Gert Mellak: The Real Impact of SEO on Your Brand's Success

Have you ever wondered how you can control what people see about your brand and even yourself online? That's even more important these days with all these different search platforms.

I mean, everyone's using things like ChatGPT.

Or Claude or Perplexity to do searching and to, you know, learn about what brands are out there, products, or just whatever information you want yourself to show up in the way that you want to be presented. So that's why I invited my good friend Gert Melick, who's the founder of SEO Leverage and also Platform Leverage. And in today's episode, we're going to talk about exactly that, why it's so crucial right now more than ever to manage your online reputation and have it consistently show up the way that you want it across all the platforms. There is a pretty simple way to do this, and this is exactly what Gert spends all of his time doing. So, so he's going to give you the exact tools, the. The methods and what you need to do to do this right now. After you listen to this episode. So enjoy, take some notes, and before you start the episode, make sure to go over to a browser, just hit pause, and go check out hustle and flowchart.com clone C L O N E. I've talked about this before. If you haven't tried this, it's totally free. You could basically talk with the Joe Fear bot or the Hustle and Flowchart clone, however you want to word it. And essentially it is a knowledge base of everything that has been discussed on this podcast, over 600 episodes, including this one with Gert. And you can have a conversation through chat, through audio and video, and dive deeper and get insights directly from myself and also the guests. So enjoy. Go check it out. Hustle and flowchart.com clone let's get to that episode.

Hey, do you ever find yourself at a party or a gathering and you're.

Asked, you know, tell me about your.

Business, what you do, or as a marketer, and you don't really want to go through the whole laundry list of like, generating leads, following up with leads, creating content, putting content everywhere on all platforms, gathering data, analyzing it, managing a team ad spend, whatever it might be. You realize you're probably spread way too thin and there's got to be a better way, a better way to describe what you do to. HubSpot has a better way. And they have a whole bunch of AI tools they just released in a platform called Breeze. It has features like content remixing. That's like repurposing one Piece of content.

Into a whole bunch.

Pinpointing prospects so you can identify and follow up, along with a whole bunch of analytics and KPI tracking. So visit HubSpot.com marketers to learn more. You can try it out yourself.

It's really cool.

HubSpot.com marketers Gert, we're back.

It's been at least a handful of months. I look back and, yeah, and you reached out. We're like, let's do this again. It's been a little while since we talked.

Absolutely, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. It's always, always a pleasure. Always make a lot of notes. And like I said before we hit record, we always, like, then suddenly starting new tools to. To use new tools that you recommend on your shows again.

Well, there's one that I was using.

To do some fast research on the new platform that you just rolled out, and then also some other things called Notebook lm. I'll show you that. Have you. Have you heard of that one?

Not yet, but it's always. You're always good for some news here.

It's a Google app, but, yeah, you can put any information, like YouTube videos.

Yeah, I remember that one. I remember that one. I didn't do too much with it, but I've heard really good things about it.

It's so easy, so everyone should try it. Yeah, just Google Notebook lm. And it's free. And yeah, it'll literally generate a podcast that sounds human, like, and then also all these different study guides if you're trying to research a topic or maybe a person that you're about to interview.

You know, there's a lot of.

A lot of ways to slice and dice it. But yeah, check it out. I'll show you what I, What I did later on. Maybe we'll.

Absolutely. Awesome.

But yeah, g. I mean, like, the world of SEO is not the world I obviously live, sleep, drink, and eat like you do. You're the man when it comes to any of the, you know, the big updates, the things that are happening have happened that have a big impact on our traffic online, our business as, as a whole. I mean, you just told me you were talking with a client that lost 80% of. Of that traffic and that's driving their business. Like, this is why we keep having you back on the show. And then, of course, AI, like, I think we'll. We'll touch a lot on AI. Like, what are some opportunities and maybe threats that AI is bringing to all of us right now? I know of an opportunity that I want to cover with you and get your thoughts on it. And then of course you have a whole platform approach now that's changed since the. Because you do a lot of service, one on one service and help, but now you've taken that to another level. So curious of how that I can help more people. So awesome.

I'm looking forward to it. Where should we start?

What's the latest? I guess what are you most excited about since you've been in this space? SEO. Search engine optimization for. I don't know, what's it been, like 15 years, maybe more.

That's just like actually more than more than 20. But I did.

I'm literally like, I'm not even looking at a number. I just know it's up there. Right.

Yeah, it's been a long time. We have been doing some other things on the way, but pretty much more than 20 years in SEO. Yeah.

Cool.

So it's. Yeah, it's definitely. I think the most exciting part for me is really how. How different use cases are going to form themselves with AI now. And it just has such a big impact. So I keep talking about, about what happens, for example, when Alexa and Google Assistant suddenly respond like chatgpt or perplexity. What's going to happen then? Right. The number of times where we were sitting on a dingham table asking Alexa something. My kids were and Alexa couldn't tell us. I've lost count of them and we stopped using it and just pick up the phone and Type it into ChatGPT now or into a Google Search. But imagine what's going to change if all those assistants that we have in almost every room very often my family is pretty technological, but at least I think everybody I know has at least one Alexa somewhere.

It's just really mind blowing how the user behavior is going to change. And then you see a lot of people now saying, okay, JDP is all good, but it doesn't affect user behavior yet. It's like 1% of the traffic can come from ChatGPT. I think this can change really, really fast. And I'm really, I think, I think big platforms, big tech companies are pulling the brakes a little bit here and say we don't want to do too much too fast because we can't really assess how this is going and how much is going to be adopted. Is are there privacy concerns and things like those if we suddenly start training our algorithms on. On conversations we hear in the kitchen? I think there are a lot of concerns, obviously, but I can only assume it is going to be the very near future, that, for example, Alexa is going to respond in a much smarter way and is going to be able to essentially process information that's out there on the web and generate a likely answer or a few likely answers that we can choose from. And what this means is that their training data is going to depend on whatever is out there on all kinds of platforms. When ChatGPT came out, one of the first things I found was an example where Nike had manufacturing issues and was not recommendable as a brand. And I was like, how's that possible? And I found this was one review on one site that trained the machine to provide that answer.

