The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™

The New Rules of Authority in an AI World With Dmitrii Kustov

• MatthewBertram.com

Share episode

We dig into how AI reshapes SEO work, why trust beats volume, and how remote teams stay tight without an office. A candid case study shows how hyperlocal signals and first‑party data restored rankings after a brutal update.

• AI as a tool, not a crutch
• Remote hiring across time zones and roles
• SOPs, status norms, and redundancy for coverage
• Quarterly meetups to rebuild culture and speed
• Recharge days to protect quality and focus
• Hyperlocal content signals that prove real experience
• First‑party data for authority and user value
• Why volume alone triggered losses after updates
• Human oversight for AI, from prompts to QA
• Shifts in agency models, pricing, and “done with you”
• LLMs, walled gardens, and non‑indexed citations
• User needs over algorithm myths as the guiding lens

Guest Contact Information: 

Website: regexseo.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/digitalspaceman

More from EWR and Matthew:

Leave us a review wherever you listen: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Amazon Podcast

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. 

Find more episodes here: 

youtube.com/@BestSEOPodcast

bestseopodcast.com

bestseopodcast.buzzsprout.com

Follow us on:

Facebook: @bestseopodcast
Instagram: @thebestseopodcast
Tiktok: @bestseopodcast
LinkedIn: @bestseopodcast

Connect With Matthew Bertram: 

Website: www.matthewbertram.com

Instagram: @matt_bertram_live

LinkedIn: @mattbertramlive

Powered by: ewrdigital.com


Support the show

SPEAKER_02:

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_01:

Howdy, welcome back to another fun filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, which I am trying to hardly rebrand as the best SEO podcast. That's what everybody knows us as. That's what our handles are. And that's how you also find us on YouTube. Thank you. We've gotten uh 41 more hours of watch time since last week on the podcast on YouTube. So thank you all for listening. Please leave a review uh if you like what we're doing. We're moving over in this era of AI uh to YouTube. A lot of people like to use YouTube for everything, it's becoming the center of the internet. Or you could say Red It is. Today I got a fellow agency owner that has been operating in the Houston space for a long time. We've kind of known each other or know who each other is. He's rebranding uh to rgx.agency regex.seo. Dimitri, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_03:

Hey Matt, it's been uh a long time coming, as you said yourself, yes. And we've been aware of each other and been kind of across the road from each other, but never met in person. So uh yeah, so I thought it's just it's time, it's time it's time indeed, and uh yeah, next uh beginning of December actually going to be in Dallas and Houston. So maybe we can meet up for lunch or something and talk more SEO shop.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, let's do it. So Dimitri's another excellent SEO out there, uh, for all of you listening. Uh, we were talking in the pre-interview about well, how is the world of AI affecting SEOs? Like, how is their role changing? Um, what do they need to be thinking about? I've been pretty quiet, honestly, on social media because I've been going to conferences, I've been doing education. There's a lot of new things that you have to learn. Like SEO isn't completely changing, but it is certainly evolving. Um, and so I've been doing probably about six hours of education a night. Uh, I'm about to finish up an Oxford program about AI and uh the future of work. Um, you know, there's a lot of people that are concerned AI is gonna take their job, Dimitri. There's a lot of people that are um concerned. I I hear it from clients, um, I hear it from team members. Cultures are really important. Uh, how to use these tools are really important. I can see when I'm doing trainings, I'm trying to do weekly trainings to kind of keep everybody up to speed. They're not comfortable with AI yet. Like they're using it and everybody's on a different curve. But if you're gonna stay in this space that's constantly moving, this is like the fourth turning. So the digital transformation happened from the industrial age. Now we're moving into like web three, uh, you know, the era of AI, like you got to change with it to keep up, I guess. That's that's the big takeaway for me. I mean, how are you seeing the landscape change, Dimitri?

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, that's uh such an interesting question nowadays. Um, there's so much talk about AI is gonna take our jobs and from from marketers and SEOs to I mean, more or less any any industry nowadays. Uh, but I do think that at the end of the day, AI itself is not a threat. It's being complacent, it's being mediocre at what you do. So um is if if if you are as a marketer, as an SEO, kind of uh doing the stuff that does not stand out, if it is repetition of the same stuff, which is the the AI is gonna be taking over all of the mechanical repetitive type of tasks, everything and nowadays in in in marketing industry, it's in SEO industry, it's everything from simple content writing to outreach to um you know some kind of technical SEO and audience and whatever else. If if all you've been doing is this menial work, I think that's when you're in trouble. And I think in all the industries, same way. So if you are not taking your work to the next level as an SEO, I think that's when you're in trouble. And um during so as as Matt for all of the listeners and uh video uh consumers out there, as Matt said in the beginning, we are, we used to be at least, both in Houston area, and during COVID, we were all forced to work from home, and that was the time when me and my partners decided to, hey, maybe it's time to go and work fully remote, uh, to save time on commute, to save time on car insurance and all that stuff, and then also it opened up our our brand in terms of hiring, not just to Houston area, but really to the entire world. And last time I checked, now we have a team in 16 countries, and it's fairly small team still, like about uh 30 people or so. Just people took that chance, like you know what? I always wanted to live in Cancun. All right, I'm going to Cancun now. And yes, I myself always wanted to live in uh Northeast, and uh so now I'm in New Hampshire, and so on and so on and so on. Uh and why I'm why am I talking about that? As I as as we started talking about being complacent and all that stuff, now whenever I talk to potential hires, potential SEO specialists, or marketing specialists, or email marketing, whatever the marketing um uh niche that you're working in is, the the first question I typically ask is what's the cool stuff you've been working on? What's something that's not typical? What's something that's stands out? And instead of even kind of show me your resume type stuff, show me the best project you worked on, and how did you use AI as a tool? And I think that's where that's where a good SEO stands out from great SEO specialist using AI as a tool rather than I do everything through AI now, and you know, I work for two minutes a day and I'm golden. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

