Pubcon 2024 === [00:00:00] Hey there. I'm Wil Reynolds. And I can't wait to get into this presentation, but first I'll be sleeping outside in Philadelphia, in late November. And, uh, if you are willing to make a donation, I would greatly, greatly, greatly appreciate it. Hopefully this presentation gets you so much value that you feel compelled to drop a 20 or 50, or maybe even a little bit more. In, uh, to help me. Help a bunch of homeless youth in my city. All right. So let's go ahead and rock and roll on this thing. So I gave this present. I gave a presentation. At Pubcon in 2020. That I could basically stand on stage and give today. And here it is. It's how do you search data to better understand customers? Oh, I'm using the C word I'm using customers. And I think honestly, We are better served than ever to focus on customers. And that's what I'm gonna talk a little bit about today. So, what we know is devices will change the platforms that people are on will change, but humans. They don't. [00:01:00] And if you look at this quote from Hemingway, Uh, two people in the book are having a conversation and it's like, how did you go bankrupt? And the guy says, you know, it's gradual. Then it's sudden. And the way that I tend to look at that. As you gradually are making mistakes financially. And then one day you have one thing that just breaks the camel's back and boom, it's done. So, what I've been seeing over the years is a gradual decline. In how traditional SEO can be successful for clients. So let's turn this into an SEO or content perspective. How do SEOs lose influence? It's always gradual. Until it's sudden that's, we're going to talk about it a little bit today. You see, I've always been in the answers business. So when I came out of college, got my first job. I looked at. Oh, man, it's great to help somebody find an answer to their question. So seeking out answers to questions is as old as caveman, right? But for 212 years. The encyclopedia Britannica had it on lock. That was the only [00:02:00] way you could go. And then these couple of bad boys came out in the mid nineties and late nineties, and then all of a sudden, boom, we see exactly what happened to the encyclopedia Britannica. Now the thing we should focus on is people did not have fewer questions over those five years. If anything, when the friction of having to have encyclopedias was gone and you could go to your little PC or you go to the web and look things up, people ask even more questions, not less. Interesting thing. About encyclopedia, Britannica is they were able to reinvent themselves. So if you think the encyclopedia Britannica is a bad business failing business today, you'd be wrong. They looked at what was happening in their space. They tried to innovate a couple of times and they've ultimately landed on something that lets them have 400 employees. 120 million in annual revenue. And evaluation that. Yeah, my friends is a unicorn. In that crazy. The encyclopedia Britannica is a freaking Yukon unicorn. But let's [00:03:00] also look at the gradual and then sudden graveyards of people like blockbuster and windows. So there's two major themes today. We're going to talk about how we track success and how those things need to change to keep up with how people are getting answers. And I want you to all ask yourself the question and only you can ask yourself this question. When customers started getting answers in new places. Did you pivot to bring that into your skillset? Or did you say, ah, people aren't. Today. I hope I make the case. I've only been on this case for seven or eight years now to say maybe we should start to focus on the customers and not just the search engines. So, you know, today you're probably thinking I have not really pivoted myself that much and that's okay that you have low confidence, uh, because that's where everybody's starting. We're all starting from the same place as we see these changes. And while your confidence may be low, your anxiety might be high, but I'm here to show you that you've got some of the, some of the skills. To not only just thrive or not only [00:04:00] survive, but also to thrive in this new world. But you know what, I'm sorry. People you're going to actually have to get to know customers and know, I don't mean some semantic search tool telling you what people are typing in. When I look at the most epic ads of our time. Look at these. Do you think a semantic search tool was ever going to help you come up with the two of those? No, you're actually going to have to get to know freaking people and customers. And in the AI world that we're all going into, I'm kind of feeling like putting your brand beliefs out. There could be the new links. Now I know you're thinking, well, that's a bold statement. You better back that up. I'm ready. So let's take the word, ethical jeans in an SEO world. We can get a website like banana Republic to rank in the top 10, like some wonderful SEO has done here for the word ethical jeans. Now we're going to have to let go of who we were to become who we can be. And. And why am I saying that? Because people will say, well, will you know, there's only 170 searches for the word ethical genes per month. Tell that to Nudie [00:05:00] jeans. Who is worth $35 million. This concept of search volume tells me the universe of interest. Is a farce. We can not go back to the old tools in this new world. Yes. Does search volume habits place? Absolutely. Yes. To search terms and keywords have their place. Absolutely. But if we're looking for the future five or 10 years from