- Speaker #0
This last algorithm update that came about last year, where it wiped out a bunch of these AI sites, was because they didn't spend any time on branding. They didn't create additional profiles. They didn't create any socials. They didn't create any anything. And they didn't let Google know that all of those things were part of the brand that they were building. So all these websites just absolutely tanked. Everybody's like, AI content doesn't work. I'm like, no. You didn't do the basis of building a business. You went ahead, threw up an affiliate website, pretended it was 2004 AdSense, and just hoped for the best. You're watching Marketing Misfits with Norm Farrar and Kevin King.
- Speaker #1
Mr. Norm Farrar. How are you? No,
- Speaker #2
I was trying to do German because you just got back from Germany.
- Speaker #1
I did. I just got back from speaking at a couple of events in Berlin, Germany, which was cool, about 500 and change e-com sellers. So it was good.
- Speaker #2
I never heard anybody say Berlin so sexy. Berlin. Germany?
- Speaker #1
In Germany. It's a cool city. It reminds me of the Austin of Europe. It's got a little decadence to it. It's got a nightlife, got a good food scene, got some good history. And yeah, it's kind of like a fun place.
- Speaker #2
Lederhosen and beer.
- Speaker #1
Lederhosen and beer and lots of e-com, lots of business people.
- Speaker #2
There we go. Well, that's what you need. Did you have a cigar?
- Speaker #1
I did not, but I got offered a cigar, but it was too cold to go outside. So I did not do the cigar, but I was offered one by Alina's husband, actually. Oh. But he was there. But no cigars, but I thought of you when I was in the cold. I was like, so this is what Norm was like living up in the great white north.
- Speaker #2
Oh, that's nothing. That's nothing.
- Speaker #1
I mean, it was so cold that I had a piece of junk, like just windbreaker jacket that I brought with me because, you know, I live in Texas. We don't get too much cold here. So I had already planned it out when I went to Berlin. I was like, you know what? Berlin, I've been there before, and I noticed there's this one street that has all these, like, really nice, like, designer and fashion shops and good quality stuff. And Berlin's further north, and so I was like, they get cold. I was like, you know what? There's probably some good jackets there. So on Friday night. I did my research online, found out where the best places are, read some Reddit posts and stuff and people reviewing different things. And I went to a couple of different shops and I ended up buying the 700 euros wool jacket, a really nice jacket. I got to wear it the next day one time. And then coming back yesterday, I go to the airport. I had a 6 a.m. flight out of Berlin to Frankfurt and Frankfurt to the States. And I put my. my bag, my computer bag on the bin, on the x-ray thing. I put my other little carry-on bag on there, and I put my coat in one of the other trays, and I put my coat in the middle of the three trays. And when it's coming out on the other side, the person, the security person, had switched the trays around. And so they put my coat as the third tray instead of the middle tray. And when the second tray came out was my computer bag and it got sent off on the secondary chute to go get an inspection, a hand inspection. And so when I saw that happen, I just naturally went over to the hand inspection place, totally forgetting that I had a coat in the third tray, which was supposed to be in the second tray. And I did that on purpose so that I would see it. But I totally forgot, went to my gate, took my stuff and went to my gate and sitting at the gate going, why does everybody got a coat on and I don't? I was like, oh, shoot. I left my coat back a mile back. It's about a mile back at the damn thing. I was like, well, they just want a donation to the German society. So some homeless person,
- Speaker #2
a German person,
- Speaker #1
brand new, really nice, long wool coat. So that was my cost to go.
- Speaker #2
Very good.
- Speaker #1
very good so i'm i'm glad that i'm not the only person losing my memory you're catching up my friend yeah yeah well i just i don't wear jackets i mean it's like rare rare so it's just not a natural thing for me to remember to do that then when i they messed up my system or i put it in the middle so i would not miss it um and they switched the trays around for some reason whatever reason it just yeah is what i want to talk about marketing with trays marketing have you seen it you
- Speaker #2
Have you seen the trays now that on the bottom of the trays, they have advertisements?
- Speaker #1
Oh, yeah, that McDonald's and people have been doing that with a little placemat things the whole time, a long time.
- Speaker #2
No, I'm talking about in the TSA tray.
- Speaker #1
Oh, in the TSA tray. Yeah, I have seen little ads in there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I've seen a couple. Where did I see that? Yeah, I actually have seen that.
- Speaker #2
You've probably seen it here in Toronto. I don't know. Like, I've seen it before, and I just don't know where. But, you know, as soon as it's going to be like a hockey rink, you'll have it on the sides, on the ice, or the plastic surface. Yeah. Valuable space.
- Speaker #1
Valuable. I mean, speaking of valuable space, I mean, the internet is some valuable space. And there's a lot going on out there in the marketing world that a lot of people, I think, just don't really understand when it comes to, like, SEO or when it comes to search engine optimization or to ranking different things. And that's something I think our guest today is going to shed some light on. Some cool stuff that people just don't realize is either happening to them or cool stuff you can do as a marketer that you don't even realize.
- Speaker #2
Kevin, before I got on, I was talking to our guest, Dan Kurtz, and he is going to tell you probably this is, depending on when this airs, something that's going to blow everybody's mind. This new Google update has changed the game for everybody in every website. as of just a couple of days ago. So it's changed the face of search engine optimization. And we're going to get into that with Dan. So why don't we bring in our guest? Because this is super cool. We just started talking about it and then you popped on. But all right. So let's welcome Dan Kurtz, Mr. SEO. How are you, sir? Oh, I can't hear you.
- Speaker #0
Oh, there we go. I knew how to hit the button.
- Speaker #1
How's it going, guys? Good. It's going, man. See, I knew you were a cool guy. When we met you in Orlando at the AI Bot Summit, I think it was, we came out one night, and Norm and I were just out there minding our own business, freezing our nuts off, smoking a cigar, and out comes you and a couple other people. You're not even wearing a coat, and everybody else is just, like, shivering. And you're like, what? It's like a summer day here. We're smoking cigars. And that's one of the cool things about, you know, some people look down upon cigar smoking. They're like, oh, that's nasty. That's gross. But some of the best business connections at events for Norm and I come out of smoking cigars. Because I don't know, it's happened several times where we're just smoking. It's an instant bond, instant thing where you come out like, hey, can we join you? You know, versus go sit in your own little corner and, you know, have your own discussion. And then that led to us going. the next night, I think to a cigar bar and I think you had recommended or someone recommended it. And we, Norm and I went over there. I was like, ah, we may be the only ones. And then you show up. And it's like, we had some, some of the, some great conversations, some great times. It's just, it's, that's the power of events. And then when you find a common bond and then we start talking about, Hey, we should do a whole event in Tampa for CMS and the whole nine yards and just went from there, which is really, really cool.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, absolutely. And I say that a lot when I go to events too. It's like, I look for three C's. It's the content, the community, and the camaraderie. And like, if those three are good, then it's an event that I will return to. And just hanging out with you guys, like I'm more than willing to go to another event as long as you guys show up. I'll bring a stick.
