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- [00:00]
Jordan Cooney
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, Jordan Cooney.
- [00:43]
SEO acquisitions are reshaping our industry over the past year we have seen various acquisitions from Semrush's purchase of Knowledge resources to larger agency mergers. How will these changes transform the search landscape and strategy? According to a report from Intrepid, after a decline in transaction volume in 2021, marketing services M and A activity overall returned to a growth trajectory in 2024 and it is now exceeding pre pandemic metrics. This highlights the accelerating pace of industry shifts across the search landscape as evident by semrush's acquisitions of five targets in 2024. Here's the challenge. Independent agencies face mounting pressure. Enterprise solutions dominate market conversations. Specialized expertise becomes harder to find. How can businesses navigate these challenging SEO ecosystems? This is the Voice of Search Podcast. I'm Jordan Cooney, and joining us today is Jim Boykin, chief ninja at Internet Marketing Ninjas, which helps businesses improve their digital marketing performance. Today, Jim will share how we are reshaping the industry through acquisition. Jim, welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast.
- [02:06]
Jim Boykin
Jordan, it is a pleasure to be here. Like, I feel we have so much to talk about that if this can only go an hour, we're gonna have to do some follow ups.
- [02:15]
Jordan Cooney
So I don't know if it, I don't know if we'll be able to limit it to an hour, but we might have to cut this up into a couple episodes. But Jim, it's exciting to have you on the show and we have really some exciting news to share with the industry and I'm thrilled to have you here to make that announcement. So, you know, Free Visible has acquired Internet Marketing Ninjas and I'd love for Jim to share more about this crazy news and this exciting opportunity for these two companies.
- [02:44]
Jim Boykin
Yeah, well, you know, Jordan, thank you. And I think both of us look at this as well as like a merger of two beautiful, wonderful companies. You know, the Ninjas have been around for more than 26 years now. We have a lot of a Lot of knowledge. I think, like the average ninja has been with us for, I think it's like more than 14 years now. Like, there's just such a good, knowledgeable staff. But the times are changing as well. Like SEO is changing, Internet marketing is changing and it's like, you know, we've always specialized in the, you know, the link building, which is still an incredibly important thing. If you want to rank in Google, you're going to need backlinks that they're, you know, that that's still the specialty. But there's, there's more going on now, there's more pieces and, you know, I guess the elephant that's in the room is AI. And so it is, you know, having as well like the merger of our old experienced SEO team along with, you know, a younger team as well that complements us, that has the content team, that has the writers, that has the knowledge, that has the tools, that have the analysts that are also looking at, you know, AI. And you know, a lot of companies right now, if they're, if they're still doing old school stuff, like they're, you know, they may not be around in a few years. And I loved, you know, the very first time we met and everything, explaining everything and there's, there's a future shift going on and just how we found out that the merger of our two companies can help put us in a spot to be where we need to be in this new changing world of not just SEO but AI as well. And, you know, finding what are all of the things that need to be done and who can do them and which part of teams and which tools do we have. And it's like, you know, the peanut butter and the jelly of teams merging here.
- [04:47]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah, I agree 100%.
- [04:48]
Jim Boykin
I can't be more happier. Like, it has me so excited because, you know, as a, is also an old SEO company. Like, we've got to change and do new things as well. You know, links are still huge, but there's this whole future of things. And then being able to partner, you know, with a company like Pre Visible and all of your staff, who I absolutely love, you know, through this merger, it's been, it's just been amazing. Sorry, I'm rambling because it's like I'm excited about everything going on. Like, you know, it's gonna be, it's gonna be tough for our industry and like, I feel like we are positioned so far above everyone else now and like everything that we're doing, it's, yeah, I'm Excited.
- [05:32]
Jordan Cooney
It's super exciting. And a couple questions for you, Jim, because I think not only is this a very exciting opportunity for these two companies, but I think it's very unique, right? It's not a common outcome for two companies of this size with this kind of history and capabilities to come together and merge. And as we've talked about, Jim, over the past six or so months, there's so much continuity between the groups from a culture standpoint, people standpoint, from a services standpoint, there's just tons of continuity in what we do. And I'm curious for you to give us a little history of the ninjas. And this is important because the ninjas go back to really, the beginning of SEO, SEO as a practice, SEO as a discipline. And today, now it's very formalized, it's very organized. Big companies have big teams that didn't exist 20 plus years ago. And so I'd love for you to give a little story of the ninjas, how it got started, where it is today, and what you guys do remarkably well in the industry.
