The New SEO Blueprint: Ranking In The Era Of AI Search | Harry Sanders

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Is SEO dead? Okay, let me answer that first. >> Harry Sanders is running a multi-million dollar tech company. >> SEO is more alive than ever? And that's all around building digital authority and building topical authority. They're the two key components you need to understand so that you can rank in Google and rank in AI. Digital authority is like how big of a brand you have. So Forbes have just so much digital authority that they can publish a piece on best Valentine's Day restaurants and

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rank. Does Forbes have any business talking about best Valentine's restaurants? Not really. So that's where the second thing comes in. >> Do you need both? >> Yeah, that's the secret. Digital PR is getting authorative links to talk about you. So for Caddy, I got escape.com.au, 9 News, big news publications talking about this luggage brand that just started and we got so much digital authority. If you look at our rankings and our SEO, boom. What changes psychologically when

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someone stops searching and they start asking such a huge shift normally it takes us about 50 days to close a client it took 20 days why when people are searching and asking in AI they feel like it's it's as good the data from our perspective is compared to our referrals people are not doing this right now and it is the biggest cheat code to get digital authority this is the takehome this episode is brought to you by Wick Studio. Here at the Agency podcast, we're building a community and we would love

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for you guys to be a part of it. So, we would love to hear from you. What are you enjoying the most? What would you like to see more of? And what do you think might be missing? Drop a comment. Make sure you subscribe. And now, on with the show. Harry Sanders, welcome to the Agency podcast. >> Dude, actually amped to be here today. The way we would traditionally look at Google, it's kind of like a library where, you know, you searched, you compared, you went down different aisles, you'd pick the book you want,

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you'd flick through it, and then take it home. Whereas the internet of today or Google today feels more like a consultant that hands you the answer and then tells you where to go. >> Is that an accurate frame or would you apply something different? >> Yeah, that is the perfect perfect comparison. And let me explain why. Because when Google started, you had Larry and Sergey, right? And they were sitting in the library looking at books and going, "How can you tell what's a

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good book?" >> Oh, that was the >> how we came up with it. And they went through and they said, "Well, all these books look the same. How do you know they've got the most references?" And that was how page rank, Larry Page, page rank was born and how backlinks worked and how the world of SEO became. So, yeah, that idea of having the librarian fetch the books and now it feels like almost like a computer kiosk at the front. You just key in and it pulls the book for you. That's where we're at.

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>> And and even more, it's like uh it finds the book, it finds the page, and it reads the page to you and then tells you what you should go do with it. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> It's a it's a it's a far cry from where the internet started. So, when you think about the internet and how we tend to interface with it, >> what has been the traditional experience and and what's changing and how are people not quite catching up? >> Well, traditionally we call it the 10

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blue links era, which has been 25 years. >> The 10 blue links. when you search something in Google, you get what? 10 blue links, >> right? I remember. Yes. >> And that's that's kind of how you found things. And you would put in a search and people like we're psychologically trained now how to search. Like if I'm searching for a couch in Melbourne, we had 10 people in our office come along and we said, "Hey, we want you guys to find a couch." Guess what? People search

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couch Melbourne, right? Easy. We're in Melbourne. Easy way to find it. What do people search now? People upload a photo of the room they want a couch. People talk about, you know, they will talk about the kind of guests they have or how many people they have or the type of couch they like. >> Just to just to make sure I'm understanding this. So like let's say my lounge room, I move into a new house. >> I look at the negative space. Snap. >> Yeah. >> Chatty BT, what couch would look good

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here? >> 100%. >> Right. And and that's where the internet is now. >> That's where people are going. And even be beyond that, people just typing in. People don't search couch Melbourne. They search what's the best couch for a living room with like two glass walls and it will come up with a series of recommendations. Now, what's exciting is it does the same thing. It's it's not like it's there's a whole new library of books that it's looking at. It's looking

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at the same books. It's even using the same retrieval methods. It does what we call a fan out query, which sounds super cool, but what a fanout query actually is is just multiple Google searches. So, if you're thinking, well, how does everything get ranked in AI? How does everything come up? with a series of maybe five, six different searches that it's doing and then pulling that information back, >> right? So, I I guess if we wind back the clock and we go to 2006 and you go to Google and you type in

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>> what's a good L-shaped couch for me, it would then show you links and then you would surf the links yourself which might be your uh a good fit and you would come to your own conclusion. >> Whereas now the interface is you throw the problem at it. It looks at a fan query. You said >> fanout query. >> A fan out query. >> Sounds cool. Super cool. >> It sounds really great. So, so it's like doing that process for you. >> Yeah, exactly. And that's we talk about

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this new how people consider when they search, right? Previously, it was those 10 blue links. You might look at the first two. I mean, the famous saying in SEO is if if it's not on the first page of Google, that's the best place to hide a dead body because just no one goes past that first page. You know, first gets 30% then 20% cascading down. Now it doesn't work like that. Now it's a whole different system. And going even deeper than that, if you will for a second, all the way that it was getting those 10

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blue links was just looking at the content, the relevancy of those pages. It was looking at the technical stuff on the website, the page speed, all those kind of things. And then the back links, which we spoke about. So how much authority does this domain have? How AI ranks things is the exact same. It's just a different retrieval system, right? So they're looking still at those 10 blue links. that's still happening behind the scenes like AI surge is still doing that. They're just clicking on

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them for you and then giving you the summary of what those 10 blue links are saying. >> So essentially shrinking the uh time required to get the optimized outcome >> massively. And the problem that's having and why it's changing the way consideration works is I don't know Dan, you might have been a power user. I was that guy that retailers hate or brands hate because I would search a brand and I would add Reddit to the end. Right? I don't know if you did that, but you

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would see all these Reddit threads and you would be able to do all this research cuz you know people on Reddit would be like, "Yeah, this is dog shit." Like, you know, my favorite one was we're doing this comparison for a mattress brand and all the AI was pulling was great mattress but stinks after 6 months and that was coming up and surfacing cuz that's in the 10 blue link. So, previously you might do a search, you might do couch Melbourne. The AI is doing the same thing. It's

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searching couch Melbourne, but it's also searching most popular layouts of couch, pros and cons of different layouts of couch. And then it's going, you know, okay, three-piece couch reviews from King Furniture and it comes back from Reddit and it pulls in that little snippet and gives that to the user. So what's happening is all of a sudden every user is now what? They're all power users. All of them because they get all of that fetched for them through the AI. >> And how do you define power user?

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>> Power users, people that appending or adding Reddit to the end of their search string, right? like that. I mean I mean that's such a basic definition but people that are doing something like that or a site command query 99% of the population has not been doing that >> and they're not doing that now but AI is doing that for them. >> It's almost like you've hired someone with a super high IQ with the ability to research that has a doctrine in ADA engineering to come back and go this is

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the best option >> for sure. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. That's what's happening. If that's true, does the concept of discovery still exist in the same way or is the internet done with rewarding curiosity and crawling? >> Okay, this is controversial. Informationational traffic is dead. and informational. What I mean by that is if you search how high is the Empire State Building or what are the best protein bars to build carbs, those brands that previously had blog posts with information on ah the Empire

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State Building is I don't know several hundred meters tall are now gone. Who's going to click on that, right? But they were already dying and Google kind of put out this update called the helpful content update which surfaced this information into those o uh those overviews a long time ago. So this has been coming for a long time. But that is dead.formational traffic is dead. So people get confused. They go, "Okay, well my traffic's dropped 50%. Is SEO dead?" >> No, non-commercial SEO is dead. But if

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you look at any of the studies coming out and there's some great ones from web flow at the moment talking about the state of SEO and how many commercial transactional things there are, it's still on the rise and Google quarter and quarter report more money that they're making because at the end of the day, this is what websites need to understand or people need to fundamentally change their thinking about. Traffic was not the metric that we should be focused on. It's conversions and conversions aren't

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going anywhere. I think it's interesting you're saying this because the popular opinion right now is that ads no longer work. >> Uh if you look at how people tend to think about ads, were they in your opinion looking primarily at clicks? >> Yes. Okay. People looking at clicks and traffic and and people and I get it. Ads are you know people talk about rented traffic and what is the stats? Ads go up 20% every year. So you can be doing the same thing this year and next year it's

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20% more. I get it. And that's where I think the opportunity of SEO comes in for so many people and brands. >> So then when you separate the two from clicks through to conversion, >> how how do you really se the two and how people should begin to think about them? >> I think people need to think about uh maybe a higher level up. They need to think about their brand, their positioning, and the conversions. So let me ask you this, Dane. If you had, let's say you've got a book business, cuz I'm

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looking at some books in the background here, and you sell books, and your traffic is down 30% yearon year, but your conversions are up 50% year on year. >> What do you care about as a business owner? >> Conversions. >> Conversions, right? You should. So, why are so many business owners, we're talking about, oh, we're missing the traffic. No. If you look at what converts on an e-commerce website, 50% of all your conversions happen on a category page. Not on your homepage, not

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on some blog post, not on some random thing. 50% on your category page. Guess what's next? 25%. Whether that that happens on your product page. So all really is coming to either your category page or your product page. With AI, that's pushing just more to your product page, but it's not changing overall traffic. >> Oh, I see. So you're uh shortening the friction between someone seeking something and getting the answer from >> correct. Do you care if people came on your blog page and never purchased

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anything? Not really. Would it be nice? It'd be nice to have some of that traffic, but that's getting surfaced in AI overview and Google's rewarding you in other ways, which we can go into separately, but that's that's the fundamental shift that's happening right now. >> Okay. If you were to look at the market from Google's perspective, >> what do they care about? Cuz if they're not thinking about your profitability as a business, >> I'm I'm sure that they're thinking

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predominantly about the user experience. But when you put yourself in the mind of Google, what what do you think they're looking for? Well, >> it's funny. We came back from uh London and we were at the Google web master summit where they were talking about this and they had all the engineers. I can tell you exactly what Google's thinking about, right? User experience. Sure, they know they've solved the user experience. What do they care about? How do we keep our ads business running?

