← The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
The Father of SEO Bruce Clay Reveals How to Thrive in Today's Digital World
01:19:56
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- [00:02]
Matt Bertram
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. My name is Matt Bertram. I am very excited about my next guest. For those of you watching, you know who it is. For those of you listening, it is none other than the father of SEO, Bruce Clay. Bruce, great to have you.
- [00:37]
Bruce Clay
Thank you very much. Glad to be here.
- [00:39]
Matt Bertram
Well, you know, we've been having a lot of discussions about the direction of SEO and, you know, what's going on with AI and the future. And you know that as SEO, that title has expanded quite, quite a bit. Like everybody's, you know, oh, SEO for LinkedIn, SEO for, you know, it's like algorithms. Right. I think it's what, what a lot of people are, are talking about. But I would love to just, I, and I think a lot of people would, to get, get your opinions on. I mean, in the last 36 months or roughly has been more changes in the last 15 years in SEO. And so I, I started getting involved in mastermind groups and going to conferences and, and had to get resynched with all, all the different changes. And you know, I think there's a lot of SEOs out there that are still kind of in the mix trying to figure it all out. So I would love to just kind of get your perspective on the industry to get started.
- [01:40]
Bruce Clay
Okay. That's a pretty open question. I will, I'd like to start by just saying when I started, this was 29 years ago, SEO was a keyword and all you had to do is put the keywords in the right spot and you would rank. And then it became things and you had to have associated words and proximity and a lot of stuff became more. I'm writing about a topic than one word. Yeah. And some of the stuff in the one word area became spam when you started writing about topics. And then you started with this usability and eeat. And so you're right, it has evolved and it got to the point where no matter what you did at a technical level, it qualified you for usability. Right. One of the tips I typically give is if you have a page and it has multiple sections and you don't have jump links at the top of the page, you're not being usable. Right.
- [02:58]
Matt Bertram
You don't have. Right. It's like table stakes. Like to get in the game, you have to have at a fast loading site that's, that's usable, especially on mobile. Right? Mobile first. And that, that's the starting point. You have to get over that threshold. And it's, it's typically pass or fail. Right. Or it is pass or fail. So. So either you're there or you're not to get in the game. Right, right.
- [03:23]
Bruce Clay
And that, by the way, has continued. The concept of SEO is free is SEO is not free. You have to pay the dues for your free SEO. Right. And it has evolved to that point. And then, and I was very excited about SEO. It was fun. I mean, I was solving Rubik's cubes while I juggled them. I mean, that was SEO. Every, every Monday, it was a new industry. Google made changes. There was the Google Dance that stopped, but they're still doing it just 3,000 times a year. Here's the problem that we ran into is Covid. Covid disconnected the educators from the students by eliminating conferences, it eliminated training classes, it eliminated a lot of things. I mean, I tried to adapt with seotraining.com which is my online training curriculum, and I've just restarted classroom. But when you look at the whole thing, conferences are thousands of people at a time hearing what they need to hear to get it, get ahead. And the big problem.
- [04:50]
Matt Bertram
By the way, everybody that's listening, I have gone through Bruce Clay's training online and it's phenomenal. So I definitely encourage you to go check it out. So.
- [04:58]
Bruce Clay
And I'll even tell you, I put up a new version. This actually it was yesterday afternoon, brand new version. So you have to keep current. It's an expensive process.
- [05:11]
Matt Bertram
That's why I was at Brighton, because I was like, what's going on across the pond? Like, what are people doing? What are people talking about? I mean, entity SEO, which maybe we can get into a little bit later. I mean, ranking in the, or the large language models is what everybody's focused on now.
- [05:32]
Bruce Clay
But you see, that is exactly the evolution. So everybody's talking about usability and eat. And you know the fact that just because you did the keywords doesn't mean you're usable. Right? There's, there's multiple entry points. And with AI, this is where we're seeing the current change. With AI, it is. Well, what people don't recognize is SEO is, is still absolutely the table stakes to just get in the game. It turns out that with Google, if you aren't in the top two pages, say, you don't show up in AI. Well, with chat search, right. If you're not Ranked in Bing, you don't show up in their AI. So obviously there's requirements that you have to be accepted by the search engine in order to show up in the AI results. And the big thing there.
- [06:50]
Matt Bertram
Go ahead, go ahead. What were you saying?
- [06:52]
Bruce Clay
The big thing there is that you have to recognize that the LLM in the, in the AI module, it doesn't want to have to go spider the web. It doesn't want to have to worry about canonicals and redirects and server speed because it's taking multiple data points and providing an answer from those. So it's no longer really caring about what's the speed of site 1 when I'm actually merging the content from 10 sites at a time, right? And all it really cares about is are you trusted? Are you having an authoritative expert type answer as recognized by all the search experts, the search engines? And if you are, then you qualify to be in an AI result. And so when you're looking at. Is AI important? Yes.
- [07:54]
Matt Bertram
Yeah. No, no. So I want to bring everybody up to speed. We kind of breeze through eat, which, which, you know, I know we've talked about, but I, you know, how, how the web pages want it these days is you got to answer the full, whoever answers the question the most fully, right? So I want to make sure that this podcast we, for people listening, that we cover it. One is, I think Google kind of waved the white flag on no AI content and just said we give up, right? Because I mean, there was already a lot of content that was AI and they kind of were unsure about it, but they said, hey, if it's useful content, you're allowed to do it. And then with eat, I believe that's probably why they added the additional E for the experience, right? To kind of say, okay, you're all experts now, right, with the AI, but prove it. Like, prove it. Show me the product. Show me, you know, if you're talking about fishing, you know, you with efficient pole on, you know, so they said show the experience component of it. And I think that that was their first attempt to combat the entourage of just junk content. Because AI, without really training the AI, it, it's just generalized content and it starts to become very homogenized and it's what other people are doing. It's the same kind of like sales, salesy, kind of like data set that's trained. So you gotta, you gotta, you gotta customize it. You gotta have an operator to, to really take it to the next level and feed it content to, to train it to Talk like you want it to talk. But, but going back to what, what you were saying, okay, that's what people want. Even though I, I've heard different numbers. I was on a podcast previously and I heard the number was a lot higher. But, but that's when I think Google has sounded the alarm bells, right? When chat gbt, the, the amount of searches started to really pick up and they were looking at the trajectory and, and most of their business is made through, through AdWords. So they need people on the search engines. And then they're, I think from what I've read, they're losing money with the AI overviews to create that, that high quality search or they're using data or processing power to create that. So I mean, the game has dramatically changed and then they got, you know, the zero search. And so, so, okay, so I just kind of wanted to bring everybody up to kind of where we're at right now. And it's a little bit of a zoo, right? It's a little bit of a zoo of, of what's going on. And even, even the Google Dance. And, and maybe you can speak to this. This is just a personal question I have. Like, certainly I use rank math a lot on the back end and you know, it ties into analytics and I'm seeing that Google Dance every day. Right? I mean, it's up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down. And I think what they're trying to do is, you know, if people are kind of trying to spam the system with clicks, you know, if you're in third position and then you go to 87 and you have the same amount of clicks, you can start to see, you know, the outliers. And so they're looking for naturality and they're testing out different things. But can you just speak to, I guess, the Google Dance really quickly and then we'll jump back into where we were with AI.