- [06:37]
Jim Boykin
Certainly, you know, in 1999, I started. We were originally known as we build pages. You know, and it was me, myself and I. That was the we. And so I started back in 1999 as Just Me. At one point, like, I realized, you know, like, back then there were, I don't know, 20 plus major search engines. And so you were doing different things, optimized for different places. And at one point, Google, Google just started eating up the industry. And at such point when I realized, hey, it is all about Google. You know, it's also what's Google's biggest ranking factor? And it was backlinks. And so, you know, I very quickly got into, hey, let's build backlinks. And really the whole goal was, how do we get our clients ranked? You know, it's SEO, you know, and especially, you know, going back not all that long ago, everything was about, you know, keywords and rankings on those. On those keywords. And one of the best ways to do that is get a bunch of really powerful backlinks to link to those pages using money phrases. And voila, you know, you're ranked really high. Now, how do I say? We've had to evolve that over the years, you know, and 2008. And Google in one sense told me, hey, Jim, thou shall not buy backlinks again with money phrase, anchor text going to money pages. And that was back in 2008. And so, you know, at the time, it really sucked because a lot of what we were doing was buying backlinks to targeted pages and boy, does that work. But you can also get penalized for that. And so. Right.
- [08:21]
Jordan Cooney
I want to ask you a question about 2008 because I actually think this is a transformative period of time for the SEO industry. We, we're in a transformative period of time right now. As Google is introducing more and more AI capabilities to the serp, we're seeing more and more shifts in how to do SEO as a practice, and that happened in 2008. You and your team at the Ninjas had a transition away from, you know, let's call it buying backlink approach to a holistic and totally different way of doing business. And that's one of the things I find remarkable about what the Ninjas do is as I got to learn more about the company and learn more about how you guys do link building, I want to know, like, give me that story of going from 2008 to doing what you guys do today in terms of trusted links, reputation and, you know, other content marketing that helps drive real valuable link mentions for brands and companies.
- [09:20]
Jim Boykin
Yeah, I mean, if you have a website, you have to be ideally doing something to get other sites to link to you. You know, if you want to rank in Google and then AI you, You know, the whole, you know, I was thinking of a car this morning and I'm like, you know, if we, for the first time ever actually, I was like, you know, all these different pieces of the equation are different pieces of the car, you know, maybe schema, some extra chrome you got on or, you know, but the whole thing that makes the car run is the gas. And that's like the links, it's the power, it's the, you know, if you have really good backlinks, it's like, I don't know, you the high grade gas in your car.
- [10:02]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah.
- [10:03]
Jim Boykin
And if, and if you don't, then you don't. So it's like you need to be doing something to your, on your website or in your industry to ideally, you know, get news and get mentions on a regular basis. You can't just be like, I sell, I don't know, watches and I'm just gonna have a watch website. And people will come like, come on, you know, like, right. You know, you need, you know, if you want to rank and things, you have to write stu stuff that can earn links. You know, whether it's maybe it's educational content, maybe it's viral bait, maybe it's creating some type of tool, maybe it's Doing some type of original study, you know, maybe it's a interview, a party, you know, something, you gotta be doing something to get mentions to your site all the time. And the more mentions that your site gets, the more powerful your site is, the better your gas is, the quicker you're gonna go. You know, the, there's certainly other pieces and other pieces are really important. You know, there, there is, usability is really important. You gotta have the right content on the pages. You want your technical aspects to be good.
- [11:12]
Jordan Cooney
So Jim, on this gas piece. All right, Links are this fuel. They're critical to how we do things. Tell us about trusted links. I really feel like how we build trusted links is something that's so unique in the industry. So few companies on the services side at least are doing things in a way that you've built. It's got so much integrity, value behind it. And just give our listeners who don't know about the ninjas, who don't know about what you've built a little bit of context as to the value of how you create these trusted links.
