about, how long it should be, what the graphics should be. Because you actually need to have like a huge, huge collection of, of like knowledge bases. You gotta be in every trade at least a little bit to kind of apply it to other parts of your strategy. I can't really talk about PPC or to any other team. I can't really talk to programmers and devs and so on. If I don't understand how websites are made, I can just tell them, okay, you need to fix this. But how? Like for instance, some website has a lot of their site is in JavaScript and then the LLMs and crawlers and so on can't really access it. I mean they can, but a little bit harder. And then most SEOs just tell them, okay, remove that from the JavaScript so crawlers can read them. And then the dev asks them, okay, but where should I put it? How should it look? And those kinds of questions are never answered by like the juniors, like the mid SEOs, because most of them think they're seniors. I've been in this business for like, like you said, like about seven years. And I would not call myself a senior, maybe like the first level, even though I own an agency and I have, we have a lot of people working with us, we had some big projects and so on. But when you actually talk to people who are really knee deep into this and have been for the last 20 plus years, then you start to understand that all of those checklists, you know, are not gonna cut it and you have to get way deeper into it and get into the other channels as well. So yeah, I completely agree. You gotta understand how the system works. You got to understand how basically everything works. Not just writing content or doing backlinks or what. I mean, you can do only those things. But then you're never gonna, you're never gonna evolve into a better SEO or a better marketer or agency owner or whatever there was.
- [17:43]
A
I've been to, at a lot of conferences this year and connecting with others and like, you know, sharing ideas and all that kind of stuff. And it was interesting. A lot of people were like, you know, SEO, what's the name? Right? Like even when you came on the show at the beginning, you're like all these different names, like there's a lot of noise, you know, other people are like, oh, like you're evolved. You got to evolve into becoming a great digital marketer. You got to understand everything. And even I did a recent Podcast with a, like an agency coach. And you know, putting somebody on the phone with a client, like Facebook doesn't solve it or a Google PPC person is not going to be able to answer the breadth of questions that somebody has. It's really, where is that foundation coming from? Where's that North Star? Like you said, how are these things associated with everything else? Because I can give somebody a checklist, they can follow a checklist and it will basically work most of the time, but there are going to be nuances to it. There's also going to be like, why didn't it work? And you know what, you know, like I, I can tell you we had a campaign recently that like, new industry, okay? New industry for us. We had crushed the same format, the same playbook with other sites. We brought on an account, it wasn't audited properly and essentially we did all the same stuff. We followed the playbook and the strategist on the account was like, Matt, like red alert. Like, I don't know what's happening. It's not working. Like, it's not working right? And they're like, we followed everything, we're doing everything the same. Like, we're crushing it on these other sites. Why is this not working? And so I, I always come in on the problems, right? So I always get pulled into the problems. I come in and I'm like, when you did the audit? Well, they, they signed up before we did the audit. But when you did the audit, did you realize that the competitors you're going up against are like da 70, da 80 sites, you know? And I was like, you're at like DA under 20 or whatever it was, right? And I was like, you're not going to solve that in four months. Like you're not going to out compete these sites and that, and that's a client expectation standpoint. And like you gotta, you gotta just like, how are you supposed to know everything? And also clients want you to know exactly, produce these leads, whatever. Like, okay, how much business are we generating? And six months or a year. And you know, you can put together models, but models are just made up data. Like, I don't know, I don't know any models. Like it gives you like a framework to understand. Like we've been doing models where it's like, okay, like here could be on the high end, here's kind of what would happen, here's what happened, like low end maybe, like if you don't do anything, but we're just guessing. And until you like get into a site and work on it for a couple months. It's very difficult to like, make those estimations on the competition, the geographic area, you know, like the search volume of the topics you're going to like. There's so many things to consider and again, like, strategy is where all this comes in. And I feel like over the last couple years, people have specialized in different service areas because clients don't want to pay for the strategy. Right. And it's like you want to build a house, you want to build a digital house. A website, I think is a digital building. And you don't, you don't want to hire an architect to come up with that. You want to just kind of guess. And so these are just kind of some of the, I guess, challenges that we're personally dealing with and that I'm seeing happening on, on, I guess, this side of the pond. I'm curious, what are some of the things that, that are working over there? You shared come some of the stories maybe go into a little bit more detail and maybe some of the stuff you're really looking at that, you know, I, I think it's good to give a, like a global perspective and what are the different conversations happening at different parts of the world.