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Right? If you look at Alphabet Group, their ads b business is the vast majority of all their revenue. >> And for context, Alphabet owns Google. >> Yes. Correct. And you know, their quarteronquer results are still very strong even with AI mode coming out. There hasn't been that much adoption into AI as previously people might have thought, but they know it's coming. So, they're looking at how they do that. And if you've seen uh anthropics ads for the Super Bowl, [ __ ] on chatbt for

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talking about rolling out ads, and that's the big issue that Google's thinking about right now. How do we do ads in AI without it feeling absolutely rubbish? Like, how do I do an ad for a camera without going, "Oh, what's the best camera lens for this?" And it's like, "Yeah, the best camera lens is this. By the way, you should buy a Red Bull energy drink." And you're like, "What the hell?" So, that's the big problem that, you know, I say a million

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dollar question, that's a trillion dollar question that these guys are thinking about right now. Now you spend a lot of time with u companies like Google and just I want to I guess edify your position. You have a team of 149 people thereabouts. >> You've been in the game doing SEO and looking at algorithms and meta ads and so such for 10 years and you have uh established your company globally. So you're in the UK, you're in the US. >> When when you're looking at the global

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market and then you're looking back at Google, what what's what are you seeing on the playing field? What what are you seeing them do? uh what are you seeing them focus on and when you talk to their engineers what what are they putting a lot of energy into? >> Well, so for context, Studio Hawk just does SEO, right? So that's our like cut through our whole messaging is just SEO. No paid ads and yes, we're very informed and Google hasn't been our buddy for maybe eight years because we don't give

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them any money, right? But the past two years, guess who wants to be buddy buddy because all of a sudden it's about the search experience. is about how do we overcome this AI mode stuff because again there are no ads currently in AI and that's why there is such a huge opportunity just like there is in the personal brand space there's a huge opportunity in the SEO space for people to do a land grab while people aren't investing and while there's no real advertising you you're getting this blue

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ocean but what's Google's approach to it again it comes back to their engineers are all thinking about how do we continue to beat chatbt uh and you can see Gemini crushing it with the models and then they're like, "Oh my god, Claude's got this great new model. How do we combat with that and what I think we're going to see is what AI engine is built for what." So Google wants to own search that is their business. Claude might end up owning code. I don't know. I mean, you know, we'll see how it plays

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out. And ChatVT is trying to figure out, do we own business process? So, I think the engineers at Google outside of monetizing this thing are thinking, what is our goal and where's our USP here? If you want to grow your agency, you need more than just a website builder. You need Rick Studio, the all-in-one platform that's built to help you scale. Design smarter in a hyperflexible, responsive editor, cherry-picking whatever clients need from pre-built UI elements and templates. Deliver robust

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collaborations seamless. Do your agency's best work at scale. Build your next project on Wix Studio. What do you think um Google's true USP is? And do you think it's going to survive the next era of business? Google's USP is their data, their infrastructure, and their search. And when Chadd first came out and Bing had a real go at Do you remember that Bing went from 3 to 5% market share which is [ __ ] huge by the way because they've moved 0.1 down in like the whole time Google's been around. So that was huge

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news unfortunately. Sorry Bing guys they've moved back but that was a big thing for a point. Um I think when it first came out I thought Microsoft had a serious shot of winning and and maybe being 50/50 to Google. I think if you look at what's going on in the market now, Google are just showing that they have the best tech, the best engineers, the best product. I mean, back when Bard was a thing, do you remember Google released Bard and that was terrible. Everyone was like, man, these guys are done.

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>> But they have the infrastructure that CHP is trying to build, they already have that. They have way more data than CHBT have. >> I don't have a horse in the race. It doesn't matter to me if CHBT is a leading search provider or if it's, you know, Dane Walker's new system. To me, it's all the same thing. But I do think Google are just going to decimate in that space just because they have everything. >> They they do have a brand advantage. I think that when you look at a company

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that has had staying power for 25 years and has knocked out hundreds and hundreds of competitors over that period. >> They're not new to having, you know, their claws in the game. >> I I do think that their ability to have owned for over two decades the notion of search is definitely in their wheelhouse. If you were to think about there being a threat, I I would imagine it's um their ability to have the largest war chest of data. >> Yeah, totally. Totally. >> Um okay, now I want to understand when

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people are interfacing with the internet and looking for solutions to things, what changes psychologically when someone stops searching and they start asking? cuz >> I realized recently I've stopped looking or with with the idea of to search and I started looking at things with I'm going to ask and you're going to tell me what I should look for. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> That is such a huge shift because it changed it breaks everything. I mean I don't believe in this idea of like the

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marketing funnel. There's no real funnel. It's just kind of everything's everywhere. But this new idea of how we do consideration which is like in the journey we kind of consider our options is completely different. So, I'll use Studio Hawk as an example because I can talk about our data very freely. We previously got 40% of all our work through our SEO. Great. Happy days. That's awesome. Now, it's about 35% but 10% on top of that is AI search, right? So, brands like we had you foods come

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through last month, which is a big company over here that found us through AI search and that path to close. So normally it takes us about 50 days to close a client at those big enterprise devil uh deal level it took 20 days. Why? Because when people are searching and asking in AI they feel like it's it's as good the data from our perspective is compared to our referrals. Like if you refer me someone Dane that closes in 20 days you foods came through AI search that closed in 20 days. the same close time as a referral

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cuz people trust it or there's so much implicit trust in how people will accept that recommendation cuz again you said it perfectly before it feels like there's a data analyst that you've employed to find this person for you when you think about how a lot of people are starting to use AI they speak about the platform they prefer to use with so much admiration and it it almost looks like people are beginning to build a parasocial relationship So if you're hanging out with your back and forth between personal stuff,

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fitness stuff, life, then you're asking it, "What's a great SEO agency?" And it says, "This one, here's why." You're saying that's shrinking the time to make a decision because they trust the platform. >> It's the IKEA effect. >> The IKEA effect. >> It's the IKEA effect. When you go to IKEA and you buy furniture and you assemble it yourself, you love that [ __ ] way more than the [ __ ] you buy. When you build something in AI or when you ask AI

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something, it comes back with something you're like, "Oh man, that's so was just for me. I made that. I made that." Yeah. >> And that is so freaking powerful. Right. So that's what I think it is. It's the IKEA effect. You trust that way more than you trust the Google links, which if you you would know now the exact same thing. It's the same data. It's pulling the same thing. It's the same metrics. It's just pulling it a different way. >> But it's yours. You made it. The IKEA

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effect. Now, what's the advantage here if someone's thinking to themselves, great, this is great information. What do I do about it? How is this advantageous to me? Yeah. So, I'm going to I'm going to give you like good news, bad news here. So, the good news is there is massive opportunity. The bad news is like I call them like fun fluencers. All these SEO funuencers are like everything's super easy. You can do this tomorrow. because it uses the same ranking factors as SEO. Fundamentally,

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there's no shortcut. People like, "Oh, you can like rank in AI super quick, super super quick." No, that's [ __ ] I'm sorry to tell you. I'm sorry to rent your parade, but there is so much opportunity to get ranking fast because I think people have really focused and dialed in on what ranks a page in Google now. And that methodology shifted so much over the past 10 years so that you can rank in Google and rank in AI. It's the same thing. And that's all around building digital authority and building

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topical authority. They're the two key components you need to understand if you want to clock it. And it's like it's like anything. It's going to take you 6 months. But the amount of free traffic that you can bring into a business and what private equity funds are looking at now in terms of you can demonstrate you're getting free traffic from AI or from SEO compared to paying for traffic. They're the companies that are getting crazy multiples. I I like what you're saying here about

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topical versus digital. Can can you help me understand that a little better? >> Okay. So, digital authority is like how big of a brand you have. So, let's use Forbes. So, Forbes have just so much digital authority that they can probably publish a piece on best Valentine's Day restaurants and rank. Now, does Forbes have any business talking about best Valentine's restaurants? Probably not. >> Not really. It's not in their topical authority. So, that's where the second

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thing comes in. topical authority and that's to say okay well you know how bad would it be if the internet was all run by Amazon and Forbes because they just have so much digital authority >> so let's create this topical authority and so we can shoe them in their little horn so Amazon you guys can own ecom and retail space and like a lot of products and Forbes you can own a lot of business discussions but we're going to give the agency podcast space to talk about these things and they might not have as much

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digital authority or they're building digital authority but they have a lot more topical authority and That's where you can own and that's where you it's really about niching down and owning your niche. >> Is it Google that's looking at the material this way and categorically it's saying okay this ind industry or this institution these guys are the big dogs therefore they have the most weight to throw around. Um so they're going to have priority just because of sheer

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volume or mass or power or budget. And then over there, we're gonna allow the little guy to have their chance in the sun to hit a topic and be niche about it. >> Yeah, it's all about again, it's that mix between page rank, the authority of a page or a business versus the authority about a topic. So, if Amazon publish a piece about SEO, I'm going to outrank them because I have more authority, topical authority in SEO and enough digital authority to back it up. But if I had no digital authority, I

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just started Studio Hook tomorrow and I could be and this is where people go wrong. They have so much awesome topical authority, so much awesome content that they're publishing with such a great unique perspective. And I can talk about what makes good topical authority later, but they don't have any digital authority. So even though they have great topical authority, they have absolutely no trust behind them. And Google's rather would rather show Amazon for SEO rather than some no-name website

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with topical authority because Google again can't verify topical authority the same way it can verify digital authority. >> Therefore, do you need both? >> Yeah, that's the secret. The third is technical. Just how Google crawls and can understand your page. It's fun it's fundamentally important to understand because if Google can't understand or crawl your page, it doesn't go into search results. M >> so that's like if you're blocking Google crawling or if the website's like a

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mess. There's just like there's no structure between different things. We call that information architecture. Super cool sounding word. We love words that make us sound fancy. Information architecture just means like cleanly laid out, right? So you've got maybe for brand called Kip and Co. Um, they've got this great menu where got kids, different quilt types, different like and everything's got its little place and the categories go down and down and cascade. That's good side architecture.

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That's that third thing that Google looks at that everything just comes together nicely. But that alone is where people go wrong because they try and build out great technical SEO. They try and get, you know, they'll get a page speed of a 100red out of 100 and be like, I've got awesome SEO. Why am I not ranking? It's like, no, dude. You've got one part of SEO that's good. And then what follows, Dane, is what kills me. People like, "Oh, dude, I've only got time to focus on one of these. What do I

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focus on?" You might be thinking this at home. Okay, I've got a three-legged stool that I'm sitting on. I have to cut off one leg. What leg do I cut off? You need all of them. I'm sorry to say. So, you need to build digital authority, topical authority, and your side architecture. The good news is you can tick off the side architecture. You can just do that. Done. And then your topical authority is just about developing content and digital authority you can build over time. You don't have

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to do it's not like one and done solved with this thing. But yeah, you do need to move resources between the different pillars. >> Okay, I want to break it down a little further. When you think about a to-do list or a checklist for digital authority, uh, and then topical authority, then technical authority. What are the primary things someone needs to have in each of them? >> Here are my cheat codes for you guys right now. All right, this is the take-home. So, I've got a separate brand

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called Caddy. I don't really talk about it too much. It's a luggage brand. We retail in Meer and it's doing really well. That's a new brand, right? And it sucks when you start a new brand because you've got no digital authority, no topical authority, blah blah blah blah blah. And people like, it's so hard to get back links. And it is. I sympathize with you. Here is your takehome. We call it digital PR. And we have a protocol we call the RAIDs protocol. I play too many video games. I'm sorry. All my names are

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video game names and raids protocol is basically so you've got recon recon let me explain what digital PR is first digital PR is getting authorative links to talk about you so for Caddy I got escape.com.au A you nine news big news publications talking about this travel brand, this luggage brand that just started >> and then so these other big brands pointing back at your brand. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> Is that digital authority? >> Digital authority, man. Because they're

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in the travel space. I'm in the travel space. Google sees them and goes, "Wow, these big travel websites are talking about this website. I'm going to assume they're in the travel space because everyone's talking about them in the travel space and these big brands are talking about them. So, they clearly have some authority. Now, the problem is people in PR world are like, "Oh, great. We'll send them a suitcase and they'll write a review on us." No, doesn't work.