- [11:46]
Jim Boykin
Sure. So, you know, it all comes down to the right, the right type of content. You know, there's content for all different reasons. You know, you need to have your content optimized on your product pages. You need, you know, informational pages about that. You ideally have question pages about that. You have all these things for the users and for the search engines. And you then need to create something that can earn backlinks. Like something that might be a bit outside of the box. Like is there, you know, if you were to think about how could you, how could you write or what is it that you could write that could perhaps earn links from edus or k12 or old.org. so you know, you got to think of what is that type of content. You know, it's certainly going to be non commercial intent content, informational, not look like some big SEO piece with keyword links all throughout it. Like, you know, if you're going to be asking, you know, a school or an org to link to a great resource, if it, if it looks like some SEO thing, they're, they're not going to link to that. And so it's like you have to understand that, you know, some of what you need to write is for links and that stuff should be written, you know, it's got to be related to your site and your topic and a really good resource and something that would deserve to get that kind of link. Because, you know, if, if, let's say we wrote Some piece about, you know, I think I mentioned earlier, if you had a site selling watches, like wristwatches, you know, you might want to, if you're writing stuff for, I don't know, these types of links, maybe it's stuff to do with how to tell time and maybe, you know, and again, there's other content as well, but, you know, maybe the most expensive luxury watches of all time or, you know, all sorts of studies on watches. But, you know, I guess the first part is, you know, there's different content for different intents. And some of the intent could be, hey, I want something to go viral and I want to get in the news and I want to get mentioned by bloggers. And so, you know, I'm going to write something that ideally could spread on, you know, Reddit or Quora or get in the news and blogs. And then there's other content where it's like, all right, you know, this is stuff that's written to go viral, but this is stuff that we're going to write maybe to geared towards, you know, schools and teachers and or govs or orgs, like some other type of informational content that may not go viral, but is a really good educational piece for those types of sites. So, you know, we're writing content for different purposes. A couple of the purposes have to do with how can we also get backlinks to the site. And so, you know, maybe it's a viral piece, maybe it's a trusted content piece that we're trying to get links from schools and teachers and orgs, but.
- [14:37]
Jordan Cooney
All of it starts with content. And you guys then do this organic outreach to really identify how to partner that content with the right resources on the web on this piece of that process. Because this process is entirely holistic, right? This is not a. There's no, like, machine generation. There's no AI fluff being thrown into the content creation or the outreach efforts. That leads me to this next question for you, Jim, which is things are changing super fast. The AI transition that we're embarking on right now is changing not only the SEO services from all companies, but is really changing the entire landscape. What's happening in the serps? How do we stay relevant? How is SEO services, consulting services, may it be link building or otherwise, staying relevant in this AI era?
- [15:29]
Jim Boykin
Well, there's a lot there, but I guess part of it is, well, and you know, that we've been going through everything that, you know, let's pick apart AI for a moment because if we say, you know, most of the Reason why, you know, a lot of websites traffic is going down. It is. And they may have the same, you know, rankings, but their traffic is going down. And a lot of that is because currently, like a lot of people may think it's ChatGPT, which some of it could be, but that really is, how do I say the, the traffic from that is often a lot less than Bing these days. And how much do we worry about Bing traffic? Everything. But the, you know, the big thing is the AI overviews in Google and that's what's pushing everything down. What a lot of people read and a lot of people, especially their blog pages are falling. And so, you know, I guess I could go on and on about, you know, this is the new thing and then we're going to see more and more of it in the future. Whether it's, you know, Google AI overviews, whether it's a Google AI interface, whether it's chat, GPT, perplexity, whatever. Like AI is going to be catching on. And so, you know, a lot of what we've been doing is analyzing what are all the pieces of the, what are all the things that the different AI large language models each one are looking at for which ones are they mentioning in the results. And so, you know, it's, it's been this huge checklist and then categorizing the checklist and then, you know, I think the cool thing when we put this all together is we're like, hey, we've done like 90% of all this stuff that kind of is new, the new priority list in the AI world. And you know, everything on here, you know, that is good for AI in a sense is also good for SEO. Like there's, there's nothing that's good or bad for the other. It's, you know, continue to make your site the best site in, in the world out of all competitors. And of course, you know, but now I guess the checklist is, I don't want to say change, but it's like now we have a new list of, hey, if we do this, it's, it's good for AI, you know, if we, you know, or AI and Google and kind of going through that.
