How to Rank SEO #1 Forever, ChatGPT Traffic Crash, and a Short Form Sales Hack | Ep. 3030

I saw this post from Matt Diggity and I thought this was interesting. So, um, he— when you think about doing SEO, how to rank highly on SEO forever, what are the things that you're supposed to do? Okay, you build content that is maybe content that stands out from what everyone else is doing. So maybe instead of publishing 20 pieces of crap, you publish one thing that's really good and one thing that stands out. So I, I think an example is, is Neil, that the charts that you have are actually things that stand out that are worth retweeting. And then the brand mentions too, not just the backlinks anymore. So you think about the brand mentions, okay, how we get a lot of reachouts and I'm sure you do too. A lot of people are looking for Reddit now. A lot of people are looking for YouTube now because they're looking for citations. They're looking for brand sentiment overall. They want to be able to control the narrative. They also know that if you're trying to rank on AI overviews, you're trying to make an AI mode. Guess what? Google is going to favor their own properties. YouTube, right there. Reddit is number one when you think about what the LLMs are citing. So that's the game that you're trying to play. You're not just trying to game anything anymore. And you're trying to understand that you have to, if you're trying to rank on Perplexity, which you did a video on, Perplexity loves fresh citations, right? ChatGPT cares more about clean structure. They all care about how much you update your content. So SEO, I think 15, 20 years ago when you and I first started doing SEO, it was a lot more gameable. But now if you take a more long tail or a long-term approach to it and do the things that are hard to do, but most people aren't willing to do, That's how you're going to rank on SEO forever. It doesn't matter how much this stuff shifts because quality is what moves to the top at the end of the day. And the quote that, Neil, you've liked to use quite a bit in the past is that the Eric Schmidt quote, right? How brands are— brands will rise to the top because the internet is just, it's a cesspool of crap, right? And brands, usually the reason they're a brand is because they try to approach things from a quality standpoint.

Yeah. And you saw the article that Search Engine Land posted, Profound ended up releasing data that there was a 52% drop in ChatGPT referral traffic since July.

Yeah, you and I both put this in here. Yeah.

Yeah, based on 100 million keywords that they were looking at on ChatGPT. But what's interesting here is ChatGPT traffic will go up and down. Not too many people are talking about it, but the real question is, is how are people, you know, is it going to be another Google? And I think it's going to be another Google in which sometimes you get more traffic, sometimes you get less. You can't necessarily rely and focus on the algorithms. You got to just do what's best for your audience and create the best information out there. And sometimes you'll win and sometimes you'll lose, but over time you should grow. And that's the true reality.

Yep.

By the way, I mean, on the screen right now, I'm sharing the Profound graph. And this is the cool thing about when Profound— Profound is a good example of sharing data that's interesting that other people are interested in resharing. So look, 1,100 likes on this, 138 comments, 120 reposts. But you can see based on their data, 52% Decrease in ChatGPT referral traffic. Whereas you can see with Reddit, 87% increase, Wikipedia, 62% increase, top 3 sources combined, 53% increase. So yeah, this guy Josh Blaiskal, worth following. Check him out.

Yeah, no, that's definitely worth following. But I look at all this kind of traffic because it's like, this is why Eric and I have been pushing for so many years to take an omnichannel approach. You have no choice. It's the only way to do really well on the web and in today's world because you can't control what a platform does.

Dude, we've been doing this podcast for like 7, 8 years or so. And I remember back in the day, I think I was probably shouting at you to say YouTube, YouTube, YouTube, right? And then you started doing YouTube and then I was like, what else should we do, right? And you've always evolved. A lot of times you've tried different things that other people wouldn't try. And then if I find something new, I'm always going to bring it up, right? And some stuff's going to work, some stuff isn't. Like when I remember, I was like, hey, Neil, check out Clubhouse. Okay, that was a waste of time. And I was like, Neil, check out AirChat. Also a waste of time, right? But some stuff like—

Did I ever check out AirChat?

Yeah, you did. You checked it out for like a second and you quit, right?

What was AirChat?

