The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
With over 5 million downloads, The Best SEO Podcast has been the go-to show for digital marketers, business owners, and entrepreneurs wanting real-world strategies to grow online.
Now, host Matthew Bertram — creator of LLM Visibility™ and the LLM Visibility Stack™, and Lead Strategist at EWR Digital — takes the conversation beyond traditional SEO into the AI era of discoverability.
Each week, Matthew dives into the tactics, frameworks, and insights that matter most in a world where search engines, large language models, and answer engines are reshaping how people find, trust, and choose businesses. From SEO and AI-driven marketing to executive-level growth strategy, you’ll hear expert interviews, deep-dive discussions, and actionable strategies to help you stay ahead of the curve.
Whether you’re a C-suite leader, marketing professional, or founder building your brand, this podcast is your guide to understanding the evolution of SEO into LLM Visibility™ — because if you’re not visible to the models, you won’t be visible to the market.
The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
From Google to Everywhere: How to Win in the New AI-Driven Search Era feat. Micheal Buckbee
AI is fracturing the search ecosystem and creating new opportunities for SEOs to expand their role and demonstrate greater business value in this evolving digital landscape.
• Michael Buckbee discusses how AI is changing search and creating "siteless SEO"
• Traditional SEO has primarily been Google optimization, but search is now becoming a feature embedded across multiple platforms
• ChatGPT and other AI tools are often the first touchpoint for prospects, who may never visit your website
• AI search operates on different rules than traditional SEO—domain authority matters less while content repetition becomes paramount
• The BISCUIT framework helps marketers adapt: check technical foundations, conduct business intelligence, and shift content strategy
• Post-purchase attribution surveys often reveal that AI search plays a larger role in customer acquisition than analytics suggest
• Distributing the same content across multiple platforms strengthens your position in AI search results
• Companies should track how their brand appears in AI responses and optimize accordingly
• Content strategy should include both "faceless" (informational) and "face" (perspective-driven) content
• Agentic search is emerging, where AI assistants conduct research on behalf of users and present summaries.
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Guest Contact Information:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelbuckbee/
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More from EWR and Matt:
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One-on-One Consulting: https://www.ewrdigital.com/digital-strategy-consulting/private-consulting-session
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The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing podcast is a podcast hosted by Internet marketing expert Matthew Bertram. The show provides insights and advice on digital marketing, SEO, and online business.
Topics covered include keyword research, content optimization, link building, local SEO, and more. The show also features interviews with industry leaders and experts who share their experiences and tips.
Additionally, Matt shares his own experiences and strategies, as well as his own successes and failures, to help listeners learn from his experiences and apply the same principles to their businesses. The show is designed to help entrepreneurs and business owners become successful online and get the most out of their digital marketing efforts.
Find more great episodes here: https://www.internetmarketingsecretspodcast.com/
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This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential, let's get started.
Speaker 2:Howdy. Welcome back to another fun-filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. As you can hear with the sound, I am remote this week, but trying to make it happen. I have an exciting guest for you today. Everybody's been talking about AI. Not a lot of the major tools tell you what's going on with the bots. I know everybody's feverishly working on it, but I thought I'd bring on an expert that has been operating and has a tool that can help you see what the other bots are seeing from a competitive intelligence standpoint with your competitor sites. So I have Michael Buckbee here. Michael, with noatoacom, and I'm excited to have you on the show. I'm going to be learning just as much as everybody else here, because this is definitely a new area of search and competitor analysis. So, michael, it's great to have you on.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much. This is a delight. You know we got to meet at SEO Week in New York and you know I was taken by just how much enthusiasm you have for the SEO industry, and this is awesome. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2:No, I'm excited. I think that the industry is changing and people are going to change with it or they're going to go up behind. I really think that it's an exciting AI agents and everything like that and so I'm excited to have you on because you're working on cutting edge tech that the industry needs and thank you so much for coming on and being part of the show.
Speaker 1:Yeah, awesome. I mean, you said a real interesting thing, which is that we are at this big time of change and you know you don't want to be left behind. But this is like a hot take. But it's like a hot positive take, which is I think this is a tremendous opportunity for SEOs.
Speaker 1:You know so much of what SEO has been for the last two decades has been Google optimization. You know it hasn't been SEO really. It's been. Really we're going to focus on Google and everything else. And the number one thing I see with AI is that it is just fracturing the search ecosystem and what we're seeing is there's going to be search as a feature in tons and tons of different platforms and tons of different ways that your prospects and customers are going to find out about your brand in all these different areas, and with that comes the responsibility of making sure all those different places they know your brand, making sure that actually the data is accurate and that you're ranking in the right way, and that's a ton of work and I think, again, it's a ton of opportunities and value for SEOs.
