SEO Expert Bruce Clay Reveals AI Secrets

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing,
your insider guide to thestrategies top marketers use to
crush the competition.
Ready to unlock your businessfull potential, let's get
started, howdy.
Welcome back to anotherfun-filled episode of the
Unknown Secrets of InternetMarketing.
My name is Matt Bertram.

(00:22):
I am very excited about my nextguest.
For those of you watching, youknow who it is.
For those of you listening, itis none other than the father of
SEO, bruce Clay.
Bruce, great to have you.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
Thank you very much.
Glad to be here.

Speaker 1 (00:39):
Well, you know, we've been having a lot of
discussions about the directionof SEO and what's going on with
AI and the future and, as SEO,that title has expanded quite a
bit, like everybody's SEO forLinkedIn, seo for algorithms I

(01:01):
think it's what a lot of peopleare talking about algorithms
right, I think it's what a lotof people are talking about.
But I would love to just and Ithink a lot of people would to
get your opinions on.
I mean, in the last 36 monthsor roughly, has been more
changes in the last 15 years inSEO, and so I started getting
involved in mastermind groupsand going to conferences and had

(01:22):
to get re-synced with, uh, allall the different changes and,
um, you know, I think there's alot of seos out there that are
uh still uh kind of in the mixtrying to figure it all out.
So I would love to just kind ofget your perspective on the
industry to get started okay, um, that's a a pretty open

(01:44):
question.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
I I'd like to start by just saying when I started
this was 29 years ago SEO was akeyword.
And all you had to do is put thekeywords in the right spot and
you would rank, and then itbecame things and you had to
have associated words andproximity and a lot of stuff

(02:11):
became more I'm writing about atopic than one word, yeah, and
some of the stuff in the oneword area became spam when you
started writing about topics.
And then you started with thisusability and EAT, and so you're

(02:31):
right, it has evolved and itgot to the point where, no
matter what you did at atechnical level, it qualified
you for usability, right.
One of the tips I typicallygive is, if you have a page and

(02:52):
it has multiple sections and youdon't have jump links at the
top of the page, you're notbeing usable, right.

Speaker 1 (02:58):
It's like table stakes right.
It's like table stakes, Like toget in the game.
You have to have a fast loadingsite that's usable, especially
on mobile right.
Mobile first, and that's thestarting point.
You have to get over thatthreshold and it's typically
pass or fail, right, or it ispass or fail, so either you're

(03:19):
there or you're not.
To get in the game right.

Speaker 2 (03:22):
Right, and that, by the way, has continued.
Or you're not to get in thegame, right, right, and that, by
the way, has continued.
The concept of SEO is free isSEO is not free.
You have to pay the dues foryour free SEO right, and it has
evolved to that point.
And I was very excited aboutSEO.

(03:43):
It was fun.
I mean, I was solving Rubik'scubes while I juggled them.
I mean, that was SEO.
Every Monday, it was a newindustry.
Google made changes.
There was the Google dance.
That stopped, but they're stilldoing it just 3,000 times a
year, times a year.

(04:12):
Here's the problem that we raninto is COVID.
Covid disconnected theeducators from the students by
eliminating conferences.
It eliminated training classes.
It eliminated a lot of things.
I mean, I tried to adapt withSEO training dot com, which is
my online training curriculum,and I've just restarted

(04:32):
classroom.
But when you look at the wholething, conferences are thousands
of people at a time hearingwhat they need to hear to get it
get ahead.

Speaker 1 (04:46):
And the big problem by the way, everybody that's
listening.
I have gone through bruceclay's training uh online and
it's phenomenal, so I definitelyencourage you to go check it
out.

Speaker 2 (04:57):
So uh, and I'll even tell you I put up a new version
this.
Actually it was yesterdayafternoon Brand new version.
So you have to keep current.
It's an expensive proposition,you do.

Speaker 1 (05:10):
That's why I was at Brighton, because I was like
what's going on across the pond,like what are people doing?
What are people talking about?
I mean into TSEO, which maybewe can get into a little bit
later.
I mean ranking in the search orthe large language models is
what everybody's focused on now.

Speaker 2 (05:32):
But you see, that is exactly the evolution.
So everybody's talking aboutusability and EAT and the fact
that just because you did thekeywords doesn't mean you're
usable.
Right, there's, there'smultiple entry points and with

(05:52):
AI, this is where we're seeingthe current change.
With AI, it is well.

(06:15):
What people don't recognize isSEO is still absolutely the
table stakes.
To just get in the game.
It turns out that with Google,if you aren't in the top two
pages say you don't show up inAI.
Two pages say you don't show upin AI.
Well, with chat search, right,if you're not ranked in Bing,
you don't show up in their AI.
So obviously there'srequirements that you have to be

(06:43):
accepted by the search enginein order to show up in the AI
results.
And the big thing there Goahead, Go ahead.
What were you going to say?
The big thing there is that youhave to recognize that the LLM
in the AI module.
It doesn't want to have to gospider the web, it doesn't want

(07:05):
to have to worry aboutcanonicals and redirects and
server speed because it's it'staking multiple data points and
providing an answer from those.
So it's no longer really caringabout what's the speed of site
one when I'm actually mergingthe content from 10 sites at a

(07:26):
time, right, and all it reallycares about is are you trusted,
Are you having an authoritativeexpert type answer as recognized
by all the search experts, thesearch engines?
And if you are, then youqualify to be in an AI result

(07:49):
and so when you're looking at isAI important.
Yes, yeah.

Speaker 1 (07:55):
No, no.
So I want to bring everybody upto speed.
We kind of breeze through eat,which which you know, I know
we've talked about, but I youknow how, how the webpages want
it these days is you got toanswer whoever answers the
question the most fully, right?
So I want to make sure thatthis podcast for people
listening, that we cover it.
One is I think Google kind ofwaved the white flag on no AI

(08:18):
content and just said we give up, right, because I mean, there
was already a lot of contentthat was AI and they kind of
were unsure about it.
But they said, hey, if it'suseful content, you're allowed
to do it.
And then with E, I believethat's probably why they added
the additional E for theexperience, right, to kind of
say, okay, you're all expertsnow, right, with the AI, but

(08:41):
prove it like, prove it, show methe product, show me, you know,
if you're talking aboutphishing, you know you with the
phishing poll on, you know.
So they said show theexperience component of it.
And I think that that was theirfirst attempt to combat the
entourage of just junk content,because AI, without really

(09:04):
training the AI, it's justgeneralized content and it
starts to become veryhomogenized and it's what other
people are doing.
It's the same kind of likesales, salesy, kind of like data
set.
That's training.
So you gotta, you gotta, yougotta customize it, you gotta
have an operator to to reallytake it to the next level and

(09:26):
feed it content to train it totalk like you want it to talk.
But, going back to what you weresaying, okay, that's what
people want, even though I'veheard different numbers.
I was on a podcast previouslyand I heard the number was a lot
higher.
But that's when I think Googlehas sounded the alarm bells

(09:47):
right.
When chat GBT, the amount ofsearches started to really pick
up and they were looking at thetrajectory and most of their
business is made through AdWords.
So they need people on thesearch engines and then they're
I think, from what I've read,they're losing money with the AI
overviews to create that highquality search or they're using

(10:09):
data or processing power tocreate that.
So I mean the game hasdramatically changed.
And then they got, you know,the zero search and so OK, so I
just kind of wanted to bringeverybody up to kind of where
we're at right now, and it's alittle bit of a zoo, right, it's
a little bit of a zoo of what'sgoing on, and even the Google

(10:30):
dance, and maybe you can speakto this.
This is just a personalquestion I have, like certainly
I use rank math a lot on thebackend and you know it ties
into analytics and I'm seeingthat Google dance every day.
No-transcript.

