← The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
Stop Chasing Traffic, Start Chasing Revenue with Ian Lurie
00:48:32
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- [00:03]
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This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet.
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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.
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Howdy. Welcome back to another front fold episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I am your host, Matt Bertram, and for those of you watching on YouTube, yes, I still need to set up my office. I apologize for anybody watching, but. But I don't apologize for the guest that I've just brought on. Somebody that's an old school digital marker. Somebody you probably heard out there. He was there at the beginning. He's well known in the circles of SEO. Ian Lurie. Ian, great to have you on the show.
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B
Thanks, Matt. Really, really excited to be here. And by the way, I've been in this office for three or four years now, and it's still not together, so I wouldn't, I wouldn't feel bad about that.
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A
Well, I got some trainings that I want to do, and I have a whiteboard that I need to get up, and I just haven't done it because it's just one thing after next. SEO is not just a moving target, which I've always said that, but it's moving at lightning speed. And every week it's like new stuff comes out and it's honestly a little bit overwhelming. I'm sure other people are feeling that as well. I mean, what's your perspective of what's going on in the marketplace today from how it's been?
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B
It's chaos, and I love the chaos. It's. I kind of live for times like this, and it's been 30 years of this in marketing. Right. I mean, I don't want to sound like I'm, you know, kind of creaking my way up on stage here to speak, but when I started, marketing was being disrupted by digital, right? And then SEO came along and that disrupted everything. And now, you know, then clicks started going away and that further disrupted everything. And now we've got AI which is disrupting the disruption that clicks for going away. So it never really stops, and I enjoy it. So if I sound like I'm, I'm kind of gleeful about all the chaos that's stressing everybody out, I apologize. I do know how crazy and stressful it is. I look at it too, and I worry about lost clicks and things, but it's a really cool challenge that I think we're all working with.
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A
It is. SEO is just a fun game. Search is a fun game. Just digital marketing. So from the aspect of, like, the Tactician and the strategist. It's fun from running a business and continuing to implement new SOPs and you know, client needs. So I actually just saw your post that ran. Had done. You had reposted Rand's post and I saw that, I think yesterday and I watched his video and like everything he said was dead on. And then I'm like, that's really the answer. Like, you know, which we've been talking about it, but it's. That's hard for a client to hear that we can't track anything.
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Yes.
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And you're just going to have to do test on uplift and it's impressions and, and it's conversions. And we've been telling our clients that in quarterly meetings that we've been having and they've been all trained on, well, one of the metrics is traffic, right. To my site and clicks. And now most of the traffic coming to the site is brand traffic. And you don't know where it's coming from and how are you measuring it. And it's like, yeah, we got a test and the tools aren't effective. I mean, I know demand sphere and I just had those guys on came out with the new tool and there's a lot of LLM stuff, but LLM's not that big yet. I mean, we're kind of skating to where the puck is going to be. But right now, like, you don't have much visibility. And so I'm just curious, I know you're doing a lot of like fractional CMO work and consulting. What are the things that are topical for clients in the conversations you're having?
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B
You know, it's interesting you're talking about skating to where the puck is. You know, Wayne Gretzky, I've always tried to tell clients to skate where the money is. You know, for us as marketers, yeah, we should always be looking ahead, but our clients need to go where the money is. And that's part of what I think we see happening right now is, is for a long time, a lot of clients were trained to equate traffic with money. And I don't know that that was ever true. You know, going back 10, 20 years to the, I mean, pre digital, the thing that we would always tell clients is you're running marketing. Okay. Is the business growing? You know, you're doing SEO, great. You're getting more traffic. Awesome. You've got really high rankings for terms you think are important. Fantastic. What's happening to the bottom line? And you know, first Google took away Keyword tracking from organic search. Right. Which people still haven't adjusted to. Then browser security took away some referrer tracking. Right. We all know how much traffic ends up coming from direct now, even though it's not really coming from direct. And now you've got SERP features and AI overviews and other things again, taking away those clicks. The thing that I'm trying to tell clients, the thing I keep bringing them back to every time they get in touch with me and I have clients who are getting in touch with me almost daily now saying, look, you know, I'm really not enjoying this way. We're ranking for less and less stuff. And this is not one client, this is every client I have. You know, what do we do? I say, well, take a look at your core business performance. Are you making more money? If you really want to test which channels are working, which ones aren't, you can always do what we used to call a holdout test where you turn off one channel and see what happens. I don't recommend that. In earned media like SEO and social and AI, I don't think that's a good idea. But you could do holdout testing of other channels and see what the effect is. Right. If, if you do a two day holdout test on paid search and you have an outsized impact, then you know, paid search may be having a bigger impact than earn channels. But I do not recommend doing holdout tests. That's sort of my final, the final statement I make to clients when I just can't bring them around. And I say, well, okay, let's turn it off and see what happens. And generally that, that kind of brings people around when I'm trying to persuade them in those meetings. Look, it's about the business performance. It's not about your rankings, it's not about traffic. Don't fire your SEO because your traffic is dropping. Right? Fire. Yeah, if your revenue's dropping.