- [11:14]
Bruce Clay
Sure. The. What was the Google Dance was actually a party that Google had at, you know, their headquarters during SMX used to be SES smx. And it'd be actually an on campus party. Food, drink. I mean it was, it was an actual. With music. It was a dance, but it was referred to as sort of like the hokey Pokey. You know, on Monday you put your left foot in and then all of a sudden you got to take your left foot out and put your right foot in. And Google was trying their algorithm changes in the live algorithm. So every time they were trying something, they'd put it in and then it would Be ugly. And then they take it out and tweak it and put it in again and you know, the hokey pokey and that was referred to by the community as the Google Dance. Now Google has a lot more dances going on at a time. They have over 100 development teams that are trying to improve overall the search results. So according to Google, they do 5,000 updates a year. I, I kind of think of it as 2000 of them are fixing what they broke yesterday. But so 3,000 and you know, 300 days in a year and you know, do the math, that's a whole bunch a day. And so we're seeing a live index that's highly volatile. So if you go in, as you pointed out, if you go in on Monday and look at your traffic and then you go in on Tuesday, you may see entirely different traffic and Wednesday entirely different traffic again because they're doing 10, 20, 100 changes on various days of the week. And that doesn't even count the fact that you have competitors that are trying to counter those changes.
- [13:20]
Matt Bertram
Yeah, it's a zero sum game. It's.
- [13:23]
Bruce Clay
And yeah, somebody's gonna get it, you know, if, if Forbes loses the traffic. It went somewhere unless people just stop searching for the keywords. So that is how the dance has evolved over the years. Yeah, you're gonna see volatility. One of the things that I've been doing as part of our AI tool, we have something called Pre Writer AI and it's a whole collection of tools. And one of the things that I've been doing the research on is I analyze a website and I use AI to do the analysis and say, okay, what is the intent of the website? Right. Is it transactional, navigational, informational? And then even on informational you get, there's 12 categories. Most people don't care, but education is one of them and et cetera. So you go through and you say, okay, for this site, what is its intent?
- [14:28]
Matt Bertram
Yeah.
- [14:29]
Bruce Clay
Then you take what are your top keywords and you do queries on that. And when you analyze the top sites for those queries, they all have the same intent, not necessarily yours.
- [14:42]
Matt Bertram
Okay, so I have a question about that. So, you know, some of the different tools out there will break it apart in the informational, commercial, navigational, transactional. A lot of times when we create informational content, it's showing up as commercial content. And you know, I'm just curious, like when you're, when you're looking at content, what are the qualifications for each bucket to meet that requirement to qualify for that. And sometimes they qualify for multiple ones. Right. But I'm looking at a ratio for certain sites and I want to make sure that the informational content is the highest percentage and sometimes the commercial section is the highest content. So it's not transactional, you know, but there's some kind of blend here and I'm just curious if you could break it down on how you see it. Yeah, yeah.
- [15:41]
Bruce Clay
We're finding very few are actually blended. Google seems to believe, and this is my analysis, and it's ongoing, that when I identify the top five sites for a particular keyword, they are true blue blood informational, hardly any transactional anywhere on the page because it will identify percentages right in my tool. And so I can tell you that, you know, that keyword is considered informational and yours is a hybrid with transactional. And maybe you need to do this. And I actually tell you what it is to, to move more towards the informational and be less transactional. And operationally that's going to be an important thing. You have to be able to understand that Google is sort of blue blooding this stuff. They're saying, I want an expert and I want the expert to be exactly about this and I don't want you to stray. And I'm finding, as I do more analysis on more words, that the straying, while it might be good for your business, isn't necessarily good for the Google search results. They don't care about your business. So if I wanted to educate but sell a course, if I try to do both of those, it's going to be hard to compete against people who are true blue blood education only because they're more expert on exactly what Google thinks the query should be. And while for our websites it may make total sense to blend them, sometimes blending them could be counterproductive. And that's, that's opening up a whole new area of research for us. But we have figured out how to get into a number of things. Let me give you a secret. All right? One of the secrets most people, when they use AI, they go up, they put in a keyword and say, generate a page that talks about this keyword and you get a page. And in our tools, what we do is we say, here is a keyword, and then we say, and who would put in that keyword? What is that Persona? What are their pain points? And therefore, what are the other keywords we need to put in the article? And so we write articles that solve pains, not just articles that define keywords. It's an Entirely different approach to article drafting. And so nobody's doing that. I mean, you should do that.
- [18:41]
Matt Bertram
Can I.
- [18:41]
Bruce Clay
If you're going to type it in, you should do that.
- [18:44]
Matt Bertram
So I have a question about that as, as it kind of relates to maybe like link equity flow and internal linking. Right. So building out associations or semantically or you know, how this word spatially interacts with, with what you're talking about as an entity. Let's say, you know, if you're talking about, for example, and I've heard you say this a number of times, you, you said you will. Well, and it may be different today, right? Like, but this was something you said a long time ago, so I'll preface that. But, but you said you will not rank for SEO if you do not rank for semi. Right. SEM was the broader category, the search engine marketing, which is broken down into the PPC and the SEO. Right. And when I had heard that, when we were ranking our own site, that was kind of a guiding light as far as like, we weren't focused on that, but we do do PPC and we do do SEO. So if you talk about content that you're creating, say you're talking about. Let's just talk about SEO, because we're talking about SEO. You're writing an informational piece. You don't have a call to action at the end. I'm curious about a call to action of like, because if you're building pages that are specifically, you should have some kind of lead capture, right? Like, or maybe it's like a, you're, you're embedding maybe a calendar link or something like that. Is Google looking at that as commercializing it when they're looking at the whole page or are they just looking at the content? That was like kind of my first question. If there's a call to action outside the, the body of the information. But then when you have written that content and say that that topic is broadened because you're expert and you're going into some subtopical authorities for whatever you're talking about, when is it a good idea, Right? So like, like, is it good to link out to the ppc? Is it good to link out to digital marketing? Is it good to link out to web design? Or is it better to link to other things that are associated inside the vertical SEO, like local technical. How do you view the world? I know it's a little bit of a nuanced art, but I'm just curious, from a link equity flow standpoint, when you're approaching that, whether it be anything, how do you, how do you decide?