(11:11):
Jump back into where we werewith AI.

Speaker 2 (11:14):
Sure, what was?
The Google dance was actually aparty that Google had at, you
know, their headquarters duringSMX.
It used to be SES.
During SMX, it used to be SESSMX, and it'd be actually an
on-campus party, food drink.

(11:34):
I mean, it was an actual withmusic.
It was a dance, but it wasreferred to as sort of like the
hokey pokey, you know, on Monday.
Monday you put your left footin and then all of a sudden, you
got to take your left foot outand put your right foot in and
and Google was trying theiralgorithm changes in the live

(11:58):
algorithm.
So every time they were tryingsomething they'd put it in and
then it would be ugly and thenthey take it out and tweak it
and put it in again and you knowthe hokey pokey.
And that was referred to by thecommunity as the Google dance.
Now Google has a lot moredances going on at a time.

(12:19):
They have over 100 developmentteams that are trying to improve
overall the search results.
So, according to Google, theydo 5,000 updates a year.
I kind of think of it as 2,000of them are fixing what they
broke yesterday.
So 3,000 in 300 days in a yearand you know, do the math,

(12:47):
that's a whole bunch of day, andso we're seeing a live index
that's highly volatile.
So if you go in, as you pointedout, if you go in on Monday and
look at your traffic, and thenyou go in on Tuesday, you may
see entirely different traffic.
And Wednesday entirelydifferent traffic again, because
they're doing 10, 20, 100changes on various days of the

(13:11):
week.
And that doesn't even count thefact that you have competitors
that are trying to counter thosechanges.

Speaker 1 (13:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (13:20):
It's a zero-sum game.
And, yeah, somebody's going toget it.
You know, if Forbes loses thetraffic, it went somewhere,
unless people just stopsearching for the keywords.
So that is how the dance hasevolved over the years.
Yeah, you're going to seevolatility.

(13:43):
One of the things that I'vebeen doing as part of our AI
tool we have something calledpre-writerai and it's a whole
collection of tools, and one ofthe things that I've been doing
the research on is I analyze awebsite and I use AI to do the
analysis and say a website, andI use AI to do the analysis and

(14:03):
say okay, what is the intent ofthe website, right?
Is it transactional,navigational, informational?
And then even on informational,you get there's 12 categories.
Most people don't care, buteducation is one of them, and et
cetera.

(14:27):
So you go through and you say,okay for this site, what is its
intent?
Yeah, Then you take what areyour top keywords and you do
queries on that and when youanalyze the top sites for those
queries, they all have the sameintent, not necessarily yours.

Speaker 1 (14:42):
Okay.
So I have a question about that.
So you know, some of thedifferent tools out there will
break it apart in theinformational, commercial,
navigational, transactional.
A lot of times when we createinformational content it's
showing up as commercial content.
And you know, I'm just curious,like when you're, when you're

(15:06):
looking at content, what are thequalifications for each bucket
to to meet that requirement, toqualify for that?
And sometimes they qualify formultiple ones, right?
But I'm looking at a ratio forfor certain sites and I want to
make sure that the informationalcontent is the highest
percentage and and sometimes thecommercial section is is the

(15:30):
highest content.
So it's not transactional, youknow, but there there's some
kind of blend here and I'm justcurious if you could break it
down on how you see it yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:41):
Yeah, we're finding very few are actually blended.

(16:07):
Google seems to believe and thisis my analysis and it's ongoing
that when I identify the topfive sites for a particular
keyword, they are true blueblood, informational, hardly any
transactional anywhere on thepage, because it will identify
percentages Right and in my tooland so I can tell you that you
know that keyword is consideredinformational and yours is a
hybrid with transactional andmaybe you need to do this and I
actually tell you what it is tomove more towards the

(16:28):
informational and be lesstransactional and operationally.
That's going to be an importantthing.
You have to be able tounderstand that Google is sort
of blue blooding this stuff.
They're saying I want an expertand I want the expert to be
exactly about this and I don'twant you to stray, and I'm

(16:52):
finding, as I do more analysison more words, that the straying
, while it might be good foryour business, isn't necessarily
good for the Google searchresults.
They don't care about yourbusiness.
So if I wanted to educate butsell a course, if I try to do

(17:15):
both of those.
it's going to be hard to competeagainst people who are true
blue blood education onlybecause they're more expert on
exactly what Google thinks thequery should be.
And while for our websites itmay make total sense to blend

(17:35):
them, sometimes blending themcould be counterproductive, and
that's opening up a whole newarea of research for us.
But we have figured out how toget into a number of things.
Let me give you a secret.
All right, one of the secrets.

(17:57):
Most people, when they use AI,they go up, they put in a
keyword and say generate a pagethat talks about this keyword,
and you get a page, and in ourtools what we do is we say here
is a keyword, and then we sayand who would put in that
keyword?
What is that persona, what aretheir pain points and therefore,

(18:19):
what are the other keywords weneed to put in the article?
And so we write articles thatsolve pains, not just articles
that define keywords.
It's an entirely differentapproach to article drafting,
and so nobody's doing that.
I mean you should do that, Imean if you're going to type it

(18:42):
in.
You should do that.

Speaker 1 (18:43):
So I have a about that as, as it kind of relates
to uh, maybe like link, equity,flow and internal linking, right
, so, um, building out uhassociations or semantically, or
you know uh, how this word uhspatially uh interacts with,

(19:04):
with what you're talking aboutas an entity.
Let's say, if you're talkingabout, for example and I've
heard you say this a number oftimes you said, well, and it may
be different today, right, butthis was something that you said
a long time ago, so I'llpreface that but you said you
will rank for seo if you do notrank for sem.

(19:26):
Right, sem was the, the broadercategory, the search engine
marketing, which is broken downinto the ppc and the seo, right,
and and when I, when I hadheard that, when we were ranking
um, our own site, um, like thatwas kind of a uh, a guiding uh
light as far as, like, weweren't, we weren't focused on

(19:47):
that, but we do do PPC and we dodo SEO.
So if you talk about contentthat you're creating, say you're
talking about, let's just talkabout SEO, because we're talking
about SEO, you're writing aninformational piece.
You don't have a call to actionat the end.
I'm curious about a call toaction of like, because if
you're're building pages thatare, specifically, you should

(20:08):
have some kind of lead capture,right, or maybe it's like you're
embedding maybe a calendar linkor something like that.
Is Google looking at that ascommercializing it when they're
looking at the whole page, orare they just looking at the
content?
That was like kind of my firstquestion.
If there a call to actionoutside the, the body of the

(20:28):
information, but then when youhave written that content and
say that that topic is broadenedbecause you're an expert and
you're going into somesubtopical authorities for
whatever you're talking about,when is it a good idea, right?
So, like, like.
Is it good to link out to the p?
Like?
Is it good to link out to thePPC?
Is it good to link out todigital marketing?