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There's like a quarter as many journalists as they were pre-COVID. They're freaking busy. They don't want to talk to you. They don't want to do lunch with you. Like all this PR [ __ ] that people talk about like, "Oh, take them out to lunch." Dude, that how you get blacklisted instantly. You need to find a story for them. and I've got a new color suitcase is not a story we do. So the first stage of this raids protocol is recon like what stories are they writing? So we saw that there was a

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lot of stories that they wanted to write or they had some stories about airlines and travel. Now we're a suitcase company. We're not an airline. Why would we want to be affiliated? Just being affiliated with the travel thing. So what an article would look like is is something like new data from caddy luggage suggests and then the article below. So we came up and we ideulated which is the analyze part and we analyzed the data sets and super easy you could do this at home. We came up with the idea people love like people

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hate sorry people hate hidden fees in airlines. So we did an article what airlines had the most hidden fees right? How do we get that data? It sounds sophisticated. We went and booked a trip on all these different airlines and and looked at like expanded the section, the add-ons and everything to see how much everything would cost if I was my weight, my luggage was overweight or I wanted a meal on the flight. You know, these are the hidden fees. And we put that in a spreadsheet. We packaged it up. Um the infiltrate was really get

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getting the list of all the journalists and you can find plenty of those lists online. Not shotgunning approaching it, not just emailing everyone, but finding the jouers that have written about travel before. Sending them an email. That's the deploy part, which is crafting up a really succinct email with the data, how you got the data, and then the S is just scoring it. We got 60 links from massive publications talking about airlines with the most hidden fees and worst times to fly. None of that is

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our data. We don't have that data. We just went and created a story, created a narrative and we got so much digital authority. If you look at our rankings and our SEO boom, right? We started, we were closing and we were coming up in AI. We were getting, you know, half a dozen orders a day just off the back of that. And it's so easy. Guess how much that cost me? 100 bucks to just like do and a bit of manpower. People are not doing this right now. And it is the biggest cheat code to get digital authority. And just real quick,

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the acronym RAID DS, recon, >> analyze, infiltrate, deploy, score. >> Okay. Is that somewhere that people can get their hands on? >> Yeah. Yeah. I've got a a YouTube video breaking that down. Uh we've got a bunch of handouts we can give out. It's all free. Do it yourself. >> Yeah. Okay. Now, if we if we think about how people can start to use that process to get attention on these different platforms, what's the difference between getting attention through Google search

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and showing up on AI search? This again, controversial, they're very much the same thing. If you're doing if you're building digital authority for SEO, you're building digital authority for AI. Remember coming back to how AI search retrieves the people the websites or the entities we call them to put in its index. If it's a query like a fan out query like a commercial query or comparison theory it's doing effectively a Google search or a Bing search but some kind of search to then get the

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websites that it looks at and that's all dependent whether it's Bing or Google or CHBT or Claude or whatever duck.go whatever the hell you use is all dependent on some variation of digital authority and topical authority. So there is no real difference fundamentally. >> So when you hear the notion that SEO is dead, what's your thoughts? >> I mean the acronym maybe like you know SEO, search engine optimization, but even then it's still a search engine. It's a different kind of search engine.

00:31:03

I mean people are saying like GEO I mean GEO is just a stupid geol location. Why are we doing GEO? Like AEO I spent five grand registering answeration.com and now I'm like why did I do that? Such a stupid acronym. But if anyone wants that. Um >> I I liken it to how they rebranded UFO to UAP. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> Right. It just had so much baggage. Totally. >> They had to kind of >> they had to change it. >> They had to change it. >> So I don't know. Will they rebrand it?

00:31:28

Is SEO dead? Okay. Let me answer that first. No. SEO is more alive than ever, right? There is more opportunity to rank in AI search where there's no ads which is fundamentally based on SEO than there ever was. And it's easier, I think, to have good digital authority and good topical authority nowadays to have a shot to do that. However, is the acronym SEO right? I don't know. I think we keep it just cuz are we really going to like redo everything? And it just confuses people as people are already confused.

00:31:58

People like, "Oh, I got to do AEO now." It's like, "No, dude. That's SEO. It's just called something else." >> Okay. When you when you think about the concept of SEO, people typically think of keyword rankings. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> So, how would you define the old way of thinking about SEO and the new way of thinking about SEO? >> So, keywords bye-bye. Keywords not not really think maybe good for like getting look now I'm just splitting heads. Keywords bye-bye.

00:32:27

Okay. Um topics thumbs up. We like topics now because if your like keywords, imagine like uh SEO Melbourne or SEO agency Melbourne, they were two different keywords with different results. They still are, but if you rank for SEO Melbourne or SEO agency in Melbourne, that's the same topic and that's how you should be thinking about it. Okay. So, so keywords are smaller gates and topics are big >> like gates. >> Exactly. A good reference. >> That's a good way of looking at it. And

00:32:56

and the way to tell if something's seen as a topic is or how big that is. So if you search digital marketing, digital marketing agency and you search SEO agency, if the results are completely different, Google sees those as different topics. So just because you have a lot of topical authority as a digital marketing agency doesn't give you the topical authority to rank for SEO agency. So that's how you should be thinking about it. Now it's not keywords. It's not like SEO Melbourne,

00:33:21

best SEO in Melbourne. You these are all different keywords. They should be thought of as topics. Okay. >> And uh the biggest thing in this space at the moment is out of Silicon Valley there's you might have seen it all these tools like Peak and they're all rank tracking tools but for AI visibility. Big prediction here. Those are fine for now. They work for now but they're basically dead on arrival because everyone's trying to track AI keywords like they track SEO keywords.

00:33:52

>> But fundamentally we're not tracking keywords anymore. We were tracking topics and how topics work in AI are so deeply personalized to you that a rank tracker can't possibly get an idea. And even just putting in the same prompt, there was some study that came out that only 40% of the prompts are the same the second time, maybe you've noticed it. If you put a prompt in and open a new chatbt and put that same prompt in, you get a different result. It's like because it's all different based on

00:34:19

different searches. You can't consistently track those rankings. When when you think about the idea of keywords, why is that now an archaic way of thinking? >> Even now in just Google, it's all about topics. Okay, >> the idea of keywords is is just very redundant. It's good for tracking. It's what we call in the industry directionally accurate, which is again cool term, but basically means if all keywords go up, things good. All keywords go down, things bad, right? Directionally accurate. Um, but if one

00:34:50

keyword's moving around, I mean, it's like the stock market. It's like equate topics like the S&P 500 >> and keywords like random penny stocks, like they're going to move up, down, who who knows where. It doesn't matter. Don't look at those. Look at the overall topic and optimize for that. >> I remember when we originally worked with an SEO agency many years ago that the articles they were writing on our website were engineered around keywords. >> Yeah. So the bulk of the actual blog

00:35:17

itself was keywords and fluff in between. >> Yeah. >> How has that changed now with how SEO needs to be thought about written now? >> Yeah. I mean even 5 years ago to be honest that's such shitty SEO. Like all all that stuff has been dead for eight years. Good SEO is good user experience. It's good topical authority. It's and when we talk about topical authority, we talk about having your own unique experience perspective. >> What does that attach to real life

00:35:43

experience? How how do we actually do that? >> Yeah. So, Google's got the acronym they call E A or E A cuz they like to add E A experience, expertise, authority, and trust. Now, that trust, digital authority. Let's not worry about that. Authority also pretty much digital authority. It's it's all about like having reviews, all that kind of stuff. The expertise and experience is what we're calling talking about here. We need to demonstrate our expertise and our experience. They're very adamant on

00:36:14

that experience part because expertise is just automated with AI now. Anyone can just I can seem like I know a lot about fashion by just writing and getting AI to help me write something. But I don't actually have any experience. So that content becomes poor quality content until I augment that with my unique experience, perspective, data, whatever it is. And that's what we're encouraging everyone to do now to make sure to be a topical authority. You need to actually be a topical authority.

00:36:40

You need to have data or expertise or like sorry experience that you can share. That's crushing. >> I was reading an article this morning. Uh I've signed up to Prof's newsletter >> and it was quite interesting how he constructed his EDM. >> There would be news press topic. Uh a bit of a consensus data breakdown. Okay, Warner Brothers and Netflix are emerging. The government are cracking down on them. Underneath that, it showed stats and statistics. underneath that it

00:37:08

said my perspective and it had Prof's opinion. So to me, I'm like, okay, huge hot topic. Yeah. That everyone's talking about >> uh backed up with data, their own data that they'd created. Yeah. >> Backed up with their opinion. And I thought to myself, Prof is incredibly intelligent. What exactly is he constructing there, >> dude? That shit's dialed in. Like that that is ranking. That is what AI wants to see. Okay. >> Why? Because it's got unique perspective, unique data. They can't not

00:37:36

site that. So if you ask anything related to that topic to AI, I bet you it's going to pull that data and send you there as a citation. >> Wait, so you're saying that if you go on the internet and you create your own data, yeah, >> your own opinion and you attach it to a big topic, Google cannot help but >> citate that. >> Yeah, Google wants that. They want to they want to send traffic there. They want to site that they they and that builds even if they don't send any

00:37:59

traffic because it's someformational query and you know what, people get the answer they want and they they never go to your website. That's sad. but they still give you topical authority. Right now, bear with me why that's a good thing for a second cuz this this can confuse the [ __ ] out of people. But because you've now Google sees you as having that topical authority, when you have terms that actually sell, like I don't know what this guy does specifically, but let's say he coaches

00:38:23

clients. When someone searches for e-commerce coach or something or whatever the hell he does, Google is going to send them to him because he's demonstrated topical authority. So, so with Google's EAT, experience, expertise, authoritiveness, and trustworthiness, what I've just shared with you is that his example of showing a expertise. >> Yeah. >> B sharing his own perspective and experience. >> What about authoriveness and trustworthiness? How do how do we unlock those two things?

00:38:54

>> That comes down to how much how many people are talking about him, linking to him, that kind of stuff. And that's where raids like the digital PR is that hack. And if he did that and if he had a website and he he's got the topical authority nailed. If he just nailed the digital authority part, then he would be ranking for everything. And that's what I'm talking about. A lot of people will get one of them, but it's nailing all of them that makes you rank. Like Studio

00:39:17

Hook, for instance, good example, we rank for SEO Melbourne, SEO City. Some of the hardest terms to rank for, practice what you preach, right? And um a lot of that comes down to we have a lot of digital authority. We have a lot of awards in the industry linking to us. A lot of industry pieces, research papers. We write a ton of stuff, not just because we're nice people. We like to share stuff. We do like to do that, but it gives us insane links and digital authority. On the flip side, those same

00:39:44

assets are all about SEO. So, they give us insane topical authority because you can download our AI white paper, you can download our, you know, all sorts of content that we have and we publish blog posts and everything like that. That is why we rank. It's not rocket science. I it it's actually fundamentally very very simple. We just mix those two things very nicely. And because we only really sit in that SEO lane. We know our niche. We rank for everything to do with SEO. Like do we rank for paid or anything

00:40:11

else? No, we don't do those things. >> But everything in our niche we own because digital authority, topical authority. >> Now, I'd like to break it down one one. Okay. Uh so let's say someone's listening to this and they're like, I've never done SEO. I don't even know how to frame this. Let's say they have a website, they have a keyboard, uh they have a business, and some experience. What are the fundamental steps? Okay, step one through 210. >> We're going to speedrun this,

00:40:41

>> right? I'm going to divide this into two categories. Sorry if you're not in these categories. Ecom, service. >> Let's just keep it there. >> All right, super simple. Ecom, what we're going to do is we're going to find this beautiful site architecture, right? You want to copy someone, Bondi Sands. Go to their website, copy the way they've structured that menu. At the top, it segments everything by product type, by category, and then it has like level two segments under that.

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>> Okay. So, this is an ecom store where you're you're looking at how they structure the library of products. >> Yeah. First thing, let's get the structure right. Like that is like our fundamental. Nothing's going to work if it's not structured right. So, don't worry about Yoast. Don't worry about whoever told you you got to follow these 30 technical SEO checklist. Forget all that stuff. If Google can crawl your website, let's fix the architecture cuz

00:41:28

that's the big thing, right? Technical SEO will be dead in 3 years. Sorry, not sorry. >> So, so one distinction is uh go and find a big brand who's crushing. Yeah. >> Look at their architecture, which is how they lay out their menus. >> Yeah. So, don't make the mistake of copying like a Nike or something cuz they've just got so much digital authority that what they do doesn't really matter until the latest update. But let's not open that can of worms. Um, so copy someone like Bondi Sance.