- [21:18]
Bruce Clay
Well, we absolutely follow siloing, which we invented in 2002, which is align your content by how people search and concentrate your content by topic.
- [21:34]
Matt Bertram
Yeah.
- [21:35]
Bruce Clay
So.
- [21:35]
Matt Bertram
And you do that in your training too. You talk about that a lot in your training, the silo.
- [21:39]
Bruce Clay
And you know, even our online, we have a separate online course for. Turns out that what you want to do is if you want to rank for SEO, you have to have a concentration of SEO information that interconnects about SEO. That way you can be an expert. But if you want to rank for digital marketing, as you pointed out, you need to have pay per click. You need to have, you need to.
- [22:05]
Matt Bertram
Have all these things in the parent.
- [22:07]
Bruce Clay
Right. Yeah. The story, the story I typically use is shoes, right. If I had a store and it had every kind of shoe in the world, I should be able to rank for footwear. But if I am only about boots, even though boots are a form of footwear, I shouldn't rank for footwear because I'm only about boots. Right. And I think Google is, as I said, it's looking for blue blood specialties. It's looking at that level. So you have, on the one hand, I want to rank for this term, I have to qualify and pay my dues in each kind of shoe, or I only want to rank for boots and I'm a boot, you know, site. So yes, you have sub silos. A lot of people call them clusters, but it is a sub silo and it is a section of a website that is just about this topic. Interconnected. Absolutely. You have to be able to do that or you're not a subject matter expert on that term. But there's a lot of terms that a normal website wants to rank for.
- [23:29]
Matt Bertram
Well, if you're flow, if you're flowing link equity like across the page and if you don't, or across pages and breadcrumbs and all that. But you're trying to build a subspecialty. Let's just continue along the lines of like, okay, SEO and then you got digital marketing, which you know. And then even web design, I think from how Google wants to see it is like completely separate, unfortunately. So those, those are, those are separate and you're siloing the pages in that way. What I've seen with like outbound linking and inbound linking, the link equity is interesting. So if this page is, is pushing to this page or this page is pushing to this page, the, the page that the link Equity is pushing from that other page or the page that's pushing the link equity to. It starts to rank for stuff that the page it's linking to has. Have you seen that? Sorry, it's confusing. Site A is linking a site B and site A is, let's say, about SEO and it's linking to ppc and you're pushing that link equity that way. Site A that's about SEO will actually start to rank for PPC because it's linking to site B. And, and so I'm trying to understand the, when the link equity flows, like if you're, if you're not keeping everything in that silo and, and you're maybe saying, okay, well, I'm going to link this page that has a lot of link equity. I'm going to flow it from PPC to SEO. What happens is the, the, the, they kind of like trade link equity or something. Like, I feel like there's like some kind of swap because the PPC page will actually start to rank for some SEO terms if it links to this page. Like, I, I've, I've, it's really, I've seen it a few times and I, and maybe if you could just describe your understanding and I know you've read all the patents about like link equity distribution, because I think a lot of people that I talk to in SEO and when, you know, we go deep, they understand the technical fixes, right? They understand how to improve it, they understand the meta descriptions. But when we start to get into like link equity distribution, like, whoa, like that, they're just trying to fix the technicals of the site. They're, they're not trying to move the power of the site around and they build these crazy, like, menu structures that everything's linking everything. And I was like, you've got to narrow the focus to drive, to drive what you're trying to rank for because everything's equal. And then you break it off of the menu and then it kind of releases it. Like you don't want to be in the footer at all if you can help it. And then even if you release it from the menu structure, many times it'll shoot up for a temporary period of time. So I think link equity distribution, something that is not talked about enough or at least I've had a lot of questions about it from personal experience and then I read a lot about it and I would love to get your kind of take on that.
- [26:46]
Bruce Clay
Okay, so obviously we've done hundreds of siloing projects, restructured websites, and Worried about moving what we refer to as logically moving page rank around and building a silo structure in the sub silos. We have this thing which I refer to as page rank laundering. Right. So the scenario there is I have all these links to my homepage and it's. They link to me with Bruce Clay. So I have all these points about Bruce Clay. Then on that page I linked SEO and the laundering happens where I take my points for Bruce Clay and I redistribute them as SEO. Well, then that page I went to has a breadcrumb and it links back and I can actually change the points on my homepage through that kind of an internal link structure. So I think what you're saying is somebody comes in, they move it over to the, from the SEO page to the pay per click, but the pay per click links back and that resets some of what the SEO page might rank for in that laundering approach.
- [28:10]
Matt Bertram
Yeah, you're trying the surfer. You're trying to kind of get back. And I do that. If I don't know where else I want to link to yet on the page, I'll actually redistribute it back to the homepage and then what it pushed back.
- [28:25]
Bruce Clay
Right. And many times you're resetting the page rank usage because you're now forming the full circle. I actually have slides on that in the training and it is a useful thing. I ran a test where obviously a lot of my homepage is Bruce Clay. And then I go to the SEO page and then I made up a breadcrumb, which was a different word. Where instead of home, which by the way, you should never use.
- [28:55]
Matt Bertram
Yeah, you should never do that. That's like the number one thing I see every time I get a sign of like, come on, people. Like, we're not trying to write for home.
- [29:01]
Bruce Clay
Yeah, you're not real estate. So I use a keyword instead that didn't exist. Right. And then within a week, my homepage ranked for that keyword. So what you're actually talking about is internal link structures, especially breadcrumbs. But internal link structures can, when you fold back onto the original source, you can change some of the intent of that page through that link.