Speaker 2:No, I agree, I think it's kind of SEOs growing up and we've already seen the term SEO start to fracture and like SEO and optimizing for different social media platforms and and now it's just taking on this, this broader term. As you know, mike was talking about relevancy engineering. I believe it's true. You have to grow into what your role is going to be and that's a lot more responsibility and I think, like SEOs are going to have more of a seat at the table because they're going to be guiding the brand experience about how your brand's found across the entire digital marketing ecosystem.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, I agree and I think that the positive angle is super important is this is exciting, like this is good stuff to sink your teeth into and learn and see where it's going, and I love to see people experimenting and finding out new things on social media and sharing, and I agree, it's a. It's a super exciting time.
Speaker 1:There's been an interesting term that we've been talking about with a lot of like our agency customers, which is siteless SEO, which is almost you know to date.
Speaker 1:So much of what we focus on is like our site and we get the headlines right and you know last contentful paint, you know loading fast and stuff, and then it turns out people are actually just going to chat GPT and they ask a question, they get the answer and they never see our site.
Speaker 1:Or you know, one of our customers said to us like Chad, gpt is our most popular and least well-trained representative of the company, where every day people are asking it like every crazy question you can imagine about your company and, depending upon the answer about that, maybe they don't go any further in the search journey. So like if you're like a SaaS and you do healthcare work and someone asks like oh, are you HIPAA compliant? And they ask that in chat GPT and it says no, you're not even in the consideration, they never see your site, they don't see anything. So getting that sort of stuff right is not traditional SEO work, you know, it's just not, but it's incredibly important. It's incredibly bottom line. Like you will make or break a company on these things and you know again, a huge opportunity for SEOs to expand their role, be better for the business. You know more budget.
Speaker 2:You know all of that is we're doing like webinars to educate our clients of what's happening, because we've been training them so much to look at traffic right and once you get somebody in the top three positions in google, traffic actually goes down because they're probably qualifying for the people also ask and the ai overviews, and so as you move them up, traffic goes down and so there's kind of this retrain of what's happening and I'm talking to a lot of people. As they move over to using the LLMs, they're not going back to Google. I'm almost seeing like AI overviews is trying to stem the tide and then, about two weeks ago, when Google released all the stuff that they're doing, it's going heavy into brand heavy into YouTube and they're changing the whole way that search is done, which's going heavy into brand, heavy into YouTube, and they're changing the whole way that search is done, which I think Google is going to probably become more and more like a LLM, because just people are not people like it's going to be the what is it Legacy option to search the old way. Yeah, because I mean it's just changing so much, so quickly and I think that people are not prepared and people are confused about what's going on and so what I believe SEOs need to be doing is educating people on how search is changing and talking to their clients. That's one of the things that we're spending a lot of time doing is kind of reteaching our clients about what's important and what we need to focus on.
Speaker 2:One of the things that I recently learned was the bots don't look at anything that's over. Typically, like 90% of all, the bots don't look at anything over 10 months old, right and so if you have content on your site that's a couple of years old, it might not even be in consideration. And if the LLMs are at the top of the consideration or top of the funnel, then you know you're going to have a lot of trouble getting getting in there, because there's not a lot of calls Right, right, there's. Typically, if you're a chat GBT, you only got maybe six links and a lot of times people aren't even clicking on because they're getting their answer.
Speaker 1:So yeah, so I mean a couple of different things there. I certainly I still find a lot of pushback from SEOs on like well, yeah, and this is crazy, I talked to a lot of SEOs, almost to a person. They say, oh yeah, I use chat GPT all day, every day, but I don't think the average person is, I don't think the normal person is, but they do. And you know, when we look at the stats, you know the stats look real weird Because like hey, google is saying they still have so many search queries every day. But the pattern we see is that when people are actually trying to research and discern and like which of these, what should I do for this problem? I have they go to the LLM because you get such a better experience. And then when you get to the end and it has like, oh, here's six different brands, you then go over and you do a navigational search to those brands and that's a Google search now, and so Google gets the credit. We're really sort of blurring into attribution here.
