SEO IS DEAD *BUT* Here’s The New Playbook for Massive Traffic

All right, we are live. We're live, guys. It is 9:01 AM Pacific time. Welcome. What I'm going to do here is we're going to talk about how AI is really crushing traditional SEO. Okay? And when you think about traditional SEO back maybe 15 years ago, traditional SEO was the only organic game in town, right? When you think about optimizing for a business, the intent was there. This is why Google built one of the best business models in the world. Still is one of the best business models today, but their business model is shifting very quickly, right? And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to jump around a little bit. I'm going to show you some data in terms of what's happening, and I'm going to tell you what we're optimizing for as well. And I think the first thing that I want to cover here is that, yes, when you think about traffic patterns, I'm going to try to graph it out for you. When you look at your Google Search Console now, which I think you all should have, Google Search Console, Your impressions are going up, but your clicks are going down, right? And that means we're all getting less website traffic. We have this open jaw pattern that frankly doesn't look too appealing. In fact, I'm going to share my screen over here for this little open jaw pattern. And this is just for our website in the last 12 months or so. So I'm happy, more than happy to share this, right? And so we get a good chunk of our leads from SEO for Single Grain. So Single Grain is the ad agency and For those that don't know me, my name's Eric Siu. I have an ad agency called Single Grain. We have a software called Carrot, which is LinkedIn account-based marketing software. And we do podcasts, right? One's called Marketing School. The other one's called Leveling Up. And I'll, you know, more on that later. And I'm going to tell you this. I started my background 15 years ago, 16 years ago in marketing. And I started with SEO. And I still, you know, still very much today when I do my podcast with my co-host Neil, We're still very much seen as SEOs today, right? Because that's where we started our background in. But the game has changed so much now. And when I was talking to all these founders, there was 8 of us in the last 2 days. Everyone's freaking out because so many people have invested so many dollars into SEO and they still think it's the same game, right? But the game has changed. I mean, even this webinar alone, I'll tell you this much. There's 172 of you watching right now. We spent $5,000 on this webinar just to get more attendees, right? And more on that later. But you look at this traffic over here. So you can see what's happening is that this purple is the impressions that a website is getting. And then blue is actually, this is the number of clicks that you're getting. So it's moving down and to the right. And so what's happening is a lot of AI overviews is cannibalizing the search engine result pages, the SERPs. So last time Ahrefs reported on this, it's about 40, sorry, 37% of website traffic is getting eaten up by the AI overviews, right? When you search for something now, oftentimes you get AI overviews or they'll straight up, Google will flip you into AI mode, right? And that's difficult because you want people to come to your website to convert on your website. And so now when you look at SEO, it's much more of a branding play. You're just trying to get more impressions overall, right? A lot of SEOs like to say that, but I think that answer is just not good enough because I still want to drive more conversions for my business. And so that's kind of what I want to cover in this webinar as well is what do you do in this situation where website traffic is going down? And so what I will say though is LLM traffic like a ChatGPT, or when you think about a Perplexity, or when you think about an Anthropic, for example, That traffic is continuing to go up right now. And the conversion rates on LLM traffic are 5 to 7 times more than what you would typically get. Because usually when someone lands on your site, after a period of time, from an LLM, they've done a lot of research already. And whenever you query an LLM like a ChatGPT, it's usually searching for 30 to 60 different sources, if not more than that. And then you have some follow-on queries as well. So maybe each query becomes a search for over hundreds of sources, right? And so it's a lot more targeted when someone reaches your website. So the question is then how do you rank for these LLMs? Because we know that even though ChatGPT is still a sliver of Google's traffic today, it's growing very rapidly. And so one thing that I will say, and I'm going to stop my share for a second, one thing I'll say is that we're focusing a lot more of our content on transactional content. And so what do I mean by that? Transactional content is more like buy red shoes online, cheap red shoes online, or digital marketing agency in Los Angeles, or the best SEO agencies in San Francisco, for example. You have a lot of different permutations, right? And when you think about informational searches, that might be like, what is SEO? Or what are the best red shoes, right? Or that best red shoes is more middle of the funnel, but like, what is SEO? What is Nike, for example? And so back in the day, maybe a couple years ago, you would maybe publish 70, 80% of your content that you publish on your website, your blog might be transactional content. Sorry, not transactional, but informational content. So you'd be publishing a lot of informational content. Maybe 20 to 30% of your content might be transactional content, right? Again, the buy red shoes online or buy cheap red shoes. And now today, I actually think that's more flipped. And so the way I look at this, I don't think you could quite see these guys over here, but this is Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. So I believe it was Warren Buffett that said that, you know, when you have a cigar butt type of business where maybe it's like a newspaper business where it was just kind of on its way down, right? But when you have a cigar butt business where you have a few puffs left in the business, you want to make sure that you're still maximizing that, right? You want to make sure that you're maximizing the cash flows from that business. I look at website traffic today as as a cigar butt channel. It's not dead quite yet, but I mean, you can still get a few more puffs out of it. That's really what I'm getting at. And so what we're doing now at Single Grain, or even for our clients as well at Single Grain, is we're focusing more on programmatic content, right? And that means that we're creating these templated pages. I'll show you maybe one example of one. Let's do this. Okay. So I'm going to share my screen in a second, but okay, here, I'm just going to pull this up. Here's an example of a programmatic page, right? So a programmatic page would be like when you go to TripAdvisor, fun things to do in Rome, fun things to do in Japan. These are templated pages that you can create. Now, I'm not saying you should spam Google all day, but just keep in mind that these LLMs, they are looking for They are looking for more content to scrape on the web, right? And so the more at-bats that you have, the more content you're actually publishing, not even just blog content, but I mean video content, YouTube content, LinkedIn content gets crawled as well. Instagram content gets crawled as well. Reddit content gets crawled as well. The more you appear as a brand, the more shots on goal you have to appear in an LLM result, right? And just bear in mind, whenever there's an AI mode, result, just keep in mind, there's not just one SERP or a few SERPs. Now you have hundreds or thousands of different examples, different permutations, and you're just trying to increase your chance of showing up ultimately. And so let me just show you this over here. This is an example of a programmatic page we