(20:49):
Is it good to link out to webdesign?
Or is it better to link toother things that are associated
inside the vertical of SEO,like local, technical, like.
How do you view the world?
I know it's a little bit of anuanced art, but I'm just
curious, from a link equity flowstandpoint, when you're

(21:11):
approaching that, whether it beanything, how do you, how do you
um decide?

Speaker 2 (21:18):
well, we absolutely follow siloing, which we
invented in 2002, which is alignyour content by how people
search and concentrate yourcontent by topic.

Speaker 1 (21:34):
Yeah.
And you do that in yourtraining too.
You talk about that a lot inyour training.
The silo Right.

Speaker 2 (21:39):
And even our online.
We have a separate onlinecourse for it.
It turns out that what you wantto do is if you want to rank
for SEO, you have to have aconcentration of SEO information
that interconnects about SEO.
That way, you can be an expert.
But if you want to rank fordigital marketing, as you

(22:01):
pointed out, you need to havepay-per-click.

Speaker 1 (22:03):
You need to have all these things in the parent.

Speaker 2 (22:06):
Right.
Yeah, the story I typically useis shoes, right, if I had a
store and it had every kind ofshoe in the world, I should be
able to rank for footwear.

(22:28):
But if I am only about boots,even though boots are a form of
footwear, I shouldn't rank forfootwear because I'm only about
boots.
Right, and I think Google is,as I said, it's looking for blue
blood specialties.
It's looking at that level.

(22:49):
So you have, on the one hand, Iwant to rank for this term, I
have to qualify and I pay mydues in each kind of shoe, or I
only want to rank for boots andI'm a boot site.
So, yes, you have sub silos, alot of people call them clusters

(23:09):
, but it is a sub silo and it isa section of a website that is
just about this topic,interconnected.
Absolutely, you have to be ableto do that, or you're not a
subject matter expert on thatterm, but there's a lot of terms
that a normal website wants torank for well, if you're flow,

(23:30):
if you're flowing link equity orlike across the page and and if
you do, or across pages andbreadcrumbs and all that.

Speaker 1 (23:38):
But you're you're trying to build a subspecialty.
Let's just continue along thelines of like, ok, seo.
And then you got digitalmarketing, which you know, and
then even web design, I thinkfrom how Google wants to see it
is like completely separate,unfortunately.
So those, those are, those areseparate and you're siloing the
pages in that way.
What I've seen with likeoutbound linking and inbound

(24:02):
linking, the link equity, isinteresting.
So if this page is is pushingto this page, or this page is
pushing to this page, the, thepage that the link equity is
pushing from that other page orthe page that's pushing the link
equity to it starts to rank forstuff that the page it's

(24:24):
linking to has Like.
Have you seen that Like?
So like is, let's say, aboutSEO and it's linking to PPC, and
you're pushing that link equitythat way, site A, that's about
SEO, will actually start to rankfor PPC because it's linking to

(24:48):
site B.
And so I'm trying to understandwhen the link equity flows, like
if you're not keepingeverything in that silo and
you're maybe saying, ok, well,I'm going to link this page that
has a lot of link equity.
I'm going to flow it from PPCto SEO.
What happens is they kind oflike trade link equity or

(25:12):
something like that.
I feel like there's like somekind of swap because the PPC
page will actually start to rankfor some SEO terms if it links
to this page Like I've.
It's really I've seen it a fewtimes and I and maybe if you
could just describe yourunderstanding and I know you've
read all the patents about likelink equity distribution because

(25:33):
I think a lot of people that Italk to in SEO and when we go
deep, they understand thetechnical fixes right, they
understand how to approve it,they understand the meta
descriptions, but when we startto get into link equity
distribution, like whoa, likethat, they're just trying to fix
the technicals of the site.
They're not trying to move uh,the, the, the power of the site

(25:58):
around and and they build thesecrazy like um menu structures
that everything's linkingeverything, and I was like
you've got to narrow the focusto drive, to drive what you're
trying to rank for, becauseeverything's equal, and then you
you break it off of the menuand then it kind of releases it
Like you don't want to be in thefooter and like at all, like if

(26:21):
you can help it, and then evenif you release it from the menu
structure, many times it'llshoot up, you know, for a
temporary period of time.
So I think link equitydistribution is something that
is not talked about enough, orat least I've had a lot of
questions about it from personalexperience and then I read a

(26:42):
lot about it and I would love toget your kind of take on that.

Speaker 2 (26:46):
OK, so obviously we've done hundreds of siloing
projects, restructured websites,and worried about moving
structured websites and worriedabout moving what we refer to as
logically moving page rankaround and building a silo
structure.
In the sub silos we have thisthing which I refer to as page

(27:15):
rank laundering, right?
So the scenario there is I haveall these links to my homepage
and it's they linked to me withBruce Clay, so I have all these
points about Bruce Clay.
Then on that page I linked SEOand the laundering happens,
where I take my points for BruceClay and I redistribute them as
SEO and I redistribute them asSEO.

(27:42):
Well then that page I went tohas a breadcrumb and it links
back and I can actually changethe points on my homepage
through that kind of an internallink structure.
So I think what you're seeingis somebody comes in, they move
it over from the SEO page to thepay-per-click, but the
pay-per-click links back andthat resets some of what the SEO

(28:04):
page might rank for in thatlaundering approach.

Speaker 1 (28:09):
Okay, yeah, you're trying to the surfer, you're
trying to kind of get back and Ido that If I don't know where
else I want to link to yet onthe page, I'll actually
redistribute it back to the homepage and then let it.

Speaker 2 (28:23):
Let it, let it push back right and many times you're
resetting the page rank usagebecause you're now forming the
full circle.
Um, I actually have slides onthat in the training and it is a
useful thing.
I ran a test where obviously alot of my homepage is Bruce Clay

(28:43):
, and then I go to the SEO pageand then I made up a breadcrumb,
which was a different word,where, instead of home which, by
the way, you should never use-yeah, you should never do that.

Speaker 1 (28:56):
That's like the number one thing I see every
time I get a sign of like comeon, people, like we're not
trying to write for home.

Speaker 2 (29:01):
Yeah, you're not real estate, so I use a keyword
instead that didn't exist, right, and then within a week my
homepage ranked for that keyword.
So what you're actually talkingabout is internal link
structures, especiallybreadcrumbs.

(29:22):
But internal link structurescan, when you fold back onto the
original source, you can changesome of the intent of that page
through that link.

Speaker 1 (29:37):
Well, let's use that example really quick and just go
a little bit deeper.
And then I want to get back toAI.
Okay, so let's forget thatBruce Clay is an entity of the
father of SEO and Google doesknow that.
Okay, let's say thatassociation's not there, but you
have a strong ranking for yourname or somebody else.

(29:57):
Let's just use somebody else isranked for their name, right,
and they got a bunch of links totheir homepage and their
homepage is about them as aconsultant or whatever it may be
.
Say they're a consultant, likewhatever, like some kind of
other consultant, but they havea bunch of links for their name,
so they have a bunch of linkequity for their name.

(30:18):
But then they link that page totheir services page and if
there's not a lot of anchor textout there or Google doesn't
really understand thatassociation between their name
and that service and you link tothat, I don't feel like the
link distribution or the pagerank gets pushed.