Speaker 1:Noa Toa actually started because, almost as a joke, I was talking with some, I had another startup on the cybersecurity space and I was talking to some founder friends and we put our names into chat GPT and what came out was just like kind of nonsense but kind of useful, not that great. So I made a little script that ran on my machine and just like pulled the data down out of opening eyes API and I made it a CSV and I sent it to my for myself and for my friends who had their own SASSs and I kind of forgot about it. But then a couple of weeks later one of them came back and said, hey, we've got this post attribution survey that we send to all our customers and they keep saying they find us with ChatGPT. Could I get an update on that spreadsheet? And I'm like, yes, you can. And so that was the start of it.
Speaker 1:And still, it's really interesting to me. We do a lot of business with SaaS and the ones that are doing that survey of just like, hey, you bought, how'd you find out about us? They show much higher rates of people indicating they found on both traditional and on AI search than any other analytics or statistics. You know your GAs would indicate, know your GAs would indicate, and so that's something we've been telling our agency partners. You need to get your customers doing this because it shows you in such a better light, because you know so much of this is. You know it's dark data You're never going to see in the attribution.
Speaker 2:Otherwise, so no, I I agree with you on that attribution. I think a lot of people are still going to the website, but it's in the selection phase and it's a lot more branded search this is what we're seeing is definitely moving up.
Speaker 2:I just think when people go across the chasm, which more and more people are, they're not coming back. That's essentially what I'm seeing, and so it's interesting how websites need to now, because Google is still the corpus right of the rag of information. It's not generating the answer and then verifying it. It's using Google as the corpus of information and being in whatever to generate it, and then it generates the answer. So I think the websites are really important to speak to the LLMs, but also from a user experience. Once you get them there, you've got to convert them. That's what I'm seeing is a lot less traffic is going to the sites, so you need to really be talking about CRO a lot more than SEO once you have the traffic.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well.
Speaker 1:I was going to say that's a great example of conversion rate optimization is not an SEO task I mean traditionally, like in the strictest sense of it, but it makes absolute sense that like, hey, we're, we're in this to win, we're in this to drive revenue, and that is where we need to, you know, put our stake in the ground and make our mark. Yeah, yeah. So what I've been trying to talk to people about is really like intent. Like you know, we've always talked about search intent. I think something where AI changes the game is you want to think a little bigger and you want to think in terms of task intent. So, you know, you know it's not just like what are you trying to find for this one particular niche, but like the bigger thing, and if you can provide that and if you can plug in in the right way, I think that's a big opportunity for brands.
Speaker 2:So well, I think, really identifying that target persona of who you're going after, because everyone's search, and even everyone's LLM, is learning you and is learning your behaviors, right. And so, if you've searched things previously, and so it's personalizing it right, and so it's going to give you an answer that is going to give somebody a different answer based upon their previous searches. And so, if you really understand your customer and who you're going after and where the places they've been and where they're searching, I think that, like you know, what is it? Sparktoro, right? Sparktoro has been a great tool to understand where they might be going. What podcast, what is it? Sparktoro, right? Sparktoro has been a great tool to understand where they might be going, what podcasts, what social media accounts, what are some of these areas that they're looking at, to understand where we need to optimize for that area. And so I think that that is something that I don't see a lot of SEOs doing. To your point, and I've found with a lot of, you know, people are hiring people for SEO as the line item.
Speaker 2:But, essentially what I've found across the board big companies, small companies. We want you to package up great candidates and deliver them to them with a bow on top. I mean, that's essentially what they're buying, and I have to continue to retrain my team and remind them that, even though we have the top rankings, what's the lead count right? Have they closed any deals? What's the conversion? We're going further and further into the sales. I've done that so much, michael, that I actually have another podcast that's called and we work a lot in the oil and gas energy space. It's called, you know, very original oil and gas sales and marketing podcast.
Speaker 1:So you know Good SEO title. Can't argue with that, so exact match podcast title.
Speaker 2:So I have a 30 year veteran salesperson in the oil and gas space that talks sales and I talk marketing and we talk about that merger between that and like what happens, like with, with comms, and, and how that all works together and it it can be applied to other industries. But I I'm finding more and more to be effective to build that brand. We can't just stay in our lane and touch SEO we can't just stay in our lane and touch SEO.
Speaker 2:There's so many other departments and verticals and skill sets that people have to have to have an effective campaign or funnel where someone's coming all the way through it and then the shape of the funnel is changing too Like it's not this linear shape. So I know there's a lot there, so speak on.
Speaker 1:I was going to say you know I'm right there with you. Like I have a background in, like I was demand and director at a big cybersecurity company, worked hand in hand with this huge, massive enterprise sales team. So I'm right there with you. And something that we recommend people do and people listening can do this right now is go to your chat, gpt or cloud and ask it to describe a business that one of your clients or your own and see what it says, see what the business objections are, ask it those kinds of things and when, as soon as you start prodding that stuff, I think you find a lot of the information that is hidden in your company you start to suddenly think, oh, this should really be in the LLM.