- [29:36]
Matt Bertram
Well, let's, let's use that example really quick and just go a little bit deeper. And then I want to get back to AI. Okay, so let's forget that Bruce Clay is an entity of the father of SEO. And Google does know that. Okay, Right. Like, let's, let's, let's say that that, that Association's not there, but you have a strong ranking for your name or somebody else. Let's just use somebody else is ranked for their name, right? And they got a bunch of links to their homepage and their homepage is about them as a consultant or whatever it may be. Say they're a consultant, like whatever, like some kind of other consulting. But they, they have a bunch of links for their name. So, so they have a bunch of link equity for their name, but then they link that page to their services page. And if there's not a lot of anchor text out there, or Google doesn't really understand that association between their name and that service and you link to that. Like I don't feel like the, the, the link distribution or the, the page rank gets pushed. So what, what are you using to evaluate the. If, if the page is, will push paint rate? Because I've seen a lot of links too depending on when you're linking out Google decide, hey, am I going to use the first link or the second link? Like it kind of decides now, right? Even if you're like do, do not follow it, it decides where it's going to push page rank two or not. And so how do you evaluate is this page actually pushing the right kind of page rank or is this not helpful? If you change the link, it resets the whole thing because all the link distribution gets moved around. And so I'm just curious how you evaluate that to know that that's the right page to link to. And if you, if you have a lot of link equity for a name and you're trying to link it to a service, but that association is not out there, I would say you need to go build out that, that entity SEO where that association is made so it will push the page rank or like, or like a mixed, you know, anchor text or something like that, where you start to blend it. So there's that, that association out there. I mean, I, I don't know what if you're trying to link from one thing that, that is not what you're linking to and you're trying to push that page rank from one page to the next, it sometimes doesn't go. And so I'm just curious how do you evaluate that? It just has to have an association, I guess, like you just don't.
- [32:17]
Bruce Clay
So at a, at a real high level, I'll just give a couple of data points. It has to be organic. So in theory there should be a relationship, complementary supplementary relationship between the content of the pages. Right?
- [32:32]
Matt Bertram
Fair enough.
- [32:33]
Bruce Clay
So let's assume that's fine if it's an external site linking to you. We also have sentiment. Most people aren't even thinking about sentiment. But a negative sentiment doesn't pass page rank. There only has to be neutral or positive sentiment to pass the page rank. And it has to be organic. Right? A bakery linking to my SEO site, they're not an expert on SEO. That link isn't very valuable. But a colleague linking to me might be very valuable. So whether there is PageRank transfer has a couple of fundamental rules. Now historically, when you link within your website, it's always going to pass page rank. The question is how much? And you know, in the beginning the algorithm had 128 variables in it. Now it has hundreds. Hundreds, many hundreds. And so the algorithm, when you look at it, page rank has been pretty much diluted over the years. Is it in there? Sure. Is it a tiebreaker? Absolutely. Is it going to change your life? Probably not. Google has even said that links aren't even one of the top three algorithmic important variables anymore. Right. So I mean, that's the way it is there, there. It's been diluted so much, but all the variables have been diluted. So the question is, if I have a homepage with a hundred page rank points, but I have a hundred links on that page, the formula says I'm only pushing 1.8 5 points to the sub page. That may not be enough to make it rank. If I only had 10 links now that might be important, but, and that's why you have to do siloing structures. You have to understand how much juice you're moving and how, I mean this is not a, you know, an overnight thing, but you have to know where you're going to put your juice. For instance, if I have a page I don't want to have fighting for ranking, why do I have to give it the juice, put it on the page that matters? Yeah, right.
- [34:59]
Matt Bertram
Well, that's the main scenario, right? Like you have multiple pages fighting for ranking and trying to decide which page you want to redirect it to. And I think a lot of people get stuck because they have multiple pages rank it for the same keyword and they're fighting for it. So they're, unless you get to the top of the first page, you're not getting anything. So it, like it's, it's kind of worthless, you know, if you're hanging out on the second page, you know, so, so, so the link distribution I think is really important in, in that Scenario. Let me ask you another quick thing as it relates to that, and I know that there's a lot of debate or there has been about this in the past. Like if you have a page that doesn't have any inbound links, right. It doesn't have any traffic, it's not like it is indexed, but it's not like a high quality page based upon like the, the strength of the site, right. How big the site is. The bigger the site is, the harder it is to move the site, you know. And so like do you view that, those pages, if they're not, you know, superbly valuable to what you're doing, you should trim them so that your overall ratios look, look better and it's easier to move the site. Or is it better to have these branches and try to harvest the link equity from those? Maybe back, back to the tree or back to, you know, who, Whatever you're, whatever you're trying to rank, your correct answer is right. Like every month they get a little bit stronger. So you know, like it's going to be valuable in the future.
- [36:35]
Bruce Clay
Potentially the answer is no.
- [36:38]
Matt Bertram
Okay.
- [36:42]
Bruce Clay
Now, so operationally when I try to rank for a keyword, to qualify for that keyword, I may have to have a fully developed content about the keyword. Yeah, right. I may need to have a cluster or sub silo built out in order to rank for the keyword. Because if I don't have the foundation, I'm not going to have a house. Right. So I have to build the required content to qualify for some of my head terms. We've had cases where people have cut off old content and all of a sudden their head term falls because they eliminated their foundation because they didn't know what's associated.
- [37:29]
Matt Bertram
Right. Like what it's looking at. And I have seen that too. You gotta be really careful about what you trim because you don't know how it's connected to something else. Because I call it link equity. But like how it's associated. So it gets, it gets difficult, especially with old sites when you're trying to untangle it, you know, and it's even.
- [37:52]
Bruce Clay
It'S more than link equity, it's, it's topic equity. I can't qualify for footwear if I don't talk about all the kind of footwear. It could be that some of them get zero traffic, but it's a prerequisite to the ranking. So on the one hand I don't want to, you know, cut off content that is required for my head term. The alternate of that Is that in the Google quality rater guidelines where EEAT is defined, there's 40 some pages in there to talk about maintenance. Now, while that isn't me E a T, it isn't meat. It is still discussed. And the concept that I assumed from it, my methodology, is that if it is content that is not foundational and it is old, then it update.
- [38:54]
Matt Bertram
And that's where people have like, here's the trends and they go back and they put the date and then they, you know, put, put. Put another paragraph on. On what?
- [39:02]
Bruce Clay
Yeah, and you look at it and you say, okay, this is a good example on my site, because I did exactly that. I went through and pruned off a couple thousand pages. Now, from the 2000s. Now remember, SES was in 99, right? From the 2000s, I was sending a team of bloggers to conferences and they would live blog sessions and we would publish within an hour the notes from the session. I mean, it was amazing. It was great. However, I looked back at my live blogs and I'll guarantee you that the live blog of a session from 2002 is not relevant for SEO today. Okay. And I had all this cool content and I had all of these people and I, I discussed the, the actual live session, but it didn't contribute to the foundation of my website. And I ended up pruning off over 1800 pages off my website and I still have thousands. But if it is old and not foundational.
