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Ben J. Schapp
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 Search Podcast, Tyson Stockton.
Tyson Stockton
Hey, what's going on? My name is Tyson from Previsible IO, and joining me today is Dmitry Dragolov, founder at Topic Ranker and growth advisor at Mingles. Topic Ranker helps website owners identify keywords that they can easily rank for on Google by pinpointing specific issues and weaknesses in search results, such as low domain authority. Today, Demetri and I are going to be talking about focus less on building backlinks and focus more on content.
Ben J. Schapp
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Tyson Stockton
With Dimitri, founder at Topic Ranker. Dimitri, welcome.
Dmitry Dragolov
Hey, thanks for having me here. Glad to be here.
Tyson Stockton
Exciting time. We were chatting kind of before we we got going here, so I know there's a lot going on in your world and in general with Topic Ranker, today we're talking about backlinks and content. So backlinks we all know, you know, it was really like the backbone that gave Google its kind of leg up and it's pushing the early days. It's always been a kind of component within SEO, at least as far as I've been in the industry. But it definitely, the conversations is like the, the banger, the, the payback that you've been getting for them doesn't seem to hold the same weight. So maybe just to kind of start off with the listeners, like what's your perspective on backlinks today?
Dmitry Dragolov
I don't think they're all that relevant anymore, to tell you the truth. I started this year thinking, you know, I, I had my team of backlink link builders going out full force. I was, you know, spending three, four grand a month on building backlinks and really I have very strict criterias and it's not nothing paid. That's essentially I'm paying a person to do. Reaching out, referencing my articles, my studies, my data primarily. And really around March of this year I started noticing that hey, the links are just not pulling the same rank for me. I, historically last year I used to be able to rank much faster and much higher with the same type of links. But this year, you know, I'm getting Dr. 90s, Dr. 93 and nothing is moving, nothing. And I was like, what is happening? And digging deeper into it. It's the focus on information gain. It's like what is new with the article? Is there a new fresh insight? Is there a new, fresh personal perspective on something that is not already in Google's knowledge graph? And if it's not anything new, the thing, it doesn't matter how many backlinks you're going to build to this thing. That backlink metric is just not moving the rankings on Google. And so that was a big like shock to me in the beginning of this year. I was like, oh, I really need to change my approach as an SEO. I need to generate original insights. To generate original insights, I gotta work harder. You know, I can't just pay link builders to build links and I cannot have general consensus content anymore. I have to be able to create original insights and personal perspectives and big shift I think in the industry altogether this year is this focus on SEO. SEO is a different game now.
Tyson Stockton
I love the way you, you kind of put that and feel like to the backlinks to me, I agree in the sense where it feels like the weight and the significance isn't there? But it feels more like it's kind of like general table stakes where it's like yeah, maybe a brand new site that's like just getting going would be more open in the conversation to it. Most established brands probably not even on my radar unless there's maybe a local component going on. But I like that you were kind of shifting into content and you weren't mentioning anything really about more of like the general relevancy but you're talking more about kind of the net new like what the contribution to the knowledge graph is. That is I think a very interesting kind of like subtopic within this with the growth of LLMs and generative content which is largely going to pull from and I loved your wording on it, what was it? Universal consensus content.
Dmitry Dragolov
General consensus.
Tyson Stockton
General consensus.