now, we're going to have to recognize that it is fully possible to have a $35 million business and something that has a hundred searches a month. All right. So what does banana Republic believe? I want you to pause this video or just stop for a second and think what does banana Republic belief. And then when you come back, Let's talk about Nudie jeans and what they believe you see when you walk into a Nudie Jean store, you might see a sign that says here's a rack full of used jeans. We don't want to put new production out in the world. We're environmentally friendly. We do ethical gene production. We use ethical denim. Therefore we don't want as much as we want to grow our business. We do [00:06:00] not want to do it at the expense of the environment. So why don't you buy these used genes that we have fixed, clean and got ready for you? Banana Republic. Don't do that. If you go there, you can get your jeans repaired for free. For the life of your genes, because they don't want to make new jeans. If they don't have to. And then here's my pair. Even when you go to go into the pocket and you, and you're washing them. And you look at the pocket, they are reminding you everywhere of what they believe. Okay. And when I do searches around ethical brands and ethical genes, including Chiechi BT gets Nudie every time. And here's some of the things you can see that they believe. So. Jackie P T's already figured out if you go and search for anything, ethical denim, ethical jeans, blah, blah, blah, blah. You're going to see Nudie. You know, you're not going to see banana Republic, and this is an issue, right? Because at the end of the day, you and I know the banana Republic don't stand for nothing but making a profit as far as I know, which is fine, which is fine. But because they don't have a belief system as customers start to get more specific about their searches. he's like, I don't see the word ethical showing up there. And you as an [00:07:00] SEO who might be ranking today, getting leads and sales on keywords, like those. They might not be available in the future. Now let's look at a few people that have made some mistakes there. I say. And seeing the world changing and how we should not be these people. So you had the CEO of blockbuster goes red box and Netflix, they're not even on our radar screen in terms of competitors. One day said they, one day said to an interviewer. So you're telling me. That we think of this through a friction lens, late fees. Aren't friction be kind before rewinding driving to drop off my videos. All that wasn't friction. We could see it a mile away. Why couldn't they. Obviously, you've got Steve Balmer's quote about, Hey man, that iPhone is never going to take off. It doesn't have a keyboard. Okay. It had my music player, my phone and my camera in one place. I was pretty happy with it. And this is the reason why I'm bullish on search using AI. Because it just removes friction. And I think a lot of us are pulling. Blockbuster and Microsoft kind of [00:08:00] farces on ourselves right now. You know, a wise man once said bees don't waste their time explaining the flies that honey is better than shit. And I agree. Chat search for me, it's significantly better than Google in a lot of different ways. Let's just take something that many of us God love America have done. We've brought cars. And let's just go through the journey, right? When you go to buy a car, you don't just usually go up and say, I'll take anything. Usually what you're going to do is you have a bunch of thoughts about how you use the car, that influence which car is right for you. And you do search after search after search, after search, after search, and then you visit websites and it's all friction, right? This is just like the Netflix. Versus blockbuster thing. We gotta be honest about the friction so we can pivot. So if I type in, I want an SUV for 60 grand. And it's got three rows. If I click on the third result on Google, I can't even see the first result because I've got this site uses cookies popping up above the Mazda CX 70. Then as I get halfway down the page, I get a popup like yo man, create an account log in with Google. And I'm saying, no, you [00:09:00] haven't given me my answers yet. You know why? Because out of the top five results on the page, All of them are under 60 grand, three out of the three out of the top five. But three out of those top five also don't have a third row option. So these answers are wrong. Wrong answers are friction. Got me. And anywhere things become easier in the same way that a late fee or driving to blockbuster to return your video was friction. Wrong answers are friction wherever they are. If we look at paid. It's also bad. Look at the ads. Now when I click on Vivian. The car is 77,000. Wrong answer. The land Rover defender one 10. Under 60,000 until I add the third row seat. And now it's at $67,000. By the time you include taxes, it's going to be over 70 as well. WTF. Wrong answers are friction. And what's really sad is I only put in two things that I cared about the price and whether or not it had three rows and look how [00:10:00] wrong the answers were. And all that is is more of my time and more friction for me. When the reality is. I have like 11 different factors that I'm thinking of. If I can't even combine two. Uh, sure as hell can't combine 11 of them to try to get the right answer. And in shows up AI search. Where I'm able to put in 11 different things that I care about. And get an answer. Now you tell me. Would you rather do all those searches, visit all those wrong