- [22:08]
B
Yeah, Like I said, we mostly do Croatia, although we do have or have had some clients from us, UK and so on. We do this because it's way easier to compete here than to compete in the US and UK, where there's like 50 million SEOs who are probably better than you. I mean, I'm not saying that you can't do it. I'm just saying that the input versus output is way, way lower out there. So whatever works everywhere else is what works in, in Europe as well, and especially smaller countries like Croatia. And it basically works like 20 fold. I wouldn't even be surprised if some companies from the US and so on got a whiff of this and saw that you can basically make way more money in smaller countries just because, like doing a digital PR campaign, let's say in, in Austria or in Slovenia and so on, is way easier, way faster, way more scalable. The results are way better. Like, we had clients in the insurance business who've gone from like 15 plus positions to the first position. They've been, they've been the first position for the past year or so. We stopped working together just because they were so happy with the results. We didn't have anything else to offer them because they're first for everything. They have basically all of the traffic.
- [23:57]
A
Okay. So I'LL bring that up. That's something that I have always had on the back of my head is when you do really, really good for a client and absolutely crush it, your reward is you get fired and you got to go find another client. Right? Yeah, it's pretty wild. Now, one of the things you said is absolutely true. I had two clients in Costa Rica for a long time and I felt like I was one of the three people creating content in Costa Rica because the content was so thin and really like the callbacks as far as like the number of pages created, there was just not a lot of content. So it served up your stuff faster. And so when it's less competition, I absolutely see that. My question for you, which I understand what you're saying, but also, you got a currency, you got a currency differential. Now I know like Australia, for example, is, you know, almost on par with the US as far as like expense level goes, but I can also see maybe, certainly UK and maybe US or maybe more mature markets than, than other areas. I, I think, well, with COVID well, everybody's kind of move. Moved it forward online. But no, I, I see what you're saying. I, I think that there's, there's other things to consider when you're working in different countries. Like I'm working in Canada and Mexico mostly because we're, we're like North America and U.S. we have done stuff in other countries. But, but yeah, no, if you're working in an area that's not as competitive or not as mature, let's say, and not as many people are into the digital transformation yet, that like, that's what I'm seeing. Like certain industries, certain geographical areas, if they're not into the digital transformation as much as like maybe other companies, let's say industry wise, like SaaS is on top of it. Right. Like, and so SaaS is a lot more competitive than, you know, home services or something like that. Right. Because they're not leaning into the digital transformation or they haven't as maybe a small business would like a plumber might not, you know, be, be working the same way. So I totally see that. What are some other insights that you've found?
- [26:26]
B
Well, first of all, regarding the retainer size, the currencies and so on, I think you'd be surprised about how many companies are firstly open to doing stuff like SEO and so on a bigger scale. And also their budgets are not really that different from, from other countries. I mean, they are lower. But like I said, if you input, let's say 30 hours a month for like an expert senior SEO and you get let's say 5k dollars out of it. And if you, and you can get a jump from like the 20th position to the fifth and then to the third to second, third month over month. And in let's say the UK in the same industry, you can do way less or you have to do way.