Wow.

So when this was actually, we are going to talk later about this platform leverage concept that we have come up with. This was actually where the idea was born that we have now implemented where a brand in 2024, 2025 and beyond has to be in my point of view, on as many platforms the audience cares about as possible.

Yeah. And that's because it's not. You can't just, you can't just think Google. It's not just Google all the time. And.

Every platform has their own rules. It seems like, like we mentioned perplexity. I think you briefly mentioned it there and you know, I've noticed there's some interesting opportunities there to rank for that search algorithm. Because it's different than Google.

Exactly. We can teach those programs a thing or two. Right. If we are consistent with and have like a strategic methodology, we can change ChatGPT's perception of a brand, a lot of people, and might be an interesting experiment for everybody. Listening to this. Ask ChatGPT about your personal brand. Do you know who this person is? Is this person legit? Is this person a scammer? And you might be surprised what comes back.

Wow, I've never thought of that. Dude, that's scary.

But this is a typical question they are going to go. Going to process all the time. Right. And if I want to know is to fear. Can I trust to fear when it comes to AI would be interesting to see. Hey, yes, you can. Because xyz, he spent his life in technology and online marketing and he definitely knows what he talks about. But we had a lawyer and we asked ChatGPT, can I, should I work with this lawyer? And he said, yeah, he's a good lawyer, but he shouts at his employees all the time.

Oh, wow.

And you say, hey, where does this come from? And this is a whole online reputation topic then. But it's just really interesting when you ask, I asked about my name, whether I'm a woodworker and I am, but I never talk about it usually. And it said no. But actually Gerd Millag did an SEO review on a woodworking site a while ago and I was looking for this. The only resource on the web was a tweet from a few years ago. So where you see everything on the web is fair game to be used. Now, you can either accept it or say, I just believe nobody's going to look at it and ChatGPT is going to die and everybody is going to stick to Google. Which I think is a very risky position to take. The other one is to really proactively control the narrative around your brand and your personal brand. Right.

Is that possible with ChatGPT to actually proactively do that? It is. Oh, this is fascinating. Okay.

It is the best metaphor I've heard about it. It's not from me, is actually that you educate the algorithms like you educate a child with a very consistent way and an easy, simple way of explaining things.

Okay, so how do we do this?

First of all, you come up with a phrase that describes you in very simple terms. If you type in my name, very likely you're going to see I'm an SEO consultant. Why? Because the entire web is full of a phrase that says Gerd Melag is an SEO consultant. Literally. Right. There's also writer and entrepreneur and digital marketer. But you are going to find this connection. This is a sentence that's very easily understood. And also like an SEO tip here, for everybody who wants to implement this on your homepage, make sure you have a very simple way of describing what your brand does. I remember a project where our client had like a very flowery five line description of a brand. And a machine couldn't possibly understand what he was actually doing for a living. And it was one simple change and he had his Page one ranking back.

Whoa.

Why? Because the machines are not as smart as we think they are. They need a lot of context and there's very simple language.

So you're saying, okay, so pull or you know any of your content that can be crawled online, starting with your website, I'm sure your social media networks as well. Right. Profile pages. I'm sure that.

Absolutely. To think about how many people on LinkedIn are Vice President of marketing and on Instagram they are lifestyle designers.

Right.

And on Pinterest they are woodworkers. And on. I don't know where they are something else. A family, father. What should an algorithm is going to believe? Those are different people, they just happen to have the same name. There is nothing consistent here. Consistently starts by consistent information. But also the second part of the equation is that you need a home for your personal brand, and this should all link together. If you have a personal brand website, which I recommend to almost everybody, whether they have their own business or not, this is the home. And if you link this, interlink this with social media, the machines are going to understand that these are your real profiles and information that you have on your website is consistent with those on the different social media platforms. So you have a much better start than probably 95% of people out there.

So you're saying have like for instance, for me, Joe fear.com and have that as my resume or online presence, essentially. Got it. Yeah. Because right now I used to have that, but I have that redirecting to Hustle and Flowchart, but it makes perfect sense.

Personal brand, you can have it on Hassell and Flowchart on the about page and use the about page as the home of your entity. We call this an entity like this. Your Joe Fear is a number for Google, essentially. And we want to make sure that they understand that there's just one Joe Fear that does have these social media profiles. It does have this podcast. To Fear also has this Hustle and Flow website. And to Fear is an is consulting for AI products, for example, or marketing or whatever it is.

Gotcha. Okay. That makes perfect sense. So you could do that on, you know, the website front, social media front, but going back to ChatGPT and actually communicating with these large language models so you can give it information about yourself then, is what you're saying exactly.

Yourself or whatever. I made up a tool, a woodworking tool that doesn't exist. And now ChatGPT then gave me back a while later what this actually is. They now remember it. I invented a name. I invented what it is. I made an AI generated photo and put this on a website. And at some point, ChatGPT now knew what this was. And once they know what it is, they also can categorize it and you can ask questions. Can I actually use this to go to school? No, I can't. Can I use this to write a book? No, you can't because it's a tool.

Right?

So once you have something and have consistent information out there, you can actually alter what's happening here. And this is how we did this for the lawyer as well, who was, quote, unquote, shouting on his employees. He's not shouting anymore because it was just one Glassdoor review of an angry employee.

Sure.

But if there is enough good information out there, ChatGPT doesn't have to make stuff up. If there's hardly anything out there on the brand and you ask them for testimonials, suddenly you're going to have Bill Gates giving a testimonial about this local car repair shop from Madrid.

