← Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Educating LLMs & Optimizing Content for AI Search
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- [00:00]
Voice of Search Host
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of.
- [00:40]
Tyson Stockton
Search Podcast, Tyson Stockton AI is revolutionizing the way we search and obtain new information online. Traditional SEO tactics are rapidly evolving and our strategies must adapt for us to stay relevant in this new era. SEO professionals are now faced with dual challenges of optimizing in traditional search as well as AI search. So how can you ensure your content remains visible and effective in this new landscape? According to the Forrester's 2024 Buyer's Journey survey, 89% of B2B buyers have adapted generative AI and making it one of the top sources for self guided information throughout the purchasing process.
- [01:19]
Voice of Search Host
This podcast is also sponsored by Ahrefs. What if I told you that you could monitor your website's SEO health backlinks and organic rankings at no costs? Sounds too good to be true. Well, it's not because my friends at Ahrefs just launched Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. Ahrefs new Webmaster Tools product quickly helps you improve your site's visibility by pointing solutions to over 100 technical issues that might be holding your search performance down. Plus AWT monitors for backlinks so you'll know the most linked to pages and how those links are affecting your rankings. And AWT shares what keywords your website ranks for and compares how you stack up against competitors for key metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty and traffic value. Look, monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools and now, thanks to Ahrefs, that's not the case anymore because AWT will help you monitor your SEO health, backlinks and keywords for free. And no, it's not one of those 14 day free trial offers. It's a powerful site audit tool that will keep working for you for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.comAWT that's a H R E F S.comAWT the challenge is clear.
- [02:39]
Tyson Stockton
Traditional SEO is no longer sufficient with the rise of zero click searches and AI summaries. So how can we adapt our strategies to Thrive in this AI driven search environment. Welcome to the Voice of Search podcast. My name is Tyson and joining us today is Dale Bertrand, president at Fire and Fire and Spark is a strategic SEO and content marketing agency that helps E commerce and B2B brands grow organic revenue by focusing on outcomes, not just traffic. Today we're going to be diving into how the industry is evolving and changing and what we can do to stay ahead of the curb with that. Dale, welcome to the podcast.
- [03:19]
Dale Bertrand
Well, thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to the conversation.
- [03:22]
Tyson Stockton
Yeah, I mean, I enjoyed a lot of the pieces that we were kind of talking about just before we hit record here because obviously there's a ton going on in the industry. You have mixed opinions of this kind of doom and gloom or bright sunny days are ahead. So maybe to kind of level set with the listeners. How would you say that you were looking at the industry as we're seeing some of these changes take place?
- [03:49]
Dale Bertrand
Well, I guess what I'm looking at in the industry is that the change is happening. It's all because of driven by technology change, which means AI, because that's what we're all looking at. That's why Google's making the changes that they're making. And what we're trying to figure out is like what's next? And the way that I'm looking at it is SEO has been a discipline, a separate technical discipline for a very short period of time. And that is over. We're now moving into a time when the SEO skill set really needs to be augmented by PR and more innovative content strategies and then also learning a communication skill set so that those of us who've been doing SEO for a long time can pivot into what's next. And the thing that I want to stress is it's not just about the technology. I think what SEO was in the beginning was a technical answer to a marketing problem, and now it's going to be a marketing answer to a marketing problem. And I think that's what's really important. And I think the mistake that SEOs are making is that they're trying to replace the old technical understanding of how to do technical SEO related things to drive customer acquisition with a new set of technical things. When what's really going to happen is that the new stuff is marketing. It's getting back to marketing and that's really what's changing.
- [05:18]
Tyson Stockton
And can you elaborate on kind of like what that means to you in coming back to marketing? Is that more like diving deeper into things like consumer behavior and some of more of like the fundamentals that went into, whether it's print, video, whatever types of more like advertising channels.
- [05:37]
Dale Bertrand
Well, yeah, because, like, it used to be that if you wanted people to buy your product or service, you need to understand their need, craft the right messaging, make sure that your product, you know, has fit in the marketplace. And these are, these are marketing activities. Right. But then there was this short, brief window of time where you could generate sales without understanding marketing. What you had to understand was how search engines worked and how HTML worked and what the right HTML tags were to put in the right place and how to press buttons in an SEO tool. That's what you need to know. But that's not marketing. That's basically doing technical customer acquisition. What it's transforming into is marketing. And AI just allows the search engines to do a better job at satisfying queries and satisfying search intents. So in order for us to do a better job of marketers, of getting found and generating customers for our businesses, we need to do real marketing to match the capabilities of AI. And these, you can think of them as technical capabilities, but what they're really doing is helping us find our target audience. And when the AI is better at it than we are as marketers, then what are we doing? And I think that's really the conflict out there. A lot of SEOs don't see themselves as marketers.