click on all those ads and all those websites close out. All those pop-ups. Just to not get the right answer. That's the current state. That's the current state we're in. And today we're going to start to show you how to pivot out of that current state, but you know what I want all of us to be careful. There's a lot of data out there that says Google is still getting more searches than ever. Google is doing just fine. Trust me. Google's got more searches, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. And those things are true more than likely, right? I'm not going to challenge the fact that those, those things aren't true. However, when your C-levels. Have gone to Chad GPT and said, wow, that [00:11:00] was such a great way to get an answer. It worked so well. You come in and tell him that that was not true. And that was not helpful. Eight. Good job security. You got to lean into those things and we're all having those aha moments where you use it for something and you go, that is so much better than searching. And when your C-levels had that aha moment, please don't throw it back in their faces, but they just spelled some random statistics from a will Reynolds or Ram Fishkin. And I really don't want you to be stack overflow and, and put your head in the sand. Let me show you why. So someone came out and was like their traffic's dropping after chat GPT launched, man, are they in trouble? And they went, whoa, whoa, whoa. We're only down 5%. Does this look like being down 5% to you? I took their Wikipedia traffic. Plotted it out. Put a line where chatty PT launched. It looks like a little bit more than 5% to me. What about you? Exactly. That's what I thought. And the way that I built that the cool part is look at these bad prompts that I wrote. I don't write great prompts. I was able to write a few prompts and put in a few error codes to [00:12:00] ultimately build a piece of software that allows me to put in a Wikipedia URL and how many months of data I want. So if I've got a Wikipedia page ranking in the top five or top 10, or number one, I can now look at how that is trending over time after chat GPT launched. And I can compare it to things like my own branded search or whatever I might. Might be doing. Anyway. I talked about building out tools and things like that in my AI survival kit for marketers, I'm going to link it for you. Please take a look because I care about you guys. And I want you to be as prepared as possible for the future. We don't know when it's going to come. I just want us to be prepared. We're like, Doomsday preppers. Yeah. We're like doomsday, preppers. Don't know when it's going to happen. What is coming. So let me save all these rations. All right. So I think what we really want to do is just to be the bridge. We want to be able to move people from where they've been, which is Google. To where they may start going, which is not just AI search, but a lot of other places as well. But we're going to start with the AI search concept. So the first thing you gotta [00:13:00] do, so you can keep your job is start yelling from the mountain tops to your executives, that the success metrics. We have today will all look horrible. As more customers move over to that experience. And that you are creating enough value that those metrics could be. Part of, but. Not the entire way to judge your success. This is our jobs. We have to reeducate our leaders to help them to understand the new world that we're living in. And then the second thing we're going to talk about is where you choose to optimize. Yeah. I'm telling you folks, like just being great at Google, in my opinion. And it no more pick a secondary area. I don't care if it's. Reddit. I don't care if it's Tik TOK. I don't care if it's Amazon. I don't care if it's AI. Find somewhere your customers are going and start to research how customers are getting answers on those platforms. For me, a lot of it was social. And I started realizing it's amazing to build shit that humans love. It feels great. So that's where I focus my time. And I'm going to share with you how I'm doing that [00:14:00] at the end, along with the metrics that you're going to have to pit it with my own metrics. So you can see the real deal. All right, but we're first going to solve the KPIs. I got 290 visits from AI search engines last month. And 35,000 from Google. So it doesn't make sense for us to all go hate haywire and start a band running Google search. You'd be a moron for doing that. However. However. You got to look at the slope of how fast these things are growing. Right. And you have to start to ask yourself, are we still reporting on metrics that really don't show our full value? Because if we keep reporting on traffic as part of our metrics, as our customers move over and start getting answers on these places, without having to click on our websites, you want to be telling your sea level, here are the new metrics to judge me on in the future. You don't want to be changing your metrics when they start to suck. Which they're starting to suck for some of us now. All right. So I took a period of January 20, 22. Through September of 2024. And I [00:15:00] looked at the difference in the numbers and we basically have about a 40% is drop in SEO traffic from our peak. Actually, I think this was March. I think that number's from March anyway. My revenue at the time was up 2%. So now it's like, all right. Repeat after me, I can lose SEO traffic and still get leads and sales. My revenue was up 2% in spite of my SEO traffic to my blog pages, being down at one point 