The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™

Pairing SEO With Automation With Steven Werley

• MatthewBertram.com

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We reframe SEO for an AI-first world and show how agentic workflows turn messy sales processes into predictable follow-through. Matthew Bertram and Stephen Werley discuss how to map the stack, from transcripts and enrichment to Slack-driven next actions that recover hidden revenue.

• rebrand to Best SEO Podcast and new AI-derived book
• why LLMs matter for analysis, decks, and feedback
• custom GPTs tuned with domain knowledge
• building automations in n8n, Make, ClickUp, and HighLevel
• human in the loop as the quality guardrail
• data enrichment with RB2B and Clay for true personalization
• marketing, RevOps, and agent orchestration converge
• LLM visibility certification and next steps

Guest Contact Information: 

Website: stevenwerley.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/stevenwerley

Instagram: instagram.com/stevewerley

Facebook: facebook.com/steven.werley

More from EWR and Matthew:

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Free SEO Consultation: www.ewrdigital.com/discovery-call

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. 

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SPEAKER_00:

This is the unknown secrets of internet marketing. Your inside a guide to the strategy top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential. Let's get started.

SPEAKER_01:

Howdy, welcome back to another fun-filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I am going to be changing the name. I was going through an identity crisis. There's a lot of like entity SEO stuff that uh is happening that we're dealing with the best SEO podcast is all our handles. We've been that for uh 12 years, maybe 13, going on 13 years. And so I'm gonna drop the unknown secrets. Um, you know, maybe we we did come out with a book. Okay, so we took all the old podcasts, like 700 podcasts, we ran it through AI, uh, and we found a storyline and we put together a book. It is up on Amazon. I would ask you, please go review it. Um, uh buy it, get uh uh if I don't have a Kendall version, just wait. I'll put up a Kendall version, like a dollar. Um, you know, I think it's great content. Uh the foundations of SEO haven't changed, but how people search the web has changed. And that leads me to uh my guest, who I actually just had on my oil and gas sales and marketing podcast. He did some cold outreach, uh, you know, convinced my uh my co-host on that podcast to bring us on. And then my co-host bailed on me and uh Steven and I were just jamming about AI workflows, outreach, um uh analysis, prep, all the things you can do with AI. I know if you're listening to this podcast, uh AI has been very disruptive uh in marketing. That was probably marketing and sales, is one of the first areas that it uh, you know, impacted. So we're we're ahead of the curve in that area. And uh Steve's doing something, Stephen Worley. Welcome to the show, Steven.

SPEAKER_02:

Hey, thanks. Yeah, no, excited to run this back, so keep it rolling. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So um, you know, you're like automations are like one layer, right? And then agentic workflows are the second layer on top of that. And a lot of people that are listening are probably using it for content creation. They're building it to enhance what they're doing. We're starting to use it a lot in data analysis, um, you know, building sales presentations. We talked a little bit about. Um, you gave me some tips on. And um cold outreach is now a very big thing, you know, uh customer service bots, but we're not talking about just if-then statements. We're talking about actual um trained LLMs that are tuned for your business, that uh can reference documents, can give information. It's really amazing what's happening. And this is the next layer is plugging in what you're doing manually or what you're having your team do, or VAs uh to use these workflows, to use these LMs and agentic workflows to drive your business forward. And so I would love for you to kind of just set the table on you were a sales trainer before this, yeah, what what you were seeing, what was happening, and why you decided to take the the jump to to start building out uh a lot of automation and mainly and an N8N.

SPEAKER_02:

So yeah, absolutely. So one thing when when you're managing a a lot of people, especially in a sales team, everyone is taking sales calls every day. So those should be to some extent reviewed and provided feedback on. So you can see and imagine whether you're in sales or not as your primary, that that's a a huge responsibility from a time standpoint uh and a personnel standpoint that creates a really big barrier to scalability. So that was the problem that I faced, and that's what forced me to start diving into AI more. Luckily, I have a little bit of a tech background, so it's pretty easy for me to start to pick up, but um I I paid somebody to help me learn it a little bit. Um, somebody who actually, I was in their mastermind for a while, so I had a lot of a good trust with them and I knew they were doing a lot. Uh, and I was able to learn how to use AI effectively, specifically generative AI, going into the LLMs and communicating with them, building custom GPTs and things of that nature. I think that step is really important to anyone that is looking to do something, because you can you might have the the mind of you know an engineer and you know, visionary and be able to architect these grand plans, but if you don't know how to get the res the results and the output that you want from the LLM, it really doesn't matter. And that right there, I think, is the biggest gap that I've seen in terms of a lot of the the SaaSes that have come out in terms of AI, because they're too generic, they're not dialed in specifically to a specific, you know, company process. And you know, the the one way that I like to explain is that when when I'm working with someone, uh they have the domain knowledge, right? I might have some AI knowledge, I might have some sales knowledge, but they have specific domain knowledge that makes them unique in who they are. And if you don't use that in your AI process, you're losing, right? Then you're just generic, then you're like everyone else. So that's the biggest thing and and the the pathway. So first I learned the generative AI train, I understood how to do that really well, and then my automation instincts kicked in, and I was like, well, I bet I could probably make this smoother, right? So when I take what I did in the custom GPT, put it into an open AI assistant, and now have it do it via API so that way when uh you know a deal moves from this stage to that stage, it automatically is grabbing stuff or transcript processes from read.ai, it grabs it from a webhook, sends it to AI, it provides feedback, drops into Google Doc, provides some follow-up messages, things like that. And now all of a sudden we're agentic, right? So that's that's the big idea.

SPEAKER_01:

Awesome. So I'm gonna break some of this down uh just a little bit more. Uh, and it also falls in line with my uh my journey um is started using uh LLMs a lot, right? Because cleaning data and labeling data was not super fun, took a long time to do anything with um big plots of data and and data marks, warehouses, lakes, whatever you want to call it. And um, you know, so we were using it uh a lot, like with like an ERP system to enhance uh product descriptions or stuff like that, but really using it day to day until LLMs came out, um that that's what really changed the game. And after I started using it a lot, and I know a lot of people that are listening are starting to use it more and more and more. And a lot of the conversation that um we're working on is how to get visibility and chat GBT uh and perplexity and and some of the other LMs. Like, so how do they sort through how do those agents uh comb through the information? Because Google was like a librarian. You go to Google and say, hey, I want to get this knowledge and be like, okay, go here, go here, go here. Now it actually goes and gets it for you, right? Um also people are starting to use it for more and more stuff as uh as the adoption curve comes in, and they're starting to ask it more unstructured questions. So prompt engineering is where everyone should start. I actually took a bunch of different certifications. Really, it was just learning for me from different people how they were approaching it, how they were building prompts. I know there's a lot of people out there, and I used to like take screenshots of like all these different prompts that people were using. And once you understood how the cake's made, then now you can start to get the outputs and uh tune that to what you're trying to do. And then a custom GPT, I have a bunch of those built. I built some really fun ones, but it was just taking the LLM and then training uh it on specific data that I would like to see, and then capturing that in the instructions so I would get that recall. So people that are using the ChatGPT get to a certain place, it knows certain things. And then if you keep talking to it or you start a new thread, and now with five uh ChatGPT five, I was using a lot of Chat GPT four, it doesn't remember everything crystal clear anymore, which I don't like. Um, I think that was due to like safety potentially of some of the stuff that's happening. Like it can still, you know, pin it and recall it, but like understanding how the transformers, how how the information is processed, how to ask the prompts, it's foundational because guess what? Everything else is built on top of that. And then what you start talking about is okay, so you you have the prompt engineering, you have the custom GPT. And if people are up to speed and workflows or if y'all are using GoHi level or whatever it is, right? You're you're if you're not strong in automations, a lot of stuff can be solved through automations. Now, what we're talking about is taking that maybe custom GPT that's tuned to get the output that you're looking for, um, and and build it into your workflow, your automation workflow. And as those two come together, it becomes really, really powerful because it can answer things, it can think, it can uh do different things that potentially a level one customer service or salesperson, outreach person can do. And so now if you start to, you know, use APIs and bolt some of this stuff together, now it's about domain knowledge and that's foundational knowledge, and then bringing someone like you and Steven to help uh, you know, smooth it out or or build it for them or something like that. I would love to kind of talk about some of the things you built, maybe case studies of uh we talked last time, you said you were building some great prompts, and then you know, you thought they were amazing, and then the sales team was like, Oh, I'm not sure uh how I how to incorporate this. I would love to hear some of those things that you built or um some of the things you're you're building for clients. I'd love to start there.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, like the the journey of like kind of where it started and where it's it's headed. Um yeah, yeah, yeah, where it's at. Absolutely. So I'm a big uh click up power user. Um, and we also use high level quite a bit inside of the the sales work. So a high level actually gets super noisy, I found. So my initial idea was with with the sales teams when I was managing the sales agency was well, why don't we just use uh go high level as a communication platform? Just send text messages and um emails and stuff like that. And we'll use go high level as the the CRM pipeline aspect, like the pipeline management because it's more more granular, able to build better dashboards and click up, and I found it just easier to create connections. And you can say that, like, hey, you can tie into go high level, and you absolutely can, don't get me wrong. It's just that if I had people coming in and managing one board, I thought that was good. That was the first iteration. I couldn't get people to go into click up and do that because they were very confused, and now it's like adding another tool. So the next iteration of that was custom dashboards within clickup. Now, this actually got a lot of good traction. So each sales rep had a a custom dashboard. And um, for anyone that that's managed sales reps, they actually a lot of times I I find that especially the top guys, they'll take all their leads and throw them in a Google Sheet, and there'll be like a list, and they'll just say like what I did last, basically, and just keep adding more like rows. So it's nice because ClickUp has this list feature, right? So in the dashboards, it would just list out like, hey, these are today's calls that need to be categorized, and then like then it would have a separate pipeline section with a list of all their leads of people they've already talked to. And and uh to be categorized, they had to do things like, and this isn't AI yet, right? But but to be categorized, they had to do things like input projected deal size, um, move it to the right stage, uh lead score state, things like that, right? And maybe put in a call URL, right? Okay, we're getting somewhere. Now it's like, well, this is still this is still a lot for a salesperson to do admin-wise at the end of the day. So now it's like, okay, and and I I touched on this earlier, but it's like, okay, what if we had, you know, uh the the call recording transcription come in from a webhook, which it does. So it can come in through a webhook, and you can use n8n for some of this, you can use make.com for some of this, you can use Zapier for some of this. Yes. And the the differences I'll I'll talk about, but for the more simplistic automations, I use make, and then the more complex automations I use N8N. And I'll talk about that a little bit later. But you know, basically webhook comes in into make, and then we can send that to the custom open AI assistant to review the call. That's something you know specifically built for that offer, and then drop feedback and notes within that clickup deal. And then we can also have it continue to then we can have now ClickUp um has integrated their own AI agents, which are uh pretty rudimentary, but still very helpful. So if you can prompt them right, you can uh get it to automatically update deal size and deal details, update custom fields and things like that. It's not going to be able to uh do super complex stuff like you can in N8N, but it's still very helpful within the platform. And the fact that Clikup has that AI ingrained within its own platform, I found to be extremely um, extremely helpful in terms of just being able to create some end-to-day stuff or figure out what happened throughout the day and things of that nature. Now, ClickUp has their own uh meeting recorder too, so that can integrate directly in as well. So, anyways, now we're automatically updating things within the deal and can help move things along for the sales folks and maybe have them just confirm it. So we talked about this last time, but human in the loop for anyone listening is super important. Um, from at least my perspective, I believe Matt Matt's perspective as well. We when AI does something, we expect it to get it 60 to 80 percent of the way there. And we want a human to really make sure that things are going well. So we're not looking at replacing, we're looking at enabling, um, is is the term that I like to use, AI enablement. Uh, and then you know, that that was like where it was at for a while, right? And still, there's still a tech aversion from the salespeople, right? There's still this tech aversion from the salespeople. And it's like, now, don't get me wrong, you got to to some extent lay down the law and say, like, no, this is the process and this is how you do it. And I believe that if if you have a good team, you can demand, you know, that and and get that out of folks. However, there's also a layer where it's like, well, what's best for the actual sales process, right?

SPEAKER_01:

So let me ask you this. So we we use clickup too, um, and we use go high level, and we are working through that integration. Um, so this is a very similar journey. Um, we implemented Google Sheet forms or actually click-up forms, like there's clickup forms, and we were having salespeople, account managers fill out these forms to populate the certain fields. I used to do that. And we found that to be a good medium step because you know, maybe people don't want to go like clickup's noisy too, if it or it's overwhelming if you don't set up the custom dashboard and you know, yeah, you're getting alerted all the time. Um, if you have a step process that they follow, and and we started using those clickup forms, and we are at least getting the information, especially even like when you're setting up projects, if it's not a template, like to fill out all the information that you need. Um, and then people can check the box. Okay, I know I need to do this every time XYZ happens. Uh, we found that to be useful. Um uh, but it's you know, of course, like you can make it better, you can make it smoother. Right. So, so so pick up where you left off in your in your story.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, so so I just to touch on that too. I used to do that a little bit. I had SDRs do more of the inputting of the deal, and then I I had the deals automatically populate in. And I do find that SDRs, for anyone listening, are more um apt to following SOPs and doing things in a certain way than than a closer is because their times uh like you want them on, right? You want them on and dialing and doing things, but their times a little bit more flexible because they don't wake up to a bunch of scheduled calls usually um as much as a a closer doesn't in the sales process scenario. Um sometimes they have some things on there that they you know have have scheduled, but usually usually a closure's calendar is much more tight. Um, I I find. So yeah, back on uh where we were at. So I I do find that the dashboards have worked better than the the forms overall. But anyways, that that brings us to to where we're at, and it's you know, what's best for the sales process, right? What what's best to actually get the most revenue out of this? Um I think we talked about this on your show, but I did some research with AI pretty recently about how much money we lose from prospects that we're not properly following up with. Now, this isn't a specific data point from MIT and Stanford, but through AI's analysis of the article, this is about what it works out to. All right. So so don't like quote me on it, FTC. Um, this is a huge FTC just you know warning disclosure, like not necessarily perfect numbers, but for about every 100K you close, uh you you lose 150K in in revenue.

SPEAKER_00:

Wow, right?

SPEAKER_02:

So so over over double what you're closing, you could potentially be getting because we're missing stuff. So that's a light bulb, right? That's that's one of those things that's almost every sales organization is facing as a problem. And that's a massive problem because almost almost all of that is gonna affect bottom line pretty easily because they're already acquired prospects. You paid for them, they're they're part of everything that's already worked into the math for the most part. Maybe a little bit of usage in emails or text messages or or uh affecting someone's time slightly, but outside of that, um the this is mostly accounted for in terms of the top line, right? So when we think about that, now it's like, well, what can we do about that? Right? Because we have these tools now, we have AI. And the idea is, well, maybe the salespeople need to work in a smarter environment for them. Maybe we do need to mold a little bit to them. And that solution that we started touch on was um in the last show was more of hey, what happens if, you know, if you're using Slack, for example, we have a Slack bot that literally messages the next thing that a closer needs to do when they're not on a call, right? This is the next highest priority thing. Send this specific email based on the conversations you've already had to this prospect or call this prospect, schedule a follow-up with this prospect, and this is what that call flow should look like. Right. So now, you know, it's almost like a closer can work off this um infinite task list, right? Um, and not saying that that we we want to overload them, we want to we want to take the thinking part away, right? So I know infinite task lists can sound like, okay, now they're gonna expect me to have this much output or whatever. Look, closures make money on commissions, right? So it's no no question that a lot of times there's a base involved, but they make more money on commissions, right? And ideally, salespeople operate best when there's some form of you know uncapped type of earning potential, yeah, right? Not saying that's always always reasonable depending on the industry, but that's how they they are most incentivized to to get their work done. So, with that said, you know, how can we help them collect the most revenue collect the most cash for themselves to make the most money? And how can we help the business also make the most revenue in a way that makes sense? Let's take the thinking out of it for them and make it easy and collect some of that 150K that we're losing every 100K or 2.5 million that we're losing every 1 million, right?

SPEAKER_01:

So I have a I have a question around that. Okay.

SPEAKER_02:

$1.5 million that we're losing every no, I love it.

SPEAKER_01:

Like, this is a great statistic. Um, the question I have is um, what got me into digital marketing was trying to get leverage because I was dialing for dollars, I was doing full outreach, I was a headhunter in oil and gas. That's kind of the tie-in to oil and gas, and I place like 200 something people in leadership positions. And so that gave me kind of an in in that market. Um one of the the activities that I had to do, and this was way back, this is like LinkedIn was launching. Okay, so this was around that time. Yeah, but every night I would go do research, okay, to find people that I could call. And depending on how much research I did, how long my list was, because some people answered, some people didn't, it it changed on how many calls I was trying to reach. So they wanted us to make 60 to 80 calls a day and leave messages if we didn't get anybody, and it would be lower if we were on the phone with somebody for a long time and they measured minutes on the phone and all this sort of thing.

SPEAKER_02:

Correct.

