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™
Entity SEO & AI Search: Winning in the New Search Landscape with Zach Chahalis
The SEO landscape is shifting dramatically with the rise of AI search and entity-based relationships, creating new challenges and opportunities for marketers. We explore how traffic patterns are changing as top-ranking sites lose clicks to AI overviews while brand searches increase, and discuss the critical importance of entity relationships in modern search strategy.
• Entity SEO requires mapping relationships between data points like organizations, places, authors, and products
• Structured data remains extremely valuable, acting as a "kindergarten reading level" translation of content for search engines
• AI adoption in search is currently low (1-2% for Google's AI Mode), but preparing now gives marketers a competitive advantage
• Many industries haven't yet felt significant impacts from AI search, creating a false sense of security
• Technical SEO fundamentals remain crucial. Ensure your site is crawlable before pursuing advanced AI strategies
• Large organizations like Apartments.com are integrating AI into products and operations while mapping complex entity relationships
• Content pruning and topical focus are increasingly important as search engines evaluate expertise more carefully.
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Guest Contact Information:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/zacharychahalis/
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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, howdy.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to another fun-filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I am your host, matt Bertram. I am just having a great time here. I know we've been releasing these weekly. We've been recording about three podcasts a week, so a lot of great content to come. I got Zach here from apartmentscom, who used to be over there at iPoleRank, and we've been just getting to know each other and talking about a lot of things. He was just at PubCon and we were catching up on kind of what's going on because things are changing so quickly. And Zach, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Well, let's just kind of pick up where we got, where we left off before. I just thought we would include everybody in the conversation. What were the things that you were picking up from PubCon of things that's maybe changed since, let's say, seo week and I know SMX Advanced just happened. So I mean, things are just rapid fire right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it seemed like folks are still maybe struggling or grappling with how to think about the impact of AI in general, of engine searches and things like that. It was interesting. There's definitely a lot of conflicting opinion on the impact of what's going to happen here, how we should look at things, how we should look at data points, KPRs, things like that. But yeah, it's. I think we're still maybe at a crossroads a little bit in the industry where folks are not 100% certain on the direction to go. But I also think that's maybe a subset of folks not necessarily knowing how to evolve as the search engines are evolving. I think a lot of folks might get stuck in the legacy ways of thinking about search engine optimization and not thinking about the gender of engines or not thinking about the impact of things like AI mode that are coming into play.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think everybody's going to wake up with AI mode when that. When that hits and the 10 blue links are gone, I mean they're pretty much like pushed so far down the page at this point that I'm seeing this inverse correlation between you get to the top spot in Google and you lose traffic, because now you're in the overviews or you're in the people also ask, and so like traffic's going down. But then my brand searches for a number of my clients are going up, right, and then I'm like going, okay, how do I track attribution across all these different platforms? And we're we're having a quarterly meetings with clients right now and you know, I'm starting to talk about Reddit and like the information architecture that you're you're you're needing to build, the information architecture that you're you're needing to build, and I've I've had a couple clients. They're not ready yet, like they're not ready yet and and they're not, they're not changing. And I think a lot of people are still playing that old game and luckily, a lot of that old game if you do the traditional stuff really well does have a positive impact on the new game. So I think it was like what was it when Google AdWords? They keep changing the interfaces. You just wait because you know how to use it the old way.
Speaker 2:I feel like it took me a real minute to get immersed in what's happening and to understand where we're going, because it's like search just broke out of the website and it's just scattered all over the place. It's running in all these different directions and you're like what do I do first? What is the impact? What is the waiting? You know how should I think about this? And I think I don't know. Did you hear people talking about different frameworks? I know what is it. Malik from Search Atlas had a couple different frameworks that he was talking about. I want to bring him on. He was talking about like a scholar framework of like here's how to look at the content, and he came up with a new waiting system for, like link power or something like that, and it was like an aggregated score but it was like here's all the different things and this is really what we should be looking at.
Speaker 2:So it could be a little bit of marketing, I guess, but I think it was still hitting on all the right things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I see that as a general theme and I think there's just several different ways that folks have been approaching it, whether they're thinking about the value of an entity and the value of I hate to say, page rank, because that's, I mean, still kind of in theory, a metric that folks do look at, but like thinking about how authority is flowing between entities and how you tie the relationships to one another. I'm just seeing it referred to in a lot of different ways and in some cases I'm seeing it more thought out. Um, there's definitely a lot of folks in the SEO space that are kind of taking this to the next level and folks doing it kind of more at an elementary basis too, where they're just kind of beginning to think about the idea of vector embeddings and you know how certain pieces of content relate to one another. Query Fana is one that I see also being thought about in, I guess I'll say, different levels of success and different levels of depth so far. But I think the folks that are thinking a little bit more intricately about that are probably going to do better in the long run.
Speaker 1:But I do agree with you I'm in an interesting spot in how I've adopted myself here, because the real estate space hasn't changed as rapidly as some other areas in search engines.
Speaker 1:So, you know, with things like e-commerce, with travel, with news and editorial type stuff. There's a bigger impact of AI on that. We've certainly seen some impacts of AI overviews, ai mode generative engines impacting some traffic numbers and visibility and that's just everyone seeing that. But I don't see something like an AI mode as frequently in the real estate space. I see it for something like hey, what's the average rent of a two-bedroom apartment in New York City? And in instances like that like I see us ranked number one traditionally and as the top source in the AI overview, I still see those things bringing traffic to the site. I'm not sure how much that's been impacted, given you know these pages are maybe a little bit newer on our side and didn't get the full weight of pre-AIO, but we're not getting AI overviews on our commercial type queries just yet. Or if we see Google experimenting with them, they're kind of bad, I mean.