41%. We're starting to turn that around a little bit, just a raw production if I'm being honest. But if we keep looking at the bros of SEO telling us how awesome they're doing and how much they're crushing, it, we're all going to feel inadequate. So I wanted to be the person to come out and be like, yo, I'm down 41%. This is what I'm doing because we know this is not real for most of us. Now revenue is one thing. We get revenues in a lot of ways that have nothing to do with our, with our blog. So therefore. What about leads? I looked at leads, period, over period, roughly the same. So we're talking about January of 2020 through, through June of 2020 through to compare it to 2024. And [00:16:00] leads were the same. All right. The other thing, we have to be educating our executives on because they're so used to the old way. We could track things that now, no matter what channel you're in. Somewhere, someone has taken away your ability to do an analysis. And, you know, who's had this happen to them for the longest period of time and it should be most ready for this it's us on SEO. I think it's 13 years since not provided or some crap like that. Now. What's interesting though. Is the data went away, but yet we all, for the most part still kept our jobs because a lot of us bucked up pivoted our KPIs and we didn't accept the first, no that we got, we found new ways and at SERE when not provide it came out. Shortly thereafter, I started researching, uh, paid search and I realized that with power BI or Tableau, I could join paid and organic data together. Get all those queries back to SEOs at last. That's because I wasn't willing to accept the no of who coach took my traffic, who cares, [00:17:00] like who cares that Matt Cutts, uh, you know, Matt Cutts, Google took, uh, took away my keywords. I have to think now and find other ways to get those keywords. If I see them as valuable. And that's what we're going to have to do in this world with no data, whether it's the Gemini chat, GPT, perplexity doesn't matter. This is what we're going to have to do. Oh, I don't need to be in here. Let me see if I can get myself out of there. There we go. Sorry. Y'all I'm blocking part of the thing. Okay. So. I went through perplexities pitch deck on ads. And I started looking at what Google's up to and I go, okay, we're starting to see ads showing up in these places. Right. And Google, but I asked them, I said, Hey, what's going on with that? My team asked, they said, Hey, we're going to still give you the queries that trigger AI overviews. So now you'll have the query. You just won't get the answer that showed up. Which I think there's other ways using tools like zip tie and whatnot, where you can get the answers that show up for those queries, but you will get the queries. So get ready for a world where you will actually have the queries. You may not have the answers. Now what's really interesting is perplexities like, we're actually going to potentially in the [00:18:00] future tell you what questions are being asked about your brand. If you advertise with us, my friends, these are the pivots. If you want to change your KPIs, you gotta be looking at things like, how are these guys doing ads and what data are they going to make available to me so that when I lose data in one place, I know another place to go for me. I'm literally thinking the minute that I can start to get ads in perplexity, I should, because they'll, first of all, they'll be cheap to start. Hopefully, hopefully. And to, and more importantly, it's going to give me data that the other sources may not give me, which will help me to better understand my customer. And what kind of questions are asking about our brand. Now again, we're back to the C-word. I'm so sorry. Are my customers, even on these platforms is the real question that any C-level worth a damn is going to be asking you. Great. I get it. It's transformational. It's awesome. Are our customers there? How are you answering that question today? And then the other part is how quickly are they moving over if they are there. And we're going to answer those two questions. I'm going to give you an example [00:19:00] with my own website. What I love about this presentation is I got full access to show you all my data. So I figured why not? So I'm a B2B company. Look at your agency or your agencies, and see if they've added chat, GPT your AI as a part of their dropdown. Now I'll admit we got a lot of options here. We don't have to clean that crap up. But when chat should be T your AI is one of the options. It'll show up in your CRM. When it shows up in your CRM, you can understand whether or not those leads are more or less likely to convert and what their value is over time. So for me, chat should be T could be the source of about 10% of my leads, but less than 1% of my traffic. higher quality traffic than the average. Okay. Now, which of you in here intentionally optimizes for being there's always two or three of you. Good for you. Okay. But the rest of us don't, you know, why most of us have ignored. It is over the last 15 years, they have stayed at three and a half or lower percent market share. So they're not growing their market share no matter what they do. They can't grow market share. But if this is the 15 month trend, Four. If [00:20:00] this is the 15 month trend. Four. Perplexity. I'm seeing some growth there. Now it's small, right? It is small. But if that trend continues, things are going to be different. Whereas for being. Yay. It's kind of trending down from me. It's kind of flat. Like it's not