have for Single Grain, right? So earlier I said, for us, it might be innovative SEO agency or innovative SEO agency in Japan or innovative SEO agency in Los Angeles, right? So this is a templated page over here. So we'll design it and these call to actions will be customized for each page and we'll just produce these pages at scale. And you can see that it looks pretty decent, right? It's well designed. And then these sections over here are more AI assisted. And you can use different tools out there. There's a handful of different tools. We have a tool internally called ClickFlow, which we can talk about later, but this allows us to make production-grade content at scale. You can certainly use tools out there like Manus, that's M-A-N-U-S. GenSpark is very good as well. And they'll help you create not only the keywords that you should go after within a span of even like a couple minutes, and they'll even produce those blog posts for you, production-grade blog posts based on your writer guidelines, based on how your website is templated, right? But here's an example of a programmatic page over here. We have some case studies, whatever. And then we link to our podcast and things like that. My point of showing you this is, and maybe I'll even show you TripAdvisor, like fun things to do. In LA, let's do that. So look, there's a lot of Google results up here, but when you click on TripAdvisor, the first thing you see, this is a templated page over here. Okay? So this doesn't necessarily apply to everyone, but if you have geolocations, multiple geographies, I should say, then you can go after this, right? Must-do experiences in LA, spot celebrity homes, bike rides by the beach, all this type of stuff. But they do this for millions of pages and they're not nearly as strong as they were years ago where they're getting hundreds of millions of keywords that they're ranking for, but they're still pretty strong today, right? And we can say safely that their traffic is going down, but that's okay because they're still making the most of what they have. And so I'm going to answer some questions in a second too. So keep the questions coming. I'm going to take a look at the questions in a second. But this study over here from Ahrefs shows that AI-generated content does not hurt your Google ranking. 600,000 pages analyzed, right? And I think this is important to see because a lot of people, when clients come to us, they're like, oh, we're not comfortable with AI content. We're just, from just a security standpoint or just a brand safety standpoint, I should say, they're not comfortable with that. And it makes sense. But when you start to look at data like this, and even when you think about what Google has said, Google has said in the past that they're not okay with AI content, but then they changed their stance. They ended up saying, oh, you know what? AI content is actually, it's okay. As long as it helps human beings, it's okay. And this, more studies like this are going to come out and 600,000 pages, that's a pretty good sample size. I think we're going to see more and more people getting comfortable with AI-assisted content. The way we look at it now is you might be using different tools out there, like the ones I mentioned, or using ClickFlow internally, but you use stuff like that. And you have a human in the loop. So we call it HIL, human in the loop. We see that as the future of marketing. The future of marketing is going into much more of a one-click world where you're going to get a lot of suggestions from different products that you have based on the data that they see. And then it's going to just say, hey, do you just want us to do it for you in one click? And that is going to be the future of marketing. It's going to be very one-click. And so that's what it is. Now I want to show you in a second. So this is Manus over here. So this is Manus in action. We use this for our internal tool, ClickFlow, but you can see it's basically scanning our entire blog and it's coming up with the writer guidelines. And it came up with long-tail, high-intent transactional keywords that I mentioned earlier that you want to go for because these are high-intent. They're not that competitive. And LLMs love this because usually when you're searching for something in an LLM, you're not just asking for a keyword, you're querying long sentences. Or maybe you're dictating into your microphone for 5, 6 minutes at a time using dictation tools to outline what you're looking for, right? And so when you're able to really outline what you want and use a tool like this, again, it'll look for the keywords, it'll scan your writer guidelines, and then it'll come up with blog posts for you in a very quick period of time, right? So this is what Manus looks like again. And then if you're interested, by the way, we do have a little offer over here. I think I can throw this up. So we are actually giving away 25,000 words for free, but there's a waitlist for it, but you can sign up at clickflow.com for that. And I'll just leave this banner up for a second as I go through these slides, because I think there's some relevant things in here that I can pull up as well. So the one thing that Neil and I talk about on the Marketing School Podcast, and I want to give him the credit for this, he actually came up with this phrasing, but Some people like to say GEO, LLMO. They like to say AI search. There's so many different ways to say this right now. There's so many acronyms for this. And we just call it search everywhere optimization. So SEO is now search everywhere optimization. And when you look at this graph over here, and I'll explain this if you can't see this that clearly, but this just shows the rise of community traffic in the last couple years. This shows HubSpot's community rising up into the right. You see Shopify's community rising up into the right. You see even Zapier's community, it seems like they don't focus on it much. It's still going up into the right. You think about YouTube. It's the 2nd largest search engine in the world. Some of you are watching this on YouTube right now. I'm spending a lot more time on my YouTube because it is the number 2 search engine in the world. You look at Amazon. If people are searching for things to shop, like yesterday I was buying stuff on my couch, right? Like I go to Amazon. I don't really go to YouTube or Google to search for things as much anymore. App Store optimization, if it makes sense for you. Pinterest, if it makes sense for you. Obviously, you want to optimize for the LLM surfaces. But what I just mentioned to you right now, if you have pretty good domain authority on your website, which is scored 1 through 100, then that means whatever long-tail, high-intent transactional phrases that you go for, you're going to have a much easier time ranking for those. And so for us right now, we're like, okay, how do we hit this harder? Let's not just go for 100. Let's try to go for maybe 500, maybe 1,000 or so. of these transactional ones that are still human reviewed, but because of AI, we're a lot more efficient now and we can pump these out and we can maximize the cigar butt channel that is known as website traffic, right? Or traditional SEO. But at the same time you do that, you want to maximize that cigar butt business. You want to take a look at this other stuff. And so what we're doing right now is when you look at, let's say our YouTube channel over here. So this is my YouTube channel, Leveling Up. subscribe if you want. It doesn't do bad, right? And so I'll say like, look, this channel in the last 30 days or so, 663,000 views. Okay? So it's not bad. We add about 3,000 subscribers or so. We publish about 33 videos. Now, I'm not going to say I'm the most popular marketer in the world. I'm certainly not. And I would say our YouTube channel could probably do better. It certainly got better in the last couple months or so. Our team has been hard at work on this, but you look at some of these videos. Okay? So some of these