Speaker 1:I know folks are going to be surprised by AI overviews giving bad answers, but like we've seen instances where it'll be like, hey, I want to find an apartment in Atlanta. Oh well, we recommend that you go visit apartmentscom and these other websites.
Speaker 2:Like cool, I could have saved that space, but yeah implying, I guess and I want to, I want to ferret it out a little bit more is you you mentioned this early on too like people don't understand the impact yet and really it's only a fraction of the overall search from Google. Right, it's just a fraction, but it's where things are going, is what people are looking at and concerned about, and and that's kind of the feedback we got from a number of our clients that were in industries that haven't been impacted is like, hey, um, like I'm not seeing much change and I'm currently still using Google and you know, like I think we're good and and and I, I think that there's that bell curve, I guess of, um, you know, early adopters and and, and the transition is going to take longer. Like I remember my mom, my mom's one of the first employees at Microsoft, and uh, she, she told me I, I wanted to get set up those like before red box, the red box things, and I wanted to put, I wanted to get those set up everywhere, cause I saw like a bunch of pharmacies and, uh, grocery stores and have them, and my mom was like, no, don't do that. Like everything's going online, everything's going to be streaming in like a couple of years and Redbox is still holding strong. I mean they can just raise their prices. I mean maybe they've owned the market and there's not a bunch of players anymore.
Speaker 2:I get it. But I mean, and it will go the way, I guess, of Blockbuster eventually, but there's a long tail on this stuff and if you're focused on the traditional stuff, then does it matter that much? Now I guess people are repositioning, like getting positioning ahead of it. Is that kind of what your thought is?
Speaker 1:I think so. Yeah, your thought is. I think so. Yeah, I mean, my long-term prediction is that AI mode will become more of a default experience down the line. At least with the last adoption numbers I was seeing, though, it was only hovering around like 1% to maybe somewhere between 1% and 2%. Now, given it's been two or three weeks, and that's with Google heavily pushing the hey try, ai mode thing. I'm getting the push notifications all the time whenever I try and use Google or Chrome on my phone.
Speaker 1:I did see that it looks like the new version of Chrome I just saw a couple of folks talking about this on social media is now incorporating AI mode as an option in the URL bar. So I am curious if this continues to result in more adoption there. But I do think maybe some folks are a little anxious and putting themselves ahead of like the cart before the horse type of thing. Right, I'm sure there are instances where folks want to start thinking about how this works and how to get involved with it. But the adoption rate yeah, I mean to your point.
Speaker 1:We're kind of in the beginning of that adoption curve where you have the early adopters that are doing it, some of the folks that I've seen outside of the space and this is just my own personal experiences in talking with folks kind of saying like hey, I'm not really enjoying this, I'm not getting what I need out of it.
Speaker 1:If they're looking for more commercial-based intent, if they're just asking it a question or they're kind of treating it like a conversation engine, it's been doing okay, but I'm just not seeing folks go out of that system yet. And then you run into the issue you mentioned this earlier where attribution is still kind of questionable. I know Google fixed the analytics measurement of attribution that might be coming in from AI mode, but there's still limited opportunity to click out of that into a website or just brings you into another Google experience. And we're seeing the same thing with other generative engines as well, where some do okay on attribution and some don't. But yeah, I do think folks are feeling the pressure to adopt and I think it's going to take time to get there. I think you've got time before AI mode becomes the standard.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think we're in an echo chamber.
Speaker 2:I agree, we're in an echo chamber and I agree. And I, I literally ask every person I hang out with socially what they're doing with ai, like, like, what are you doing with chat gbt? Or, you know, have you used any of the other stuff? Right? And chat gbt is a lot more personable than like, for, for example, right when, when, when, when you're when you're talking to it, and like, how are you using it? What are you using it for? And then, um, you know, there there's some data that I I was pretty shocked. Uh, some people are leveraging it too much and they're like, losing brain capacity because right I just I, just you know, and so I don't think people know what to think about everything.
Speaker 2:I saw that me incorporate it into everything I do and my workflow and I just don't see that transition happening. I mean, I do think that on the enterprise level, I'm curious what, like at the executive team of a large company, how are they talking about incorporating, maybe, ai? If we even remove ourself from search for a second and just say there's this thing called AI and artificial intelligence and deep learning that we can take data warehouses and do all kinds of cool stuff with it now generally, where we're not having to label everything and it's a lot more user-friendly when you're up with applied AI, like it's a lot more user-friendly like when you're up with applied AI, what? What are big corporations like apartmentscom Like? How are they thinking about it? I'm just curious.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think I'll speak as generally as I can.
Speaker 2:Talk just as you and what you think, and don't share anything that you can't share. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I think it comes down to a couple of things. Right, you're, you're one. You're trying to figure out how to integrate AI in the products. I think that seems to be the hot thing where everyone's integrating AI in some form. I see a lot of companies doing this. Some are doing it in an interesting way, others are doing it in I'll call them, lackluster approaches. You know, speaking for ourselves, you know we've announced some products on the front end where it's a conversational approach to finding a rental, finding a house. We also co-star owns homescom, so we have folks that are working on that side where you can kind of speak into it and, in theory, it understands. You know what you're asking for, what amenities you're asking for, and then can apply those filters dynamically. So that's been an aspect. We also have independent landlords and operators that exist, so we've been trying to create products to help them, I would say, complete their listings and make them more successful in finding a renter on their side them more successful in finding a renter on their side. So, like we have the ability of helping you leverage AI to create a property description based on looking at some of the images of your property. So there's aspects like that.