- [27:26]
A
More hours because it's more to get the same output. I, I see what you're saying. So even if you're charging a different size retainer, one is companies might do a bigger retainer because they know whatever, but also you might not have to do as big a retainer because it's not as competitive. So yeah, you know, something that would take 50 hours could take 30 in, in a, in a less competitive country or something like that. Yeah. Here's one of the craziest things for me and anybody listening when, when we started. Well, you know, we're, we're getting a lot of leads through like chatgpt from everywhere and, and one of the first ones we started working with was again Canada and Mexico, which we had kind of done stuff in the UK and other places, but not like consistent business, I guess. Like it was like a one off thing from the podcast or whatever. I was just surprised how little we needed to do as an agency to work in another country. Like I thought there would be all kinds of paperwork that we would need to fill out and there would be like all kinds of other issues. And really it's like just make sure you get paid up front because, you know, there's no like recourse I guess. And it's like a month, like everything's month to month and get paid up front and, and that was it. Like I was shocked. And I've had multiple conversations with different business owners and we work with a lot of like oil companies and stuff like that that are in multiple countries. I just thought there would be a massive amount of paperwork to be able to, you know, work with people in other areas. And it, and it's really just a currency thing which, which is shocking. And I think even with, you know, blockchain technology that's going to change. I, we were always hiring contractors, you know, all over the place. Now it's more integrated into our, our true like remote style setup. But man, hiring companies and working with companies is the same and I think that you're calling out something big. There is really the playground is now global. Right? Like I think I, and I think that countries are now competing globally and it's not just about a geographic area. I mean that's what the Internet did, is it? It expanded like the reach and it expanded the connection. I think it's crazy. We're actually in virtual reality talking right now. For any of you watching on YouTube, we've actually never met, we're actually not really looking at each other, but we're in virtual reality. And you're listening to this podcast wherever you're at. It's pretty wild stuff.
- [30:12]
B
Yeah. And you also asked about some insights I had from companies here. Well, like I said, we worked for other companies as well in the uk, US and so on market. But I think most of the issues are present wherever. They're always present wherever you work. The biggest issue we have is, especially with big companies, when they have a strategy and like a separate strategy, team, branding team, then they have like some sort of brand guidelines where you can't really do anything, you can't change anything on the website. They don't want to do link building in that specific way because it's, I don't know, they see it as hurtful to their brand. They don't want to change their channels at all. So, and especially regarding like technical SEO, that, that's a huge issue because you want to, you want to give them the option to rank for more keywords and so on. So you do like a huge categorization like level up where you try to see like all of their products and how you can create new categories out of those products. Because that's the, let's say, the low hanging fruit, let's say just like creating more categories that works for SEO, that works for LLMs. And then they come up and they say okay, but we don't like this because so and so and because of X and Y and whatever. So I think all of those issues are the same basically anywhere. And you, you can kind of help yourself a lot if you just give up on some clients. Like not try, not try to have all of the clients all of the work because, because of the dollar amount or whatever. I've, I've improved my life a lot by not taking on any client I can get my hands on. Because we had some clients who were just like all the best about all of the X's. But some clients can really get all of the energy out of you. And then you can't work on clients who are actually grateful and who would be open to maybe even expanding on the corporation.
- [32:50]
A
Yeah, I think that that's, well, both of those issues you brought up two Things that I think are issues everywhere. One is depending on, you know, how their it's structured, right. Like there's issues with access to the website or there's not a culture of SEO. They don't understand why you need to make these changes. Like brands are changing. Like the more teams you work with, the more silos, it becomes really difficult with the bigger clients and really asking those questions and you hit a lot of gridlock. And that is a challenge. And I think that that's a challenge. Well, everywhere. The second thing you said is absolutely true. It's like the Pareto principle of, you know, you put, you get 80% of the results from 20% of your energy, but also you get the same thing like in the reverse, like on the negative, 20% of the clients give you 80% of the headaches, right. And then