The Best SEO Podcast
AI-Driven Visibility. Real-World Impact.
Getting found, named and cited by AI search.
Running since 2009. Over 5 million downloads. The same question the whole time: what is actually working right now, and what only sounds like it is.
Matthew Bertram hosts. He owns and leads EWR Digital in Houston, so none of this is theory. It is what he is seeing in client work every week.
The shift is not that buyers use AI. It is that a model now decides which companies get mentioned at all, and most executives cannot see whether theirs is one of them. Ranking was something you could measure. Being named is not, yet, and that gap is where the risk sits.
Every week: operators, analysts and specialists who have run the thing they are talking about. What still works, what quietly stopped working, and what to do on Monday.
If you run a marketing team, run a company, or you are building your own name, this one is for you. Because if the models cannot find you, your buyers will not either.
The show explains it. EWR Digital does it. Get a free AI visibility audit at ewrdigital.com/ai-visibility-audit, or find more from Matthew at matthewbertram.com.
The Best SEO Podcast
SEO Isn't Dying, Bad SEO Is With Krešimir Ćorluka
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
We argue that SEO isn’t dying; bad SEO is. Fundamentals still drive wins while LLMs change how answers surface, making complete, original content and smart strategy more valuable than ever.
• fundamentals over fads as LLMs shift discovery
• why pages beyond top ten fuel LLM citations
• customer journey, CRO, PR, and dev fluency as real leverage
• global markets with lower competition and faster output
• enterprise constraints, silos, and when to say no
• partnerships over one‑stop shops to deliver depth
• personalization pitfalls in tracking and sane KPI alignment
• future of agents, multimodal search, and offline attention
Guest Contact Information:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kresimir-corluka
Website: canonical.hr
Summit: croatiaseosummit.com
More from EWR and Matthew:
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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.
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Welcome And Guest Intro
SPEAKER_01This 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_00Howdy, welcome back to another fun-fold episode of The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, but better known as the Best SEO podcast. We're exploring LM visibility and moving into the era of AI. I uh if you listen to the last podcast, um I interviewed a former uh local uh SEO agency that kind of moved up to the northeast, um, called Regx. Okay, so the name of their agency was Regx SEO. Uh, I now have Keonical uh SEO, and um now this is not as close, so he's all the way over there in Croatia. Peter, welcome to the show.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, hi, thank you very much for inviting me. Uh for everyone listening, it's actually Kreshmir, but uh because it's easier for Matt to pronounce because Kreshmir basically meets means Peter, so we'll we'll go with Peter.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we're gonna we're gonna go with Peter just because everybody
LLMs, Indexing, And Moving Targets
SPEAKER_00uh wants to understand who I'm talking to and what I'm talking about. And um I'm a little dyslexic, everybody, every once in a while. So uh apologies, but Peter, um, I I love that you reached out um talking to a lot of different agency owners about all the changes that are happening. Um we are talking about a lot of well, uh internal changes that you're changing your playbook. Um, people are working from a remote team since COVID. Um, there's there's a lot of things on agency owners. There's a lot of agency owners that also listen to this podcast. Um but man, I talk to a lot of different agency owners from different areas, and everybody's focused on something different about what's going on with Google. And all the time on social media, there's new studies coming out that are contradicting past studies, and then things are changing, and it's like a constant um well, it's a constant moving target. And so uh I'm working on building a little news bot that's like bringing in all the news for me to tell me what's going on because I have clients all the time that are like, hey, did you see this study where um you know it it's now it was a uh SEM rush study, I think it was, and it's kind of surfaced a lot more recently, but this was like maybe a week or two ago, and they're like 27% of LLMs are picking up uh like data from things that are not getting indexed. Where is that coming from? And I was like, I don't know. Like, I want to go look at that study, that's pretty interesting, right? And so things like this are constantly happening. Uh, I think that the LLMs were even following uh more more or less when when they introduced RAG to what Google was doing. They were kind of relying on Google. Hey, you've done this for a long time, we're gonna lean on you, but now they're they're not doing that. They're surfacing stuff from you know searches 21 and below uh a large amount of time. I don't have the exact statistic. So there's just all this data that that that's um constantly uh I guess evolving. And so I would love to hear kind of you set the table of kind of how how you're viewing this, um, what you're looking at, it what are the things that are important to you, and kind
Fundamentals Over Fads
SPEAKER_00of how how you're gonna move forward with it.