- [40:18]
Matt Bertram
Yeah, no, I think you can do it. Delineation, right? Like, and you can use to kind of bring the conversation back into the AI, Right? You can use the AI to analyze, okay, what is this topical authority or what are the things you need to talk about? And then would this be considered content? And you can upload it and you can ask it, but I get your point. Now if you took some of those sessions, which there's things like no one wants to listen to old podcasts about SEO, right? Everybody thinks that it's gotta be the newest thing, but there's stuff that was taught so long ago that's foundational or discussed that's still relevant today. Because it is foundational. And it's tried and true. But. But I think you, like, like we were talking about, you got to connect it with now, right? So you got to say this was foundational and it's still believed to be true. And this is how it affects today. And then, and then, you know, you have the link equity and the time that that page is built up, but now it's relevant and so, you know, it, it changes where it fits in the algorithm.
- [41:30]
Bruce Clay
Right.
- [41:30]
Matt Bertram
And what I did from foundational and kind of current, and now we're not talking news anybody, but that's a whole different category.
- [41:40]
Bruce Clay
Yeah. So what we did is we either removed the page and redirected it, or we determined it was Evergreen and we refreshed it and just kicked it, dragged it up kicking and screaming into the current age, you know, refreshed all the content. Or we decided that there were multiple pages over the years on that topic and we consolidated them, redirected some and Evergreen did on one of the strong URLs. So there's a lot of things you can do, but then once you're done, you still have to manage the internal link equity. Because if I'm deleting pages, it probably linked to something.
- [42:27]
Matt Bertram
Yeah.
- [42:28]
Bruce Clay
And I have to figure out how I'm going to handle that. I mean, if SEO were easy, everybody would be number one. I mean, that's just the way life is. And it isn't easy. You got to pay your dues. The link equity issue is a big issue. And people, I'll tell you right now, if I had page A and I decided I didn't want it anymore and I'm going to redirect it to page B, the question is, in the content of page A, what did it link to? Because I lose that when I link. When I redirect it, those sub links.
- [43:03]
Matt Bertram
No longer exist of the link equity on, on, just like off the top. But then you're, you're lo. You're losing other things. And that, that's the trouble. Right. Because what else is that linking to? And then what is that linking to? And like really having an organized structure. When you get like a legacy site come. Comes in, you've got to go slow.
- [43:27]
Bruce Clay
I, I've seen, you know, I've seen really strange things. I've had people come. One person came to me, he had 714 links in his top nav. He decided to link to just about every product he sold because somebody might want it, of which 96% of his links were not clicked on in the last year. But what he did was he diluted his page rank transfer away from his important pages. Yeah, right. So it, it is a management task to understand the architecture of your website. It may work, people may be able to live with it and find their way around, but the search engine isn't a person. It doesn't click, it doesn't understand that it reads the dom, the document object model, it understands what is resolved and it attempts to figure out how to, how to make that work. Are you trusted? Are you putting text behind your images and hiding it from us? Is it, you know, spam rules and all these other rules, and at the end of the day, it's trying to figure out what you're about. And that's the search component. Then you throw AI on top of it and it's, are you trusted? Are you an authority? And can I trust your information enough to put it in an AI Answer? Right. As soon as, mentally, if I had a list of 10 blue links, I could go to each and I will mentally say, that is the opinion of that author. But if I take 10 blue links, take all the content, mush it together, and give it to you in a paragraph without calling out where it came from, it's gospel. And now the burden is on AI not to burn it, not to harm you. I don't know how AI can effectively do your money or your life sites. Right? When I started doing our AI product, I looked at it and I said, there's no way we could cut the writer out of this. They're the artist, they're the ones that follow the rules. They know the voice, they know the company, they know the products. There's no way AI out of a box somewhere is going to know your company. So we called it Pre Writer. That's it. That's the name of the product. Pre Writer. We build briefs, but the writer has to finish them. There's no way AI can handle your money or your life.
- [46:22]
Matt Bertram
Okay, question for you. So I was thinking through this, like, from a workflow standpoint, right? And if, if you're, if you're uploading, let's say, just like technical writing, something, you know, automotive or whatever, you could upload technical specs, right? You could upload past blogs if they're happy with their, their, their tone, their voice, whatever. You could upload like an industry journal or something like that. You could upload a competitor, if they like that, whatever, to, to train it, to then write the content based upon that. And maybe you're refining it and there's other steps that you do, but that AI can produce. If you know where you're trying to go with the content, it should produce something pretty advanced. And then you can ask it, hey, where are the gaps? And then you got to kind of sift through it a couple times. But I think you could come up with really strong technical content if you have the right inputs. Does that make sense? Like, like Not.
- [47:32]
Bruce Clay
Oh, absolutely, I fully agree.
- [47:36]
Matt Bertram
They're overlays that you can put right that, that, that, that are trained to keep it in a narrow, defined path. Like, I do think you can replace the writer eventually, and then now you can even automate that. Right? And so, so, Bruce, this is the thing that I'm like, worried about is people are going to build these automations and it's just going to, like, and it's probably already happening now. You know, you're just pushing out so much content and it, and it's automated off of maybe a list and it's going through these repetitions. And so you got a lot of people out there that are writing with a writer and creating content, and then you got somebody out there producing, I don't know, five articles a day, like every day, like, you know what I mean? Like, and, and Google does like that. When you hit that kind of 30, 45 days, I, I think another algorithm gets hit, at least on social media. I see it and it, it, you know, it's looking, it's coming back to you, right? The bots are coming back to you going, hey, give me some more, give me some more, give me some more. It seems like it's going to be a race to the bottom with a lot of, a lot of these use cases. And so where, where do you think SDO is going? Like, I know we're getting into this a little late in the podcast, but I, I really think that that's what's on a lot of people's minds. Like, you know, I need to get, I need to get involved with this. I need to get, you know, like, and there are certain people that have a certain opinion here there. Like, even with podcasting, hey, like, I can listen to AI talk about it, I can listen to a human, and I'm going to prefer one or the other. Just like ads, right? Like ads versus organic, right? There's certain people that have different flavors. I mean, where do you, where do you see, like, you've seen all the iterations of it change, right? SEO's dead. Long live SEO. Where do you see it in 36 months, in five years?
- [49:36]
Bruce Clay
Oh, SEO is never going away. My saying is SEO is done when Google stops changing things and all your competition has died. Yeah, that isn't happening. But going back a little bit, you see, I view the writer as an artist, right? And I think that you ought to let the artist do it. But left brain, right brain, right? That artist isn't necessarily a good researcher. So pre writer is the Researcher?
- [50:11]
Matt Bertram
Yeah.
