The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
With over 5 million downloads, The Best SEO Podcast has been the go-to show for digital marketers, business owners, and entrepreneurs wanting real-world strategies to grow online.
Now, host Matthew Bertram — creator of LLM Visibility™ and the LLM Visibility Stack™, and Lead Strategist at EWR Digital — takes the conversation beyond traditional SEO into the AI era of discoverability.
Each week, Matthew dives into the tactics, frameworks, and insights that matter most in a world where search engines, large language models, and answer engines are reshaping how people find, trust, and choose businesses. From SEO and AI-driven marketing to executive-level growth strategy, you’ll hear expert interviews, deep-dive discussions, and actionable strategies to help you stay ahead of the curve.
Whether you’re a C-suite leader, marketing professional, or founder building your brand, this podcast is your guide to understanding the evolution of SEO into LLM Visibility™ — because if you’re not visible to the models, you won’t be visible to the market.
The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
The AI Revolution in Search Marketing with Cindy Krum
The digital marketing landscape is transforming dramatically with Google's MUM (Multitask Unified Model) reshaping how search works and forcing marketers to adapt their strategies beyond traditional SEO approaches.
• MUM combines text, images, videos, maps and other data types to create a comprehensive understanding of topics
• Google's framework has evolved from "micro-moments" to the "four S's of discovery" – stream, scroll, search, and shop
• Customer journeys are no longer linear but resemble atoms or squiggly lines as users bounce between different touchpoints
• Small businesses can compete by focusing on building communities and engaging audiences across multiple platforms
• Traditional keyword tracking is becoming less valuable as search becomes more personalized and conversational
• Content strategy should shift from high-volume production to creating fewer, higher-quality pieces with extensive distribution
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Free SEO Consultation: www.ewrdigital.com/discovery-call
With over 5 million downloads, The Best SEO Podcast has been the go-to show for digital marketers, business owners, and entrepreneurs wanting real-world strategies to grow online.
Now, host Matthew Bertram — creator of LLM Visibility™ and the LLM Visibility Stack™, and Lead Strategist at EWR Digital — takes the conversation beyond traditional SEO into the AI era of discoverability.
Each week, Matthew dives into the tactics, frameworks, and insights that matter most in a world where search engines, large language models, and answer engines are reshaping how people find, trust, and choose businesses. From SEO and AI-driven marketing to executive-level growth strategy, you’ll hear expert interviews, deep-dive discussions, and actionable strategies to help you stay ahead of the curve.
Guest Information:
Website: https://mobilemoxie.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cindykrum/
Twitter/X: https://x.com/Suzzicks/
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This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential, let's get started.
Speaker 2:Howdy. Welcome back to another fun-filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I'm your host, Matt Bertram. We've been bringing on some fantastic guests. I am remote, so if there are any glitches or sound issues, please I apologize ahead of time, but I think you'll love what we're going to be talking about.
Speaker 2:It's not something we've talked about a lot on this podcast yet, but we've indirectly talked about the buyer's journey and what's happening with the buyer's journey and how that's changing and how to measure things. And there's a term called MUM Multitask, Unified Model. The way search online is changing. Like I don't even know if Google is really a search engine. The analogy I heard is it used to be like the librarian that you would go to and it would tell you, hey, go check this out over there. And now you go to the librarian and it just gives you the answer, and so everybody's starting to optimize for the answer. Engine SEO's got a lot of different terms. Things are changing and I wanted to bring somebody that's an expert on to really talk about that. Cindy Crum with Mobile Moxie Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Hi, thanks very much for having me.
Speaker 2:We met at SEO conference and you actually grew up down the street from me and that it's such a small world You're now based out of Denver, but this world, as everybody transverses I just even remember and I know that this is not the point of the podcast, but the world's so much smaller today Like I remember calling cards, like if someone lived near you you would have to do a calling card to talk to them and schedule everything.
Speaker 2:And mobile phones and how people are searching online is absolutely changed and how people search online we used to talk about like a standardized funnel, right, and it was very linear, that you would go from here to there, to there to there. And you know, I remember reading a Google study where that said it. It kind of looked like a atom or something, like people would come out, come back to the center, come out, come back to the center. And then I've seen those images where it's like a squirrely line. For those of you listening, I don't have the image pulled up, so don't worry, but it's like you know, they go back, they get distracted, they come back and it's not a linear funnel. And now, with you know LLMs and you know mom, like everything's changed and I would love to kind of get your perspective on like. Maybe you define for the audience what mom is like and like how it's changing stuff and we can just start the conversation there.
Speaker 3:Sure. So MUM is something that Google started talking about back around 2017, 2018, as I recall, and it was right around or just after mobile first indexing started rolling out, and the abbreviation or the acronym stands for multitaskified Model, which doesn't really mean anything. Those are just a bunch of words, but a lot of people remember it as Multimodal Unified.
Speaker 2:Model.
Speaker 3:And that's kind of more representative because when Google announced MUM, the announcement talked about this language model that didn't just use text, it used images and videos and maps and statistics and facts and all of those other things and it could combine those into this unified model.