SPEAKER_02Sure. Um, I mean, me personally, I'm kind of in the uh SCO is basically uh LLM EO or AEO or whatever you want to call it for certain for LLMs optimization. But um but I'm not I'm not deaf, uh I'm not blind. I see things happening all the time. Maybe some things are even changing a little bit, but I think that the fundamentals stay the fundamentals, and if we try to kind of pick up every little thing that's changing all the time, we're just gonna get paralyzed by information and by choice. So I think that we should basically just look at the fundamentals and try to get away away from them in a way where we can experiment a little bit, but base most of what we're doing on all of the all of the things that worked before that still work. Um like you said, uh a lot of the citations in LLMs come from like the 20th position, the 50 uh 50th position, and so on. That is uh in part because those those results uh explain the topic a bit better than the ones on the first place. Because someone who's in the first position can maybe uh have the best backlinks, maybe they can have a great uh great content, maybe a great brand, but possibly uh they don't explain the product or the service or whatever the the user is searching for in a complete way, and the LLM is pulling information from someone who maybe doesn't have all of all of those backlinks and branding and so on, but they do have like a really contextual uh product page or a service page or an information like a blog post or something with original info, insights, data, statistics, and so on. Um, I could really go deep into what I think the fundamentals are and that we should do, uh, and what we should do, but um, I think whoever's listening to this podcast probably knows what those are. Um, I think uh like generative uh experience or whatever optimization or LLM optimization um is basically good SEO and bad SEO is what people think is dying. Uh yeah, yeah, people are saying all the time like SEO is dying, and then they list what they think SEO is, and it's like uh cloaking, uh black hat, it's uh writing up like really stupid articles that are 2,000 plus words because of some reason, uh, and so on. And that is dying, and that has been dying for a long time. Uh, so good SEO or whatever you want to call it is is not dying, it's more alive than ever. We're seeing great results with uh with all of our clients, we're seeing great results from other people in the space as well. Um, whoever's doing their job right gets listed in in LLMs. So that's not an issue. But if you're trying to do the black haty stuff and so on, that can work for a while, but not uh not long term. So I don't know if you want me to get into something more specific uh about the fundamentals or the future or yeah, so I I really like that.
SPEAKER_00The the headline that I'm walking away from is,
Beyond SEO: Journey, CRO, And LLM Basics
SPEAKER_00and I think you put it perfectly bad SEO is dying, right? And I think that understanding like the vocabulary that everybody's working from is really important because I think a lot of people don't have a good handle on what SEO is, and I think you have to have a handle on what SEO is to understand like the the the future of search and where it's going. Now, I think that there's other things you have to consider as well. So I think you have to have a a strong fundamental SEO background to understand what these changes are or or how they adapt, but you also have to have different skill sets as well. So the the areas that I think are important is customer journey, like how people are searching online, the user experience is completely changing, right? Like CRO, like how people are buying. Okay, people are leaving Google and they're finding stuff other places. What is it? 58.5% of traffic has left Google, has gone other places, at least where they're starting the search. Google's still growing. Um it's debatable where that is, what that is, but it but it does keep growing. I think it's in parallel too, right? So I think people are still using Google, but they're also using these other um uh search engines and platforms to to do that as well. And I think really understanding that's important. The other area where where I've really dived into myself and and spent probably the last six months in heavy, heavy education on is understanding how LMs work, how they're trained, how the transistors work. You know, there was a big article, the attention is everything. Attention is everything, like understanding the fundamental shifts in machine learning, why LLMs are doing what they're doing, how rag works, to uh like you gotta have a basis in that as well as SEO. So there's like different sides or different surfaces that you have to think about on how these all roll together. And I do agree with you, good SEO tends to work, but also understanding why it works and also understanding that the LOMs are really searching like a very intelligent person, like they're surfacing reviews on third-party sites that you've never heard of before. Yeah, right. Um, AI, if you're running ads, which I'm branching out here, just kind of giving some use cases. I've seen ad campaigns like there's a lot of spam that's on the rise and you can use with AI. Well, guess what? Like, there's a lot of black hat strategies where people are getting frustrated and attacking other people. We've been attacked. Like even if someone's running an ad and people start spamming the ad, then it starts to optimize for spam. Like, like, so there's