really doing much for me. Right. So again, I can see chat chippy. P T perplexity and Gemini look at the ramp up over time. We're starting to see a major ramp. And remember these things always start gradually. So I'm trying to, if I'm VRVO back in 2011, when I had this massive lead over Airbnb. I kind of want to start to figure out what are the little things I can put in place from a KPI standpoint. To gradually understand how they're coming after me. So I don't get surprised one day and they've built so much momentum that I have no ability to compete with them. One of my favorite tools to use in this regard. The spark Toro. Remember we are in a data list world. Right now. We are in a data list world about whether or not our customers are there. Not completely [00:21:00] dataless, but most of the data we wish we had, we don't get right. Spark Toro helps you by allowing you to look at its overall global rank of websites. Against specific domains. So in this instance, I put in stack overflow and I can see after Google and Wikipedia. That's the third, most popular site for people who also visit stack overflow. Open AI is the third, most popular site for people who also visit stack overflow. However. Globally open AI is the 20th, most popular site. What does that tell me? This audience is more likely to also be visiting open AI based on their actual web traffic. Great use of the tool. If you throw your own sites in as an agency, our clients are more likely to be using this than the average person in society. Therefore, now I don't need to go on generic metrics. I can now say, Hey, according to these couple of metrics, our customers are probably there. And then what's really cool. The spark tour is working on something. Um, will you be able to upload like [00:22:00] your customer list and see like, all right, if they can match them to some of the people that are in their panel, you can really start to then see how are my customers are the people that visit my website? Are they in my newsletter? How do they look compared to the general populace as well? So you want to start to compare your audience ranking to your global audience ranking. Just using a simple tool like spark Toro. Now in analytics. At 36 visits from these, uh, from the AI different websites. And now in September, I've got 280 ish. So, you know what, this is a great use of model knowledge. I think another thing about the AI survival kit for marketers, you have to put stuff into models over and over and over again so that you can see how they improve. So this is a great use case for oh one. The new chat should be T oh one. And I put in a bunch of metrics and I said, how long would it take given this trajectory for me to get to 10,000 visitors? Let's just say, I think that is a meaningful metric. Okay. It would take me 22 months. You can bring this into executive and they show all this math stuff. I bet you, it looks smarter than you are [00:23:00] and you go look. This is how I calculated it. Here's how I thought through it. And basically it's 22 months. So we stay on this trajectory where 22 months, and every month I'm going to add in my new data and have it recalculate, how long it's going to be. Ah, that's the kind of thing that executives are looking for. Right. And that's just using my existing referral traffic. Now we know, we know that. Referral traffic is harder in an AI world because a lot of these answers are just going to be given. So do you know what. Use the trajectory of the growth of the line for your homepage. How about that? Right. Where they are specifically recommending a company and linking out to you. Maybe that's the better version. We'll figure it out for you and your business, but that's how I'm looking at it in mind. And keep in mind, all traffic isn't the same. And those AI sites do not always send you the traffic. So, like I said before, start looking at your home pages versus your blog posts for these cohorts. And I, I like to see my homepage being showed more because somewhere somebody is either looking for it. They're looking for a company. They're either looking for a job. Or [00:24:00] they're looking for a company that can help them solve a problem. Otherwise, there's really no reason to link to my homepage from chat GPT or Gemini or perplexity. And we've built a dashboard that you can just click on automatically grab, and it'll help you to understand these different chats, search engines, these AI search engines and how they are performing. Alright, a couple of action items here. Now this is where you start to get a little bit more advanced, but it's not that advanced. The last place you can get data from your customer in their own voice is not SEMrush. It is not It is paid search. They have all the queries that the customers are entering in, in their own voice. And what I believe I'm going to show you in a second, is that when you go to these chats search engines, you start to talk to them a little bit less like a robot, like. Rooftop bar Barcelona and more like I'm looking for a rooftop bar with a great view, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. So if you've got your pay data, you can join it together and you can start to look at. Actually, if you got your paid data, you need to join it for this site. For [00:25:00] this. For this part, you don't even need to join it. Technically, you can just look for how many keywords start with the word I by month. And back in September, a year ago, I looked at a set of clients that were at a 1%. And now I've got a couple clients that are in the two to 3%. Some