Speaker 1:I also think there's a good amount of conversation around how to integrate AI into efficiency and how to leverage that to be better at what you're doing on a day to day basis. That's resulting in kind of a couple of interesting things. I see folks that have dove into it and they understand like, hey, this allows me to be quicker at what I do. It may still have errors. We need to account for that and be responsible for what we're doing with it. But then I also see a lot of folks that are scared of it, kind of taking their jobs, and that's a reasonable concern. I'm not going to argue with that. What I've been trying to tell folks is and maybe a random aside here I have a weird fascination with engineering of certain things, including like cruise ships and theme parks and things like that.
Speaker 1:But there was a good documentary on like how they built Disney World like many, many, many years ago, and this analogy has kind of stuck with me. But they were talking about, hey, all the animators that were programming these rides were programming them manually and they're sitting there and they're getting recorded in their motions and things like that. But it came out with this box that allowed them to program, what was going on and what you wanted the right to do. And a lot of folks were concerned hey, this is just going to take my job, I'm not going to, I'm not using this, I don't want to get involved with it.
Speaker 1:And they started having conversations with those folks going hey, this allows you to take some of the menial aspects of what you're trying to do on a day-to-day basis out of it so that you can focus on the things that do matter. So I see ai being adopted. I think it will be adopted more readily in the enterprise space to improve efficiency, whether that's helping to do um, initial coding or even coding what's whatsoever. I know google this point. I think they stayed in their last earnings call. They're using AI to write about half their code right now, somewhere around that number, and it's self-improving, right, right.
Speaker 2:So what is it? Alpha, or I forget what they call the engine, but it's self-improving, so it's writing the code and then it's improving upon the code that's written to reduce what was it like data storage by 7% or some number across all of their infrastructure, which is that like a huge amount in savings? Yeah, or something like that?
Speaker 1:yeah, yeah, they're going to keep trying to figure out ways of incorporating it into the day-to-day process and be more efficient. I do think folks still need to be careful with how they do integrate it or how they rely on it. I still, although it continues to get better, I see hallucinations, I see bad recommendations. I was talking to some developers the other day where it's kind of recommending inefficient ways of handling some aspects of coding that either result in additional latency or, say, low time effects or things like that. So I just encourage folks to not be relying on it but use it to help improve your efficiency.
Speaker 1:And even I was having a conversation with one of my team members this morning where, hey, we're trying to figure out how we organize this data, that we have to ingest it into our platform just more effectively, and we kind of sat there going all right, we could regex this and probably get it 90% right, or we can stick in chat GPT and see if it can do any better. And it did. I would say it got 99% of the way there. A couple of things that we didn't like but that improved the efficiency. I don't have someone sitting there and going through multiple thousands of lines of a spreadsheet trying to recalculate something.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no for sure. I feel like we're making this an AI podcast, which is awesome because I think that that's what everybody cares about and everybody's trying to orient their head around it. I think we covered quite a bit of information already. I wanted to walk back to into TSEO. I really haven't. I really haven't covered that as well as I should. We are working on entity SEO and schema markup internally.
Speaker 2:I am a customer of WordLift. I want to get the CEO on and we're early in this process, right, because we were doing a lot of manual schema and starting to build, like, these associations. But I would love for, like you, to kind of map out you know what dabbling with it looks like and then what advanced looks like, and just give people that understanding of we're now moving from like word to vector, like keyword association or even semantic search to relationships and you know how the knowledge graph plays into it, because, I mean, you see it at such a broad level and and it's really important to understand all these different associations of, well, what makes up an apartment, right, and and I would love for you, like, if you know, you could speak to us like we're one of your team members and we're new and you're educating us on what this is and why it's important. I think that'd be pretty interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So the way that we look at entity perspective is we're trying to tie together all of the information about what we work with on a day-to-day basis. So an entity could be defined as the organization of apartmentscom. It could be defined as a place hey, I'm talking about apartments for rent in San Diego. It could be defined as an author folks that are writing our content and contributing to that. There are multiple different ways of defining and thinking about what an entity is and how we explain it to the search engine in the form of structured data so I'll come back to that in a second but also in how we tie it together from a relationship conceptual perspective. So I talked a little bit about this actually in my PubCon talk last week, where, if you land on that Apartments for Rent in San Diego page that we have, there's contextual linking that exists, driven by the entities that we've defined that say, hey, you're in San Diego, but a lot of folks tend to look at these neighborhoods. So here are the neighborhoods and we're trying to tie the relationship to say, hey, this neighborhood is a part of this place of San Diego which is a part of the state which is being listed on this website. We have our properties and we're defining the listings as the type of property that they are and we're trying to explain to search engines that hey, this property is located here, we're talking about it in this way it ties back to that parent geography. Oh, and this is listed on apartmentscom. Oh, and this piece of content was written by so-and-so. We're trying to help search engines understand all of the relationships that exist between these different data points.