- Speaker #1
You know, I just got some, I just messaged Norm yesterday. I was coming back from Frankfurt and I went through the duty free and they had these like 40. thousand dollar bottles of whiskey like in these little cases and i was like i took a picture and since posting one online sending one to my buddy mark it's like i almost bought this for you but the credit card didn't go uh but so then then i took a picture like a 35 000 euro one said but i was able to get it to go on this one for you uh but but they had a little cigar uh humidor there and i went in they had all these cubans and it's like limit one per passenger back to the united states and i was like It's going to be my luck. I'm going to buy these Cubans, and something's going to happen, and they're going to take them away. But I'm pretty sure you can bring them in now. But I bought some Romeo and Juliettes, Cuban Romeo and Juliettes instead of Nicaraguan ones. But they had Year of the Dragon there, which is a cigar that Norm and I really like. It's a Davidoff cigar. And here in the States, they're about $150. In Canada, they're probably like $1,000 a stick. But in the States, they're about $150 a stick. And they had a sign that said, promotion, you're the dragon case, 499 euros, marked down from 899 euros. And I was like looking around and there was no cases left. The only one left was the display. And I was like, hmm. So I found the empty box like behind the counter or sitting on the ground. So I grabbed the empty box. It says smoking kills, you know, all over the top of it just like they do in Canada. And slid the thing in there with all 10 cigars and went and bought it. So 50 bucks a stick instead of 150 bucks a stick. So I was a happy camper. So I got some of my $700 back.
- Speaker #2
Nice. So, you know, just on that, you want to talk about marketing and cigar marketing. Take a look at that case. So I don't know if we'll be able to show this on the podcast when it's released, but the Davidoff Royals or Year of the Dragons or whatever they do, they create a work of art. And these cases, just their marketing pieces by themselves. When you finish the cigars, you want to hold on to these cases just because of the quality. And there's a lot of other high-end cigars that they do this as well. I mean, I'm sure you've seen it, Dan. You know, these high-end, like, look at this case.
- Speaker #1
Yeah,
- Speaker #0
it's real pretty.
- Speaker #2
Pop off the side, pull up the cigars. Oh,
- Speaker #0
that's pretty.
- Speaker #2
It's gorgeous. Yeah. So, Kevin, do any of those have my name on it?
- Speaker #1
There's one that has an N. Is that you?
- Speaker #2
Yeah, that's me.
- Speaker #1
That's me. I didn't know. I didn't know if that was normal or norm.
- Speaker #2
Yeah.
- Speaker #1
Or something.
- Speaker #2
Whatever you want to call me.
- Speaker #1
Just call your daddy.
- Speaker #2
Sometimes. So. So let's get into this. Just before the call, I want to just get this out there because people just don't realize what just happened. And you want to talk about this and how huge this is going to change every website or many websites?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, absolutely. So I have several friends in the SEO space that own tools, different things for rank tracking, reporting, figuring out optimizations. And a lot of my friends last week were saying that they were having a problem where Google apparently turned on JavaScript. So you have to have JavaScript now in order to browse Google search results. What that means is for anybody that's using any kind of scraper, parser, or third-party API is last week, everybody was in a scramble to figure out how to get around this. So what's happening now is a lot of people are using what's called a headless browser, which allows you to use JavaScript. It's a programming term. A lot of guys are familiar with it if you do data scraping or anything like that with an API. And in doing this, what that now does is Google can tell binarily if you are using a headless browser versus a regular browser, which means Google can now determine what is a bot and what is a human. And what I can only speculate is, is that they're doing this because they're probably about to roll out something very large and very expensive that they only want humans to be able to see in the search results. I don't know what it is. I have no idea. But I know. Based on that, they were probably just trying to block bots because Google's number one generator is obviously ad revenue. Their big thing is being able to do click fraud detection, things like that. That's what they specialize in, in determining that stuff with the ads. So I imagine they turned it on to block people from running bots and killing people's ad budgets and sending defectors away to different ad networks. But I think it's probably going to have long-term implications for anybody that's developing a tool that relies on... scraping Google's data services in the near future.
- Speaker #2
So this is completely going away from anything text-based, right?
- Speaker #0
It's so you will still be able to make the text request, but your browser has to be able to handle the JavaScript and CSS when it comes in. So probably will, as my friend put it, probably double or triple the amount of time per request that you send because it's got to render all that stuff, but you'll still have the same thing.
- Speaker #1
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- Speaker #2
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- Speaker #1
8fig.co 8fig.co see you on the other side
- Speaker #2
So we talk about opportunities, you know, just jumping on opportunities when it happens, you know, the way that we marketed 30 years ago, when I kind of got into it, right up until now, just up until a couple of years ago, or even six months ago, things change, and you've got to be able to turn on a dime. And that's what we like as entrepreneurs, I was just going to open up opportunity for new marketers or new SEO people.
- Speaker #0
So It's going to open an opportunity, I think, in the tool market, the tool sector, because now you have to load all that information from Google. So that means you can see things you wouldn't normally see. Like, so, for example, one of my friends had built a JavaScript bookmarklet that allows you to go ahead and open up the people also ask that little question box that shows up in Google. But what his tool does is it also grabs the source from that question. So it grabs the question, the answer. And then it grabs the URL of where that exists in Google's data center. So when you're filling out the FAQ on the page, you can actually put the citation link as Google's own data center. It'll tell you the exact block and location of that piece of text and where it got pulled from. So when Google goes to reference that page, they go, where'd you get the question? They go, oh, from us.
- Speaker #2
So that's completely different than what phrase.io does. And by giving you that mind map of the top number one blogs, and they're pulling it from people also ask, but it doesn't go that deep, does it?
- Speaker #0
Right, because it's a surface level text scraper. But if you get into the weeds and you see how some of the JavaScript stuff now works, and I've got plenty of friends that work on Black Hat tools as well. And they like doing script stuff and figuring out, you know, how do we extract this data? How do we find this piece of information? And now with Google making it a requirement to now have JavaScript, they can see anything that Google might be running in the background and go, aha, I can stop this process in my browser. Or I can do something with that JavaScript as it comes in and manipulate it and get a different result than what Google wants and be able to play with that so that they can feed back custom data to their users.
- Speaker #2
So I just got one other question. Kevin, I know I'm keep interrupting here, but this is just fascinating. So for the people that are listening right now. that aren't into SEO, aren't techies. Why is it so important that, like you were talking about, going back and actually finding the block it came from? Why is that important to marketers, or why is that important for people developing their website or SEO?
- Speaker #0
Sure. So the reason behind it is because Google... has a fascination with itself. Google very much is narcissists. So if you were to go ahead and build a Google site, Google will give that priority for ranking because it's a Google.com domain. It's a subdomain, but it still has the weight of Google.com behind it. So they recognize that authority, that brand, and obviously they trust themselves. Same thing when it comes to any of the data that you're pulling for creating your website or anything else. Google wants to see where you're citing the information from, where you're getting your data. especially now in the world we live in with augmented AI, you know, blog post generation, content creation, all of that. If you can tell Google, hey, here's the source. And by the way, here's the data center URL that we found for it. Or, you know, here's the string of text and where it's located in your system. Now you're not playing a game of, hey, here's a question somebody may have asked. We're saying that, no, you index that piece of information and you are holding on to it. we're just writing a piece of content about that post or about that question that you have. So now you're essentially it's a giant feedback loop. That's a lot of what SEO is, is you do something. It's a feedback loop. Google figures out where in their ecosystem your page fits, and then it tries to scuffle it in there. All right. And doing stuff like that, this is the next iteration of it.
- Speaker #1
So you've been doing this like 15 years. You've been involved in SEO. What got you into this SEO game? i mean you become like a master like a ninja master and just talking to you at that cigar bar you're just laying out stuff what really got you down down this uh seo path and and uh It made you one of the best out there.