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A
So I have kind of two follow on comments to that. Like the first one on the holdout testing. That's in my opinion, in my personal experience, working with clients. Yes. I don't recommend that because. Well, if you have, I'll give you an example. A client came to us that had been running paid traffic for a couple years with no targeting set up. Okay. And I was like, let's measure this test by setting up another test with parameters. Run it and, you know, compare it side by side. And he didn't want to run another test that would, you know, eat up the traffic that he currently had. And he's like, let's install the traffic on my, you know, my campaign because there's no traffic. And I believe everything you're saying.
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So.
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And I was like, I don't think that's a good idea. And he's like, how? It's not. I say, well, the AI, I don't know what the is doing. It's like learned who your your stuff is, right? Like, it's like a heat seeking missile and it'll find what you need.
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B
You're talking about Google Ads.
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Yeah, I'm talking about Google Ads. And so then we, so then we, you know, we got pressured to add targeting because I said that this is a good thing to do and it tanked his performance because you don't know with the machine learning what's there and you're basically resetting it. So our recommendation or my recommendation, which I don't know if this is like industry wide standard, is like once you turn on ads, like, don't turn them off, like, and even don't turn them down by more than like 25% because it will collapse like some of the targeting. I mean, what is your view on that?
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B
So, and you know, okay, it's a little after eight in the morning here and my caffeine is just now kicking in. So, you know, when I broadly define holdout testing, some part. Holdout testing is usually holding out part of your traffic, not all of it. And just to make it clear, I don't think I've ever had a client actually do holdout testing as far as turning off a channel or turning down a channel. And yes, you're right. With any algorithmic system, if you turn things down, if you adjust them, you could have long term impact.
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A
Yeah. And for everybody listening, I want you to know I'm looking at Ian as a mentor here, okay. He is a expert in this industry. He's very modest. He's been around a long time. So I'm asking him for what is what I'm doing, right? It's like this is how the conversation is going just for everybody listening.
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B
And by the way, that makes me feel really old when you say he's been around a long time. But it's okay, it's all right.
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A
No, it's in a pot. It's in a positive life. You're expert level, like way past 10,000 hours. Like, you know, like, right, you're, you're an expert as, as a mentor. It's, it's definitely meant to be a comment, a compliment. My, my second question for you or comment for you, going back was, I've always had to train my team and the, the SEOs and the people doing the work that just because you're ranking them like top three in Google doesn't mean they're not going to fire us. Okay. Because ranking doesn't equate to revenue. And I've drilled that in their head so much and like when I talk I'm like, what is the impact of this? And I feel like it's almost been reversed. Like the client, even though the revenue's up, they'll be like, oh, traffic's down. And then they'll be upset. I'll be like, what, how's revenue? Oh, well, yeah, that's actually done pretty well. And if you don't have those conversations to get like in alignment and that expectation in line, you know, it tends to turn out negatively from a client interaction. So there's this constant education with a client and also team to make sure we're looking at the right things and we're starting to speak in terms of revenue, not in terms of ranking.
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B
The, the thing to coach teams and it's something I always kind of coached my teams as best as I could. But the thing to coach everybody is you do still need your numbers. You need to have them in order. And when it comes to this, this fall of traffic, right, this decline of clicks, decline of attribution, you need to be able to do this lift based measurement. And I'm you, I'm going to steal that phrase from Rand because lift based is so much better than time managed, time matched or anything like that. It just, it fits. But being able to look and say, here's when our rankings improved, or Here is when ChatGPT started naming us as one of the top tools for X or y. Here's when ChatGPT started talking about us in a different way. Here's when Google put us into this particular SERP feature. And then look at this, a week later, revenue went up. And then here unfortunately is when we drop back out of this, you know, this particular prompt response or this particular SERP feature or whatever. And look at this, revenue went down a little bit. You need to be able to match it up like that.
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A
What are those tools you're using to do that? And then what would be the KPIs you would recommend to be looking at today?