Speaker 1:I think structured data is an interesting piece and I've been a structured data nerd really since it came out and started to get integrated. I'm thankful for the approach of implementing JSON-LD schema versus microdata in some of the legacy formats. But we're able to do so much on the structured data side and, like I said, I do like cheesy analogies. I attribute structured data to taking a Shakespearean novel and distilling it to a kindergarten reading level for a crawler and making it very digestible at the beginning of the page load so that search engines or generative engines don't have to go and process the entire page to understand what it's about and how it relates to other things.
Speaker 1:So, for example, apartmentscom was kind of the pioneer in the unit level shopping experience, meaning folks want to look at a specific unit of an apartment complex. They want to rent that unit, they want to know all about it. They an apartment complex, they want to rent that unit, they want to know all about it. They want the videos, they want the 3D tour, they want the photography, they want to know how much it costs. So we've tried to structure the entity of the apartment building to also explain the entity of the units that exist within it, so that way, if folks are looking at that, then they can understand the relationship between. Hey, this 3d tour aside, we own um matterport, which is a 3d tour y'all.
Speaker 2:Y'all own matterport. Yeah, no, I'm familiar with it. I didn't know y'all own it.
Speaker 1:That's awesome, that's it because on that one a couple, a couple months ago now. Okay, because, uh, for home inspections. It's just amazing, right, like you can buy a house unseen you can tag all the issues.
Speaker 2:You can walk around the house. Okay, because for home inspections it's just amazing right Like you can buy a house unseen. You can tag all the issues. You can walk around the house. Matterport's a fantastic technology.
Speaker 1:And that's where, like, I'm loving the approach of being able to tie together hey, you can go and view every unit in this building and view it as mapped and you can actually navigate the hallways and the parking lots and all that. But we're trying to express that in an entity perspective that search engines understand as well, so that way it kind of ladders up hey, you have this unit in a building. This building is an apartment complex. This building lives in the neighborhood of X, which is a part of the city of Y and is listed on this site and is written by so-and-so. And that's just scratching the surface of the idea of entities there. But really we're trying to tie together all these things so that search engines understand these search engines loosely, I guess, I mean every engine in Crawler, but understanding the relationship that exists between these things and the big shout out, I'll say, with structured data is and this bothered me a little bit. I saw so many folks about six months ago saying, hey, structured data is meaningless. Now, like, don't bother doing this.
Speaker 2:Just that the generative images are gonna figure it all out like without any help.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like I saw that and it kind of made me question a lot of things about people. Then you have both Bing and Google come out and say, hey, this is still valuable and like, the AI crawlers and engines rely on this extensively like, don't get rid of it. So it kind of makes me laugh because, like I said, I've been a fan and structured data nerd since the beginning, just to see folks say like, nah, this is meaningless now, just because something doesn't appear as a rich snippet in results. I see so many people get rid of FAQ schema, for example. Right, but folks are still asking these questions and, especially as you're thinking now about something like an AI overview, if you're making that question and answer more digestible for search engines or generative engines to understand, you're more likely to get that treatment because they understand the entity and they understand the data that they're looking for.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's some trust associated with it. Like you've structured to say this and I know that this to be true, so I'm much more likely to show that. I mean, we were doing a training internally on on GMB actually, because no one's talking about GMB right now and there's all these kinds of things like veteran owned right, women owned. Like there's all these different choices you want to select. No, like you want to give it more data. Like there's a score associated with that. Like because if you're, and like there's a score associated with that. Like because if you're, if it's, if the, if the LLMs are out there guessing or, um, uh, you know, the, the, the bots are out there just trying to figure it out on their own. They want to show the right thing. They're going to show something that has a higher trust.
Speaker 2:I wanted to go back to something you said, um, and I wanted to get your opinion and I I don't know the answer on this.
Speaker 2:I want to know if I'm looking at it the right way and I'd love to just get your take on it. So I feel like entity SEO or entity associations when you're building that vocabulary of this entity versus that entity is just the next layer of categories and tags. Categories and tags. So this is my thought Categories and tags was so that the bots could figure out what was going on and what you were talking about on the site as a quick reference guide before it would have to go process all this data so it could go across more of your site and it would have to use as much process power. Now you got the entity associations, so again it uses less compute power. So you know you're going to get more crawl budget potentially if, if you don't have a bunch of errors and it's just kind of like 3d chess versus 2d chess, Um, and you're just, it's just. This natural progression is kind of how I look at it or saw it. How would you add to that or change that viewpoint?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't, I don't disagree and I actually don't. I don't hate that analogy. I mean, in theory you're, you're trying to I think it's more of the 3d chess model, right Like in theory, you're trying to tie together the categories and tags that exist underneath one another, so like for an apartment complex versus an individual apartment, you're laddering that up and you're laddering it up to the city in that sense, but then off to the side you've got who the seller is, who the agent is, who the author is. So, yeah, I think there's an element there where you're thinking about it from a top down, like, let's say, we're just sticking in the realm of a geography and a place aspect. Then you also have those related entities of.
Speaker 1:I know folks are kind of still debating on the value of eat, and even me just saying that is automatically like a debate topic. But you know it has been expressed in Google's quality writer guidelines that it is something that they look at. If you can define an entity in thinking about it from an eat perspective, I think there's value there. Like all the authors that we have that write content on apartmentscom are well versed in the real estate space or well versed in the rental marketplace space and they're kind of established as leaders that talk about and write about and have experience with these things. So it's automatically, naturally applying the idea of EAT and then looking at the entity, and we're talking about building up the entity of, let's say, apartmentscom by having these knowledgeable authors.