you're sucking all your time or energy to, you know, help try to please them, which they may not be able to be pleased. And then you got to make sure that you're giving equal attention to all the other clients. And that's why we use like internal management of hours to, to try to do that. And I can just tell you, taking on the right kind of clients, we passed on a number of clients. That's one of the things that I'm actually gonna set up in this like certification program. And, and I've developed some really good referral partners that if the client's not the right fit for us, it could be like, okay, there could be a client that just needs a lot of help and one on one attention that doesn't have a big budget. There are people wherever their business is at that would be super thankful for that client that want like super high touch. They want to explain everything. They want to grow together and that's the perfect fit. And so I used to be a headhunter, actually, that was my last company. I grown in my twenties, a staffing company and, and flipped it and essentially making sure that the match is correct between the client and, and what, what you're good at. Right. And I've been trying to really let clients know what we're really good at and why we should bring in other partners for other things. Because one is if we do everything, we're going to do everything. Okay, I would rather do a few things really, really good. But then you have this, and I'm sure you have this over there too. A lot of people want the one stop, one stop shop everything, right? And, and so we, we certainly have done that for, for a number of years. But I've been a lot more open to say, look, we're a general contractor, okay? We're gonna, we have really good people that do different things. We, but it's not always going to be all us. We're going to manage them, we're going to make sure it's good, we're going to be responsible for it. But we have great other agencies that come in and do other things that, and we're all working like, and rowing in the same direction. And I think explaining that and kind of setting that expectation has worked pretty well. But man, we've really honed in on, on certain things and specialized in certain things. Like we, we used to have a. Well, we still do have, I guess for the podcast we have a full time videographer, but we had a full time videographer the agency and we held on to them as much as we could through Covid. But now we actually have a handful of contractors not in house, but a handful of contractors that give us a lot more reach and a lot more depth if someone wants to do live streaming for a show or someone needs to come, somebody to shoot or do drones or whatever. Like we now have like a bench of different people that we can, we can utilize versus we have our one guy and we got to wait for him to finish up whatever work he's doing to work on this. So, so I think that there's trade offs and, and, and everything.
- [37:01]
B
Yeah, there is. We do that as well. Basically we have like people who work directly with us, like our employ employees and then we have like outside experts who we really trust and who we can't really employ because they're experts in their field. Like let's say for instance, someone who is really deep into analytics. I can't really be the guy for SEO and analytics and PPC and whatever. Then we hire someone like him for, for just that project. We have a couple of people that we work with this way. And I think that more agencies should stop looking at everything like a zero sum game because we've all kind of lifted each other up because we employ that person or that person for something specific which is like we have a huge project coming on and we're not really sure we can do it ourselves and we hire them and then like two months go go by and then they ask us if we can work with them on a client they got or they just send us the client. Like hey, I talked with, with these guys, we can't really figure anything out. But here, if you want the contact and we basically, all of us do this and.
- [38:28]
A
Well, maybe.
- [38:31]
B
It'S a different story in small countries like Croatia, Serbia and so on. Because we basically all of us know each other. There's not that many of us. There's like maybe a thousand people you see all the time. There's way more who do marketing generally. But these are the people who are all on, all the, all of the conferences and so on, all of the meetups and so on.
- [39:00]
A
Yeah, so. So I've realized like, as we've started to work with a lot more law firms recently, I've just made some connections and we've been doing some great work. Is that. And associates, it's like, you know, they do the same thing, right. They go get the right person. I think you're right in different areas. One of the things that you said that resonated with me again, so like bad SEO is dying. Like that's a big takeaway for me. The other thing you just said is SEO is not a zero sum game anymore because the optimize everywhere, right? Like you got to optimize everywhere. And Google is still growing, but also there's all these other searches and all these other platforms that people are doing in parallel to. Right. It's not instead of some people, it's instead of like me. It's like instead of like I only go to Google to like check to make sure.
- [40:01]
B
Yeah.