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I'm still using plain old Google Analytics. And then the books, right? The business's financial performance. You know, every business should be able to tell me what their revenue is and hopefully tell me what the revenue is from digital versus in store, if they're doing in store or other sources. So I should be able to literally just match up, okay. And then whatever rank tracking tools I'm using, right? So like I use Gumshoe to track AI mentions and I have my own hack together tool that does that. And then I use Semrush or Ahrefs or Moz or whatever to track rankings. But those three things, right? So some kind of traffic measurement like Google Analytics, some kind of rankings and share of voice measurement, probably two or three tools because you're tracking multiple places. And then whatever the business, business earnings are right, wherever you're getting that data, you should be able to match those up and you can get more granular. So if you know that a client did a particular offer or if you know that a particular product or service gained visibility, you should be able to track to that one service. What happened to revenue from for this one part of the business or this one product or this one suite when suddenly all earned media and I do include both SEO and generative engines of some kind or another. I can't believe I started saying generative engines because you've heard me rant and rave about GEO before. But we should be able to track when mentions in earned media changed for a particular product or service or facet of the business and attribute that just over time just lift based to the sale of that particular product or service. Or we may see, you know, unintended follow on effects where suddenly we got more mentions for product A but sales for product B increased. And then we want to investigate that. There's a lot of homework to do here and that's the part that I find really cool. But you do have to train your teams and your clients that it does take that kind of work. It's not just going to Google Analytics taking a look at where your revenue is coming from and saying, oh, it's coming from direct. All right, then I guess I don't need organic search or paid search anymore. You want to be very, very careful about that.
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A
I had a question out of that. I have gotten a lot of clients manually, right? They're not using all these tracking tools that we have, man, manually doing searches from different spots on the phone on device in different locations. Yeah, you know where I'm going with this. And they're like your data. And I'm like, it's not my data, it's this is either, you know, I'm using like a Rank Math or GA4 or Search Console or Ahrefs or Semrush, like Mangalo tools, like we have tons of tools. I've used Nightwatch, like we've used all kinds of tools to track this. We use Moz. Like every one of them is going to give you a little bit different answer based on when it's updated, where their data centers are, what it is. And I've found myself in conversations with teams, okay, with like you get on with the team and you got the IT guy there and he goes, this is all theoretical. And I'm like, you're right, it is. But these are the, these are the industry standard tools that I have those.
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Gravity I'm just pointing out.
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So how do you have that, how do you have that conversation? Because when they do a personal search and it's like, I'm not seeing what you're telling me. You're telling me you're ranked number one for all these terms, which I'm like, this is what the tool's saying. And they're like, but I'm not seeing that because of that personalized search. And then I'm trying to ask them where they did the search. And you know, I understand the chain of logic with like LLMs and like it stores all your information, it's going to give your preferences. But I think Google's doing that to, to, to a point too. So how, how do we speak to that? When people even go in, you know, incognito mode and they search it and it doesn't come up with the data you have, how do you handle that?
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I really just explain all the details and to me that's actually an awesome teaching opportunity with clients to explain to them just how personalized traditional Google search is. Right. Even today, even just the way the results page is laid out can change from person to person, even if you are incognito based on your location. And it is important also that they understand incognito really isn't quite incognito. Right? So what I'll generally tell them is, look, I'm using tools that give us the most accurate user neutral view possible and I am tracking for different countries and regions. So, you know, for example, if I switch my VPN so I'm sitting next to you in your office and then they get really creeped out, then you'll notice I'm getting the same result as you, but most. But all of your customers are not sitting in your office. They're all over the place. So when I use rank tracking, I'm tracking all over the place. And it is going to vary. It's definitely going to vary. But you know, I'm. This isn't, this is us tracking your performance over time overall in search driven earned media. This isn't about precise tracking down to one position on the page. And this is something I really try to emphasize to clients. And there'll always be someone in the room who rolls their eyes and says, yeah, sure, you know, this is what all the marketers are going to say. But what, you know, what I'll say is you're totally right. Right. We are not marketing to algorithms. And even if we could get you consistently to number one on every search engine, for every location, for every person, with every search behavior on the planet, there's still going to be differences in behavior and response in the audiences that are using these things. You know, we are not in a quantitative world as marketers. We are not in a quantitative world when it comes to share of voice and visibility. We are in a quantitative world when it comes to business performance. But marketing, as long as we're selling to humans, right, or even agents that are programmed by humans and customized by humans, we are still in a qualitative world. We're not measuring precise numbers. We're using numbers to sort of give us a general idea of how things are performing. In the end, it does come down to the business. And by the way, I'd say I get fired about half the time when I'm having that discussion with clients. But there really is no other discussion to have. I mean, unless you want to go out there and tell people, you know what, I can do this precisely. Yeah, I know your numbers look weird, but I have the right numbers, which is just not accurate. Right. You don't want to, you don't want to corner yourself that way and you don't want to make assertions that even as you're making them, you know, you can't back up. So that was a very long answer. But what I'm generally telling clients is rankings vary based on human and location, and there's nothing you can do about that. Even an incognito session. What I'm using is tracking the most user neutral rankings possible.