Dmitry Dragolov
That's typically, I mean if anybody's listening to this and you and I have done this, you type in anything into chatgpt or perplexity or whatever, it's going to be general consensus content. This is what it has indexed, it has garner. It's a language learning model. So it's been going around the web generally reading stuff and regurgitating it into a kind of general consensus. So us as marketers listening to this, we have a major privilege to be able to think critically and create original insights. LLMs do not have that yet. Their thought pattern is mainly they're really good at just crawling and regurgitating everything that's on the web in a nicer format, more applicable, more personalized, easier, better formatted than Google. That's why everybody is just trying to use this thing. There's metrics are exploding, the traffic is exploding, leads are exploding from the lem. Why is it because it's a different format of what we're used to. We're used to Google search. You click on it, you kind of digest it yourself. Here it's been a little bit digested, but still there's not original insight. So for us to stand out in this environment now, we need to create something that has not been created yet. We need to say something that is bold and new and fresh. And so that is why I think our jobs have been, you know, are being pushed to higher standard now. So no longer can we create a listicle and kind of take bunch of articles, combine them into one behemoth and kind of make sure everything is there and just publish it. Right? That's regurgitating the same content in a different format. That's that general consensus. We need original experience, original Personal experience on a subject matter, screenshots of your own campaign, screenshots of what you've done with this specific thing and what your outcome was. Experiments, data, insights. This is where us as marketers are probably going to stand out. This is what I'm studying now, and I think it's exciting times. But it's also useful to shift this way. Right? It's. It's really hard for us as marketers to shift this way. We've been trained to acquire backlinks, do some pr, get some content going and get it ranking, you know, and all the tools have been designed the same way. What is our rank on Google? Oh, it's number seven, man. We haven't updated the content in a while. Let's update the content. Let's get a content writer to update it. Okay, what do we do to update it? Let's put in some new news sections in there about what happened recently and kind of tied into what we had before. It's like none of it works anymore. Guys, like, just throw all that out. You got to update it. You're going to have to create a whole new data study and like, really zero in on new insights about what you've done and an experiment you ran. Otherwise it doesn't even matter. Right. So, yeah, different times now. I feel like completely.
Tyson Stockton
No, I. And I think, like, in some ways I feel like we've been pushed or been going in this direction for some time, but it feels like more recently the quality of the direction has become more clear. Where it's like before, I feel like the conversation was just quality content. It's like, well, what does quality content mean? And I guess, like, we're still kind of within that. Where it's like, are you adding something new to the user base and to the community as a whole? Where before it's like we would say quality and really I think we were meaning, like, relevancy of the content, where it does feel like something that's a little harder to measure, though. Like SEOs. Like, we love to boil things down into, like binary, like scores and things like that. Like, how do we take this component then of originality in content? Like, not in the sense of is it duplicate word for word, but more of like, what has been added. Like, how do we measure that and map that towards evaluating content? Like, because if you're trying to do it to scale, I assume we're going to need some sort of measurement stick.
Dmitry Dragolov
Yeah. So I've been wrestling with this ranking tracking. Right. Tracking your rank on LLMs. Perplexity and ChatGPT as well as tracking your ranking in the generative AI answer on Google, as well as regular rankings on Google. Right. There's different types of rankings to track. They're all different signals kind of move them. And so for me, what I've seen is the clicks to open web. Rand Fishkin did a great analysis of data where he said 41% of clicks actually go to open web from Google now. The rest kind of stay on Google or Google's properties. So to me, I guess raw clicks from Google is not a great metric anymore either. This year, at the end of this year, as we head into 25, I think it's really important to think about your brand showing up in LLMs and different queries and questions that are surrounding your brand and on generative AI answers on Google. So tracking tools that track these rankings will do well and I think the behavior will have to move into tracking these things. So a handful of questions and will Reynolds from Seer Creative has a great little template he used back in May of this year where he would use a spreadsheet and then spreadsheet, you'll just query Chat GPT for that question. He'll query the answer and every day he'll record the answer. And so essentially you're tracking the rankings. And