← The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
Why Old SEO Metrics Fail And What To Track Instead With Corey Morris
00:55:52
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- [00:03]
A
This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential? Let's get started. Howdy. Welcome back to another fun filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I am your host, Matt bertram. It is 2026. You're probably not going to get this podcast for about a month or two. Apologies. We're backed up, we've a lot of great interviews. I also need to change the intro. I know that, but things are getting done. I got a whiteboard set up behind me. You know, there we're, we're going to be doing some, some conversational talks. We got a small group going now. There's a lot of, well, discussion in that group and I'm kind of pulling some of that forward into the podcast because I think a lot of people are having the same questions. I've been talking to a lot of different agency owners about where the market's going, what's happening with the AI systems, how does that interact with the traditional systems. I got a lot of client conversations happening and so the small groups have been pretty, pretty active and I think, you know, kind of bringing that out there to, to the public is, is good if you're an agency owner listening and you don't know what's going on. Matthewbertrom.com I'm getting some consulting going there. Formally, I've been doing this for a long time and people have been asking me for that. But we do have some small groups. I do have Corey Morris here and CEO of Voltage Digital. And Corey, welcome to the show. You got a great background, love for you to share it with the audience and we can kind of get into a discussion of how the market's shaping up for you.
- [02:01]
B
Yeah, sounds good. Thanks for having me, Matt. Yeah, much like what you just said, I've been doing this for a long time and it's like, where do you start and what do you unpack? A little over 20 years now into my career and it's wild to take a moment and get out of the weeds and step back and think about where things were 20 years ago, let alone just three or four years ago in the digital marketing world. But my career has spanned going from being a project manager to digging really deep into SEO as a subject matter expert and leading a team there at a previous agency, having paid search in my background, email marketing, and then all of that before social media emerged, and then being a more well rounded digital marketer and then starting landing in Voltage as An employee and eventually working up through running the agency day to day to becoming the owner several years ago. And so there's a lot of entrepreneurial stuff in there. There's a lot of like, you know, SEO woven in and digital marketing, digital strategy and SEO and all where it's going is still a huge core part of what we do day to day.
- [03:21]
A
You know, I don't know if you knew this, but my pathway has been very similar to that. And so I, I came on to, to EWR when it was e web results as a contractor actually, and then got brought in house and, and moved up. And then we actually, Chris, who is my co host, who started the podcast, we grew another business that's very, very successful now. I'll tell you, I don't want to give too much away, but we just got him on another podcast. But this is where podcasting's going. Okay. We paid $23,000 or close to that, somewhere in that number for 45 minutes on a specific podcast. Okay. And he had to drive to the location and all that. And why did we do that? Why did we do that? Well, when we were first launching the supplement brand, he came to me and he said like, how, how do we need to. What's our go to market? And I was like, how much money we got? It's like eight grand. And so I got him on a bunch of podcasts and we saw huge ROI from that and built affiliate programs and you know, continued to, to build the brand. Now he's got a book, he's got a conference, he's got his own podcast. And one of the major objectives that we're tracking on kind of like experimental search in addition to like the, the, the main staples, our podcasts. And we found a huge ROI from that and so it's really worth the, the investment. And so now he and the other partners that started EWR are doing that full time and I had the opportunity to, to buy an ownership share and looking at, you know, you know, taking out the rest of the cap table at certain point. So, but yeah, so, so I've, I've kind of gone through that as well. And I would tell you that SEO was a very nice shiny object that you said SEO and everybody wanted that. I'm starting to feel the same way when we're talking about, you know, showing up in chat, GPT or something like that. People don't really understand how the systems work. I think they're a little more hands on with it, but, but I'm seeing a lot of need for it. And there's this huge debate, okay, and, and I know a lot of the top SEOs and man, they, I, I hate getting on LinkedIn because there's just too much going on all the time. It's pretty noisy. But there's a huge group of people that are like, it's still just SEO, right? And then there's a huge group of people going, no, it's fundamentally different. And then I look at the data and I'm like, well, there, you know, is about 30% something overlap. And fundamentally they're trying to get to the same result, but how they get there is completely different. And I don't think, I don't think that that's been fully realized. And I think there's just a lot of debate around like a new name or a shiny object. But fundamentally, the more I get into learning about AI itself and how machine learning works and then how they surface everything, it's fundamentally, well, improved my understanding of like, it's not about following checklists, you know what I mean? It's not, it like everything's been shifting and I think everything's a lot more open and more transparent, but it's more complicated. So it's still kind of black box for a lot of people. And I just now, in the last couple months have started, see people fundamentally take the shift. I mean, maybe people are talking about it, but they're giving lip service to it. But now I'm starting to see real inroads happen in the space and I also see these AI systems acting really, really odd. They're not like just following what Google's doing anymore. So I'd be interested to hear kind of your take on the market itself and like, what I know we were talking previously about KPIs and tracking and revenue and all those sort of things. I would love to see kind of how you're stacking it up today.