- [40:02]
A
That this is like, you know, but, but it, but it's growing and a lot more people are using it and there's a lot more exposure. And I think to your point, the what I have seen and, and tell me if, if, if you see any of this. But I, I worked with a variety of different companies over the years, but we would run ads. One of the things we did do is run ads for clients outside the US doing SEO. We've started to do more of that. We got some country managers, whatever. But, but running ads was easy, right? Like in a different country. And now it's like even easier. But the campaigns that used to work like gangbusters in the US on the B2C side, okay, not so much B2B, but B2C side, they worked like gangbusters. Don't work as well in the US anymore. But you go down to South America, those same campaigns work like gangbusters again. It's like there's like this three year delay of. I think it's like the maturity in which people are searching and how they're using the Internet. It's like you can almost predict the future, I felt that way with I guess fashion I guess in New York and California seeps to the rest of the country. We're in Texas so it takes a while to get here. But it probably comes from Europe, right? Uk, Paris, wherever, Japan. And it like there's a pattern, there's a flow of, of how these things go. And I think you're speaking to like the use cases or the maturity of the industry in these different countries. And so I think that that would be interesting to map out where that growth comes from. One but, but two is it's not a zero sum game anymore. Everybody's using all these different technologies to figure it out. Like the customer journey is not linear. It more looks like a, like an atom where everything's just like going back to the center and then people are stopping and then people are picking up later. And so attribution has been pretty difficult. How are you. That's one of the things that I would love to get your opinion on is how are you looking at attribution? I'm even finding a lot of the different tools which a lot of the different like gold tier, gold star tools to, to, to rent, do ranking, to do rank tracking is different. Here's something interesting. So a buddy that's in the space was doing, did a survey like 30 people and asked all 30 people to just go to chat gbt I think and, or Claude or I think it was probably Jack tbt and asked them to just ask the same question about this company, okay. And to see what the results were. And then the company, the people at the company did it, his team did it. And then like he reached out to a bunch of people and did. Here is the craziest thing. The client he was searching for was showing up at one place or another for every search, like top, bottom, middle, whatever. But the client who had been I guess searching themselves, it wasn't showing it anymore. And then what was different was where it was showing up for different people. It would bring in other competitors, like big clients, like big competitors, some no name, you never heard of competitors. And all that I think goes back to the instruction data set that you're building of like the Persona that Google or these LLMs have on you. And so you're always going to get a personalized customer result. And also all these tool trackers, right? Like when Google just said hey, you're only getting the first page. And then the tool tracker's like oh well we can go get the top 100. All these tool trackers have different Data and then when I search I get different data and it's like I'm taking like an average to try to triangulate what's going on, but it's super frustrating for the client when you send a report and it's like, oh, you're number one or you're number two and then they're like, no, I'm like seven or whatever it is. And so I'm curious how you're dealing with attribution or how you're looking at it.
- [44:28]
B
I just had a talk with one of my friends who's a real data geek and he's trying to create the perfect SEO attribution system possible. But we kind of just circumnavigated the issue by just asking the clients what they're okay with because we could I guess create some really impressive data driven report pulling from Ahrefs and Google Search Console and Analytics and whatever. But we just ask the clients, okay, what do you want? How do you want to track it? What's your KPI? And that's it. Most of the clients here, I think the UK and us and so on, is probably way, way different. Well, assuredly. But here people basically say, okay, we want to be on the first position for this and this or we want to increase our organic revenue. They're fine with, with it just being the basic organic revenue report in Google and in Google Analytics and, and that's basically it. That's what we track. And it's the easiest way for us because if we try to tell them, okay, we have the perfect system, then what you talked about happens. Like we create like a really detailed report and then they see in some 5th or 7th report somewhere else in some other tool that it's way different because the SERP is personalized or because it tracks clicks way different or their traffic estimations are different or whatever. And a lot of people are trying to track like LLMs. I don't think that works like doing this synthetic queries or prompts doesn't really work, but people are for some reason looking at it like a traffic channel instead of like a visibility visibility channel like billboards or social media or whatever. So I think that you shouldn't really care about attribution in the LLMs. And for SEO I think it's just easier to kind of figure out with the client what they want and what their proposed mode of attribution is. We can also look at like first click, last click, data driven, whatever.
- [47:07]
A
That's tough, man. Last click attribution. I have A client that's been focused on that for so long and they stopped doing everything but paid ads like over the years and the numbers keep going down. And so we're trying to correct that through some consulting and strategy work. Awesome. We're kind of wrapping up. I'm getting close to a hard stop. My last question for you is, where do you see the future of SEO going? And then how do people follow you, get in touch with you if they want to find out more?
- [47:44]
B
The future, I think, is basically in agents for every person. That's basically what you have right now. You're kind of training ChatGPT or whatever.