- [19:18]
A
I love that, I love that word. I'm going to have to, I'm going to have to utilize that word. And I'll definitely, yeah, I love that neutral, neutral, user neutral view. And we're not living in a quantitative world, so I'm going to use that. And I'm going to definitely give you credit for it too. Because I think it's, I think it's fantastic because it's, it's. I was saying that and we were communicating that, but not as precise as that because that, that answers the question for me. When I heard you say that at the beginning of your answer, I wrote it down and I said, okay, that makes sense. I just wasn't articulating it right. And I feel like a lot of consulting with clients has become being the teacher, but like getting in alignment with expectations and like I, I think a lot of clients, depending on who you're talking to and the type of client it is like this profile. Some clients don't even want to hear it, they don't want to learn it, they don't understand it and they. You almost have to be a marketing company or understand marketing to run business today. If you're running it online, you can't just get louder and say fix it and, and that be the case to transition really quickly to another topic that I think I would love to get your opinion on. I just had a quarterly yesterday. We have a client that engaged us six months ago. We're first position, literally like couple positions or two. But they were not ranking at all for every term. Okay, like that they wanted like literally every term. Not getting the kind of like, they were like, they want the head terms, they want the, you know, they want that core term. And I'm like, I'm not, you know, and I'm like this website, I'm not sure about this website. And I, I voiced those things at the beginning. But I'm like, if you're paying me to rank it, ranked it, we're at the end of the six month contract. I'm like, I delivered exactly what you asked me to do, but, but the revenue is not there. And you know, there was a couple people on the call and you know, one was kind of getting sour on the website and they're like, okay, now we're open to radical changes on branding, design, everything with the website. So I still feel like we have authority, but it's like they've invested a bunch of money and they're not seeing the roi. And I'm going, well, there's not a lot more juice we can squeeze out of this limit. I mean we can do some more con. We. So we're working on conversion rate optimization. We're encouraging them to spread their ad budget around. You know, there's some strategies going after specific LLMs that were, we're, we're rolling out. They're, they're at a very nascent stage right now. But I'm like, and then I explained to them some of the stuff from, you know, SEO week, like, like here? Yeah. And I was like, this is where we're at. And you know, I don't, what, what do you want to do? You know, And I, I, I really, I, I think they were like, they understood and they're like, okay, now lead us. Like, right, so we moved into, okay, we want to view you as the trusted advisor. And I'm going, okay, but I don't have a lot of comps. Like, I have a few, but I don't have a lot of comps. I'm like, like, we got one client in the AI overviews and then got a link in there, right? And I was like, okay, I can, I know how to do that, but I'm looking at their traffic and they're like, why do you think the website's not working? And, and so to be completely transparent, I wasn't 100% on why, why it wasn't working. And, and so we've set up like heat mapping and like, like I'm, I'm doing things to try to get granular, to understand, but in the old world, the old game, like that thing should have been pumping out leads. Now transactional type of content was like two point whatever. And then informational content was like 70. So it was like, so, so I'm like, hey, all that's off page, you know, and you got to build a brand. I don't know. That was kind of my answer. I know that you don't know all the details of it, but tell me, critique me, how did I do? I'm curious, I mean, what you would.