Speaker 1:I really wish Chad GPT knew this about our competitor versus us, because it would make a world of difference for this question and so much of the traditional enterprise sales tools like your battle cards, you know your you know here's our script, here's our you know objection list that when, here's how we overcome it. All of that is not SEO material, but all of that is vital to trying to do the sales and marketing movement in the modern world and people are less and less eager to talk to someone you know for this stuff and they want to do their own research online, especially in the enterprise space and there's, you know I won't say they've made a decision before they talk to you, but they have an opinion before they talk to you, you know, and positive or negative, and it's vital to be able to you know these LLMs and just provide more of a window into what people are doing on the cutting edge of AI search.
Speaker 1:Sure. So you know where I like to direct people to, to get started is we wrote something called the biscuit framework, which is you know, I'm very hyped about AI stuff. You're very hyped about AI stuff, but there's still a lot of people using Google. There's still a lot of traffic in it, and how do you start to carve out? Here's the strategy going forward that doesn't get rid of all of that effort. That doesn't get rid of all that work and all that expertise that we built up as SEOs, and so that's what it's trying to do.
Speaker 1:So, you know, we recommend people do some basic technical things. Um, you know how the indexing bots crawl your site from. All these ai services is a real different world than just making sure googlebot can reach your site. There's a lot of them that don't provide traffic back to you. That, I think it's very easy to think. I can just block these like a big one is creative commons. Uh, creative commons is this like multi-organization group that anybody can go and download just massive dumps of the internet, terabyte text files of the internet and, of course, every AI company use that as the basis to get started.
Speaker 2:So you were talking about Creative Commons is when it froze out of me. So you said Creative Commons is a great place where they've scraped the internet and that's where they got started with their body of knowledge.
Speaker 1:Small, it's Common Crawl, not Creative Commons. Though it does start with C but yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so Common Crawl, it's basically a crawler that anybody can get the access to the data and there's a bunch of these where they do data collection on all these different sites. And there's a bunch of these where they do data collection on all these different sites and you know it's licensed, anthropic, or you know whoever licenses this data. So it's important to be there and you know, mapping that out and taking care of that is very useful. And then the rest of the framework is really about content strategy how to move like further down funnel in your content strategy as well as to try to address things Like a crazy sort of thing is that?
Speaker 1:You know, having a chat is a lot more like having a conversation with someone, and the example I always bring up is Wells Fargo, which is Wells Fargo had some really big fines from the Federal Trade Commission, and anytime you ask a question in chat you'd be like, oh, should I use my local credit union or Wells Fargo? It's like, well, I guess you could use wells fargo, but just to let you know, you maybe do an ethical review of them first before you use them and all this stuff, and that's not what comes up in traditional search, which is very much. You know, hey, there's an atm two blocks from you. Here's how you log into your checking account.
Speaker 2:So would you say that reputation management is spilling over into SEO with these LLMs? I mean, that's what I heard from you is like Wells Fargo needs to do reputation management with the LLMs because there's some schema out there or you know there's a source somewhere that's pulling in that information that has high trust from maybe a news site or something like that, and they're you know, they're, they're taking, they're taking that as preferential of the lead, of what to share with the user.
Speaker 1:Well, you know you mentioned high trust less of that, I think, than in traditional search which is that you know there isn't really the same notion of domain rating and you know page rank and all of that in LLM search as there is in traditional search and so much of what is out. There is really a consensus opinion based upon all of the data that was available.
Speaker 2:And so once you scrap, scrape all the data, there's a lot of people saying, hey, wells Fargo is maybe having some issues, maybe they're better, but you know, so there's, you know there's certainly reputation like so so are you saying that the number of pages that are created about a certain topic and maybe what people are coming on about social media, as the LLMs you know, scrape all those and then it's aggregating the data? Is that what's happening, or can you talk a little bit more about that?
Speaker 1:So let's. A real challenge with all of this is that there's both AI models, ai search services that are like blended with other things and they call out to other services. So let's just talk like strictly like, hey, we just made our own AI model, now we're going to train it. And if you do that and you consider it that way, you know, there's actually this technical term in the AI community a bag of words which is literally like we just throw the words in there and then we shake it around and it goes in this particular order and then we pull them out in the right way. And that's what's happening. When, mike, you talk to chat GPT at like a real basic level, there is not a built-in, you know, thought of page rank. There is not a built-in thought of like oh, this is coming from the New York times and this is coming from Mike's Twitter account. One of these should be a lot more valuable. Now what happens is the New York Times posts something everybody on social media talks about it, they retweet it, they put it back out, and so you can imagine the impact they have on what that particular opinion or the topic is, or just the pattern of the words is a lot bigger with that than it is the smaller one. But it's not strictly true to say, hey, the New York Times and I said something different, the New York Times is just automatically going to win on like a trust score.