- Speaker #0
So it's, I wouldn't say I'm one of the best out there. I know plenty of people that are good at what they do, and we all kind of have our own thing. So like one of the guys I work with, his name is Ted Kibitis. He has a tool that's really good at figuring out reporting. Some other folks that I know are really good at building private blog networks, specific networks for links. Other people like Terry Samuels are very good at schema. People like Mike Merlino are excellent at figuring out. GMB and brand authority for local businesses, different types of things. So not necessarily great.
- Speaker #1
The creativity with it,
- Speaker #0
right? Yeah. So my big thing is playing with systems and automations and figuring out how to build, not necessarily a better mousetrap, but how do we streamline the data we're already using? How do we make better workflows? How do we make it so that we're giving Google the data they want out of their own system? Literally handing them and saying... hey here's the filet mignon recipe you asked for by the way it's from your cookbook like you can't get much better than that um but this all started probably back in like 2006 which is when i really got into it i was going to college at the time and that was the year that india and the philippines came online and they were doing all the outsourcing of graphic design at the time i was going to college for graphic design and i went well crap i've got to go figure out something to do so I started looking into different forms of advertising, marketing, something else, because I liked the idea of creating an ad. But seeing as they were coming online and being able to do it cheaper, faster, better, initial panic as a 20 something, okay, what can I do that's not going to be, you know, how do I become indispensable to a business and start looking up well, website development, and then marketing and paid advertising, you know, PPC with Google was relatively new. I think that was like 04 that it came out. So it was like two years in. Started learning that and then stumbled upon SEO, which was being able to perpetually generate traffic or to generate organic traffic through different means. So I went down that rabbit hole, learned the whole rank and rent scenario, building out websites and businesses and optimizing title tags and just read everything I possibly could about it. And instantly I was hooked, dropped every video game that I was playing at that time and went, this is it. This is my new version of Xbox, Call of Duty, Halo, whatever. I don't want to. do any of that stuff anymore. This is the payoff. Like I would rather do SEO and get a paycheck than sit there and play Call of Duty for 12 hours a day and get nothing.
- Speaker #1
So has this been with your own company or were you working for someone initially before branching out?
- Speaker #0
So I had initially just started doing it and learning it by myself and then started applying for jobs for it once I felt I was competent enough to do it. And a lot of times applying for those jobs was ranking for the company name with my own webpage. So they would have a listing for whatever the job was. And I would run through that job listing with their company name in it and show up above it. And they were like, hey, you need to take that page down. I'm like, so do I have the job? Yes, take the page down. Okay, cool. I'll see you on Monday. That was how I started getting my first couple clients.
- Speaker #2
And how hard was it to rank?
- Speaker #0
Some of them were like local marketing companies. So it wasn't terribly difficult, but it was, you know, stuff they were ignoring.
- Speaker #2
Ah. What about going forward now? So going into 2025 and forward, what are some of the new SEO techniques that you're seeing on the market?
- Speaker #0
So there's not really, SEO doesn't change nearly as much as people think it does. Pretty much since the Panda Penguin update, it's been pretty much the same. And those were back in like 2009. So we've been doing pretty much the same stuff for forever. And everybody tries to put their own spin on it and call it topical maps or this, that, and the other, whatever, but well-structured content that's relevant to the user. And then on the back end, making sure that you are branded, making sure you're an authority in the space, and making sure that Google can find other sites that reference you. This last algorithm update that came about last year, where it wiped out a bunch of these AI sites, was because they didn't spend any time on branding. They didn't create additional profiles. They didn't create any socials. They didn't create any anything. And they didn't let Google know that all of those things were part of the brand that they were building. So all these websites just absolutely tanked. And everybody's like, AI content doesn't work. Like, no, you didn't do the basis of building a business. You went ahead, threw up an affiliate website, pretended it was 2004 AdSense and just hoped for the best. So like if they had spent some time, you know, putting together some branded content. Opening Canva and making the little templates for, you know, through YouTube thumbnails and all this other sort of stuff and actually creating content other than just the blog posts. They would have cleaned house, but they didn't.
- Speaker #2
We've been talking to our clients about the importance of just being very diverse, not just having the website. Like you said, building that authority or having the Google business profile or having the social media consistent with your brand, as well as creating content, but doing lots of content. It's not necessarily lots of content, but quality content and just kind of updating it. every quarter, something along those lines. But just so you can be diverse, show that you have a brand and that you have authority. So I think authority is damn important.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, exactly. And the way I look at it from especially now in 2025, there's a million different ways that people are browsing content. You've got the LLMs scraping content from people's websites and figuring out who's the de facto. Again, based on branding and authority, you know, how many other sites are talking about you figuring out, well, if you typed in, well, what's the best coffee place in, you know, Waukega, Minnesota, it'll come up with a list based on these Google profiles and these websites that back it up. And it'll tell you things like Amazon products, for example, there was a thing a couple months ago, and this is fun for you guys to know is everybody's familiar with perplexity, right? The data. LLM? Well, they started doing this thing where if you plugged in, what are the best watches for men in 2025, it would come back with a list of five or 10 watches. The trick is, is that they were inserting their own Amazon affiliate code onto each one of those links. So now they're sponsored URLs inside of a GBT.
- Speaker #1
So now you can't make little guys just like honey, right? Lighting in there on the side,
- Speaker #0
right? But what does that do for their rapport as essentially, quote unquote, unbiased data engine? If they're scraping data and now coming back with, oh, well, these are the best watches for 2025 because these are the highest commission ones that we can find on Amazon right now with our affiliate tag attached.
- Speaker #2
Totally against TOS.
- Speaker #0
Yeah. But they were doing that. I don't know if they still are. But as of, I want to say like November, they were still doing it. But, you know, things like that.
- Speaker #1
How do you trust? I mean, when it comes to SEO, I mean, the average person online has no clue about search engine optimization. They're just a user going, what are the best watches to buy for Father's Day? A whole bunch of sites and they don't realize that probably 90 to 99 percent, maybe even 100 percent of those are all gamed. Yeah, but they're they're they're rankings. They're not necessarily. I mean, they might be if it's consumer reports, there might be some legitimacy to it. Maybe. a little bit. But if it's just the average top 10 watches for Father's Day, it's all affiliate based. It's all SEO based. And how do you, from a user's point of view, not from the marketer's point of view, but from a user's point of view, how do you ascertain what's real and what's not? I mean, Norm and I do this when we're on Amazon. We can tell fake reviews. We can tell a bad listing. We can tell instantly. We just have that gut feeling and experience. But from an SEO point of view, when you see it. How do you know that this is a BS SEO website that was created to rank number one?
- Speaker #0
So most of the time, it's not well thought out. You can find plenty of typos in there, or you'll find the common GPT or AI buzzwords in a lot of the content.
- Speaker #2
Dive deep.
- Speaker #0
Yeah. Let's delve into the world of watches for men in 2020.
- Speaker #2
Unlocking the secret.
- Speaker #1
It says conclusion at the end.
- Speaker #0
Right. No,
- Speaker #2
it doesn't.