- [06:55]
Tyson Stockton
I mean, fair. It's like we've kind of been in this, like, two different worlds where even if you look at where it sits in the organization, you have, sometimes it rolls up to the cmo, sometimes rolls up to the cto. And we have kind of been. And there's been this big push of, like, products. I mean, especially like Eli pushing kind of like the product LED SEO, which is, you know, I think as an industry, we have been leaning more towards more of the developer framework rather than kind of the, like, creative side of this.
- [07:27]
Dale Bertrand
And I'll give you a good example, which is like, a lot of SEOs and digital marketers in general are hiding behind analytics. So if you ask them to tell you something about the customer that they're targeting, you know, what's the right messaging, what content's doing well on the site. They're going to take a look at keyword research reports and Google Analytics reports when what they should be doing as marketers is talking to customers. When you talk to customers, not only do you understand what they're searching for and the keywords they're typing in and which search engine they're using now that they have so many choices out there. But when you talk to real people, you also understand the why behind it. And it's the why that we need to understand in order to optimized for the right search intents to basically craft messaging and content that satisfies those search intents and calls to action that convert. It's the why that we're not getting in analytics and SEO tools right now. And that's the difference between an SEO like a technical SEO without the marketing skill set, and an SEO with a marketing skill set.
- [08:34]
Tyson Stockton
Interesting. And with that, do you feel more of the push than is coming from some of these, you know, more standard SEO best practices are just going to be automated, you know, through some of the advancements, or is it more in the sense of as there's more and more, you know, call it what you want, 0 clicks or, you know, answers being satisfied within more of like the search experience or is it even just like a combination of the two? Which is why we're kind of driving back into this.
- [09:07]
Dale Bertrand
So I think a lot of what we're doing now will be automated, but that almost doesn't matter if you're not, if you're not reaching your customer where they are with the right message at the right time. So there are fundamental questions around where is the audience that you're going after? So I think the right definition of SEO is really harvesting organic demand, wherever that organic demand is. So we all have, for our products and services, we have potential customers out there that, that need our help, they need our product, they need our service. And they that organic demand might surface in a search engine when they're searching for a product like ours. Or it might come up in a Reddit thread like we've all seen or on in. It could be in an offline conversation, right? Or an online conversation with the chatbot. But this is all organic demand and us as, as, as SEOs. Like it used to be that the vast majority of that organic demand was on Google, and that was also the easiest place to harvest that organic demand. That's what's changing. And in order for us to find that organic demand and convert it, we need to figure out where it is and we need to understand our customers well enough to craft the right messaging to convert that organic demand. So I think it all comes down to figuring out where your audience is and serving that audience. It's almost thinking of yourself as a publisher and not as much of a marketer, because what a publisher would do is understand their audience Intimately and then anticipate what information they need when they need it, what are the right topics? Because they are, they've got this mind meld with this audience that they're serving. So imagine marketers serving their audience, not serving Google. And that's, that's really what's going to work going forward.
- [10:53]
Tyson Stockton
Which I do like the framing that you're giving of like organic demand because it's like, yeah, too often we're just thinking of more of like rankings in Google. I mean, sometimes you might have people throwing in other search engines, but like for the most part it's just rankings in Google. But with that kind of like shift in focus, we still have the component of like measurements of performance. And so it's like, how, how do you feel then about like the more traditional kind of like rank tracking and reporting on SEO from this kind of more traditional mindset? If we're repositioning and looking beyond just rankings and beyond just Google in that sense to more of like the users or the audience?
- [11:40]
Dale Bertrand
Well, traditional ranks tracking is doa. I mean, we all know that, even the concept of like a query. And like, because the way we think about SEO when we're, we're trying to rank is we're thinking about a user asking a question and getting an answer in the form of a bunch of links. So they're basically getting a research project. They have to find the answer on their own. And going forward, our customers are going to be having conversations with trusted experts. These are going to be AI conversations. And what we want is we want our brand, our products, our services to come up in conversation. And that's different from answering questions or even thinking of keywords as questions that have answers that we should publish. The way I like to think about it is imagine if you were to get engaged at a fancy restaurant in Boston, right? The next day you go into work and you tell your colleagues, oh, I just got engaged. They're going to be happy for you. They are going to give you advice whether you ask for it or not, about planning a wedding, what venue to pick, how to deal with your parents in law. Like so many things, right? Those are the topics that come up in conversation. They are not the answers to questions that you asked. It's just your, your colleagues having the concept context of who you are, what you do, what your preferences are through that relations, and then being triggered by the fact that, oh, now you're getting married. Here's the things I think you should know. So what we want to train the AI on is that our brand, our products, our services should come up in conversation when we are relevant. That's why we're thinking about building content and brand websites going forward that are relevant to the conversations that we want to show up in. And in order to do that, the better we know our customers, the more successful we'll be at being relevant when conversations we want to appear in happen in AI.