- [17:45]
Jordan Cooney
Two things that stand out for me in that, Jim, is one of them is mentions still matter.
- [17:50]
Jim Boykin
Yeah, right.
- [17:51]
Jordan Cooney
Like being mentioned, being recognized for a topic still matters greatly. And sure, we could all go spend, you know, tens of millions of dollars on super bowl ads. That's unrealistic. So how do you do that on the web? You still have to build Authority through trusted link placements that are, that are highly contextual, highly useful to the main theme that you're trying to rank for or be present for. Right. Because now presence is almost more important than rankings. The whole concept of rankings is changing in this whole AI evolution. And one of the, that you've brought up, Jim, and I've seen it in some of the work that we've been doing together over the past couple months as we merge the two companies and people together is how we identify these key signals. Right. So you mentioned this massive checklist, these elements that we're looking at. But one of those elements is understanding where the authority is being built on a topic. And I think that that discovery work is one of the biggest changes that's going to happen in our SEO work is how do you figure out what actually works in an LLM? And you've been doing a lot of research on that and I'd love for you to share with our listeners a little more context as why is that so important to the work we're doing today in AI?
- [19:17]
Jim Boykin
Oh yeah, exactly. Like, you know, there's, there's the analysis of the car, you know. Yeah, you know, there is. If we look at the different pillars, you know, let's, let's start with the easy one. You know, there's content, you know, I guess to start with there needs to be some type of content audit. You know, what content do you have? Do your current SEO pages need better optimizing? You know, I guess you start out with there. I guess that would be kind of the first step, the on page optimization. But then, you know, there's conversion enhancements, looking at your internal, internal linking. Kind of one of the new things as well is what's known as topic clustering. And that's, you know, I guess I'll go back to the. If you're someone that sells watches, you want to have all this, you know, different types of watch content, maybe let me go backwards, let's say you sell, you know, all sorts of jewelry, including watches. You know, you're going to want a whole bunch of different watch content, maybe ring content as well, and different types of content and you're going to want to interlink those together. Part of the audit as well is going to be, let's do an AI audit. Which places are you showing up for? What are your pages that are getting traffic from AI? You know, here's kind of a big one. If you look at people's, their reputation, their about us page, like we'll make it Simple. If you look at someone's about us page and their author pages, do these pages exude authority? How is that site mentioned across the Internet? You know, are there content clusters that need to be written? How are there testimonials? What is content that could potentially earn links? What's content that potentially could be written or created to earn links? How is their usability like? Do you know there needs to be a usability analysis? You know, how is the usability? Are there improvements in there? There's the technical aspects. You know, one of the bigger things is structured data. Now structured data was always on the list, but maybe a little bit lower on the list. Are you using the right kind of schema? Do you have your product schema, your article schema, your faq, your how to, your breadcrumbs? How's the crawl, the accessibility? What is the internal linking strategy? What are the page speeds? Is it mobile friendly? Do you have images where they should be, videos where they should be they on the right topics? Do they have the right meta descriptions or meta tags on those? There's social proof, you know, are they, are they mentioned in Reddit? Are they in Quora? What does their social look like really? It's the entity consistency, you know, and there's the whole research of, you know, is your, what name, address, phone number everywhere across the web? Are you using the same images, your, I don't know, your, your Google business profiles, your Google merchant centers? You know, there's. Are you, are you, do you have the right type of media on your site and are you optimizing it? Right? I guess there's, there's all these different checklists that are things that now we're looking at through the eyes of LLMs and what they are looking at to analyze who are they going to mention and their AI answers. These are all the things that they are looking at and you can touch on all those and make them all a little bit better, then great, you know, and it's not just one piece, it's not just backlinks, it's not just, you know, you're optimizing your money pages. It's a big, big picture of a lot of areas that need to be looked at. And then how can it be better? How can this area be better? How can this area be better? And you know, work on improving every one of those pieces. And there's a lot of pieces, you know, some are stuff that, you know, that our teams can help out with and some are things that, you know, they may have some of their people to help out with. But, you know, at least it's identifying what are all the different pieces and let's see who can do them, you know, and, and here's how to do them, which is part of everything we're putting together. What are all the things to check for, how to check for all those and then how to improve those and the whole checklist. Yeah.