- Speaker #1
no it doesn't all these blog posts that say conclusion at the end i hate that yeah but that's for that was for seo it's like yeah but i can tell that's just that's i hate it i hate it the layout yeah
- Speaker #0
it's and and that's that speaks to a lot of things too so like it's schema right that's a schema it can be schema yeah so schema is in the grand scheme of seo you have all your on-page stuff so I look at it in like orders of magnitude. So like the basic thing is like your headings and your subheadings. So your H1s, 2s, 3, 4, 5, 6, all that kind of stuff. And within that, you have your paragraphs and italics and bolds and keywords. That makes up most of the content. And then you have some of your off page stuff. How many referring domains are linking? What kind of backlinks are you getting? What neighborhoods are they from? Things like that, that make up the majority of it. As you go down that list, it gets more and more difficult. So the way I look at schema is if you're running a marathon, schema is the last 20 feet of the marathon. It is the thing where if you've maxed out and you've matched everybody else in the space and you are duking it out between you and some other guy and he doesn't have schema, if you spend the time to do it, and the reason I put it later on the list is because you're recreating an entire web page in JSON, which is a JavaScript language. So you have to recode your entire website so that it's machine readable and then stick that on the page. It'll get you over the finish line, but the amount of work and resource and time intensive labor it takes to do that, as opposed to going and building 25 links to your website, is just night and day difference is how much time you'll spend versus the rate of return.
- Speaker #1
Now, a quick word from our sponsor, LaVonta. Hey, Kevin, tell us a little bit about it.
- Speaker #2
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- Speaker #1
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- Speaker #2
Interesting. So how is it? I mean, I've seen stuff where there's been a mixed bag with AI and SEO, where it's a $91 billion industry. And I've seen stories where people are like, all the SEO people are freaking out that AI is going to kill this whole business. And the SEO guys are like, no, you guys need to take a chill pill. There's nothing here. And I see Neil Patel now pushing out stuff like, SEO is changing in 2025. You got to start talking to the machines and start. changing everything to intent-based and all this kind of stuff. Where are you seeing this going? And how are we going to filter through the junk and the AI learning from other garbage AI because of all this SEO?
- Speaker #0
So that's going to be a couple of different things. It's going to be whoever's writing the content, their understanding of the topical authority of what they're writing about. So they can go ahead and blast out a 5,000-word article and get it done. That's fine. But you're going to have to go back in and put in stuff that nobody else has. Like if you're taking, for example, what you had said earlier, you know, best watches from men for Father's Day. That's a very specific keyword. And in fact, that's the intent behind the intent. So that that phrase that you just said, instead of it being best, you know, best men's watches, like men's watches is the root keyword, right? But best men's watches for Father's Day is a very specific subset of the market. You're looking for people who are probably between the ages of 22 and 65 plus who have had kids who are, you know, you're probably dealing with a woman who is trying to buy something for her husband. So it's that article needs to speak to that person very specifically about what would what would their husband like about that watch? You know, what would. As a spouse, what are you trying to get your significant other? Are they a flashy person? Do they want something that's a smartwatch? Or, you know, like one of those hidden smartwatches, like they've got some of the ones that have like the screen behind the dial. Like, what type of watch are you looking for? And then breaking it down by like, here's your budget, here's your styling, and then having those pieces. And that's stuff that AI is not going to know. Like, it's not going to know the difference between the variations of a Bolova watch versus a Citizen watch versus a Rolex.
- Speaker #2
you know versus an armatron you know you can go the entire with wet you know width and breath of the the topic but but if you get an idea based on reading reviews and stuff and get a census a general sentiment of different types of watches to actually recommend couldn't you
- Speaker #0
could but what if those reviews are fake like you had mentioned earlier then you're pulling in false information and then the whole thing just collapses on itself so again it involves a little bit more nuance than just going and generating it and so the source i mean you just you just look at the recently deep seek is all the rage uh that came out uh they
- Speaker #2
they put out their latest version last week as of this recording and then the the following week on on monday the markets crashed because now everybody's freaking out that You don't really need billions of dollars. You can do it on the inexpensive. But someone just basically disproved how valuable DeepSeek is with using me. They posted online today. They asked DeepSeek, who is Kevin King? And it came back with so much garbage. I started amazing.com, and then I specialize in dropshipping, and this and that and the other. It's just so freaking wrong. And then they typed the same comment into... chat GPT and it was dead on accurate and much more detailed. So it's garbage in, garbage out. But that's the problem I see is people start using something like a deep seek or other tools that are out there that are just wrong to create their blog articles and their SEO and all this stuff. And it just starts a vicious cycle of other people using AI as shortcuts instead of writing it as a human. And you get this massive amount of just garbage that you don't know. who to believe and who's an authority and who's not an authority. Cause you can put garbage on our authority site with all the right backlinks. And it's still garbage.
- Speaker #1
Right. Well, you know, Kev, like when I, when I ran that report, I was shocked that it didn't go deep enough. The, the deep fake report about you that I didn't talk about your beginning as a Chippendale dancer. That was,
- Speaker #2
that's why I was upset because it missed some, some fundamental,
- Speaker #1
really great stuff about you. And, and, you know you you went from a chippendale dancer like the one of the top right you were the chip of the dale's put it on his weight and then nobody would pay attention well no when you did that you went into foxy boxing there you go and like that's something you could have found on your wikipedia page you know yeah you just need exactly a little bit of scrubbing editing my wikipedia page dang it i gotta turn the editing off off of there that's that's how it has too much authority
- Speaker #0
Yeah, absolutely. But to your point about figuring out the authority piece in all this is when you're looking at something like that, you want somebody who has both width or breadth and depth on the topic that they're talking about. So like somebody who is like in my space doing SEO, like talking about all these little instances and doing things like that, that would be an example of an understanding, at least not not an authority necessarily, but an understanding of the workings of what's going on. Um, and those are the type of things that you have to look for. And then given my example, like the intent behind the intent, sure. You could fake that, but like, if you were to go and look for, um, just as an example, like midsize SUV under $55,000, every single one on that list is going to be wrong. It's not going to be an SUV. It's not going to be under $55,000 and it's not going to match your criteria for safety. Like if you just go through.
- Speaker #2
With OpenAI as a new operator, it's in beta right now for the $200 a month pro users, where it's actually doing travel and doing some different restaurant stuff, where it's actually taking over the browser like a built-in mini browser and actually recreating what a human would be doing, doing all this massive research, and then spitting back something out. How do you SEO to that? Because it's not a human looking at it. It's not a human that's making these... these judgments based on a human, it's a machine making judgments and based on what's going to serve up to you. So is there a different type of SEO that you have to do? Do you have to ride the line? I guess what I'm saying both ways right now for humans and for machines when you're doing SEO.
- Speaker #0
Well, yeah, that's always been the case. So the way, the way that I've always looked at SEO is that Google first and foremost is an advertising platform. They have a search engine, but that's only so they can show the ads, but the. The purpose of Google having that search engine is to be able to terminate that search for the user. They want to be able to provide the best result based on however they measure their criteria and their algorithm, get that user to click, and hopefully they don't bounce off that site. And the bounce rate is one of those things that can affect where a site is ranking. So to your point, if somebody is going through a list of best watches for Father's Day 2025, and they click on the site and within 10 seconds they go, no, this isn't what I want, and they back out, Google is going to count that as a, you know. a negative against that site because the user came was browsing it didn't match the intent of what that keyword was and they backed out and went to the next one and went to the next one until they found the thing they were looking for however far down the page but to your point A lot of the stuff that's happening now is we're still writing for humans and machines at the same time when we do a lot of this stuff. On the back end, GPT is going to come and scrape the website and figure that out. But I think the more branding that you have around your business, the more authority that you're able to not necessarily manufacture, but the more authority you're able to put in that brand. So things like press releases, putting out videos, putting out podcasts like you're doing here. Different types of media, because there are so many different ways that people browse that information. So if somebody goes to, let's say they go to ChatGPT, and they say, hey, I want you to find the top 10 Pinterest pins for this particular topic. And if you're not on Pinterest, you're not included in that search. To your point, that operator will go to Pinterest, go and do the result book, and go figure out what images are the top 10 ones, and then pull back the URLs into the system. And say, here they are categorized by volume and size. this many searches and this many repins and this many shares and all that other stuff and just show algorithmically, here's the data. But if you're not playing on any of those platforms, you're missing that traffic pool.