So so yeah, you you you brought up kind of two lines of conversations that I think we can go down. Um, also for unfortunately, the podcast I did yesterday, no, two days ago, hasn't come out yet. Um, and it was with somebody that coaches agencies. And so a lot of like anybody that when this podcast comes out, I would encourage you to go listen to the previous podcast because this is kind of an extension of that. But we were talking about AI taking your jobs and and also remote work was really something that towards the end of the podcast, he had a lot of appendix on because a lot of businesses had to change how you work and how you interact. Uh, we had had a remote team when like pre-COVID for a long time, but it was always like an adjunct added to the team that was working in the office, right? And they were kind of like this extra layer, tertiary layer of what was going on. They weren't fully integrated in what was happening. And and COVID helped force that integration to be on a you know a cloud platform that everybody's working on, no matter where they're at. And you can do it in the office, you can do it out of it, fully integrating that. He had a lot of great tips for agencies and freelancers working on different projects of how to work together, how to map that, because you don't think about when you go into the office, hey, and you you get stuck doing something, you can just tap the person beside you, hey, show you how to do it. So your SOPs have to be really, really good. Because some people will just get stuck and wait till they talk to their manager the next time around, or you know, they might not be working on the right hours, uh, like where the hour allocations are. Like there's a lot of things to consider when you're in a silo by yourself and all you're doing is using a dashboard to drive what's happening and you're not having a lot of those conversations of how that's going. And I think it worked really, really well when everybody knew each other. Okay. So when everybody knew each other, you go remote, you get these huge efficiency gains. And that's that's that's what he what he had mentioned. And and I see that, but now you got new hires coming into it that don't understand your culture. Um, like those are some of the things that that I'm pulling off of uh LinkedIn. Like someone posted the other day, here are the top three things we did with our culture to change what we were doing in a remote first uh agency environment to help to be effective, right? Like, so because these people don't know each other, they don't have that benefit of who they are, the culture, how things work. It really has to be defined really well.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, it's very interesting that now I'm looking forward to watching that episode. But yeah, it's it's uh in in the beginning when we were in office and then we went remote. As you said, we all knew each other, we had that experience of in-person interactions, so we knew everything about each other type of stuff. Then when we went remote, efficiency gains were huge. But then with the new team members, you're right, it was a little bit tough. So, what it's actually funny to me. Um, back in the day before full remote, being remote was almost like a treat. You know, it's like, you know what, today I can work online, or you know, I'm gonna work one or two days or whatever remote. Maybe I go for some kind of uh I'm gonna travel for a little bit and kind of travel and work, and that was a treat. Nowadays it's the opposite, and we actually we made it almost not a policy, but like a perk uh here at uh now it's RGX, but uh at Regicks SEO. Um we took the budget that we used to pay for rent, and we were on Woodway in Houston, I'm sure you know where it is, which is fairly expensive. We were sharing an office which was not huge, um, and we were paying five grand a month. So, what we took, we took that money and we actually put it towards bringing people together in physical spaces, yeah. And we just had a get together, we we try to do it quarterly, and then we do one big one annually with almost the entire team where we bring everybody from everywhere in the world into one place. But we just had one actually in New Hampshire with like a quarter of the team or so, and then locally, where people have some somewhat close together, uh, we encourage them on at least monthly basis to go in some kind of co-working space or whatever and spend some time physically together because it does change dynamics so much that quote unquote water cooler talk does not happen naturally anymore. So, in a sense, we have to force it. Not and it's not force it as in hey, go talk to each other type of stuff. Because I tried that I tried that in the beginning. Hey guys, every Friday we're going on the virtual co-working hangout. I'm gonna put you in a room one-to-one.

SPEAKER_01:

Everybody buy pizza, we're gonna all eat pizza together. Yeah, yeah, we tried that too.

SPEAKER_03:

It did not work, but now it's it becomes a treat to be together, and I don't know if it's uh it feels to me personally, it feels more special to get to spend time together, um, because of that, because we only do see each other a couple times a year, maybe you know, three times a year. Um, and some team members I haven't seen for longer than that. So whenever whenever you do get to meet, you do cherish that time and you do learn a lot about that person. Um our the not the purpose, but like the why. I don't know if you yourself and listeners know the whole thing, the why from Simon Sinek, right? Yeah, uh, but yeah, our our why is giving time back to first our teammates, but then hopefully through extension of our work to um our clients and their employees. So it this is where it be where it becomes it all integrates in the sense that let's cherish the time that we have, and you know, if you want to go into all of that, I can I can talk about that all day because there is it's it's all based obviously on personal experiences and stuff like that, where there were people in my life where didn't cherish the time with them and now they're gone. It's like oh you know, I can't do that anymore. So the the spending time together uh is amazing now. So for all of the people who are remote, I encourage strongly whoever those folks are in your life, either they're teammates or you know, family or whatever, somebody you your grandma, if you haven't seen them for a while, go see them. And uh it's because you might not have time tomorrow. So yeah. Yeah, that took a turn.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, no, and I would I would say also um go see your clients, okay. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I I think I think that so much happens when you're in the same room with them. Um, I I think a lot of people are getting fatigued uh on just Zoom meetings or Google Meet meetings or Teams meetings, and all these tools need to really talk together better. I feel like um these big companies should be able to integrate better, uh, but maybe that's by design. Um and and I'm seeing that in conferences. I'm seeing like people are just coming back to being in person together uh on how how important it is to understand how people work. One of the questions I did have for you was like we we have uh a couple different teams or people on on different continents, and we have some time zone issues. Like we have like major like three major time zones that we're rotating through. And as we were moving to that, we were dealing with like, hey, when are you available? Uh when are your kind of office hours that you can talk, especially on the like web design side, right? Like we needed to have a webmaster 24-7, like, you know, because if one webmaster, like the sun sets and they go to bed, like we need to have another webmaster to be able to pick it up if something happens with the website. And so we worked a lot on uh making forcing people to a certain degree of talking, like you need to talk, especially new team members. We've actually like bundled like a new team member with the old team member so that you can go to that person and like ask the questions. Cause when you get on a big call, even like me, I started having one-on-ones with a lot of people on the team because when I got on a call, everybody would be like scared of me or something, right? And they wouldn't say things. And so I've tried to kind of uh modular tize it and kind of break it apart and have different groups talking with people on so many different continents. What are some best practices of how you've implemented having everybody communicate and talk?