Speaker 3:And so the multitask part is really checking all of those different kinds of assets to put them together into a model where the search engine can understand a topic in a more multidimensional way and understand what is the right kind of experience that the user wants when it's searching for this topic. So it kind of takes. You know, we went from having entities sorry keywords and then we got into entities, which were kind of groups of keywords and language agnostic keywords, and then we have journeys, and journeys are kind of like all of the things you could do with an entity and that's what Google was trying to map. So that's that's kind of it. But then they've taken it a whole lot further in terms of the way Google is talking about search these days versus how they used to, and a lot of it does seem to incorporate these mum concepts.
Speaker 2:You talked about the different customer journeys. That was one of the things that really got my ears to perk up is based upon the journey, like the bucket they fall into and the typical like. I mean they mapped out right, like how you used to buy a car or a computer online and what that process would look like. But now they have enough data to figure out what these typical buckets are and when they drop you in that bucket that's going to be representative of the search, so it's not just all the searches that are out there based on that keyword or that entity, but it kind of falls you into that journey.
Speaker 2:That journey how, cindy, does that affect? Like, does that give small businesses a stronger opportunity to rank? Because I'm concerned with the bifurcation of all the things you have to do online to show up that small companies can't compete Like they have the GNB or the GDP. But beyond that now to show up, I feel like it's a lot harder to do and you've got to have a lot more plate spinning and things working to reach these different things unless you've built a community and I think everything we've we've talked about on the podcast going kind of going back to a very laser focused community centric model for small businesses. I mean, how, how would they deal with something like that with these changes?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think that you're right and I think that there is um a lot of good reason to um worry about smaller businesses and how they're going to compete, especially in Google getting the traffic that they maybe used to get, because it is true that bigger brands are getting a larger share of the traffic and for some kinds of businesses it is getting much harder to show up in search results. So, with journeys, what Google talks about, or what they originally talked about, was what they called micro moments, and this was aligned with kind of Google's move towards mobile, and they called the micro aka like small, and this was kind of, I think, micro moments they started talking about before mobile first indexing started rolling out and what those were. They said when people are on their phone they're more action oriented and their actions fall into one of these four things, and it was I want to know, I want to go, I want to do, I want to buy, and I think that someone's told me that they later added another micro moment. I'm not sure about that, but what's interesting is that those four micro moments fall neatly into Google properties that have been well monetized or at least have been attempted to monetize. So I want to know is regular search. I want to go is maps. I want to do ends up being YouTube and I want to buy is Merchant Center.
Speaker 3:And of course, we've seen massive progression and evolution of how Google has monetized those properties for themselves to make them kind of profit centers where they can make money by driving more searches and selling PPC ads in the searches, but then if they want to keep making money, then they can rank and send searchers to other properties that they've also monetized, because obviously all of those properties are owned by Alphabet, so they benefit either way. And then the other thing to know is that even when Google isn't actually making money on a transaction or an ad or something like that, they're making something monetizable, which is they're collecting data that they can monetize later. And so all of the behavior that they're capturing through Chrome about us as we search is allowing them to do things like create the AI that now runs PMAX and all of the cohort modeling and journey modeling that makes PPC much more profitable, like they needed the data of what people want to make that a profitable solution for advertisers.
Speaker 2:I love how they even have added, like the CAPTCHAs to training labeling data for you, right. So like they, like yeah, I didn't know that until I don't remember when someone shared that with me is that's what they're doing, right, and they're training their, their, you know, before tesla, they're self-driving cars and, like all this data is super valuable. I remember was it google that bought? It was like a uh, a temperature company. Did they buy the nest or something like that? They, I think they bought I I could have this wrong alphabet buys a bunch of stuff. I think they bought nest and the reason they bought that is it was all this digitized temperature data that they could use. They were buying for the data, not necessarily for the cool, you know Apple looking tool. That's probably a nice add on, but, but everything, data is the new oil.
Speaker 2:I know that that's been talked about. I think it's starting to come to the forefront with all these LLMs and these models now, like I think people had said that. But there was a lot of manual effort that had to be done to label all this kind of data and Google's been capturing and labeling data for so long and that's why, on these ads, you know you turn them on, you set up your parameters and over time, it's just like a heat-seeking missile and it finds your right type of person. I I also know that google started moving like really pushing in their last announcement um, you know, e-commerce, like on the site, because they're not going to drive them necessarily off the site, they're going to do the transaction there and then they're leaning into youtube really big.
Speaker 2:I'm not sure exactly how they're going to add additional ads to youtube, because youtube, if you don't pay for the subscription, are already. Uh, I, I can't even handle it. I had to, I had to pay to the subscription model to not get ads every uh, 10 seconds. Um, but I mean what? What can you speak to of where the general market's going and and maybe how companies need to be thinking about this journey and how to track it?
Speaker 3:Sure, so Google has updated how they're talking about micro moments and they don't use that phraseology anymore. Uh, most recently they've published some articles about the four S's of search, and those are stream, scroll, search and shop, or the four S's of discovery, or something like that, or brand awareness or whatever.