(30:41):
So what are you using toevaluate if the page will push
page rank, because I've seen alot of links too.
Depending on when you'relinking out, google decide hey,
am I going to use the first linkor the second link, like it
kind of decides now right, evenif you're like, do do not follow
it, it decides where it's goingto push page rank to or not.

(31:04):
And so how, how do you evaluate?
Is this page actually pushingthe right kind of page rank, um,
or or is this not helpful?
And you know, and if you changethe link right, it just it
resets the whole thing becauseall the link distribution gets
moved around.
And so I'm just curious how youevaluate that to know that

(31:26):
that's the right page to link to.
And if you have a lot of linkequity for a name and you're
trying to link it to a servicebut that association is not out
there, I would say you need togo build out that entity, seo,
where that association is made,so it will push the page rank.
Or like a mixed anchor text orsomething like that, where you

(31:49):
start to blend it, so there'sthat association out there.
I mean, I don't know what, ifyou're trying to link from one
thing that that is not whatyou're linking to and you're
trying to push that uh page rankfrom one page to the next, it
sometimes doesn't go, and so I'mjust curious, how do you

(32:10):
evaluate that?
It just has to have anassociation.
I guess like you.

Speaker 2 (32:15):
Like you just don't don't think so at a real high
level.
I'll just give a couple of datapoints.
It has to be organic.
So in theory there should be arelationship, complimentary,
supplementary relationship,between the content of the pages
, right?
So let's assume that's fine Ifit's an external site linking to

(32:37):
you.
We also have sentiment.
Most people aren't eventhinking about sentiment, but a
negative sentiment doesn't passPageRank.
There only has to be neutral orpositive sentiment to pass the
PageRank and it has to beorganic, right?
A bakery linking to my SEO site.
They're not an expert on SEOo,that link isn't very valuable,

(32:59):
right yeah, but a colleaguelinking to me might be very
valuable.
So whether there is page ranktransfer has a couple of
fundamental rules.
Now, historically, when youlink within your website, it's
always going to pass pagerankank.
The question is how much?
And you know, in the beginningthe algorithm had 128 variables

(33:25):
in it.
Now it has hundreds, hundreds,many hundreds, and so the
algorithm, when you look at it,pagerank has been pretty much
diluted over the years.
Is it in there?
Sure, is it a tiebreaker?
Absolutely.
Is it going to change your life?

(33:45):
Probably not.
Google has even said that linksaren't even one of the top
three algorithmic importantvariables anymore algorithmic
important variables anymore,right?
So I mean, that's the way it is.
They're there.
It's been diluted so much, butall the variables have been

(34:05):
diluted.
So the question is if I have ahomepage with 100 page rank
points but I have a hundredlinks on that page, the formula
says I'm only pushing 1.85points to the sub page.
That may not be enough to makeit rank.

(34:26):
If I only had 10 links.
now, that might be important andthat's why you have to do
siloing structures.
You have to understand how muchjuice you're moving and how.
I mean this is not a you know,an overnight thing, but you have
to know where you're going toput your juice.

(34:47):
For instance, if I have a pageI don't want to have fighting
for ranking, why do I have togive it the juice?
Uh, fighting for ranking.

Speaker 1 (34:58):
Why do?
I have to give it the juice, putit on the page that matters,
yeah, right.
Well, that's the main scenario,right, like you have multiple
pages fighting for ranking andtrying to decide which page you
want to redirect it to, and Ithink a lot of people get stuck
because they have multiple pagesrank it for the same keyword
and they're fighting for it, sothey're, unless you get to the
top of the first page, you'renot getting anything, so it like

(35:20):
it's, it's kind of worthless,you know, if you're hanging
around on the second page, youknow, so, so, so the link
distribution, I think, is reallyimportant in in that scenario.
Let let me ask you another quickthing, as it relates to that
and I know that there's a lot ofdebate or there has been about
this in the past like, if youhave a page that doesn't have

(35:42):
any inbound links, right, itdoesn't have any traffic, it's
not like it is indexed, but it'snot like a high quality page,
um, based upon, like the, the,the strength of the site, how
big the site is.
The bigger the site is, theharder it is to move the site,
you know?
And so, like, do you view thatthose pages, if they're not, you

(36:05):
know, superbly valuable to whatyou're doing.
You should trim them so thatyour overall ratios look better
and it's easier to move the site.
Or is it better to have thesebranches and try to harvest the
link equity from those, maybeback back to the tree or back to
you know, whoever?
whatever you're, whatever you'retrying to rank, your correct

(36:27):
answer is right, like everymonth they get a little bit
stronger, so you know like it'sgoing to be valuable in the
future, potentially the answeris no, okay now.

Speaker 2 (36:43):
Uh.
So operationally, when I try torank for a keyword, to qualify
for that keyword I may have tohave a fully developed content
about the keyword right.
I may need to have a cluster orsub silo built out in order to

(37:03):
rank for the keyword, because ifI don't have the foundation I'm
not going to have a house right.
So I have to build the requiredcontent to qualify for some of
my head terms.
We've had cases where peoplehave cut off old content and all

(37:24):
of a sudden their head termfalls because they eliminated
their foundation.

Speaker 1 (37:27):
Because they didn't know what's associated right
Like what it's looking at, and Ihave seen that too, you got to
be really careful about what youtrim, because you don't know
how it's connected to somethingelse, because because I call it
link equity, but like how it,how it's associated, so it gets.
It gets difficult, especiallywith old sites when you're

(37:48):
trying to untangle it.

Speaker 2 (37:50):
And it's even.
It's more than link equity,it's, it's topic equity.
I can't qualify for footwear ifI don't talk about all the kind
of footwear.
It could be that some of themget zero traffic, but it's a
prerequisite to the ranking.
So, on the one hand, I don'twant to cut off content that is

(38:14):
required for my head term.
The alternate of that is thatin the Google quality rater
guidelines where EEAT is defined, there's 40 some pages in there
to talk about maintenance.
Now, while that isn't M-E-E-A-T, it isn't meat, it is still

(38:38):
discussed and the concept that Iassumed from it.

Speaker 1 (38:44):
My methodology is that if it is content that is
not foundational and it is old,then it update, and that's where
people have like, here's thetrends, and they go back and
they put the date and then they,you know, put another paragraph
on what?
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (39:02):
And you look at it and you say, ok, this is a good
example on my site, because Idid exactly that.
I went through and pruned off acouple of thousand pages Now
from the 2000s.
Now remember, ses was in 99,.
Right From the 2000s, I wassending a team of bloggers to

(39:25):
conferences and they would liveblog sessions and we would
publish within an hour the notesfrom the session.
I mean it was amazing, it wasgreat.
However, I looked back at mylive blogs and I'll guarantee
you that the live blog of asession from 2002 is not

(39:46):
relevant for SEO today.
Okay, and I had all this coolcontent and I had all of these
people and I discussed theactual live session, but it
didn't contribute to thefoundation of my website and I
ended up pruning off over 1,800pages off my website and I still

(40:11):
have thousands, but if it isold and not foundational, you I
think that's delineation, right,like and, and you can use to
kind of bring the conversationback into the ai.