- [07:33]
B
Yeah, I mean, you just mentioned a whole bunch there in just like two minutes. And I'm very aligned with you on the. In fact, I had to go, I had to stop and back myself out of LinkedIn for a period last year and just be in there for essential things and ignore the feed because people I know and love and trust were giving me either frustrating me, not in a bad way, but just with where the debate was going and the conversations were going, or giving me some FOMO where it's like, well, I'm not doing all these massive experiments and reverse engineering everything because that's not a good use of My time right now for this fraction of maybe getting one visitor or speculating on where this is. My goal isn't to, to break the news in the industry, it's to help brands move forward and distill a lot of that down. So yes, I'm testing and experimenting, but at a level that is closer to being something I can implement or my team can implement. And so we actually wrote a, it's not a public pov, but we wrote one last year as an exercise for us to really get around that because there was so much about people wanting to coin the new term and, or talk about what it is and isn't where I think to the point you were getting into a little bit is, you know, on the traffic side of it, it's not a correlation of okay, well maybe search traffic dropped 50% and that 50% can be accounted for over in an LLM. It's like this is not just it moved type of scenario one to one. It's changing. And Google also, obviously with their AI overviews and integration and direct, you know, direct answers, but try changing in the most disruptive way they ever have. The search results page, there's, there's just a big shift with multiple variables that is hard to quantify. And I know we're going to talk about attribution and some of that to come, but philosophically, where I started was, and when I was, when I was starting to get asked by some colleagues at a mastermind of hey, you guys are really like doubling down on SEO right when AI started to blow up, that's kind of a bold move. And I said my answer was and continues to be, no matter what the avenue is in the platform or whatever the algorithm looks like or source is, there are brands out there that want to be found. And the game is getting even more complex now. So there's going to be as much if not more demand even when we look at some of the short term drops in traffic and the questions. And is SEO actually finally dead after the millionth time of people asking it? Well, maybe SEO from 2020 is dead. And I think that's where we get into the nuance of what you were talking about, of all those debates out there that I think are distracting of. Well, yeah, outdated SEO, there's so much nuance into that. The SEO changed so much in the last two or three years anyway that if you modernized it, a lot of things are working. So maybe there's 80% of your SEO strategy, your modern, accurate, up to date SEO Strategy does influence LLMs but SEO in 2026 is different than SEO in 2022, and so a lot of that applies. I was just talking to my team yesterday, who we've had three leads come through that were actually real people. We talked to them as prospects through finding my agency through LLMs. And that's not through us having a dedicated separate GEO strategy versus SEO strategy. That's just through a lot of the evolution of doing the right things across the board for visibility and doing it and being able to do those things and push those forward. So that's my soapbox now. Get off of it.
- [11:36]
A
Well, again, kind of a similar story. I don't know if it was two years ago, two and a half years ago, something like that, but we got a call and they're like, we're only like. So we got. So I got asked to be on the call by my sales team. So I came on the call and, you know, this good client and became one of our biggest clients. It's still a client today. But essentially what happened was they called and said the only re. This is how we started the conversation. Like, I get on the call and they're like, the only reason that we're talking to you is you showed up first in perplexity. And this was two and a half years ago. And my first question and look like, I mean, I was a little behind the curve. I wasn't on the cutting edge of all this because I didn't understand it. I'm not going to talk about it if I don't understand it. I was still learning about it. I go, what is perplexity? That was my first question. So he goes, okay, so, so. But I go, great, right? Great. And, and then as we were talking, he was like, I recognize your voice. And he goes, I've listened to your podcast. So that was why we got the client, right? Like, so there was a discovery component of it, but there's a lot of other things that you need to do with your brand to, to close the deal. And so it could be, you know, a tipping off point. But I also think we, we were talking with one client about setting up custom GPTs as like a, you know, a visibility component. I go, no, this is more of like a trust or intake component. It's not being used in that light. But to your point, I think that good SEO has evolved, right? So like, if you're operating on old strategies and it moves into kind of like, you know, the bert and then there was like, like the semantic stuff and then there' Entity like, so things have moved and they will continue to move. But if you're doing good work, you're creating visibility. And I think that traditional SEO, the way I see it is it's like the layer one, it's like to, it's the table stakes. To get into the game, you, you have to be right in the top 100, at least showing up for the keyword. If you don't show up for the keyword like in that top 100 and that's like a good target, you're not going to qualify for anything else, whether it's AI overviews or, you know, rankings or what have you. Right. So you have to be good enough and differentiate yourself enough where the machines, whether it be search engines or AI bots, understand what it is you do. So you have to be really clear about that and the clearer you can be about that kind of entity, disambiguous, disambiguitization of who you are versus somebody else. And like, also a lot of people have data out there that like needs to be cleaned up because, you know, like, they just assume that I'm on this platform, this platform and this platform and this platform. They know it's all the same person and they're giving you credit for that. And I'm seeing that not being the case in a lot of instances, but I feel like traditional SEO and that foundation gets you into the game and then there's kind of that icing on the cake, which is like the, the LLM layer.