might get 7,600 views or so, 3,800 views. That's better than this webinar over here. And I love you all on the webinar. I think this is very high intent. People will convert and then sign up for a free offer or whatever. But if I can get 5,000 people or so, 7,600 people or so, or in some cases, sometimes I get lucky and I get 31,000 views, okay? Or sometimes I get very lucky and I get 176,000 views over here, okay? So I look at this as we all have to be playing the new organic game. And the new organic game is search everywhere optimization, which means you are hitting YouTube. When I was kind of a— I felt like I kind of had to lecture these SaaS founders the other day. They're like, oh, what about traditional SEO? We put so much money there. Well, unfortunately, just because you put money into it doesn't mean that you deserve to have that traffic, right? I'm like, guys, hey guys, who's doing webinars here, right? Webinars work well for B2B. Who's doing LinkedIn? LinkedIn has good organic reach right now. Hey guys, who's doing YouTube right now? YouTube certainly has, for me, I think it's the best channel for the next decade, which is why we're continuing to obsess over this. And we're going to try to get better over time. Because look, some videos don't hit that well. This is a long-form podcast that Neil and I do. 500 views here. It's not great. 1,300, 2,000. It's not great. But I'll tell you what, I might not be getting millions of views for each video, but you want to aim for relevant views, right? So if you're going to start playing this organic game on On LinkedIn, you're going to start hitting X, you're going to start hitting YouTube, wherever it is that your audience hangs out. You got to think about starting to understand the games on these different channels. And some of you might say, well, I don't want to go produce content. I don't like being in front of the camera. I would say, number one, maybe you go hire an in-house influencer because there's some people that do that. You pay them a good salary and then get them to hang around. Okay? Or number two, you stop being selfish and you stop thinking about yourself and you start thinking about, hey, I know I have a lot of value to deliver and this is the value I'm going to deliver to other people, right? That is my mindset going into this webinar. Do I still get nervous going on stage when I speak in front of, let's say, thousands of people? Absolutely. But the moment I start thinking about, well, okay, that's nice, but it's not about me. It's more about what can I deliver to this audience and what value are they going to get? Making sure that you get at least one actionable takeaway. That is what I'm looking for ultimately, right? So that's that. By the way, keep the questions going. I'm probably going to move over to questions maybe in the next 5 to 10 minutes or so, and then maybe jump around a little bit. But before I do, type 1 into chat right now if you feel like this is getting you what you need, or if you want this to go in a different direction, type in where you would like it to go, right? Because this is kind of a, maybe you get to choose your own adventure thing, and I can, in real time, I can make adjustments here, right? So look, I will say one thing. I'll try to make this a little actionable for you too. So Neil and I, we've been focusing more on our YouTube channels in the last couple months because again, number 2 search engine in the world, still owned by Google, right? We are focusing a lot more on the ideation, right? And so we have someone great on my team, Maya. She comes up with the outlines. And then what I'll do is I'll make a Loom video. Maybe it might go for 5, 10, 15 minutes or so talking about what I want to talk about in the video. And then she'll refine the outline. And then I'll walk about 10 minutes to a studio over here in LA. I'll record the long-form videos and then we'll get these videos out. But not only that, we have to think about the packaging here too. When we're testing, we're testing multiple different headlines. We're testing multiple different thumbnails. We're thinking about the 30-second retention. Every single channel has a meta. And I'm not talking about the company meta, I am talking about the most optimized way to play the game for each channel. So earlier this week, someone showed me, oh, don't look at my views today. Look at my views 6 years ago, okay, for his channel. And sure, he got 3 million views on one video, 600,000 on one video. I'm like, dude, the game has changed. 5, 6 years ago, I would get 400,000, 500,000 views on a video. And that was as easy as me just raising my hand, that would happen. But YouTube is getting more competitive. And so the meta, the most optimized way of playing each channel changes all the time. Just like how traditional SEO has changed. Just like how now Reddit, the game has changed there where they're getting a lot more traffic and people want to rank on Reddit. A lot of the inquiries that we get for Single Grain, a lot of it is Reddit and people looking for YouTube, right? And at that retreat, someone's like, dude, why don't you guys just do that for your agency? Why don't you do that for other people? And Sure, we can certainly help with strategy, but when it comes down to it, if you're going to do organic really well, I don't think that's something that you can hand off to an agency. When you look at some of the best people on, let's say LinkedIn, Adam Robinson, he does a really good job with LinkedIn, right? He is mostly writing his own posts, okay? When you look at on the YouTube side of things, Neil and I have a lot of control over our respective channels, right? But when you try to hand it off to someone else, they're just not going to care as much as you will. When it comes to organic. And so you have to find someone that really cares and you can't just hire a mercenary. Agencies are mercenaries. You can't just hire a freelancer. They're mercenaries as well. You want to hire missionaries, right? You want to hire someone that would join the company internally. And maybe you want to hire someone like yourself because you care the most ultimately. So that's what I would say. And by the way, when we do long-form podcasts, We'll use things like Opus over here. So I'm going to share this tab. And the beauty of Opus is it will find moments that I can throw over to short form. So over here, we talked about Meta stealing OpenAI talent with huge salaries. Is this a war, right? So this will just scan all the content that we have and then find the right moments. And then we'll just republish these moments. I actually had a chat with my brand team this morning. I was like, guys, we produce so much content. How are we not getting this content out there? How are we not having more shots on goal? Because I look at social media, especially short form, as a slot machine. You just don't know what's going to hit. Long form's a little different. It really comes down to the idea and sometimes how strong your channel is from an authority standpoint. But from a short form standpoint, you don't necessarily need a lot of followers. If you have something that just hits with— you have a good idea, you have a good hook, and it just hits, that's good. And a lot of times when I have a video that will get 8 million views, 7, 8 million views or so. I don't know what's going to hit. And so the thing that we're trying to do now is just publish more. And it's kind of becoming that way with traditional SEO. It's just publish more of that transactional content and the informational content, still do it 20% of the time, right? But 80% of the time, go for transactional if you have a relatively strong domain, right? Now, this SEO advice that I'm giving, it's all relative. Because when I give the advice, I'm really thinking about myself first. But if you're starting from scratch right now, and if your audience hangs out on LinkedIn and you have a lot of good data from whatever you build, maybe you have