SPEAKER_01:

It would have been great. So, how would you set that up? Like if someone is doing cold outreach, um, like I'm thinking through it right now. I have some ideas, but I'd love to hear from you. If it could give me an endless amount of prospects to call, like, right, I load in a list, um, you know, use some kind of tool to enrich the data where where, you know, and then it pulls in like Hunter IO or whatever. It starts to pull in stuff like into the workflow and it just keeps giving you people to call. Um, that's different than like the organizations, like the bell rings and the you answer the phone, it's all inbound, right? But like just how would you look at that? I would love to break that down a little bit more because that was one of the activities that I did and I spent so much time doing research. And I know in our previous podcast, which I'll link that guys when it's live, I'll go update it in the show notes of this show. So it's kind of like part one, part two, I guess. Um uh, but you know, that's oil and gas sales and marketing, but there's a lot of good like sales and marketing conversations that happen. And this was an uh interview with just Steven and I. Uh, so so so we we we started to tee some of this stuff up. But I would love to hear kind of how you would view that. Um, because that's that's probably something that a lot of agencies uh or freelancers are dealing with. Okay, like I need more clients or whatever. Um, where do I start? Because, well, SEO is a little, um, it's changing, paid ads are changing, like, you know, search is going everywhere. So a lot of people are saying, hey, I need to switch to cold outreach, right? And so um, you know, they're they're starting rudimentary, maybe setting up that outreach. Like, how would they do that?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. So so one thing that I just want to say is there are people smarter than cold outreach than me, but I have strategies that we use within the sales process that I I feel are um very useful. And you can do what you said where you, you know, you generate a list, like maybe you go into Apollo or something like that and you generate a list and you can start there. But I would urge everyone who's listening to this to start smarter, not harder. If you're not starting a brand new business and launching a brand new domain and your your business has been up for a minute, uh throw RB2B up on your website, uh, which is a tool that will identify, and there's there's competitors of them too, but it's a tool that will identify uh people who are visiting your website and give you like an email and a LinkedIn profile. Okay. RB2B has a uh they have integration setup and everything. So you can do the same thing with a code list that I'm saying right here. I'm just gonna talk in this aspect because I I feel like it's an easier win for anybody who's like, I'm hurting for clients. What do I do? Well, why don't you look to see who's actually visiting your website, not doing anything that you don't even know. They're not filling out lead forms or anything like that, which is let's be real, the vast majority of people landing on your website. All right, so uh you take that information, right? Now you set up an account on uh clay.com. Clay is a RevOps data enrichment platform. Uh, what does that mean? It means it's really good at taking some information and finding out more information. It can uh eliminate a lot of the research that people do in a sales process. So if you already have someone book a call with you, like this is great too, right? If you have someone hit your website, it's great. If you have leads that you know you're gonna call or something like that, or maybe you have an initial conversation or through the cold calling and you're gonna try and do some more, then that's great. If you're using like a dream 100 list, you definitely want to run these people through here before you have the the conversation with them. Okay, so um RB2B, I'm not gonna get into the nitty-gritty details, it integrates with the clay table, right? So that information comes over usually first name, last name, email, LinkedIn profile. And Clay will use that information to find a sell number of theirs, not just a business number, it can find a sell number. Um, it can confirm business email, it can look at the company profile and find out information about the company. It can find out if they're um hiring for a specific uh piece that might relate to your service. So if you're in marketing, you're a marketing agency, you it Clay will be able to potentially find if they're hiring for a marketing manager or paid media expert or something like that. And that can create uh hooks for you in order to use an you know email outreach, but then also have this knowledge when you call them, right? So if you're calling someone on the on this, you know, Dream 100 list or someone that hits your site and it's like, hey, um, you know, saw you hit the site and saw you guys were, you know, hiring for this, you know, position, is that something that you're open to outsourcing instead, right? Like, and and I'm not perfect word tracks at all right now, but like that strategy is something that can be highly useful. And and clay can integrate with pretty much anything too, right? So that can come back to Slack channel, it can go into um your CRM, it can do whatever you want it to do. Obviously, keep in mind these people didn't opt in, so you got to be smart about how you're handling all this stuff um with text messaging laws and and things of that nature. So um, you know, cold calling is one thing, but um certain other things are different. I know Texas is getting all crazy with with their text message laws. So keep that stuff in mind as as you're going through all this. But um, in terms of the data enrichment side and doing pre-research before a call, AI is uh like just completely changing the game. And you know, to the point where, you know, Matt, you and I had some off um off podcast conversation about how you can create pretty intense, you know, presentations or reports to send somebody that can be pre-call collateral that you can go over on a sales call. And we do that, you know, in you know, in an organization I work with where we talk about how we can increase EBITDA, right? And if if that's something that speaks to that industry, like we can create reports around that with AI in a matter of, you know. 15, 20 minutes, what used to take hours of research and make it look design pretty using something like gamma.