- [14:58]
B
Yeah, well, and I think several of the things you talked about with differentiation are important. And in the era, the last two decades, I mean, while I've been doing this, there's been so much focus on, well, it's digital so we can just pump out more and, and all the wasted impressions. Who cares? Wasted traffic, who cares? It'll go through the funnel. We'll get what we need. When you see diminishing visibility and traffic now, it's actually pushed us back to the things we've said all along. And when we, I say we, I'm pointing at myself as well. Right. The things that we've said, we want to create a quality experience. We want to have brand, you know, talk about our brand in a way that stands apart. Unless you're selling, you're the low price leader and you're selling the widget for the cheapest price, which I've not worked with clients who are like, I just want the mass and I'm going to undercut somebody because that's the Amazons of the world are going to do that or whatnot as well. Right. And I haven't had them as a client. But when we actually have to actually do what we've said for a long time in the industry and go look back at reinvesting in brand strategy, brand development, product development, sales, messaging and process development. Because if you get, we can actually get hopefully the same opportunities but we have to be more focused and when we get that impression and what we do with it and to move it through the funnel so we actually have to put our money where our mouth is on the quality versus quantity focus to it and differentiate. I had the opportunity to work with a publisher and write a book and it's really just outlining my five step process for digital marketing planning and it's an acronym called Start is my process and it's that first six week to two month process we work through like so many other agencies as well. But we, we, I was very clear there because we also niched down our service line and we stopped doing branding, we stopped doing brand strategy and all that. And, and so I talk about those things as prerequisites. You have no business. And we find out the hard way sometimes with clients if there are big gaps, you have no business going and giving Google hundreds of thousands of dollars in Google Ads and spending a year or two on SEO to find out that in a really expensive experiment that you had some gaps in your messaging and your product development in your roadmap or you didn't have things that were PR worthy and some of the traditional things that become digital and are those influences now. So there's just so much there and so much emphasis where it's like I can't just kind of fake my way through it and I can't just in mass scale AI generated content throw it out there and hope that it's going to tell the brand story and land that per that that diminishing amount of traffic I might be getting and convert them or impress my AI content to go impress an AI entity.
- [18:01]
A
Yeah, I mean I, I, you know the term that Everybody's using on LinkedIn is like AI slop. Right. And I think it is really as people get more comfortable with these tools and when I say comfortable I mean a foundational level. With these tools you're able to create tons of content at mass and that's where I think the eat component, they added that experience layer to it because now you can kind of trick the search engines to think that you have a certain kind of Experience. Now, to put that all together in like, whatever your kind of, you know, customer acquisition component is and also to match it with the brand. There's actually a lot of additional strategy work that has to happen. And to your point, that's been a struggle for, for us and, and I, because we can execute really well. But you know, to make, you know, doo doo fly, sometimes there's, there, you know, there's certain things you have to go back and fix. Right. And so if you want us to execute this, we have to do these things. And so what has kind of happened over time is me and a few of our strategists have really started to move away from the execution. Okay. And try to evaluate the business problem of what you're having. Because, I mean, many times people are coming to me and they're going, I have a paid media problem. And I'm like, well, okay, you're ranked fourth for a keyword that has huge volume. If you push that up, you could do that way less than what you're spending on paid ads and you're going to get a much better quality. No, you have a SEO problem, right? Or like they come in and there's all different kind of scenarios. So, but you're right, there's many times is, okay, well, you have a website structure issue, right? Or you have a brand issue, or you have no demand whatsoever. So for a keyword that no one's searching for. So SEO is not really going to work. You got to make better decisions on the front end of what your go to market is or your start program is to, to get there. And, and I really like that. And one of the things I do want to talk about, if we have time, this is an area I am looking into and I don't know how much you, you've, you've like, researched this or not. I've, I, I was reading a Dwayne's book, the Machine Layer over the, over the holidays, and he was talking about, which I, I knew about this, but he, he really put it together pretty well. I'm going to have him on the podcast. But AI influence. So when we get into KPIs, AI is influenced by what you're saying, but is not referencing you. Right. So your framework, like, your framework, like really making sure that that's well defined and you know, potentially trade marketing, all that sort of thing is important. So you get attribution for that because it might take your framework and it might apply that framework and it might impact it and it never gives you Credit. And so how do you measure that? Right. And so that, that is some of the factors around trademarking, the LLM visibility and going, hey, y' all can fight over whatever you want to call it. This is what I believe it is. This is what we're doing. We're just gonna, we're gonna just build this over here and, and if anybody that I'm talking to want to come over there and check it out and then, you know, some of the industries followed a little bit in that direction. But I still think that there's, you know, GAO and AEO and AI SEO, like, all, all of that I think is relevant, but that where that battle is on, the naming convention is distracting on the implementation of, of, of what's happening. And really what we're seeing is clients need to understand how to measure this. And, and I don't think that anybody's come up with some clear KPIs. And I don't think that search rankings are the right metric anymore. And so we've been really slowly moving away from that because it's not, it's not even relevant. It's just like we're looking at just honestly, it's like revenue, like, how. Where's the revenue? Like, and can we figure that out? And what is that? And work our way backwards from that. And I'm not saying that that's right. I'm just saying that that's what we have done and that's the only way in the conversation with clients to explain what's going on is just like, look at your bottom line. Is what we're doing having an impact? Does it make sense? Is it logical? This is good business. This is good marketing, like, period.