of them have actually doubled or tripled the number of searches that start with the word I, now you might be thinking, well, what kind of KPI is that? It's an innovative one. We have to get out of checklist mode because AI is going to automate that stuff. Right. The checklist stuff will eventually be automated. What you want to do is you want to start to think, where can I get data that can help me offset? This, uh, this belief that I have, and my belief is that more people are going to slip and put an I in my keywords when they're doing Google searches, because we're getting more and more used to chat kind of interfaces. And I ran that for every one of my clients started finding where people are growing, where they're dropping, et cetera. And then now that we've built it, we can also look at things like what percentage of your conversions come from queries with how [00:26:00] or what, any other words, and you start to go, okay. If this is a threat, maybe, maybe not, which of my clients are most exposed to that threat. And we're able to compare them against all of our other clients. Now sticking with how you can also use zip ties tool, which will show you how much, how to, and it says, Hey, we're tracking in a dashboard. How often these results from AI overviews are showing up. So now at zip ties, dashboards are doing is they're trying to index for you. Things like how much, how to, and how often are we seeing AI overviews showing up for these. Very very, very helpful to see if in their broad set of data, they're seeing them show up more or less because that could explain what's happening for your queries. So now is a good time because most of us don't track how blah-blah-blah keywords. We don't track a bunch of them. We have 1300 different keywords that start with how something, right? So now you take all those keywords and now you've got all the URLs, go check those URLs against Google search console and see what your click through rates are looking like. [00:27:00] Do you find that as open AI? Overview. Oh, sorry. Do you find that as AI overviews grows. Your click-through rates are dropping according to what your data you get from zip tie and the data you have in analytics. But this isn't true for everybody. And my God, my friends, this is why I'm saying get your own data. This data is from a friend of mine who actually sent me his, how to content and how the clicks are actually growing. On his, how to content? In spite of AI overviews. So I share this with you to invalidate what I just showed you. My clicks are way down. I'm seeing traffic down. He's not to his, how to kind of keywords. So this is why it's so important for us to all dial in using our own data, to make these decisions. Because if you just follow what will says, or somebody is best practice. Mine might not work the same for yours. We have different brands of different organizations. And these SERP layouts are changing all the time and we gotta be wise about this. I love it. Some rush now has this sitting in their database [00:28:00] because now I can look at SERP feature. That is the answers. Uh, the AI overviews, I can then see different keywords and I can see my different pages that are ranking. And this instance. You know, you can see, all right, I got AI overview showing up for these. IRA versus 401k. If you were USA bank back in the day. You had the answer box. It probably took away a good amount of your searches, but now. You've got this and that layout looks totally different. And we need to know how, when these layouts shift, how they impact our ability to actually get traffic and conversions to our websites. Does this even matter? Did anyone who ever searched for IRA versus 401k to, and even ever convert? Cause if not, The traffic loss has kind of a nothing burger potentially. I think the most important thing we can do is to be tracking meticulously what layout changes were made and on what dates. So then we can look at our traffic and go, oh, the week that Google made that change, I had my lowest ex. Okay. And [00:29:00] keeping a library of these changes to layout is important because the big thing is Apple's going to be rolling out their version of. The new Siri or whatever, and more than likely. It's going to change how people search are you starting to separate your traffic mobile versus desktop to see what happens on the day? That open it, that, that. Apple launches. All right. A couple of other action items here. Now, the way that we're looking at tracking is just a little bit different. So I'd like to pull in a bunch of questions. Customers might ask. I have a video link on how to pull tens of thousands of questions from PAs. So I have a video linked to my resources. But then you're looking at how often does our brand show up, right. For this set of keywords. And what about my competitor brands? And we're just using AI to basically find the entities and which ones are the brands, the direct competitors, but we're also looking at what are the themes, and we're trending this out over time so we can see, are we gaining, share of voice across this cohort of questions or losing, and remember people, if you just refresh the question [00:30:00] over and over and over again, You will see different answers. So. While I know that to be true. I will not use that as a reason to show up to my client with no good answers to what's happening in AI search. But then what we also did is we started to feed out the questions and this is where we're able to see, Hey, in cars, we're seeing technology, we're seeing affordability, we're seeing