e-commerce, maybe you have SaaS or whatever it is, well, you can publish that data and just publish consistently. And then eventually LinkedIn's going to give you that reach. I look at all of these channels, LinkedIn, YouTube, they're looking at you as an employee. And what I mean by that is how consistently can you publish? Can you publish about relatively the same topics? And if you can over extended period of time, then they will reward you with organic reach. And that's how it is. If you start being inconsistent, you start talking about different things, they will strip that organic reach from you and you don't get it anymore, right? And ideally what you do is you— the reason why MrBeast likes to say that podcasts are overpowered is because one, you have long-form retention, right? It's good for retention, which drives more ads for them. And they will then reward you with views because you're driving good retention with your videos. But then you also get the short-form clips over here. And what you can then do is you can go out there and you can hire clippers, right? And what I mean by clippers is someone that can go out there and find even more moments and then publish it to their respective channels too. And you reward them. Maybe you're paying them anywhere from $20 to $40 per video, and maybe you're bonusing them on $1,000 if they hit a million views or more, right? So it's kind of, you give them a base fee and then it's a little bit of it is pay for performance. And when you look at startups out there today, like Clue.ly, for example, Clue.ly, they raised like $50 million from Andreessen Horowitz. I think these are really smart. Literally, I think 21-year-olds, very young, right? Literally just out of college. They are hiring 50 clippers, 50 people who are good at short-form video, and they're just going for it because they're a consumer SaaS app. And so when you look at people, out there that they're doing things that are creative, you got to think about, hey, how can I apply that to my business? Because again, when I talk about SEO, when I talk about traditional SEO, sure, that's the topic of this webinar, but really what I'm talking about is traditional organic reach. And AI has really changed the game with traditional organic reach. Okay. So I am going to take a look at the questions for a second now, and I'm going to answer some questions. And let's take a look. I'm going to start from the— Okay, so I'm going to type in some of the tools. So Opus is one of the tools, and then Manus and GenSpark would be another one. Okay, and let's see. Faith says Neil Patel said that OpenAI heavily weights stuff that is on Wikipedia. It's a different approach than Google. I don't know about that. We'll have to ask Neil when I record with him tomorrow. Let's see. What app is that on screen? I'm just looking at this. I'm just looking at some of these questions over here. Okay. We got a good one from Elaine over here. So Elaine says, how does this impact small businesses that are not thought leaders or content hungry, but they provide a valuable service in their communities? There must be a game they can play. Okay. Great question. Okay. So same question that all of these SaaS founders had the last 2 days. One person is in KYC, so know your customer. Boring, right? One person's in real estate, boring. One person is in cybersecurity, okay? Boring. One person is in weapons security, right? So if you're walking into a school, you want to screen people for weapons, you can detect it. But one of the guys actually came up with the weapon screening one. He came up with an idea. He's like, dude, what if I just walk in, try to walk into these certain stores in certain states with a gun and see what the reaction is, right? And I don't I'm like, that's super controversial. And then frankly, that's dangerous in some states, but that for sure is going to get views. Okay? And so there's always a way to figure out how you can get— the more controversial you can be, the better, obviously, in terms of views. But you also don't want to be controversial for the sake of potentially damaging your brand, right? So if I go back to the Clueless guys, what they've done was one of their ads was a guy was on a date with a girl and then he has these these glasses on and the glasses were, it's like a heads-up display telling him what to say to the girl to kind of look, appear hip, right? And then they had another video. They had a creator appear as if she was on a date with a guy, like an online Zoom date. And the guy was talking about sports and she didn't know anything about sports, right? And the heads-up display said, oh, you should talk about Neymar, the football player, and you should talk about how he's good at this and that. And that video got 4 million views on TikTok. But more than that, All the comments were like, what is that? What app is that? What is that? What is that? What is that? Right? And so when you're able to just get people to stop the scroll and think about something that might be a little out there, you should be— it doesn't really matter what niche you're in, right? You should be able to do that. And so I don't care how boring your industry is. If we're talking about weapons screening or something like that, or for example, the guy that's in real estate, he has a tremendous offer. Where he's able to help you figure out, oh, if let's say I applied for an apartment and I got rejected. Well, usually what happens there if you're rejected is usually you have to go start from scratch again and apply to other apartments, right? Well, he has a thing where if you get rejected, maybe 3 other apartments will appear for you and say, hey, you got rejected by this apartment, but we'll accept you based on based on the credit that we ran, based on what we see about you, based on what we know about you. Now, that's an interesting offer. And he can run that. He could have different people in different states, college towns, all that. Like really creativity is just a matter of how much you're willing to push it and how much you're studying other people. And if you go to Instagram, you look at your For You tab, you look at who's driving the views, maybe you're able to pull ideas from there or whatever scroll stops you. I like to bookmark things on my Instagram or on my YouTube. Whatever stops my scroll, I'm going to try to figure out how I can make that into my own. I think it's just a matter of spending time on it. And I believe in today's day and age where you have very strong organic, especially with short form or LinkedIn or sometimes even X and YouTube as well, I think you're making a mistake by not spending time on it. So I think that's a really good question. All right, let's see. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. What platform are you using for your templates? Elaine, if you can clarify what that means. I don't know what you mean by what platform are you using for your templates? And then Jen, 2023 study. So 2023, they said they're not against AI content, but before that they said they were, right? But this study over here from Ahrefs, which I didn't scroll down for you guys, but it actually shows that there's a minimal difference between AI content versus purely human-generated content, right? So this is a separate study that Ahrefs did, just to clarify that. So yeah, cool. And by the way, there's some people coming in from Facebook from this. That's great. Here's what I wanna show you too. So the bulk of our traffic, like we used to rank number 1 for the keyword digital marketing agency, and we drove a ton of leads from it. That's how we got Amazon as a customer. That's how we got Uber. That's how we got Airbnb as a customer, for example, right? But you just, I showed you guys my traffic in the last 12 months. We're lucky from an organic standpoint, if we're getting, I don't know, 60,000, 70,000 visits a month on our website, we used to get 400,000 or 500,000, right? But a lot of that was maybe not as qualified. Now, what I'll say is when I take a look at my— let me share my screen. Let's take a look at this one. I'm just going to share my window. All right. So you guys can see this over here. We are driving about 1.44 million impressions in the last 30 days or so. Okay. Oh, you might say, oh, well, Eric, you've been doing this for so long. That's easy for you to say, blah, blah, blah. No, that's not true because a lot of my stuff frankly sucks. Go look at my Instagram right now. You look at a lot of the reels, 1,000 views, 2,000 views. That's not a hallmark of a great channel, right? And then sometimes you look at my YouTube, 500 views on a video, pitiful. 