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, extremely important, of course. So transparency becomes an issue because again, you're not physically there in person, you don't overhear folks chatting about whatever. So, yeah, in our case, we uh for all of the new people, we have we use Google, Google stuff, you know, Google Sheets, Google Docs, we use Google Chat for communications, meet for Google Meet for uh video calls and all that stuff. So, yeah, we have uh basically just a spreadsheet, Google, Google Sheet, with everybody's availability in terms of their time zone, and we just um uh uh convert it all to Eastern time or it used to be central time, now it's eastern time, and then uh so that anybody new on a team can just go and quickly check. But then we also encourage folks, it's not an almost encourage, it's like a um it's it is an SOP in a sense, standard operating thing that you have to do when you join our team. In Google Chat, you can set statuses, so it's required for you to have a current status of whatever it is. So if you're working, just say here working. If you are taking a lunch break, it's good, you know, you you should say I'm on a lunch break. If you have some kind of doctor appointment or whatever, you know, doctor appointment, be back at 1 p.m. Eastern, and so on and so on. So this way it becomes very quickly and easily. You open in Google Meets, you you can open the person, like click on a person and see uh their chat, and the the the status pops up right away, or you can even just hover and there's little um uh emojis that now we kind of have almost like a standard set of emojis, uh, which means I'm either working or off or running some kind of errand or whatever. And uh with time being the why, we don't have set hours. Here it's kind of do your work. Obviously, if there's a meeting you have to attend, you need to be at the meeting, but otherwise, as long as you do your work, we don't care what time you work. You I myself as an I I am the night owl, so my prime time is around midnight, my time. Um, so and then in the in the morning, you wake me up at 8 a.m. I can't put two words together. So uh yeah, just uh whatever works best for you. And uh in terms of you mentioned uh because there are tons of time differences, and at some point we don't have it the moment, but we had a person, two people actually. One was in Thailand, another one in Bali, and we are in the US, that's literally 13 hours difference. So getting together with those folks was quite painful, even on video calls. Uh, so what we started doing for somewhat of a key roles, like for example, you must mention webmaster, which in our case it will be basically head developer. We started doing uh backups for people. So, right now we have uh our head developer, um, he is in Europe, and actually, if anybody who's listening, if you know somebody or if you are a full stack. Developer with a lot of experience, please reach out. We need someone who lives close to um Eastern Time Zone or US time zone. So any kind of South America, Central America, or obviously uh uh North America, if you're any of the Americas, please reach out. We need somebody with uh a lot of experience uh for a head developer, and yeah, basically, if the our main guy is not available because it's night, we do have somebody who can cover for him if client reaches out when he's asleep to do some changes quickly on during the time when he's not available. So, yeah, just uh in certain cases for certain key positions, we have to have that uh the duplication.

SPEAKER_01:

I always is there anything else? I want to go down another pathway, but I want to make sure if there was anything else about like remote work that you think would be uh useful to share or highlight uh before we switch topics.

SPEAKER_03:

Oh, there's so much stuff to talk about. Um, and maybe it's a topic for another time, I don't know. Uh, but for since since the whole idea here is to talk about the folks who are watching, if you are remote, if you work remote and don't get to see your team often, sometimes there's that complacency that comes from just being by yourself at your home. And I myself feel that sometimes, so it's kind of you get complacent. Ah, you know what, today I just gonna take it easy. So, what we introduced, and it's it's been a couple years at this point, more. Uh, we we do recharge days where you can anybody can come in uh in the morning and say, you know what, today I just don't feel like it. I I know if I have to stay up in front of my computer, it's gonna be it's not gonna be my best work. My day my day is gonna be wasted, so it's a lose-lose for everybody. Work is gonna be horrible. Personally, I'm not gonna be fulfilled. So we allow now uh recharge days. So if you don't feel like you're gonna be your at your best, just take a day off. It's gonna be win-win. You're gonna get recharged, your mental state gonna be in the right zone, and then your work is gonna be better. And uh so what I encourage folks to do who are listening to this, who are watching this, just start asking for those type of days. Um hopefully your agency you work with, the the company you work with are gonna be lenient, but it's so much better to want to come into work. We have an internal modification to the saying, thank god it's Friday. I hate personally, I hate that. I I always hated that.

SPEAKER_01:

It means you hate your job, right? Like, that's essentially what it means.