- [23:02]
B
Yeah, no, you're. What you're talking about is exactly what we found works, has, has worked really well for us. A few years ago we started really. And some of it was because we realized no one wants to engage with someone, whether it's an agency or hire someone who doesn't ask the right questions and works, just does the work blindly for six months or a year. And then it's like, oh, I wish I would have known that, or I wish you would have told me about that KPI or how this impacts CRM or whatever. Like me, the 18 year ago, starting out SEO just wanted to do my stuff and stay in my lane and stay in my channel because I had enough to worry about there in that world and keeping up versus, like getting into messy corporate politics on the client side or ask questions about things that were outside of my channel or outside of my subject matter expertise. But what I my team and I realized even though our focus as we narrowed our focus to just search and websites and stop doing branding, social, email and the and creative services and 12 things we're doing, you get down to just two things. As an agency, we still have to, we can't just hide in that silo or in that in that subject matter expertise. But we have to start with we're going to get fired. Even if it looks like all of our KPIs are up and to the right. If someone can't measure that gap between what we're doing and how it's impacting their bottom line. And it definitely has gotten harder. But it's also a lot easier when you can have transparent conversations, whether it's with the C suite or whatever highest level you can to your point of working backwards, whether it's from revenue or profit and whatnot. It's been interesting when we've asked some of these questions sometimes to senior global directors of marketing about how their business makes money. And it's like, well, wait a minute, I'm just asking you about SEO. Why are you asking me some of these ROI questions about profitability? But we need to understand that so we can have full visibility of that to be able to help them understand. Because to your point, it's like, do we want to pour more into this or is that an unwise decision either in this moment because you're not ready yet, because there are some other problems in the foundation of your house or in a couple of cases, this is not the right channel. You do not need paid search. To your point, we need you have an SEO problem, not a paid search problem. Or even one of the stories I share in my book too about a client actually didn't become a client. They were prospect asked us to audit their paid search because they're like, well, we feel like we're getting this level of profit, but we feel like if we outsource it to an expert, they might be able to take it even further. What we ended up finding out is they were actually they thought they were 20% profitable on those leads. They were actually 20% negative because they had attribution problems. And we're connecting those dots like you don't need to spend any more. Maybe you need to spend less until you get these three or four things fixed. So we probably sold ourselves out of potentially taking that on, but we would have been fired anyway when they would we or that they would have figured it out down the road on accident or when harder questions were asked later. And so being it's, it doesn't feel comfortable early on if you're deep in the weeds like I was as a channel person and just want to nerd out on one thing. But thinking like a, like a C suite or CMO or director of marketing and what they're accountable for and working backwards from there just opens up a lot of new layers to be able to be successful or navigate it together versus being walled off and in a silo away from the actual KPIs that matter.