- [23:51]
Jordan Cooney
So, I mean, there's so much to cover around how AI is impacting our landscape. And you did a thorough review of so many of the aspects that we're looking at at the remarkable piece that I know you and I, Jim, both agree on, and I think much of our industry is still trying to wrap their head around is links and link mentions and how you're being mentioned matter even more now than they had before. Whether it's in these social commentary places, in multimedia type environments like YouTube and video in a more traditional way, sourced in a, in a, in a, in a reference of data or information. All of this matters greatly to the context that is built by LLM models to then display, mention, reference you in these responses.
- [24:46]
Jim Boykin
It's branding too. Like, it's, it's just, it is, you want to be mentioned kind of everywhere or as many places as possible. It can't just be, you know, I just want to do X or Y or, you know, there's for years a lot of people, like, I don't want to look at social. Well, you know, social is part of what's being gathered, especially in ChatGPT and Bing and, you know, anything that can be crawled is open game now as well. And, you know, a lot of people didn't want to write, you know, other type of informational content for their site. Like we saw watches and we have product pages and that's all we're gonna do. And it's like there are pieces that a lot of people have neglected over the years that, you know, these are things that need to be done now because, you know, AI. AI is gonna continue to grow, you know, and a lot of it is SEO. You know, who are gonna be the best AI people? I think it's gonna be the people that really understand SEO. Like, what are all the different aspects of your site that need to be looked at to make your site better than all of your competitors? And that's, that's the whole key.
- [25:55]
Jordan Cooney
And I love that piece. And I want to ask you a question about that, Jim, because that is, you nailed a really important point there, which is these are the experts. These are the people who are going to help us unlock growth in any of these experiences.
- [26:10]
Jim Boykin
Right.
- [26:10]
Jordan Cooney
I mean I watch commercials right now of Google, you know, promoting, you know, ask Google anything and you know, they're trying to promote push the whole voice enabled LLM response type search experiences that they're developing and invested in. And particularly they've got a lot of different avenues with their Android capabilities as well as their search capabilities to address some of these user expectations and features. But who are the people that are going to figure those things out? Those are SEOs. Yeah, those are the individuals that are going to figure that out. And you know Jim, for 20 years you've built amazing team that goes and does this amazing work. We're forming, I think, one of the most impactful groups of talent that exists in our industry that just specialize in SEO and content marketing. There aren't many companies that do that. There aren't many agencies and consultancies that do this. Most of them will go do paid search or social or do a bunch of other stuff. We only have the best SEO resources on the planet figuring out this problem. Tell us how you've done that. Tell us about the people we've got. You know, I think you are an example of how to create a dynamic and thriving group of SEO professionals that are doing this work. I mean most of your people have been with the company for over, over 10 years.
- [27:35]
Jim Boykin
Yeah, well, you know, I guess it's, I have a really special team. I do, they've, they've been with me for years and they've really fine tuned their craft. And you know, some of them may not be as well known as other people that are specialized in that craft, but my guys probably know more than a lot of the people that are known in those crafts. That's right. And so they may not speak at conferences or blog, but they're really good. You know, if we look at the different teams, you know, we have the content team and a lot of that is writing either the, I mean when you look at content, you got, you know, optimizing current pages, finding content gaps, finding clusters to prove you're the expert and the authority on your areas of what you're trying to sell. There's, you know, you know, then there's the creating content for the purpose of can you get links from schools and teachers and orgs and govs and old trusted sites. That's a specific type of content geared for those users. And there's the, can we create the viral content? You know, the stuff that can spread and do really good on Reddit and get in the news and on blogs and you know, and then there's the analyst team that is looking over the, all the technical, technical aspects to a website and a lot of the SEO recommendations. You know, then there's the trusted link team who is specifically out there promoting the stuff for schools or teachers or dot org old trusted sites. And you know, then there's the, the team that's promoting the viral stuff. You know, you can't just create stuff and put it out there and be like, hey, you know, can help things by actually promoting them. And I'm, you know, I'm not talking about paying links or buying post or anything. It's, you know, creating real stuff and then letting, you know, writing to journalists to cover that area. I mean like, hey, you know, here's a piece you might want to cover. Here's a new study, here's a new infographic, here's a neat tool or something, you know, non commercial stuff worth covering. There's another topic almost I should bring up too, you know, and that's Google. Google and other places continue to get smarter and smarter and smarter. And so, you know, and