391 views, pitiful, right? And then sometimes some of these will hit. So I would say we're doing, I don't know, 7.5 out of 10 right now. But we're constantly optimizing. We're just like, okay, how do we grow 10% month over month? How do we grow 10% month over month? If you keep growing 10% month over month, over the next 12 months, over the next 24 months, that's going to compound into something really big. We all start from somewhere, right? And what I'll say is, okay, 1.44 million impressions, that's good kind of across the board on these channels. And that's not even including LinkedIn. That's not even including, I don't even think X is in here as well. And so there's, I think maybe overall, maybe we're getting, I don't know, 2 million, 2.5 million impressions a month. So what is that? That's 30 million impressions a year. And I still don't think that's enough. And so in my mind, I'm like, okay, how do we start planning for more creative ideas? How do we plan for more creative offers? How do we do more webinars like this? And again, those of you that are joining right now, we spent 5 grand on this webinar and roughly I think it was $8 per signup or so. So we'll see how this goes in terms of driving leads for us because that's the ultimate goal. But what I want to call out here is if you look at the last 30 days or so, we published 556 pieces of content and that's publishing to Twitter or X, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok. Threads. And so Maya's watching this right now and Maya knows that I think this is just not good enough, right? And so we look at this in the last— so if we look at it every week, we're publishing 139 pieces of content. We need to get this, and this is actually better than I thought. Earlier today I said 70. If we can triple this to 417 pieces a week, that's going to give us more shots on goal to have one video that takes off. Sometimes I'll publish a video on an Instagram hack, boom, 300,000 views. Or I published something on my Instagram 2 weeks ago on just a ChatGPT prompt. That post has 400,000 views on it. Is that going to drive customers? Probably not. But my point is you just don't know what's going to take off. The other argument, Neil and I will talk about this sometimes, is sometimes I might get 8 million on a video. I talked about a discount store in Italy when I went to Italy. And for that discount store, that got 8 million views on it. And I will say that when I went to an entrepreneur's event or when I went to a conference, a few people walked up to me and say, hey, they saw that piece of content, right? So sometimes you might not reach the right people if you're going wide TAM with your content, but still, there's still going to be a subset of the right people in there. Because if I'm at a conference or whatever, or if I'm at a dinner and someone notices me, it's still worth it. And sometimes it leads to a deal, right? It's staying top of mind. Especially for a business like mine, if it's like we're talking LinkedIn account-based marketing software with Carrot, or if we're talking like an agency, oftentimes 99% of people are not in market to buy. But if you're just constantly top of mind, eventually maybe you're gonna be thrown into the RFP, request for proposal process, or like the pitch process, right? So that's what I'd say. And so what we wanna do here is leveraging AI. So leveraging like Opus, which I mentioned earlier, We should be able to maybe double, I think, the amount of content that we're publishing per week, hopefully more. But again, we're taking long-form 80-minute podcasts or podcasts I'm doing with other people. Maybe I'm going to try to do 1 or 2 more podcasts per week. So we're going to have a lot more content. And yeah, we'll see what takes off and what doesn't. So anyway, I'm going to answer some more questions over here. Hi, Eric. Shannon asks, let's see. I'm a retail boutique. What's the best way to drive sales? Impressions, likes, et cetera, are great, but don't pay the bills. Conversions are king. Oh, thanks for that, Maya. Maya pinned it. That's awesome. So look, impressions, likes, if you're in retail and boutique, I actually think the most creative marketers are in, they're doing DTC marketing, right? They're marketing to consumers. I think the most creative marketers are doing consumers. Consumer marketing. And when you look at what they're willing to do in terms of being creative, what I just mentioned earlier with Clue.ly, with consumer, you can show people on a date. You can show people cheating on a test, for example. You can show all the different use cases, right? So I don't know what you sell exactly, but you need awareness ultimately at the end of the day. So the impressions, getting the right impressions, if you're at least showing off your product, maybe you're working with influencers, right? So maybe you say, hey, the first 5 seconds of the video, you cannot talk about the product. I want you to be as creative as possible. Shannon, you're going to go to Instagram. You're going to look at your For You page. Just hopefully you're looking at people that are talking about similar products or in a similar industry. Whoever's getting the most amount of impressions, you want to DM those people. DM all of these people that ideally know how to get views and it looks like it has taste to you and you want to reach out to them and say, hey, We're doing a paid collab here. And what are you going to charge? What would you charge? What are your rates for doing posts where you would promote our product, for example? So we'll give you our product and you share whatever story you want to share. First 5 seconds, do not talk about our product, right? Because if it's too promotional in the beginning, you're going to lose the— you're not going to hook people in. And then you're going to see how it goes. And the cool thing is micro influencers are a lot cheaper today, right? And so, by the way, All this stuff I'm talking about, like some of you joining right now, well, what does this have to do with traditional SEO? Guys, traditional SEO is dead. It's dead. When I say it's dead, like cigar butt business, that's what I mentioned earlier, right? So you've got to start learning this other stuff. How do you play it? Where is organic reach? Where are my customers hanging out? Okay? And then where are my customers hanging out? And then how do I play the game for that channel? And maybe you don't have to learn every single channel. Maybe you just learn one first, get really damn good at one channel first. And then you can think about expanding to other channels, right? And so I think right now, what are we pretty good at? Yes, my base level, my base skills in SEO, but I think we're getting better at YouTube. That's good. I think we are— I think we're— what else are we decent at? I think Instagram sometimes will pop off, right? I think our TikTok sucks. I think if I were speaking to my team right now, I'd be like, guys, do we need to make a new TikTok? Do we need to make multiple new TikToks? Do we need to be using WAP? Or maybe there's a Discord channel called clipping.exe where you can hire clippers. You got to be obsessed over this stuff, right? I'll tell you one more thing. Just because you hire a director of marketing, that's not enough. I think those of you watching this right now, I think you, even if you're a