- Speaker #1
You know, there's, if I take a look throughout the last 20, 30 years, and this goes back right throughout time, tides change, right? Epsom flows. Now, are we starting to see that with Google and perplexity? Is Google starting to move out and Perplexity starting to move in?
- Speaker #0
They have a percentage of market share, but I don't think as a search engine that it's going to go anywhere. So the stuff that SEOs wind up doing isn't going to change. What changes is the platform that that data is being accessed through. So to your point, Perplexity could go ahead and do a Google scrape, figure out the top five, and then filter and parse categorically based on their algorithm. on which ones are the best sites based on user experience, G2 reviews, CapTarot reviews, Amazon reviews, whatever the platform is of choice that verifies that specific market sector. So like for local, it's usually Google Maps with the reviews or Yelp or TripAdvisor. For e-com, it's going to be Amazon or their actual site with the reviews on it. So those things are going to be pulled in as a feature. of what comes in from the searches. It's augmenting the search with that information. So if you have all those pieces that they're going to be looking for, because at the end of the day, the AIs are emulating human behavior. They're doing it in a really streamlined version of what human behavior is, but it's the same thing. They're trying to get to the result as fast as possible.
- Speaker #1
But isn't perplexity learning from Google to become better?
- Speaker #0
Not with the JavaScript turned on.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, that's true. That's true. So the other question I have about this is we market to YouTube, we market to Google, we market to Bing. Is there ways that we can market for perplexity to pick up search ranking?
- Speaker #0
Yes. So they have specific bots that will come and crawl your site. And if you look at the site logs that you may have for your web page, it'll tell you what the name of the bot is. You could, and this is a black hat disclaimer, you could do this. I don't recommend it, but you could serve up a version of that page specifically for that bot. You could say, if this bot comes to crawl this page, serve it this information.
- Speaker #2
If it honors, the bot sometimes don't honor those commands, though.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, but you can, if you're a black hat person, you could play with it. But the idea is... You're not really playing that game. But I would watch for when they come and crawl and add stuff to their database because you can see how often that bot is pinging your website. Like recently, probably within the past two, three years, Apple bots started showing up because they started crawling and finding information for them to go build out their version of Apple places or whatever it's called, their alternative to Google Maps.
- Speaker #1
Right.
- Speaker #0
They started scraping websites looking for that additional information to categorize their stuff. But up until that point, nobody had ever seen Applebot before. But now people watch for it. And every time they come, they have a payload of local data waiting for it. And they say, okay, here's the news information about our business. Here's all the reviews that we have on Google. We're just going to give you that box of stuff. Go take it back to the system and process.
- Speaker #2
How about, though, with SEO? I mean, in the past, if I wanted to know, I don't know, if I want to know the answer to a topic, back to the watches or whatever, the top ten. watches, I would go type that into Google and, and see what Google spit back out and try to find something that matched my, my needs, uh, that told me an idea for the watch versus now you have stuff like Gemini has, what's it called? Deep intelligence, deep knowledge, deep research. Yeah. Uh, and you can go in there and Custom program exactly what you want and tell it, prompt it, and say, analyze all the past trends. You can even tie it to APIs if you want to. But on Helium 10 for this product, for the last, this category, for the, I don't know, the wall calendar category that you, you know, the calendars you pin up on your wall for the last three years and predict what, look at the trends and the ups and downs and what happened. analyze Google trends and analyze all this other stuff, analyze the last 20 years of history. And stuff tends to cycle and go in cycles every 20 years and say, what predict what's going to be the hot calendars for next year. And it will come back with about an 80 to 85% accuracy of this is what's going to be hot in January of 2026. And so I can then take that information. I can roll the dice and I can have actually get ahead of it instead of doing research. That's. based on past only, I can actually analyze the past and predict the future with some of this stuff. And how does that affect SEO? Because then I can come out and have the counter. If, I don't know, trolls are going to be hot in 2025, that's what it predicts and expects thing. There's a 15% chance maybe that it's not, but also if I just launch any random products, 15% chance it's going to fail anyway. So how is that going to affect SEO once people get better at
- Speaker #0
prompting or do you think people just will never really get better at prompting it's just going to be the geeks and the researchers that are good at an average person it's going to still be lazy and depend on the seo serving it up no i mean it's i'm seeing it even now like i've got you know younger generation uh siblings and they're using gpt in ways that i'm not even thinking of you know when they're looking for stuff they go to gpt before they go to google now because they just have it in their pocket you know ask the question and get the answer they're looking for but With your point with a lot of the automation stuff, predictive analytics, that's all stuff that can be built in. So if you're looking at your analytics data and your search console data, barring Google doing some totalitarian algorithm update, you should, with fairly good predictability, be able to feed that data into their system and say, OK, based on this, what should I focus on next? What should my next topics be? What can I do to? make this work better? How do I get the user to see this as a zero-click search result? Zero-click means the little box at the top that just kind of is the AI-generated piece whenever you do a search now. And you can ask it questions like that, and it'll say, well, you're missing this markup, or this thing might not be on the page, and here's what I would add to the site if I were you. So you can kind of use AI to predict what the user's going to want based on those pass trends, and then work that into... the existing pages.
- Speaker #1
I wonder if it'll just be a series of small questions or prompts. So you can have regular search or just have an advanced search with maybe three or four questions.
- Speaker #0
Yeah. Like a topic drill down.
- Speaker #1
Yeah. Yeah.
- Speaker #0
And I look at search the same way most people look at navigating department stores or Walmart, for example. And that's how search has always kind of been structured. You walk into the Walmart, the website. All the little banners are hanging up overhead. It's your main nav. And then you walk to the aisle, find the item that you want, and then go to the register and check out. And that's kind of the same way that the data is structured for AI. But instead of you having to go look at the store map, you just have somebody waiting at the front that says, you know, take me to the, you know, men's workout shirts and it's size two X in black and they go, okay. And take you right to that aisle and hand you the shirt. That's the difference is you're You're removing the buyer's journey by getting people what they want on the first shot. So as long as what you're doing with your website and your information is what people are looking for, you know, overall ranking, click-through rate, all those different things that Google's taking into account, the AI will be able to see some of that when it goes to scrape the search result.
- Speaker #1
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- Speaker #2
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- Speaker #1
They've helped up and coming brands like Magic Spoon compete with Cheerios for top category positioning, while also helping Fortune 500 brands like Unilever launch their new products.
- Speaker #2
Right now is one of the best times to get started with Stack Influence. You can sign up at stackinfluence.com or click the link in this video down in the description or notes below and mention Misfits, that's M-I-S-F-I-T-S, to get 10% off your first campaign. stack influence.com. I like that because then you're taking me straight to the men's shirt and two X, and I'm not getting to stop and peruse stuff along the way that I might buy that I didn't know I wanted, that I didn't even come forward to buy. So is that going to be from a marketing point of view?
- Speaker #0
Yeah. I mean, in the long run, absolutely.
- Speaker #1
Or it'll prompt you at the end.