00:41:53

mediumsiz now becoming large, growing super fast, crushing SEO. Just look at how they've laid out their website. Look at their category page. Look at the they have different links to other category pages on their category page. Look at the block of text they have on their category page. Do all those things >> and that's technical authority. >> Yeah, that's just like that's the basic fundamental stuff. You could say that's technical SEO. >> And if Google's crawling it with AI

00:42:15

bots, it just knows how to navigate because >> it knows exactly what to do. Like if you have a category page but there's no text on it or no internal links and there's just a list of products. >> Y >> it's confusing. What is this? What is it? Like I don't actually know. And so having that snippet of text and having those internal links. >> Yeah. We did this for a billion dollar brand in Australia. 30% uplift in Office Works was a brand. 30% uplift in revenue

00:42:38

from organic just from adding category pages with internal links. Really? Boom. That one's free. Go do that. If you message me and you haven't done that, I'm going to tell you go back to step one. Get that right. Service business. All right, we're coming back to you guys. Have an awesome about page. Have your team members on your about page if you can. Uh if it's just you, don't like make fake profiles, but just talk about the company, whatever. When did it start? What do you guys do? What are you

00:43:03

known for? Any industry awards or anything like that that helps create that trust or authority is huge. Could be >> Why would you Why would you put your team on your about page? Why is that important? >> It just shows that you're a bigger organization. >> Oh, you're communicating aware established. Totally. You're communicating that and Google looks at that in terms of coming back to authorship and trust and like wow this is a real company with real people yada yada yada. Don't fake it because if they

00:43:26

can tell and they probably will be able to that's just going to hurt you. You don't need to do cheap tactic. This is very easy to do naturally. Um so have that on your about page please. Case studies case studies case studies. I want you to sit down for the next month and write 10 to 20 case studies >> a month >> just to start just a found foundation. Sorry, not a month. I'm not going to kill you. I'm not going to do you dirty like that. But 10 to 20 case studies using stats, using what happened, as

00:43:52

much as you can give. And same as personal branding, don't sit there and you like hopefully you might have just listened to Sam's episode. Don't sit there and go, I don't want to give this away. Give it all away. Give it all away. The data, what you did, everything. Cuz you know, if someone in a similar industry sees that, or better yet, what I'm going to do for you, what's going to happen in AI, someone is going to put their exact problem they're going to have and guess what page is

00:44:14

going to come back? >> Wow. your case study. And so when I'm searching for that accountant that works with agencies and I see this a this accountant with that case study, guess who I'm freaking hiring? Those guys. So please, please, please, one month case studies reps. And then only then do you start working on blog once a month. Don't do anything crazy. Please do not spin out 10 chat GBT blog articles because your mate who knows a guy who's an SEO guy said that's the latest and

00:44:41

greatest thing to do. Make sure those blog art you can use AI to write them. Don't get me wrong, you can use AI, but edit them. Make sure it's you. Make sure it's your brand. Make sure it's got that unique perspective we spoke about. That's your fundamental step one. Okay, that sounds like a lot, but remember we spoke about two different categories. >> Step two, digital authority. Digital authority. >> Okay, so just to recap, so those two were technical authority for both

00:45:06

service and ecom. Is there any other little bits and bobs people can include in those to uh to to make sure that they're rinsing every inch of credibility they they can get? >> I mean, there's tons, man. We could talk about another two hours about this. Like, >> maybe what's one or two more? >> Okay, so one or two more for ecom. Um, there's all sorts of tricks you can do around discontinued products and and 301ing those back to a category page so you don't lose any of that juice. That

00:45:33

should be fundamentally what you're doing. >> Well, okay. One question I have then. Let's say it's an ecom brand and they have a product. How much information should they have about their product on their product description page? >> That's a better one actually. That's a much better one. So on a product page is a great a great hack. You can have you should honestly have a ton of content on your product page and it should be hidden under FAQ kind of sections. You

00:45:58

should have an FAQ for everything. one great hack, go through all your call logs, any question a customer's ever asked you in your DMs or just questions you might have and put that in an FAQ section on your product page addressing all of that cuz a person's probably never going to go through all those FAQ pages and you don't want it like content just spewed all over the web page, right? But AI will go through those and what it's going to do is going to pull out all those common questions that you

00:46:22

might get about a product like does this work with a Nintendo Switch? I don't know, maybe like put it in there and it's going to pull you as a source because good chance other competitors especially this is great for small businesses because a big business just doesn't have the time to do this. As a small business, you can really own those really longtail searches or queries that people are asking by just having a lot of FAQs on a page that answer those questions. >> Okay, so that's step one, service based

00:46:49

ecom. What's step two? >> Step two is about building that digital authority, right? So now sit down, follow that rage protocol. What's the idea you have? And remember this is so important. What would a journalist want to write want to write about? Not what do you want to write about? >> Oh, this is important because when you think about what you want to write, you want to spru and sell your product. >> Yeah. >> Think from a journalist perspective, they're they're writing more for the

00:47:14

consumer to feel something. >> No, you're so on the market. Have you ven diagrammed this thing of what um brands want to write about and what journalists want to write about? It's like a little slither, right? It's this tiny little thing. >> Why is that? >> Well, because I've got a luggage brand. We got a new Weekender coming out, which is awesome. I'm excited about that. I want to sell that. Goodbye. My new Weekender. It's awesome, right? >> That is not a PR story. Like, it's like

00:47:38

it's just not. We're not a big enough brand where someone would be remotely halfinested in that. to throw your aspirations out the window uh and suspend your own opinion for a moment and then totally >> what is the what does the world want to talk about right now? >> They want to talk about hidden fees on airlines. What does that have to do with me? >> Not much. >> Where can I go to ideulate what those topics might be? >> You can use AI to help you. So you can

00:48:00

say like I'm in digital PR. Help me ideulate some topics based on my business that a journalist might want to write about. Y it's an easy prompt. Okay. Um, I could put together like a custom GPT um, super easily for people um, based on like our SOPs and stuff. You know what? I'm going to do that. I'm going to give you away give that away to people. So, that's >> that's recon. >> Yeah, that's recon. That's all the ideation stuff. >> Okay, that's recon and then moving to a

00:48:24

>> Yeah. Then you're just analyzing what's what's like coming up with that data. But that's honestly you could you could just pull that in. Just think about what a journalist is going to want to cover. That's fundamentally what I want you to do. and you will come up with a way to get that data or come up with that could be an expert opinion very similar to the topical authority stuff we're talking about Dane it's just something unique if you pitch a journal with some AI

00:48:44

generated article >> that goes straight in the trash pile like what is something unique that you can talk about we can talk about travel and we've got caddy and all it's going to be it's not going to be an article about caddy luggage it doesn't need to be it's just going to say data from caddy >> suggests or tells us now this that's all it is like >> so you're thinking about that clickbaity type stuff that says How to make 10,000 bucks while you're on a holiday. Like

00:49:07

what? Click. >> Yeah. >> So, great ones you can do. Trendjacking. We worked with a brand actually. You might know this way. It's like Yeah. Jumping on a trend. So, do you do you remember when Banksy's art was shredded in half? >> Yeah. >> Okay. That was a great one. Do you remember >> was that the one with the painting on the uh wall went through a paper shredder? >> Yes. >> Did you read anything about articles saying that the art was now worth double?

00:49:27

>> Yes. >> That was what we did, right? Was that art worth double? I will confess probably not. Um That was you? >> Yeah. We worked with a a brand, an art appraiser in the UK. >> I remember reading this article. >> Yeah. Yeah. That's digital PR, man. That's digital PR. And we said, could you say that this art is double? I was like, well, it's possible. >> Great. Boom. >> This art is doubled. Yeah. >> So, that's like, you know, a member from

00:49:53

our team like worked on that. So, >> it's uh awesome. Like what you really got to thinking like a journalist. >> Yeah. You just got to think like a journalist about what you can come up with. And then all it said is new data from this um art appraiser suggested this. The article was not about, oh my god, this art appraiser is so incredible. They're the best in the business. They've won seven awards. No one cares. No one cares. >> But how can you associate something? Um,

00:50:17

you know, can you do something with Bad Bunny talking about the halftime show? A lot a very common one I see jewelry companies do is, oh my god, Katy Perry's wearing this new ring worth $2 billion, right? Is it actually worth that? No. But they've got someone in their team that's kind of appraised it and then they've got that link. You'll see this now you know about this. I've I've kind of exposed all underbelly. I'm sorry. But like now that you know this, you're

00:50:39

going to see it everywhere. And the more you absorb it and the more you see it, the more you'll have ideas for your brand. And don't come to me telling me your brand's boring. I worked with this brand. It's one of my favorite stories, guy called Magic Mike, we'll call him, for the purpose of this. He um he's an accountant, right? and he was really struggling to rank for accounting terms and we said to him, "Hey, you're not going to rank for accountant Melbourne.

00:51:02

You're not going to rank for accountant. It's not going to happen. You just don't have the digital authority and even if we were to try and build it, it's just going to take years. It's just the ROI is not there." >> And we said to you, "This is a bit left field, but would you rank for like Only Fans accountant?" Because that's something you could rank for if you built topical authority there. >> Yeah. and he's like sure I rank for Only Fans accountant. He is now doing

00:51:27

millions millions and millions of dollars in revenue by being a topical authority in Australia and publishes all sorts of content on only fans accounting finances and magic Mike. You can imagine this guy's an accountant. He's in my office. He's like, "Oh my god, I've got the best job ever." Like so and so I'm working with I'm doing all this stuff and he just created great content pieces around that and got journals to talk about it. Why? because it was an interesting topic.

00:51:52

>> It is interesting and talk about it. >> I can imagine he has the weirdest Zoom calls >> and he won the award in Australia for best SEO campaign out of every company in the in Australia that was doing crazy SEO. He won because it was such good topical authority, great digital authority just just doing like outreach to journers saying, "Hey, have you ever thought about accounting for Only Fans? 40% of Only Fans accountants aren't going to declare aren't going to claim

00:52:13

tax this year?" Like that's a story. Jonas are like, "Oh my god, that's funny." But if I was talking about um here's 10 tips for accounting, how many journalers you think are gonna pick up that story, Dan? >> No one. Because I I'm just thinking the amount of times I've had conversations with SEO type characters, >> they're usually mechanical engineer oriented with with how they're thinking about things. You're thinking about zeitgeist, pop culture. Yeah.

00:52:39

>> Hot topics, trending topics. >> That world is changing. Yeah. So look, digital PR, we have different people that do that. We have a digital PR team. They're more ingrained in that. But we we still try and get SEO people to think creatively with these campaigns. Okay. Like how do you become a topical authority on something? >> Okay. Do you want to do rapid fire real quick? I want to see what you're thinking. >> Oh god. >> Uh I'm a plumber in Adelaide.