this is, by the way, this is the wild wide west. We, we can't like, we don't have any tracking for Chat GPT answers right now. So you have to be able to have some kind of consistency. So you turn memory off on your thing because you don't want it to personalize anything to you. And you essentially are tracking day by day, week by week. Is the answer for this question changing? And like, for my industry mangles topic rank, like what is the best keyword research tool for SEO professionals? Right. That's the question, for example, and that's a very relevant question to me. And I think this question, you can get an idea of how many searches it has on Google Trends and you can kind of say, okay, this is a very important one. So for that, I mean quite literally I'm copy pasting, like I have these formulas in spreadsheet and it just literally gives me the answer. And then I essentially have a find function that looks for my brand within the answer, week by week, month, month to month, and see if my brand is in there consistently or not. And if it's not, or if it's moving up or it appeared in there. What is the consistency across day to day, month to month, and that's how I'm tracking rankings and LLMs currently. Now with mangoals we're building a more sophisticated tool there that allows you to do this a little more easier with Perplexity and the Gemini and ChatGPT. But I think that's an important factor for SEOs to track because that will impact the clickovers from Chad, GPT and just brand perception, brand marketing. I think tracking Google serp, I mean is always going to, is going to stay around with us. We're still going to report on those metrics but I think as things change a lot I think rankings but it's so subjective on, on LLMs that this very little consistency that I'm seeing right now. So because of that maybe it's because so early. It's so early but it's unclear also the sources that it's using. So I was able to do a few interviews about one topic and all of a sudden I started showing up across the same answer consistently for myself. I asked a colleague in San Diego, I asked a colleague in Vienna, Austria to do the same searches and it seemed like I was showing up there for a few weeks and all of a sudden someone, someone else started showing up. Mine dropped out of that, out of that same answer. And I was like well maybe they had more information, new information that I didn't cover or something like that. It's still unclear how PR impacts this thing but it is very useful to ask it for the sources it's using for each answer. So I also track that day by day I'm tracking, you know, okay, what are the best SEO tools? Great, tell me what are the sources you use to come up with this answer? Have you crawled any new sources since this date on this answer? And you know, it'll try an answer if there's new ones. Again, it's very generalized consensus type of an answer like here are the best authoritative sites. You ask it what authoritative means. It doesn't actually give you any real metrics around it. There's like well regarded sites. It's very subjective kind of general stuff. So I think the sources it's using are still not 100% the ones that I'll be using later on. I think there's a changing. Just give you an example from earlier when we were talking best SEO agencies for banks. It's like just no name random agencies. I started, I asked what are the sources you use? There was like some random agencies website that listed themselves as number one. They listed me the first. I'm like well this is clearly not authoritative. So I let it know and it said, okay, thank you for the feedback. So I am finding very bizarre sources for certain queries a lot and I, it's interesting to think about it because it's just so early in the, in the space. So people are just doing all sorts of experiments trying to learn how this thing is functioning and fronting up results. But yeah, measuring it I think will mature as LLMs mature, but that's how I'm measuring it. Spreadsheet with query in there and then literally opening it up. It loads the ChatGPT answer for that question day after day. And you just hope for consistency. I mean you want any consistency in this thing and anytime it's shifting you're like, I just don't, you know, it's like with SEO it was like I just want to climb number one. Like, oh, I'm number seven still. Damn. Here it's like it shifted again. What the hell? Like, like, you know, it's not so much like I want to be in the top five, I just want the top five to be the same for like two weeks and there never are. Like I always, like I feel like I won a lottery like for a week I have the same answer without memory on for ChatGPT, maybe. I don't know.
Ben J. Schapp
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Tyson Stockton
Maybe on on that piece, can you speak to a little bit of the volatility between like in comparison? Because I feel like with probably the data you're collecting, you probably have a. A little stronger sense where I think we all have a consensus of like, yes, there is more volatility, there's the potential for more volatility given the technology. But like, how great is it? Like, are we talking like you said Weeks, is it obviously probably dependent on query type, but like, in general, are you saying that it's significantly more volatile than like our standard Google search?