there's a lot of things that you have to consider. There's a lot more, I guess, guardrails to know. You gotta go, okay, is this long-term data? Is this like, okay, it's constantly changing now? Chat GBT, if that's what you're using, is constantly um uh citing citations now, right? To make sure it's grounded. Um, because there is still 27% of the callbacks or hallucinizations. Like there's a lot of things I think you have to consider in addition to good SEO. Now, if all you know how to do is good SEO, you still can win. But I think also there's reasons why you're winning that you just know that you're gonna win by doing this. But I'm like, I guess the person that wants to understand why. Right. And like really neural networks and like Google's just one big, you know, LOM, like, right? It's trying to organize information, it's trying to give you a callback to a certain degree. And so the better you can understand this stuff and how it works, once you have this fundamental framework of SEO, you can start plugging this stuff in. But but I I I talk to a lot of people and we're we're launching like a certification soon. But it's like if you have a big bucket, like you you got to get the water to a certain line before you can even have any of these conversations. Because if you tell somebody to do this one thing, but but they don't understand how it fits in the bigger piece of it, they don't know why that that plugs in there and what it does. They just know they need to do that, and then it gets down to a checklist. Because
Skill Depth Versus Checklists
SPEAKER_00I've been hiring some um SEOs that really know how to do certain things really good, but they don't have a full framework or a philosophy around what they're doing. So if you get off that track or you get off optimizing with that tool, like it's like they've just jumped into the the deep ocean, you know what I mean? And I'm like, no, you've been doing SEO for seven years, like you should understand why this works, I guess. I don't know. That's that's just my uh yeah, I agree.
SPEAKER_02I mean, uh SCO was always kind of on anachronism for me. Uh it was a like uh evolution from uh webmasters in the early 2000s, late 90s, where you didn't just do like on-site, you you were trying to do whatever you could, so your website is uh known uh known about, uh, so people can access it, use it, and so on. So SEO has always uh been more granular to me than maybe some of the people who've been coming into it, like okay, I just need to know SEO, and that's that's it. You gotta know how PPC works, you gotta know how PR works, uh uh conversion rate optimization, like whatever. Uh, just recently we're trying to uh employ a person for digital PR. Uh, that's something which I think we do really well. And uh it's a specific skill set, you can't just ask Chat GPT. I mean, it can help a bit, but uh all of those AIs just pull up pull uh all of the campaigns which have been done before, and we're trying for to find someone who can get creative with it. And uh we really did have some creative campaigns. We ended up on the on the new national news. We uh we made a little fight between hospitals, the biggest hospitals in the country as well, and so on. Um, and we were trying to find a person for that, and a lot of people applied because oh, yeah, I know SEO, I know how to write articles, I know how to uh collect data and analyze data and so on. But when we tested those people, they basically just wrote like really boring blog posts no one no one wants to read. They didn't understand why people uh read content, what they want to read about, uh how long it should be, what the graphics should be, because you actually need to have like a huge, huge uh collection of uh of like knowledge bases. You gotta be in every trade at least at least a little bit to kind of uh apply it to other parts of your uh strategy. I can't really talk about uh PPC or to any other team. I can't really talk to programmers and and devs and so on if I don't understand how websites are made. I can just tell them, okay, you need to fix this, but but how? Like for instance, some website has uh a lot of their site is in uh JavaScript, and then uh the LLMs and crawlers and so on can't really access it. I mean they can, but a little bit harder, and then most SEOs just tell them, okay, remove that from the JavaScript so uh crawlers can read them, and then the dev asks them, okay, but where should I put it? How should it look? And those kinds of questions are never answered by like the juniors, uh like the mid-SEOs, uh, because they most of them think they're seniors. I've been in this business for like like you said, like about seven years, uh, and I would not call myself a senior, maybe like the first level, even though I own an agency uh and I have uh we have a lot of people working with us, we had some big projects and so on. But when you actually talk to people who are really knee deep knee deep into this for and have been for the last 20 plus years, uh then you start to understand that all of those checklists you know are not gonna cut it. Uh, and you have to get way deeper into it and get into the other channels as well. So, yeah, I completely agree. You gotta understand how the system works, you gotta understand how basically everything works, uh, not just writing content or doing backlinks or what I mean. You can do only those things, but then you're never gonna uh you're never gonna evolve into a better SEO or a better marketer or agency owner or whatever.