- [50:12]
Bruce Clay
If you look at a newspaper, they have researchers, they have writers, journalists, copy editors, they have all the checks and balances. If you took off the blinders and looked at your content process, there should be a checks and balances in there, right? I don't know if you're like me, we had to bring, I write something, I put it down. If I pick it up an hour later, I'm asking myself, who wrote that? I mean, you can always make it better. And I think that what we want is, you know, do a brief, do an outline, do a list, do a this, do that, and give it to a writer and let him improve it. The problem you're going to run into is, and we've had conversations in the industry about this for a long time, AI is not creating new content, it's regurgitating existing content. Yeah, right. It may be wordsmithing it, and it may be that you can change all of the LLM and the rules and everything else, and you can customize it through programmatic interfaces. You can do that, sure. But if it isn't creative, it's a problem. Now, Google has published or stated, I think they've stated, not published, but they've stated that what they want is for it to be considered a valid AI. It has to not be radical. It has to somewhat adhere to, to accepted norms and offer something unique. Both. Right. I mean, if I came up and said blueberries cure cancer, that is not an accepted norm, it's going to die right there. Right. But if I came up with something and it was well documented that it did it, and I said, and you can do this with it that nobody else has thought of yet. That is my value add. That is why I'm first among equals. Google's looking for that. And I don't think AI is necessarily even close to being able to do that, whereas humans can do it in a heartbeat. So I really seriously believe that for years, if, if all you need is regurgitated content, AI is great. If you look for creative things, things you haven't thought about. If you're looking for storytelling, it's going to be a while before AI catches up. And AI sure. Is SEO dead. Well, as long as SEO is the pre qualifier for the AI, the answer is that absolutely not. Right. It's going to be around. It's the AI part that we're all wrestling with and saying, oh, I can write a script that'll do this. I have a script that generates a content brief. I counted had 158 specific commands in it. 158 different commands.
- [53:41]
Matt Bertram
Wow.
- [53:42]
Bruce Clay
I mean we're talking Personas. The example I gave earlier where you had to back it into doing a pass pain activate solution, you have marketing strategy, you have how to do call to actions, you have a gazillion things that are part of the process. Including by the way, this is something that's interesting. You understand the concept of a Japanese sword where you fold it over a thousand times. Right, right. And it becomes super sharp, super hard Japanese sorts. Do that to your writing, write it, take it and then ask chat to improve it. And it will.
- [54:25]
Matt Bertram
Yeah.
- [54:26]
Bruce Clay
And then you can say I want it to be this and it'll change it. So even what chat creates isn't final. You gotta have a human involved. And I, that's my take.
- [54:38]
Matt Bertram
Yeah. No, you gotta, I think the operator and understanding how to use it and advanced prompting and all the other tools, but if you don't know what good looks like, it's hard to get to that point. Absolutely. So I wanted to try to cover one more topic really quickly. This was something that was talked about a lot at Brighton and, and I've seen it as well is the drop in traffic. Right. So Google. So I, so I want to get your opinion as a thought leader in the space on how you're dealing with that, how you're, how you're approaching it, how you're looking at what you're telling the clients. Right. Because I mean ultimately they're not buying SEO, they're buying potentially lead gen. It depends what, what their goals are. Right. But it could be public, swaying public policy or. But, but a lot of people want lead generation and that's what they're buying. They're not buying SEO, they're buying I need leads. And then the traffic's dropping because of all the changes that Google's making. Just, just curious, like your take on that.
- [55:45]
Bruce Clay
Yes. Well, there were a lot of people who ran data analysis and the data analysis implies that when, when AIO is present, the number one organic site had a 70% drop in click throughs. Documented. Yeah, I mean we're talking tons and tons and tons and you see the numbers, you don't believe it. So you rent it some more and it's consistent. Aio, when Google showed it at the top of the page, it pushed everything down. I hate to say it, but right now the first organic listing on a page is certainly nowhere near the top of the page. And I think that Google is going to have to change how it's formatting Its content to be multi column. I think if it's multi column done.
- [56:41]
Matt Bertram
Right.
- [56:43]
Bruce Clay
But what do you do on a mobile device? And while desktop is still growing, I think you have a problem, I think that you have a problem with the intended use, the non clicks. Right. 60%. I mean that's a ridiculously high no click ratio on mobile. Right. You add it all up. Yeah. I'm going to tell you right now, impressions are steady or increasing.
- [57:16]
Matt Bertram
Yep, yep.
- [57:17]
Bruce Clay
But click through on number one organic is dropping and it's because there's too much stuff at the top of the page. I mean, I hate to say it, but sometimes you actually have to pack a lunch if you're going to go journey to the number one organic result, it's that far down on the page you're scrolling to get there. And those days of the 10 blue links right at the top are long gone. It's the formatting of the Google search result page that's resulting in the traffic drops. And if you throw a great big block of AIO at the top of the page with the right hand side having some sites you can click on, it changes your orientation to how to build your web page. Here's an example. Go to go to my site and if you go through my blogs, what will happen? You click on a blog, you'll see the jump links. Go to the faq, take that question and this is the important part, take the question, highlight it and search. And over half the time I am called out in the AIO or I'm the featured snippet because we figured out a methodology for question presentation and answers that it's loved by AI. Right. You can see it. Just go through all of the blogs right there on my blog page. Just go to the questions, do the question as a search, not even in quotes, just search it. And what we're finding is that if you have a site that actually definitively answers the question, you'll rank for it. So I go to the question and I take out half the words and search for that and I'm still there. Right. And we're finding that you have to qualify in the search engine, as I've mentioned before, but you also have to change your architecture and your content schema to be more about answering questions. It used to be that the number of questions Google would get would be 4%. Now what I'm hearing is it's 16% and growing. People have learned to ask questions and usually that's why people go to a search engine anyhow.
- [59:51]
Matt Bertram
Yeah, yeah.
- [59:52]
Bruce Clay
And so what we're trying to do, mum, when mum was announced, or I think it was when Bert was announced by Google, one of the examples was, where is the Seattle Space Needle? Guess what, it's in Seattle. And is there an Italian restaurant near there? And it would be able to relate the questions and give you an Italian restaurant near the Seattle Space Needle. Well, guess what? You do that in one question now. Yeah, you don't have to do separate queries. You just say, I want a restaurant near this Seattle Space Needle and it'll give it to you. Right. I can say for this keyword, what are the five top Google results and what cities are they in compound questions and get that answer. But if I needed to do that as Google queries and what I think is happening is people are learning that power, right? And as they learn the power of how to ask the question, more and more questions are being asked. So one of the methodologies that you should follow is to have one question per page, not a whole bunch of FAQs. Get rid of your one paragraph, one hit wonder answers. It's nothing but a definition. You're not going to be beating anybody else, but have a comprehensive answer to the question. And if you can do that per.