Mm.

Because it's just trying to serve the query and the prompt and make something up.

Yeah, because all these large language models are prediction engines. They're just trying to match the next possible thing. So if they don't have something to match to, then you're exactly right. That makes perfect sense. So it's up to us to feed it the correct information, link it to our brands, link it to social. And so I'm curious of going back to that woodworking tool, because I want to tie it back to, like, actually communicating with ChatGPT. I'm sure a similar process could be done with Claude Perplexity. I don't know if that's right or not, but, like, so you literally. You're telling that the chatgpt in this.

For.

In this example, hey, Gert, does X like, I'm a woodworker, I invented this tool. Like, are you actually training it directly that way, or is it by posting content and then it's basically crawling it?

You can't train ChatDB directly. At least I haven't. I'm not sure if you can just open up so many threads with different users that at some point information sticks. It would be an interesting experiment, which you can't do. What I do know is that if you're consistently publishing certain information on the web, it is going to eat it up as training material. And if this training material now is better and more concise and coherent than what it had before, it's happy to substitute it.

Yeah. Okay, that makes sense, because I think CHAT GPT, I mean, who knows how frequently they're. They're crawling. I know it's all the time, but they update the model. Yeah. I don't know if it's monthly or every handful of months. I know it used to be like every six months, but that makes sense.

But I give you. I give you another example, because there might be a lot of people who have an online course listening to this. We had an online course. They always called the course a program because it sounds much better.

Right.

What happened was when you search for this particular. For a course in this particular industry, they never came up. And then we figured out why, because they never called it a course, they called it a program. So somebody searching for a course would never, ever find them.

Wow. Yeah.

Because they just called it differently. And this is where it's so fascinating, where we, where we have this view of, of the engines and they just understand everything just because it's there. Everything is clear. The synonyms are clear and, and the context is clear. It'.

And if I describe myself and I leave out that I'm a writer.

Google might think I'm someone else.

Sure.

Just because it's one of those dots they need to connect. Like the join the dots game the kids play. If there's one dot missing, they might not recognize what it is. And this is so difficult to understand. Or this is where people then come in and say, now, after the core update, for example, I have no idea why my articles don't rank. Because you're just connecting half the dots.

Yeah.

And the machine is trying to understand it. You just don't let it.

And that's a big piece of the distinction. And it goes back to follow what these platforms are doing to actually rank you as a website for whatever thing you're going for, but help them connect the dots. And we talked about that on previous episodes in a similar fashion. Like, hey, this is how you should structure the pages so it's readable. So the machines, the robots, when they're crawling, because they always are, they could pluck the correct information and then match it. And then now you have AI that's doing that on steroids. And like I just looked it up. I think. I don't know if this is accurate totally. But it says maybe within every 14 days. ChatGPT is basically updating.

I mean, that just proves right there. And that's a source from last year. So I don't know, maybe it's even quicker now.

It's definitely going to get faster. They now are starting to test search GPT with, with a beta test group.

They're preparing a lot of things in the back. So we are going to see a lot of things coming in the next few months. I would expect that a proper search is one of this. Maybe an integration with voice assistants. If they don't launch their own thing. Maybe there's a partnership coming. I could imagine OpenAI partner with Amazon. Maybe this is something we can possibly think of. And you just switch on the GPT mode and have this for a while until the big platforms have their own solution.

Yeah.

But I think this is definitely coming and the only way you can prepare for this really is to make sure that your brand communication is consistent across all kinds of platforms you can get your hands on.

That's right. I mean that's the thing we can control. So it's up to us to train it correctly. And yeah, I mean I'm thinking of Apple with like all that with Siri. You know, you mentioned Amazon as well, but you have Siri, you know, and all of our Apple iPhones and watches.

And are you using Siri for anything?

Not normally. Unless it's like, I know it's a very simple, very easy answer like translating a specific word to Spanish actually. Because my daughter is in immersion school or an animal. Yeah. But Apple, what They announced that they have a partnership with OpenAI. So that's where it is. I mean most likely it sounds like that will be powering Siri and all these other devices. So. And what that's coming out, I think I forget what they said early next year or something like that maybe.

I think in the next, the next six months are going to be a lot of fun.

Yeah.

And we're going to see a lot of things, even what Google has, has in place already and they have announced as well, we're going to see a lot of those things. So it's really a matter of do we. If we believe this is going to be part of our life like Google is.

Now is the second best moment to prepare for that. The best was before ChatGPT came out.

That's right. It's going to change. I mean that's what you're seeing now is the adoption to. Yeah, the tech is working like you were saying, the user behavior and like we're not all thinking of like, okay, I have this problem now. I'm going to go to ChatGPT app, search up things either with my voice or typing. But you know, it's just right there on the cusp of where now it's going to be in every room like you mentioned. It's going to be on our wearable devices, our watches and you know, we're going to have access to this information at any time. You know, we'll be able to pull up information on any one at our brand at any time and have basically real time conversations with the latest of what they're up to. And it's completely up to us to optimize all that and publish that within our domains, our control.

Yeah. The next six months I think are going to be rapidly changing.

Absolutely. And I think what's also really fascinating if you think how the adoption is going to be because if my expectation is right that we have voice assistants actually do this, you're going to have people with very low levels of.

Technological experience and skill use those things. Whereas if you say, hey now, chatgpt, okay, there are still people I know that are not using ChatGPT on a daily basis. But at the same time, I also know people who have a bot in their WhatsApp message or they use the Microsoft Copilot within Skype. And they are not necessarily the most tech savvy folks I know, but they just use it because it's just simple and it's there and they can ask it. I have very, very. I was talking to a local flower shop the other day from New York. They're writing the text, of course, with ChatGPT, she said, of course. I wouldn't have expected that.