Speaker 2:That are also entities as a person. Right, and there's some authorship associated with, like some same ass schema of they've written all this different kind of content. So there's some more authority there.
Speaker 1:That's still murky to me.
Speaker 2:It makes sense but it's murky to me. Like how much weight right, like and I guess it pulls. I don't know how it pulls. Like you got a bad doctor and a good doctor right, someone graduated top of the class, bottom of the class. Like I guess they pull from reviews, they pull from, you know, the corpus of information they have. No, there's no great tools or do you know of any that can kind of start to wait? That, like you know, if you're looking at influencers or whatever, or content writers to guest posts, like how do wait? Who does what? Like you know what I mean. Like it's, it's murky to me I think it is still murky.
Speaker 1:I don't know if there's a way of it getting better. I'm not sure of anything offhand to answer your question.
Speaker 2:Okay, cool. No, I just, if there's a tool out there, tell me, because I'm trying to figure it out when you see so many of these.
Speaker 1:Let's look at the generative engine of like hey, hey, who's the best SEO consultants? Half this list doesn't do SEO anymore and you know, for folks that were at SEO Week and heard Rand talk, he's kind of like I don't do this anymore, take me off this list. So, yeah, I don't think it's great at understanding currently, and there's definitely not a tool that I'm aware of it might exist that identifies what the most valuable entity within a set of entities would be if you're comparing them to one another, especially if since, in theory, you become less tied to a topic over time Like let's look at Ran right, like he's doing so many great things with SparkTour I know he's also doing like a video game development company. That's awesome, but he's not doing SEO anymore and he fully admits that, so he's like he's shifted away.
Speaker 2:But okay, like I get it, like it's almost semantic because he's the keynote speaker at SEO week, right, okay, and SparkToro is very much like next gen, where you know what's your target persona is, where do you find them, which is that kind of speed, like he's in front of the curve, right Of where everything's going.
Speaker 1:It's going to come back more in the SEO, right? Yeah, yeah, Like so I think it of where everything's going.
Speaker 2:It's going to come back more in the SEO. Yeah, I think it's a strategic positioning play and he has a corpus of information out there that he is like. If you compare him to anybody else, even though he doesn't do it, he still knows more about SEO than 99% of people or whatever number you want to put on that. He but he's. He's one of the top SEOs based upon the knowledge in his head. But he's changed his title Right, so it's Samantha in my mind.
Speaker 1:Exactly Cause. Yeah, I mean there's still the general relationship of it, but like those lists just generally don't represent, yeah, they're not, they're not. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I agree, like I mean people. Yeah, those lists are pulled or aggregated based on on on data. It's not and that would be interesting to. Is it who has like an awards or whatever that is is really curated and maybe community driven on? Like who's doing that? I don't know. Um, who would you say, like where you would go get the real list? Like I mean, it's either people's opinion, like that's the problem with seo there's no standard, like framework, and I think people talk about that a lot too.
Speaker 1:And it is sort of comical to me and I mean maybe just I'll speak to myself for a second here. Like I've been doing SEO now for 15 years. I have historically been an SEO that loves working kind of in the background, Like I don't want to be famous. That just hasn't been a thing for me. But lately I've been wanting to do more speaking and educating and helping the community and giving back.
Speaker 1:But I don't make any of these lists, despite having 15 plus years of experience at this point, because folks just don't know who I am. So they reference the ones that are visible and that opens up to interpretation who people think are the best SEOs. I see folks trying to do it and trying to curate their own list. I actually saw a good one recently from DigitalEat, if you're not familiar with them, but like it's a curated list of hey, here's a bunch of professionals in the industry and folks have gone through and tried and said, hey, you know, these lists we see aren't as relevant as they used to be. Here's what we're thinking now, but that as relevant as they used to be. Here's what we're thinking now, but that's someone's opinion that's not graded in any particular way and I don't know that we have a way of grading that.
Speaker 2:I would love to see, like I've always thought, like a competition, right? You know, it's like you enter in the competition, you start from scratch and it's like go and people are using different strategies because that's what they do in cybersecurity.
Speaker 1:Huh, did Wix do that? Did Wix do that at some point A long time ago? I think this was many, many, many years ago. But I think they tried doing a competition to basically like prove that their platform was was SEO friendly and they basically said hey, have at it. But I think that's been some time.
Speaker 2:Well, wix is doing a lot. I'm impressed with what wix has been doing and and how they've been out there. Um, I, I don't know, I just want to see a game show because you know, you got the seo weather right. You got the seo weather. I like I thought I thought I was like I was waiting for more stuff to come out like that. I thought it was so cool, okay. So I have one more big question for you and then I want to open it up to anything we didn't cover that you want to highlight as well as, like you know what you're doing and what you're working on, really enjoy hearing you talk. I'm glad you're out there, putting yourself out there more. I mean, that kind of is part of it for brands too, right, like, like, if you've done, if a tree falls in the woods but no one's there to hear it, does it happen? Right? It's kind of that analogy. You know, and you alluded to this earlier.