founder, you're a leader of the company, you got to understand this stuff because it's super high leverage. And if you don't, the people you hire, you're not going to be able to push them to try to understand this stuff. You're not going to be able to push them to get better. You're not going to be able to show your frustration to try to push them to get better, right? And then what's going to happen is things are going to fall to the status quo. Then your organic reach is going to go to zero. Everything's going to go to zero. Your sales are going to go to zero. Hopefully not, but you get my point. So let's see. How important is the llm.txt file for crawlers? Let's do this over here. Oh, I did the wrong one. Sorry, Maya, I picked the wrong one. Rahul asks, how important is llm.txt file for AI crawlers to cite us? Right now, I would say most SEOs, we're not paying attention to llm.txt. We haven't seen much of an effect from it. And it's interesting because Ahrefs, their team has talked about this too. And I think their team does pretty good research. I'm currently learning data analytics and digital marketing. Will AI take those roles soon? No, I think you're good. I think as long as you are ahead of the curve, I think if you're okay, let me just put it to you. Maybe this is a little controversial. I think if you just want a 9-to-5 job, I think AI will take— an AI-enhanced human will take your job. I think as long as you're constantly staying ahead of the curve and you're very hungry, we look for people at Single Grain who are humble, hungry, smart. As long as you're humble, hungry, smart, and you're constantly getting better from an AI standpoint, you're going to be good. So I wouldn't worry too much about that. Speaking of which, this is the other offer that we have over here. We're doing these free AI-forward marketing plans if you just go to Single Grain. So let me answer another question here. As a consumer with a kid, Instagram ads are how I find children's clothes. Olivia, thank you for that. That's freaking awesome. So Shannon, that just goes to show to you that you'll be good. Let me see what else over here. Yeah. And by the way, any of you worried about your job being taken? I just wouldn't worry about that. I am concerned by people. When I just look at people, I can see who's AI obsessed. This entire retreat I was at, everyone was like, okay, what are we going to do? What are some AI nuggets? How are we driving AI fluency throughout our organization? And I would say for the majority of the people on my team, I can see who's bought in and who isn't, who's obsessed about it and who isn't, right? I would say that if you have the power to hire people, you want to make sure that whenever you're hiring people, the first question you ask them is like, hey, how are you using AI? What's the most innovative thing that you've done with AI? And tell me what metrics you drove forward with this. And then you just ask them, hey, what are the 2 most important or 2 most impressive or hardest things that you've done and what numbers you impacted there? Those 2 questions alone will help you sift through a lot of the noise. So that's what I would say. Now, Aparna asks, do you think every leadership member should be active on LinkedIn and post consistently to get better traffic and brand mentions? Yes, I do. I do think that if you can have your leaders posting to LinkedIn and you can sometimes even run thought leader ads to promote the people on your team. I'm a proponent of someone, if someone on my team wants to build their brand, I'm for it, right? Even, yeah. It's like, oh, whoa, Eric, what if they leave your company? Yeah. What if they leave the company? But wouldn't I get benefit during that? If we help grow them, aren't we going to get benefit from that for a period of time at the very least? And also you build goodwill because people remember that. I am friends with a lot of ex-employees. I'll meet with them in different countries. I'll still talk to them. I'll make introductions for them. I'm so happy to help them. We become friends afterwards, right? And so I think it's worth it. I think the majority of people probably don't think it's worth it because like, well, why would I help someone else grow their brand, right? So I'm not against it. I'll just put it that way. Let's see. And then Olivia asked for the content team. So our brand content team is, I would say, 7 or 8 people right now that help with the organic stuff. And I would say we have our internal SEO team. Let's say there's probably 2 or 3 people and maybe like an editor or 2 helping with the transactional content I was telling you about earlier. Samantha asks, what's the difference between Single Grain versus Semrush? So Semrush is SEO software. Single Grain is, that's more of a performance agency. So we do paid media, SEO, CRO. But I think if you're asking the difference between Semrush and our product ClickFlow, ClickFlow is our SEO product and that focuses more on helping people with internal links. Updating, deleting, consolidating content, and creating production-grade content at scale. So we don't do a lot of the analysis that Semrush does or Ahrefs does. So that's what we do there. And then Zane asked this. So Eric, since traffic is going lower and lower from Google to our websites, should we even consider writing content for humans and start focusing on generating content for LLMs now? So look, I think— here, I'm going to take my screen share off. I should have taken it off a while ago. Yeah. What I mentioned earlier, cigar butt business, right? So cigar butt channel, your website traffic is going down, but it doesn't mean it's dead yet. People are still like, we're still getting traffic to our site. We're still getting leads from our website, right? And when you generate more long-tail traffic, like how to integrate NetSuite with Salesforce, or maybe something like a much longer question, right? Because LLMs are typically getting much longer questions. If you're optimizing for those and You are growing more of a brand on the internet, the LLMs are going to crawl all the areas of the internet. They're going to determine if you're a brand or not, and they're going to determine whether you deserve to fall into those LLM rankings or not. Let me give you an example here. So if all of you open up your ChatGPT right now, if you type in, what's the best marketing podcast? I'm pretty sure Marketing School appears number 1 or number 2. Try that for the majority, right? And The way I look at this is Google was very much based on links, traditional SEO. But I think the new LLM optimization or search everywhere optimization, whatever you want to call it, I think we're looking— the LLMs, they're multimodal. They can crawl videos, right? They can crawl all sorts of places. I think the more you can appear in all different places, because that's what people are doing right now. They're trying to— the attention is so fragmented. So the more you can appear as an authority across different areas, different surfaces, the more you're going to have a chance to rank. And the more of this transactional, high-intent keyword content that you're producing, the more you're going to appear in those results, right? So that's what I would say. And so I think there's a reason why marketing school consistently appears number 1 or number 2 for most people. We actually ran this test at this retreat, I think yesterday or maybe the day before we ran this test. And for, I would say, 7 out of 8 people, marketing school was at least number 2 or higher. And then for 1 person, it appeared like number 5. So what is the reason for that? Citations. Links are certainly citations, but how many times your brand is mentioned on internet. But also you look at the category, our library of Marketing School episodes, 3,000+ episodes. Okay. We've been doing it for a very long time. Number 2, both Neil and I are at least semi-known entities in the marketing space, right? Neil much more than I am, but we