00:53:01

>> Okay. What uh what kind of toilets get clogged the most often? >> Okay. Uh I'm a reptile tank installer in Sydney. >> Five scariest reptiles that most people don't even know about. >> Whoa. Okay. Uh, I am a florist uh that does uh same day delivery. >> Okay. Definitely something about Valentine's Day. We're going to tie in here. We're going to say um why 60. Like you could find some data about breakups on Valentine's Day and do a data piece around that and try and

00:53:33

weave in flowers somehow. >> You're a content machine. Okay. Uh I'm a dog washer and I I live in a rural country town. >> Worst dogs that we've had ever had to wash. Like literally, it doesn't matter where you are. Again, the rural part, the city, doesn't matter. The more broad you can go, like if you can do a piece, if you can go to a journalist and be like, "Why poodles are the most piece of [ __ ] dog to watch?" Like journalists like they get that in their inbox and

00:53:59

they're like, >> "What is this cooker on about?" And they will click that and if your data is good enough and your expert opinion is good enough, >> they're going to run that in an article in like the dog section. As long as this is the right journal and you've you've pitched the right journals. Yeah. Because someone else is going to see that and be like, I have a poodle or my friend has a poodle and I'm going to click that article. Why is the poodle so

00:54:19

bad to watch? Watch. >> Okay. Uh let's say I have a startup uh fashion label I'm trying to build from scratch. >> Okay. Startup fashion label. I'm looking at what are the big trends happening at the moment and I'm going from contrarian take. So why I mean I would love to name a single fashion trend that's happening right now. I'm just going to make one up. Why baggie pants? New data reveals that baggy pants are the biggest underdog in 2026. >> Okay. >> And then you can get keyword data or

00:54:49

search volume or Google trend data about baggy pants. >> Okay. But your point is we didn't prep any of this. The point is you you need to have that snappy quick hot take. >> Notice none of those were about the brand. None of those was about like why you're the best dog washer, why you're the best skincare brand. Like not even about new product releases. It's about an industry or a topic. Could be travel, could be skincare, could be beauty, something adjacent to what you do and

00:55:14

some data you could share about that. >> Why is that the case? Because I I know this people have that immediate urge to I got to sell my product. >> This is not the place to sell your product. This is this is three steps away. What we're trying to do is build digital authority so that Google and search engines and AI engines can then send us the traffic we want to sell later. We're probably not going to sell any product through these articles that we get. None. I mean, I think for Caddy,

00:55:42

we sold two. And I was so surprised. I was like, how did someone read that article and go, "Oh, I'm going to buy a suitcase after reading about hidden fees on airlines." >> But that's not the purpose of that whatsoever. Again, don't try and double dip here. This is to build up your digital authority. If you try and double dip, it's like, "Oh, this is a great brand piece and digital authority." Well, no. It's not the same thing. Don't double dip and you'll succeed. If you

00:56:04

try double dipping, you're not going to get anything. >> It's like a checkpoint in a video game. You can't just go straight from the start to fighting Bowser. You gota >> got to earn your stripes. You leave that first checkpoint. >> Exactly. This is not the end goal. Remember that. This is not the end goal. This is a step on that journey. >> Okay. If you were to break them down in checkpoints, in a sequence, is there a sequence or are they all happening simultaneously?

00:56:25

>> Coming back to the whole process. >> Yeah. If we zoom back out to 10,000 ft of everything we just talked about, how do we then stitch it back together? >> Zoom back out again. that the the first step was the technical authority piece like building up all that foundational layer so that everything else plays on top. Then you want to start building out some digital authority so that you have some kind of we we used to call it link juice which is such a terrible name like oh no it's so bad let's call it

00:56:49

authority juice you know I like juice we're sticking with juice and you you now you've got something >> to we we can funnel that somewhere okay and that's the third step which plays in really nicely the topical authority piece right so now we've got a bit of digital authority like a couple big um like articles have spoken about us maybe we've done a few podcasts podcasts are a great way as Well, like this being on this podcast is good for my digital authority. How good's that? Thank you.

00:57:15

>> And then the topical authority. Now we've got a bit of that digital authority. We can now sprinkle that down to topics. So now I let's use that dog walker walker example. I'm going to make sure I've got really good service pages for all the different services I I do, all the locations or great location page for all the locations I service. And maybe I do a blog post every month. That dog walker is overkilling, right? for a regional dog walker, they're going to rank for everything. You're not going to

00:57:40

not see this dog walker. But even for like an e-commerce brand where it's a bit more competitive, you can now start channeling that to category pages. You can start doing really good category pages, really good products, and you're going to start seeing that digital authority bringing traffic to your site. And and this is what I'm trying to say, Dane. >> It's not it's not that crazy. It's not that not that like it's not that complex. When you lay it out like that,

00:58:05

it's simple. The unlock for me I think is thinking about creating your own statistics. >> Yeah. Uh which I think will give you some weight as a as a digital authority. Having your own opinion, your own take talking from a unique perspective of like I work in this industry, therefore listen to me. Um these are these are great unlocks and I think that um maybe the last missing piece here is how much of this do I need to create and how consistently do I need to produce this content? the foundational stuff. Once

00:58:35

you get that right, like that's done. Unless you're like a massive enterprise brand where you're adding stuff all the time, changing stuff, then you probably have an in-house team doing this foundational stuff always on for you anyway. Like, >> so the technical stuff is kind of one and done. >> One and done. >> The authority stuff is kind of one and done. >> The authority stuff you've kind of got to do maybe every quarter. >> Okay. >> Like just do some like if you're a rural

00:58:57

dog walker, you probably need to do this once. You've got enough digital authority. Just you're done. Like you're like sweet now. you've like you've got so many bookings that you're sorted. If you're a jewelry company, guess what? The needle's always moving cuz your competitors are getting bigger. No one's no one's like just standing still. Everyone's trying to grow. So, you probably need to do something every quarter. Like, what's your idea? What's

00:59:19

your pitch? Boom, boom, boom. It's like crabs in the bucket. Everyone's trying to >> Yeah. Yeah. And also like you're not going to be number one for jewelry overnight. You don't need to be. Think about what niche of jewelry you want to be number one for. And again, focus on being the topical authority for that. But then over time you're gonna expand, right? You're gonna be like, "Okay, I'm the topical authority. I'm like the now authority for I don't know, water

00:59:40

>> water jewelry. I don't know what that is." >> But you're the you own that, dude. You own that. But now you want to go after different things, rings, whatever. So now you just keep on doing more and more and more. >> And then topical like is that something? >> Topical is probably the most frequent, right? You're always kind of updating pages, adding FAQs, changing your content. And again, you can use AI to do a lot of this, but please don't fall into that trap of only using AI. You

01:00:04

still need to steer it and give your opinions, but that's the game, man. Like, uh, it's, you know, we we had this brand, Atlassian, uh, not Atlassian, sorry, Agyant, uh, and they're multi-billion dollar medical company and AI just took 50% of their traffic and and conversions. It was conversions as well because like like they were getting a lot of hospitals and people inquiring >> and AI search like the overviews that come up at the top of searches were taking all their traffic and

01:00:32

conversions. Normally I wouldn't be worried too much cuz like we said before informationational traffic who really cares but also they're converting customers. That's a big deal. >> All we had to do there was just reline the topical authority to take it out of PDFs and stuff they had on their website and just surface it on the pages. >> Oh, I see. And that gave them that topic authority. Boom. They got their traffic back. They grew 30%. Everyone's happy. Pats on the backs.

01:00:56

>> Was it that crazy? No. It was just surfacing content. >> Surfacing meaning take it out of PDFs, ebooks, and put it on the website. >> What I'm saying is you probably have a lot of content that you could surface or even just edit content to add those perspective, those things. >> Wow, man. We we I'm just thinking about this now. I've got thousands of slides, hundreds of um pieces of content that I've created artifacts out of that all sit on my Instagram, but they're not on

01:01:21

my website. >> And that's doing nothing for your authority. So, if you want to come up with AI, Dane, you put that on your website, you start doing little bits and bobs about that, you call me up in six months, you won't be doing dinner. >> Oh, okay. If someone's listening to this and they're making a lot of social media content, >> you're saying that if it just sits on their social platforms, not building authority, >> does nothing for you. Okay? Like having

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a big Instagram is an authority signal, but like the content of that does nothing for you. >> So then what should someone do? Turn what they've transcribed in a video into a blog. >> Yeah. Turn those assets. Don't just transcribe it word for word cuz obviously you're not going to sound that good. >> No, but go through. Go through do like uh add some data if you can or if you don't, it's just a artifact or whatever. Just put it up and just say, you know, copy what I know, I shouldn't say this,

01:02:04

but copy what Studio does. It works really well for us. You'll see we have these artifacts we create for social and we put them on our website and we just put them so that you can see them and download them and interact with them and that builds our authority. Do that. Create a page for them. You can have a resources library on your website. You can put them as a blog post. There's a variety of different ways to do it. >> If I were to add a third category here because we did service and we did uh

01:02:26

e-commerce. What about personal brands, celebrities, known names? >> Personal brands. Yeah, we've done some personal brands obviously in that space. A lot of NDAs and stuff. Uh but it is it's exactly what you described. They've got the content. They've got so much freaking content. Uh that >> you're just adding the step of take it from social, put it on your website. >> Yeah. Put on your website. Like a lot of the people we work with, big brands, they they want to get booked for more

01:02:49

speaking engagements. Um >> and a lot of the time that is surfacing the content they've already done on their website. I wouldn't pay anyone to do that. I would do that by the way. Like if you got a personal brand, like you can really do this stuff unless you're a massive personal brand. He's just like, I just would rather throw money at this. >> Yeah. I'm just thinking to myself now like we've got our book, we've got the podcast, there's a lot of lot of

01:03:09

material. >> So much opportunity. >> Yeah. Okay. Now, uh I want to talk to you about how Google tends to look at the size of a brand because before you talked about you got to make sure your team are on your website so you can look established. >> Uh you said Google's algorithms have a big brand bias. >> Yeah. >> Is that unfair or just efficient? And does Google trust brands because users trust brands? >> Yeah, it's unfair. Welcome to life. Everything's unfair.

01:03:41

Um, but there's, you know, chinks in their armor. I mean, sometimes it gets too far. I mean, let me, let me tell you a story. So, Forbes was that example I used before. There's this whole sect of SEO called Parasite SEO, right? I'm really nerding out for a second, so you're just going to have to indulge. But parasite SEO was Forbes realized that was so big and they had so much digital authority that they could rank for anything regardless of topical authority just because they had so much

01:04:04

digital authority. Right? Smart. So they started selling that to other or renting that to other people. So I would come along and I would say hey Forbes I've got a protein brand. >> I'm going to put a affiliate on your website under protein and you're going to rank for protein. >> Very clever. So they turned themselves into a marketplace and we call that a parasite like parasite SEO. Now that was happening and that was printing millions doz like hundred like I'm moving to

01:04:29

hundreds like almost hundred million dollars probably of >> forbes >> for forbes and other brands right and I'm just parasiting off the back of all this digital authority big Google come around that whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa this [ __ ] has gone too far this is killing the experience for people >> we're giving you a penalization for parasite SEO you need to kill these sites off you need to whatever >> daddy's home >> daddy's home daddy's in the house right

01:04:51

and they started saying this topical authority and that's why topical authorities making this big comeback at the moment because they're seeing this. Previously, it was really really unfair because just so much digital authority you can't even compete. Now, if you have a good enough content, good enough digital authority, uh uh topical authority there, you can still rank. So, yeah, coming back to it, it's unfair, but there's absolutely ways to win. Uh and you've just got to focus on, as I

01:05:18

say, the riches are in the niches, right? Like what what can you focus on? What can you own that someone else isn't going to go after? >> It's kind of like Pokémon cards. You're trying to collect these little niches and create material around them. >> Okay. Uh, how do I force Google to then begin to trust me or see me as some type of authority figure? >> Well, first of all, I hate force. Like, and I hate like when people like, what's the cheat code? What's the like

01:05:41

>> Yeah, what's the silver bullet, man? >> Dude, what's the silver bullet? What's the one? Like, I know you've got one secret you're not telling me. Like, what's the secret? I know. It's like, okay, there is no secret. It's like the Instagram algorithm. Like people I know there's like one thing that you do in the algorithm and it just ranks you. It's like no, you create good stuff, man. Like create good content, have good digital authority. >> Um