safety, we're seeing range. And then what we get to do is take all those different themes. And tell our client what their share of voice is. So for this client reliability, and I just checked it a little bit ago is actually growing. So the answers are giving them as an answer to reliability more. But for performance and affordability, they're dropping. Okay. So what does that mean? You know, what does that mean? But what I love is the ability to use AI, to categorize my themes and then use AI to categorize the brands that are showing up and see which brands overweight on which themes. Okay. So now that is the AI's coming part of the presentation. This is the do shit. Humans love part of the presentation. [00:31:00] And don't be an algal. Ho so many of us are so busy chasing the algorithm. We forgot this whole thing was supposed to be about people. So again, if I lose 41% of my SEO traffic, you know, what's my life raft. Brand is my life raft. And what does that look like? Boom, here's the KPI. You should be looking at your branded search against your drop in blog traffic. If your brand is continuing to stay at its level, people are still finding out about you. You're good. If your homepage, which is another indication of brand, why would you get to my homepage? Right. That's actually growing for us. That's good. So now you can see, I'm trying to use some different metrics to back into. Is my brand taking a hit or am I just losing traffic on content that ultimately people didn't search for our brands anyway. I have looked at my direct traffic and my brand traffic and my blog traffic, you know, what's the best indicator of whether or not I'm going to get leads is it's direct and brand. So let's talk a bit about community. This is the pivot that I made. I'm like, I'm going to get better at. Social organic social full [00:32:00] stop. It was one of my decisions. Because people are going there. LinkedIn's got growth red, it's got growth. Tick talks got growth. These are places where people interact with other people and people leave comments on other people's stuff. And they like it. I'm not trying to figure out how to juice the algorithm. I'm trying to figure out how to get people to love my shit. Right. And you can even screen grab. You can. Now this is where we don't have to bridge our SEO knowledge with. Um, and some AI knowledge with the future state. If people are on Tik TOK, just want a psycho and Tik TOK and a couple of your top keywords. And then screen grab three or four pages worth of it. And then drop it into a tool like Google or Claude and say, look at this image and make a table for me of all the different publishers, their, their titles, their descriptions, how many views they got, how old the post is, how many likes they got, if it's available. Just screen grab that's the beauty of AI folks. You can literally just screen, grab this stuff, throw it into my favorite right now is AI studio. Uh, Google. Uh, Google AI [00:33:00] studio and it gives me all that back. Now. We, because we do stuff at scale. We also index every meta description for the top 100 for every keyword. And we track millions of keywords for clients. So when you have those descriptions, I can start to look for certain things like in the last three months, what contains millions of users? Billions of views on certain Tik, TOK URLs, et cetera. But you guys can do this just by screen grabbing. Ah, it's awesome. Now, one of the big things that I believe in as well is this concept of zero click content. And Amanda Natividad is another great person to follow. And I've leaned into this. I am now putting up content that has no links in it. And then when I go back to look at, okay, well, I posted some content a while ago with no links. It's getting a bunch of impressions. Two weeks, two months, two weeks. That's not helpful because I need to know the day that I posted it so I can understand what's the tail like? Well, my friends. The good news is there's a tool out there linked in my resources where you can drop a LinkedIn URL in, and it'll give you the exact date and time. So you can see, okay. When I launch that piece of content, what was my next four or five days looking like, why [00:34:00] couldn't you write shit? People love their interesting behaviors. You will see that aren't just traffic. Okay. So if I post something on a certain day, what I'm really looking for is, Ooh, a week after what happened. I'm above my typical average right now, I can't go in with exact numbers, but exactness is over. We're going to have to get used to living in a world where we drop something one day and we go, okay, what was the other things that might be happening after that? That showed the value of what I just dropped. You can see my home page. Remember that direct stuff. We dropped a blog post. On, uh, on whatever day this is, and you can see the big spike there. You can see the secondary, big spike there. That week. My homepage had more than normal traffic. So, what was it that happened that day that made all these people know that we were out there talking about something. I don't know, but that was the post that was live at the time. This is the new set of metrics that you can go to your manager and say, look, I'm winning for community. And I'm going to show you the math about why [00:35:00] winning for community is probably better in some ways than just winning for search. So another thing I've done is now I've almost 10 X. My traffic from LinkedIn. Remember people would say, oh, you can't put links in your content. That's bullshit. If you do