I, I talked a little bit about links here. But you know, part of what Google's looking for is, you know, there's a lot of people that when they think about SEO, they're like, we do X or we do Y and it's, that's not enough anymore. You know, you got to be real, you got to have your brand, you got to be everywhere. And you know, a lot of the things that people do in hiring companies that's wrong is they, you know, they hear that something is good, like link building is good. All right, let me get a whole bunch of like guest blog posts, you know, and they run out and they, they buy a whole bunch of these quick links, you know, but they're like, but the relevant blogs and they're going to write about my, you know, product I sell and give me a direct link to it. And it's like all these things are in networks that Google Maps that almost all that doesn't pass page rank, you're buying nothing. That's all the stuff that Google penalize the sites for. Like 99 of the penalties that are out there are we detected this unnatural link thing. And basically you're buying links in these networks. And so there's good and bad to all these. And it's like if someone's like, I want to do the shortcut method that you know, I'll just pay a Little bit and get something that, you know, it's like, no, there's, I think in today's world, it's like, there's no more hiding behind stuff. You know, it's like, you're about us. Page your author pages. Like your brand name and your brand mentions have to be real everywhere. Like, you can't just, you know, I'll do this weird little thing and do a shortcut over here and that'll be okay. Like, those days are over. It's like, no, you got to do real stuff here and here and here and here. Cover all of these different check boxes of, you know, not just the content and the technical and, you know, the stuff that you're writing to bring in more gas and links into your site to help go. But sure, you know, it's like, you have to be real. You have to be real now, you know, and it's like, there's not. The shortcuts are over. You got to be a brand. You got to be a brand everywhere. You got to participate in everything. You have to be the expert in your industry. And the expert is not one that goes into one or two areas and does shortcuts. Like, those days are gone. Like, you know, you got to be real everywhere. And you know, you have to have real help of people that are doing the real things in all those areas and the shortcuts and the guest blog post or they're, you know, buying artificial other things. Like, they're, they're gone.
- [32:18]
Jordan Cooney
So let's talk about the future. You know, we've got some amazing people both on the pre visible and on the ninja side. We formed this new set of talent that allows us to serve all aspects of the web, everything from large enterprises to a digitally native brand. A startup we can unequivocally, like, answer all the questions of how to become present in organic sources of traffic, in everything from technical to content marketing to brand link reputation, trusted link sources, outreach services that enable a whole online business to successfully scale their presence in LLMs, AI search and traditional search. This is remarkable. I believe it's remarkable. This is why we did this together. Jim, what's the future hold? How are you seeing the future of search? How are you seeing the future of our capabilities serving the changing landscape?
- [33:25]
Jim Boykin
Well, I think a lot of SEO companies that were doing shortcuts are going to be out of business. You know, I guess I'll, I'll start with that. It's like, you know, only those doing, only those doing real stuff are going to, you know, have Real results and, and that, you know, I guess goes on to, I should say only clients or companies or websites that are doing real things are going to survive too.
- [33:50]
Jordan Cooney
Correct.
- [33:50]
Jim Boykin
You know, and that's like the client has to be willing to be like, yes, I'm going to work on my brand. I'm going to work on my brand everywhere. I'm going to work on writing this expert content, I'm going to work on social. I'm going to try and be a presence as many places. So I guess it's a mixture of, you know, clients have to wake up, SEO companies have to wake up, you know, and those that don't, you know, they're, they're not going to be in business and those that are like, yes, you know, let's do real things and build the brand and build our authority and expertise across the web. Those are going to be the ones that are going to win. Absolutely. What is the future? I think it's more AI. You know, what is that going to look like? How is that going to be laid out? You know, we don't know. It's going to constantly change. But you know, if we look at just AI overviews in Google or even Gemini, that your best chance of being mentioned in the AI result is being on the first page of Google. Like let's just start with that. Like, you know, there's all these other aspects that you can look at, but your best chance of being mentioned in Google AI overviews or Google Gemini is you're on the first page of Google for those related phrases. And that is SEO for one. You know, I guess I should, I don't know what version of SEO would call this, but it's like it's the all fake stuff gone real. Build your brand. You know, I don't know if that's level, I guess 2026, you know, it's like what's going to last not just this year. There's all sorts of changes. It's 2026. What is the future? I think it's more AI, you know, is, is it going to be Google? Probably. Is it going to be chat GPT, maybe Perplexity, I don't know. Is it going to be Bob's new AI version? Whatever? I don't know. But what they're trying to surface is the most trusted websites and pages out there.