- [26:57]
A
Corey, one of the things that you said is a discussion point in all the crazy conversation that's been going on. And I went to more conferences last year than I've gone to in a long time because I really wanted to talk to people and hear their stories and join some masterminds and all that sort of thing. I would tell you that the biggest takeaway for me is that SEOs that want to stay in their lane and do their thing and actually have a lot of great data and knowledge that, you know, are well underpaid in a huge, like the, the amount of data from traditional marketing and like the reason that people or CROs or you know, executive suite throw money into paid ads is they can measure it. And SEOs haven't done a good job of tying it to revenue because it's, it's a little bit abstract, right, of like how to tie it and how it influences it. And the best case studies I have, okay, which I need to like publish them. I need to get, get on that and publish them. But are really reverse case studies, like, so I'm not, I don't have as good of data of like this measured this. If, like, I can't tie it to, to the data points. But what I can show is if you lose keyword rankings for certain keywords or like, for example, I have a, like a, a private equity brand and there's a bunch of different brands and they're like, okay, we need to focus on this one brand. And, and, and I basically took all the budget and focused on that one brand and kind of let the others kind of shrink based on the, the layout of the website, right? Like, like we're gonna really focus on this because it's too noisy, we don't know how to categorize it, all this kind of stuff. Their revenues dropped dramatically. And I'm like, you had other lead funnels coming in. But the, but the brand, the brand presence is so important and it's like how do you measure like or that, like a lawyer with tort or whatever. Like the, like the brand being there when people research. And I'm even seeing this in similar web data. People are going to the website, they're of course searching you on Google, they're checking. Now one of the key sources from similar web that I'm seeing on a number of brands is like Grok or chatgpt. That's like the out. So people find out about you whatever way it is, but then they go research you and they want to see like where is that authority, where is that expertise, where's that trust? How are, how is that website presenting it? And if you don't have those right things and you aren't, you know, hitting on the hot buttons or positioning right, it's affecting revenue on the backside. Just like the other example with the keywords. If you lose certain keywords or categories or you know, fan out too much and it's not focused, they feel the reverse impact a lot more than the incremental increase. You know what I mean? Or I don't know, it's been weird, it's been. But it's these like reverse case studies where I see the value in the data of where that risk factor is if we don't do this versus here's what we would get if we do do this well.
- [30:12]
B
And I think for, and I'm going to say this and make this disclaimer for anyone who's tuning in at this minute and didn't hear what we just Talked about about 10 minutes ago, but I'm not advocating for old SEO, but, but obviously a big part of content and context driven and authority building SEO forever has been quality content. And so if you've got stale content, outdated content out there, even on a page that you think might get one visit a year, but it still needs to be out there because it's a service you have or it's still a blog post for that super long tail, one person, right fit prospect that might come in and it's worthy of staying on your site, make sure it's updated, make sure it's accurate because that whole complete picture still matters. And so yeah, you can't go into, okay, we got to prune everything. But at the same time we can't like in the old days, neglect all this old content out here either because that complete picture is being judged exponentially more by AI than it even was by Google, who would have to fan out and eventually see it and put the picture together. In a more, more longer term way.
- [31:23]
A
I think you just said it the complete picture. Right? That is what AI is doing is really grabbing the complete picture and looking at it from all these different angles. And so you have to think about everything. And then even going back to my earlier point to highlight a little bit more when you said at the very beginning you're like I went through this phase, you said that you were a digital marketer. And I actually think it's very, very difficult today unless you work at a very large company which there's a lot of issues with siloing and everything as you go bigger and red tape. But if you're not a digital marketer, at least have that surface level understanding like the previous experience with the agency of doing all these other things make you better at SEO, make you better at kind of like the information capture, the information organization or discovery process because they all impact it. They're all woven together, they're not siloed. And I just think it's SEOs really need to improve their language about how they're communicating about what they're doing. And I honestly think that the KPIs are what's holding everybody back. And rethinking through what the real KPIs are of how do we measure this and have more kind of boardroom language is going to change the game. And I feel like SEOs have the most data now. Some of it's siloed and bringing it all together. And again AI helps with that. But being able to articulate that data is where the gap is.
- [33:10]
B
Yeah. No, and that's exactly it. That goes getting and that's the hardest part again to get comfortable going outside of your comfort zone of this is what I know now I got to enter into somebody else's territory or find the gray area where Nobody owns the KPIs. Things are disconnected. And to be willing to be a problem solver at a different level, you might have two or three months if you're in an agency or even new hire in your team of before you actually do any SEO work or any optimizing anything just trying to troubleshoot and problem solve and connect the dots with dashboards and data that's everywhere and CRMs things that have been neglected for years or have been built by certain teams and that aren't talking to each other. And whether that's a Fortune 500 or a 10 person company, those things exist and those they've always existed. But it's more important than ever to get the dots connected. Because we can't just assume that everything's up and to the right. I even see leads go through or E commerce sales come through from search with a nice attribution string that it's going to equal somebody saying good job in the ownership or C suite or on the client side or in the stakeholder seats to actually understand that. And it has been fascinating to see how things have changed. You mentioned earlier talking about podcasts and strategy and that's again some of the things that maybe aren't text on a page or inbound link that you can see as an SEO from years ago. Maybe don't get thought about as much because it doesn't feel like indexable content. But all the collection of stuff is important and how much you're willing to share knowledge and put it out there is important too. And there are all kinds of problems and question marks on trademark and defending it. And you know, if I give more to the LLMs, are they gonna just gonna rip me off into Google? Are they gonna rip me off even more? And so there's, I'm not, I'm not even gonna wade into the legal side. How do you protect that? That's still to come in our industry in the next few years. But there's just so much about considering how much do you gate and keep close to the vest and maybe not get found versus how much do you freely give away? And and I was reminded of this a little bit when you were talking about some of the education my team yesterday was talking about as going through interviewing and hiring for another search role. Talking about the approach of most of our clients don't care about the nerdiness and the super technical parts of it. But do we hold that back and water it down where they, and they don't get the impression or understanding of it enough. So we're like we have it there and we might give them 90 seconds of it before they check out on us and then get down to the level that they care about. And that's whether you're an agency or an in house or whatever you're doing. I think that's important to be able to validate big pictures here. We'll take you there and you need some forced education, even if you don't want to listen versus chasing all those shiny objects and making it feel like the snake oil or crystal ball that it isn't if you're doing it, doing it properly and to be able to demonstrate that shift. So I think that's part of the gap that we talked about too. There are people talking about it way out here on the exploratory end and people who sound like it's outdated and you can't validate if it's outdated or we're just making it more approachable and where that middle ground is of how we work through it, talk about it, and educate stakeholders of where we're going and how messy it is now compared to how it's never not been messy, but how it was a little bit more linear and how we measured it 10 years ago.