Speaker 2:I feel like SEO is really growing up and getting a lot more scientific and I really like the presentations I've seen about, you know, the vector-based, like keyword associations and pruning the content that's not relative to that topical authority and and I would love to hear, kind of, how you're looking at that, how what your take on that is and whatever you're willing to share, because, I mean, you cover such a wide corpus of knowledge with departmentscom, like how, how do you even rank what those topical authorities are and how do you decide because the site's so big? Well, we want to go after this and we want it. Well, we want to go after it all, but like we can't go after everything. So how do we force rank it? And you know, link equity, like how are we going to distribute this? Because I see, with a lot of medium-sized companies, they want to be an expert in all their services, right? Or if they're selling a product, they want to be an expert on the product. But I'm like we need to give a real world like mirror to how you are you the category leader in all these things, like because we can't just make you the category leader unless we spend a ton of money, which you know we can do that, but it's going to take some time.
Speaker 2:I'll I'll tell you one funny story about this, which I don't know if I could do it today, but a a company that I was working with is a MMA company and they had multiple locations and they came to me and they were, like, we want to outrank barcy. Uh, gracie barry, or whatever the like, whoever the inventors were, uh, I think I I'm hopefully I don't think I'm saying that right, the mma people are going to get on to me, but, uh, gracie barry, I think it's the name of it they invented mma, like.
Speaker 2:They brought it over here, okay yeah and somebody else wanted to outrank them and I was able to do it. Like you know, I was able to in a geographic area, uh, based upon them, and I was able to do it. Like you know, I was able to in a geographic area based upon these things, I was able to outrank the inventor of it. Going back to what you said hey, like if you're not putting yourself out there, you could be the best SEO in the world, but if no one knows about it or you haven't put it out there in the way that the LLMs understand it and I think Google is just a big LLM myself Like it's just a big machine learning tool, like you got to feed it the right data and it's it's learning and it doesn't know everything today, but man, the trajectory rate is like crazy, but I but I agree that if you're talking about random stuff over here, it's going like that.
Speaker 2:That, based on math and a vector, is not close to what you typically talk about over here and I've seen a lot of case studies where you chop that data off and it just kind of slingshots sites up in keywords ranking, even though keyword ranking is not a factor anymore and we shouldn't be looking at that, but I would love to just hear kind of your take on that and how your approach to it is, because there are some new tools doing some of those type items and even I was playing with loading content and building some really advanced prompts and some of the different LLMs and I was getting some pretty cool outputs. But I still feel like it's pretty early and not a lot of SEOs. This is not in their toolkit and I want to try to give them something actionable to start thinking about when they're thinking about content. Because what I'm hearing is like we're just going to generate a bunch of content with chat, gbt, with basic prompts and no tuning, and we're going to post it and that stuff's getting unranked Like that's getting delisted. That stuff's not, it's just diluting, it's just creating a bunch of noise, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Um, it's interesting from from that perspective. So from an econ side, from a marketplace side, like what I'm dealing with, Apartmentscom has the benefit of being a leader and a legacy brand, right, yeah, name, and we are always getting brand references and mentions and that type of thing.
Speaker 1:Do we see competition from other folks in the space? Yeah, of course Everyone's competing against everyone else. So I guess we have a little bit of luxury in saying, hey, let's look at a certain geography, let's figure out what content we're missing here, Because we always have on our site a summary of an area, a guide around why you would want to live there. We have some data-driven content pages, like our average rent pages that exist. But sometimes we're getting the questions going hey, what's the top neighborhood for X, Y and Z? I mentioned San Diego, right, let's go back to that. What's the top beachside neighborhood for someone that wants to be near the water? We get those types of questions and if we're going to write that one, we need to make sure we have the right data and that we're authoritative on it.
Speaker 1:I don't want to say we're cheating, but apartmentscom is a part of CoStar Group. Our goal is to digitize the world's real estate and have those data points. So it's very easy for us to get that and make the right decisions, but then figure out how we write that content and support it. But we almost kind of have to break it up in certain areas and focus on one thing at a time and we can see when we focus on that one thing that does great and then you kind of move on to the next one. But you almost can't let it. You can't rest on your laurels, in a sense, right Like you can't not forget about the ones that you've already been working on. We also have, I guess, blogs is kind of what I call them that go after and work for both the landlord side and the renter side. So we're trying to target both of those audiences and in that case we're trying to cover multiple different approaches to topics. Right, Like, what are the questions that people were asking? Are the questions changing or are new questions coming up because of new technologies or things like that? Do we need to go back and update old content or laws changing?
Speaker 1:So a big one that, like we've talked about a good amount in the past is the New York City Fair Act. So for folks that aren't familiar, like New York City used to have broker fees was a concept and the Fair Act essentially eliminated this. So there's historically been content from us and from other folks like hey, how do you negotiate the idea and navigate the idea of broker fees in New York City? That's not a thing anymore. Navigate the idea of broker fees in New York City? That's not a thing anymore. So that content's almost not necessary. But it was something that was needed to become an authority on that topic in the past. So you're kind of thinking about that. But now, all right, does that content need to exist anymore? No, unless maybe you want to talk about the idea of that going away and how you think about it now, but how you thought about it two years ago doesn't matter anymore. So, yes, there's some value and benefit in content pruning in that sense.
Speaker 1:But I think you've got to focus on what you're capable of doing within the skills, the technology and the bandwidth you're working with, right, I mean, you can't be the knowledge of everything. If you're trying to divide your attention across five different things, it's the whole. You know I'd rather whole-ass something than half-ass, two things type of thing. If you can, and you can do that effectively, that's great. But I generally try and encourage these days like focus on a certain area and become well known in that area and talk about that and publish content that's helpful for your renters, your customers, your whatever in that particular area. But cover off on those topics and make sure that you're well versed in them before you move on to the next thing. You can start to do that, move on to the next thing if you need to, but just know other folks might be playing catch up or, you know, the competition might not be sleeping on that and they might go down a path that you haven't. So just need to continue to think about that.