Speaker 1 (40:25):
right, you can use the ai to analyze, okay, what is
this topical authority or whatare the things you need to talk
about, and then would this beconsidered content and you can
upload it and you can ask it.
But but I get your point Now,if you took some of those
sessions, which there's thingslike no one wants to listen to
old, old podcasts about SEO,right, everybody thinks that,

(40:48):
like, it's gotta be the newestthing.
But there's stuff that wastaught so long ago that's
foundational or discussed,that's still relevant today
because it is foundational andit's tried and true.
But but I think you like, likewe were talking about, you've
got to connect it with now,right, so you got to say this

(41:10):
was foundational and it's stillbelieved to be true and this is
how it affects today.
And then, and then you know youhave the link equity and the
time that that page is built up,but now it's relevant and so
you know it changes where itfits in the algorithm.
Right and what I did fromfoundational and kind of current

(41:34):
and now we're not talking newsanybody, but that's a whole
different category.

Speaker 2 (41:40):
Yeah.
So what we did is we eitherremoved the page and redirected
it yeah, or we determined it wasevergreen and we refreshed it
and just kicked it, dragged itup, kicking and screaming into
the current age, you know,refreshed all the content.

(42:00):
Or we decided that there weremultiple pages over the years on
that topic and we consolidatedthem, redirected some and
evergreened it on one of thestrong URLs.
So there's a lot of things youcan do, but then, once you're
done, you still have to managethe internal link equity,

(42:23):
because if I'm deleting pages,it probably linked to something.
Yeah, and I have to figure outhow I'm going to handle that.
I mean, if SEO were easy,everybody would be number one.
I mean, that's just the waylife is and it isn't easy.
You've got to pay your dues.
The link equity issue is a bigissue and people, I'll tell you

(42:45):
right now if I had page A and Idecided I didn't want it anymore
and I'm going to redirect it topage B, the question is in the
content of page A.
The question is in the contentof page A.
What did it link to?
Because I lose that when Iredirect it.

Speaker 1 (43:03):
Those sublinks no longer exist.
You lose 10% of the link equityon, just like off the top, but
then you're losing other thingsand that's the trouble, right,
because what else is thatlinking to?
And then what is that linkingto?
And like really having anorganized structure when you get
like a legacy site comes in,you've got to go slow.

Speaker 2 (43:27):
I've seen, you know I've seen really strange things.
I've had people come.
One person came to me.
He had 714 links in his top nav.
He decided to link to justabout every product he sold
because somebody might want it,of which 96 percent of his links
were not clicked on in the lastyear.

(43:48):
But what he did was he dilutedhis page rank, transfer away
from his important pages.
Right.
So it is a management task tounderstand the architecture of
your website.
It may work, people may be ableto live with it and find their

(44:11):
way around, but the searchengine isn't a person.
It doesn't click, it doesn'tunderstand that.
It reads the DOM, the document,object model.
It understands what is resolvedand it attempts to figure out
how to make that work.

(44:59):
Are you trusted?
Are you putting text behindyour images and hiding it from
us?
Is it?
You know spam rules and allthese other rules?
And at the end of the day, it'strying to figure out what
you're about.
And that's the search component.
Then you throw AI on top of itand it's are you trusted?
Are you an authority?
And can I trust yourinformation enough to put it in
an ai answer right, as soon asmentally, if I had a list of 10
blue links, I could go to eachand I will mentally say that is
the opinion of that author.
But if, if I take 10 blue links, take all the content, mush it

(45:21):
together and give it to you in aparagraph without calling out
where it came from, it's gospel.
And now the burden is on AI notto burn it, not to harm you.
I don't know how AI caneffectively do your money or

(45:41):
your life sites Right.
When I started doing our AIproduct, I looked at it and I
said there's no way we could cutthe writer out of this.
They're the artists.
They're the ones that followthe rules.
They're the artists.
They're the ones that followthe rules.
They know the voice, they knowthe company, they know the

(46:02):
products.
There's no way AI out of a boxsomewhere is going to know your
company.
So we called it pre-writer.
That's it.
That's the name of the product.
Pre writer.
We build briefs but the writerhas to finish them.
There's no way AI can handleyour money or your life.

Speaker 1 (46:22):
Okay question for you .
So I was thinking through thislike from a workflow standpoint.
Right, and if you're uploading,let's say, just like technical
writing, something automotive orwhatever, you could upload
technical specs.
Right, you could upload pastblogs if they're happy with

(46:43):
their tone, their voice,whatever you could upload like
an industry journal or somethinglike that.
You could upload a competitorif they like that whatever to
train it, to then write thecontent based upon that.
And maybe you're refining itand there's other steps that you
do, but that AI can produce.

(47:07):
If you know where you're tryingto go with the content, it
should produce something prettyadvanced.
And then you can ask it, hey,where are the gaps?
And then you got to kind ofsift through it a couple times,
but I think you could come upwith really strong technical
content if you have the rightinputs.

(47:30):
Does that make sense?
Oh, absolutely, I fully agree,there are overlays that you can
put right, that are trained tokeep it in a narrow, defined
path.
Like I do think you can replacethe writer eventually and then
now you can even automate thatRight.

(47:51):
And so, bruce, this is thething that I'm worried about is,
people are going to build theseautomations and it's just going
to like, and it's probablyalready happening now.
You know, you're just pushingout so much content and it's
automated off of maybe a listand it's going through these
repetitions, and so you've got alot of people out there that

(48:14):
are writing with a writer andcreating content.
And so you've got a lot ofpeople out there that are
writing with a writer andcreating content.
And then you've got somebodyout there producing I don't know
five articles a day, like everyday.
Like you know what I mean, andGoogle does like that.
When you hit that kind of 30,45 days, I think another
algorithm gets hit, at least onsocial media.
I see it and you know it'slooking, it's coming back to you

(48:37):
, right?
The bots are coming back to you, going, hey, give me some more,
give me some more, give me somemore.
It seems like it's going to bea race to the bottom with a lot,
of, a lot of these use cases.
And so where, where do youthink SDO is going Like?
I know we're getting into this alittle late in the podcast, but
I I really think that that'swhat's on a lot of people's

(49:00):
minds, like you know, I need toget, I need to get involved with
this, I need to get you know,like, and there's certain people
that have a certain opinionhere.
They're like even withpodcasting.
Hey, like I can listen to aitalk about it, I can listen to
human and I'm going to preferone of the other.
Um, just like ads, right, likeads versus organic, right,
there's certain people that havedifferent flavors.

(49:22):
Um, I mean, where do you, wheredo you see, like you've seen
all the iterations of change?
Right, seo's dead.
Long live seo.
Where do you see it in 36months, in five years?

Speaker 2 (49:35):
oh, seo is never going away.
Uh, my saying is seo is donewhen google stops changing
things and all your competitionhas died.
Yeah, that isn't happening.
Um, but going back a little bit, um, you see, I view the writer
as an artist, right?

(49:57):
Um, and I think that you oughtto let the artist do it.
But left brain, right brain,right, that artist isn't
necessarily a good researcher.
So pre-writer is the researcheryeah, if you look at a
newspaper.
They have researchers, they havewriters, journalists, copy
editors.