I think it was the Naval— the Naval—

Oh, Brian Norgaard and— Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But okay, we started the podcast. Okay, we saw that start to get movement and we just continued doing that. We saw YouTube, like even though you and I, I wouldn't say we love making videos, We started quite a while back and we just continue to do it, right? It's because this stuff works and we try to do what works and we try to play the game to at least an optimized level. And if we don't think we can play the game well, we'll quit. Like, Neil and I, we're not making satire shorts, right? Whereas other people are. So I found this last night, this girl, I think it's Travel by Livvy or something. I don't know if you see this account, but she Does content— here, actually, let me show this to you right now. This is kind of similar to what I'm talking about. So check this out. Do you see this?

Okay, I can see it. Travel with Evie.

Yeah. So check this out. Let's go here.

I'm good. I'm good. I just wanted to say thank you again for the house. It's been spectacular. I know I gave you shit about the price, but I'm just so grateful you found something for the entire family so last minute.

Of course, you're welcome.

Thank you. I need a favor from you. Okay, I didn't want to call and be difficult because you know I'm not difficult to put on for. I probably consider myself one of your easiest clients, actually, but I do need something.

Okay, what is it? How can I help?

So I'm not sleeping and I have a feeling it's because I don't have my pillow. So I'm gonna need you to get my pillow. Just go into my home, get my pillow, and then just ship it to me.

Oh, those wind pillows you have. Yeah, I'm not in LA. I can't, um, I can't do that.

Well, just send someone to do it then.

I also don't think I can send somebody into your home. I could order a pillow from there and have it shipped to you, potentially.

Uh, yeah, uh, that's, that's fine.

So anyway, this, this, the reason I'm calling this out is she's doing all— this is all satire, right?

So she—

It's all staged, right?

Yeah, it's all staged. And so, but, but here's what she sells. So Travel with Livvy with 2 I's at the end. So she helps with booking 5-star accommodations, so like villas, private suites, and things like that. So when you do satire like this where she's playing out a moment where— I was watching a video yesterday where one person's daughter— this is a stage, right? She's talking to the father and then she's like, yeah, your daughter spent about $410,000 this past weekend and we booked her this villa. She's going to spend this. And he's like, $410,000? Are you effing kidding me?

Right?

So The type of people that end up watching this, you're going to— because it's kind of tied in with the first world problems of luxury travel, she's getting the attention that's required and it's the right viewers to get her to not only get views but get bookers for her, to get people booking her 5-star hotels, villas, and whatever. So I think she's a travel concierge. If you're in B2B, here's the deal. LinkedIn account-based marketing sucks, but it doesn't have to. With Carrot, It allows you to create personalized ads towards your customers and also personalized landing pages that align with the ads. So you're going to have higher conversions and influence pipeline reporting to prove that your ABM works. So if you want to learn more, just go to karrot.ai and you can join the waitlist. Again, it's karrot.ai and we'll see you on the other side.

There's another guy who does this with Jets. I forgot his name, but I watch his clips every once in a while.

Yeah.

And he has crazy stories. And the guy would be like, there's a girl named Mackenzie, like, hey, does your dad know about this? Can I book it? Then he calls the dad, hey, your daughter. And he's like, how much does she want to spend to go from New York to Nice? And he's just like, oh, $300 grand. He's like, tell Mackenzie I'll only pay for this much. You got to figure out a trip for her and her friends at this price, you know? And I'm like, dude, this just has to be made up because he even has employees walk into his Obviously, hey, I just saw on our corporate card you had dinner the other day and you charged 10 grand. I'm like, man, this isn't realistic.

Yeah, but look at this one over here. Client demands Poppy Steak from Miami in her $150,000 Dubai penthouse, right? A caviar baked potato from Poppy Steak. So again, this is just first world travel, luxury travel problems, and it's in satire, right? And you and I, we make fun of marketing quite a bit, and whoever does this in marketing will probably succeed as well. But my point of calling this out too is, You and I, we're— as much as I would like to do this, and as much as I think I would actually be pretty good at doing this, it's not what we do. And we just focus on what we're good at. And we focus on if it converts, great, we'll continue. And, you know, going back to it, this is why you have to take the omnichannel approach because organic is spread everywhere now.

So this is not hate, but this kind of marketing is great if you want to create a lifestyle business. If you're trying to create something that's much larger, That kind of marketing isn't too effective.

Yeah. And by the way, so no hate on, on Livvy. She probably does really well for herself.