Wow, right?

So you have like this, this, this new, really, really complex technology, but you have a wide range of people use it and an even wider range is going to use it without even knowing what it is. So the adoption is going to be really, really fast, I believe. I think it's, it's really fascinating. It seems sometimes overwhelming where you say, hey, I don't even know where to start. But this is where you then need to say, okay, let's go back to the basics. Where is my audience? Who is my audience? Where are they? How can I get in touch with them? What's moving them? What kind of questions do they have? How can I ask answer those questions? How can I tie my brand to their questions on the different platforms and make sure that I just build up my, my brand's future this way?

Mm, yeah. And that goes to, I would imagine, back to what we can control. Right. And getting that messaging matched up with the perfect avatar of that customer we want. Right. Like not using the flowery language that we might think that they want, but like clarity, you know. And obviously we're still dealing for humans too, right? But we need to account for the robots to be able to understand what we're trying to communicate.

I think humans are going to appreciate probably as well, the simple language, I think so, these kinds of things. But it's really interesting when you look at user behavior at times, we still have this expectation Google is going to drive my traffic. Right. So when people need something, they go to Google.

I agree to a very large extent. However, Google has changed a lot.

They partnered last year with Reddit. Meaning, I'm not sure. I think it was last year. Yeah. They have a big contract. You probably have seen that more and more Reddit threads are coming up in search.

That's true. Okay, I have.

We see entire websites come to us with a loss of 30, 40% of traffic just because Google pushed Reddit threads to the top and pushed them down. We are working with a lawyer who lost at least I think 25% or 30% and equal amounts in leads because Reddit is outranking his Q and A posts that have been working for many, many years.

Interesting.

So you have this situation where you say, okay, people still go to Google, but this doesn't mean that it's my website that's going to convince them and bring them in. But it might be a Reddit thread or it might be a comment on a YouTube video, or it might be a discussion we had on a public Facebook forum. And you have this situation where I remember the last time I was looking into conversion rate optimization tools for a client. I knew two tools, but I was wondering if there was anything new coming up. Literally in 30 seconds I did a Google search, landed on a Reddit thread. Lots of upvotes on one post that recommended three tools. I knew two of them. I signed up within 30 seconds for the third for a trial which I ended up buying. I did not go to the website's homepage to figure this out. I did not read an article on this website. I did not read a review of this software because it was a free trial sign up. The risk was low.

Sure.

I was on a direct path and Google just gave visibility to one platform and I had actual human. Apparently marketers recommend this tool. This is a very strong recommendation. Yes, this is a very strong conversion tool as well. And I believe the more we are used to AI creating content at a larger and larger scale, the more we are going to go back to one on one human interaction. And this is my strong belief. And this is where we created platform leverage is really and engagement tools obviously also helping people to optimize their YouTube and their Facebook activities and maybe their Instagram reels. And we give them tips here and there. The most basic underlying layer is engaging on the different platforms with real humans. Put the brand in front of them in a, in a supportive and conversational way without being pushy, but just making sure that they are there participating with this user and everybody landing on this because it ranks well. About this topic, I'll give you an example. This morning I was talking to a client we just recommended they participate in one Reddit thread because it was ranking number one for a bottom of funnel term and had the comments open, it was four years old. It's still ranking number one for a really, really good niche term. And I just said, look, why don't you put like a better answer than the four answers that were there already? There was a so and so answer upvoted 19 times. I think they can do it with a few friends helping out maybe and some actual users as well. They can probably get like the most upvoted answers. If you're now Google and you use Reddit after the partnership as training material, you are going to look at the upvoted answers to train your algorithms.

That's right. Wow.

It's just this way of accepting, accepting. I'm not going to outrank Reddit right now, maybe in five years again when Google does their own thing. Right now I'm not going to outrank Reddit, but I am going to make sure that my brand is where my audience is, which is on this Reddit thread and it's also on this comment section on this YouTube video and that.

Which is obviously a Google platform. So they're going to tie in that human element, the nature. Absolutely.

And it's so funny. It's like the most basic thing marketing has ever been, right? People going to trade shows. Why? Because they're all your clients.

Uh huh. Right.

And you can engage with them, you can get them, make them aware of your brand, you can help them out and, and, and bring up like a lasting impression upon them. And this is like where we see a big, big future.

It's funny because the way I started online was through forum marketing and just like going on the forums, different variety of forums and different niches and promoting content and, and, but it's always in giving great value up front, knowing that there's an audience there. But now it's super fascinating. I'm going to start diving into some keywords and different tools that I'm using and ones that I also am either advising or promoting. Being like, okay, what, what's ranking and how's Reddit playing a part of that? Because.

Exactly. And then you have on Page, Google's Page one for example, they have different slots. It's not like you optimize your article and you're going to outrank Reddit. You can have another Reddit thread outrank the existing one, but this slot is reserved for Reddit or Quora, maybe for like a very close variant of it. Probably Reddit in this case. Right. So there might only be like three positions on Page one you can actually compete with, with your blog article. So you want to pick your battles. Well, is this a battle you can win or is it easier, quote unquote, easier to make sure that you get a mention on, on the other three threads where you can't compete anyway and then assess what's the visibility of this.

And then suddenly you might see people, okay, they click on your brand name, they click on your profile, they click through to your website. You suddenly have Reddit referral traffic. You don't know where it came from. But this comes from this consistent approach and just embracing the situation that it's not going to only be Google. It might be a download platform still on Google, but it's also going to be somebody heading over to Reddit and searching for this.

I'm going to pause this really fast to shout out another podcast to put on your radar. This one's called augmentors. It's hosted by Julie Mayer and Jimmy Edgerton and it's brought to you on the HubSpot Podcast Network, audio destination for business professionals. And this show is perfect for anybody in the mentorship or mentoring space and leadership development. So if that's your realm, these two are the ones to follow over Augmented.