(50:18):
They have all the checks andbalances.
If you took off the blindersand looked at your content
process, there should be achecks and balances in there,
right.
I don't know if you're like mebut I write something, I put it

(50:39):
down.
If I pick it up an hour later,I'm asking myself who wrote that
.
I mean, you can always make itbetter, and I think that what we
want is, you know, do a brief,do an outline, do a list, do a
this, do a that and give it to awriter and let him improve it.
The problem you're going to runinto is and we've had

(51:05):
conversations in the industryabout this for a long time AI is
not creating new content, it'sregurgitating existing content.
Yeah, right, it may bewordsmithing it, and it may be
that you can change all of theLLM and the rules and everything
else and you can customize itthrough programmatic interfaces.

(51:28):
You can do that, sure, but ifit isn't creative, it's a
problem.
Now Google has published orstated I think they've stated,
not published, but they'vestated that what they want is

(51:48):
for it to be considered a validAI, to not be radical.
It has to somewhat adhere toaccepted norms and offer
something unique.
Both right.
I mean, if I came up and saidblueberries cure cancer, that is

(52:10):
not an accepted norm, it'sgoing to die right there, right.
But if I came up with something, and it was well documented
that it did it and I said andyou can do this with it that
nobody else has thought of yet.
That is my value add.
That is why I'm first amongequals Google's looking for that

(52:32):
, and I don't think AI isnecessarily even close to being
able to do that, whereas humanscan do it in a heartbeat.
So I really seriously believethat for years, if all you need
is regurgitated content, ai isgreat.
If you look for creative things,things you haven't thought

(52:56):
about, if you're looking forstorytelling, it's going to be a
while before AI catches up, andAI sure.
Is SEO dead?
Well, as long as SEO is thepre-qualifier for the AI, the
answer is absolutely not Right.
It's going to be around.

(53:17):
It's the AI part that we're allwrestling with and saying, oh,
I can write a script that willdo this.
I have a script that generatesa content brief.
I counted it.
It had one hundred and fiftyeight specific commands in it

(53:38):
158 different commands.
Wow, I mean, we're talkingpersonas.
The example I gave earlier,where you had to back it into
doing a pass pain activatesolution.
You have marketing strategy youhave how to do, call to actions.
You have a gazillion thingsthat are part of the process,

(54:00):
including, by the way this issomething that's interesting you
understand the concept of ajapanese sword, where you fold
it over a thousand times rightand it becomes super sharp,
super hard japanese swords.
Um, do that to your writing,write it, take it and then ask

(54:20):
chat to improve it.

Speaker 1 (54:23):
And it will.

Speaker 2 (54:25):
Yeah, and then you can say I want it to be this and
it'll change it.
So even what chat creates isn'tfinal.

Speaker 1 (54:34):
You got to have a human involved and I that's my
take no you got to, I think, theoperator and understanding how
to use it and advanced promptingand all the other tools.
But if you don't know what goodlooks like, it's hard to get to
that point, absolutely.
So I wanted to try to cover onemore topic really quickly.

(54:56):
This was something that wastalked about a lot at Brighton
and I've seen it as well is thedrop in traffic, right?
So Google?
So I want to get your opinion,as a thought leader in the space
, on how you're dealing withthat, how you're approaching it,
how you're looking at it, whatyou're telling the clients,

(55:17):
right, because I mean,ultimately, they're not buying
SEO, they're buying, potentially, lead gen.
It depends what their goals areright, because I mean,
ultimately, they're not buyingSEO, they're buying, potentially
, lead gen.
It depends what their goals areright, but it could be public
swaying, public policy, or.
But a lot of people want leadgeneration and that's what
they're buying.
They're not buying SEO, they'rebuying I need leads, and then
the traffic's dropping becauseof all the changes that Google's

(55:40):
making.
Just curious, like your take onthat.

Speaker 2 (55:45):
Yes.
Well, there were a lot ofpeople who ran data analysis and
the data analysis implies thatwhen AIO is present, the number
one organic site had a 70% dropin click-throughs Documented.
I mean, we're talking tons andtons and tons and you see the

(56:08):
numbers.
You don't believe it, so yourent it some more and it's
consistent AIO.
When Google showed it at thetop of the page, it pushed
everything down.
I hate to say it, but right nowthe first organic listing on a
page is certainly nowhere nearthe top of the page and I think

(56:31):
that Google is going to have tochange how it's formatting its
content to be multi-column.
I think if it's multi-columnsdone right, but what do you do
on a mobile device?
And while desktop is stillgrowing, I think you have a
problem.
I think that you have a problemwith the intended use, the

(56:56):
non-clicks right 60%, I mean,mean that's a ridiculously high
no click ratio on mobile, right,you add it all up.
yeah, I'm going to tell you,right now impressions are steady
or increasing yep yep, butclick through on number one

(57:19):
organic is, and it's becausethere's too much stuff at the
top of the page.
I mean, I hate to say it, butsometimes you actually have to
pack a lunch if you're going togo journey to the number one
organic result.
It's that far down on the pageYou're scrolling to get there
and those days of the 10 bluelinks right at the top are long

(57:44):
gone.
It's the formatting of theGoogle search result page that's
resulting in the traffic drops.
And if you throw a great bigblock of AIO at the top of the
page with the right-hand sidehaving some sites you can click
on, having some sites you canclick on, it changes your

(58:04):
orientation to how to build yourweb page.
Here's an example Go to my siteand if you go through my blogs,
what will happen?
You click on a blog, you'll seethe jump links go to the FAQ.
Take that question, and this isthe important part Take the
question, highlight it andsearch and over half the time I

(58:29):
am called out in the AIO or I'mthe featured snippet because we
figured out a methodology forquestion presentation and
answers that it's lovedpresentation and answers that
it's loved by AI.
Right, you can see it.
Just go through all of theblogs right there on my blog

(58:49):
page.
Just go to the questions, dothe question as a search, not
even in quotes, just search it,and what we're finding is that
if you have a site that actuallydefinitively answers the
question, you'll rank for it.
So I go to the question and Itake out half the words and

(59:10):
search for that.
And I'm still there, right, andwe're finding that you have to
qualify in the search engine, asI've mentioned before, but you
also have to change yourarchitecture and your content
schema to be more aboutanswering questions.
It used to be that the numberof questions Google would get

(59:35):
would be 4%.
Now what I'm hearing is it's16% and growing.
People have learned to askquestions and and usually that's
why people go to a searchengine anyhow, yeah, yeah.
And so what we're trying to do?

(59:55):
Mom, when mom was announced orI think it was when Bert was
announced by Google, one of theexamples was where is the
Seattle Space Needle Guess whatit's in Seattle, and is there an

(01:00:16):
Italian restaurant near there?
And it would be able to relateto questions and give you an
Italian restaurant near theSeattle Space Needle.
Well, guess what?
You do that in one question now.
You don't have to do separatequeries.
You just say I want arestaurant near the Seattle
Space Needle and it'll give itto you, right, I can say for

(01:00:43):
this keyword what are the fivetop Google results and what
cities are they in?
Compound questions and get thatanswer.
But if I needed to do that asGoogle queries and what I think
is happening is people arelearning that power right, and

(01:01:04):
as they learn the power of howto ask the question, more and
more questions are being asked.
So one of the methodologiesthat you should follow is to
have one question per page, nota whole bunch of FAQs.
Get rid of your one paragraph,one hit wonder answers.
It's nothing but a definition.

(01:01:25):
You're not going to be beatinganybody else, but have a
comprehensive answer to thequestion.