Speaker 3:So it's those four S's stream, scroll, search and shop and those also fit with properties that Google has right Stream is YouTube, scroll is Discover, search is regular search and shop is Merchant Center. So again, google is telling marketers that this is how journeys happen, that people bounce from these four S's while they're on a brand discovery or product discovery or a search and discovery process, and that if you want to be seen, you need to be potentially in all of these, or at least you need to map out where people are doing these activities in the discovery process. And they give even an example. Um, I think they call it. They don't call it journey mapping, but they call it some other mapping, like awareness mapping or something like that. And they say figure out, you know what percent of your traffic is coming from each of the four S's in early discovery. You know mid and then end of funnel and make a graph. And they show you how to make the graph.
Speaker 3:So what that tells me about Google's vision of the world digitally is that successful brands are not just banking on one website to do all the work, and this is what you were alluding to. Is that you kind of. You know, a lot of SEOs right now are saying you have to be everywhere, and that sounds really overwhelming to small business owners, and so I think what Google is kind of trying to subtly hint at is you don't have to be everywhere like full time 100%. You have to be where your users are and where they're looking for you in their normal journey and give them the kind of content they want for that particular product or service at the point when they want it. So I think that's their yeah, that's their advice of like you don't have to do everything 100%. We want you to be a multi-faceted business that isn't just, you know, pumping out loads and loads of kind of light, fluffy, boring content every week on your website, but creating a community, like you said, and doing creating the community and engaging with your community where they are already.
Speaker 2:So, cindy, it's interesting If you look at the major gold standard tools that measure a lot of keyword tracking, they typically broke content up into informational, transactional, commercial and navigational Is you name it? It was all about the brand discovery at the top of the funnel, right. So it was like really heavily informational searches, the direction from Google that I saw in one of their I don't know exactly where it was, but I believe it came from Google. They really want you to be 25, 25, 25, 25. And you know, if you have an online business or other things, maybe there's a carve out for that navigational search. And what we see with a lot of clients is they don't have as much transactional search at the bottom of the funnel.
Speaker 2:And that transactional search the comparisons, the you know you're trying to make a decision is across the internet, and so you know the traffic. What Rand Fisken said you know like, based on a number of his slides I saw him at a couple SEO conferences is like traffic's been cut in half or more than half, and so you know you need to help the LLMs understand the bottom of the funnel transactional content that you can control on your website um and listicles and there's other things and and what I'm seeing from what you're saying what Google's saying is no one's really mapping that one for one, right? It's like everybody's got their own ranking factors that they're using. And then there's like this is what Google wants you to do, and then you're trying to have to connect the dots there. I mean, what are your thoughts around that? Just in the market in general?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think at large, that is kind of what we're trying to do is connect the dots. But I think that the way that we're all thinking about SEO and search as a whole right now is probably going to need to change soon, because if you think about what Google's been investing in marketing towards recently, it's AI mode and then all of the AI stuff in in the paid side of the house AI mode, and even, you know, recently I think it was a week and a half or two weeks ago Google added AI summaries to Google discover, and this was something that I kind of predicted at SEO week, because I said, you know, at that point Google had just internationalized SEO or Google Discover and made some changes towards making it more international and I said, you know, this is not an accident and they've just rolled out AI mode.
Speaker 3:Now they're making Google Discover international AI mode is rolling out're making Google Discover international. Ai mode is rolling out internationally. This seems like it goes together. And then, of course, they just added the AI summaries to Google Discover and they added AI mode as an option on the main page of Google and I think we're going to see more convergence where potentially, ai mode and Google Discover combine or at least are going to test. That is my guess, and the reason that's important is that Google Discover has always been personalized to not just a cohort but a person right and their own individual interests.
Speaker 3:And I think that AI mode, if it's going to be successful, they're probably going to try and go really personalized and that's why it's, you know, in AI options you're getting the chat with Gemini stuff, because it's trying to understand you and your decision-making process and what you, in particular, want and are looking for. So if I have a history of consistently, you know, shopping for groceries on the internet and looking for the best price on paper towels, it's going to stop showing me the most expensive paper towels and it's just going to show me the best deals potentially. So the idea and the takeaway is, yes, we can't, we're not going to be able to optimize for you or me, but we're going to have to understand our customers on a very deeper level and understand why our brand sticks out to them as opposed to the other ones. So if all I want is the cheapest paper towels out there and it's showing me deluxe paper towels, I'm going to have a bad experience.
Speaker 3:So if you're trying to talk to the LLMs and you sell cheap paper towels, what you need to say is our paper towels are super cheap're. We know you're just using half of it and throwing the rest away anyway. You don't need the super heavy bulky. Whatever, buy these, save money. It's better for the planet. And then you're going to make me feel good about my decision to buy cheap paper towels. Um, stuff like that, where it's it's not just, it's not just listing product like basic specs, but it's listing more deeper benefits that will resonate with a buyer when they're making a final decision.