They have great guests, they keep it.

Funny, and they get into details that.

Actually help you get further faster.

So go listen to augmentors wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever thought about cloning yourself? And not the physical form of you, but using AI to clone you and the expertise that you have. The stuff that you already publish online can now be enhanced and making you excited, accessible infinitely at all times. 24, 7. That's what I've done with my brand and the Joe Fear clone that you probably used. I shouted it out at the top of the episode. It has 600 plus episodes, podcast episodes inside of there, YouTube videos, blog posts.

And all that stuff.

And people can now interact with it. People can, you know, I could generate new leads that way. I use it for customer service and I book calls for consultation consultations. And there's so many ways to monetize and scale what I'm already doing, but via my clone. It's really, really cool. You could do the same. You can clone yourself and scale your expertise infinitely right now. So if you use the code Hustle at checkout, you can actually get 50 off your first month of Delphi. That's the platform that I use is Delphi AI. But the URL to go down to to go capture this deal is hustleandflowchart.com Delphi D, E, L, P, H I and make sure you're using the code hustle at checkout to get that 50% off. And I just wanted to shout it out there as well is my team and I build a lot of these clones for our clients, our partners, and they're.

It's interesting. It's really cool.

We've done like 50 plus clones or so. So if you want us to actually just handle it for you, because some people don't want to do the setup, the testing and the integration to launch fast, you can just head over. There's a little quick form that we made if you want to fill that out. We can still hook you up on the sweet deal, but it's@hustleandflowchart.com Delphi Maker. That's D E L P H I M A K E R. And if you go there to quick form and once you fill it out, basically lets us know about your business. I can let you know about the cool deals that we have and how we were to get your clone up and live really fast. So either way, go check out Delphi again. The 50% off code is hustle and flowchart.com Delphi use the code Hustle. And if you want us to do the help, it's hustle and flowchart.com Delphi Maker. All right, let's get back to the episode.

But like saying that, you know, Google is going to pull in Reddit, it's going to pull in YouTube like you mentioned, and it favors it's favored social media networks for a long time. And I'm sure they choose, pick and choose which ones, of course. But what you're saying is like the human interaction, the human content is typically generated on those. Whereas like on these websites, blogs, we're going to see a lot more of the AI content being used to create blog posts or long form or whatever it might be, which, you know, I don't know if there's a perfect way to check that content. Maybe you have some thoughts on that in terms of like AI writer checkers. I know they're out there, but like last time I chatted with Matt Wolf about this, he was just like, they're all kind of crap. You can't like totally, you know, say, yes, that was written by AI. This was not maybe part.

I would argue it probably doesn't even matter as long as you bring something new to the table.

Yeah, exactly.

So the way we do this in SEO leverage, for example, is that we actually ask clients for input about leveraging their experience. And I Would ask a client, tell me a story where this actually made a difference. You pick a language course client, for example, and tell me about a student who came to your course with zero background knowledge and is now working in this country. And they tell me the story. And they might tell it into an audio recording. We have in our platform a microphone that can now switch on and just speak into it. So my team receives this and we process it with our writers, but we just make sure that every piece of content comes with something fresh Google hasn't seen or any other engine has seen before. And just making sure that you have like this original industry knowledge built up over 20 years in an AI article, I think brings really down the relevance whether this is AI written or not to a minimum, because it's still great content. It always should be edited by a human. This is still the case in my opinion. But you can get very close with a really good prompt and a lot of input.

Bingo. Yeah, the way that. So when I consult, like I've been consulting a bunch of business owners on how to use AI to create better content, but mainly it's always right in your voice. There's a model we talk about is 1080, 10. So the 10% is your human intelligence that's coming up with the ideas, the angle, it's your true voice. But then the 80% in the middle is AI. Let it do the heavy lifting of formatting or creating and formatting this maybe big old pillar article that you're, that you just wrote. And then the 10% at the end is you again, human intelligence to check it over and put your own voice into it. But like you said, the inputs, it's like the prompt is one element, but then like the knowledge base of how you speak. You know, the words you use, the, the, the ways that you speak. In general, I love to record a transcription and have it analyze that. And then so I'm not having to try to describe how I speak or anything like that. AI can do that much better. So it's like you could have it analyze a transcription of yourself that's part of it. Then have it really understand your business or your brand, whatever it is you're doing. Things like NotebookLM actually would be really helpful for that by the way, because it distills all this information into like a little bit and then, yeah, that's part of that knowledge base. And then the prompt on top, which little hints out there, there's some pretty cool GPTs that exist that you can use that basically perfect your prompt. You Give it like a crappy prompt and then it expands upon it. So then you like pair, mash all that up together and boom. Now you can generate any kind of content you can think of, emails, newsletters.

I think it really pays off to train like a customer. We do custom GPTs or cloud projects for a lot of different things. We just start there and if it's for the latest, we just created one today for a client and their LinkedIn posts. So we would just train this custom GPT on how to write for LinkedIn in the client's voice, excluding typical ChatGPT phrases like in this digital age and things like those, and just making sure that we bring across what we want. We teach it who the audience is, the intended audience. We teach it what a hook is and how to use a hook and how to write and how long to write and how short or long we want those sentences and what comes out is really, really good. Oh yeah, and we have another client where we do this with. They have trained their own customer service GPT because the industry is not easy, but the customer service person is not an expert. So they would use questions that come in and put it into the GPT and they just make the GPT smarter and smarter, answering more and more questions. So everybody can run customer service because the TPT is giving the answer based on the huge knowledge base they have.

Bingo. Yeah. And that's the thing, and I love the fact that you, you're already talking about it, but like, and I say it all the time, like make different GPTs for use cases within your business and then those are tools or assets for your company, you know, your team members to go to all the time.