- [13:38]
Tyson Stockton
Interesting. So it's like you're kind of swinging away from, I don't know, let's call it like authority aspect of SEO and more into the relevancy or your relevance to the user, to your target audience.
- [13:53]
Dale Bertrand
Yes, because that's where we are right now with a pure LLM based audience. You know, chatbot, let's call it something like ChatGPT without any tools. Right. But when we add tools, then it becomes a hybrid of an LLM based search engine and a ranking engine. So ultimately we, we need to be optimizing for both. But even the ranking engines are, have been based on AI technology for a long time now, so relevance is what matters. Now I do believe that there will be a concept of authority because it makes sense that some websites, some authors, are more authoritative than others. We just don't know if that's going to be something that feels like page rank based on the link structure of the web or if authority will be determined some other way when it comes to these AI based search engines going forward.
- [14:48]
Tyson Stockton
A lot of this I feel like, does kind of bring me back to some of my marketing classes where it sounds like if I was just listening to part of this conversation without the SEO components, I would feel like it's more directing towards a branding conversation and building more of brand reputation rather than anything else from traditional SEO sense.
- [15:15]
Dale Bertrand
Yeah, the smartest thing you can do is build that trust and authority, what you're calling brand reputation, building that with real humans, with your existing customers, with, with the audience, with your customer base. And then Google and other AI search engines will pick up on that. Like at the end of the day they're trying to simulate, or let's say the signals that these engines are looking at are proxies for what we would care about. If we were seeking out the right human to answer a question or the right human to give us information. We would want that human to be knowledgeable, to have the right background. We would want them to be affiliated with the right organizations and institutions, and we would want that human to be endorsed by other humans that we trust. That is what these AI or what, what Google, traditional Google Search and eventually the AI algorithms will, will catch up to that are trying to simulate, they're trying to simulate this real world process of us as real humans, figuring out who we trust and who we don't trust so that, that you can give us the best information. So why not, why not focus on that and then when you get that traffic, making sure that you have the right, right messaging on your site to actually convert them into whatever it is you're, whatever action you're trying to convert.
- [16:33]
Voice of Search Host
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- [18:01]
Tyson Stockton
Fair enough. And I feel like you're positioning for us like having more of this like mental shift or moving away from those traditional aspects, have this new kind of focus of it maybe that has a different form for different products and websites. But what's the next piece then? Where's it going next kind of after it? If we know traditional search, AI search or LLMs, it's using a lot of some similar kind of technologies or systems. So it's not really, you know, you're not saying like you're targeting this one or that one, but what's kind of I guess like the next layer as we like kind of push it forward?
- [18:45]
Dale Bertrand
Well, it's important for me to Say that the SEO skill set is still valuable, but what we need to do is we need to add more marketing skillset. On top of that, the SEO skill set is still valuable because we need people or the organizations, the brands that we work with need people who understand the technical aspects of making content visible and also the aspects of making sure that content is relevant to specific intents that our customers have. When that organic demand pops up online like that we're trying to harvest. Right. But what we will need to add to that in order to remain relevant and keep our jobs basically is more of that marketing skill set that allows us to understand our customers, figure out how to message our customers, get the actions that we want, and then also to basically talking to our customers and no longer hiding behind analytics and thinking that we're getting enough of the full story. One of the ways that I look at the evolution that's happened in SEO, especially now that tracking is broken and we're not getting the information that we would love to have from platforms like Google and OpenAI about what's happening in those conversations. We're not getting that data. We're not going to get that data. It's kind of like the not provided all over again. Like it's going away and it's not coming back. So we need to replace that capability which used to be like it used to be spoon fed to us by the platforms. And before we had that data, marketers were forced to do marketing to talk to their customers and figure out what's going on. So I think the way that I'm looking at this shift is we can no longer pretend like SEO tools and analytics and search console are giving us all the information nation that we need to do customer acquisition on the organic channels that we're targeting. Like that's really what's changing.
- [20:39]
Tyson Stockton
Interesting. I like, I like that it's kind of like you're painting more of like a balanced picture because I feel like there has been so much conversation recently as far as in most people that I talk to is all kind of like advocating more of like it's swinging more and more technical or it's more and more about schema, markup or indexation, health or like all these others and.