Speaker 2:So I'm hearing and I've heard this in other conversations is we have to go so much deeper on the ideal target persona than what we think and doing additional research. There's tools out there, like Rand Fishkin's tool that, like it, really opens it up of like where your people are at, what they might be looking at, what are the associations, because it's going to be so personalized to you. And I've seen some customer journey maps where you know if you're not speaking to that person's value structure or what they've done historically, even if you're ranking for that keyword, you might not show up in that journey at all and so it's again getting laser focused, like you said, on that target persona. So the question that I ask and I think we've been kind of dancing around it's again getting laser focused, like you said, on that target persona. So the question that I ask and I think we've been kind of dancing around, it is okay, I understand that it's changing, I understand I need to know this better, but how do I measure this? Like, how do I see how I'm doing? And I've heard a lot of people doing manual searches and that's not a very unified way to see what an agnostic look of what other people might be searching for Because, again, all your searches are now customized to you and I would even say, which.
Speaker 2:I don't have complete clarity on this. This is my assumption, but when you go to incognito mode in Google, when Google said, hey, you can do, do not follow links, and we're still going to look at them, I feel like the same thing is is the case for incognito. Because you're incognito, my incognito is going to be different. What is that based on? Well, where we are geographically, maybe, and our user preferences, and so that's where I think everything starts to unravel for people that are trying to rank and search is how do you measure all this stuff? The current set of tools that are available today are not what we need for AI mode and and mom and um. I know that there's a couple of people out there that are trying to stand up tools, but the majority of the industry right now is still playing the old game.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I I don't think there's a great answer to the question, honestly, because you're right, the industry is still playing the old game, because the idea of summarizing everything that's happening in everyone's private AI chat conversations is just so monumental and hard. There's this oh, not allegory, but there's this um, what do you call it?
Speaker 2:a story that tells analogy yeah, like a fable more oh, fable, I love fables.
Speaker 3:All right, let's do it um, but there's this fable and I'm not even I don't even know the name, but it's about um, a map maker, and the king of the region. Has a contest for the map makers to see who can make the best map of the region. And this one guy goes crazy and wants to make the best map, so he makes the most detailed map because he thinks detail is the best. And so he makes the most detailed map possible, and it ends up that the map is the same size as the territory and it covers the territory and kills everyone. So not helpful, right, like. So you've got to know, like, when to summarize and when to omit details, right. But the problem is, when things get so detailed and so deep down and individualized, it's really hard to summarize that and know what's important. And so I think we're going to be ending. I think for a while, and maybe, you know, for a long. I think we're going to be ending. I think for a while, and maybe, you know, for a long time, we're going to be leaning harder on basic query statistics rather than success statistics or visibility statistics, and we might have generic visibility, share of voice kinds of statistics, but not, like you shut up for these 8 billion queries, because the queries are all going to be so different and they're going to be strings of queries in a conversation, not a single keyword or not a single keyword phrase. You know they're going to be in a deep context that you're not going to be able to tease out, and so that makes our job harder. But that's why Google needs the journey modeling is because in a conversational search they need to understand what the next most likely question is going to be. And you can already see them using search to train to further train their journey models.
Speaker 3:Right, like, think about, if you think about, every time you see a people also ask that's a prompt to say, hey, your question was kind of vague, did you really mean this? And when they click on a people also ask, you're saying, yeah, when I searched for that, what I really meant was this Right, and it's a bit of a deeper iteration on the question. It's not the same level, it's slightly deeper, right, and then they'll keep going a little bit deeper. Ok, you have that. Do you also need this? Do you also need this? And so they're trying to. They're seeing what users click to get a model of you know, when someone searches for this, what they really where they really want to end up is there so.
Speaker 2:So it feels like we're going back to like old school marketing, right, where you're measuring, like uplift and you're, you're doing something and you're seeing, okay, I, my impression counts higher. Did that produce over x period of time? Uh, more leads, more revenue, right, and I mean you can measure stuff that's happening on a website. But how? How do people wrap around their minds Because we've trained them for so long, right? Like you're at the top of the rankings for X amount of these things, like you need to track these keywords, like, how do you follow the analytics?
Speaker 3:I guess I think, yeah, like I said, like I don't think there's a great answer. I think there are a lot of people trying to solve this problem. I think we're going to need to change KPIs. What you said about community building is huge. I think that's really kind of the sneak. The sneaky way to get around having to not have data is when you build a community, you can have real engagement, data and real interactions with your customers, and that not only helps your brand resonate better in a more long-term way, but gives you a lot of more data about them, more opportunities to re-engage them and stuff like that. And then there are also, I think that we might see a shift towards more active engagement metrics, things like comments on a post or a video, or and when I say post, I mean like social media posts, not a blog post necessarily I think we're going to see a decrease in I hope we're going to see a decrease in people just like pumping out the same boring website content, and it's going to shift to these kind of multi-channel distributions that represent the brand as a whole across the Internet, where your website is just you know.