Dmitry Dragolov
It is. That's what I'm finding now is that the queries I'm looking at are around SEO. I haven't been doing research in other industries yet as much, but what I'm seeing is that if you keep the question exactly the same, there will be less volatility. But if you add a pronoun or a like, what are the best tools of SEO to look for for professionals versus what are some good tools to look at for SEO for professionals? Right? That some good ones versus the best. Big difference. Even the word the like, if you put that in there versus not. And this is a good. There was team Solo and Olga from SCM Rush. So Tim Solo did this question with a. The Olga from SCM Rush did it without the completely different. And you might argue, okay, they're personalized, they shut their memory off, but somehow it was personalized, they switched and they also had different results with the. And not the or only and not only or just like a pro. Like an. Or a adding anything to it changes it. And you're like, well, the meaning of that thing didn't change the versus not done. It's like, no, it like when LLM is crawling, it's crawling and it's. It's literally like relationship between words. That's what it's analyzing. So these like AI. This is an interesting discussion on LinkedIn about it, but there's like these AI experts or LLM experts we're talking about. They're like it's relationship between the words. So if it sees the best tools and. And they sees it over and over and over again in these different articles and it sees the same tools and these articles, it's going to front those up versus best tools where it's like, oh, it's best tools in these other ones. So it matches the best tools and then best tools and it doesn't know that they're the same. And so the best tools it has crawled all these websites and it found a different subset of tools and best tools it called these other sites and they found this other subset of tools. And so in its index it's got these two different lists. Even though this thing kind of means the same, I think right now it's just too early. Maybe later on these things will become mergeable and easier to sort of optimize for. But yeah, I'm seeing that volatility. I think it's also like the early days, like remember the early days of Google, you could just buy a bunch of PBM links and just rank number one. So these days I find like people are just looking at and be like oh, you don't know about my tool? Well here I'm going to teach you about my tool and here are all the sources where it's been featured and look at this source. And so I have like this experiment running where it's a brand new brand and we taught ChatGPT about it and then every day we tell it, oh it's been featured on this product. Hey, it's been featured here, it's been featured here, it's been featured here, it's been featured here. And then we have other people in Europe trying to ask for it to see if it pops in the best tools or whatever. So you have like people that are doing that kind of experiment just to see if you can just teach the thing without and force it to crawl these things somehow. It's still like very early days. So it's exciting to see sort of how it crawls and like how many mentions it needs to start fronting you up and you specific questions. I think like with research you just need to be very specific. Like here's a question, here is the, the learning that you wanted to do and here's the the result you want it just keep doing that like oh, it's not in my question yet. Okay, we gotta keep it going like keep teaching it stuff. And that's a sent might be essentially. I mean I'm just thinking forward here but might be our jobs, you know, in the next years to come is like teaching LLMs about brands and best ways to teach them. You know by contributing to well known publications and letting them know that hey please you know, crawl this article and that kind of stuff.
Tyson Stockton
Which I think from that it kind of leads into the like natural follow component of like well what do we do we with this? So it's like we know it's adding a layer where it's another potential kind of like, I mean, it's a new channel in some ways. Like you're going to chat GPT versus Google within Google you have the blended, but then from that you have that additional touch point to your brand. We touched earlier on kind of originality or like what you're contributing something new with your content. But I think from this tool, like the LLMs, they're being trained in digesting information in a variety of pieces. Like, does this shift the focus? And in addition to how we think about the content we create, we're also needing to think more about where we have those placements to then influence the training of these LLMs.
Dmitry Dragolov
I think to sum it up for me just to. I like to make things really simple. I don't want to get lost in sort of like I'm unsure. There's a lot going on. Like the people are throwing around all sorts of random like thoughts and theories and research. And like you look at LinkedIn, it's like insane for me. Like everybody every day has some insight about this or that. At the end it's like, for me it's like, can you create something with information gain that is completely new, like original insights that is teaching people something great and that idea is not revolutionary or something different. It's just more important now. Like we've always had to kind of create new things to really get people to grab on to. So if you have any kind of innovation, it's just now you need to bring innovation not only to products but to content. It has to be original insight and then how can you get it distributed the best way? So now no longer is it like, you know, I'm posted on Reddit and it just kind of like takes off and I get tons of traffic from it. No, like you have this like traffic hoarding. So all these different platforms, Google, Reddit, LinkedIn, Twitter, like they're all keeping their traffic on their platform. So how can I distribute it the best way? Can I get into newsletters? Can I get into a YouTube channel? Can I get into somewhere else where I can distribute my original thoughts so that they get published on, on different publications and YouTube channel and, and podcasts and newsletters and get spread and then eventually get picked up by LLMs consistently enough for it to start fronting it up for an answer? So it's like our jobs have changed a bit from just siloed pieces with lots of different links, backlinks to this original thought focus and pr. And so it's like information, insight, information gain and PR with it. How can I do that? Really well. And I think that's what we're going to focus on next. It's like, can you create something really original, amazing for personal, experience wise, not a knowledge graph. Great. Now what is your promotional plan for this thing that you created? Okay, you're gonna go on the podcast, you're gonna go promote on LinkedIn, you're gonna go on YouTube, you're gonna publish a guest post on HubSpot, you're gonna do all these things and it's gonna promote this info and it's gonna get your brand out there a bit. So that's, I feel like the new marketing, so. And the original stuff and then really direct, kind of like direct marketing kind of thing. Like going out to all these different places like we used to and you know, we're not running ads in newspapers, but we're like reaching out to YouTubers and like, hey, you know, like, can you have me on the show? Can I have. Can we discuss this or that? Or you're asking HubSpot to guest posts on their site or you're looking to see where your demographic is hanging out and just literally like reaching out to them and being like, hey, you got 117 subscribers on your newsletter and LinkedIn. I'd love to work with you. Like, we can do original data for this thing. I have, you know, that's, I think where. So SEOs are becoming more PR driven and original. Insight driven.