SPEAKER_03:

Exactly. So we changed it, like, thank god it's Monday. Yeah, so whenever whenever uh we interview the the we kind of talk about that. So, like, if you don't want to come into work, you're done doing something wrong with your life, and just mathematically, and I'm a huge data nerd, math is my my life type of stuff, but mathematically, if you spend at least eight hours a day working and then eight hours, let's say sleeping, so that's half of your life is going towards potentially something that you don't get any kind of fulfillment from or not enjoying. What kind of life is that? So, another tip, I guess, here doesn't matter if you're remote or not, if you don't love what you do, there's always time to find something better. Um recently it was a little like I saw it on YouTube, uh, one of those shorts, and it was of course taken kind of out of context and turned into this uh funny thing, whatever. Um but the saying, the original saying was oh boy, now I have to remember. Don't love your job, job what you love. There you go. So don't love your job, love what do what you love that way, job what you love. All right, so this basically the point is find something you love, and then you're never going to work the day your life has the same goals. So, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, no, I think I think that that's great. So I I wanna I wanna switch gears. I think a good transition to that is if you don't love what you do, uh, and you're using Chat GPT or one of the other AIs a lot, uh ask them what you think you would be good at and it knows you better than you might know yourself. Uh, maybe upload your resume to it, upload your disk profile or whatever like data you can give it, and and it can give you some really, really interesting insights uh into what's going on. I think that AI is expanding um what people can do or think about doing. I even think that vibe coding is expanding people that are creative that couldn't program to actually like talk through and get stuff made. Like the the world is at a really interesting point and it's it's just getting started, and there's there's so much potential. Like, if you don't love your job, if you're listening to this, trying to learn SEO to do your own site or whatever, like there's so much opportunity out there, and and the information's out there. There's trainings, there's certification, there's YouTube videos, um, uh learning.ai, I've been using a lot uh to to go through like some orchestration layers with like LM ops. Like, there's it's all free, it's all out there. We're in the information age. So go figure it out. Um, try to maybe use uh uh your LM as uh a therapist, and you can uh you can find out a lot of really interesting stuff about yourselves. I'll tell you a personal story, probably about a year over a year ago, uh when the when the feature on Chat GBT, uh which they just did it on Claude, okay, but basically you could listen uh from the different threads, right? Like the thread, you knew what was going on. This was Chat GPT 4. So it might have not been quite a year ago. I can't remember things are moving so fast. But when that happened, when it remembered everything that you said, and by the way, I think chat GPT 5 is crap. Okay, I'm just saying it, I'm calling it. Um, like I understand why they did it, like there's uh a data usage thing, so they want to uh vacillate between um you know short answers and and long answers all blended together, but I can tell you if you were a user, a heavy user, a power user of ChatGPT 4, it was phenomenal. I also was reading this book called AI First, uh it's like a Harvard Business Review book. Like the head of LinkedIn had ChatGPT 4 before 3.5 came out. Imagine having Chat GPT 4 like a year or two years before Chat GPT 3.5 came out. Like you have like a superpower, right? Um, anyways, I would walk around like walking my dogs on the on the voice section where you could talk to it, right? And I would just like I would that those dogs got some walks because I would just I mean, I was walking and talking, and then I was like, I'm not ready to go home. Like, let me go get the other dog, like let me keep walking. And I mean, I'm talking like my wife would be like, Where'd you go? I was like, I was walking the dogs for she was like three and a half hours. So I was like, you know, I was like, Yeah, you know, and um it was really insightful, and I started to use uh LOMs from a personal OS standpoint. I'll even just share a quick fun fact. This tells me my water usage. Um uh so I'm drinking water and it's it's tied into kind of a personal OS through Apple Health. And please don't hack me if you're listening. But um, there's you know, there's a there's a lot of really cool stuff that's coming down the pipeline. And just the bottom line is if you don't love what you do, now's the time to explore and look at that. And the sky's the limit. I think that this is uh like maybe twice as big, three times as big as the internet. So if you remember dial-up happening, what was the internet gonna be? We're in dial up phase of LLMs. So so there's so much potential. And I I want to pivot back to like AI's taking your job. One of the things I can tell you if you're doing stuff the old way or you're just kind of using you know whatever LLM to create a little bit of content or do a little bit of stuff, lean into it. I can tell you like the comment browser. Now there's prompt injection issues, chat GPT just launched theirs if you're using Apple. Um I can tell you right now that you can just do a repetitive task, whether it be like outreach, billing, whatever, and then it will learn what you do and it will take it over. I have case studies where like a billing company had like three billers, and then they were they let comet just kind of follow what they were doing for a month. Okay, just just just you know, it's recording what you're doing, and then after a month, they're like, All right, you do it for a week. It did it for a week, perfect. They laid off two people, and the one person was overseeing it, and now they're getting higher quality work. Like this use case can be applied to a lot of different areas. So if you're listening out there, and a little bit of this was discussed on the last podcast, like I said, I would go check it out. Is if you don't evolve, if you don't grow, if you don't build your skill sets, someone that uses AI will take your job. There will still be a human in the loop, but it might not be you because if you don't understand how all this stuff works and how it's integrated, and and Dimitri, that's like the perfect question when you're asking new hires, how are you using AI to complete your job? Like that's that's literally like the first question that I ask. I was like, how do you use AI to complete your job? Because there will be a human in the loop, but there's a gonna be a lot of jobs out there that are gonna change. You're gonna need to upskill. Like, I don't know. I don't know what's gonna happen in a lot of big businesses, but it's got to be a top-down approach, it's got to be a bottom-up approach, and like AI is solving problems. It's really good at okay, automating stuff, but also predicting stuff. So there's a lot of new use cases. There's a lot of things that used to take time that it's being shifted. And and the better you understand how to utilize this stuff, which I'm starting to see it in the last like month, month and a half, people weren't really talking about AI. Now I feel like everybody's talking about it. I don't know how much it's lip service and and like, you know, real kind of depth. Like, you know, I could talk, you know, uh particle swarm theory like after this, like right. Like uh, we can go deep on the math side of things, but like people, I don't think understand the fundamental change of how big of a change this is going to be and how AI is in everything that we do. And the better you can understand that, um it can be applied in all these areas. We're getting all kinds of use cases, even outside of like just marketing. We've, you know, like RevOps sales, like solving problems because we can we can reach more based on data and and knowledge to do other things. And you know, I I think that a lot of businesses um that don't go through this this transition, like they're just moving from that industrial area to the the uh you know web transformation or digital transformation era, they're starting to get a handle with digital marketing. The companies that are gonna make that next transition are gonna outshine a lot of these other companies really quickly. And I and that's the thing. If you ask me what keeps me up at night, that's the thing is are people gonna be able to upskill fast enough? And or are they gonna just treat LLMs like a toy?