Speaker 1:The biggest ranking factor that we see in AI search is repetition, just repetition, repetition, repetition, and so so much of what we recommend beyond content. You have to create the content, but then you have a distribution strategy, and that distribution strategy, to my mind, needs to start with. There is not a duplicate content penalty, which is something SEO people just cling to, and so it is not a problem. You post something to your site, you post an article Great. You go to LinkedIn and maybe you post a link to it, maybe you post a summary. You could take that whole article, post it as an article to LinkedIn. You could take that whole article, make a video of someone reading it, put it on YouTube and that still counts.
Speaker 1:That's not a duplicate content penalty, but it's a way of getting your message out there. And a real aspect of this is when you stop competing at the top of the funnel and you start trying to really like, fill in the gaps and handle the lower part, where people are trying to discern this and, like you know how much content is out there saying like, hey, we're the best. For this reason, here's our reviews, here's this great experience we had. You aren't competing with that, you're just publishing into, like an open space, so much better, so much better for your company. And you know, just 360 on the marketing.
Speaker 2:Interesting that that that opens up a whole new thought of different kinds of strategies. It also makes me fearful that there's just going to be crazy amounts of spam content and content that's going to be generated Like how are people going to combat that?
Speaker 1:Well, in a lot of ways this is a reinvention of search and that you know, chat GPT is trying to become Google faster than Google can become chat GPT, and you know, I think eventually there will be a lot more in terms of, maybe, trust scores, maybe some of these other things.
Speaker 1:But you know there's also aspects of this where it's I don't know. There there are terrifying aspects of this and I, I too, worry about, just like the black hat spam just repeat the same thing a million times and even the old tricks of like oh well, the background on my page is white, so I made the font white on my text and put it at the bottom. Like those were some of the original tricks, like some of the AI search people did and they worked. But you know, I think as an industry we've also matured and, you know, for the areas where it makes a lot more sense, I think there is big reputational issues with doing that. Like you can't just post the exact same message to LinkedIn a million times. Even Twitter is very strict about like you know, you can't publish the same message a lot. So there's limits to all these things as well, and new challenges.
Speaker 2:The last thing I'll say about that. I just got done with this, like IBM training, like I said, and they were talking about making images and certainly you can put weights on different words, but it also was recommending, like in the training, just repeat the word multiple times where you want like it to wait. And I was like you know, and I was like Red, red, red, red, red, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:You're like I want more red, so red, red, red, red, red, and it understands that.
Speaker 2:And then now I'm like going, oh, alt text, and I'm just like, okay, this is all fresh, right, this is all new and it's learning and it's it's foundational and and it's growing.
Speaker 2:I would love to move into some of the stuff that you're specifically doing and what your company is doing and how you're looking at competitive analysis, because I think that that's a real need for people right now is I'm talking to a number of different kinds of CMOs and they want to know all kinds of competitive information of how are they doing just as, like a weighted metric versus everybody else. Like how many webinars are they doing, how many emails are they sending? How are they like what is happening with everybody else to, to create a barometer internally to say where do we fall Right? And so I would love to hear from you looking at the competitive nature of well, how many times are the bots going to that site? What pages are they going to? You know, what are they ranking for? That's what I think the burning question is on everybody's mind and and you're just so knowledgeable on that at SEO Weekend I would love to share that with anyone listening.
Speaker 1:So you know at some level what we're doing. You know is you know an AI specific version of a rank tracker, and there's been rank trackers for a long time. I think what's different is that we are not strictly trying to track ranks just on a url, that we do it. Off your url you can actually put in their technically unlimited number of like product names are you tracking entities or brands, or like how, how are you?
Speaker 2:how are you the easiest way to?
Speaker 1:consider is just strings that you know, like, hey, like, because, um, it can be so different. What the responses are that, like you know, the cyber cybersecurity company I used to work at, they had you know a dozen different products and you could ask like, hey, what's the top product? And you know this part. It doesn't have a brand associated in the answer, it just says what the product name is. So we have to track all that. So, as part of the competitiveness, we try to track both the domains, the actual name of the company, all the product names you know. Even if you wanted to, you could go as far as, like, key executives or spokespeople, because all of that comes out and I think that's a real different thing and so we track that against.