things that people love. I don't listen to the generics. I'm literally showing you. That's a 10 X of my traffic from LinkedIn off my all-time low in November. How did that happen? I wrote shit. People liked. Yeah, sure. I'm losing traffic in some places, but I'm gaining attention and others. So. Sometimes you're just gonna have to do shit. Cause you think it's good for people. And I think all of us are gonna have to start to have conversations with our managers that sound like this. And this comes from Rand Fishkin. Hey, I got 80% of my budget. Fully hold it to ROI. Can I get 10 or 20% of my budget? That's not so restricted that I can try new things that I can learn from. That might be things our competitors aren't even thinking of doing, but it can't always be tied to an ROI I gave out. I'm not an author. I have no books. So therefore, why would I go on stage and give out thousands of dollars worth of books? Cause I thought it could help people. I had presented at a [00:36:00] conference and I said, Hey, here's all the books that I've read that shaped this presentation. If you like this presentation, come to me, give me your problem. And I'll give you which books I have that actually, I don't know what the ROI of that is. I can't track leads back from that. Right. That's community building. You can't do that. If somebody goes, what's the ROI, those thousand books, you're never going to have an answer. So we have to proactively start to ask for a little small piece of budget that isn't tied to that, because that is how you win over humans. And now here comes the tension. But the reality. So we had a blog post, a how to blog post that we optimize back in January and February at its lowest point. It was slated to bring us 18,000 visits a year. We optimize that sob and boom. Now we're on pace to hit 38,000 visits this year. That's an extra 20,000 visits for an SEO effort. That is amazing, especially in a world where traffic seems to be dropping a bit. However, nobody gave a shit. Nobody shared it on social. You got a couple of minutes from Reddit, but. [00:37:00] I got to, I'm not going to talk about that, but nobody signed up for the newsletter. That's that bigger value thing than just came to the site and visited. So remember this every comment or like it's a human feedback loop, not an algorithmic one. Now if my KPI says a visitor's worth 10 cents, my, how to blog post. Would it be worth $3,800 to me, my sea of sameness blog post. Only got 5,800 visitors. This is the metrics from it. So I'd only value that at $581. So what would you do? I would do more of the first one. I would do more of the other one. But that sea of sameness post grew community and brand. So now if you're saying all right, Traffic's my KPI. Then you would value it. This way. But what happened if newsletter signups was added to your KPI? Because people aren't going to directly go to your content and all these like, sign up for a, um, a demo. It's just not going to happen. So at least in my instance, if I just looked at the KPI as newsletters, I could take my $3,800 from. Ah, sorry. Mistake here. I'll [00:38:00] fix that slide. Um, I would take my $3,800 for my house. Two blog posts versus my $581. From my sea of sameness posts. And then if I look at the newsletter signups, I got 26 newsletter. Sign-ups each worth $500. So if I value a newsletter, sign up at $500. Well guess what? Now I've got 13,000 plus that 581. That's 13,000 or so it's $10,000 more in value. But if I was only looking at traffic, it had only been 5 81. So now I can start to understand that when we write these things that take off on social and perform well, and this is my trend from social media traffic, you start to go every time. One of these things pops, we're winning humans, and that can't be worth the same amount is just winning for Google. Because more than ever, people are gonna start changing where they get answers. They're going to branch out all over the place. And you and I, we need to get, or stay in the answers business. We have to be customer centric. We have to follow these people wherever they go. And I don't mean with cookies. We have to meet people where they are. [00:39:00] You know, my most important referral right now. It's Microsoft teams. Every time. I see traffic growing from Microsoft teams. I know somebody inside of a enterprise company is sharing something on our website with another human. That is worth a lot more. To me. Those visits are worth a lot more to me then. I don't know who the heck searched this, this keyword. I don't know what keyword they search, but they landed on my website somehow. Me too. Content is dead. You guys, and I'm not going to get too deep into this. But I went down a whole path where I looked at what SEOs were doing from a semantic search standpoint. And I wrote from my heart into the opposite. And ultimately ended up beating out a lot of that semantic SEO. So I think the question we all have now is. Who do you want to be? Are you okay. Being the blockbuster CEO or Steve balmar. Or stack overflow that can inspire of seeing the lack of friction for customers. You still go. Yeah. But. My numbers say, this man said this. Uh, Google came out and said this, or are you just going to lean into the fact that lower friction will win? And I [00:40:00] think if you do. And you allow that to take you in multiple directions. And you start having the conversations with your leaders now that the KPIs need to change. Based on where your customers are getting answers from. I think you're going to be just fine. Thanks so much. See ya.