Tyson Stockton
Yeah, it's like, it's more and more product placement.
Dmitry Dragolov
Yeah, great.
Tyson Stockton
I already, I already did my part. Now where can I get other people to talk about me?
Dmitry Dragolov
Yeah, it's different. I think it's just different way to do it, but it's not that far from what we've done before. It's just, it's just not how as typical SEOs function. It's more like general marketers who would just do that function for us. Now we're forced to think that way. Like, how is this going to be spread? How is this study going to be, you know, distributed?
Tyson Stockton
Absolutely. All right, so as, as we kind of wind down or kind of wrap up this topic, I feel like in this last part we've hit on that kind of getting your name out there in those different channels. But we can't really hit on that without touching on Reddit. Like that's been one of the big kind of shifts in the last couple years. Like really this return of UGC content has been like quite strong. Like what are some final thoughts and kind of how we should be looking at Reddit as a platform and kind of this shifts in marketing?
Dmitry Dragolov
Well, beginning of this year, Google signs this deal, they start using Reddit to train their LLM data. Right? And so with that LLM traffic, Reddit traffic has gone through the roof. Lots more people come on it. And of course marketers are trying to market the heck out of this Reddit thread. And everybody who's had an account on Reddit or is selling their account on Reddit. By the way, the majority of people who are doing quote unquote marketing on Reddit, they use IP masking and they buy old Reddit accounts, they post something with those old Reddit accounts and that post usually lasts for about four to six months until it's taken down. Even the agencies themselves will make sure and tell you that hey, this is not permanent. So the marketing that is being done on Reddit is still in its infancy, sort of not mature stage. Right. We have talked to death about information gain and original insight as far as actual content goes. But the thoughts and comments in Reddit, some of them of course are really good. But we as marketers do a very poor job at quote unquote marketing on Reddit because we're trying to push the brands in there and trying to do our old marketing thing. And so I think that thought pattern needs to evolve for marketers. Marketers need to think the same way about Reddit as they do about regular market SEO and generative engine optimization as well. Is that a information game? Right. How can you create something that is mind blowing to this discussion that you identified as a very hot discussion on this Reddit thread? So you actually need to contribute something thought provoking and earth shattering. Not like promoting your blog post and getting them to click to it, but literally doing that. And then they need to kind of click on your profile and maybe from there somehow find what you're doing or ask you in DM for your website URL. But this original like, oh, we're just going to hire somebody and it's going to be this. They already know the formula, they can put the stuff in there. No, because right now, because Reddit has so much traffic, people are trying to still do that old. So let's just put, put ourselves in here. It's a hot discussion and I think original thoughts need to be there. The other thing is you need to be asking LLMs for your query how much of that answer is being crawled and learned from Reddit. Right. So for me, as I explained earlier, I am tracking my answers in that spreadsheet and I ask it as well, how much what percentage of your answer is relying on Reddit versus other sources? Right, because I want to know. And for me it's been about 30% so far. So 30% of the answers that are in the SEO space and SEO arena that I track because mangoes is in keyword research, I am topic rankers in the keyword research space is relying on Reddit. So I can loosely say, okay, like 30% of my optimization work, marketing work should be contributing to Reddit and the other 70 should be working on PR signals like these other publications or podcasts or newsletters or whatever. So I think it's important to know what the value is for you to market on Reddit, even though you know it's exploding with traffic and it's number one result for all these different search queries. And also not do the original, you know, like the old school marketing and just do the original insight type of thing. Easier said than done. Most of us nod our heads as we listen to this and then we go back to the old standards of just, let's just plug my thing in there. Or we start with the first sentence and then, you