- [37:04]
A
Wow, you brought up some things that I will have to save or maybe we'll bring you back for another discussion. I don't want to veer off too much into data hygiene issues internally, externally, but, but I would love to dive into, in the kind of, this last piece here about KPIs, and what were the KPIs you used to use? What are the KPIs you're using now? What do you think the KPI should be? Are there any tools that you're finding helpful? Like, let's give people like, actionable steps on what they should actually be looking at. Because I'll tell you right now, all this nerdiness is exciting for me. Like, I, I love digging into it. I, I love the data. I love how it all connects together. Like, that gets me going. So this is, this re. Evolution of the industry has been fantastic. And, and it's repositioning everybody at the starting gate. Right. And so certainly, you know, people that have done everything right are, have an advantage, but for the most part it's a reset. And, and, and I love, I love that. And it's fun to compete now, but everybody else that's not thinking that way is like, oh my gosh, I went through another learning cycle here. I just went through digital transformation. I'm just now running ads since COVID Like, I figured it out and now I got to learn it again. And I'm trying to run my business and you know, the private equity guys don't have a clue what, what is going on. They just want to dump their money into something. And so, like, how do you measure this stuff? Like, or what. Just how are you dealing with, with, with the, the KPI component of it. And I know we talked about that prior to going live.
- [38:57]
B
Yeah, I'll go back to, to what we talked about, about starting at the furthest endpoint we can get, whether that's revenue or, or, or adjusted gross income or whatever it might be a profitability and working backwards to make sure that for us in many cases our dashboards get all the if we can get attribution of search or digital marketing driven traffic like the old days all the way to through leads. And in many cases we're working B2B and so we have lead values and getting close to the sales team or CRO or whoever it might be who's leading that and can validate that this data is clean all the way through, getting to that number and understanding that and customer lifetime value and all those things. So that's the holy grail, that's where we want to be. Because then we can at whatever regular checkpoints, annual or more often reevaluate that and have a pulse of are we getting enough leads, are we getting high enough quality leads, are they targeted properly and start the converse and keep the conversation there on an ongoing healthy basis and not have to keep going and reevaluating the the ultimate business goal and have and have challenges with that. So if we can anchor to that at least at at an on an annual basis and understand have the businesses goals changed, are the marketing goals in alignment with that and that doesn't again sound like an SEO's job, but it's become more, more of important to validate that some of these points are in place. So for us the deepest goals we get to typically and that we love reporting on are Those agreed upon KPIs related to deals that come through or leads that come through and validate and our ability to connect into CRM or whatever levels of data we can. We have E commerce clients too and that's different and feels easier because we get the data in real time coming back to us. But also we have to understand margins and if you're drop shipping versus where your warehouses are and what tariffs did to you or anything else that you can't just turn off that part of the brain either and say well it's a 4 to 1 or 12 to 1 ROAS or if you're looking at from an organic perspective how you're validating that return on spend of what you're investing in SEO efforts. So whatever that is, not just trusting it for a year or two or three and saying okay well we got you 50,000 leads in the last five years, why is that not profitable? Or why is the company shutting down or selling off or whatever. And so that's the KPI layer. It's not much different than what it's been in the past, but there's extra scrutiny on it and making sure we understand it and not just trusting the other side of this too. Not just trusting GA4 out of the box. Right. Of course, what doesn't get talked about is that GA4 emerged a few years ago and still frustrates many, if not all of us because we have assumptions that things just work and get measured properly like they did previously. We wrote a great article my VP of strategy did last year. That's got 15 screenshots and walking you through the 10 minute setup to go set up the attribution you need to see LLM traffic and categorize it properly. And we've got another one coming in the next few weeks based on a client problem we were solving yesterday. That's solvable, but not an out of the box feature. And so the constantly revisiting and rechecking and validating has become unfortunately, a new time commitment to make sure the KPIs don't get taken for granted.