Speaker 3:For a while, people have said your website should just be one part of your marketing, but the other parts were like your website and your emails and offline. But now I think it's like your website, your Instagram, your TikTok, your LinkedIn and stuff like that, because the LLMs what they are looking for is not just on your website and if you just have a website, even if it's great, it's not enough To convince the LLMs that you're good. You need to be the places where the LLMs are looking. And what LLMs you know? Seos keep saying that LLMs love novelty and they like novelty, they like to learn new things, but what they love is consistency. And if they see a consistent message across your brand, from you and other people that you're engaged, that you're the best, that you're the cheapest, that you're the whateverest, then they believe it.
Speaker 2:So the thing that I think about when you shift from like website content to social media content is which I would would. If you have any data or can point me in the right direction, it would be great because I I don't know the answer. The decay rate on social media posts, okay, like for a visual user is, you know, four to six hours maybe right, and so when I hear you need to be on on social media like, I know people that are very big on instagram or tick tock and they have to continue to produce these videos because they they only, they only have so much uh like, uh life in them. Um, there are some kind of information architecture, structures like reddit and things like that. You know gnb where you can grab some of that stuff, but I wonder how far and and the lms I did see some data that said on a blog post, on average, they only look back about 10 months, um, so I'm wondering. You know there's so much noise on linkedin right now, but there's a lot of great stuff that people are posting.
Speaker 2:I wonder if if you've seen anything about the decay rates for LLMs going further and reading social media posts, right, cause you're, if you're building out the hashtags and you're, you know, you're, you're, you're setting that, that in motion. Do you know? Is it just the life cycle of the post or or is there, you know, more runway to, to, to, to speak to the LMS, and again, right, I do need to say it, the LMS are only, you know, one to 3% of search. Still, right, so it's, it's not that big of a deal, but we've even shifted at our agency to uh, offering more of a social media as an SEO company, because it's kind of like left arm, right arm, like the full body of your, your brand, like building your brand online. You need to incorporate some of those things and I think, historically, when I would talk to other SEOs, seo was a silo and social media was a silo, but there's a big merger happening. I don't know if anything. I said you can kind of speak to it, but I'm just talking out loud now because I agree with you that social media shouldn't replace being search optimized. But what is a search engine now? And then, as people move over to AI mode, which I think AI overviews for me was a way to keep people in the old search until they get everything else set up you might have a different perspective on that.
Speaker 2:These other LLMs like when I started using LLMs pretty aggressively, like I go to Google and a website to do a final check on something, but a lot of my research is done on social media. Or what are other people saying? Reviews, yeah, and that engagement rate. I have seen data that 30% of the time that people spend on social media is now reading comments, you know. And so I think that that's really really important.
Speaker 2:But for a business, whether it be a big brand or a little brand because big brands you got to go through legal or maybe you have some executive that people are ghostwriting for, potentially because they can't spend all day on social media. And then the smaller brands well, they're trying to run a business and they don't have enough people to do it. You got to pump out a ton of content to just keep up and it's really quite noisy. I like your idea of going back to really focusing on those new micro moments, whatever they're called. I remember micro moments. I can't even say GDP without thinking about it. I still say GMB. It's ingrained in my brain, it's not GDP, it's GBP.
Speaker 2:And I'm dyslexic. I'll say that so sorry to everybody. Hopefully they know what I'm talking about. But this just looks to be, cindy, a monumental task for any brand or any business to do. Now I do think all of these things have been said over and over again. You should be doing all these things, but now it's kind of like it's not like a bonus, it's like a necessary thing that you need to be doing to be able to compete. What is the world going to look like, you know, in another 18 months?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think this is now table stakes for SEO. This is what you need to be. A good SEO is to be doing this kind of, you know, cross platform optimization. They used to call it barnacle SEO, and it does still have that benefit where, if you're struggling to rank your blog on XYZ keyword, you might have an easier time ranking a YouTube video on that keyword or an Instagram post on that keyword, and I think that has not gone away. That may even have doubled down now that Google is ranking UGC, forum content and whatever, with more preference and big brands with more preference, right, like, so. So it's a really, I think, solid strategy, but I think that you know you're right that it it, it's this huge commitment.
Speaker 3:But if you think about how many blog posts people were pumping out that were kind of like mid quality whatever, um, I think the idea is, um, and there's someone who talks about this a lot um, ross Simmons, the coolest cool on Twitter. Um, one of my favorites, and he talks about like not creating you know so many blog posts all the time, but creating like better ones and then getting the distribution really right. And if you spend, you know, five hours writing the blog post, you need to spend, and I don't remember his math. But let's say if you spend five hours writing it, you need to spend. And I don't remember his math. But let's say if you spend five hours writing it, you need to spend 10 hours doing the distribution. And I think that is going to go even further.
Speaker 3:So let's say, if you're a small company or even a big company, let's say you're a big company and you have to get a concept approved by legal and that takes months, so you have to plan out your content way in advance. You do one 10x piece, but then you get the distribution of that 10x piece right. Then you break it up into a million different shorts and videos and stills for Instagram and stories and reels and put it everywhere where the whole major concept has been pre-approved. You're not actually creating new stuff. You're creating one big thing and then breaking it out and turn and allowing the smaller pieces. So the the one, the one piece you know, gets you links, gets you authority from people who already know who you are and are aware of you. The smaller pieces feed the journey of people who are still in the discovery phase to get to you.