Speaker 1 (01:01:33):
And if you could, do that per page, because because
that that one page is, and it'sgoing to be, the best answer to
that one question, right, right,and and so, ok, yeah, no, I can
.
I can see that.
I've also seen the more you getin the AI overview, the link

(01:01:53):
equity starts to pull it up therankings, like, the more you can
get qualified up there, I'mseeing callbacks get shot up
when you get in there.
I'm seeing callbacks get shotup when you get in there.
So I'm looking at it more likea brand play almost is your
impressions are going way up.
People are associating yourname with the expertise You're

(01:02:13):
showing up in the AI overviewsand that's actually the new
rankings, right, so it's like,how do I get in those questions?
And then, really, what'sscrewing it up is attribution,
right, it's like converting,right, like.
And then you're combining itwith ads or socials or whatever

(01:02:35):
else you're doing, and you don't.
You don't know where theattribution is coming from,
because the customer journeythey've cycled through so many
different things.
Like, it looks like you know,they kind of start here in the
center and then they go up andthen they or they go out and
they go in different directionsand they come back, but it's not

(01:02:55):
like linear, like the search isnot linear, and so you got to
figure out again that entity, Iguess of, like that topic of
spatially, every freakingdirection, how, how are you
associated with that in relationto everything else?
And then I, you know, I guessyou're, you're amplifying that

(01:03:17):
with trust and it broadens outthe, the sphere of, just like
the GM, gmds, right like it, thestronger, the trust, the, the,
the stronger, the strength,pushed out in every, every
direction with those long tailkey phrases and remember.

Speaker 2 (01:03:33):
Uh, because it isn't a list of individual sites, the
trust is higher with an aioanswer.
So, um, I I mean it's verypowerful, but that is one of the
reasons the click-through ratehas dropped off.
For the organics Now that'sonly one out of eight queries.

(01:03:54):
I have plenty of otheropportunities and it's only for
informational queries, jim.

Speaker 1 (01:04:03):
O' Informational yeah .

Speaker 2 (01:04:04):
Ed Helmske, PhD Right .
So if I have something that istransactional, I'm still I'm
totally okay.
However, if I'm a transactionalsite, I ought to be developing
informational pages, Jim.

Speaker 1 (01:04:21):
O' yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:04:21):
Ed Helmske, phd, and a lot of people are still a
little behind on understandingthat requirement.

Speaker 1 (01:04:31):
Do you see a bifurcation?
Last question, I appreciateyour time A bifurcation, because
they used to I don't know whatthey called it, I don't want to
say what the trainings I wentthrough, but low quality links.
But local links right.
So they're giving the localplayers a chance, right, if they

(01:04:57):
don't have the usability, ifthey don't have that, but
they're specific to an area,like if it's a nonprofit or
something like that.
But I'm seeing in this newworld like you've got to ante up
and you've got to meet thisrequirement and so these big
companies are starting to ranklocally right, right when other

(01:05:32):
local players like if you're abakery if you're a national
bakery versus like a localbakery.
The national bakeries arestarting to really take up a lot
of the serves and the localbakeries are kind of getting
pushed out and that's going totranslate to business.
I guess it's just kind of thecourse of the evolution of
search.
But, like, what are some, Iguess, tips to leave behind to
maybe small business owners ifyou're not working with the big
corporations or you're not a bigcorporation?
Like how are, how are the smallplayers going to compete with

(01:05:56):
all the different things thatyou need to do?
Cause SEO is just yeah, it todo it right to, to have all the
steps to have, like, even ifwe're just talking about content
, you know the smaller playershave to cut corners because they
don't have the budget.
But how, like?
How are they going to be ableto compete as they move forward?
I mean, what's, what's theguiding star for them?
To kind of leave, leaveeverybody with some hope.

Speaker 2 (01:06:20):
Okay, so um I understand, Google is in the
business of making money.

Speaker 1 (01:06:25):
Yeah, right.

Speaker 2 (01:06:28):
They don't care about us, they care about making
money.
They're a public company, it'stheir job and I'm okay with that
.
Local has a tendency, becauseit is focused, geographically
focused, it has the ability forme to want to pay a little bit
more than if I was trying tocompete in the national area as

(01:06:54):
a local business.
So Google supports local local.
I wouldn't think that it wouldspend so much energy giving
national accounts local presence.
The thing that is the numberone local factor.

(01:07:17):
Number one local factor isGoogle Business Profile.
The second one is local reviews, and let's just take those two.
It's going to be very difficult.
A national program cannot get alocalized business profile.
You have to physically havepresence there and most of them
can't and they don't necessarilyget local reviews.

(01:07:40):
They don't necessarily getlocal reviews.
So there is an ability tocompete.
The problem you face is thatthe SEO on a local level is not
that much cheaper than the SEOon a national level.

Speaker 1 (01:07:53):
These big sites, as every month goes by and the page
rank increases.
What I see is like there's a bigpop whenever that happens in
that cycle and these Web 2.0s,or you know, multi-location page
sites, pop up in the searchrankings temporarily every time

(01:08:14):
that I guess that page rank getsreleased and I mean it just
dominates the SERPs, like ifyou're in an industry that has a
couple of those players inthere, you know, like NerdWallet
, for example, if you're infinance, I mean, you know their
stuff, just like crushes itRight and and they're going into

(01:08:37):
every conceivable niche relatedto finance that you can think
of and they're doing thisnational SEO at a very high
level that transitions out toall these different searches and
locally and they're starting toown the SERPs for a lot of

(01:08:57):
different terms that youwouldn't think that they would
normally own.
And you know, I I think it it'sgetting really competitive and
and then that's becomes okay.
If you want to compete likeit's going to take, it's going
to take more firepower.
We're going to have to work onyour site a lot more to do that.

Speaker 2 (01:09:16):
Absolutely.

Speaker 1 (01:09:16):
Just kind of what you have to do if that's what you
want, and then you got thetraffic dropping too.
So it's a confluence of of ofchallenges.
Uh, for, for somebody that'slooking at a marketing budget
and saying I don't reallyunderstand what's going on, but
I want to put you know, I wantto invest my marketing dollars
and I want to output, um and andthat number keeps going up.

Speaker 2 (01:09:40):
Right, so the way we've done it, we have this
thing called localware, okay,and it's got three phases.
You see, the biggest problemyou face is if you're given a
quote of X number of dollars amonth, it's because your project
is that big, right, or that big.
The thing is, on day one you'renot going to do all of it, yeah

(01:10:04):
.
So what we did is we saidhere's phase one, it's a
fraction of the real SEO project, but that's all we're going to
do for phase one, and then we'regoing to add on for phase two.
So your bill will go up forphase two, but we're doing more,
right?
But on day one I don't have tocharge you for this big national

(01:10:25):
program, because we're notgoing to be ready for some of it
until you know three months in.
So you have to end up, insteadof saying this is my program,
this is what it costs, you haveto be ready to say this is my
program, this is what it costs.
You have to be ready to saythis is my program, this is what

(01:10:46):
it will eventually cost.
But we're going to start and doit block by block by block, and
we're only going to charge youas we expand.
And now, if you get the returnon your investment.
Now, if you get the return onyour investment, you don't mind

(01:11:06):
investing, right, if I put in adollar and get out 10, I'm going
to go to the bank and get astack of dollars.
I mean, it's that simple.
And so you really need to havea building block system for
local and you need acomprehensive system for
national, because most of thetime when we get a national
account, it's already developed.