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>> maybe that is the silver bullet is in the simplicity of what you're saying because you're saying you can't skip this stuff. >> Yeah. >> You got to nail it. >> I think the best Yeah. The best thing I could possibly tell you, the best thing you could take away is the simplicity. Keep it simple. >> If you nail the digital authority, you nail that technical authority and you nail that topical authority, you're going to rank out. You need to figure out, you need to solve for what Google's

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trying to do. And that happens to be very simple, building authority, right? So, I think Google wants to show brands and they want to show people, but they're not going to show a new brand with no trust because that's how a lot of spammy things happen. Guess what happens if in the AI overview, and you've seen this before, is something pops up that's really bad. Like, remember when these first came out, it was like, "What's a good diet?" It's like eating three rocks a day. Like that

01:06:45

was all SEO people taking the piss. There was on Disney's page there was like Disney's um they were pulling like Google was experimenting with this new AI search results. >> Yeah. >> And all this stuff was being said about Disney cuz people were just injecting this stuff through SEO and Google was pulling it up. >> They don't want that. That's why that's why digital authority exists. Okay. >> So that we can weed out all the random stuff that we don't trust and we can

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just take the good things. Can I can I take a stab at what some of the things I might be hearing here as as a strategist? One is that you're suggesting that people move their conversation off their product and their service and the exchange and onto culture and things that are relevant in the world. >> Yeah. >> To to me that's more of a branding conversation than it is a product and sales >> conversation. I got to think like a journalist. I've got to share my experience and all these things that

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you're saying. is is that essentially the merge of the technical SEO coming together with your brand's team. So rather than being those are the creative brand dudes over there or dudets these are the you know technical SEO dudes or duets over here they're different you're to me at least in my head you're saying they're one system it should be in an ideal world like we call this productled SEO is a is again we love our cool terms and we've got some zingers guys u productled SEO is this merge of like

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thinking from the product first so everyone on the product team should be across SEO it's not like oh we'll just flick this to the SEO guys It's like at a whole organizational layer SEO is now such a fundamental pillar that everyone should have a basic understanding right and so that's what that's saying hey educate the whole team and so from product up everyone's thinking about it but then coming back to what you say that digital authority piece that really sits with that particularly thinks about

01:08:35

creativity and how do we forward face our brand to the rest of the world the topical authority still very much your product your category your staff your industry you don't need to trend jack your topical authority. In fact, you shouldn't. It should be about you and your unique perspective. >> The technical foundational stuff should all just be about getting those things ticked and and done right. And that can be done with developers. It can be done with whoever. But I think what I'm

01:08:58

trying to say is that everyone needs to have a level of SEO knowledge in the world of digital businesses. If you want to rank in AI search, again, same as ranking in SEO, you know, you need to have that educational level. And there's so many free resources. Like we've got a fully free education hub that we created. It used to be paid and we're like, "Dude, we're making 100 grand a year off this. Why not make this completely free?" Cuz like rising tide lifts all ships, right? If everyone

01:09:23

knows about this, it's going to be better. So, not just our resource, but there's so many resources out there. >> Okay. This is this has really helped me a lot. I'm truly changing my perspective on SEO, and I've had a lot of conversations about the technical side. So, it's refreshing to hear the branding component of this. Um, let's think about how we look at the internet now. There's there's a conversation around AI slop. >> Mhm. >> So, when we start putting this material

01:09:51

on our website, what does Google truly think? Because before you mentioned that Google doesn't really care if you write with AI so long as it's good. Can you unpack this? >> Okay. We're now going to have to dive into some technical concept. We're going to very uh controversial land here. There's something called crawl budget, right? Um again with the terms guys, we are on fire. Crawl budget. Remember we spoke about our authority juice earlier. We have so much juice we can send to all

01:10:22

these pages. >> What happens when instead of having maybe 50 pages and I'm funneling that juice to those 50 pages, I have 50,000 pages. >> Whoa. >> What happens to that juice? There's less juice. >> Does it get diluted? >> Gets diluted, right? That's crawl budget. Now Google has to freaking crawl all these websites. That's a job and a half. >> Oh, I see. So, so if you fan out a lot of material, you can go too far. >> Boom. Nailed it. Done. Next topic. Yeah,

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that's that's it. Like what happens is people go, I'm going to do a 100 blog posts a month because I read it in this article. >> Or I saw Nike do it, which is dangerous. Well Well, let me tell you, Nike have so much freaking juice that's coming out their ears. Yeah, >> they can Google's looking at the energy required to crawl 50,000 citations versus five good ones. >> Totally. But your new website that's got no digital authority again comes back to that authority juice that's got nothing.

01:11:18

>> You really think Google's going to invest the technology and the like resources to crawl all your pages? So no, from that perspective, it hurts you and it also hurts your topical authority cuz you're probably talking about the same thing a million different times. We call it cannibalization. Cannibalizing yourself. And if not, then you're talking about a bunch of topics that you shouldn't be talking about anyway because they're not actually in your niche. Like my favorite one is when I

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see um like founders blogs hosted on a website that that doesn't belong in your website. I I know that's a unique perspective and that might sound counterintuitive, but unless that's directly related to your industry and your topical authority, your snow trip that you went on last month, Google's like, "What the hell do you want me to rank this for? Like, where do you want me to show this? I don't know if DNE's now a branding agency or if he's now a travel agency. Like, what is this

01:12:07

content? >> Right. So, you're muddying the waters by muddying the waters. So, what I'm Yeah. Don't create a million billion different pages or even like a thousand different pages of small business. Focus on the things that really make a difference. Yes, you should have a bunch of different service pages, which we spoke about before, to cover off all the different errors you do. Don't have like one service page that lists everything. They should all be a specific page. and

01:12:27

then have the headlines so Google knows okay this is the about this is this this >> fundamentally you know it's there's another chain of thought called programmatic SEO um and programmatic SEO is like programming your website to just create all these pages again great if you're a massive like Zupller or something huge but if you're a small business that is just going to crush your SEO don't do that don't do that >> and and for the listeners what is programmatic SEO Yeah,

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>> programmatic SEO is just like I could set something up on my WordPress page so that it automatically creates a thousand different pages using AI of different service areas or location pages with unique content on each because you can't have duplicate content, right? >> But uh and again, that sounds super cool. So people go, "Wow, that's so cool. That's so smart. I'm so freaking smart doing this shit." And Google goes, "This is all AI slop and I'm not going

01:13:22

to rank any of it." And worse than that, because our website's done that, we're not going to officially penalize them cuz they do that very rarely, just algorithmically now. But we're going to algorithmically penalize them because it's diluting their do uh their digital authority and it's diluting their topical authority. So, catch you later, boys. >> Okay. >> So, it's actually going to hurt you more than it's going to help you. If any, again, keep it simple. If you're doing

01:13:43

anything that just seems too smart, it's probably dumb. >> I see what you're saying. Okay. Now, let's let's talk a little bit more about how people have a relationship with AI. So, even though you're creating the same subject matter, I guess the way the users interfacing with it is quite different. Yeah. >> So, if you're googling something, even though we'll give you a summary, there still is links to scroll through. When you're running in and out of an LLM,

01:14:08

it's more conversational, more counsel. So, so how do we make sure that we're building something that's valuable enough for these LLMs to think we're worth talking about? So people will say things like and again we're diving into some topics. I know it's I'm trying to keep it super fundamental. There's there's something called schema that people talk about. Now schema is basically markup on a website so that AI and different bots can understand your website. The good news I have for you

01:14:36

guys today is that schema is mostly you don't need to worry about it for AI. AI and a few studies. Mark Williams Cook did this great one a week a couple weeks back saying that uh really what you just need to do is have the content on the page. You don't need to worry about structuring it correctly. There was all this, you know, again, all the SEO people when AI started crawling things saying, "Oh, you need to structure the content in like a question answer format so that the AI can pull it." Um, cuz AI

01:15:05

can't pass long passages of text, which I never understood because AI fundamentally pulled billions and billions of archives of all sorts of content. Google came out and said, "No, you don't need to write specifically for AI. It does help if you format it into short responses that are succinct. Like don't add a lot of bloat, but succinct answers help. But that's that's really the only guidance I have for you in terms of the difference. Like you don't need to change your approach. How AI

01:15:35

will pass that information to users is up to AI. You have zero control in that and you need to have zero control. What should you do? Build out the authority so that you get shown in those different queries. Yeah, this this is remarkably help. One more thing here around how this system or infrastructure works is how do we then focus our material to the conversion? >> Mhm. >> Rather than having Google look at us as valuable, which is fantastic. Like you said, there's that's early in the

01:16:05

relationship. Maybe we're like communicating, hey, we're a worthy date. When it gets to closing the deal, >> I love the date analogy here. What deal are we closing? kind of like uh so we want to go to the bedroom. What's what's that next step that takes someone from perusing or or crawling to deciding and and engaging? >> Okay, so you don't really get to control the hey, let's get out of here line. >> Why not? >> Because Google or whatever AI engine you

01:16:35

have, they have a citation. They have an option like the whole time you're on the date. They basically have a like I'm going to put this button on the table throughout our date and you can push it at any time and that's the let's get out of here button, right? >> Which let's just go with that because despite how weird that would be in real life and that's a citation. Now people just like on a date aren't really hitting that button. They're just asking more questions, doing more. And by the

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time they are ready to get out of here, they're going to do that themselves. They're going to search your brand. They're going to search your content, their YouTube or whatever multimedia they want to consume and they're going to go there. Again, that's why I hate this idea of funnels. There's no funnels. It's not like AI is gonna, you know, you can do it in a way that's going to send someone to you >> by being valuable. It's the same in in any space of like modern marketing.

01:17:24

being valuable, showing value, people will then engage with you because when people are searching for commercial terms like hire an SEO agency, even if they don't even know they've been consuming my content, even we've got all this content about dash or underscore and a URL and all this content I've been saying to you, you might say to an AI engine and it might site studio hook off to the side and you didn't even read that. You don't even see that as a end user. I don't care. That's cool with me.