- [21:02]
Dale Bertrand
It'S like this, this hurts my brain. I don't mean to cut you off.
- [21:05]
Tyson Stockton
Yeah, yeah.
- [21:06]
Dale Bertrand
That's what boils my blood. It's like the world is changing. For those of us who've been doing SEO for a long time, it's going to be a major shift with any Shift. There are going to be challenges that feel like existential challenges and opportunities. Focusing on the technical side is the wrong direction because the reason why these platforms are getting more, more technical is so that they can do a better job of simulating, like what I talked about around finding the right information, like, and how you would find the right information and figure out who to trust as a real human, just talking to other humans. The technology behind search engines is getting more complicated with AI. I get that. But the answer isn't to dive deep and become an expert in exactly how LLMs work and how the hybrid search engine ranking and LLM engines are going to work. It's really about realizing that the reason they're getting more complicated is because they're getting better at helping your customers to find the information and the products and services that they need that they look for. They're getting better at satisfying organic demand. So we as SEOs, need to learn some new marketing skills that we have to use to understand as an SEO, but we need to start learning those skills so that we can do a better job of serving our customers with the information they need when they're making a buying decision. And that's different from saying we need to understand the technical workings of search engines and AI and vector embeddings and vector databases and all that stuff. I enjoy learning that stuff. That's how I got into the profession and I learned it as a hobby. But that's not the answer for SEOs that are trying to stay employed. The answer is moving in a less technical direction towards learning more of a marketing skill set.
- [22:59]
Tyson Stockton
Always fun to that point, though. So it's like, on that, I think we're hitting on a really valuable element for the listeners because there has been a lot of hysteria, a lot of panic, which, I don't know, we've had this conversation, I feel like every five or ten years kind of in this space. But beyond just the marketing, like, mindset and learning some of those more fundamentals of consumer behavior, how people are looking for it, like the why behind it, like, what are the other skill sets that we should be investing in as SEOs, if we are concerned about staying relevant? If it's, hey, like, maybe I'm a tech SEO and I feel like my job's, you know, threatened in three years or whatever time frame.
- [23:44]
Dale Bertrand
Yeah, let's pause right there on technical SEO, because I get the spirit of your question, which is like, for people like me who have been doing SEO, content, SEO, technical SEO link building for more than a decade, Going on two decades now, actually. Like, how do we pivot our skill set? And what I'm throwing out there is that the, the technical side of that skill set is what is less relevant. ChatGPT can do the technical side of my job when it comes to analyzing websites, understanding like quick SEO wins. Moving pages from, you know, page two of the search results to page one of the search results, that's not the hardest thing we do, right? And then also fixing broken HTML and canonical tags. And those are technical things that I can do. Like what I can do as a human is understanding other humans and communicating with humans and doing high level strategy and planning around that high level strategy in a way that my organization, with its unique peculiarities can execute on that strategy. And that's the direction that we all need to be moving. The good news is that if you've got a solid SEO skill set, then you've got a solid platform to build on. You're not somebody coming right out of school trying to get your first marketing internship. You're somebody who already has your foot in the door. You've been successful at your profession up until now. And the new, and now I'm going to answer your question, I promise. Tyson and then the new skills that you should be bolting onto that would be PR skill set or a deep, I would say AI focused, like content strategy skill set. Or if you are like, if you're just a person in your organization who's really good at talking to customers and figuring out what it means. A lot of us with SEO skill sets, like that's not our thing, but damn, is that valuable if you're willing to be that person, right? If you can be the person. And here's another, another direction that is technical. If you could be the person on your team that 2x's 4x is 5x's your productivity by going deep into the tools. And what I'm talking about here is automating some of what you already do. You need to be willing to do that. Now all of a sudden you're the person that knows how to push the right buttons to do the SEO analysis that we've all been doing for a long time to automate them, right? Like that's valuable too, because you're generating insights from those analyses. And if you're the only one on your team, you'd be that knows how to do it, then you're one of very few people in the industry that know how to, how to 5x their productivity. And it's possible we've we have people doing that at our agency using SEO agents and different automations that we put together. So that is a, that is a route that I think would be, would be quite interesting for some people. But the other thing I want to be honest about is a lot of us ended up in SEO with a content background. And that's really tough because it used to be that blog articles were really valuable. Now when you're writing top of funnel informational blog articles, you know, longer, longer, longer for your, for your audience. Like what you're really doing is training AI. You're working for free, right? So if you're coming at SEO from a content perspective, that's when I think it would really be advisable to move into PR or even like one thing we're doing is we're building content strategies around interactive tools. These are interactive tools that basically force people to come to your website to use them. Google's AI cannot summarize them because there's a database behind them and marketers without a technical background can create these tools using AI. And in my opinion, these are the new SEO content, which is these tools. So if you could build a specialty around that, that's a great place to be right now.