(01:11:27):
Yeah they've been doing SEO fortwo years and we're their fourth
SEO company.
Right, they need somebody thatcan do a deep dive.
Finally they're ready for that.
But until then, we just have to.
But until then, we just have to.

(01:11:48):
I appreciate and recognize thata lot of local sites don't have
budgets.
Yeah, all right.
So we'll start you small, we'llfix the basics, we'll bootstrap
to phase two and if your siteyou know one of my sayings it's
not the job of SEO to make a pigfly If your site is terrible,

(01:12:09):
seo didn't fix it.
So I can only do what I can dowith what I'm given.
But under normal circumstancesI'm able to do quite a bit.
But if I have to do it to abudget and you're a small guy
with a limited budget, I have todo it in blocks.
I can't sell you the wholeproject.

(01:12:33):
You're not going to be able tokeep up with me, so I have to
sell you the piece that, okay,we're going to do this and see
what happens.
Then we're going to do this andsee what happens.
Then we're going to do this andsee what happens.
Then we're going to do this andsee what happens, and we'll
walk you through a growthprogram.

Speaker 1 (01:12:50):
Do you have a tool that, like a calculator, that
kind of analyzes?
Because I've been playing aroundwith a couple of different
things in Excel but you got topick those variables and the
thing for me is, once I get intoa site and we start working on
a site, I don't really know howlong it's going to take until I

(01:13:11):
kind of go through the long-termdatabase update about two and a
half months.
So I'm like I can give you anumber of what I think it's
going to be, but until I startdriving your site, see how it
responds like I call it, likeblooming the flower, to take
whatever they have to just see.
Let's optimize it and see whathappens, set a new baseline.
Now I can tell you what I thinkit's going to take to get to

(01:13:33):
where you want to go.
But now they're three months inand you know there's a lot of
trust building and you know theyhaven't seen any ROI.
Like you know there's a lot oftrust building and you know they
haven't seen any ROI.
Like you know it's horseshoesand hand grenades with SEO.
And so you got to, you got toreally do a lot of education so
they understand what they'regetting into, because you know a
lot of them.
I'm like I call it like walkingthrough the desert.

(01:13:55):
I'm like, ok, we have to get tosix months Like and I will show
you the progress and you willsee it.
But to get to six months likeand, and I will show you the
progress and you will see it,but on the back end of the six
months you're gonna be reallyhappy.
But until then, you know, likeyou gotta trust me, we gotta,
you know, I gotta show you thesuccess, I gotta show you the
steps, just kind of like salescalls and you know proposals,
like you're gonna get there.

(01:14:16):
But but you gotta know that thisis something you really want to
do, because when someone has asmall budget and it's their
money, right, like when you talkto the corporations, it's, you
know it's budget, but you knowthe small businesses they're,
they're, they're going I need to, you know, rob, peter, to pay
Paul kind of thing and andsometimes they don't have the
budget for it and or or or.

(01:14:36):
The market can't bear actuallythe budget that's actually
needed.
So I'm starting to have a lotof the conversations if, if
they're competing in a high DAkeyword, right, and there's some
really strong sites that areout there.
I'm like you know this is thisis going to take.
This is not going to be a threemonth thing, right, like I'm

(01:14:56):
going to need the long-termdatabase to update at least
three or four times.
You know, and that's just whatit's going to be.
You know, and so Well, theproblem you face you know you're
absolutely right.

Speaker 2 (01:15:10):
This is the problem every agency has.
But even then, we in my agencywill tell you we run in
four-week sprints Because ifGoogle is going to change the
rules, if your competition isnot static right Yep, we're in a

(01:15:32):
dynamic environment.
I cannot tell you, even fourweeks from now, what Google just
did to the entire industry.
I cannot tell you that.
So what we do is we say ourvisibility is four weeks,
chances are it's reasonablystable.
Here's the four week projectand at the end of four weeks we

(01:15:54):
define the next four weeks.
There's no way I can give you asix month project plan.
I can tell you these are thethings that are broken and I
have to work on them, but Icannot tell you that in seven
weeks, google is going to rollover the algorithm and you're
going to get crushed.
I cannot tell you that in 11weeks, you're going to get hit

(01:16:17):
with malware.
Somebody will break into yourservers.
I am not going to tell you thatGoogle just invented something
else and it's a rule, not aguidance.
I can't tell you any of that,right.
All I can do is my best job tomove you along on a good project

(01:16:38):
Right now, probably 95% of allof our clients have seen a
significant traffic increasesince they started with us, but
I still can't give them asix-month plan.
Yeah, yeah, where am I going toget?

Speaker 1 (01:16:59):
ROI.
When am I going to see the ROIon this?
And then, what the funniestthing is, like we have clients
that, oh, boom, boom, boom, boom, bunch of leads, Right, and
then they're like, man, it'sbeen quiet this week and I'm
like, yeah, I just went overthere and turned it off the lead
.
I said that just what, likeyou're still in first position
or top three or whatever it is.
I was like, so, you know, it'sjust kind of like the demand in

(01:17:23):
the marketplace ebbs and flowsand so, but I think, for
everybody listening, if youenjoyed this conversation, Bruce
Clay does Ask Me Anythings,which I've been on a few of
those where he answers questionslike these and and goes into

(01:17:43):
detail.
And certainly you know, aboutthree years ago I was on a lot
of them because there was a lotof stuff going on and and I had
a lot of questions and he did agreat job answering them, like
he did today.
Bruce, you want them to go toyour website, bruceclaycom.
How do you want them to get intouch?

(01:18:04):
People to get in touch with you.
Just really enjoyed having youhere.

Speaker 2 (01:18:10):
Yes, Thank you.
Most people would just go tobruceclaycom.
But if you just wanted training, I have seotrainingcom.
If you just want tools, I haveSEO toolscom.
I have some nice domain names.
Yeah, pre-writer I havepre-writerai and in fact, you
can go to pre-writerai and signup.

(01:18:31):
We'll give you 20 free tokensto try it.
So you know we've got some verypowerful things, but Bruce Clay
would probably be the best way.
You also probably want tofollow me.
There's Bruce Clay and BruceClay Inc on LinkedIn and you
might want to follow me as well.

Speaker 1 (01:18:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:18:52):
We have our blog.
I mean you ought to subscribeto the blog, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:18:57):
No, I'm subscribed everybody, I'm subscribed to his
blogs.
I would just tell you there'sso much going on in SEO.
You need to stay abreast ofwhat's going on.
I think the tools are startingto get a lot more powerful,
giving you a lot more insights.
I would encourage you to gocheck out SEO tools and yeah,

(01:19:18):
bruce, thank you so much forcoming on, really enjoyed it.
Until the next time, everybody,if you're looking to grow your
business with the largest, mostpowerful tool on the planet,
which is the Internet and now,coupled with what AIO is doing,
ai is changing the game yetagain Reach out to EWR for more

(01:19:40):
revenue in your business.
Thanks again, until the nexttime.
Bye-bye for now.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season

Dateline NBC

Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}SEO Expert Bruce Clay Reveals AI Secrets

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season

Dateline NBC

Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang

All Episodes

SEO Expert Bruce Clay Reveals AI Secrets

40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season