- [61:35]
Matt Bertram
Page because, because that, that one page is going to be the best answer to that one question. Right? And, and so. Okay, yeah, no, I, I can, I can see that. I, I've also seen the more you get in the AI overview, the link equity starts to pull it up the rankings, like, the more you can get qualified up there. I'm seeing callbacks get shot, shot up when you get in there. So I'm looking at it more like a brand play almost as your impressions are going way up, people are associating your name with the expertise you're showing up in the AIO reviews. And that's, that's actually the new, like, rankings, right? So it's like, how do I get in those questions? And then really what's screwing it up is attribution, right? It's like, when is this converting, right? Like, and, and then you're combining it with ads or socials or whatever else you're doing, and you don't, you don't know where the attribution's coming from because the, the customer journey, they've cycled through so many different things. Like, it looks like, you know, they kind of start here in the center and then they go up and then they, or they go out and they go in different directions and they come back. But it's not like linear, like the search is not linear. And so you got to figure out again that entity, I guess of like that topic of spatially, every freaking direction, how are you associated with that in relation to everything else? And then I guess you're amplifying that with trust and it broadens out the, the sphere just like the GMBs. Right. Like it, the stronger the trust, the stronger the strength pushed out in every, every direction with those long tail key phrases.
- [63:32]
Bruce Clay
And remember, because it isn't a list of individual sites, the trust is higher with an AIO answer. So I mean it's, it's very powerful. But that is one of the reasons the click through rate has dropped off for the organics. Now that's only one out of eight queries. I have plenty of other opportunities and it's only for informational queries.
- [64:04]
Matt Bertram
Information. Yeah, yeah.
- [64:05]
Bruce Clay
Right. So if I have something that is transactional, I'm still, I'm totally okay. However, if I'm a transactional site, I ought to be developing informational pages.
- [64:21]
Matt Bertram
Yeah.
- [64:22]
Bruce Clay
And a lot of people are still a little behind on understanding that requirement.
- [64:31]
Matt Bertram
Do you see a bifurcation? Last question. I appreciate your time. A bifurcation because they used to, I don't know what they called it. I don't want to say what, what the trainings I went through. But, but, but low quality links. But local links. Right. So, but, but you know, so they're giving the local players a chance. Right. If they don't have the usability, if they don't have that. But they're, you know, specific to an area, like if it's a nonprofit or something like that. But, but I'm seeing in this new world, like you got to ante up and you, you got to meet this requirement. And so these big companies are starting to rank locally. Right. Where other local players, like if you're a bakery, if you're a national bakery versus like a local bakery. The national bakeries are starting to really take up a lot of the serps and the local bakeries are kind of getting pushed out and that's going to translate to business. I, I guess it's just kind of the course of the evolution of search. But like, what are some, I guess, tips to leave behind to maybe small business owners if you're not working with the big corporations or you're not a big corporation, like how are, how are the small players going to compete with all the different things that you need to do? Because SEO is just. Yeah. To do it right. To have all the steps to have. Like, even if we're just talking about content, you know, the smaller players have to cut corners because they don't have the budget. But how, like how are they going to be able to compete as they move forward? I mean what's, what's the guiding star for them to kind of leave everybody with some hope?
- [66:20]
Bruce Clay
Okay, so understand Google is in the business of making money.
- [66:25]
Matt Bertram
Yeah. Right.
- [66:29]
Bruce Clay
They don't care about us. They care about making money. They're a public company. That's their job. And I'm okay with that. Local has a tendency because it is focused, geographically focused. It has the ability for me to want to pay a little bit more than if I was trying to compete in the national area as a local business. So Google supports local. I wouldn't think that it would spend so much energy giving national accounts local presence. The thing that is the number one local factor, Number one local factor is Google Business Profile.
- [67:17]
Matt Bertram
Yeah.
- [67:18]
Bruce Clay
The second one is local reviews and let's just take those two. It's going to be very difficult. A national program cannot get a localized business profile. You have to physically have presence there and most of them can't. And they don't necessarily get local reviews. So there is an ability to compete. The problem you face is that the SEO on a local level is not that much cheaper than the SEO on a national level.
- [67:54]
Matt Bertram
These big sites, as, as every month goes by and the link the page rank increases. What, what I see is like there's a big pop whenever that happens in that cycle and these Web 2.0 or you know, multi location page sites pop up in the search rankings temporarily every time that I guess that page rank gets released and I mean it just dominates the serps. Like if you, you're in an industry that has a couple of those players in there, you know, like Nerd Wallet for example, if you're in finance, I mean you know their, their stuff just like crushes it. Right. And, and, and, and they're going into every conceivable niche related to finance that, that you can think of. And, and they're doing this national SEO at a very high level that transitions out to all these different searches and locally and, and, and they're starting to, to own the SERPs for, for a lot of different terms that you wouldn't think that they would normally own. And you know, I, I think it, it's getting really competitive and, and then that's becomes okay if you want to compete. Right. It's going to take, it's going to take more Firepower. We're going to have to work on your site a lot more to do that.
- [69:16]
Bruce Clay
Absolutely.
- [69:17]
Matt Bertram
Just kind of what you have to do, if that's what you want. And then you got the traffic dropping, too. So it's a confluence of challenges for somebody that's looking at a marketing budget and saying, I don't really understand what's going on, but I want to put, you know, I want to invest my marketing dollars and I want to output. And that number keeps going up. Right.
- [69:42]
Bruce Clay
So the way we've done it, we have this thing called localware.
- [69:46]
Matt Bertram
Okay.
- [69:47]
Bruce Clay
And it's got three phases. You see, the biggest problem you face is if you're given a quote of X number of dollars a month, it's because your project is that big. Right. Or that big. The thing is, on day one, you're not going to do all of it.
- [70:05]
Matt Bertram
Yeah.
- [70:05]
Bruce Clay
So what we did is we said, here's phase one. It's a fraction of the real SEO project, but that's all we're going to do for phase one. And then we're going to add on for phase two. So your bill will go up for phase two, but we're doing more. Right. But on day one, I don't have to charge you for this big national program because we're not going to be ready for some of it until, you know, three months in. So you have to end up. Instead of saying, this is my program, this is what it costs, you have to be ready to say, this is my program. This is what it will eventually cost. But we're going to start and do it block by block by block.
- [70:53]
Matt Bertram
Yeah, Right.
- [70:54]
Bruce Clay
And we're only going to charge you as we expand. And now if you get the return on your investment, you don't mind investing. Right. If I put in a dollar and get out 10, I'm going to go to the bank and get a stack of dollars. I mean, it's that simple. And so you really need to have a building block system for local, and you need a comprehensive system for national, because most of the time, when we get a national account, it's already developed.