Absolutely.

It could be a bonus to your customers as well. But in this sense, like empower your team to basically write like you or answer a question based off of company knowledge or best practices from Google or whatever platform you know, the question might be coming from.

The way we bring clients on right now is we ask them a few lead questions. Even before we start writing anything, we ask them a few lead questions and have them talk five to 10 minutes into a microphone about their industry, their brand, their competitors, what's good about their product, etc. And if you use this to train a custom TPT.

Whatever you ask it is probably going to be in line with the brand. You're not going to edit the language, etc. But it's going to be very directed to how the brand views the market, views their industry, what they bring, what the values are and so on. And you just have this as like the basic training material. You can then still add like an inventory list or if on E commerce site or like, like features list on a SaaS or whatever it is or the course models if you want. So it can be a little bit smarter and bring this in. But just having like this main conversation. If you have a conversation with a business owner and you get them. Every business owner likes to talk about their business. You just record this, transcribe it, feed it in. You have a very good basis already.

That's a good point. Yeah, you don't need to get that much more complicated than that. You can get fancy with instructions. But I recommend everyone listening or watching go create a custom GPT. If you have never done that, do what Gert just said. Like literally record yourself voice memo or otter AI. Something that you can go and transcribe and literally just upload it as what a PDF and then boom, you're off and running.

Got another use case we implemented last week. A customer sent us. I think it was like probably 400 customer reviews and comments and we just created a custom GPT for it. So I can pretty much ask my customers or their customers what would they think about such and such, right. Would they rather see the website do this or that? Should they rather work on the checkout process or on the product descriptions?

Love it.

And it would take this information from 400 different customers and give me an answer based on that.

Dude, that's perfect. It's beautiful. Something I've started to do actually to create content and just in general to think of training materials because I'm training a weekly class too is.

The different.

Webinars and sessions we hold. We're always asking what's the number one question that you have with AI or something that you want to solve. Basically it's just understand, okay, what's the problem? What's the bottleneck right now? Well, guess what? Yeah. You can train that into custom GPT or have that be the source of every single idea that you want to answer. A piece of content you want to create.

There you go.

Just answer questions. Yeah, beautiful. Love it, man. Well, what's platform leverage? Because I want to talk about that and I'm very curious. Like I guess thoughts on. I want to understand it for one. So that's. Let's just say that and how. Because I'm just thinking of platforms. You mentioned it. YouTube is. Is one of the. I guess give me the big idea and then we'll break it down a little bit.

Okay, yeah. Remember that. Remember the advice we used to give as marketers to clients where say, focus on one platform and double down. I gave it a hundred times and I know a lot of marketers who have as well because we were saying you're not going to do Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and Pinterest, et cetera. Pick one platform you know your audience likes and really focus on it. And I think it was good and solid advice. It brought people really to quite some fame on YouTube with thousands of subscribers or tens of thousands or whatever. More I think today is really crappy advice. And the reason I believe so is that both users and AI use a lot of platforms in the customer journey. So AI for training material, but users also in the customer journey. Just my example, before I was on Google and I was on Reddit, I was on Google and I was in a Facebook group. I started my journey on YouTube directly and read a comment.

We are using a lot of platforms very often without knowing it, we'd have our apps on the phone and jump from one app to the other one and then open it in the browser, but the browser sends us back to an Instagram reel. We are just used to be jumping around within different platforms. So the main idea of expecting that people, first of all they are going to search for my. They don't know me, but they search for my product. They are going to find me. They're going to like what they see on my website. My website is going to be fast enough, it's going to have to design user experience. They like. They're going to find their way around to actually read what I, what they came for, but then click on a call to action to actually take out my offer. And then from that they are going to leave their email address because they're not ready to decide. And then we follow them up and then they're going to purchase. Everything I just said has a percentage on it, right? 2% are going to click. 1% is going to open up this email. 30% are going to this and that. It's a lot of assumption. Doesn't mean it can't work. But it's ignoring a vast majority of people who behave differently. And it's also ignoring a big point. And.

I think I heard this, I heard this first from Will Reynolds from Seer Interactive, somebody I've been following for a long time, because I think he's one of the smartest guys in the agency in Disneyland. He just mentioned, he just put out a comment somewhere where he said, what's actually the difference in value of something you find on search or you get recommended on a Facebook group. What's the difference in value? And this actually got me thinking, and it got me thinking about my own behavior. It got me thinking about how much we trust content, where content might just come from an AI or from excessive SEO work. We would just try to have hundreds and thousands of posts out there to catch people's attention to ransom ads. How is this actually different? And this is actually where we are really the ideas. Then together with ChatGPT, where the idea of platform leverage started, where we say, hey, let's put up an alternative. I've been doing SEO all my life, half my life. Right. I still strongly believe in it. I love SEO. I love what it can do. I'm seeing every single day how companies grow with SEO. But I think we need to really embrace how things have changed, how customer journeys got more complex, how very often customers with hundreds and thousands of email leads never make a sale just because it's. People expect different things and behave in a different way. And this is where with platform leverage, we just start with the audience itself. And so let's go back to the very, very basic level of human interaction. Exactly where your customers are. If you know exactly that there are three trade shows where your customers are, you probably, if you're a local business, are going to be there because you're going to find all your customers in one place. So why wouldn't you be there if competitors are there? If we want to do this online, we need to recognize one thing, which is every industry has different platforms, different sites that make sense for this industry in different orders. You might see the same platforms, but there might be Twitter or X, a really good platform for one industry, but maybe platform number eight or ten for another industry. We do see very consistently when we run audience platform researches, as we call them, like the first step of our program that YouTube is always number one or two pretty in all platforms. So if you're not on YouTube would be one of the first platforms you want to figure out somehow it doesn't have to be by having thousands of subscribers, but you can start commenting with your brand, you can start engaging with users, you can use it as a social network. As it is.