SPEAKER_00There was uh I I've been to at a lot of conferences this year
Global Markets And Competition Levels
SPEAKER_00and connecting with others and like you know, sharing ideas and all that kind of stuff. And um, it was interesting. A lot of people were like, you know, SEO, what's the name, right? Like, even when you came on the show at the beginning, you're like all these different names, like there's a lot of noise, you know. Other people are like, Oh, like you're evolved, you gotta evolve into becoming a great digital marketer, you gotta understand everything. And even uh I I did a a recent um podcast with a like an agency coach, and you know, putting somebody on the phone with a client like Facebook doesn't solve it, or a Google PPC person is not gonna be able to answer the breadth of questions that somebody has. It's really where's that foundation coming from? Where's that North Star? Like you said, how are these things associated with everything else? Because I can give somebody a checklist, they can follow a checklist, and it will basically work most of the time, but there are gonna be nuances to it. There's also gonna be like, why didn't it work? And you know, what you know, like I I can tell you, uh, we had a campaign recently that like new industry, okay, new industry for us. Um we had crushed the same format, the same playbook with other sites. We brought on an account, it wasn't audited properly, and essentially we did all the same stuff. We followed the playbook, and the strategist on the account was like, Matt, like red alert, like I don't know what's happening, it's not working. Like it's not working, right? And they're like, We followed everything, we're doing everything the same, like we're crushing it on these other sites. Why is this not working? And so I I had I always come in on the problems, right? So I always get pulled into the problems. I come in and I'm like, when you did the audit, well, well, they they signed up before we did the audit, but when you did the audit, did you realize that the competitors you're going up against are like DA 70, DA 80 sites? You know, and I was like, you're at like DA under 20 or whatever it was, right? And I was like You're not gonna solve that in four months. Like you're not gonna outcompete these sites in that. And that's a client expectation standpoint. And like you gotta, you gotta just like how are you supposed to know everything? And also clients want you to know exactly produce these leads, whatever. Like, okay, what how how much business are we generating in six months or a year? And you know, you can put together models, but models are just made up data. Like, I I I don't know, I don't know any models. Like it gives you like a framework to understand. Like, we've been doing models where it's like, okay, like here could be on the high end, here's kind of what would happen, here's what happened like low end, maybe like if you don't do anything. Um, but it we're just guessing. And until you like get into a site and work on it for a couple months, it's very difficult to like make those estimations on the competition, the geographic area, you know, like the search volume of the topics you're going. Like, there's so many things to consider. And again, like strategy is where all this comes in. And I feel like over the last couple of years, um people have specialized in different uh service areas because clients don't want to pay for the strategy, right? And it's like you want to build a house, you want to build a digital house, a website I think is a digital building, and you don't you don't want to hire an architect to to come up with that. You want to just kind of guess. And so um these are just kind of some of the I guess challenges um that that we're personally dealing with, uh, and that I'm seeing happen on on, I guess, this side of the pond. I'm curious what are some of the things that that are working over there? You shared come uh some of the stories, maybe go into a little bit more detail, and maybe some of the stuff you're really looking at that um, you know, I I think it's
Enterprise Constraints And Saying No