01:17:47

But when you come through and you search SEO agency, it's going to list us and that's when you're going to go go to that website, engage with us, and that's how we get that conversion. Okay? >> It's a very passive sale. There's no way of unless you're one of the engineers at one of these AI companies changing the whole way it works. And I don't think they want to. If if I were to make an assumption that the world used to be uneducated user browsing the internet,

01:18:14

bumping into walls, trying to find a solution, >> ending up on a call, and then getting sold and converted. >> Now, the system to me seems like, well, now they have access to Gandalf the Gray >> of intelligence guiding them and and Gandalf has a IQ of 10 billion. It's pretty dialed in. it it's now dialing in their uh ability to go from problem to solution before they even talk to you. So before they even browsing, >> they're pre-sold. >> They're already pre-sold on their

01:18:45

problem. >> Yeah. >> Like what's your take on this? Like how do you tend to look at old market, new market, and what was the world doing and where are we now? >> Well, I think you're exactly right. I mean, HubSpot are a good example. They had so much content and they demonstrated so much value. you would have seen their SEO explode and because at the end of each blog that they wrote like um you know they might write a blog on how to start a social media channel right and you click on that you got a

01:19:10

HubSpot at the bottom of that is like sign up to HubSpot it's a big CTA that CTA is gone right because you're not consuming that on HubSpot's site you're probably still consuming HubSpot's content but it's in AI >> okay so so what what I want to really focus on here is the psychology of the user solving a problem before they select your business >> yeah the user doesn't care who like wrote the article or who wrote the content. >> You don't even know you're reading an

01:19:34

article. >> No, you probably don't even know. Like you might have some of those links. It's like HubSpot or something, but like the stats show that those links are so infrequently clicked. >> You're the user in flow state as at one with AI and you're going back and forth on a problem and you're seeing these little sublinks, but you're not clicking on them. So, you're not even thinking about the articles. your your your subject matter is being put up in this LLM and the users interfacing with

01:19:59

it. They're not thinking about you. So then >> how do we optimize that experience? >> Okay, so this is coming back to what we were saying before. So it's almost like this is a checkpoint moment now. Previously you were this is huge for you. You now got the user on your website. Hey, maybe they even sign up for your call to action and maybe some of them go through that pipeline, whatever. Traditional conventional stuff now. And and and to be clear, that's still happening in the bulk majority of

01:20:26

cases. People are not interacting with AI as much as people would like to say, right? But in five years time, what's going to happen? Everyone's got a Gandalf the Gray and they're going to be guiding them. Right? Now, Gandalf the Gray is not perfect. Sometimes he tells you to eat rocks, right? But in 5 years time, that's all going to be refined out, yada yada yada. What's the incentive then for me as a user to be a part of that journey? but I don't get any attribution or any tracking or any

01:20:52

anything, right? And that's what Google's trying to solve. But I think they've already solved and that is by contributing to all those checklists at the end of the day when a user is looking to select a CRM, which is what HubSpot do, we're going to show you as one of those options because you've contributed all these other pieces of content that cement you as a topical authority. And that's when we're going to bring you in. And at the end of the day, that's that's all that mattered

01:21:19

because you're getting that conversion and that conversion is going to sell so fast because they already trust HubSpot. They pre-sold. The AI has told them that HubSpot are the best contender and their use case is going to be perfect for HubSpot because the AI's filtered it out into exactly their use case and suggested other people that might be better for a specific use case, but that's not them. They're the HubSpot use case. So, is the conversation someone's having with their AI LLM replacing the

01:21:50

traditional concept of a funnel? >> Yes, completely. That whole consideration funnel is completely out the door, out the gates, out the at the zoo. It is very much you can't control it as a funnel. You you're just contributing information in the hopes that when it comes time to a purchase, you're going to get surfaced. And if you're doing what I spoke about, you will get purchased. The problem is attribution. >> Okay. So the game is be as valuable as possible to Google.

01:22:19

>> Yeah. >> In the hopes that when the user is in their version of the funnel that Google goes, go talk to this guy. >> And they will. >> Yeah. >> And they because it makes most sense for them. Right. >> But uh trying to attribute that is probably the biggest challenge we're going to have over the next five years. business is going to be like, I'm getting all this work. I just don't know where it's coming from, right? >> Because you can't attribute it really to

01:22:42

ads, to anything. If attribution is already an issue, imagine just how big it's going to get because you don't know. Like someone could say the most complex query ever and then find you as a result. Like that case study example I gave before, it's like, I'm having this issue specifically at an agency that's doing $20 million and I'm having this specific issue and the AI is like, boom, I know exactly the company that's got a case study similar to that. I'm going to

01:23:04

surface them. >> Okay. Okay. So then you're talking about the potentially where trust sits on the internet and the fact that it's moving >> big time. Yeah. >> Where is move where is trust moving from and where is it now showing up? >> Well, trust is moving away from first party websites. So you can't just have a website and used to be you could say whatever the hell you wanted. You know like on your product page fivestar reviews this is the best thing since sliced bread. People are going, "Well,

01:23:32

that's [ __ ] because I looked on Reddit and this thing smells after six months." Right? So that trust is fundamentally broken with websites because we have big teams working on websites now. Um, so people now trust things like Reddit, but even Reddit's breaking at the moment because why? Cuz that trust moved to Reddit and marketers moved to Reddit. Those pieces of [ __ ] those bastards, they corrupt everything. Yeah. So now they're astroturfing all the Reddit threads, buying up votes,

01:23:57

down voting things that they disagree with. And so Google's now like, "Well, we can't really trust Reddit that much." So, if you've listened to other podcasts and like, "Oh, Reddit's the thing. You got to do Reddit." It's like, "Well, that's like also dead on arrival." Like, I'm not saying don't do anything there. But like, that's not the solve. The solve is to kind of be everywhere. Be in the podcast, be producing the white papers, be producing such high quality

01:24:19

content, having happy customers that leave reviews on Trust Pilot, leave reviews on Yelp, leave reviews on Google, wherever the hell because all those sources are pulled in to AI. Now, >> are there other things people should be cognizant of around how to develop trust on the internet? >> Um, I think trust is one of those things it you just earn it over time. Like if I I was in the Uber literally yesterday with a guy who who had an e-commerce website and he he said this he said this thing to me that couldn't forget. He's

01:24:50

like, "How do I gain trust?" And I'm like, "That is the funniest sentence I've ever heard in my life. How do I screw people over and get trust? >> How do I gain trust? It's like >> that is not the game. Like that is not what we're doing. That's not what we're playing at. We're building actual trust. How do you make people trust you, Dane? Like you make them make do a variety of things like how do you how do you make them trust this podcast? We have some

01:25:14

great guests come on. You have a lot of views. You have a lot of people engaging with you. You have an ecosystem around that. People trust that. People now more likely to listen to what you're saying. How do you do that on a website? Well, you have reviews around it. You have great digital authority. You have big websites talking about you and that's creating trust, right? And so, you don't need to gain any of that is what I'm saying. And remember, it's so fundamentally simple. This is why I

01:25:39

always get I bash my head against the wall when people like, I just need to cheat it. You don't need to cheat [ __ ] Just play the game. The game is designed for you to win right now. >> But you just need to gradually build trust. Don't sit down and go like the classic like how do I build so much trust in a month that I never have to do it again. It's like crypto trading. Who who makes money in crypto? People that trade for a long time like they compound over years. SEO is the same thing. Don't

01:26:04

think of it like a quick hack cheat win. It's like I'm sure you'll agree with your personal brand. It's all about compounding, right? It's not about like how do I get 100,000 followers next month? Okay, you can buy 100,000 followers. What has that done for you? Nothing. How do you actually build that? You compound that following month over month over month over month until you know 5 years later at Studio all our leads come to us. We do no outbound. >> Is founders desperation for quick

01:26:30

immediate response and reward hindering or even sabotaging their ability to grow a business? >> Yeah, constantly. I mean, one of the biggest things I talk to and I try not to mentor too many people these days, but when I was mentoring people, it's just patience. The number one attribute you can have is patience, right? And it's hard because when you're starting out, it's you've got to do everything with like ruthlessly, fast, efficiently. But then as soon as you start hiring

01:26:57

people, you need to like swap. You need to be like the opposite. You need to now have brutal patience. You need to like trust that you've planted the seed and the seed will grow and you'll just keep watering it. >> Uh it's like so many we see so many parallels in life whether it's gym like you can't just go to the gym and get huge. uh you need to have patience and you assuming you do the right things given enough time it's going to work out. It's just science. Personal brand,

01:27:22

it's the same thing. Just patience. You like it might not blow up overnight, but over time it's going to continue and grow and grow and grow. Your revenue like is like how many business have you seen that go to like a million dollars and to zero the next month. I I've got this great story of a guy called Mike who I started in SEO similar time 10 years ago. This is maybe this will help you. 10 years ago he started in SEO. Now Mike over 10 years has made a million bucks in SEO. That's awesome. But he

01:27:48

started the same time I did. I've made tens of millions of dollars growing agency, brands, doing all sorts of stuff. And Mike will be the first to say, "I should have just done one thing. I should have just like compounded because Mike would have like a $2 million year, then the next year make zero dollars and then like just up and down constantly. And if he had to just stuck to something or just focus on compounding something over time, that guy would be worth tens of millions of dollars. And he'll openly say that. It's

01:28:16

just some people get so caught up on trying to do the quick win, the easy thing that they miss it. Who's Mr. Wonderful? You know what I'm talking about? >> Yeah. Yep. >> He talks about this as well. Uh he talks about it in a gender based, but it's actually got nothing to do with gender. He says that he likes to invest in femaleled businesses. Why? Why femaleled? What? Like >> they're I I would say females by nature, and this is a generalization, have a more of a proclivity to be

01:28:42

patient. >> Boom. Got it. And so they're happy to grow what 20 30 40% yearon-year and they do and that compounds because we all know the most wonderful you know world miracle is compounding interest compounding anything. Compounding is a word I love. I hear compounding I'm like boom that's my word. >> Yeah. >> And their growth compounds right? What happens with guys because a lot of the time and I'm just generalizing. I don't mean to offend anyone but guys can be

01:29:06

very impatient. They're like I want to be doing a million dollars next year. I'm gonna do a million dollars my first year because I heard on this podcast this guy did and they do a million bucks and the next year they do 10 grand and the year after they go down they only do 600 grand and the year after they go up to 800. Boom boom boom boom boom. >> Well, that female has done 200 grand their first year 30% 30% 30% 30% boom they're doing 5 million. >> Every business owner complains that they

01:29:32

can't find quote unquote good people. you stopped complaining about this a long time ago and you started building what you've called a university. >> Yeah. >> Uh can you explain what that is and and why you did it? >> Okay. So, we have to address a few things. Everyone in everyone's like, "Well, there's a million SEO companies and there's a million SEO specialists." There's a million SEO hustlers. There's actually very few SEO masters. There's

01:29:58

not that many people that understand all the things I've been telling you. And that's probably why some of this can sound so new because you're so used to hearing, "Oh, you got to do this checklist and you got to do this thing. You got to do this." And they make it sound very complicated. Why? Because they don't understand it. It's confusing. It's scary. They don't understand it. And so therefore, they make it complex. Um, and so those people exist in the market. We obviously don't

01:30:20

hire those people because they don't fundamentally get what makes good SEO and how to get brands to dominate. So we tried hiring. We increased salaries. We increased benefits. We did all the thing and we couldn't find people, right? Why couldn't we find them? And it's also our fault because our model is a bit unique. Instead of being a SEO specialist hides in the corner on the dusty laptop and never speaks to anyone, our SEO specialists are all client facing. All of them. All of them. All of them. All of them.