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, this is where it's the I guess the the underlying thought of this conversation, on my side at least. Before AIs, there were tons of different tools that you could have used. Let's say you know, when Photoshop came out for graphic designers or I guess designers, yeah, it's like, oh, you know, we're all dead now. It's like, no, it just makes your life easier and faster and whatnot. But you still there were tons of different other tools available for you to explore nowadays with AI, same thing, it just even more tools that come in out by by hundreds probably nowadays, every day. So, really, what it comes down to is like in a sense, you kind of have to have a little bit of laziness in you. It's like, how can I do my job the easiest way? And then that uh if if if whatever parts, the small parts of your everyday work can be outsourced to whatever AI tool, the then you free up your brain power to do something that AI cannot do, which is anything from idea generation to uh some kind of like a higher level thinking to more strategic thinking and uh everything that AI is I I assume at some point is gonna be good at, but nowadays it's still not. The uh if if if you understand how AI works, it's trained on data sets, so kind of like on existing data, but it cannot invent truly new things. So that approach from a different angle, and that's that's what I hate about AI still, because nowadays we think that it can do anything, but then when I talk to Chat GPT and like, hey, give me some fresh ideas out of the box ideas for some kind of branding command we're doing or something that's a little bit more creative, and it just cannot do anything.

SPEAKER_01:

Um Dimitri, there's this uh video in some of my education I was going through. It was it it actually explained how like stable diffusion on image generation worked, and you know, why the fingers would come up, or like yeah, how were these images being created? And some of them were very, very like we would call it creative, but it was just create adding randomness or static into what's going on, and then creating like additional um deviations or layers of what you were doing, and then building those back, and so you're just kind of changing the temperature on on what's happening. And I actually last night I was reading a newsletter, it's more of like an investment newsletter. Um, but they were talking a lot about the money that's being dumped into AGI, okay? And they were like, and he was just like, We're dumping a lot of money into AGI, and you know, everybody's saying we can scale and pute comp compute to just you know solve anything. And he's going, I'm not sure sure that we can, right? I mean, maybe there's gonna be an instantaneous like consciousness is gonna click on. I mean, maybe. Um, I'm not saying that it's not possible because we don't know how it's created today, but the likelihood that's gonna happen, if you understand how um how how how these transistors, I guess, are built uh or transformers are built. Like you got it's gonna make someone better that knows how to use it and then has a foundation of what good looks like, but it's not gonna take somebody that's not good to try to use this tool um really effective because they're not gonna know what good looks like and and they're gonna be mediocre at best. Oops, sorry, they're gonna be like mediocre at best because it's gonna take the the average of all of what it's trained on. And if you're not tuning it, if you're not, you know, personalizing it, um then there then there's gonna be some real problems on uh you know what what that output's gonna be and what you're trying to do with it. And and then it's gonna be, you know, it's it's like there's a degradation rate of uh all the people that are creating content, right? Like online, all this content. I think it's four generations of AI trained on AI, on the models just collapse, yeah. And and it and so there's this real premium, which I'll even think if we go back to like SEO tying it back to the algorithms. Um, there's a real premium on human-generated content.

SPEAKER_03:

Absolutely, absolutely, and I boy. So one of our largest clients in terms of size of the company. Uh, not gonna talk about who they are. They closed last year at 175 million dollars in home services. They're the largest privately owned home services company in the US. They're on track, I think, for 225 this year. Uh, we've been working with them for like seven years, I think now. And obviously, it was before AI time, all of Chat GPTs and stuff like that. So, all of the content, SEO content we were producing for them was human written fully, completely. And then uh for this year, no, no, not for this, starting in 2024. Um they have so much content needs that us writing it with humans became a problem. So, and of course, myself as a AI denier almost, like I don't want to do it with AI, man, talking to their uh marketing director. And basically, at the end of the day, decision was made uh mutually that we're just gonna try it and see what happens. You know what? Let's just spit out our goal, was 100 and something pieces of content a month, uh, and see what happens. 2024 went great, surprisingly. To my I thought we're gonna get banned, Google is gonna drop everything. Obviously, there is the main rating, the main authority for for that domain is ridiculous, so that definitely helps. But then after the last I think three last Google algorithm updates, especially the October one, they just got smashed. Um, we use SM Rush for uh uh visibility tracking. They went from average about 50-60 percent visibility, which is very, very high. Uh the search visibility, to under 20, so more than half. And we're like, uh oh, all right, here's the here's the first sign, so we gotta do something about it. And thankfully, we were able to change it. How did we do it? This is this is this is the interesting part. So, you know, this is where that difference became between. Mediocre SEO in a sense that people who just use AI to write content without thinking, versus if you are the originator of the idea and then you use AI tools as the tools. So we we we and of course we follow all the trends and all of the uh Google algorithm uh main points and kind of understand how Google works or tries tries to work at least and what they are looking for, what they're not looking for. So we had almost like a thousand pieces of content that we had to change in some sort of way. So what we did was from understanding that nowadays Google wants, and I think it was very, very directly said in the uh notes for the October algorithm update that they want kind of hyper, if you're talking about local content, hyper-localized, yep, specific things talked about, mentioned about on whatever content you're talking about. So let's say we are in we are both from or we lived in Houston, you live still in Houston, I lived there for 12 years. Uh if we're talking about let's say the oaks um area, or the the what's it called? The the oaks, right?

SPEAKER_01:

The the there's a lot of oaks, yeah like midtown area or yeah, yeah, the midtown.