Speaker 2:Right, I feel like you need to produce one like pillar piece of content and then splinter it out. Um uh, ryan dice, uh, his social media marketing course, which now all that stuff he's like just giving it all away because everything's changing really explained to me conceptually many years ago about taking that piece of content. And I haven't heard the word Barnacle SBO before. I've got to look that up. That's really cool. It makes a lot of sense. I haven't heard that one.
Speaker 3:Oh, it's a bigger site and then you rank by proxy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we did that, but I never heard it called that. That's really cool. That should be a name for a company, um. So what that makes me think is like people are just turning out content Right, and you said that the the mid quality content that you know. People are just throwing something in chat GPT and posting it Like you're like the bar is coming up, but it's still like that's the bare minimum and it's really that really high quality content.
Speaker 2:The way I see this stuff, where it's original research and um, you know something different, that's that is novel, that that people might not know about, but it's helpful. So I mean, where's the balance between volume and and quality? And I mean it's very hard to get both of those off the charts for for for any business. And going back to what you said before, what are the things that you've seen that? Maybe because I think LLMs are just modeling very intelligent people of looking for stuff online and getting a bunch of different resources and coming up with um, you know a conclusion, uh, like, how do people need to be thinking about this in a framework like high quality sites or um?
Speaker 2:You know certain types of content that map to those different decision points. I mean, what would be a SEO plan for I don't know? Pick any company and like, let's just do a walkthrough of what that might look like. I love the idea of getting that concept approved and splintering it, but I I just still think you know how many times can you post about that same type of thing from a different angle? Right, if you got a four to six hour window on social media why do you say four to six hour window?
Speaker 2:tell me more about that uh, so from what I've seen of how the algorithms work, like if you post on facebook or linkedin, unless through the initial audition period you get some really high engagement, those those posts will, um, get kind of down indexed and not to say that if not a big influencer reposted or comments on it, it's never going to get the trajectory or reach of another post. And so if we have that initial concept that we broken apart into all these different things and we post that, and maybe we post it from a couple of different angles, tell that story like, how many times can you recycle that type of content before you need something new? Because, like you made me think, maybe we just do one really, really good piece of content that goes viral versus a bunch of mediocre content.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's the idea. Yeah, that's the idea. And then, and then you're posting. When you're breaking it into the smaller pieces and posting it across the web, it's going to resonate and you'll learn this. It'll resonate in some communities better than others. This, it'll resonate in some communities better than others. And so then you learn what that community likes and then you do slightly different things.
Speaker 3:If a different community likes different stuff, right, and you get to fine-tune your messaging and how you repurpose content for the different audiences in the different places. Or you say, like this isn't working, this channel isn't working. We're going to de-emphasize that. Um. But I think, like one of the reasons I like uh ross's model is like how long did you spend on it? Create a multiplier of that's how long you should be um repurposing it or how much effort you should spend on on uh distributing it. Creating a model like that for your own business, because it's going to be different for everyone and it's going to be different with the level of effort you put in in the first place. Right, if you put in five minutes, then spending 10 minutes to distribute, it is fine. Spending 30 minutes to distribute, it is fine. But yeah, I think it'll be different depending on the content and depending on what your availability is and what the depth you can go on the the initial idea in the first place, um, and then you've just got to measure the success and the roi right, um, so I don't think there's going to be one specific answer for everyone, but the.
Speaker 3:So I I've totally shifted how I think about digital marketing as a whole and I am really interested in the brands and products that are succeeding without websites at all. So things, products that have gotten TikTok famous, or maybe they have a website, but it's auxiliary compared, you know, products that are just TikTok products basically, and yeah, now they have a website that they didn't originally. Or people who have made millions of dollars doing influencer marketing right, like, I think, influencers, digital influencers and influencers even that are, I think, ai influencers is an interesting future space Terrifying, but also interesting, and so I think we really need to shake off, you know, the shackles of history and of the way we've thought about SEO before. We've thought about SEO before Because you know, when you search for something that you know, or if I were to search for something that I know is on TikTok a lot, the likelihood of the website ranking versus a TikTok video or a Reel or an Instagram or whatever, because all of those things can usually be cross posted across all the places. I think the website might come in.
Speaker 3:Eighth, you know, and what we're tracking, what we have great tracking on is the website. What we have less good tracking on is sometimes where people are discovering us and like how many times it takes them to see the brand on a couple of different channels to actually make a decision and seek us out and search for us by the brand name and stuff like that. So I think we have to kind of get comfortable in this lack of data and like I don't know how to convince people that that's the reality, except to say that like you've been operating on horrible data for years. Like just don't. Like it's always been bad data, it's been directionally accurate at best. Um so.