Speaker 2:I think that's great advice about going deep right and you really need to become that subject matter expert on that one thing. And I try to give that advice when I'm doing coaching to smaller brands because, like going up against apartmentscom, you're already I call it like a jet stream, like you get to the top right and it just people keep mentioning you and traffic keeps coming and you just you're kind of floating up there, uh, and if you keep doing some stuff you can maintain that that jet stream. But if you're you're not, that you got to punch through to the top and you got to focus on one area, maybe where someone is sleeping or where, where you're laser focused on that, that target persona, I just I that resonates with me on the advice. I have one follow-up question for you. Yeah, traffic just just getting crushed Right. At least that's what I'm seeing, that's what Rand talked about.
Speaker 2:Right Traffic is? Is 58.5% getting cut? I'm not quite seeing that. I'm. I'm seeing something more like 15, 20% drops. Some clients are actually bucking the trend. Um, but I do agree that the traffic that comes to your site is a lot more educated, a lot more transactional. They're well-researched and and I'm curious how you're mapping? Or is there a renewed emphasis on mapping, like the UX of what people are doing when they get to your site, and like where they get stuck and then identifying hey, like a lot of people maybe in the search are asking this question, we're gonna build content for this. Or like, how are you deciding? Yeah, that's my question how are you deciding what content you should build next with the amount of information you have? And then also, how are you looking at the customer journey, because you have so much data, like, how are you, how are you viewing all that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'll go into it as much as I can.
Speaker 2:Yeah, tell me just yeah, whatever, I'm just interested, it's really uh, yeah, public company public company perspective is always fun um, so we do a fair amount of surveys.
Speaker 1:We're always asking renters, landlords, uh, property management companies what are the things that you're seeing, what? What is it something that you care about like a good one, that is public, that I can talk about like give or take? I think this is our second quarter renter survey. Then, some of those days gone out, somewhere in the 40% range of folks are willing to rent an apartment sight unseen, because they've looked at it from a 3d tour or a video and that gives them enough of the information. And folks will actually not rent something that doesn't have that unit level information and detail. So in that case it's trying to provide what folks are looking for. So we're getting the feedback from our customers going hey, these are the things we care about. Number one typically is always price point Cool, well, let's figure out how we can support that conversation from a price point perspective and either offer new product features or new elements on our page that help you understand that process, or you get those types of things where, hey, you know, having a 3D tour is very important oh, cool, we own a company that does that. Let's make sure we're integrating that properly and that's something we've done a lot of lately since the acquisition is integrate that effectively into our site. I think the other thing there is, you know we're just trying to continue to improve on the user experience and understanding that journey more effectively.
Speaker 1:To your second question, if folks are coming in, we still see folks coming in on some of the informational content that we create. We also see folks coming deeper in the funnel. We see folks coming on the brand. I think to your point earlier. We've tried to figure out ways of saying, hey, the folks that are coming in here, based on the navigational path we see them taking, they're trying to get from here to here. So we've tried to revisit a lot of our page templates and understand that user journey to support them with what they're looking for. They may come in already well-educated and they might be further down that conversion funnel where they're going.
Speaker 1:Hey, I know I want to live in the Buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta and I want an apartment with two bedrooms and a pool that has a doorman and they're able to execute that search and get in and find exactly what they're looking for. We might have folks that just say, hey, I don't know what neighborhood to live in, but I got to move to Atlanta and you're much higher up that funnel. So it's trying to support that navigational aspect down the funnel that says hey, you started out here, let's help you find the best neighborhood for you, maybe based on price, maybe based on what you like to do in your free time and navigate them down. Well, you know, maybe the Buckhead neighborhood is best for you because of this. Here's how you can drill down even deeper.
Speaker 1:Now you can figure out how much it costs you. Oh, you're moving from an entirely different city. Hey, here's the cost of living differential. So, based on this, you're moving from New York City to Atlanta. That money might bring you a lot further in what you can afford. So now, based on general rules of looking at real estate and how much money you should spend on rent, here are properties that you could look at that fit your new budget and fit your lifestyle. So we're trying to provide those touch points during the journey that help to say, hey, depending on where you come in, how do we bring you to the next thing and how do we bring you to eventually finding the right place for you to live? And either go take a tour, look at media, submit a lease or an application, but we're trying to support the entire funnel and how you come in from the side of it.
Speaker 2:I hear you got to have stuff mapped out like down to a T. You got to know exactly what's going on and then really looking at that next step of the data, I love that. Um, we've covered a lot today. Um, I, uh, I have some other questions about, like, the future, because you're generating so much content and you have a lot of visuals. So you know, I'm seeing all the, you know meta glasses and all this kind of stuff. So I'm going to have to have you back on as that becomes more in the zeitgeist, um, but I would love to see how y'all are incorporating that and and all the content that you're creating with Matterport.
Speaker 2:I think super, super interesting. When I first saw that tool I was I was blown away. It was amazing. So that's awesome, uh, that you're with such a forward-thinking company. What is anything that maybe we hadn't covered that you want to share? What are some interesting projects that maybe you're working on? When's your next talk? How can people find out more about you? I would love to talk a little bit more about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So for me, my passion is really in all things SEO, so I've historically done a lot of speaking and educating on the technical SEO side. I've kind of fanned out a little bit from that. So some of my talks at PubCon were more on the content heavy side of things. I also did a talk on how to work effectively with your developers.