know, people are just, it's hard. Like you have a piece of cake sitting, sitting in front of you, eventually it would start eating it. You know, it's just the same deal. Like it's the human nature to just kind of, we're marketers want to promote. Like, gosh, like I, I put up this whole answer in here and I didn't even promote my brand. Like, what the heck? Like, people are answering this thing, but they're not clicking on the thing. Like, I'm falling down. And it's like training yourself to really do marketing differently. You know, you're, it's the insight that you share that I think will get people to ask who you are and where you're coming from. So that's my main two things on Reddit. It's like, don't lose track of what you're doing. Stick with the information game and ask LLMs whether they even care about Reddit. You know, these Reddit threads, or maybe there's other Reddit threads or Reddit in general for your queries. Generally speaking, they will, but it might not be 50% of their training data. It might be 30% and that evolves as well. But just be like knowledgeable about it. Just be like, all right, well, right now in this month, I'm doing 40% of my marketing work on Reddit because listen, like LLMs like 40% of their answers kind of based on these Reddit threads. So I want to like do some marketing and learn about these subreddits and participate in them and show value and hopefully eventually, you know, my brand will start sort of fronting up in LLMs. But that's my thought around the Reddit craziness right now.
Tyson Stockton
Yeah, and the 30% number is significant. Like, and with the recency bias or kind of like favoritism within that platform too, it's like, it definitely feels like in addition to this we have this significant component of recency. Loved the conversation here and appreciate the time. But with that that's going to wrap up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Thanks to Dmitri from Topic Ranker and Mangles for joining us. If you'd like to get in touch with Dmitri, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in their show notes or go on over and check out his company's website@topicranker.com okay.
Ben J. Schapp
Thanks to Tyson Stockton, our guest host. If you'd like to get in touch with Tyson, you could find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can contact him on Twitter where his handle is TysonStockton. Or if your team is interested in SEO consulting or organizational education, you can always head to their company's website, which is Previsible IO that's P R E V I S I B L E I O 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 just one more link in our show Notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com, where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is Ben jschapp B E N J S H A P and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day during the work week. So hit that subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.
Voices of Search Podcast Summary: "Focus Less On Building Backlinks, Focus More On Content"
Podcast Information:
In this episode of the Voices of Search podcast, host Tyson Stockton from Previsible IO engages in a deep conversation with Dmitry Dragolov, founder of Topic Ranker and growth advisor at Mingles. The central theme revolves around the evolving landscape of SEO, particularly the diminishing importance of backlinks and the increasing emphasis on original, high-quality content.
Dmitry Dragolov initiates the discussion by expressing skepticism about the current effectiveness of backlinks in SEO strategies:
"I don't think they're all that relevant anymore, to tell you the truth."
– Dmitry Dragolov [03:27]
Dmitry shares his personal experience, revealing that despite significant investments in backlink building, his website's rankings have stagnated. He attributes this shift to Google's enhanced focus on information gain and the quality of content, rather than just the quantity of backlinks. This marks a significant departure from traditional SEO practices where backlinks were a primary factor in ranking algorithms.
The conversation shifts to the importance of creating original insights and personal perspectives in content:
"We have to be able to create original insights and personal perspectives and big shift I think in the industry altogether this year is this focus on SEO. SEO is a different game now."
– Dmitry Dragolov [05:35]
Dmitry emphasizes that merely aggregating existing information or relying on general consensus content is no longer sufficient. Instead, marketers must produce unique, data-driven content that offers new value and fresh insights to stand out in the competitive SEO landscape.