Speaker 2:so we got to grow as SEOs, we got to evolve as SEOs. Is the message that that I'm getting, and you know, being more comfortable with other verticals inside digital marketing um, really looking at like, how is your brand showing up? And, to your point, I'm about to bring somebody on that's grown totally through influencer, markerships and partnerships. He's grown his own brand. It's a speaker brand and hundreds of thousands of visit, valuable traffic, never done SEO, all brand searches, how? How are these brands growing? Because we got to be thinking about it differently and the current set of skill sets that a lot of seos have it's like, well, now you're telling me I need to be social media and I need to do this. And it's like, yeah, you do. I think everything's shifting and and a lot of people I've heard shedding off the seo uh title and maybe becoming more of a digital marketing. We talk about relevancy engineering, like kind of that concept.
Speaker 3:Well, if you're not convinced by what I've already said, think about, like, what would have happened if all of the companies that were hit by helpful content had a diverse set of traffic sources and a well-established brand that wasn't just getting traffic from Google. This is good business strategy, good marketing strategy. It's not just good SEO strategy and it's not good. What was it? What does Mike call it? What engineering Relevance, engineering Relevance, engineering strategy. It's just good business strategy as a whole to not put all your eggs in the Google basket.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I think I think everything is changing and broadening Awesome. I would love to transition to what you do over at mobile moxiecom. You know where, what, what you typically talk about. I think some of this stuff this was the podcast that I really you really did it to to get people to shift gears right, like everybody's talking about what's changing, but the reality is you got to make the shift to say there is, there is a whole new way of looking at things, and I actually heard from a lot of different sources SEO is going to kind of go away and get integrated into everything else those concepts but it's just that broader business strategy of what you talked about and you really put a great, great point on that. I would love to talk about more about what you're doing over at Mobile Moxie and how people can find out more of what you're talking about and your speaking talks and all that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, sure, well, so I'm going to agree before I get into my personal stuff. Like I think SEO should have been integrated into all the different things for years now, like that's how SEO is done correctly, and I think it has been true for years. It needs to be at all of the different aspects of a marketing journey in a company need to be informed by SEO, and so that's kind of what I do is I'm a consultant. I help some of the biggest companies in the US and in the world with their SEO strategy, and that's what I'm doing is usually like cross-functional making sure the different people in the company are aware of SEO, understand how it works and what they're doing right and what they're doing wrong and what they can do to help, and stuff like that. Educating internally to make sure everyone's singing from the same lyrics, and yeah.
Speaker 3:So I do a lot of consulting, I do a lot of speaking and training around the world. I'm still you know, even though it sounds like what I'm saying, people might interpret it as me saying SEO is dead. I don't think SEO is dead. I think it's absolutely changing and evolving and I'm here for that. I think it's exciting, I think it's also scary, but you know we've got to evolve or die right. So that's what I'm helping is helping my clients evolve and make sure that they're doing the best job they can to still show up in Google but also be ready as all the AI systems come on board. I'm talking to clients and training people about the four S's, about how Google views journeys and journey modeling and how they're using that data.
Speaker 3:And then, of course, I have a tool set on mobilemoxiecom, and the tools that people love the best are called the Serperator and the Pagescope. The Serperator lets you see real live search results from anywhere in the world down to an address. Most tools just work on a postcode or whatever, but we can do it down to an address and we show you the live search result of what it looks like right now and we can track that over time and we parse it with different metrics. So we do like if you set it up, we'll track the same search result over time and give you things like you know your website's pixels from the top percent of search. We let you claim things that aren't just your website. So we have a score called Moxie score, so you can say this is me, this is me, this is me, and you can claim all the things in the search result that are actually you or like benefit you Like. So if you're a restaurant and you're in a top 10 list, claim that, and that way, seo gets credit for everything SEO is doing and not just for the website, right? So if you have a YouTube video as social so this is kind of how I'm looking at the future is this Moxie score concept of like how much Moxie is like, how much do you own that search result, and then we also show AI overviews and stuff like that.
Speaker 3:So that's the Surferator, and the long-term tracking is called SurpDatalizer, and then the Pagescope lets you track competitors and it gives you a visual and then rendered and unrendered source code for whatever page on the internet you want.
Speaker 3:So it's like the Wayback Machine, but it's reliable and you can say get this page and get it daily, weekly or monthly, whatever you want.
Speaker 3:And it's a great way to track your competitors, because if all of a sudden, you lose rankings and your competitor gets above you and you didn't change anything and Google didn't really have any big things, then you know that your competitor changed something, but you might not know what, and so we have all the code, all of the visuals, and we have a diff checker that'll let you say, like, check rendered code from this day versus this day and, you know, show me what's changed, and that way you can see oh, they added schemer, oh they changed the title tag, or oh, they added this piece of content and that's why they're ranking right.
Speaker 3:And so the the hard part about selling those tools is that it's kind of like selling insurance to healthy people. People are like oh I, oh, I don't need that, I'm doing fine, but by the time you need it it's too late, cause we only it's capturing. Things live as they are, but we can't go back in history, and that's the problem with any SEO troubleshooting. Like your boss might come to you and be like when did this happen? And they're showing you a search result and you're like I don't know, I wasn't, you know so.