Speaker 1:You know there's different types of searches.
Speaker 1:You know there's different types of searches, but the ones that we're most focused on are the competitive searches, which is like what is the best in category and how you show up there.
Speaker 1:And you know there's some tweaks you can do to how you call this stuff, but that is fairly stable and it's very similar to the sort of ranking order of what you get out of traditional SEO or search and it's influenced by a lot of the same factors. But there's enough nuance in it that when you look at the competitive side of this that you want to be doing more in terms of both what we call faceless content and face content. So the faceless content is what like gets the raw ranking in there and the face content is sort of the conversion part of it. So you know, the faceless content is anything if you can read it and you can't, like, hear Matthew's voice in it, can't? You know there's no point of view that I think it's a lot more of a challenge where the face content is much more you know like, oh, there's a relationship and that it's converting on that basis and I realized I don't think I answered the competitiveness as much as you were hoping for in that.
Speaker 2:You gave me another question too, and my question is like predictions right, do you think that there's going to be more of a draw towards communities and people wanting to trust people? Because, like everybody, like a lot of the online stuff that's coming like I already see it, it's online bots or it's faceless YouTube pages or whatever it is Do you think that there's going to be a gravity towards, like a human being, uh, or an individual, which you know they're leveraging ai, whatever they're they're?
Speaker 2:making themselves more productive, but it's there's still a human being at the core of it that someone can know, like and trust and and it it starts to move more towards like, what are people in this community saying? What is this individual saying versus, you know, just a faceless brand Like I've kind of seen that with spokesperson like spokespeople, but now you've got influencers saying stuff. So you're like, do they even really believe what they're saying? Like I just think that it's very noisy right now and I'm just curious, as you're working with clients, you know, where do you project the ball going, like, where's the puck headed to right now with what's going on? Like when it all shakes out? I'm just curious.
Speaker 1:So I think um, at least in my mental model of this, is that the face content is the multiplier for the faceless content, which is, you know, like the same way we're talking about the New York Times. They publish something, it goes all over the place versus you know, my much smaller footprint.
Speaker 2:Let's go back to the competitive component of kind of what you're doing and how you're viewing that with your company.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so, like on the strictest case, we want people to focus on, you know, a small number of high value competitive searches, most of which take the form of like what is the best in my category, who is the most trustworthy?
Speaker 1:Those kinds of things, and you want to make sure you show up in there. And those are not the end all be all of tracking competitiveness, because that's sort of like the tip of the pyramid. There's a tremendous amount of knowledge that you need underneath this in order to get those influenced, which is all the parts of the rest of the search journey, which is that, you know, people start with, like I'm having this problem, how do I get the solution? And then it eventually trickles down to okay, now that I understand the right terms and the way of this, tell me what to do. And, you know, depending upon how you phrase that and how aggressive you get with the LLMs, they will tell you like oh, you should get the Ford, you know, truck over the Chevy, and that's very persuasive. To go through that and that is where we're trying to get people to influence is not all the bits leading up to making that final question of like what should I buy? Who should I go with? Who should I give my money to?
Speaker 2:So right at the bottom of the funnel, all those kinds of transactional terms, and, and and by by related terms, very interesting. What are? What are? Can you share some case studies of, of, of maybe utilizing these tools and like what you've done to influence the results and the impact that it had?
Speaker 1:Sure. So I was going to say something. We do so when you put your site in, we do what we call a deep classification of it. So this goes through all the existing keywords that your site ranks for and we try to then pull out the intent of those along with some information with your site. We try to then pull out the intent of those along with some information with your site, and we sort of build that funnel out of all your words and say like, well, these are the informational, these are the ones that are looking for stuff, and then at the bottom of it we have those very you know the business terms and what we've seen our most successful customers do is do that content strategy shift and with that, at the very least, they feel more effective.
Speaker 1:You know, in terms of actually influencing sales, you know the attribution is still a bit of a dark art, but certainly they haven't seen sales go down bit of a dark art, but certainly they haven't seen sales go down. And in a couple of cases we've seen very much like competitor brands. Like one of the first people started using this was like a podcast hosting network and that's pretty much a commodity. It is also very strictly what is the best podcast host to use. And they were able to rank much better in chat, gpt and cloud and all these other systems than they were in traditional search, in large part because they did a lot more user generated content and they did a lot more with being active on reddit and they did a lot more um with really hitting these bottom of the funnel terms, in part because you know they started seeing what the content strategy shifts were.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would love to go back to your your full on framework of how you look at search. If you'd be willing to go through that, I would love to. Yeah, sure, break that down.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you know I said there's things you should do today that are easy technical things, you know. Make, check your robots that text. If you're do today that are easy technical things you know make, check your robotstxt. If you're not familiar with how to interpret it, copy it out, put it in a chat, gpt, it will tell you what you've done you know, you know we have an active checker.