publish a lot of content on our own. So it's like, okay, Not only is the podcast itself consistent, but the 2 co-hosts, they're consistent on their own. Oh wait, what else are all these co-hosts about? So that makes it easier for us to just appear higher in those rankings, right? So citations are a big deal. So that's what I would say. It's a long-winded answer to your question, but that's that. And by the way, these questions that you guys are asking, I'll probably go through a couple more, but the questions that you guys like, leave a thumbs up and I'll try to cover those. Where I can. So Malin asks, if my blog suddenly got indexed from crawl to not indexed, should I focus to update my old content to be more relevant and form it after AI, or should I focus my new content to be relevant and focus to be relevant in AI search? So I think I'm lacking context here. I don't want to give you the wrong advice. But if it's crawled, not indexed, I think you probably want to take a look at the rest of your website. I just don't know enough right now. So I'm actually more concerned, like, is your other content getting indexed or not? Right? Because I wouldn't even worry about net new content if you're having an indexation issue. So that's that. And let's see. Another question. I asked 8 people to go to Perplexity as a brand-related prompt, click the citation, and visit our agency site. I waited 48 hours to reconcile the visits and only 1 How vague, blind is this referral traffic important for KPIs? So I would say, Aaron, I don't think it's that accurate for our website too, when I look at Google Analytics. And the thing that we've said on the Marketing School Podcast is what do we do now in a world where it's much harder to measure things? Because when I first started doing SEO 14 years, 15 years ago or so, you actually could see keyword data, like who was visiting. You can track a lot more. A lot of that is now anonymized. And the quote that used to be said in marketing, and I'm paraphrasing here, was, 50% of my marketing works. I just don't know what 50% works. And so I think trying to, and both Neil and I used to obsess about optimizing for every single little visit and every single, we wanted to be very super data-driven. Now we've settled on, hey, we're okay not knowing sometimes and not trying to track every single thing because that leads to over-optimization and you end up leaving money on the table when you don't decide to try other things such as branding or getting impressions, right? I used to think like, why would I try to get impressions? That doesn't matter. But when I see that it does in fact drive leads or it does rejigger the pipeline in terms of knocking deals loose to get them to come back to the table, It's been effective. I'll give you another example. So my LinkedIn right now isn't the best. Maybe I'm getting 100,000 impressions a month or so. So I think Adam Robinson's, I don't know, a million a month or something like that, but 100,000 is decent. And I think later today I'm talking to someone who's high up at Microsoft and we haven't talked for a year or so. And he wants to talk about the agentic stuff that we're doing, the AI stuff that we're doing. He wants to just catch up. And I don't know if that's going to lead to any deal or anything like that, but that's a matter of him just watching some of the content that we repost to LinkedIn. So whatever content you produce, again, long-form podcast, chop it up. Also post it to LinkedIn, post it to X, post it to short-form areas as well. Hit up your email list with it too. And then you're going to get more shots on goal. Even better, if your stuff starts to take off on Instagram, for example, leverage a tool like ManyChat. use it to collect emails for you at scale. So I think if there's any key takeaway from this one webinar today, it is that search is everywhere and you have to optimize for all these different channels, right? And I'm not saying do it all at the same time. Don't try to boil the ocean, but try to do one step at a time, right? Don't feel like, hey, just because you invested a lot into traditional SEO that you should continue to focus on it because that's sunk cost fallacy, right? We got to focus on What does the data say out there right now publicly? Where should we focus on more? And where is the organic reach right now? I'll put it to you guys this way. When I have companies like, there's like, let's just say publicly traded companies will reach out to me. They'll say, hey, Eric, we'll pay you $40,000 to do a YouTube video and a LinkedIn post. We'll pay you $25,000 to do just a LinkedIn post, right? I talked to someone who does marketing for Meta, actually runs PR for Meta. And she does these deals too where they'll offer people like influencers $50,000 to $100,000 or so. I'm like, how do you justify these costs? How do you measure this? And she's like, we don't. And that's a bad answer right now, but we don't. But Meta has continued, they're happy to pay this because they know it's very much a land grab with this new world of AI right now. So a lot of it's not measurable. I'll just put it to you that way. But everyone knows that organic is the game to play, whether you go with big influencers, which I don't recommend, you go with micro-influencers, right? Look for these people. Go to your Instagram, look for people that are up and coming where you have these college kids who are very good at getting reach, whether it's on TikTok or Instagram, and then reach out to these people. Ask for a paid collab, right? If you're in consumer, for example, even in B2B, this might work too. Or if you're in B2B, you see some people that you like on LinkedIn, maybe reach out to them. Hey, how much for a post? How much? Maybe it's $1,000, maybe it's $2,000 or so, right? Um, and maybe that works out for your numbers, or maybe it can be $50, $100 or so. But I think the key is to be out there and to constantly be learning. And the key out there is not to be expecting someone to train you on this new world, to train you on AI, to train you on where things are going. It's to be self-sufficient, right? So to be humble, to be hungry, to be smart, that's what it's about. So I'm going to answer a few more questions here and then we can work towards— we'll do it for like the next 5, 10 minutes or so. So Amy has a good question here, and thank you guys for these thumbs up. So Amy asks, can you share examples of transactional content again, please? I hear transactional and think conversion versus informative. So that's exactly right. So I'm going to, you know, anybody that says, what is Salesforce? That is informational, okay? When someone searches for how to integrate NetSuite with Salesforce, That means that they are interested in— it's a much more targeted question, right? Or what's the best Salesforce deal, for example, right? That means they're in the buying mode. Or if I'm searching for best digital marketing agencies, I'm in the buying mode. Or what is digital marketing agency? I'm more in the informational search. I don't even know what a digital marketing agency is. It is conversion versus informative, but just keep in mind now, when you search for something on Google, you're going to get an AIO a lot of times, or an AI overview, or it's going to flip you into AI mode, right? And so it's hard to just occupy a SERP for that because the SERPs aren't the SERPs anymore. They're very different now. So hopefully that answers your question. So along with YouTube, what is the best way for a boutique marketing PR agency to cost efficiently get exposure? So Ed, I wonder for you, it's what stories can you share? Obviously keeping your clients confidential. What stories can you share? What lessons can you share? Any of you that are listening to this, by the way, if you're starting out, what stories can you share along the journey? Can you bring people along with you for the journey? All right. And try it for at least 30 to 60 days or so. Or if you want to be outlandish and