- [42:47]
A
Yeah, I think GA4 is something that was kind of like when AdWords switched over to the new system. Like, there's actually some really good components to it, but they move stuff around and you've got to do it a different way and you got to hook certain stuff up, you know, So I do think it's more powerful or useful. And a lot of stuff that might not be as useful, they're kind of going, this is not as useful. Like, you don't need to focus on this, but people are focused on older KPIs. I would love to hear kind of as we close out, what are the tools that you're using and are the tools effective? Because, okay, like in the last four months everybody added their bolt on AI visibility tool, right? And I mean, even the traditional tools, like, I'm going like, okay, are, are y' all even. I'm like going to my team, I'm like, are y' all even looking at keyword tracking? Like, is it accurate? Like, you know, and everybody's going back to manual searches. That's, that's a lot of what. But then manual searches are personalized. If you're looking in the AIs to, to, to yourself. And so then it's like, okay, have the client look at it. They're, they're, there's so many different like layers or kind of like different angles to look at this. And then like these tools are also giving you one data point and you're like, okay, well maybe that's pulling from over here or over there, but I can't replicate it or the client can't replicate it. Right? It's like, oh, you're ranking number one and then nobody on your team can replicate, the client can't replicate. You're like, where is this number coming from? And like, is that even data valid? And then I was on a, like a, a bigger panel discussion with a bunch of teams and the, the IT team was there and they're like, isn't all this data theoretical? I was like, yeah, a lot of it is. And they're like, so how do we know if it's true? And I was like, we don't. And that's why we're using multiple tools to, to kind of create like a, a GPS coordinate to, to kind of validate it from different angles. And I said these are the gold standard. This is what's out there. You know, I was like, so what, what we ended up doing is a guy on my team and his brother in law, they're like, they're like coders and stuff. They built a tool called Carrot and we're just launching that and it's literally like all the input and we're going to be using this tool customized mainly for our clients. But like it's going to be out there, but there are tons of tools. It's just like really customized to what we need. And, and it's, it's been wild. It's been just wild about what's out there. And I'm like, we paid for this tool, we're paying for this tool. And then I'm like they're telling me different things and then I'm like trying to talk to the, their dev team and like then they're like explaining to me and I'm like, like it's almost going back to like your, you know, you look at the revenue number and you know what you need to do and you know what things should be. And I mean I've just find myself relying a little bit less on the tools as kind of a definitive answer and more kind of on like what I see happening at where I can see it in the data. But, but I don't feel like the tools have done a, a great job doing that. And now it's, you know, I don't know, there's just a lot of, a lot more noise out there is what I feel like. But that's my personal. And I would love to hear your, and if you don't agree with me, I would love to hear the disagreement because I'm always learning and Talking to other SEOs and trying to learn myself.
- [46:34]
B
So no, I, I, I love what you said and that example you gave of being challenged on theoretical aspect of it. It's always been theoretical. You might have been, we might have felt more comfortable with being able to see things in what I've called a linear way before. But there's always first click, last click view went through, you know, Windows, Facebook. Taking credit for everything, right? Like all, all of that has always had problems of flaws and every tool when we were still focused on keywords way back when would give you wild different ranges of estimated volume. And Google was always pulling back data and trying to make it, you know, go through all their privacy things and keywords not provided, moving it to search console and changing how they sample data versus give you literal data, your own data and look at, you know, and then filtering out spam and bot traffic. So all of that has always been somewhat theoretical. We just got better at packaging it and feel entrusting it and it got, it did get better. But it definitely, I agree with you. We have, you know, we use some of the, you know, leading tools like Ahrefs and Screen Frog and things in our stack. But we went away from the enterprise level dashboard and report third party dashboard and reporting tool. In fact I couldn't, I you know, we'd been in, in them so long then we had a 12 month contract that I didn't realize it wasn't monthly. And I'm like oh man, we've moved away from that. I still got paid for it for six more months on that enterprise huge ticket thing that we were paying for because we had gone to building our own looker dashboards and our own reporting infrastructure. Not in a way, not a software development way like we would have thought about it 10 years ago, but in a way practical way where there's a base of what we're pulling in. We have a lot of custom configurations in GA4 like we talked about a moment ago to make sure we're actually getting the data in the way we need it and to be able to parse it. But all of that's connected as much as we can to that data point on revenue or sales or leads or whatever it is. And at the end of the day it obviously is a to a degree still theoretical conversation and the client or if you're again in house, you have to be in an environment where your brand and company is comfortable with understanding that this is an investment and we hope to see a return on investment. And I use the example of like do I go question my financial advisor and scrutinize there's a prospectus. There's disclaimers that say, you know, past performance doesn't, does it guarantee future performance? It's not a big line item expenditure or it shouldn't be. It should be looked at as an investment with an expectation of return on investment. When we, when we can look at it that way, then it's a healthy conversation like in other categories of life or business. And know that there are ups and downs and we're using what we know from the past and what we project for the future. And we're trying to connect the dots right here. But you know, it'll get us there. But it might not have been exactly how we thought it would.