SPEAKER_01:

So yeah. So I think what we're talking about is very personalized. Like when when you when you hear the term personalization, this is what we're talking about. It's a personalized you you know about the person, you can customize the outreach. Um, the more prep that you do, because everything's so noisy. You talked about the text messaging laws, which right? Like, I don't want to answer my phone if I don't know uh who it is. Um, and then I get a bunch of spam text messages, and then people are um not even checking their email because there's uh people violating all kinds of laws uh on that. Like I remember fax blasting, I mean, marketers ruin everything. Um I mean they they do so blasphemous, you know, the the more the more customized you can be to speak to the person's problem. And if you can hit them in the pocketbook of of finances and show them uh hard numbers, they're gonna pay attention. And with all the noise out there, you how do how do you get in front of them if you're not physically in front of them at a conference or you're you're going by their office, which takes a lot of time. Um, and if you're doing mass cold outreach, how do you do it smartly? Because it's spam if it's just shotgun everywhere, but if it's personalized, it's helpful, right? Like so, so you can really damage your brand if you do it wrong, um, but then you can make connections you would never have if you do it properly. And you know, we talk about taking time to do um some additional research to make sure that connection and you know, if you're having uh AI do a lot of this stuff, like small start with a small training set, like don't just turn it on and don't check it. Like I know so many people that have set up automations which violate LinkedIn, like let's say a LinkedIn bot or whatever, violate terms of service, and then they're pushing out a link that doesn't even work. Okay, like, or it has like name and they didn't test it, and so it's just saying, like, you know, whatever, whatever the little boxes, you know, um with the name in it, but it's actually not their name. Like, take some time if you're gonna leverage automation to make sure it reflects your brand. And then the answer to that is like, oh, it's just volume, volume, volume. It's like buy 10 different domains that you don't use, okay? And then blast it out. Like, like, I don't like these tactics. I love inbound. I yeah, you know, like I like to drink my own Kool-Aid. And when people call us, they like 75% of the research is done before they pick up the phone and call you. So you were talking about retargeting or you know, reaching out to the people that that are on your website.

SPEAKER_02:

Right.

SPEAKER_01:

If you're doing cold outreach, guess what, everyone? If they come look and you haven't posted on whatever their favorite channel is in two years, okay, like it's gonna be an issue. Like, you got to maintain your presence online. You have to maintain your socials. Um, people need to be able to find out who you are and and what you are because when they get that message, if it catches their interest, the first thing they're gonna do is go to Google, right? They're gonna go to your website, they're gonna look at you. So they are investigating um how you present yourself, what you say, your customer reviews, all the things that go into digital marketing have to be done right before you start to outreach people because they're gonna do that investigation. And and and I I've I've done a number of podcasts where we're where we talk about personal brand, and you know, I'm starting to get into more entity SEO and like who are you as an individual? If someone researches you, Steven, or like let's say somebody else, someone researches somebody else on LinkedIn that was doing cold outreach and they haven't been posting on LinkedIn, they don't have a picture, uh, the the company they work for is wrong, like there's red flags, right? Like people are gonna do that, or they're gonna Google you, or they're gonna go to your website. Like it needs to be clean, it needs to be updated before you start introducing yourself to people like on the street online, like you know, going into groups, whatever, um, or or reaching out to them by email. You better make sure your digital presence is in order and is reflective of your brand before you do that. And so marketing and sales are starting to be connected in the CRO. And then in the RevOff space, you're just starting to, you're pulling in finance, right? Like and you're pulling in actual numbers and deal size, and um it's that next layer. And so all these things have to work like an orchestra, uh it work in concert. Um, uh, and we, you know, we haven't even got into orchestration of agents yet, but um, you know, like all this is where it's going. And adopt it now because you're gonna have to adopt it later and you don't want to be on the tail end of the curve. I feel like so many people are operating their business uh the same way that they always have. And there's a monumental shift in how business is done, and people are using it here and there to like get a little bit of leverage, and they haven't built the automations, they haven't started to connect things in. They're they're not only losing out on a deal and a half size or whatever, whatever metric you want to use. Um, yeah, like they're getting left behind of what the market's doing. And right now we're still in the early adopter phase. So, like, get on this now. Reach out to Steven, reach out to me. We can help you integrate this stuff before it gets noisier, right? The personalization cuts through with that that message that speaks to them. That's working because everybody else is just creating spam and noise and not leveraging these tools right. It's just a volume and a numbers game. And sales has been that way for a long time. That's shifting to.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I I agree. I I think a lot of what you said just is so like it resonates so much. And and with a lot of industries, some of them got away with not operating very quick on the internet side of things, right? Because it you it's a fact. Right, yeah. People talking, like reputation was enough, and it still got to the point where internet you know helps and and would help more. And there's people that know that, but AI is a different monster because it's not just it's not even just visibility at this point. I know we're talking about marketing, but it's about how your business operates from an efficiency standpoint. And if all of a sudden, no matter what your reputation is, your competitors competitors start out producing you or able to do things quicker than you and more efficiently with a more consistent output and do it better, it doesn't matter. It like nothing uh nothing's gonna save your business at that point. So, yeah, being being at the end of this isn't a good place to be. Being early on on this is definitely the on-time metric, I would say. Like being early is on time in in this one, uh, you know, by by like, and that's not just a projection. That's I think that's pretty objective at this point, the way that that people who are you know looking at this are. This isn't about being early to be, you know, investing in a stock, right? We know that this is going in a direction that's going to change business.