Speaker 1:Make sure that you can be indexed by all the sites and then, from there, start to think about you know your business intelligence, which is all of the sales sort of things we talked about. Start to think about you know your business intelligence, which is all of the sales sort of things we talked about. Start to think about how it is considered with respect to you. Know the sentiment about your company. There's a lot of easy questions you can ask, like is my company trustworthy? Like that's a great thing to ask, that's a great thing to track. Ask those kinds of questions and then start to track the questions of, like the direct competitive ones Are we the best in the category? Who is the best? Who is considered better or worse? And track all that. And you know, once all of that is done, you know you can then start to actually do the content shifts and what we see is then, once you have that, you can look at how it changes over time, the responses, and then reflect back what the latest output is. So chat GPT again, like we do a lot of work with SAS, so it's very like here's the key features, like the older versions of chat GPT, you would say who's the best. They would just give you a list of 10 names and now they literally break it out Like here's the key features and here's best, for like, those are titles, like each three subheads in the markdown of the response.
Speaker 1:And so our customers are now. They're like great, this is just gold. I'm going to go write an article. It's like why are we the best for this category? Here are our key features very explicitly. These are much better and this is what differentiates us from our competitors. Put that out there. And that's, of course, just catnip to you know, chat GPT, and it's a little bit different for Claude, and it's a little bit different for Gemini. But that's the strategy is to, you know, reflect back the end results we see out of it.
Speaker 2:What I'm seeing off page is a lot of people are talking about how to incorporate, from a vector standpoint, your brand with like whatever service or term that you're offering, and there's been a lot of people talking about, in the traditional sense, how to utilize like into TSEO really, and I really like your take on how you need to better define these associations and what you want people to know about you. I'm hearing a lot of like interview style. You need to ask chat, gbt or Claude or whatever platform you're using, what they think about you and then take that into consideration of the kind of content you need to give them. I mean, it even goes back in my mind to when you think about GMB or GDP, how you don't even a lot of companies don't even put their terms or, sorry, their hourly operation, like the hours that they're on their website Right, and so this becomes like the standard and it's like, well, it it wants to check it, like for trust. From a trust standpoint to your website. You really need to include those things on your website and a lot of people get upset if they don't update, like on a holiday, weekend or something like that, if they say that the store is open and it's not right. Right, or the business is open, and so it's really interesting to me just about how everything is evolving.
Speaker 2:I mean how, michael? Because a lot of SEOs listen to this as well as web developers, and a lot of this stuff just keeps being put on the back of their shoulders. How do SEOs need to better communicate this to leadership or clients of? Like what you're asking for is now 10x more work to you know, all these fracture platforms to rank and to do all these things, which I think that that's going to translate into well larger retainers and higher paid SEOs, and I think that that's a good thing over time, but in the medium term, there's going to be a lot of frustration across the board of how do we do these things and just loading up SEOs with additional work that is really outside their scope, and it's just like a lot of companies can't afford the amount of work Like so it's like the leverage that LLMs give you on the productivity side, outpacing the amount of work that you have to do, like I haven't seen a chart yet that someone shows you where that breakeven point is, but I think that that's essentially what what's happening. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I think it's going to look a lot like social. You know, like social has a lot of the same issues where, like, you have to make a decision on every platform of like, well, do we start a TikTok channel for my, my enterprise? You know farming equipment, you know. You know, like, maybe, um, or you know, is there a way to be better with distribution? Is there a way, you know, to handle some of these things in a better way?
Speaker 1:But I do think there's a lot to be learned from you know our friends on the social side of things where they have very messy attribution. They have a lot of, you know, metrics that are they vanity metrics? Is this audience metrics? Is this? You know what exactly is there. And you know a lot of the same troubles with attribution. And you know I, you know I mentioned before the the more post-purchase attribution you can do and surveys and stuff like that's proven to be a real win and a very bottom line win as far as like putting people in a good light, bottom line win as far as like putting people in a good light. And I think there's just going to be you know a lot more of that, unfortunately where analytics is just going to get worse and worse and we're going to need more and more you know elements outside of that to compensate.