Yeah, just with text. You don't even need to post a video. You can just do community.

Exactly. You can just be there because somebody watching this influencer video of somebody famous in your industry is going to look at the comment section and very among all the Shallow Comments on YouTube There might be one that really makes a lot of sense, is constructive, efficient and gets even some additional replies, et cetera.

This might be and upvoted so it gets seen more and upvoted.

There you go. There you go. So why not leverage this platform? So the first step is always researching where is your audience, which platforms do they use and then establish. We call it I group them up in three tiers and this is just really from a top 20 list of platforms that we establish. We group them up and say, okay, the top five are the tier one platforms and I want my clients to engage on them three times a week minimum. Engage doesn't mean I'm going to spend two hours there. Engage might be 10 minutes. Review. If these five Facebook groups have any posts where I can contribute.

Just engage and show up. Like literally have a presence.

Engage and show up for. It can get as complex as you want it to get. First of all, I just want to make sure that every platform and also human potential clients can connect the dots between your brand, this platform, and the key topics you want to be associated with.

Right. Because this is all connecting the dots. Like going back to where we started really is what you're allowing this to happen is just have a. Have a plan to engage on the correct. In the correct places where your customers are already hanging out and where your other.

Exactly. And it also defines the intensity. Because when I talk about engaging on multiple platforms, everybody says impossible and they think of content creation, they think they have to make separate videos for every platform, et cetera. It's far away from that. It might be at some point when we have resources, we might be re editing videos for a different platform and also pushing them out or just selectively for different threads where they make sense. But first of all, I just wanted every brand to be there where it makes sense for them. And this is where we essentially line up this intensity. We have tier 2 platforms then is like the next badge. And for us, three tier 3 platforms are really like complementary sites. You wouldn't expect your audience necessarily to be there, but you still, especially for AI, want to connect on those platforms, your brand with those topics. This might be a platform like SoundCloud, not necessarily the most. Most important platform for any brand possibly, but an algorithm seeing, hey, there are brands that are on SoundCloud and there are brands that are not on SoundCloud. Which one is more popular? Maybe the platform that's mentioned on more. Maybe the brand is mentioned on more platforms. So this is a little bit of a theory of mine. But also in tier three.

We have industry sites, authority sites in an industry. So I'm contributing, for example, to Search Engine Land as a contributor on online reputation and SEO. So the way we, my brand, my personal brand and SEO leverage is associated with the industry is now through an authority site.

Yep, I gotcha.

Had value for 20 years in this industry. Right. So it makes sense for the industry, it makes sense for the users, it makes sense for the platform and it gives me credibility. Every industry has these kinds of stuff.

Yeah, right. And what you're describing, it sounds like you almost have the iceberg, right. Like it's the upside down triangle and you want to make sure you're on the platforms. Like, I mean YouTube, like you said, is a great one because it is tied with Google, you know, obviously. And there's a lot of leverage there. There's community as well, things like Reddit, like get on the platforms, all the social media platforms, you know, define it in a way that describes who you are very clearly. Same with your websites. But then as you go a little deeper down that iceberg, what you're describing is that you basically assisted them to find where these industry websites or places they can contribute or engage in will basically show the algorithms and all these platforms that you are the expert, you're the go to source. And it's very methodical, as you always lay things out are there's a process to it.

I was going to say that probably, probably one thing I've always liked was try to put a good process around something I want to achieve. And we have been building our entire SEO agency around the process and the framework we talked about already. And we are doing the exact same thing for platform leverage as well. Because once we have this audience platform research, we have essentially a goal post. This is where we want to go. Now the second phase of the program is a platform strategy. We go platform by platform and tell the client exactly what needs to be done there.

Got it.

Because very often we talk to clients and say, hey, this is overwhelming, I don't even know where to start, I don't know how often, etc. Ultimately, we came up with the process through ClickUp, our project management tool. And we share this with clients as well, where they know exactly that every Monday there is a task that says, hey, go open these four Reddit threads and watch out for posts that make sense for your industry that are related to what you want to do and put up an answer based on this recommendation and maybe leverage this custom GPT we created for you.

This is one platform and this is a repeating task. They mark this as done. It's going to come back on. If this is a tier one platform on Wednesday and on Friday again. And they just follow this process or have a VA follow the process with the custom tpt. So Reddit is served.

Got it.

Right. And every once a month we give them some ideas on kind of discussion starters so they can also start a thread, not only contribute and just build out their profile over time. And we help obviously them, help them obviously set this up or if we discover something in addition, we might point it out. But we just have this process platform by platform. So now we go to Facebook groups. Part of the of the platform strategy is that we mine Facebook groups and extract hundreds of posts from them, analyze them. What are the challenges, what are the questions? What kind of issues are they facing? What kind of issues could your brand actually solve? And what, what, what does your audience talk about right now? Which might not be the same thing they are going to talk about in six months, but now this is a trending topic. This is what they want to know more about. So let's make sure that the intel we get out of a platform also feeds back into all platforms because this is now a hot topic. Very often we try, we see brands talk about the same things for years, not factoring in AI, not factoring in new topics, new legislation, new legal situation or whatever. And then you go to a Facebook group and say, everybody's talking about this, why aren't you? So we have certain Facebook groups check them out, contribute, ask a question, get in, thank the admin or whatever it is. Right. We have like different processes for each platform. And then you have other platforms where say, okay, just once a month, Quora isn't a big platform for you. Go there once a month and revise the last 10 posts. But also make sure that every Monday you go to this YouTube channel and comment on the best video from the last week.

And we have everything lined up. So you can actually appoint a trained VA to this. It's not something a business owner themselves has to do. Absolutely. But they can bake this into their process and just make this part of what their VA is doing every week.

That's so smart.