- Speaker #0
Right. Yeah. If they're designing it correctly and it's working as a assistant, as everybody likes to call them, and working as a tailor of some sort. Hey, you found the workout shirt you were looking for. Do you also need a new pair of shorts? Are you looking for wrist protectors for when you go to lift the dumbbells? That kind of stuff. Are you looking for a protein supplement? Or it could ask questions like, what type of workout are you looking to go to? Oh, I'm going to go train for a marathon. cool, here's some running shoes that also might work for you based on what the information you've given me. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And then that's where that perplexity affiliate link comes in handy.
- Speaker #1
So based on your audits that you're doing, or maybe clients or just what you see nowadays with different websites, what are things that people are just missing out on? And then like just things that they they've just missed? Simple, easy to correct. And then what are some of the common mistakes? No, the two different things, Kev. So what are they just missing out? And then what are some common mistakes? Sure.
- Speaker #0
So the main thing that they're missing out, like I mentioned earlier, with this algorithmic update that happened last year, this EEAT update, as they're calling it, which is expertise, authoritativeness, and trust. I forget what the other E is because it always just used to be EAT. They added a second E. I don't know what it stands for. I don't care. But the point being is that you should be not only creating your brand on your website, but throughout the internet. Like if you're, if you think of it from the old school days, if you were a brick and mortar business, you wouldn't just put a sign out front that says open for lunch. You would go probably put a bunch of stuff down by a construction site because all the boys, you know, there might be a construction yard down the way or a contractor, you go hand out menus over there. They'd come in for lunch whenever they got on lunch break. You would go maybe sponsor a local event for kids, youth group, YMCA, something like that. And you would provide sandwiches and then hand out business cards. You want to be in as many places as possible. And you want people to know that those places exist. So claiming your brand on as many pages or websites that is applicable to your business as possible is going to help you to swing that. That also gives you additional places where you can post content most times. So like if you go claim a WordPress, a blogger, a Tumblr, a medium.com and a Pinterest, you've got four blogging platforms and an image share site. And then you can go and put image you are in there. And then now you've got an additional image site. But everything that you're posting on your website fits into one or all of those different buckets. So if you're a local business, you're going to want. like I said before, like TripAdvisor, Yelp.com, maybe one of the reservation sites, Resi, to have your business out there so you can get more people in the door. But having your brand established on all those profiles with the same information, whether you're a brick and mortar business or not, but having all of your pertinent information and then having links to each of those additional properties somewhere on that page. Like, hey, here's our website. but also here's every social channel we own. Like they do it on YouTube brilliantly. You go to the channel and then they have that little bar on the side that has, you know, X and Facebook and blogger and all that stuff. And you just add as many of those in as you can, because when Google comes to look at it, they will then see, Oh, you're also active on these other sites. When was the last time you posted there? What did you post? Oh, you posted an image with a link back to a blog post about an article or a product you just launched. Let me go check that out. Oh, I found this keyword. Now this also tells me that you had put out a press release. Let me go find those. And now you have this interconnected web of stuff that at any given time you hit publish, and now it's showing up everywhere. A great example is using AI and automation to go ahead and build out miniature podcasts. So let's say I want to talk about a topic. I could plug in a topic into a Google sheet that would go into an automation and something like make.com. use my voice and then write me a three minute podcast episode about that topic and have it post directly to SoundCloud, let's say. And then on the back end, I have that hook to Spotify for podcasters. So now that goes to an additional 12 services that I don't have to pay attention to. That's 12 additional sites that I'm now stacking keywords in. that I'm spending time, three minutes of coming up with topics and plugging them in and waiting for them to publish. And now I've got topical relevance for every single one of those things, because I have a blog or a podcast on 10 different websites. And now I've got 10 different URLs that I can go rank in the search results. And then now I own page one, because I have 10 URLs, and everybody knows 10 blue links on the homepage when you go to search for that keyword.
- Speaker #1
Now, back in the day, uh you you know this well i'm sure you know this well just about private networks we used to just spin really bad but content tons of it right right is that something you not that really poor quality listening don't know what spin is norms just so that they know what that means well we would take that we would take these already crappy articles And we would just turn them into variations and variations and variations.
- Speaker #2
Right, the same thing.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, and that one article might be written 25 times or more. So I'm wondering with what you were just talking about with that three-minute spot, because you're using your voice but it's artificial, can you just drop in there that you want to use these 25 different keywords in these 25 different... podcast and then spin it out that way.
- Speaker #0
Yes. That's exactly what we're doing.
- Speaker #1
That's what you're talking about, right?
- Speaker #0
Yep. And then so every topic that I want to cover, or I can pull something I've written on my website. And obviously after I've gone through and edited it, I can have it pull that article and have me do a talking synopsis of it and then hotlink that podcast link in that article. So now that'll link out to the service and then show, hey, you can subscribe to this podcast, which is just me talking about the blog post. on these 10 services. And now Google knows that every time I post something in that category, that I have an audio podcast that corresponds with that that's listed on these other 10 properties that I wasn't paying attention to previously.
- Speaker #1
So we did that with we were doing an influencer style, not event, but we would post different audiences for different products that had multiple avatars. And This is another really great way. I'm just thinking about this now. So you have a product and that product might hit five different avatars. You could take that podcast or take that article, take the blog article, turn it into a script, make that script break down into five different podcast styles to your avatar. and then publish it it would all have this basically the same content but worded more directly towards your avatar yeah so the personas yeah so and we were we've already been doing that with amazon with the influencer program so that we would see products and we would just change the tiktok scripts that we were writing for these different uh personas yeah that's yeah exact same thing it's the same thing yeah that's uh i really wasn't thinking about that But I can see a lot of different ways that you can do that quite easily and automate it easily.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, you can do that. One of the other things we're automating right now through Make and a few additional services is we're automating infographics. So we have it where, let's say you want to promote a product. It'll go ahead, do the perplexity research on that product, use GPT to write up what goes in the boxes for the infographic. And then at the bottom of that, it actually has a hotlink or a shortlink out to that product. with your company information and a little blurb about you at the bottom.
- Speaker #1
You can take that information and upload it into Napkin and have a really nice infographic.
- Speaker #0
Right. And then you can upload it to the rest of the infographic platforms as well. And then take the text that was on that infographic, stick it in the sidebar. Because although Google can kind of read images, it's really not that great. It's the same reason why your YouTube description has to be as long as it is. Because that helps them to figure out. And same thing with the transcript on YouTube. If that has all the keywords and stuff in it, that also helps.
- Speaker #2
And then you put the time codes and the transcripts too for SEO.
- Speaker #0
Yep. Absolutely.