Speaker 2:So the competitor rank tracking and the share of voice is, you know, in the social listening tools are now a staple. Like you, you need to have those to to be able to understand, because how these algorithms work is is how you're doing versus what's going on in your marketplace in that area. So if you don't know where the weights are changing for the competitor, those all those things impact you, Even if you didn't do anything or got a penalty or whatever, and now you tanked, it's not that you tanked, it's that other people shot ahead of you, Right, and so you. So I think that those tools are really powerful If you understand that you need to be contracting competitor data of what they're doing. It's not you're, you're not in a vacuum, you got to it's all in comparison, and so tools like that are super valuable.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think SEOs for years have been so focused on just their own website and what did we do to make it better or worse? And like, maybe you didn't do anything, maybe someone else just changed something and that helped. And they're all like, well, what are where's our website ranking? Well, where's the rep? What else is ranking? That's influencing a searcher's journey, right, like that's kind of what we want to capture. So, yeah, those are the tools. They're really cheap. Actually, I think our lowest price is like 30 or 40 bucks a month, I don't know.
Speaker 2:I would encourage people to go check it out. I wanted to bring her on as well to talk more about how to use her tools and let her kind of walk me through it, so I got a little free demo here. So this is awesome. I would encourage everybody else to go check it out. You really should be looking at what competitors are doing. That's what's going to give you the insights, and some of these tools are absolutely powerful. So I would go check out mobile Moxie. Cindy, I know you're active on LinkedIn. Is that the best place for people to find you?
Speaker 3:No, actually LinkedIn is the worst place. I get so much spam. The best place is, unfortunately, twitter or email. I need to get better at LinkedIn, but I get so much spam there. I need to get better at LinkedIn, but I get so much spam there.
Speaker 2:They've reduced the amount of connections. They've been really working on that signal. I do Twitter like if y'all are wanting to rank in Grok, like that's why he bought Twitter. If anybody wants to know, he needed a data set. And Twitter we were talking about the information architecture is somewhere you need to be. That's a lot, cindy. What we're talking about with clients is like why you need to be all these different places and like where you're showing up and like you got to really understand that market and understand what the competitors are doing and how people are searching for you. Uh, Twitter, twitter's great. My my account got banned twice, so I've started over.
Speaker 3:Um well and I know people have bad experiences on Twitter, but I tweet like. I tweet a lot of dog videos not my own, sometimes my own dog videos but mostly I retweet dog videos and my algorithm is great. So you just have to like retweet dog videos and you won't get the bad people on the Twitter.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, um. So, cindy, definitely, give me your Twitter and we'll, we'll, we'll share, we'll share that in the show notes. So hopefully everybody got a lot out of this podcast. There's two big takeaways for me, and you need to know that SEO is changing and if you're struggling which you may be because everything's new it's because the game has changed. Everything's new, um, it's because the game has changed and you need to think of yourself as a digital marketer.
Speaker 2:Uh, a Swiss army, nice, multifact, functional tool. You need to be able to be everywhere. You got to be able to explain that to your clients. Uh, if you're listening, please understand. Like, it's not a one trick pony with Google anymore. That owns most of the market for people searching, so it's getting harder. There's, there's other services, uh, and, and areas that you want to be optimizing for your brand. And then the biggest thing that that Cindy said right there at the end is you really need to know what your competitors are doing. Uh, like, if, if you don't know what your competitors are doing, you're you're running blind. Uh, cindy, I want to end this podcast with asking you what is the biggest unknown secret? And you can repackage something we've talked about, but what would you say the biggest takeaway is for somebody listening that they need to be thinking about. What's the one unknown secret of internet marketing in your book?
Speaker 3:I think I'm thinking really hard. So I think that I have been successful because and I've gotten a reputation for being able to spot and understand changes that Google is making and explain them before their public knowledge, before they're announced. That's kind of my special skill, I think, and the reason I'm able to do that is I spend a lot of time looking at what Google is doing, what Google is publishing, what they're investing in and what they're writing about, and that helps me connect the dots of going, oh, they're writing about this, but in SEO, they're talking about this, and how do those two things go together? And you think about it for a day or two and then you're like, oh, that's how they go together, that makes sense. And that has really helped me be able to understand where Google is going and I've gotten it right quite a number of times.
Speaker 3:So I would say, think like you were Google and say, like what would I be doing if I were Google? And then plan on them making reasonably intelligent and I used to just say reasonably intelligent. Now I'd say reasonably intelligent and money making decisions. Like Google is really trying to make a lot of money right now and they're changing their decision models in favor of making more money where it used to be more on the don't be evil side. Now they're like make more money and that's cool, they're a business, they're allowed to do that. But how is Google going to monetize? This is an important question.
Speaker 2:Absolutely Well, everyone. Hopefully you enjoyed this podcast. Please shiko us, share like. Follow us. Please leave a comment. If you've got any value. Please tell us what you found valuable or what you want us to talk about. Thank you, cindy. So much for coming on. Until the next time, everybody, my name is Pat Bertram. Bye-bye for now.