- [35:58]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah.
- [35:58]
Jim Boykin
And the most trusted web pages out there are those that are mentioned across the web naturally. You know, they are experts at their craft or whatever they sell and they have all this expert content. This Non commercial expert content, you know, and they're, and they're being mentioned other places and they're getting backlinks and they're seeing, you know, how to have the best site. So it's like no matter what, you know, if It's Bob's new AI 2026, that's the rave next year, like we, you know, I guess it's kind of the same as search engines, you know, I guess it is. They want the best sites. And along the way, along the years, there's been different gaming things. You know, whether it's, you know, white text on a white background to artificial paid links, to guest blog, to whatever, whatever. And it's like, I guess as they get smarter, you know, any large language models, any search engines, anything gets smarter and smarter. The answer is you have to be more real and more real. You have to be more in authority. And so it's like the game is the same. The game has really always been the same.
- [37:10]
Jordan Cooney
Correct.
- [37:10]
Jim Boykin
You know, maybe it's been convincing either clients that, you know, you have to do everything. You got to be real about it. You got to work on some expert plan, you know, do some original studies, get your name out there, write stuff they can earn, right links, like, you know, I guess it's, you know, either educating SEOs and clients that, you know, if you just continue to work on making your site the best site in the world and better than all of your competitors and doing everything all the time, you're going to win more often than any of your competitors.
- [37:42]
Jordan Cooney
I love that and I couldn't agree more. I think that we are in a, in a transformative period where the experts will prevail as long as those experts are adapting to this changing landscape and the expectations that Google has had out for many, many years now. It's really funny. Even their new AI documentation, 2/3 of it is stuff we already knew. We already knew about structured data, we already knew about sitemaps, we already knew about making your website fast and performant. There are a couple new sprinkles in there, but the reality is that you still have to have that foundation. And the way you started, your answer about the future is you still have to be on page one. You still have to be relevant enough to compete and win out 99.9% of the other players. And I think that's what's really unique about why SEOs are so well positioned to be successful in digital marketing in the future, is that they have the skills to do that. They have the skills to compete and win in this landscape. And I think it's exciting to see how us combined will drive even faster growth. A more complete set of services that candidly, not many SEO consultancies and companies have today, even some big companies don't offer a real value around brand building through link acquisition that creates meaningful impact to companies, traffic and revenue. And you've done that for over 20 years, Jim. And I'm excited to continue doing that with the Ninjas. And I can't be more thrilled about the opportunity that we have to do this together. I want to ask you, Jim, one kind of parting question here.
- [39:30]
Jim Boykin
Okay?
- [39:31]
Jordan Cooney
And maybe a fun question. As you look at your legacy, as you look at, you know, what you've created over, you know, nearly 30 years in the industry, what advice do you give the SEO community, the SEO businesses that are, that are out there, the entrepreneurs, the new startup consultants, the new in house or the rookie agency employee? What direction do you give them as we face this changing landscape? You've built a remarkable company in this industry and that legacy is going to continue. And I'd love to hear from you how, what advice you'd give anyone in the industry.