01:30:53

>> And just to add weight here, you have 140 plus of these staff around the world. >> Yeah. >> And they're all client facing. all except for like your head office people and even then a lot of them have been client facing and the reason is you know we only offer one service it doesn't make a lot of sense to have like that account management layer you know every person should really have an in-depth understanding of the business they're working with and be able to execute on

01:31:18

those strategies it's again it's not rocket science it's that consultative doing things and especially in this age of AI where you know you can code up fixes for clients very quickly like you we can have these people that very dialed into SEO that can also implement things because of the help of AI. Um, but we've always been very bullish on this. It's the thing that gave us the biggest USP in the company. It's like, yes, we're SEO only, but you work directly with your specialist. So,

01:31:44

again, these people are very hard to find. They're like unicorns. We call them hawks, right? Makes sense. And we would win because we would be knocking back so much work because we couldn't take it on. We didn't have the capacity. And we hired people externally who we thought were very smart or very good big names in the industry that would just flunk. They would just crash the second you put them in front of a client. And then we were like, well, do we change the whole model? Do we separate it? Like

01:32:08

no, that's what makes us really good. It changes the whole DNA of the business. So we did what agencies don't like doing and we invested. I'm not talking about just hiring juniors. I'm talking about we hired a full L & D lead on very high salary to build up. They don't do anything other than build up systems, processes, and training. We do influxes and like universities of kids that come through. Kids, I say kids, I'm 28, half of them my age. Um, I always get caught out on that. But we we bring these

01:32:38

people in that have no knowledge and they might have skills around marketing or communication and we teach them everything about SEO. And >> this is amazing. How How long does your training program take? >> About a six-month boot camp. >> Whoa. >> Yeah, it's expensive. >> Okay. We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars. We'd be touching almost a million dollar a year in training costs. >> Are you kidding me? >> I'm serious. >> We have hundreds of candidates that

01:33:03

apply for these roles. Like um without, you know, pumping ourselves up. We're the biggest in Australia. We've got I think we're now the second largest or even the largest in the world at this point in terms of SEO manpower, revenue, in terms of that specialized SEO space. So, we have a lot of people that want to come work with us, right? Especially because there's not many agencies hiring juniors and we come in and we say, "Hey, you don't have to have a lick of experience. We will hire you from

01:33:28

scratch and in, you know, this is your career roadmap. We have a full career road map, the different levels, the salary packages, and people like, whoa, in like like three years, I can be making so much money." And we're very transparent about that. Uh, and so we we filter these people down. We do group interviews uh to start and people like, "Oh, I don't like group interviews." Like, dude, we got a lot of candidates to get through. And I again I'm not that into this process. I It's very different

01:33:54

than when I did it. It's dialed in now because we have a full-time L & D person. We have a full-time recruiter. And from last I saw what they make you do in the group interview is stand up and they give you a little piece of homework. They say, "Hey, go and find out like some stats about a bird, some data about a bird and present that to the group in this group interview." And I think that's hilarious because people come in and be like, "This is the eagle that does this." But it tests how well

01:34:17

you do like researching something, putting some slides together and communicating in front of a group of people. >> If you can't do that fundamentally, you don't have the confidence to talk to our clients, do what we do, you're out. Sorry, bro. Um, and so that's it. And we find that girls tend to do a lot better here. Um, and then it kind of go next stage with the one-on- ons and then all sorts of stuff. And then assuming that all goes well, then you get kind of there'll be a batch of people. We might

01:34:46

take an intake of between six and 10 people depending on region. In the US it'll be maybe like two uh because we only started there a year ago. But then we'll go through that whole boot camp. The head of L & D will sit with you and go through everything checklist. We have exams like you'll need to sit in rooms and do exams with no computers and stuff. Go through we have exams at each level by the way. SEO specialists before they come seniors have to do exams. We like the whole thing is really built

01:35:12

around again SEO. >> This is fascinating. There's so much stuff and so much gamified as well. I can tell you the things that are working and the things I did in the past that did not work so well. >> But yeah, it's all about SEO. So that's how we have that program. And as a funnel for this, I spoke about this academy before with this thing called Hawk Academy. And one of the reasons we made it completely free to be totally transparent is because we need a lot of talent. We need people coming through

01:35:38

and we have thousands of students go through this academy and we take the best ones based on test scores. So, if you're in Atlanta, Melbourne, Sydney, or London, and you sit through Hawk Academy, there's a good chance and you score well, there's a good chance you'll get an email from us saying, "Hey, would you be open to a role at Studio Hawk?" Cuz we'll then put you in that junior program. So, >> so you're kind of positioning yourself like Harvard, like you've been you've

01:36:04

been you're chosen. >> Well, we will like we don't even tell people we do this. I think it's the first time I've publicly spoken about it. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe it's a bad thing, but we will then take out the best performing students and put them in that intake. Um, now not every one of them will like have good interview skills, so we might not take them or not. But we know that fundamentally they do SEO and yeah, that's that's what we do. We have um

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Hulk Academy which funnels these candidates and it pre-educates them on SEO so that we can get them a little bit ahead before they do that six-month boot camp. So, if you're spending millions of dollars of your money, uh, months of your time, your team, your energy, and your resources to train these kids, uh, who's to say that they're not just going to go and become your number one competitor? >> Oh, and they do. And they do. And this is, uh, I think a lot of agency or people in general in business, they take

01:36:54

a lot of withdrawals, like this concept of withdrawals. They withdraw talent from the industry, but they never like inject talent. >> Wow. >> We inject a lot of talent. Uh why why is that a good thing? A lot of people. >> Why would you not see that as a threat? >> Well, because they're great SEOs and they're now on our wavelength. Uh they go work in-house somewhere. They want to hire an agency. How many agencies do SEO the way we do it? >> Oh, I see. So, so you're saying the

01:37:17

upside is uh you get to be talked around town. Totally. >> And that's better for you than the threat of one person creating a threat a competitive agency. We've had we've had people one of my like first ever hires left and started their own agency. Like this happens. At the time it was devastating. We've tripled since they've left and they've you know got a small little agency. >> Yeah. >> Cool. Like I don't see competitors in the same maybe traditional sense. I'm

01:37:43

not like let's kill everyone. Let's [ __ ] all our competitors. It's like dude we're all in SEO. If everyone's doing better SEO, this is good for the industry. The industry gets hurt when we all do bad SEO because then people go man I hate SEO people. they're all charlatans or all this. That makes it hard for us to sell [ __ ] because people like, "Well, I work with these guys and they scam me and then blah blah blah blah." But if we can get our SEO specialists to work inhouse or rarely,

01:38:03

I'm going to be honest, like they rarely move to other agencies. Why? Because we've got a good culture, good progression, good everything. But if they do, they start their own agency. Like such is life, dude. This is the world of capitalism. The best person wins. But we're obviously investing so much in getting good talent. And I think there's a certain level of love and I not just from a business perspective, it makes a lot of commercial sense, but on a personal level, I love that we give

01:38:28

people an opportunity. We love pe we love giving people a go. And I'm fully aware, man, that if we got acquired tomorrow, this program would be shut down. It would be straight into profitability. And I think it would hurt the business long-term commercially, but also what makes me so sad is there's a lot of people that wouldn't be given a go because they don't have experience and no one else will take them. And these people, by the way, one of them is my now chief of staff, my ex-general

01:38:51

manager who took the company from three to 15 million in Australia. One of them is my general manager in the UK. Um, I a lot of my senior leadership team or even just team leaders started as juniors and we invested in. So this program, yes, it's expensive, but the ROI on it long term and the industry impact is huge. >> I'm really curious to understand how you've become so compassionate and thoughtful and considerate of the humans in your company because I talked to a lot of founders and you're right they're

01:39:26

they're typically how do we dominate and crush the competition meanwhile here you are spawning the competition and helping them out at the same time. Another thing you mentioned about your culture uh is how you look for passion. So >> yeah, >> rather than looking for say 5 years experience, you're thinking about how passionate is this individual? We don't care about experience. Explain that. >> I think passion is so it's hard to track. It's hard to measure. I I've

01:39:54

actually thought about this a lot. How do we put a rubric around passion? >> It's a hard thing to figure out. >> It's hard because people default back to experience. But then we look at the industry and we look at okay we can hire that person with three years experience and oh they're [ __ ] like they just they don't have any of the qualities that we would consider a good SEO specialist. >> Yeah. >> And they could lie about it too. >> And they could lie about it. But if

01:40:16

someone comes in there and they're you you can call it coachability called passion. Like they come in there like I love SEO. I want to learn more about SEO. Who do you think is going to be a better long-term hire? >> Obviously the person who's like pumped about it. >> Totally. So why not hire them? >> Yeah. like, okay, someone's got three years experience. That's three years is six months at your company. >> How how do you test for passion, though? How do you identify that that's real?

01:40:39

They're not just saying it in the interview. >> So, what what kind of SEO blogs do you read? Like like you interested in anything like that? Oh, yeah. I research engine land. Oh, yeah. I thought Lily Ray's thing last week was just ridiculous. And you're like, >> "This is legit. >> Awesome. This guy's legit." >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> We have a similar question arrival where we tend to try to identify what their creative passion is outside of work. And

01:40:58

you know, you can tell pretty quickly when people are lying about not really having a hobby when you ask them to explain it. >> Yeah, we do that exact thing. We um we ask two controversial questions like um one of them is like what are you nerdy about? Like what's what's something you're passionate about? Um and people will be like, "Oh, I'm really passionate about this or that." We don't really care what you're passionate about as long as you're passionate about

01:41:19

something. Um that's great. And then we can, you know, as long as you want to be doing SEO, that kind of stuff, that's awesome. We can teach you that. The other very very controversial question that we ask is um what's an example of a hardship that you've been through? And that is a full-on question. >> Wow. >> And it could be a professional thing that you went through. It could be a personal thing, but we're looking for people that have been through something because nothing against people that have

01:41:46

skated through life the whole time. But when [ __ ] hits a fan with a client or something and you're like, "Ah, this is too hard." They're not the people for us. They're not hawks. We want people that have it doesn't have to I'm not asking you to be homeless or something awful to happen in your personal life, but maybe you know you had to move to a whole new city by yourself. Maybe you left your old career to do something like SEO that you were really passionate about. Like what's an example of a

01:42:11

hardship that you went through and if you can't name a hardship, this isn't the right place for you. Yeah, I I would say that, you know, from my experience, the person who's been through something extremely difficult and come out the other side tends to have a higher sense of willpower, a higher sense of problem solving. >> Are these the things you're looking for? >> Exactly. Awful things happen to all of us. We all go through bad things. It's just can we identify them, learn from

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them, and be better. But, you know, some people are too scared to answer because they're like, "Well, I don't want to say something in an interview." Um, and we encourage people, it's like, "This isn't going to be used against you." And it isn't used against you. Even if you have a shitty example like, "Oh, I was late on the train." It's like, "Cool. We're just going to like mark you as like whatever for that question." But those

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people that really have something, of course, you're going to get bonus points. >> I love this. And and this has been a pleasure talking to you about where you've come from, and it's it's abundantly clear that you're coming from a place of like a really good heart, really good intention, helping your team, and then also contributing to your industry in a massive way. Um, I'm really excited to see where Studio Hall goes. It sounds like you're crushing it in the States and you're also crushing

01:43:19

it in the UK. Um, one final question. We like to ask this at the end of every episode and in the spirit of our show. I'm a guy who owns an agency, but I'm really big on people who take agency. Thinking to yourself, what does it mean? And what does taking agency mean to you? >> The original answer would be ownership. Taking agency is taking ownership. But we all take ownership. You know, sometimes it's accountability. When bad [ __ ] happens, we take accountability for it. Real agency is learning from the

01:43:54

things that we take ownership from, even when they don't work out, right? Real agency is real ownership. But it's like at a deeper level than that, I think, is learning, right? And so I can point to the million times where something's gone wrong. I've taken ownership of it and I've, you could say that's taking agency and I've moved past. But you haven't actually taken agency of something until you've learned from something. So to me, taking agency is taking ownerships of of

01:44:22

the things that happen in your life, whether that's being homeless and moving past that, but also getting the learnings from that. Because if you just go through that, take ownership of that, but never wear it or never own it. It's not really taking agency. So that may be a little bit too deep or maybe that's a bit fluffy, but that's what agency. Yeah, I take ownership of a lot of [ __ ] that I don't need to take ownership of. Like I mean, we all do as a business. Like something goes wrong in a client

01:44:41

account or something, I'll be like, "That's my bad. I'm happy to do that, right? That's taking ownership, but that's easy. That's easy. That's my job to take ownership of that. That's like the fundamental level. If I can't take ownership and I blame my team for that, like you're just a shitty owner. But there's a level deeper than that, which is taking agency, which is like actually understanding and learning and understanding where that mistake happened, who made that mistake, and how

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you can kind of make everyone better from it rather than just taking ownership and moving on. >> This has been a pleasure, man. This this has been a wild ride. I think I've I've had a complete new perspective on what SEO is and I think how the future is shaping up and how we can use Pleasure. Thank you so much for being here, man. >> Thanks, man. This has been epic. >> This has been a blast, dude. Yeah. When you're back in town, we need to catch up for sure.