SPEAKER_03:

The the the what's the it's not red oaks. I'm blanking right now. Anyway, uh so like if you if you know a specific area, um, let's say or Woodway, whatever, uh there is Gardener is Gardener is that what you're saying? Yeah, or like you know, there is on the Woodway that there is a bayou that goes through. Yeah, so simply mentioning that let's say there's a business that is located or targeting uh the Woodway area, um mentioning that you know uh blah blah blah by the bayou, or talking about some some some kind of uh uh statue that's in the middle of the town square, uh as you know, as locals Sam Houston, yeah. As as we yeah, well, there is a Sam Houston statue, right? On going towards Dallas, so like let's say you're in Conroe area, or that's a bit past Conroe actually. Yeah, it is Conroe, right? So, like maybe you're somewhere in that area and you're targeting that area. So, as all locals love the statue of Sam Houston, we love this product, whatever. So simple changes like that that have to originate but from the person, AI will not come up with any of this stuff because sometimes it doesn't even know. Um, or if there is some local trend or local, I don't know, famous spot, famous person, whatever it is, it's making those small changes to content where you Google kind of starts to understand, oh, it's not fully content AI generated, there's actual human touch to it.

SPEAKER_01:

So I think I so I interviewed um like the the the former head of Google My Business uh a couple podcasts ago, and the whole podcast was really about levels of trust, right? Levels of trust. So um there's different thresholds, the algorithms are looking at different things. If you mention the bayou, right, and we're talking about eat, maybe, or like you know, that that's a con that's not really the algorithm itself, it's kind of a way to summarize what's happening. But if you mention this bayou or this bar or this location, you're showing experience with that area, which creates a higher level of trust that you know about that area. Maybe you're servicing that area, maybe you live in that area, maybe you do business in that area, whatever it is. Uh, but it it it it weights trust to what you're doing versus just pure content, right? Right. So so it adds kind of fingerprints to that that say, okay, like we can trust this person saying that more than someone just talking about it, right?

SPEAKER_03:

And then so that was one thing, and then the second thing what we did was obviously this uh company, the brand, they have a lot of data about the customers themselves, the areas they they service, the the average, like in home services, in HVAC world, in HVAC world, plumbing world, things like average cost to install something is one of the main questions by the users. So, what we did, we just took the data, compiled it, turned it into small blogs with the actual data in there, and then we started referencing within content. You know, in this type of zip code or in this town, average cost based on the thousand of our customers is this much. Here's the link to our blog. So just adding two of those things, and it can be done not quite programmatically, but with AI tools, it can, especially with like WordPress nowadays, have uh so it's so many different plugins. Just doing two of those things allowed us within uh basically a month to change the content, recall it, and we're basically back to 50-60% visibility. You ask AI to do stuff like this, like hey, go to this website and figure out why it's why it's not ranking, what happened, it will never tell you. So, as an SEO specialist, if you don't understand the backbone or like the the foundational way of how Google is thinking and what they want, what they don't want, and if you just keep using AI as all be all, that's that's when you're gonna die. But at the end of the day, if you if you approach it from kind of um not a fresh generation idea, but more about I don't even know how to explain it, it's it's understanding the the the the the center yamminess uh of like what's how how many licks does it take to the get to the center of the lalibab, right? Whatever. Like when you understand that the core of what Google wants, or if you're not doing SEO, if you're doing whatever email marketing, what the customers want, that's also a big thing nowadays, obviously. For last quite a few years, that Google is very clearly saying we're all about customer experience and what users want. So use the data, use AI to actually build for what they want instead of what you want, or as a business, or or like when I talk to the clients, oh my goodness, every day they say, I want to do this thing. My first question is like, let's think about why. Why do you want to do this thing? Because it's you want to do that, or it's your actual customer wants that and asking you for it. And when you just frame it that way, after literally a half a second, something clicks in the brain of our clients, like, oh yeah, it's just my personal opinion, or something like that. Right? So uh our jobs as marketers is to take well, let's say SEO in general. Uh if if you're if uh uh uh our job as SEOs is to understand what Google wants and how they process things, how what users want, combine those things, and then use the tools of plenitude nowadays of AI things to speed up the process of creation of whatever we need to create. That's what our job nowadays is, and it looks like it will be for more or less observable future until something even more drastic happens. Um, and then kind of to finish up that thought really quick. Have you seen the new Coca-Cola commercial, the AI one? Uh they just released like a couple days ago.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay, no, no, I have not seen it.

SPEAKER_03:

No, so uh for if you don't know, but it but it's all made with AI, right?

SPEAKER_01:

Like that's the big thing. I I I I've seen a couple brands start to launch these and it becomes yeah, PR in itself, right?

SPEAKER_03:

So uh Coca-Cola's been doing the that fully AI produced commercial for the last three years, I think. Um, and you can kind of see the progress of how it gets better and better, but it's full AI, and they just released a new one, and oh boy, it's it's pretty next level. And then you know, you hear it's like, oh, it's been done with AI. Uh therefore, therefore, the like a no-human touch. And then so so you know, anybody who's watching, listening, go watch it, it's pretty cool. And but then uh go to YouTube and find the behind the scenes of how it's been made. There was, I they said it took five people of like the professional uh CGI artists, five people a month of manual work to produce it. So, sure, it's been done with AI, but and then they show even like the um the prompts that they used for AI. They show they show the because there's like uh what's it called? Uh not just you know cuts in video editing, but like um um like overlays and whatnot. I forgot the word. Um so it starts with that proper prompting of understanding what you want to the the touch of that uh human editing at the end that puts it all together. And now when I watched it yesterday, it's like man, that is amazing, but it's still you know five people a month, so uh full time, so that's uh 200 200 hours a week, so let's say 1200 hours, and they're not cheap labor people either. So, you know, maybe it took them$100,000 to produce, which is still cheaper than compared to the 90s or early 2000s produced commercial, like with actual you know, uh T T V work, like you know, normal camera stuff, which probably would cost I don't know, a million dollars or whatever, still cheaper, and nowadays I think it's getting to pretty much the same or possibly even better quality, but it still requires that original thought, it requires knowing what you do to do it.