SPEAKER_01:

And and one other thing I want to highlight about this is the the buyers today, like the search behavior online is fundamentally changing. And the buyers and the stakeholders in today's world are more internet savvy because they're closer to the genesis of it all, right? And so um that's gonna continue to happen and assistance to those decision makers of the people going to do the research to even get you in the short list, are using the internet to do that. Okay. And so the like there's a lot that's colliding right now. And yeah, we're talking about fundamentally changing your workflows, how you work, because now you have a gentic or like helpers, like like people that are like super intelligent, but need some direction and guardrails. And um, that's where the SOPs and the workflows come in. And so how you've been operating business up to this point, or 2023 or whatever, um, has fundamentally changed. And and all these areas of not just how people are searching for information, how they are finding information, how they are buying, how like I remember when no, like they were just trying to give you your credit card online. Like they were just like, please buy this online, right? And and and and people weren't weren't there yet. Um, now it's it's common day practice. And I even see uh crypto, okay. I I see um the the stable coin rails colliding into this and and that layer of money for the internet, and you know, is absolutely coming, and people need to be prepared for it, and you know, getting up to date on automation, getting up to date on taking all your fractured systems, and like I know people and we still do it to a certain extent, log in to like multiple platforms a day, right? These systems need to talk to each other so you can pull insights, you can make decisions, and also if um, you know, uh uh uh LOM, whatever, pick whatever one you want, has access to this information, which you now you talk about data governance, like you you got a lot of different components here that you need to think about, but moving towards like a kind of an AI first company, um you're gonna get what you were saying is so much um like you're gonna start to outpace people in a way that they can't catch up. Correct, you know, and and so I I wanna let you keep talking. I think what you're saying is is completely brilliant, but I wanted to tee that up for everybody to like take the leap. Like, I'm just take action, reach out to Steven, reach out to me. Like, we can help you because I know that there's a lot of agency owners out there, and it's a lot, it's a lot, okay. Um take it a piece by piece, eat it one elephant at a time, force rank what you need to learn, have different people on your team, learn different things. You know, this is all about working as a cohesive unit. And if you have more teams or VAs that you're working with, you know, start to have them learn different things. And anybody listening to the skill sets that people are hiring for is AI first. Like, like if you're lit, a lot of people that listen are, you know, in college or graduating or whatever, like you being able to use these tools is better than any internship, and it's almost better than any degree. Okay. It's it's about how to think in systems that that is is going to be the most powerful and having agency in in what you're doing it is really what this is about. You can learn the tools, you can figure it out, you're smart. Um, but but being able to be the architect of this sort of thing is is where I think it's going. So back to you, Stephen.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, no, I absolutely I I couldn't agree more. And and one thing just to kind of you know touch on what you were saying in terms of the if you start this, people can't catch up type deal. There's a reason that is, and and it's not it's not like, hey, like, you know, in in internet marketing, it was like, okay, you can eventually do enough SEO and potentially outpace that, or you know, do more blogs or more guest articles or whatever it is, increase the way that you're getting quality backlinks and and that's something I'm not an SEO expert, so I just want to make that clear. So hopefully what I said made some sense there. But in in uh in in the AI world, the reason why it's different is because AI becomes part of a process in in which that you operate. So the second that you start adjusting your processes to include AI, just means that you're you're outpacing things so far that these other folks aren't gonna catch up. Because by the time you're six months down the road and they start, if you if you go another six months, everyone in your company is already thinking in AI. So they're going to naturally create more solutions that are using AI to be better. You're gonna be like, oh, well, we could do this, we could make this process better, which would cut down on this amount of time, and we could just review it, right? And if you think about that on the other end, it's really scary, right? If you're on the opposite side of this and your competitors are using this for six months, a year, two years, whatever it is, and you're just getting going. And their RFP process takes three hours, and you know, they're able to create campaign strategies within, you know, 30 minutes and and all this stuff, and you're you're literally spending days on all these tasks. Well, their ability to acquire more customers and produce for them completely changes, especially if they know how to input their their domain knowledge into it all, and it's not generic.