- [71:27]
Matt Bertram
Yeah.
- [71:28]
Bruce Clay
They've been doing SEO for two years, and we're their fourth SEO company. Right. They need somebody that can do a deep dive. Finally, they're ready for that. But until then, we just have to. I appreciate and recognize that a lot of local sites don't have budgets.
- [71:49]
Matt Bertram
Yeah.
- [71:49]
Bruce Clay
All right, so we'll start you small. We'll fix the basics, we'll bootstrap to phase two. And if Your site. You know, one of my sayings, it's not the job of SEO to make a pig fly. Okay. If your site is terrible, SEO didn't fix it. So I can only do what I can do with what I'm given. But under normal circumstances, I'm able to do quite a bit. And. But if I have to do it to a budget and you're a small guy with a limited budget, I have to do it in blocks. I can't, I can't sell you the whole project. You're not going to be able to keep up with me.
- [72:37]
Matt Bertram
Yeah.
- [72:37]
Bruce Clay
So I have to sell you the piece that, okay, we're going to do this and see what happens. Then we're going to do this and see what happens. Then we're going to do this and see what happens, and we'll walk you through a growth program.
- [72:50]
Matt Bertram
Do you have a tool that, like a calculator that kind of analyzes? Because I've been playing around with a couple different things in Excel, but you got to pick those variables. And the thing for me is once I get into a site and we start working on a site, I don't really know how long it's going to take until I kind of go through the long term database update, about 2¾ months. So I'm like, I can give you a number of what I think it's going to be, but until I start driving your site, see how it responds, I call it blooming the flower. To take whatever they have to. Just, let's optimize it and see what happens. Set a new baseline. Now I can tell you what I think it's going to take to get to where you want to go. But now they're three months in and, you know, there's a lot of trust building and, you know, they, they haven't seen any roi. Like, you know, it's horseshoes and hand grenades with SEO. And so you got to, you got to really do a lot of education so they understand what they're getting into. Because, you know, a lot of them, I'm like, I call it like walking through the desert. I'm like, okay, we have to get to six months. Like, and I will show you the progress and you will see it. But on the back end of the six months, you're going to be really happy. But until then, you know, like, you got to trust me. We got to, you know, I got to show you the success. I got to show you the steps. Just kind of like sales calls and, you know, proposals like you're going to get there, but, but you got to know that this is something you really want to do. Because when someone has a small budget and it's their money, right? Like when you talk to the corporations, it's, you know, it's budget but you know, the small businesses, they're, they're, they're going, I need to, you know, Rob, Peter, pick Paul kind of thing. And, and sometimes they don't have the budget for it and, or the market can't bear actually the budget that's actually needed. So I'm starting to have a lot of the conversations if, if they're competing in a high DA keyword, right. And there's some really strong sites that are out there. I'm like, you know, this is, this is going to take, this is not going to be a three month thing, right. Like I'm going to need the long term database to update at least three or four times, you know, and that's just what it's going to be, you know, and so, well, the problem you.
- [75:08]
Bruce Clay
Face, you know, you're absolutely right. This is the problem every agency has. But even then we, in my agency, we'll tell you, we run in four week sprints because if Google is going to change the rules, if your competition is not static, right?
- [75:31]
Matt Bertram
Yeah.
- [75:32]
Bruce Clay
We're in a dynamic environment. I cannot tell you even four weeks from now what Google just did to the entire industry. I cannot tell you that. So what we do is we say our visibility is four weeks. Chances are it's reasonably stable. Here's the four week project and at the end of four weeks, we define the next four weeks. There's no way I can give you a six month project plan. I can tell you these are the things that are broken and I have to work on them. But I cannot tell you that in seven weeks Google's going to roll over the algorithm and you're going to get crushed. I cannot tell you that in 11 weeks you're going to get hit with malware, somebody will break into your servers. I am not going to tell you that. You know, Google just invented something else and it's a rule, not a, you know, guidance. I can't tell you any of that. Right.
- [76:31]
Matt Bertram
Yeah.
- [76:32]
Bruce Clay
All I can do is my best job to move you along on a good project. Right now probably 95% of all of our clients have seen a sign, a significant traffic increase since they started with us. But I still can't give them a six month plan.
- [76:57]
Matt Bertram
Yeah, yeah.
- [76:58]
Bruce Clay
The reason they get when am I.
- [76:59]
Matt Bertram
Going to get roi, right? When am I going to see the ROI on this? And then what the funniest thing is like, we have clients that, oh, boom, boom, boom, boom, bunch of leads, right? And then they're like, man, it's been quiet this week. And I'm like, yeah, I just went over there and turned it off the lead. You know, I said that just what, like you're still in first position or top three or whatever it is. I was like, so, you know, it's just kind of like the demand in the marketplace ebbs and flows and so. But I think for everybody listening, if you enjoyed this conversation, Bruce Clay does ask me anythings, which I've been on a few of those where, where he answers questions like these and, and goes into detail. Uh, and, uh, certainly, you know, about three years ago, I was on a lot of them because there was a lot of stuff going on and, and I had a lot of questions and he did a great job answering them like he did today. Bruce, you want them to go to your website, bruce clay.com. how do you want them to get in touch people to get in touch with you? Just really enjoyed having you here. So.
- [78:10]
Bruce Clay
Yes, thank you. Most people would just go to Bruce Clay dot com, but if you just wanted training, I have SEO training dot com. If you just want tools, I have seotools dot com. I have some nice domain names. Yeah, Prewriter AI. And in fact, you can go to Prewriter AI and sign up. We'll give you 20 free tokens to try it. So, you know, we've got some very powerful things, but Bruce Clay would probably be the best way. You also probably want to follow me. There's Bruce Clay and Bruce Clay Inc. On LinkedIn and you might want to follow me as well. Yeah, we have our blog. I mean, you already subscribed to the blog.
- [78:57]
Matt Bertram
Yeah, no, I'm, I'm subscribed. Everybody. I'm, I'm subscribed to, to his blogs. I would just tell you there's so much going on in SEO. You, you need to stay abreast of what's going on. I, I think the tools are starting to get a lot more powerful, giving you a lot more insights. I would encourage you to go check out SEO tools and you know, Bruce, thank you so much for coming on. Really enjoyed it. Until the next time, everybody, if you're looking to grow your business with the largest, most powerful tool on the planet, which is the Internet, and now coupled with what AIO is doing, a AI is changing the game. Yet again. Reach out to EWR for more revenue in your business. Thanks again. Until the next time. Bye bye for now.