Speaker 2:So I agree, Interesting. You say social. That's. One of the things that we're working on internally at EWR is to build a really robust social team to complement the SEO team, not because we think it's nice to have, because we think it's need to have today.
Speaker 1:Um, just that, both owning your own distribution platform as well as your own content platform uh, the need for site with SEO, the need to succeed in these other areas, and I think the great benefit of it is that, as far as selling this to upper management, what you're selling is more effective marketing in general, even if it's not exactly search like you know it's it's really hard to, it's all directionally positive.
Speaker 1:you know saying, hey, cmo, let's mix up our LinkedIn or Instagram and talk more about the company, how we're great in these specific ways, like, yes, that's going to benefit this, you know, search we're trying to optimize for Also, that's just great content. That is just, you know, straight down the middle, good content for us to have. Anyway, there's no risk there, you know. So that's very different than you know. I think a lot of people have like set aside AI stuff. Is this like new, kooky, too technical thing? And I think a lot of this just comes back to being really understanding your customers, really speaking their language, really trying to reach them where they're at and, as a benefit, if you do all that in the right ways and the right framing, you're going to just really do well on AI search as well.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Well, michael, I've learned so much already and it's really got me thinking of some of the things that we might want to firm up even more that we're currently doing. Is there anything else that, like we haven't covered in your conversation our conversation that you think might be valuable to anyone listening, if they're trying to wrap their head around all this?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, I think there is a big trend that's happening that is like guaranteed to be occurring, and it has a funny name, which is agentic search, which is just means search with agents. And even that, I feel like, is too highfalutin you know it's too like fancy a term for it, cause it's really just like almost a bot doing some of the Googling for you. And if you take that term for it, you know, uh, there's a lot of tools that are doing this. Google's AI mode is the biggest one, which is kind of like a light version of their deep research stuff, which is, you know, it goes out, it finds 10 links, it looks at the content of those 10 links and then it brings it back to you with a little bit of a summary and a recommendation. And that's an agent.
Speaker 1:It made some decisions for you, it is custom to you, it's not the generic answer everyone gets. It's got a little more discernment and rationale on it and we're going to see more and more systems like that and even just holding in your mind that pattern, that like, oh, I need to write this page on my site that describes what we do in a way that the bot can read it, understand it and then, when it weighs us versus our competitor, it recommends us to the user. That's ultimately going to see this in a summary, and that's something real different than trying to write just the right headline for it or doing these different pieces. And I think in some places it's going to be different content, that there's more like a human version of it and more a face and faceless version of it.
Speaker 2:Awesome. I think that that's a great unknown secret of Internet marketing. Right there, would you say, out of everything you talked about, what is the one thing that you want people to take away and take action on? That's the most important thing that needs to be happening right now. I heard create content about your brand and put it out there to make sure you're answering the questions that people might be asking across multiple platforms. That's what I, what my yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, I think there's an even easier one, which is and this is self-serving, but you know we're marketers. You know, like, on our site, we have a we call it like an AI search console and it really does. It runs through like 24 different bots that are indexing your site and we have so many people find out issues from this that are just the basic stuff, like cause you can write stuff, but if it's not being indexed, doesn't matter. You know like, and so it's free. It's super easy to try out, like. Just start there at least to get your foot in the door and to start thinking about like hey, you know these are important, this is something we want to influence, and get started there.
Speaker 2:So so noatoacom's no-a-t-o-acom, or is it ai? Sorry Okay com.
Speaker 1:I want to make sure we got the com we're doing it for real Awesome.
Speaker 2:So, michael, if someone enjoyed this conversation I know I have and they want to hear more about what you're doing. I know you're active on LinkedIn. Yeah, how do people find you? What, what? Where should people be searching?
Speaker 1:Yeah, Go to go to noatoacom. It is a free signup. It gets you like a couple of questions that you can ask from a chat GPT. You can put them in yourself, like whatever you want to know. We'll track those for you for free to just see what the reports are. We will check for the bots and you'll get our newsletter and the newsletter. If you heard me today, it is very much written in my voice. It is a face version of this that I write every week. That has, you know, an interpretation of like what's happening and things, not just sort of a regurgitation. So trying to be helpful and add value to people.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming. On the unknown secrets, I am going to go do it after this myself. I know I was looking at it and I'm I'm super excited. Thank you so much for coming and sharing some valuable knowledge with everyone here.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for having me. Honestly, it was great meeting you in New York. It was great talking to you now and have a good week, bye.
Speaker 2:All right, until the next time, everyone, my name is Matt Bertram. Bye-bye, for now, it's not going.