- [40:13]
Jim Boykin
Wow. Well, you know, I guess it might tie into my last answer. No matter what it is you're doing, it's how can you improve the website? How can you improve the reputation, how can you add value to the site? How can you add resources to the site? You know, almost no matter what team that you're on, if you're an SEO, you know, don't just study. Also your competitors, like study other websites. You know, we used to study, you know, if you want to study what other sites are doing, I don't know, search for like cheap web hosting or, you know, or some drug phrases or whatever. And like, you know, there's other industries that are doing stuff that's really clever. And a lot of times certain industries, they only look at their own competitors. And so they're all just kind of doing the same thing over time. And it's like, yeah, you know, all the, all the flower people are doing X and all the lawyers are doing why? And all the, they're doing this. And it's like, you know, there's, there's a little bit of good and all that. Like look beyond the competitors, like be that one that everyone's like, wow, Bob's doing this now, you know, and you know, be the leader, so to speak, and try other things and look at other things across different industries and you know, shortcuts. Try not to do. And, you know, there's, you know, if you're an SEO or a company or anything, I guess it's, you know, you better have a great plan on how to make your website and business and reputation better every single day. You know, it's, it's not another thing where people are like, all right, we did something, we're done, right? You know, it's like, you got to be doing this stuff every single day. You know, if you did it, you know, there's always the people, like, we got links from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and blah, blah, blah. I'm like, well, yeah, you got those links like 15 years ago. Like, not quite the same as what you're getting this month. You know, like, you want to be doing a bit of everything every month. No, don't do the shortcuts. And, you know, there's always stuff to do to make your site better in all different categories. Like, I can't see ever being bored. No, if you've done everything within your industry, start looking at what other industries are doing. Type in high volume, high cost per click keywords into Google and see who's ranking organically and what they're doing. And you know, I mean, even if, even if Google removes the first page of, you know, clickable used to be the 10 links or whatever, like, even if it's just AI, it's kind of like, you know, those that have that knowledge of what are all the things that Google was looking for when they used to give, you know, a page of links, you know, what is all of that, you know, and, and you know, SEOs that have been around for a bit are gonna know that. It's kind of like when there's, you know, Google used to have all these penalties. Panda, Penguin. You know, if it was a panda penalty, you knew your content was bad, you know, and there'd be certain days, you know, and everyone whose traffic fell that day, it's like, oh, you got a content issue, you know, or it'd be, you know, penguin, which is, oh, you got bad links, but it all happened on one day. Or there'd be above the fold update or the, you know, the whatever update. And you would know that if your traffic fell on this day, here was the problem. And then Google's kind of stopped doing a lot of that. And it's kind of like there's this old score and new score and like Google maybe doesn't update and I don't know, maybe they're looking for obtrusive inner sills or something, you know, and they really don't like them now or, you know, whatever it is, but they don't take your rankings and traffic and shoot it down overnight. Like, you know, over the course of six months you're gonna, you know, hit your new score. And so, you know, sites are going about and they're like, well, we didn't, we kind of woke up one day and really well, our traffic's gone down in half over the past six months. Not sure why. And it's like it takes that person to be able to have all that knowledge and all that understanding of what are all the updates, you know, in our case of AI, it's what are all the things that Google looks at to rank a website or to value a website?
- [44:11]
Jordan Cooney
That's right.
- [44:12]
Jim Boykin
You know.
- [44:12]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah.
- [44:13]
Jim Boykin
And even if that first page goes, it's still, even if that first page of Google result goes away and it's only AI or chat, GBT wins the war and everyone's only using that, it's still what are all the things that, that These engines or LLMs are looking at to try and put in the best sites possible? And those are good user experience, good content authority, trust, links, all those things I've mentioned, mentioned all those factors.
- [44:39]
Jordan Cooney
Yep, 100%, Jim. I think it's a remarkable direction to give the SEO industry, which is all of the things, all the skills that we've learned over the years are still as relevant, if not more relevant, in doing our work very well. It's going to be critical as the frontier changes to have those core skills and refine them, whether it's in your existing industry, going into other industries and seeing what they're doing well and successfully applying those capabilities, whether it be in content marketing and tech, SEO, in links and link and PR and outreach efforts, all of those skills will become critical as the AI landscape unfolds. And that wraps up this episode of the Voices Search podcast. A huge thank you to Jim Boykin for joining us. If you like getting in touch with Jim, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or at voicesofsearch.com for more information about Internet Marketing Ninjas, visit Internet marketingninjas.com if you haven't subscribed yet and want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or on YouTube and we'll be back in your feed soon. Okay, that's all for today, but until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data sa.