- [49:40]
A
Wow. I think that's a really good place. I want to add one more point to that and then I want to give you an opportunity to promote whatever papers or you know, stuff that you, you want and we'll, we'll get it in the show notes what I've seen and I am in the same situation actually. We, you know, at, at a certain point we got locked into like a big enterprise like visualization, all this kind of stuff and our team loved it. Okay. And they're like, it's enterprise and it's presented to the clients and all that. And the conversation became like are they seeing value in it and are they using it and is it helpful? And like they, I, the, the. So I started going on the calls, right, and we started recording, we started about a year and a half ago recording all our calls and I'm feeding it to AI and we're getting kind of a sentiment analysis as we scale what needs to happen. And I haven't fully automated it pushing into a CRM tool yet where it just creates tasks, but I want to get there. There's a little bit more training that has to happen, but I can tell you that they weren't using it. And we've started to build our own dashboards and customize stuff. But the point that I'm trying to make is when I'm having those discussions with clients, they don't care about what happened. They care about forward looking, they care about where is it going, what are we doing, what can we expect. And then they want me to put stake my name on it and then, then they want to hold me to whatever I think will happen. Does that make sense? Like that's what I'm seeing is they're like, this is what, okay, what do you think will happen? Where do you think will be based on all this data? And then I'll tell them. And then whatever I said, that's what's going to get measured at whatever next milestone there is. And then either that's true or false or how close am I to that number? And that's what I'm starting to see. The forward looking indicators is really what the executives that I'm talking to care about and am I right or am I wrong? So they're like, you synthesize it all, just tell us and then we'll measure if what you said is true or not.
- [52:04]
B
And in so many cases, that's bringing them transparently and authentically into the mess with you to understand that this is not an exact science because it can backfire if we don't do that. Here's the flashy slide, here's exactly what you're getting in terms of revenue and then something in the marketplace changes. But we've never had talked about the risks involved in a transparent way or what we know and don't know. And then traffic starts dropping. It's like, well, we haven't educated or talked about what we do in this case and why, why we actually expected it to start trailing off. But this number of your revenue hasn't because it's quality versus all those things. And so yeah, to that point that the trust in an industry that unfortunately has had a lot of burned and misplaced trust like others, but being able to share with them the expertise and how we're bringing you along on this journey and where we're going, much like again a financial advisor, right, you're trusting them to try to manage your money and do it proactively and not let something sit out there for six months and get tanked and not have a new strategy ahead. And I think that's the cleanest example for me to take this to a different industry. But that's the part of it where if we're too buttoned up and we're always trying to sell and present, and I say this from the agency side of things, if we're always trying to just present and put another deck and put a rosy picture on something, then when something really drastic changes, we haven't built a framework where we talk about it in a problem solving, same team, proactive way. Now we're reacting and the house is on fire and, and it's more catastrophic than it ever should have been.
- [53:49]
A
I love it. Corey, you've talked about a lot of great things. Y' all are doing some awesome stuff. I'd love for you to plug whatever you would like to plug. And I would also love for you, if there's one thing to kind of crystallize for anyone listening, what is the one takeaway? What is the one unknown secret? I guess, you know, I used to say of Internet marketing, but just what's the one big takeaway that you would have recommended to anybody listening?
- [54:17]
B
Yeah, I'll come back to that. I'll first mention the areas to find me. So my agency is Voltage. That's easily found at Voltage Digital. I do a lot of speaking and sharing in the industry. So you can find me@corymorris.com for that or go find me on Search Engine Journal or Search Engine Land for my articles there's or for my book the Digital Marketing Success Plan where I give away that five step start planning process. That's a long title so I've shortened it to the DMSP.com and you can find it there or find it on Amazon. But that takeaway really is connected back to that start planning process. And it's the one where I know it gives anxiety if I bring up the question of if you don't know or feel like you know that your marketing is producing ROI and you feel like you're just doing it because you've always done it or somebody said you should do it or you're buying a channel essentially of activity, that is where you definitely should scrutinize where it is. And if you have a plan, and I love to say, you know, if you don't have a plan, you're just spending money.
- [55:33]
A
I love it. Well, Corey, thank you so much for coming on. Everyone listening. This is the future of search with ll Invisibility. My name is Matt Bertram. Bye bye for now.