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B
Have done different or that it sounds like you said all the right things. I mean, what I would generally say to the clients is, all right, let's start looking at the site. You know, we've done these things. Let's look at two things, right? You had these terms you really wanted to go with, and I don't know how that initial conversation went, but you know, and I had mentioned maybe these other phrases would make sense as well. You know, maybe we should focus a little bit more on, on the, the, the chunky middle than, than the head, but whatever. But let's, yeah, let's take a look at the site, right? So your traffic is up, assuming their traffic is up, but your revenue's not. Let's take a look at your site. That may be the opportunity that we're looking for. So let's start tracking it. The only other thing I would do, and I do this and I do it sincerely with clients, is, look, I know how frustrating this is. You know, humans are a pain in the ass and that's who we're selling to again. And I know I bring that up a lot, but so, you know, we've done what we can with the machines, right? We've done everything we can to make you visible in earned media. Or at least you've seen some gains there, but those gains aren't turning into money. Okay, yeah, let's start looking at your site. Let's do heat mapping. I think that's, you know, that's exactly what I would do. Let's take a careful look at engagement with individual pieces of content on your site. Let's look at the, the Path Explorer in Google Analytics and see how people are navigating through everything. There's all sorts of steps we can take now. Just. And the only other thing I would have said is the work we've done isn't wasted. Right. We have, we have grown your traffic. Right. We've got people coming to the storefront now. Now we need to figure out whether we need to change the storefront or whether we need to add other sources of traffic or do we need to go where the users are and maybe not look at increasing traffic. So do we need to have some of that content out there where people don't need to click just to sell, you know, to start to get a better sense of your product? But my gut tells me, you know, if their traffic's up, you got them ranking for the right terms. The terms make general sense to you? Yeah. Then it's, it's about the site. Let's take a look at how we get more of those people on your site converting and let's also look at what our conversions are.
- [25:47]
A
I just want to stop there and do a quick commercial for you. Anyone that's listening. Ian is a great coach. And if you're looking at struggling with dealing with client issues right now, which I feel like, you know, with all the headwinds that are going on, like, I mean, I'm right there with everyone else and I appreciate the input. Hopefully other people are getting value from this call, but Ian's one of the go tos that he's run an agency for a long time. He's seen it all. He's a great mentor in that regard. So reach out to him. I believe he does consulting in that regard as well. So I just wanna do a quick Commercial for you.
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B
If nothing else, I can tell you all the things I did that failed utterly.
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A
That's that. Well, that keeps you out of a ditch, right?
- [26:35]
B
Like hiring. People ask me sometimes, you know, can you help me with hiring? I can say, I have made hires so bad that people who worked for me 20 years ago still make fun of me about the hires, but at least I can tell you what led to that. And then you can make sure you don't do that so often. My coaching is, yeah, this really didn't work. So I would, I would try anything but what I'm telling you right now. But, yes, I am always happy to chat with people about their agencies or consulting or, you know, whatever challenges they're facing.
- [27:05]
A
I appreciate your humbleness. All right, let's go to, like, what's topical right now? I mean, what are the things that you're dealing with that you're seeing that you're keeping you up at night? Like, what's keeping you up at night? Like, what are you looking at? Or what's fun, right? Like, what's keeping you up in a positive way? Because, I mean, I was sitting around playing with my kids, Vimeo 3, making some AI prompts, right? And letting their, their, their creativity come to life and them seeing it. And then I got my kids going, we want to make a YouTube channel. We want to, you know, so, so I, I'm seeing, like, creative creativity is opening up. And I know that that's not the topic of this conversation, but, like, I'm spending time in AI and AI is like, permeating into everything. And I think it's still early, but, I mean, if Google's going to switch over. I was having a conversation with a local. Like, we, we've been doing a lot of, like, SEO local stuff recently because I still think there's a huge opportunity that ties to revenue in that area. And I was talking to a consultant and, and I started going in AI mode. The 10 blue links are going to be gone. What's going to happen to gnb? Like, I. And I'm like, I've never had that thought in my head before. Like, where is the market going? I'm just, I'm. I would love to get your predictions and.