SPEAKER_00good to give a like a global perspective and what are the different conversations happening at different parts of the world?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, like I said, uh we mostly do Croatia, uh, although we do uh have or have had some clients from US, UK, and so on. Um, we do this because it's it's way easier to compete uh here than to compete in the US and UK, where there's like 50 million SEOs, SEOs who are probably better than you. Um I I mean I'm not saying that you you can't do it, uh, I'm just saying that the input versus output is way, way lower uh out there. Uh so whatever works uh everywhere else is what works in in Europe as well, and especially smaller countries like Croatia. And uh it basically works like 20 fold. I wouldn't even be surprised if some companies from the US and so on got a whiff of this uh and saw that you can basically make way more money in smaller countries just because, like doing a digital PR campaign, let's say, in uh in Austria or in Slovenia and so on is way easier, way faster, way more scalable. Uh the results are way better. Like we had uh clients in the insurance business who've uh gone from like 15 plus positions to the first position, and they've they've been the first position for the past year or so. Um we stopped working together just because they were so happy with the results. We we didn't have anything else to offer them, uh, because they're first for everything, they have basically all of the traps.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so so I'll bring that up. That's something that I have always had on the back of my head is when you do really, really good for a client and absolutely crush it. Your reward is you get fired and you got to go find another client, right? Yeah, it's pretty wild. Now, one of the things you said um is absolutely true. I had two clients in Costa Rica for a long time, and I felt like I was one of the three people creating content uh in Costa Rica because the the content was so thin and and really like the callbacks um as far as like the number of pages created, there was just not a lot of content, so it served up your stuff faster. And so when it's less competition, I absolutely see that. My question for you, which I I understand what you're saying, but also you got a currency uh you got a currency differential. Um now I know like Australia, for example, uh is you know almost on par with the US as far as like expense level goes, but I can also see maybe certainly UK and maybe US are maybe more mature markets than than other areas. I I think well with COVID, well, everybody's kind of moved moved it forward uh online. Um but no, I I see what you're saying. I I think that there's there's other things to consider when you're working in different countries, like I'm working in Canada and Mexico mostly, because we're we're like North America and US. Um, we have done stuff in other countries, but but yeah, no, if you're working in an area that's not as competitive or or not as mature, let's say, and not as many people are into the digital transformation yet, that like that's what I'm seeing. Like certain industries, uh certain geographical areas, if they're not into the digital transformation as much as like maybe other companies, let's say industry-wise, like SaaS is on top of it, right? Like, and so SaaS is a lot more competitive than you know, home services or something like that, right? Because they're not they're not leaning into the digital transformation or they haven't, uh, as maybe a small business uh would, like a plumber might not um uh you know be working the same way. So, so I totally
Non‑Zero‑Sum Partnerships
SPEAKER_00see that. Um, what are some other insights that that uh you've found?
SPEAKER_02Uh well, first of all, uh regarding like the retainer size, the currencies, and so on. I think you'd be surprised uh about how many companies are firstly open to doing stuff like SEO and so on on a bigger scale. And also uh their budgets are not really that different from uh from other countries. I mean, they are lower, but like I said, if you input, let's say 30 hours uh a month uh for like an expert senior SEO, and you get uh let's say 5k dollars out of it, and if you uh and you can get a jump from like the 20th position to the fifth and then to the third to second, first uh month over month, and in let's say the UK in the same industry, you can do way less or you have to do way more hours because it's more to get the yeah, to get the same output.