SPEAKER_01:

So the jobs are changing, right? Like exactly the roles are changing, and maybe you can do better more efficiently, but there's still new rules, there's still people that are gonna need that, and I think the sky's the limit as far as like the careers go. Um, we are getting somewhat close to time, but you gave me an idea that's kind of been rolling around in the back of my head. Uh, that you know, I I get the podcast is not something, guys, that I do full time. I would love to get to the place to do it full time. Maybe uh, you know, I set up a way to to monetize this a little bit more, but we we run our agency, EWR Digital, uh, and and I provide a lot of strategy work over there. What I think would be really cool, Dimitri, to do, and there's been a couple key points in kind of history where I wanted to do this and I didn't do it, but we were gonna talk about failures, right? We were gonna kind of open up and talk about agency failures and what it takes. Like, if you can fail fast, you can you can get through it and figure out all like I mean, I've learned all the ways to not do stuff that now I know like these are the bright ways to do to do stuff. Um, and and that that took a lot of trial and error, uh, even with hiring, like there, there's a lot of like experience and and battle-tested wounds that people have. Us so now you got the remote shift that's happened since COVID. Now you got the AI shift. So all the playbooks, all the rule books have to be at least modified, right? And so you got a lot of people that are listening that are agency owners out there. What I would like to do is set up a panel discussion uh and invite you to come back on and and and have people talk about it from an agency standpoint. What are the things that are going on inside of agency? How do people change uh or modify what they're doing to adapt to the reality of what the expectation of clients is today? Because here's here's like there's two ends of the spectrum, right? There's the people that are like, I still use Google, I don't want AI, and I'm not saying that that's the same person, but I've heard all these things in the last 60 days. Okay. Like I don't, I don't need to optimize for AI, I still use Google. Um, I don't want to use any AI. And I actually had some big publicly traded clients that were telling us they were running it through kind of like uh originality.ai that I've had him on, but but different tools like that, where people want to know if it's AI or not, right? Like plagiarism, like not so much anymore. It's all about like, is it AI or not? And companies uh were filtering content to say, hey, this is written with AI, push it back. I'm like, this was 7% AI, and AI models were trained on human writing. So like I don't think I can get this number to zero. Like, those were some of the early kind of discussions to other clients saying, I want this cheaper and better because you have the tool of AI. So there's cost suppression of what's happening on what we're delivering. There's been kind of a shift in our business to a done with you model instead of a done for you, because people want to buy, you know, an SEO package off the shelf uh or a paid package off the shelf. And that's not going to solve your problem because 50% or more of the traffic has just left Google. So just running Google Ads is not kind of working like it used to, right? And so I think all these different things and more, I'm sure there's a number of things you can add to this too, but there's a lot of things that are being put on not just specialists, but agency owners. And I know that there's a lot of agency owners or SEO agency owners or digital marketing agency owners, what how AI agency owners, like there's so many different GIO, you know, like AEO, like whatever. What like there's a lot of changes that are happening today, and everybody that I've talked to is kind of dealing with it a little bit differently, but those are a lot of conversations behind closed doors. I'll reach out to some people. I know that you wanted to talk about it. I think that that's the best way to learn is learn through other people's experiences and and take that advice to keep you out of a ditch and to get to where you want to go faster. And I think even a lot of what we talked about too today is transformation. And so I would love to have you back, Dimitri, um, and and have like a panel discussion with a number of other maybe SEO agency owners and talk about you know what their viewpoints are because I can tell you on LinkedIn and on social media, as well as people I talk to at conferences, there's two sides of the debate out there, like a lot. Okay. Even internally at our agency, there's been some debate or clients are calling me and I'm saying, well, like people were okay. I had a call yesterday. Okay, I had a call yesterday from uh a CMO at you know a law firm, and he was essentially saying, What do you think of LLM.txt files and what rank map is generating a couple of days ago with me as well.

SPEAKER_03:

It's like, what the hell, man?

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's funny, right? And then I have to pro like, what do you think? And I'm like, well, let me preface it with like this is what there's a disagreement on in the marketplace, and what I'm hearing, and then let me tell you kind of what I think, and then let's incorporate it into what what you think's right for your situation, right? Like that discussion would be helpful to put out publicly and let a couple different top SEOs, yeah, share their opinions because I'm gonna hear different things, like you know, I'm on a couple multi-purpose, like multi-functional teams, and like people have different opinions. And I'm and it's like I and I have to say I don't know what the right answer is because someone just published a study that that is completely different from a month ago of what I thought. Like, here was a data point that someone sent me. Here's another data point, Dimitri. Let me actually grab it so I actually have the the statistics correct. So this was in a like a group Slack chat, and then like this is a a decent sized group Slack chat, and then they're like, Matt, what do you think?

SPEAKER_03:

At least they're asking you what you think. I got yelled at, I got yelled at by a client, like, hey, when I type in whatever this thing in my in in um chat gpt, I my company doesn't come up, and then I don't see the LLM text in on my chat on my website. So that's gotta be the reasons. Like, why you aren't you supposed to be great as CEO? It's like so you think if we add LLM.txt to your website is gonna it's gonna do the magic, like for real? Well, for real?

SPEAKER_01:

This the same client I said is that that's what they thought the difference was between them and a competitor. Okay, let me read this to you. This is like a brand new data point that was shared with me a couple days ago. SEO visibility in the top thousand chat GBT cited pages. Nearly one-third of cited pages have zero organic presence, 28.3 percent or 200 and 283 pages have no organic keywords, no traditional search visibility. So what which I haven't seen the study where the data is coming from, but they just gave me the graphic. Is they said, okay, so almost 30 percent of the keywords that or or pages that are coming up in chat GPT are not indexed in Google. Where is it getting the data from? Like that's a very loaded question.