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B
Let me tell you the things that keep me up at night in a positive way. Yes, AI is a tool. Its ability to automate certain things that we do or at least add another set of eyes to certain things we do. Like, when I'm doing data analysis now, when I'm reviewing client performance Quick example, I use, you know, you probably do too. I use at least 10 different tracking tools or I use Little Warden to check if something's wrong with the client's site every single day. I have Rank Tracking, I use Google Alerts, I use Visual Ping. That's a lot of stuff coming into my inbox. So what I've done is I've built something in Claude using their Gmail MCP server that just goes out to my Gmail inbox and I have a whole set of rules and it goes. And it looks through all those emails and then it gives me a quick summary, says, here's according to your priorities. These are urgent, you need to take. And I just had one come in saying someone's robots txt is returning HTML instead. That's a problem. Those are the kinds of things that can do. So I'm very excited about that. I'm really excited about the way that AI can help us with that. The thing that keeps me up at night, the two things that keep me up at night in a bad way are the rate at which we are adopting AI to generate content. Yeah, because. And I don't need to go into all the technical explanations of how it works. Everybody's heard them all by now. But I mean AI, when you ask AI to generate content, it's generating it based on an average. So that means any content you have AI generated is average. And people are generally using AI to generate content because they feel like they don't have time, which to me means they're still in that mode of cranking out content. You should generate the content that you. You should generate what you feel you have time to do that's exceptional. If you don't have time to do it and feel like it's exceptional, why should your audience spend any time reading it or watching it? So that concerns me a great deal is the rate at which we're adopting AI to do to create content, and the rate at which we're adopting AI to help us find things, because it's not that good at it yet. I am not a Luddite and I am not here to say don't use AI. I use it every day. I love learning this stuff. I love working with it. If you could see my desktop right now, I've got Claude and ChatGPT and I've got Windsurf and all these other things open. But we are not sufficiently skeptical when it comes to using it to discover and using it to generate content. And we need to be more skeptical because otherwise it's going to be just like when we were from pure marketing standpoint. It's going to be like when we were using spun content to rank, right? Or we were going to link exchanges and purchase links. There's going to be a nasty wake up call and it's fundamentally reducing the quality of our marketing. So that may not be an algorithmic wake up call, it may not be Google coming and penalizing us or something, but you know, we're going to all start wondering, well, why isn't this working? It's because we're generating the average, right? And that's the content side to, to.
- [31:43]
A
To add on to that and tie it back into something we were saying before. And I agree with you, like I've talked about, dead Internet theory is just proliferating, right? And now you got agents posting on social in addition to that, not just, you know, medium content. I love how you said kind of it gives you the average. I think that that's a good frame of reference in people's mind of what you're producing. My fear, and I am going to claim guilt on this publicly, is I ran, There was a recent article that I, I shared about mit and I know other people have shared it as well about how we've outsourced our brain and our thinking. And there was a time like a year and a half, two years ago, whatever, I don't know, Time goes by so fast, I have no idea anymore where I was. Like, this is a better copywriter than me and if it says something, I'm just gonna believe it, that it's better and do that. And I recently had a, a long time in the industry copywriter on, on this podcast and he really opened my eyes, which was being opened like beforehand, but he like really like hit it home. Like the content is just mediocre and it doesn't always solve that problem. And when you, you said earlier, like, let's look at the website and see how it performs, right? And if people were outsourcing their brain and they're writing a bunch of copy and then you got a bunch of the watermarks in there, right? You can see that it's AI and the copies, like, I'm not saying it's bad copy, but I'm not saying it's exceptional copy for what you're trying to do and how it fits in to the whole page. And even if you like give it the page and it reads the page and it produces the copy, when I look at that in like a critical set of eyes, like I'VE read a bunch of Dan Kennedy stuff and, you know, a bunch of other, you know, direct response copywriting. When I apply it against those principles, which I guess I could upload some, some documentation and training to fine tune it, but just out of the box. LLM like a, A chat gbt? No, like it's not there yet, man. It, it's probably way better than it was, but I've been guilty of that. And you got to read what's being produced and understand how it fits in. And it needs to be a helper. But, but it can't replace what, what's in your head, in your knowledge.
- [34:19]
B
So I'm going to get a little theoretical.
- [34:22]
A
Do it. I love it.
- [34:23]
B
You know, humans are narrative creatures, right? We're driven by narrative and semantics. And AI is probabilistic. It's predicting what the next word should be. That's why I can't yet generate good content, because it can't build a narrative. And by narrative, I don't mean literally telling a story. I mean this way of proceeding from one idea to the next and having the kind of the gut instinct around when do I transition to a new idea, right? How do I guide my reader through or my viewer? I shouldn't just say reader, my viewer, my whatever. From one idea to the next. AI is not narrative and we are. So I use AI to generate ideas like you just said. In fact, what I often say is you should build an AI sandwich on human bread. So it should go human comes up with ideas to give to the AI. AI generates more ideas, human generates the final product. And I don't mean just going through and sort of rewording what the AI spat out. I mean, you're using your brain to actually turn it into a piece of narrative information, semantically targeted information that's going to pull the right emotional strings. And I mean that in a positive way and be something that's truly going to generate a response from your audience. And that's a hard discussion to have with clients, right? Because the clients really can. They're saying, look, I just need to produce 10 blog posts a week. And I don't have a great answer for clients with that, except that that is what everyone is doing. And when everyone is doing it, it's not going to last very long. There's certain things that are. That we can't outsource. I just saw a great article somewhere that someone sent to me about how good taste, you know, just general taste. I don't mean, you know, I have good taste. You know, someone else has bad taste. I have no taste, by the way. I, you can see how I'm dressed. But, you know, there's this vague sense of, of what is of high quality and what is not. You can't outsource that to AI. And that's what we have to appeal to in marketing. And that's, again, that's narrative, right? That's descriptive, and that's what AI can't really do. All it can do is take what everyone else has said and then based on the percentages, say, here's what the next word, sentence, paragraph should be. And by the way, I don't, you know, people talk about, you know, generalized artificial intelligence. We're hopefully very far away from that. And even the day that we get there, we're still marketing to humans, right? When we're marketing to AI is when we should probably all, you know, watch Wall E a few more times and figure out exactly how, which couches we want to lie on. I think we're pretty far from that. I'm getting real philosophical here. The, the, the short answer, the clear answer is AI can't generate information and stories the way we need to be able to tell them to get people. Com. To compel people in a positive way to buy the products they need when they need them. But that is not something that AI can do. AI can organize facts and organize words and generate it for us, but it can't do the actual, the, the, the.