SPEAKER_01:

So, Steven, we're running low on time. Um, I want to uh stop here and maybe we'll bring you back on and and do a part three or part two, yeah, right. Um, uh I think uh the perfect environment for this, guys, is we are launching a LM visibility training course. Okay, we're launching an LM visibility certification. And you know, this was kind of a sneak peek into a mini mastermind on you know how to grow your agency in the new like AI era. Um, and so we'll definitely bring Steven back. Um, we'll we're gonna talk more about the details uh in that mastermind, in that workshop, because you can't get away from AI. Does that make sense? Like even if we're doing SEO, AI SEO, Chat GBT SEO, GEO, LLM visibility, like AI discoverability, whatever you want to call it. Okay, like there's a lot of different names, there's a lot of different noise. There's a lot of noise out there. You know, I believe LLM visibility, which I've actually uh tried to coin the term and and build a framework around this, okay. Um this is the future. Um, and so our LM uh visibility certification will be launching shortly. Um, bestseo podcast.com is where it's gonna live temporarily. Uh LM Visibility Stack Um.com. We're building that out right now. Um, and you know, until then, uh, because this podcast is going to be released, um, not immediately, um, reach out to Steven. Steven, uh, what is the best way to get in touch with you? Uh, where do you post your work? Um, you know, just share with uh uh anybody that wants to find out more.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, connect with me on LinkedIn. It's the easiest place. Stephen uh Worley, Steven's with V W-E-R-L-E-Y. Sure, it's somewhere around in the notes or whatever wherever. Um, and then also you can also uh check out my website, which is closable.ai. Uh and you know that has more of the tools around actual sales uh processes and and whatnot, which is obviously a lot where my focus is and sales first uh businesses and organizations and how we can use AI in there. And obviously, because AI is so overreaching, sometimes we extend a little bit within. Um, but that's where we start, where we can make the the most impact.

SPEAKER_01:

So I love that. All right. So if you're listening, by the time this comes out, we should have everything up and going uh with with our certification, our links. We'll put all Steven's links in the show notes. Um I would ask you to leave a review. Uh, anybody that is listening and is getting good value out of this, please leave a review on the platform you're listening on. A lot of people like to leave reviews on our GNB um and that or Google Business Profile. Um leave it please on the platform you're listening on. That that's super helpful. Uh we'll we'll be talking more about uh entities and and and how that works, but we want to tie everything back and link everything back to to where we're at. So I I would ask, you know, share share this podcast with somebody that you think would be uh this would be useful for. Um and and please leave a review. And thank you so much for your support. Um and you know, if you want to grow your business with the largest, most powerful tool on the planet, the internet, like get on it, like jump in and and start start leveraging it. It's time, um, and uh leverage it with AI. I think AI is comparably equal to the launch of the internet. I I or bigger, I don't know.

SPEAKER_02:

Um I think it's bigger, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

But but it's on that level, and and I've even seen projections of AI agent economy growing by 75%, like the existing economy size. Like, so different areas of the country are are affected differently. Like I talked to a VP of innovation that said, I haven't found any use cases for AI. That that that's an education thing. Um, this is not a fad. Get on it, guys. Until the next time, my name is Matt Bertram. This is the best SEO podcast. Bye bye for now.

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Matt Bertram

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