Yeah, good for her.

It's not like, I don't think she's trying to build like a massive company. Um, I think it's just for her business and I'm sure she's crushing it on her own.

Yep. No, I'm with you and good for her. She's making good money from it. I hope it grows. I hope she has to hire more people and makes more. Um, and it is clever marketing and it takes her time. The big thing that Libby does that most people don't do is they don't put in the time to create content. And it starts with that.

Dude, I mean, but to do that, you have to script it. You have to have someone on the other side and it's like different voices all the time. And it's really hard to do actually. To do one video like that, she's probably spending hours.

Yeah.

And it doesn't sound like it's AI. It sounds like it is another—

It sounds like it's another person on the other side. Whereas you and I, we're just first, you and I are just chatting and we get lucky every now and then. It's like a slot machine. Sometimes something takes off, sometimes it doesn't.

So— Dude, like I'm recording content after this, right? So we'll be done recording, call it in another 20-ish minutes. And then I'll drive to record more content. And as I record the content, no joke, show up, teleprompter, super detailed. I reviewed, I helped create the scripts, reviewed, et cetera. I reviewed the last one this morning because I was making tweaks to the intro and the hook. Yesterday I was making tweaks to the copy as well when I was on the plane flying back. I'll go, I'll read, in and out, less than an hour, 2 videos cranked out. I'll do 4 a month, you know, pretty much 1 a week. So sometimes it's, you know, 5 a month, sometimes it's 4. And I'm trying not to spend more than 2 hours a month on creating the content, move on with my life.

Dude, you know what I find myself enjoying more now with YouTube? It's doing screen shares because on a screen share, like, it's like when you're doing a webinar, the time goes by really quickly, 30, 45, 60 minutes or so, and your retention's higher. And then people do like the walkthroughs and I'm just nerding out on what I enjoy versus I hate it when I— so I'll go and record the teleprompters there, but then the outline is based on like a Loom video I made, but there's like bullet points and open loops that I don't like. And when there's things I read in the script or the teleprompter that I don't like, it throws me off, right? And I start to get more and more annoyed. And so I'm finding that I enjoy making the walkthroughs more and I'll probably do more of those. And one pro tip for everyone. I've been using ytjobs.co more to find pro YouTubers, pro YouTube talent, right? And these people are freaking amazing, Neil. Like, the people that are applying, you can see which channels they worked on, how big those channels were, what videos they actually worked on, and the channel that they worked on, they have to verify that this person in fact worked on that channel. And so, you're getting legit vetted people. And so, if you want a scriptwriter, if you want someone that's a strategist, a producer, you want someone that can handle thumbnails, all these things, It's all there. And we've been testing some other editors and some of these editors are far and above kind of what we have on the current team. And what I would say is we want our editors to learn from these people. So we're probably going to bring on a couple of them and then they're going to learn from these editors because again, like if they've been there, done that, then we don't need to tell them what to do.

But we won't do screen shares and that kind of content for YouTube. We found it doesn't work for us. For generating enterprise leads. So I think the screen share content does extremely well to generate views and you get a lot of SMB leads. We found that when we go too detailed and too much in the weeds, it doesn't do as well for enterprise.

But don't you go, you go pretty deep on your webinars, don't you?

Yeah, but we don't go deep where we show them how to do it step by step.

Ah, okay. You're showing them just like high level.

The concept, the strategy. So by sticking high level, what we find is we get less webinar attendees, but we get more leads that we can pitch versus when we go step by step, we have more webinar attendees, right?

Yeah.

When we do top high level, we get less signups.

Yeah.

But if we go step by step, we get more signups and we get more total leads. But out of the leads, the total number of enterprise leads is much smaller, like by more than like 40%.

That's interesting. And by the way, when Neil says webinar attendees, he expects at least 5,000 per webinar. So it's a good amount of people. That's not normal for most people. But I will say, to your point, Neil, when I do the screen shares now, I don't actually show them how to do it. I don't really explain as much. I'm just like, here's what I'm doing right now. Here's what I'm building. Here's what I'm building. So I am keeping it high level and that's what gets them interested, right? So to your point, it's, I would just say, Double-click on that one. And that is it for today, guys, and we'll see you tomorrow.