- [47:59]
A
System to kind of Python how to automate the boring stuff, how to automate everything. And then I have, I have. This is my, my light reading. We got building LLM powder applications, building AI agents with LLM rag and knowledge graphs, LLM Ops, applied LLM Ops. So if anybody wants to know what I'm doing in my free time, I'm reading textbooks, essentially.
- [48:31]
B
Yeah, I think that's basically how the system will work. Like everyone will have their little agent, their talk to Siri or whatever to buy stuff and so on. That will probably be the average person, because the average person doesn't really like the cognitive load. I don't mind it. I like exploring things myself, especially products and services. So someone like me probably won't use it in that way, but a lot of people will, because people don't really like to waste time on buying stuff, especially if it's not like fashion or something related to taste, like furniture and so on. But those systems will either create their own indexing system or because they still have to work with suppliers and so on, they're either going to have their own or they're going to just use Google and Bing like they did until now. The other thing I think that will change a little bit more is that offline will become a lot more important, because offline is where the attention is going to be, especially if most of the Internet turns into AI slop, and then you have like YouTube is AI slop and the social networks and so on. So it's either going to be that the social networks completely ban AI, which is not really going to happen, or it's just going to become so much full of slop that people are going to stop using it, or maybe not stop using, but just use it a little bit less. And then offline will be where you're going to be able to get their attention way easier than doing like social ads or whatever. Because the quality of the user is going to go down. So that's my quite dystopian vision. I, I don't know if, if it's gonna happen that way. It's just how I see things. And yeah, so SEO and all of the traditional channels are gonna do fine. They're gonna change a little bit, especially ppc. I don't know how PPC is gonna work exactly in the LLM future if LLMs expand.
- [51:11]
A
Oh, I think I, I think they're gonna find a way. I mean, they're, they're, they've always found a way. I, I know that the affiliate route, what Perplexity was doing with the affiliates was super interesting. No, I, I, I think everything's gonna go multimodal. I think it's gonna be like, you know, really your attention, but the recall, how are you going to get in that, that little sidecar bot you got there? Right? Like, how are you gonna break into that? So I think it's just going to continue to get more complex. I, I, I love your dystopian view, though. I agree with you. Because I think people are going to tune it out at a certain point. Like, I can, I can already tell you, I, I can start to see things and I, you know, know, I'm just like, ah. And so, so I think I, I, I, I think that there's a lot of the validity in what you shared. All right, so we're, we're, we're really getting close to time here. How do people find you? Get more on your thoughts. How do people reach out to you if they want to connect with you or connect with your agency? Canonical hr.
- [52:15]
B
Yeah, it's Canonical hr. It's canonical SEO agency, like a canonical URL. Like we're the original ones. So you can find me on LinkedIn, you can find me at our SEO conference, Croatia SEO Summit that we have every year. The next one is going to be in June next year. We're going to have Lily Ray, Craig Campbell, Gus Pelosia and so on. So some really hard hitters. You can find me on SEO meets that we do all over Croatia and the region. We're actually trying to expand those SEO meets into other countries in Europe as well, because a lot of countries don't really have a live SEO scene where you can just go and have a beer with some colleagues and talk about your stuff that's annoying you at work. So, yeah, that's basically it. LinkedIn, our conference and that's it. Or on our website, Canonical hr. Although we mostly do work in the region. We can take up clients in other regions as well, but we're not really looking to expand into the US or UK aggressively. So, yeah, that's basically it.
- [53:49]
A
Well, awesome. Well, Peter, thanks so much for coming on. I enjoy the conversation. It opened up my mind in a number of different areas. If anybody you like this, please leave a review. Please leave a comment. Please leave a review on whatever channel you're listening on. Also, we're really trying to get our YouTube going, so I think we're, we've almost got it all built out. Please go check it out. Thank you so much for following along. If there's a topic you would like to see, reach out to us if you want to grow your business with the largest, most powerful tool on the planet, the Internet. And I guess now LLMs, you know, check out EWR for more revenue in your business. They are sponsoring this podcast. We are pretty much North America. So check us out in North America and you know, let's stay in touch. Peter. Thanks so much everybody for listening. My name is Matt Bertram. Bye bye for now.
- [54:51]
B
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