- Speaker #2
So you mentioned before when we were having a cigar, speaking on YouTube that you could rank any YouTube video on the first page of Google for almost anything. Can you explain how is that? I mean, you can't give away your exact magic sauce, but what's that process like? Is it creating a lot of backlinks? Is that by just making sure it's. optimized properly or what is what because this is something i want to do with you because norman i want to rank marketing misfits on the first page of uh of google for every every little topic that we have on all of our stuff so what what do we think we're doing
- Speaker #0
So there's... So disclaimer, you can, you can, but before we jump into that, cause saying you can rank any YouTube video, somebody should be like, no, and I could prove it. So before we go down that rabbit hole for most longer tail videos, yes, you can wind up on the page. You're not going to show up for payday loans or stuff like that. So if it's a product, if it's a service plus location, stuff like that, you have a better propensity to be able to do it for the shorter tail, higher volume keywords. It's going to take a lot more than. what we were talking about to do this. But what we do have is there's a number of things in YouTube that work very well for getting it to show up better. So as we talked about before, engagement, so bounce rate and view time on the videos, same as it is on webpages. How long are they there? What are they watching? When do they drop off? That's important. And then the other one that's important to them is links, citations, and shares. So... I have a system that we go ahead and we do exactly that. Take the URL, take a few keywords, and go ahead and distribute it across a network of websites that we have, that we've built, that do all that. And then we let Google come and naturally find them and crawl them and index them and do their thing. It's not an overnight process by any stretch, but it will create at least the baseline to be able to make that consistent jump. And then we can do additional things to the back of that to make it work. So Norm is probably familiar with this. We've chatted about it a little bit. You're familiar with Parasite SEO. So using a site that's not your website in order to rank for a keyword. Yeah. So a thing a lot of people don't pay attention to is, like I was mentioning earlier, all those branded properties that you should be building out for your company for authoritativeness and trust and stuff. You can build backlinks to those. And those will count for actually showing up. So you can power up additional things. So like, for example, your LinkedIn profile, you can power up. And anytime you make a post about something like that, because you are a person who is managing company XYZ, every time you post about and tag company XYZ, all the backlinks that are hitting your LinkedIn profile are now helping to drive company XYZ up for whatever you just wrote the content about. So you can do things like that. that are relatively easy. Another one, a lot of people don't know, speaking of LinkedIn, is if you have Clear, the pre-check program here in the States, if you have Clear, you automatically get verified on LinkedIn for free if you plug in your Clear ID.
- Speaker #1
Really?
- Speaker #0
So that's another way to do the verification we were talking about earlier. So to be verified as a person, LinkedIn will match you to your Clear ID. and then automatically give you the check.
- Speaker #2
They took mine away.
- Speaker #0
Ah.
- Speaker #2
Damn Clear Plus.
- Speaker #1
I was a comedian.
- Speaker #2
Yeah.
- Speaker #1
Just want to tell you, well, once you become the 51st state, then maybe you can come out and do it again. But until then, I didn't know that about Clear. I'm actually going to actually have to do that because that's a cool little technique. So. So basically it comes down to what you're saying is SEO. It's going to come down in the future. It's authority. And it's the, the tools are going to Google. And these guys are going to figure out how to shift through the riffraff of AI. Like the example you gave now of the new JavaScript enabled to see if it's human or not human. They're going to be, they're going to be taking steps like that because they're going to protect that $235 billion in ad revenue best they can, even though. their CEO has come out and said that we expect to see a downturn. Right. But they're going to protect that the best they can. So what do you see and where's the future going with SEO? Do you think it's status quo or do you think it's going to have some minor shifts or some huge shifts coming in the next few years?
- Speaker #0
So it's going to have its shifts like anything else. There'll be your main site, which will have all your stuff on it. But. More and more people are becoming more compartmentalized, I'm seeing, on social media platforms. So, like, you've got certain groups of people that only go on Instagram, and that's where they browse and that's where they buy. Some people only go on TikTok for as long as that stays around, and they browse and they buy. But I'm finding more and more of those people are not necessarily not using websites, but they're going into communities. So, like, for example, Google went ahead and… and put, I think it was like $50 million last year into Reddit. And then mysteriously overnight, all of the Reddit threads are starting to show up for keywords at the top of the page.
- Speaker #1
Yeah.
- Speaker #0
So the reason behind that, and it's making sense because it's trending that way is more and more people are trusting less and less websites. They want to know, you know, they see an ad for something. They know that AI generated stuff is out there. Especially you can get like these UGC videos made for like five or six bucks a pop using certain pieces of software of like a talking head holding your product and stuff nowadays. Um, so people are going onto these sites, they're going out to Reddit, Cora, um, They're going back onto discussion forums. So all the old school forum days are coming back because people are trying to find communities of people who are like-minded about that topic and ask them a question like, hey, is this legit? I keep seeing these ads everywhere, but I think it's the same guy from this other commercial. Are they doing AI-generated stuff or is this actually a product? Is this a hoax or not? And sometimes the brands are jumping in on those platforms and trying to respond to those. So I'm seeing a lot of that type of... stuff go on. And I'm sure, especially like with Amazon stuff and e-com, that conversation obviously happens both on Amazon and then on other platforms as well.
- Speaker #2
I've heard it go even farther than that, that in the near future, so a couple of years out, there won't be websites. So, you know, and this is a guy, a very good marketer, Kevin, I think you were there when we were talking, I've been talking to him since then, but he's adamant. that there won't be a reason especially for local to have seo and he gave me an example of a dog walker who also has these pet other pet services doesn't have a website doesn't want a website all of her business comes off of facebook kind of like what you're talking about right now so there's no need for it right so it's it's interesting but you know he was he was pretty adamant he knows the game and yeah he won't invest in websites. Right. So, and that's as of now. So, uh, what was the, there was another, oh, this is just kind of a comment. Kevin, do you remember I was on, you know, you invited me once, uh, then never invited me again, but, uh, to helium 10 elite.
- Speaker #1
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. To use the word, I couldn't invite you back.
- Speaker #2
Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Very popular. So I wanted to show authority, but this goes back. 2019 and uh kevin gave me no authority but so i i wanted to to show what we were doing back then with seo and i uh this was for bully sticks so very you know this is competitive so i showed came up with keyword put the keyword on and uh google the search engine came down and it said amazon.com amazon.ca uh chewy and then it went into press releases from three years earlier then it came down you had all the photographs for ours then there was a whole bunch that didn't look like ours but they were all influencer based more press releases went to the next page we owned the first two pages with except for two spots on the second page and then it even went into the third but that's all just highly optimized author authority and this is you know it ticks me off uh i'll go and i'll talk about how powerful content and press releases are and people will either think that oh i'll get a 49 press release i'll run it once and oh it doesn't work right and like i can show them proof and owning the first page or the second page with now it's not necessarily your website, but it's your social, your website and influencers and press releases and you can dominate.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, absolutely. And that's kind of what we're talking about with the Parasite SEO.
- Speaker #2
By the way, he never invited me back even with that very impressive authority thing.
- Speaker #0
Yeah. But that's to your point. That's kind of the Parasite SEO stuff that we're talking about is how many platforms can you be active on? How many places can people find you? What corner of the internet? Because like, for example, I think we had chatted through this example when we were sitting down having cigars, but let's say I'm an older person living in Florida and my AC unit blows out. Chances of me going to Google and typing in HVAC near me, probably pretty good. Am I going to click on the Google guaranteed and the ads? Probably not because as an older person, you know, this hypothetical, I don't trust that. It's not a business I've seen in the real world. but I know who the BBB is. So I'm more likely to click on the Better Business Bureau because of my age demographic and my reluctance of using the internet. because we don't get yellow pages anymore. But my reluctance to use that, I'm going with something that I know in my head is a verified source. And I'm clicking that and I'm booking it through there. So that's a perfect example of somebody who's not going to pay attention to your Google Guaranteed. They're not going to pay attention to your paid ads. They're not going to pay attention to your GMB. And they're probably not going to visit your website. But they know that the BBB exists. And as a local business, that's something you can have in your back pocket. That's an additional place for people to find you. But that's kind of what we're talking into is how widespread is your brand? Thinking of what Coca-Cola does as a great example. They're everywhere. You know the colors. You know everything. They even have it where you go to Star Wars Land and Disney, and it doesn't quite say Coca-Cola on the bottle, but you know it says Coca-Cola because they wrote it in some weird little cliff alien language thing. But you know it's Coke because of the coloring and everything else. And that's going to become the thing. To that point, on the other side of SEO and getting into how this is going to evolve, there are tools out there that allow you to take control of your brand on everybody else's platform. So there's a tool out there called Awario, A-W-A-R-I-O. And it's the same tool that Southwest Airlines and Disney use to manage their social media profiles. But you plug in your keywords, you plug in your brand information, you plug in your products. And it will monitor wherever people are talking about online blogs, forums, Reddit, YouTube, all the socials, news, news websites and allow you to have an active conversation with that user. When they post it from your branded account, whether it's somebody who's on your, whether it's a you're a larger company and it's your C-suite or it's somebody using the, the actual company brand social. But having those out there and being able to engage with a user when something happens, like Southwest cancels a flight, somebody writes an angry tweet, and 10 seconds later, Southwest is responding directly to that person saying, hey, check your DMs, we have something for you. And they're, you know, rebooking them on the next flight and just taking care of customer service and brand management like that. And I think that's where SEO and a lot of the social stuff is going to start to merge. It's like you have to have that presence and be trusted. authority, but also you have to be able to respond to customers.