like the earlier example I gave you around my friend saying, hey, He's going to try to walk into a store with a gun and see what the reaction is. Maybe you can do that, right? To prove that you actually know how to get exposure on your own because you're a PR agency. That's great because most PR agencies don't know how to prove that they know how to get the exposure, right? And PR to me now actually is, it's kind of moved over into how do I just work with these influencers? How can someone broker these partnerships or these influencers for me? and go from there because that is where the exposure is. Do I care so much about a feature in a magazine? Not so much. Maybe if it's a high net worth magazine and maybe there's 1,000 people reading it, but they're all billionaires. Sure. I would care about that. But again, the landscape is shifting. Okay. Where on your Single Grain site do we get the free AI-forward marketing plan? You just sign up for the free consultation and then If it's a good fit, then we'll let you know and go from there. And Kavya asks, how do you ensure your blogs rank good in AI search? So Kavya, I don't know if you just joined right now. I would recommend that you rewatch this webinar. But I'll give you a high level just so I just don't just throw the question away. So if you want to ensure that your blogs rank good in AI search, One, ideally you have some sort of brand or high domain authority on your website. 2, you are producing more long-tail traffic. Could be more long-tail informational traffic, maybe 20% of the time. And then 80% of the time, at least for us, we're doing more transactional, but more long-tail traffic. Because again, like an LLM query is typically much longer tail. It's not just one phrase, it's like a series of questions. And that's what you'd go for, right? But I'll just say this too. People saying they know how to do GEO or LLMO right now, a lot of it's the same stuff. And that's what Neil and I have been saying on the other Marketing School Podcast. It still is links. It still is citations. It still is your brand. It still is making sure that you update, delete, consolidate your content. It still is making sure that your H1 tags are good for AI overviews, right? So that is the game probably for the next 6 to 12 months or so. But the game is shifting more towards this optimizing for search everywhere optimization. So when we talk to clients now, we say, hey, SEO is not just this one piece, it's all these other things over here. It is Reddit, it is YouTube, or it is other areas where you and I might not have talked about, but we're going to have to do some research in terms of where are your people hanging out now. So marketing 101, the game has always been bringing people to the point of sale. And if you're able to bring people to the point of sale, That's your job, right? And your sales job is to close. So while bringing people to the point of sale, like where are your people hanging out? That is marketing 101. We don't need to overcomplicate it. We go back to, I hate using the word first principles because I feel like it's been so overdone, but it is very much first principles, right? If you want to get customers, where are my customers hanging out? Where are my best customers hanging out? How I'm going to hook them? What are their struggles? What's going to get their attention at the end of the day? And then you craft your marketing around that. And then you craft a really good offer too, to get their attention, right? So that's what I would say. Let's see. Let's see. We had 1 million plus impressions on GSC for our website, but this month it cut down to 50% due to AI overviews. So what's the top 3 things we can do? Literally, I would say it's everything that I said on this training. It is optimizing for search everywhere optimization. It is what I just answered for, I think it was, Kavya. That's what it is ultimately, right? You cannot be a one-trick— I used to be a one-trick pony. All I used to know was traditional SEO, but now it's very much, oh, I obsess over, oh, how's our packaging for YouTube? How's our headline for YouTube? How good is the outline? I still don't think it's good enough, right? But it's becoming much more of a— the word that comes to mind is promiscuous, but it's not the right word. You want to be more of a dynamic marketer. You could say promiscuous marketer too, right? You're trying a lot of different channels and then you're figuring out what ideally works and you're doubling, tripling down on it, right? That's what I would say. But organic reach is no longer what it was 15 years ago. Organic reach is very much search everywhere optimization now. Yep, Rachel, that is the TLDR. And other than that, here's what I'll say. If you guys want to type in chat, because we're not done doing these webinars, just the very— we're going to do these every 2 weeks, right? If you type in the chat, What you're interested in hearing more on. I have a lot of things I'm interested, like how we drive more efficiencies through AI for our marketing. That's one topic, right? So whatever ideas you guys have, throw them into chat because then we'll record it and then we'll start putting these topics together for the next couple weeks. And we're going to do these every 2 weeks. So you guys look out for your emails and type in the chat right now what else you'd like to learn about before we work on wrapping this up. And I'm going to answer one more question before we wrap, but type in the chat what you're interested in. Ed says, okay, I made a post on LinkedIn that generated over 300,000 impressions and generated some inquiries. I can do that again or try to. So my challenge to you, Ed, is this. You think, you look at LinkedIn and you look at what works, because guys, we're still talking about organic reach here. We had a post for Carrot where we just said, hey, LinkedIn ads doesn't allow you to do this until today. And then we basically posted a screenshot of our app Carrot, which allows you to make these personalized LinkedIn ads. If you want to target enterprises and you want to make a bunch of these personalized ads, it would take you weeks to do so. We allow you to do it in minutes, right? So that was the copy of it. That post got 700 likes. It got 1,300 comments on it, and we drove 800 leads from that one post. And that was actually the validation for us to go after that product, right? And now that product's moving along today. And so what worked there? Well, we showed something that was novel and we asked people to comment if they're interested in getting on the waitlist. And that's what blew the thing up. So whenever you have maybe something, Ed, maybe some interesting data that you can share, or maybe some industry research, AI industry research on whatever your industry is, that could do really well. And maybe it might not get a ton of views, but you'll get the right amount of people that are opting in for that. And you can message those people. You can use tools like HeyReach. And so I'll dump this in the chat. HeyReach is one. I think Law Growth Machine is another one. I'll type that into chat. These are different LinkedIn tools you can use to text people. You can use it to call people. You can use it to DM people on LinkedIn. And so that's what you can do there in terms of maximizing what you're doing on LinkedIn, right? So look for patterns on what's working and then figure out how you can apply that to yourself. I think we don't do enough of a good job there right now, but that's me, right? I'm perpetually dissatisfied. And that's how you all should be too. I think you should be perpetually dissatisfied. You should motivate your team obviously, but be perpetually dissatisfied, I think. And then you're always going to try to get better that way, right? So that is that, guys. And we'll see you in 2 weeks. We're going to basically start marketing the next webinar. And thank you so much for being here. Thank you for spending your time with me, and we will see you later.