SPEAKER_03:

Like, yeah, that's very interesting.

SPEAKER_01:

28.30. So they're not ranking for any keywords, not top 100 at all. They're not in the directory, but they're showing up in chat GPT.

SPEAKER_03:

So my first thought that's that's very weird, right? How's that impossible? That type of thing.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, that that was like put me on the spot, ask me what do you think? Okay, so I thought it was super interesting. I want to dig into the study, I want to find out more. Like the first thing I thought is I said LLMs are probably not respecting walled gardens, okay?

SPEAKER_03:

Right, that's possible, too.

SPEAKER_01:

Because you know, Google, no follow links, don't matter. The LLMs from the data I've seen don't care, they're scraping every data they can get to. So if it's not getting indexed in Google, it's going behind the walled gardens.

SPEAKER_03:

That was the whole um Yeah, I was gonna say there was that big thing where all of the paid content was available through Chat GPT at some point.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and so like, okay, turning turning that off, like you know, that was a big so that was the where my brain went first, but I don't know if that's the right answer. And they're looking at me as the expert saying, like, why is this? And I said, I need to see the study. Let me dig into it more. But like, remember, even when the LLMs, like as Like they opened up the train data with rag, like they were really leaning on Google for the results. And then I saw another study that said a lot of what's showing up in LMs, and I don't remember the percentage, was position 21 or more, like or or higher, right? So so the LLMs weren't saying super optimized for Google. That's not the right, that's not the answer that they're looking for. And it makes sense because they're looking for a very, very narrow answer. They're not looking for kind of something that's over optimized for Google.

SPEAKER_03:

Right.

SPEAKER_01:

And so, like we're in a landscape that's constantly changing. Um, and so you're layering on this landscape that's constantly changing, the the workflows are constantly changing, the the you know, your your your playbooks are constantly changing, and then a constantly changing environment of how people want to work and how the newer generation wants to work. Like all of these things um are very uh uh fluid, right? And so uh I would love to hear kind of like you were sharing some of that earlier. I thought some of the information about working remote and what you're doing was fantastic. Like, I I think a panel discussion to talk about some of those things, to talk about some like crazy failures that people have had and like what did they do about it? Because when I do coaching calls, uh, and by the way, um I don't have a formal coaching, but people reach out to me from the podcast. A lot of what it is is like I'm dealing with this client issue. How would you deal with it? Yeah, right. Like that's what a lot of the coaching calls that that I've been asked to to be on. And so we get on either weekly calls or monthly calls, or or bi weekly is actually what we've found to be the best format. Um, and they're like, hey, this happened. What would you do about it? How would you handle it? Like, how do I need to position this? And and I think that kind of information and share with you like uh my experience or your experience, that I think would be extremely valuable for a lot of people, and then we could get a panel discussion and everybody could uh you know cross-promote it. I think that could be for awesome, yeah. Um so so we're we are bumping up against time here. I do have a hard stop in in about seven minutes. So I would love to hear if there's anything we didn't cover and you wanted to kind of quickly, you know, share it that you thought would be valuable. Uh I'll give you the opportunity to do that. And also, Dimitri, how do people follow you? Um, you know, what domain do you want them to go to by the time this comes out? Um, and you know, anything else you would like to share?

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, well, I'd like to share a lot of stuff, but you know, uh nothing we can fit in a couple of minutes, uh, because yeah, there's so much stuff to talk about, and I can talk about it for two weeks straight, probably. Uh so yeah, um I'd love to be part of that discussion, the panel discussion, and uh you know, the whole failing fast uh is awesome nowadays with AI. Anyway, but yeah, uh if anybody wants to reach out, uh if you are looking for work for a great agency to be at, our domain is still rejectso.com. That's the main one we are rebranding. Uh we have the landing page at rgx.agency. If you have any questions, you can reach out on Twitter or um LinkedIn. My tag is at digital spaceman, which uh you know, being from Houston and the whole brand with the with the uh space theme on our website, that's what it made sense to me. But yeah, uh, if you if you have any questions, if you'd like to talk to me at Digital Spaceman.

SPEAKER_01:

Dimitri really cares about his clients, about his team. Uh, I encourage you to reach out to him. It's another great agency out there. Uh, again, uh our sponsor, which I don't mention enough, is EWR Digital. Uh, two great agencies. Um, as AI moves forward, you should probably think about specializing. Dimitri and I were kind of talking about where we're going, what's on our roadmap. And so, you know, I would just encourage you if you're looking for a great agency, reach out to a couple people, find somebody that's the right fit for your situation and what you're doing. It's not a one-size-fit-all. Uh, SEO is also not a commodity. Uh, someone's price and someone's price isn't it doesn't mean you're getting the same thing or the the same, it's very difficult. So I would say educate yourself on what you're looking for, work with someone to find out the right strategy uh and the right people to work with for your business. Um, there's somebody out there for everybody. There's a lot of great people out there like Dremetri. Thank you for coming on the show. Guys, if you want to grow your business with the largest, most powerful tool on the planet, the internet, reach out to somebody that has an SEO agency for more revenue in your business. Don't try to figure it out yourself. Listen to some podcasts. Binge, listen to this podcast. If you like any of them, leave a review, tag us. Uh, really appreciate it. Reach out to us. Um, I am doing a lot of consulting calls these days, so there's a there's an option to that. Uh, until the next time, everybody, thank you so much um for listening. Dimitri again. Thank you for coming on the show. Until the next time, my name is Matt Bertram. Bye bye for now.

Head Shot

Matt Bertram

Host