The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT has further transformed SEO strategies. Dmitry discusses how these models generate "general consensus content" by aggregating information from across the web without adding original insights:
"LLMs do not have that yet. Their thought pattern is mainly they're really good at just crawling and regurgitating everything that's on the web..."
– Dmitry Dragolov [06:38]
He points out that to differentiate themselves, marketers need to produce content that offers something genuinely new—be it through unique experiments, proprietary data, or personal experiences—that LLMs cannot replicate.
Tyson Stockton raises a crucial point about quantifying originality in content:
"How do we take this component of originality in content... how do we measure that and map that towards evaluating content?"
– Tyson Stockton [09:54]
Dmitry acknowledges the challenge and discusses current methods of tracking content performance in the context of LLMs, highlighting the need for new metrics that go beyond traditional SEO scores to evaluate the true value and originality of content.
Dmitry delves into the complexities of tracking SEO performance when LLMs are involved:
"I've been wrestling with this ranking tracking..."
– Dmitry Dragolov [11:04]
He explains that traditional ranking metrics are becoming less reliable as clicks from Google evolve, with a significant portion now interacting directly with LLM-generated content. Dmitry shares his methodology of using spreadsheets to track brand mentions and consistency in LLM responses, emphasizing the experimental nature of current tracking techniques.
One of the standout points is the heightened volatility in search rankings due to LLMs:
"It's significantly more volatile than our standard Google search?"
– Tyson Stockton [20:18]
Dmitry confirms that even minor changes in query phrasing can lead to different LLM responses, making SEO stability a significant challenge. This volatility necessitates a more dynamic and adaptable SEO strategy, where consistency is harder to achieve compared to traditional SERPs.
The discussion moves to the integration of PR and multi-channel content distribution in modern SEO:
"Can I get into newsletters? Can I get into a YouTube channel?..."
– Dmitry Dragolov [24:45]
Dmitry argues that SEO professionals must now adopt broader marketing tactics, leveraging various platforms to distribute original content. This approach not only enhances visibility but also ensures that content is picked up by LLMs, further influencing search results.
A significant portion of the conversation focuses on the strategic role of Reddit in training LLMs and influencing SEO outcomes:
"Google signs this deal, they start using Reddit to train their LLM data..."
– Dmitry Dragolov [30:38]
Dmitry highlights the surge in Reddit’s influence on SEO due to its integration with LLM training data. He explains that marketers need to engage authentically on Reddit, contributing valuable insights rather than traditional promotional content. By doing so, brands can influence how they are represented in LLM-generated answers, thereby improving their SEO performance indirectly.
In wrapping up, Dmitry emphasizes the necessity for SEO practitioners to innovate in both content creation and distribution strategies:
"It's not that far from what we've done before... But we're forced to think that way."
– Dmitry Dragolov [29:27]
He reiterates that the future of SEO lies in creating original, insightful content and effectively distributing it across multiple platforms, including emerging avenues like Reddit. This dual focus ensures that content not only ranks well but also provides genuine value to users and stands out in the era of AI-driven search.
Notable Quotes:
"SEO is a different game now."
– Dmitry Dragolov [05:35]
"LLMs do not have that yet..."
– Dmitry Dragolov [06:38]
"How do we measure originality and map that towards evaluating content?"
– Tyson Stockton [09:54]
"It's significantly more volatile than our standard Google search."
– Tyson Stockton [20:18]
"It's not that far from what we've done before... But we're forced to think that way."
– Dmitry Dragolov [29:27]
Final Thoughts
This episode of Voices of Search underscores a pivotal shift in SEO strategies, urging professionals to prioritize originality and comprehensive content distribution over traditional backlink-focused tactics. With the advent of generative AI and platforms like Reddit influencing search dynamics, the landscape demands adaptability, creativity, and a multifaceted approach to content marketing.
For more insights and detailed discussions, listeners are encouraged to visit voicesofsearch.com and connect with the podcast and its guests through the provided channels.