Speaker 1:You know there's a lot of conversation around SEO and product and how they live together. At Apartmentscom, the SEO perspective lives as a part of the product organization, so we're creating things that focus primarily on users and also benefit search engines. So there's a lot of talk from folks in the industry around how to think about product SEO and that's something that I've been enjoying drilling into because I get to create things that I see people use and that they they're excited about touching and interfacing with um, like our cost of living data. I referenced that earlier. That's new for us. We launched that um uh, almost six plus months ago now. Um, but that was a new idea for us to kind of go. I'm like, hey, we have folks asking about this thing, let's create it. Oh cool.
Speaker 1:It also happens to have a lot of demand from the search engine perspective, from the gender of engine perspective. Well, let's make sure we have the content that supports that need. But I've also kind of ventured out Like my role is also from, like a leadership perspective, right, Like I still do some day-to-day, because, A I enjoy it and B I want to stay sharp, but a lot of it's how to manage a team, how to have that team work effectively with developers. So my next talk is actually a digital summit in Minneapolis where I'll be talking about, like how to lead a team effectively and build that cohesion in between them. Even from the technical side, like one of my weird passions, I would say that one of the things I love more than structured data is replatforming is in migrations.
Speaker 2:And.
Speaker 1:I think maybe I'm mental for saying that because most folks think that's their idea of hell. But for me, like your brain is a.
Speaker 2:You got an engineering brain like everything's got a map right.
Speaker 1:It's a fun puzzle to solve right. It's an exercise in compromise, in time management, in knowing how to develop requirements, understanding the data implications of doing things. Those are all things that I enjoy. So, like myself, and there's another gentleman on my team that is also big into doing that Like maybe we're weird, but that's just something we've enjoyed doing.
Speaker 1:I think at this point in my career I've done if not over close to 100 different forms of replatformings, migrations, redesigns, things like that. So you end up seeing and learning so much about the technical side of SEO, but also the interpersonal side of how you work with other people, how you work with developers, how you communicate between a developer and a CMO and how you change what you talk about in those cases. It's one of those things where it's interesting and it's fun to me, but it's also taught me a lot in my career and helped make me, like I said, I've been doing this for about 15 years, but I feel like I have even more knowledge than that because I've worked with so many different scenarios of those types of things and understanding how all these different brands and categories might work.
Speaker 2:I feel like that's a talk in a podcast on its own, talking about enterprise level migrations and figuring out do we need to move all this content? You got huge sites right and that had been there for years and years and years and you're like let's change it over and you need to do that right.
Speaker 2:You need to do that and how do you do that effectively and what are the things you need to bring across? And at a large organization, there's a lot of red tape and approvals and people that have to correspond. I think that that's a really amazing topic I got so, before we move on to the last question, I wanted to know, like, where are you most active, like? So I know you speak a lot. Are you LinkedIn I'm assuming it's a good place to find out what you're doing or is there somewhere else that people want to check out?
Speaker 1:LinkedIn is where I would say I'm most active, typically also active on X, a little bit on blue sky and kind of navigating around there Trying to get into blogging more. So maybe more to come there. But I think even to your point of explaining to the gender of engines and the search engines that you're a knowledgeable entity on things. I feel like I need to do more blogging. I like doing this type of stuff where it's a conversation rather than writing, but trying to do more of that. So, yeah, definitely come chat with me on LinkedIn, come chat with me on X or Blue Sky, and look forward to that.
Speaker 2:Awesome. So we've talked about so much today and people that listening are at different levels of where they're at in their SEO journey. If we brought it back to one thing, maybe it's something you mentioned, maybe it's something you haven't, but what's one tip you would give to people today that's actionable, that they could do something with to try to figure out what to do with all the changes that are coming down the pipe?
Speaker 1:Yeah, something that's been sticking in my head for a couple of months now and for anyone that was at SEO Week or saw my participation there, I was on a panel with Jory Ford and Ann Laurie, and one thing that Ann said really continues to stick with me, and it's the idea of don't try to get fancy without making sure that you're doing the basics correctly.
Speaker 1:There's still a fundamental need to make sure that your website is crawlable, that you're handling the technical components of SEO. A lot of these LLMs and generative engines don't understand any form of JavaScript and, as much as Google says that they do, I still see them struggle with certain components of it. Other search engines struggle more with it. Don't try and get fancy with doing a whole bunch of different AI stuff if your site's not even properly crawlable or if you don't have an understanding of it is more so for enterprise sites and larger sites. But your crawl budget and how it's being used and how much of your site search engines and general engines are actually seeing. Maybe spend some time looking at your log files, but understanding where you have those gaps in your technical foundation and addressing that before you try and do the really fancy stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm going to have to have Lori on to talk about the log files, cause that's foundation and addressing that before you try and do the really fancy stuff. Yeah, I'm going to have to have Lori on to talk about the log files, cause that's. Thanks so much, zach, for for coming on for everyone listening. If you want to grow your business with the largest, most powerful tool on the planet, reach out to EWR for more revenue in your business. Thank you so much, zach, for coming on until Until the next time. Everyone, my name is Matt Bertram. Bye-bye for now.