- [37:48]
A
Storytelling part of this man, all that philosophical stuff. I have a bunch of threads that I would love to go down, but not right now by that we could have a side conversation about that. I would love to hear more about your predictions. As we're talking about philosophically, where do you see things going? What are the things that maybe people aren't paying attention to or what are you hearing in the marketplace tone of as you're interacting with clients, like where they're at versus where you see it's going and like where that gap is.
- [38:23]
B
Clients are very concerned still about vanity metrics like traffic and rankings, and those are going away. There's nothing we can do about that. Right. We're returning to 20th century 19th century style marketing attribution, and there's nothing to do about it. And clients are struggling with that. And I totally get it. Right. I mean, it's, you know, it's, it's a very difficult and scary transition. So that's one thing. Another transition that's scary is we are moving into a world where brand is even more Important, which is going to make it very difficult for smaller businesses. And smaller businesses are going to have to get very good at building a super powerful story. And I'm sorry this is so generic in general, but around their brand for a very small, super targeted audience. You're not going to, you know, if you're running a business out of a spare room in your house and you're competing with Amazon, you're not going to be able to just rank right behind Amazon and sell a ton of stuff. You're going to need to really figure out, all right, who are the hundred or thousand people that I can sell to right now? And if that's not going to work, if selling to a thousand people isn't going to work, how am I going to change my business to make it work? So those are two big trends. The third one that I don't think any anyone has really thought about yet is the rise of agents and agentic AI. I actually think it's kind of bs. I don't think agents are particularly effective as far as transacting business, but they're probably going to get there for no other reason than people want them to. And so businesses do need to think about a time when their content, their information is being delivered to people second and third hand. Third hand, right. Google delivers secondhand, but if there's agents involved, then they're going and finding the products and they're bringing the information back to me, the customer. So that's third hand. You're going to have to figure out a way to have that narrative show up when agentic AI is bringing information to people as opposed to people going and searching, finding on a search engine and landing on your website.
- [40:22]
A
So to add onto that, I feel like when people go across the river is like the terminology I'm using and they start using like, there's a lot of people and even clients, hey, I'm still using Google. I feel like AI overviews is just holding them there, right? And it's keeping them there. But they're still searching Google. But then Google's like, oh, we're going to launch, you know, AI mode. Or they've already launched AI mode. And I've seen people, if they're really using LLMs, like they almost don't use search anymore. Um, or, or that's what I'm consistently seeing. I'm not saying everyone. And then back to your point of like, you need to do the real research because it can just give you whatever it thinks. Here are the six links now, or here are the six companies. Here's the listicle. And you're just going to go off of that. So there's a lot of optimization. Absolutely. Around that. I would love to get any input you have on, on that. I just kind of wanted to state that I'm absolutely seeing that, that that search is dying and that kind of bring. Brings in the comment about GMB gdp. Gdp, Yeah, I hate that change. But the second thing you said is really powerful. And I feel like that's where, if you're working with small brands, which we've started to work with much, much bigger brands because you have to do so much to compete on that level, there's this bifurcation happening of if you can actually compete online and you can't. And Google in the past has done a good job of like helping like small businesses make it, you know, I mean, even what they sunset it on, GMB gdp, how you could build a website in other countries, you know, you could build and. But now that's not the case. And so to your point, you got to have a memorable brand. You got to have like, okay, use AI, whatever. Um, but you need to have a mascot. Like, you need to have a community that you're selling into. And then maybe, you know, you, you were talking about changing your business model. If, if that doesn't work, like, where do you see that going? Like, can you further push out where you see that? Because that pendulum of you need creative people, mad men is coming back, right? Like, I think that there's a, a pendulum swing back. But if you're a small business, I want to know what you think the answer is to say to them that this is the future you will be facing. Maybe not this year, but in the next two to three years. This is a reality.