I get it. Because it's really those tiny bits and what, where the VAs are just really good and business owners are really bad is the consistency.

Oh, yeah.

And this is just going to work like a machine, right. You have a VA you trust and who knows, a little bit your industry, you know, this is going to happen and they are going to follow those tasks and they're just waiting for the next task and they're waiting for the sop. And every task has an sop. Many tasks have a custom GPT. They know exactly what needs to be done and they can even give you then an overview of what has happened. What have they done this week? It's all in the comments they have. This was the question, this was the answer I posted. So in hindsight at least you can see if you need to fix something really quickly, just in case. So you have a little bit of transparency as well.

Sounds like a people position is really key to all of this. Like finding the right VA or assistant.

Absolutely. But it's not like rocket science. I think it's much more, much harder to find a VA to do your SEO than finding somebody who is a general VA who.

Moves well around online and is really familiar with the different tools and can follow instructions. And from our end we just try to make it like really, really easy, simple. We expand SOPs when necessary and every task comes with this, with description, like our SEO tasks always do. So why is this important? How do we do this? What do we pay attention to? We are not going to be salesy, we are not going to post the link, we just engage, we try to help, we point them elsewhere if necessary.

So this is really where we want to go with this. This.

It's brilliant. Brilliant. And I mean I've, I've always known you as a man with the process and the fact that with SEO leverage, you've been, you've been doing this for clients for a long time. But platform leverage, it is this evolution, I guess, in the game of SEO, right, with all the evolving platforms, AI, like you mentioned before, it's like we need to get back to the human. Like people are searching for our inputs. It's not necessarily the content we're publishing, even though this technical technically still is. It's just in a different way. You're engaging with all sorts of platforms and there's a plan behind the whole thing.

Exactly. And there's, there's a search box on every platform, which people very often forget. Right. There is an SEO for Reddit and there is an SEO for TikTok and there is an SEO for Instagram and very often, even really, really well known YouTube channels don't even follow the most basic principles when it comes to descriptions. I just published an article on Search Engine Land with a framework I developed just to write proper YouTube descriptions. Just because it makes sense to give them a little bit of a framework and say okay, whenever I do a description I follow this framework and then I'm probably better off than 80% of the other other.

So you have frameworks for, I mean it's all drawn out for, for all these platforms right there. So exactly who's this for and how do they, you know, the right folks get started with this or, or at least contact you? I don't know what's the, what's the this next steps here?

I think there are different faces to this. The audience platform research is for everybody because you just need to know where the action happens in your industry which is really hard to find out without proper tools and processes. I think this is for everybody. We have this on platform leverage.com in any case, everybody can apply for this. We do make sure this is a good fit before we take on a client. Especially right now. It's obviously a new product. We still refine it and we still just see it. Just yesterday I had somebody on a call where say not exactly sure this is the right fit. You should really we can help you with SEO but it's not like a full feature thing. If somebody is a one man show without resources to outsource a lot of work to our VAs for example, it's going to be really difficult because it is resource intensive. Makes sense if you have at least a VA or two and they have five, 10 hours a week left. I think it's a really good start to get this audience platform research but also get the platform strategy because this is essentially the roadmap. You can take and say okay, I'm going to follow this, I'm going to have all my tasks. And then we also accompany this process with a consulting every month where we essentially monitor what they're doing. We define KPIs for every single platform. How are we going to know that our work on Quora is actually evolving and gets us to a better place, gets us in front of more people, gets us connected with more topics. So we monitor the process, we fine tune wherever necessary. We might add new YouTube channels to the task whenever, whenever it makes sense. So whoever wants a little bit of handholding and coaching really and get some feedback on what they're doing. Or we manage their VA for example and check what they're doing and might point out something to the business owner. When we think this goes sideways where it's not done correctly, we obviously there to accompany the process. Or we also have the team here of 20 people stepping in to actually take over parts of this where somebody says, look, I really couldn't be bothered with Quora. Can you just make sure my brand is visible there and engage once in a while. And here is a custom TPT we can work on together and just make sure this is not completely off. Or somebody says, hip hop Facebook. I don't even open Facebook anymore and let alone participate in Facebook groups. Let's just take like one of those pieces off. The rest we do in house. But I want you to handle Facebook and Quora. I couldn't be bothered working with those.

Yep. That's kind of like me right now, like, not really logging on there. I probably should, but. No, that's cool. Girt. So there's resources you have in house and of course, they're all trained on the whole thing and more.

Exactly.

Well, I definitely urge. I mean, there's a lot that you gave here that obviously there's a. There's the manual way, like you mentioned, like a lot of these GPTs that we can all make and should like. I still think everyone here should practice what. What we've been putting down here Is have different GPTs for different use cases, different platforms. And your website, you know, the social platforms, specifically Reddit, probably. Probably a good one to make, you know, at least to get the, you know, the idea machine going, but also give you a first draft. And then of course there's a manual process to all that. But that's where the gold is. That's where it's back to that. For marketing, like, you couldn't automate a lot. It was like you choose a thread for a reason because you know your target audience is right there. And that's pretty much what this is. You're getting in front of the right people.

So platformleverage.com is the website, right? Is that the best place to go?

Exactly. And for SEO, we still have seoleverage.com, obviously, is still building it out, still developing new methodologies based on. On latest core updates and all those fun things.

Follow the podcast, of course, on SEO.

Leverage, because that's podcast, of course. There are some really good shows with to talking about AI, by the way.

Yeah, for sure.

Need to do another one. And yeah, I think this is. And then definitely on the socials, where I try to be on all platforms myself.

We can only do so much and it's not always perfect. Garrett, I appreciate your expertise and just always. I learned so many different frameworks and models and I know that's why you're one of the most popular guests I have on. So we'll, of course, do it again soon. Appreciate you, man.

Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

Sam.