- Speaker #1
Like it's going to be, you know, dual service type thing. because you don't want to miss a single episode of the Marketing Misfits. Have you subscribed yet, Norm?
- Speaker #2
Well, this is an old guy alert. Should I subscribe to my own podcast?
- Speaker #1
Yeah, but what if you forget to show up one time? It's just me on here. You're not going to know what I say.
- Speaker #2
I'll buy you a beard and you can sit in my chair too. You can go back and forth with one another.
- Speaker #0
Yes.
- Speaker #2
But that being said, don't forget to subscribe, share it. Oh, and if you really like this content, somewhere up there, there's a banner. Click on it, and you'll go to another episode of the Marketing Misfits.
- Speaker #1
Make sure you don't miss a single episode because you don't want to be like Norm.
- Speaker #2
Oh. Yeah, I remember back in the day, just, and this goes, I don't know, this goes back in the 2000s, but just. starting to monitor keywords. I think we started with Hootsuite way back in the day, and you would just monitor those keywords and then get involved with the tweets that were happening or wherever it was happening. This sounds probably more sophisticated than the old hashtag and alert.
- Speaker #0
It'll do all that. Plus it'll figure out brand reach, number of impressions based on how you responded, all that kind of stuff, user sentiment. But the other cool thing is that now because you can see into everybody's... everybody's yard where they're talking about you, you have the ability to go in there and have that conversation and drop a link or a coupon code. Now you're building backlinks on these platforms in, in resolving a problem with a customer. And now they're going back to your site anyway. So now you're dropping links everywhere that people are having conversations about you.
- Speaker #2
Nice. Well, we're getting to the end of the podcast. Kev, do you have any other questions?
- Speaker #1
I've got a bunch, but we'll just have to bring him back or just have to hire him. I mean, if I wanted to hire you to do some of this for marketing misfits for my companies, Dan, how would I do that?
- Speaker #0
Um, you can reach me on LinkedIn, um, or you can go to my agency website, which is miss pepper, M I S S pepper, like this, the plant.ai.
- Speaker #2
All right. Very good. Now there's one question I got to ask you at the end of every podcast, we ask our misfits if they know a misfit. Well,
- Speaker #0
if I was going to bring in a misfit for you guys. I would like to recommend or nominate Chris Moore. Chris Moore is a, to put it nicely, he is a marketing kingmaker. He is the type of guy that goes into a company, runs special ops, you know, black ops type stuff in the background. And in one of the companies he's working on right now, they have seven X bottom line revenue in the past 12 months.
- Speaker #2
Wow. Wow.
- Speaker #0
Then straight up marketing knows his stuff. He's got his fingers in several different businesses, but he talks a lot about consulting for equity.
- Speaker #2
Okay. That's a good topic, too. Yeah.
- Speaker #0
Awesome.
- Speaker #2
All right, Dan. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to remove you, but we'll come right back to you a bit later.
- Speaker #0
All right. See you guys later.
- Speaker #2
All right. Thanks for coming on.
- Speaker #0
You got it. Bye, guys.
- Speaker #2
Mr. King.
- Speaker #1
And that time flew by. I looked at the clock and I was like, dang, we've already been talking over an hour.
- Speaker #2
I know. I know.
- Speaker #1
When you start geeking out on fun stuff, on marketing stuff, that time just flies.
- Speaker #2
You know, sometimes when you're listening to something about SEO, especially if you're not a geek or you don't know the technical terms, your eyes kind of roll back in the bottom of your head or the back of your head. You fall to the ground in the fetal position. That's usually what I do. But it's so interesting. If you get just a small grip on any of this, it can help your marketing so much. And just understanding it. Now, we've talked about this a million times, Kev, that you don't have to be an expert in it. You just need to understand it. And then you can go hire experts like Dan to get the job done and get it done really well.
- Speaker #1
I mean, we'll probably, I mean, I'm sure marketing misfits and dragonfish is going to be using Dan for, for several things. I mean, so it's, it's, I mean, you and I know quite a bit and we've been around the block a few times, but we're, we're not experts in everything and not living and breathing it day in, day out. Like someone like Dan is, that's on top of just like that latest thing with Google that, you know, he brought up with the JavaScript thing. We would have, we didn't have any idea that we're not following that world as closely as he is. And so that. don't be afraid to reach out and actually hire people like this and when it comes to seo it's one of the most important things that's probably underutilized by a lot of people uh and it is something that's not short term just like he said you know i'm ranking the youtube it's not something you're going to see immediate results for so so that's why a lot of people don't do it they they'd rather spend that money on ads on facebook or on social media and see it on an ROI or a ROAS really quickly and know if it's working or not on SEO, it can be six months, eight months, 10 months, a year sometimes before it really starts kicking in. And it's hard for some people to make that commitment and to be consistent and to keep that up with a payday that's a year down the road.
- Speaker #2
I've had guys or people that we've done work with, and as soon as they become successful, they stop. So it might be eight months into it and they, oh, we're successful. It's just going to be constantly optimizing or constantly going to be providing backlinks. They stop and they tank. So if you start it, you're just going to waste your money.
- Speaker #1
It's part of your marketing. I mean, SEO should be a key part of your marketing and a key part where you put the money in. And just like you said with Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola still spends money. Everybody knows Coke in the world. It's one of the most recognized brands, if not the most recognized in the entire world. But they're still running ads on the Super Bowl. They're still doing sponsoring events and still doing things because you've got to stay there on top of mind and remind people that you exist. And SEO is exactly one of those types of things.
- Speaker #2
Okay. Well, enough said. I think that's it, Mr. King.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, that's all for this time. So if you like this episode, be sure to share it. Just like he said, make sure you share this episode. Don't just like it. You can do that too, but share it with somebody. Repost it. Feel free to grab the share link there and repost it on your own social media. Ring the bloody bell. Ring the bell and say, hey, you got to check this out. Check out the Marketing Misfits. This is cool. This is cool. Norm even wears diapers sometimes.
- Speaker #2
Sometimes. Sometimes. Because he did say he's old and I can't stay for an hour. You know, I got to usually shut off the camera.
- Speaker #1
I told you to quit drinking those Coke Zeros before we sit down for these hour-long things. Men make this work. They don't care.
- Speaker #2
All right, everybody. Oh, by the way, where can people check us out?
- Speaker #1
It's marketingmisfits.com.
- Speaker #2
Let me check my paper. Oh, it's not CEO.
- Speaker #1
Not CEO. Yeah, marketinglistlets.co. Check us out there and be sure to check out a new episode every single Tuesday. We'll be back again next week.
- Speaker #2
See you.
- Speaker #1
See ya.