- [42:59]
B
So I gotta, I gotta, I gotta give you two answers because the first thing you said is about search dying. And I want to make sure people understand search is not dying. Clicks, yes. Are shrinking. Right. People are still searching for and discovering things. And that has always been true in marketing. And you know, as marketers, we are all about discoverability, whether we're in SEO, paid search or something else. So don't worry about search dying. Worry about how you work in a world where clicks are no longer the primary driver of your business.
- [43:29]
A
I love that.
- [43:30]
B
And then when it comes to smaller brands and bigger brands, but smaller brands especially, I have two rules in marketing, right? Two basic rules. The first one is maximize return on time invested. And if you're a smaller brand, you can do this in ways big brands can't. What I mean is when clients interact with you, wherever they or customers interact with you, wherever they interact with you, social media, somewhere else, execute really well. Make sure you're delivering exactly what they need when they need it. Keep your ego out of it, right? Think about what they need. And that brings me to the second thing, which is you got to teach the shit out of everything. That's my second rule of marketing. If you teach the shit out of everything, right, if you are giving your customers more information and more support as they are deciding what to buy and how, and I don't care if you sell broccoli, rubber grommets or bicycles, they are making decisions based on information you give them. And you can teach things implicitly, right? You can just make sure your site is super clear and all the information you communicate in social media or wherever the structured data you're providing to, to the LLMs, whatever is really informative and information rich, right? It gives me everything I need to make a decision right then and there without gating and without forcing me to download something, without forcing me to, to get in touch with you. That's a critical first step, right? That's doing two things. It's maximizing return on time invested, and it's teaching the shit out of everything. And if you want to build your brand without needing Don Draper, right, And Mad Men, you know, to me, that's the, that's the most powerful gimmick of all, is making sure that you do a better job of teaching your audience how to use a product than anyone else is doing, and you help them make a better decision than than anyone else does. If you do those things right, then you've got one up on Amazon, you've got one up on Target and all of those. And no, you're not going to make a billion dollars, but you will build that super, super dedicated audience. I know this sounds idealistic and I know it sounds. Your customers or your clients are going to look at this and say, oh my God, I don't have time to do that. What else are you going to do? That is how. That is how this. That is how business has worked for a long time. And I don't mean to be glib. You know, these are core principles that have worked in marketing and business for decades and decades and decades. So you're going to need to get back to that. You're going to need to focus on that. It's not going to be easy, but when you're done, you're going to have something a lot more sustainable.
- [46:08]
A
I love that. And I've really got a lot out of this that I need to contemplate on at this point. Is there anything else that is on your mind that you think is valuable that we could share that we have haven't covered so far?
- [46:25]
B
You know, I have more general, the general advice that things are always changing. Obviously right now marketing is very much in flux. People's businesses are in flux. It's scary or even terrifying. Right. It's frustrating. You have, you have to understand that this is, this is sort of how marketing has always been. And it may feel like an unusually chaotic time. But you know, try to adjust to this and try to, try to not panic too much. Rely on your experts, rely on your expertise and stick to those basic principles that make marketing work and you will come out okay on the other side. I promise you will.
- [47:06]
A
I love that. Is there any unknown secret of Internet marketing that you feel like underutilized that you would like to share with the audience?
- [47:16]
B
I do think teaching the shit out of everything is an under, it's an undersold tactic. Everyone says, oh yeah, you know, I'm doing a really good job of teaching. But think about one question all of your customers ask you and then look at your business and see whether you provide them that answer in a way that they can get it even if you're not present. Right. Can they get that answer from you even if you're not right there talking to them? Take that one question, answer it on your website, answer it in social media, do that a few times and see what that does for your business.
- [47:49]
A
I love that. Ian Lurie, everybody. Ian, what's the best way for people to get in touch with you if they want to hear more or follow along with what you're working on?
- [47:59]
B
Probably just track me down on LinkedIn. I'm just Ian Lurie. I A N L U R I E I think there's only like six of us on LinkedIn. You can always send me a message. I'm happy to answer questions and, and that, that's probably the best way to reach out to me.
- [48:13]
A
Awesome. Well, everybody just hang in there until the next time. My name is Matt Bertram. This is the Unknown secrets of Internet Marketing. Bye bye for now.