- [27:41]
Tyson Stockton
I feel like from that there's still some, I don't know, there's still like a silver lining or a hope from like the technical side. Because even though, yes, some of those like technical implementations could be served from SEO agents, that same mindset could be someone that then drifts more into more like, I almost describe as like an architect in that sense of like, well, what are those tools? What are those agents? What are those things? How to kind of create those plays.
- [28:14]
Dale Bertrand
Oh, I love it. I love it. If you look on my LinkedIn, I posted a job posting for an AI agent SEO strategist. And the primary responsibilities are to document SEO workflows. These are analyses that we do, keyword research, you know, authority building strategies, stuff like that, to document them and then basically train the agents how to do them. So I believe that that's the. And people. I get booed off stage when I say I do a lot of conference speaking and I get booed off stage when I say this. But unfortunately the direction we're headed is like, if you have a VAL experience, like let's say you have experience in technical SEO, one of the core values that you bring to the table going forward is your ability to train agents to do what you do. And the shift that we're seeing for a lot of Skill sets like that is that you are 10x more valuable. If you are willing to train an agent to do that task, then you are actually doing that task. And it's because the technology is progressing to that point.
- [29:19]
Tyson Stockton
Interesting. I think, like, some people could interpret this as being maybe more negative or like, you know, maybe some people are getting a little anxiety and some panic from this. But to me, it's like what you're describing is there's still a path forward and there's also a path forward that's very, I think, conducive to the natural skill sets of a good SEO, where as a good SEO, we're naturally curious. Everyone fell into the industry from one direction or another. So it's continuing that like, you know, hunger or seeking like something new, new information. And even like you said, if you're on the technical side, there can also be this route in this path, but you should be focusing more on the agents and the tools to carry that rather than just those technical implementations.
- [30:15]
Dale Bertrand
Yeah. I think the future is bright for SEOs who make the mindset shift. Your technical skill set is best used to train the AI, and sorry, I said that, but it's true. And then if you can bolt on some marketing skill sets related to PR and customer research, competitor research, messaging, really the, the core pillars of marketing onto your technical skill set as an SEO, that's what's going to make you valuable going forward.
- [30:47]
Tyson Stockton
I like that too, that it's just, it's the mindset shift. It's not something that we can't do or we haven't done in the past. Yes, is new, but it's not, it's not something that I think is completely foreign to us as SEOs.
- [30:59]
Dale Bertrand
I want to add one more thing onto it, which is that for those of us who've been doing SEO for a long time, we've got a technical skill set, but we often forget that part of that technical skill set is communicating the insights that we find to our colleagues, maybe internally at our organization. If you work with clients, that's the whole business finding these insights in the data, but then communicating them to the clients you work with and making sure that they can execute on the recommendations that you're making. So we're already doing a lot of that as SEOs, and that is the side of our job that we need to really double down on, because that's the piece that AI is not going to do very well anytime soon.
- [31:40]
Tyson Stockton
Absolutely. I mean, in our SEO, like we were collecting SEO jobs data across like 2024 to then be like, okay, like, how is the health of the industry from, like a, you know, job market perspective? And one of the areas or one of the bright spots was more in that kind of management leadership area where we saw more, you know, sure, there's not gonna be as many, you know, leadership roles as analyst roles, but it was an area that we saw more growth. And then, you know, of course there was, you know, more negative impact on kind of like the straight, like, content side of it.
- [32:20]
Voice of Search Host
And a special thanks to Ahrefs for sponsoring this podcast. Monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools, but that's not the case anymore. Thanks to Ahrefs because they just launched their Ahrefs Webmaster Tools product, which monitors your SEO health, helps you keep track of your backlinks, and gives you the insight into what keywords are performing for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.comAWT that's Ahrefs A H R E F S.comAWT.
- [32:53]
Tyson Stockton
All right, so that wraps up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Thanks again to Dale from Fire and Spark for joining us. If you'd like to get in contact with Dale, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes, or be sure to check out his company's website@fireandspark.com if you haven't subscribed yet and you'd like a daily stream of SEO and content marketing knowledge in your podcast feed, be sure to hit that subscribe button in your podcast app or on YouTube and we'll be back in your feed soon. That's all for today. Thanks for stopping by the Voice of Search podcast and we'll see you in the next episode.