SPEAKER_00I I see what you're saying. So even if you're charging a different size retainer, one is companies might do a bigger retainer because they know whatever, but also you might not have to do as big a retainer because uh it's not as competitive. So yeah, you know, something that would take 50 hours could take 30 uh in in a in a less competitive country or something like that. Yeah, here's one of the craziest things for me and anybody listening. When when we started, well, you know, we're we're getting a lot of leads through like Chat GPT uh from everywhere. Uh and and one of the first ones we started working with was again Canada and Mexico, which we had kind of done stuff in the UK and other places, but not like consistent business, I guess, like it was like a one-off thing from the podcast or whatever. I was just surprised how little we needed to do as an agency to work in another country. Like I thought there would be all kinds of paperwork that we would need to fill out, and there would be like all kinds of other issues. And really, it's like just make sure you get paid up front because uh, you know, there's no like recourse, I guess. And it's like a month, like everything's month to month and get paid up front. And and that was it. Like I was shocked, and I've had multiple conversations with different business owners, and we work with a lot of like oil companies and stuff like that that are in multiple countries. I I just thought there would be a massive amount of paperwork to be able to, you know, um work with people in other areas and it and it's really just a currency thing, uh, which which is shocking. And I think even with um you know blockchain technology, um, that's gonna change. I uh we were always hiring contractors uh you know all over the place. Uh now it's more integrated into our our our true like remote style setup, but man, um hiring companies and working with companies is the same. And and I think that you're calling out something big there is really the playground is now global, right? Like I think the I I and
Personalization, Rank Tracking, And Attribution
SPEAKER_00I think that countries um are now competing globally, and it's not just about uh a geographic area. I mean, that's what the internet did is it it it expanded like the reach um and it expanded the connection. I I think it's crazy. We're we're actually in virtual reality talking right now for any of you watching on YouTube. Um we're we've actually never met, we're actually not really looking at each other, um, but uh we're in virtual reality and and you're you're listening to this podcast wherever you're at. It's pretty pretty wild stuff.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and um you also asked about some insights uh I had from from companies here. Well, uh, like I said, we worked for other companies as well in the uh UK, US, and so on market, but I think most of the issues are present wherever, they're always present wherever you work. Uh the biggest issue we have is especially with big companies, uh when they have a strategy and uh like a separate strategy team, branding team, then they have like some sort of uh brand guidelines where you can't really do anything, uh, you can't uh change anything on the website, they don't want to do link building in that specific uh way because it's I don't know, they see it as hurtful to their brand. Uh they don't want to change their uh uh channels uh at all. So and especially regarding like technical SEO, that that's a huge issue because you wanna you wanna give them the option to rank for more keywords and so on. So you so you do like a huge uh categorization like like uh level up where you try to see like all of their products and how you can create new categories out of those products because that's the let's say the low-hanging fruit, let's say just like creating more categories that works for SEO, that works for LLMs. Uh and then they come up and they say, okay, but we don't like this because so and so, and because of uh X and Y and whatever. So I think all of those issues are the same basically anywhere, and you you can kind of uh help yourself a lot if you just give up on some clients, like not try not try to have all of the clients, uh all of the work because of the dollar amount or whatever. Uh I've I've improved my life a lot by not taking on any client I can get my hands on because it we had some clients who were just like all the best about all of the X's, but um some clients can really get all of the energy out of you, so and then we can't work on clients who are actually grateful and who would be open to maybe even expanding on the corporation, yeah.
SPEAKER_00I I think that that's uh uh issue. Both of those issues you brought up two things that I think are issues everywhere. One is um depending on uh you know how their IT is structured, right? Like there's there's issues with access to the website, or there's not a culture of SEO, they don't understand why you need to make these changes, like brands are changing, like the more teams you work with, the more silos it becomes really difficult uh with the bigger clients and really asking those questions. And you hit a lot of gridlock, and um that is a challenge, and I think that that's a challenge uh well everywhere. Um uh the second thing you said is absolutely true. It's like the Pareto principle of you know, you put you get 80% of the results from 20% of your energy, but also you get the same thing like in the reverse, or like on the negative, 20% of the clients give you 80% of the headaches, right? And then they're you're sucking all your time or energy to to to you know help try to please them, which they may not be able to be pleased, and then um you got to make sure that you're you're giving uh equal attention to to all the other clients, and that's why we use like internal management of hours to to try to do that. Um and I can just tell you, uh taking on the right kind of clients, we passed on a number of clients. That's one of the things that I'm actually gonna set up in this like certification program and and I've developed some really good referral partners that if the client's not the right fit for us, it could be like, okay, there could be a client that just needs a lot of help and one-on-one attention that doesn't have a big budget.
Future: Agents, Multimodal, And Offline Attention
SPEAKER_00There are people wherever their business is at that would be super thankful for that client that want like super high touch, they want to explain everything, they want to grow together. And that's the perfect fit. And so I used to be a headhunter, actually. Uh that was my last company. I had grown in my 20s, a staffing company, and and and flipped it. And essentially making sure that the match is correct between the client and and what what you're good at, right? And I've been trying to really let clients know what we're really good at and why we should bring in other partners for other things. Because one is if we do everything, we're gonna do everything okay. I would rather do a few things really, really good, but then you have this, and I'm sure you have this over there too. A lot of people want the one stop one stop shop everything, right? And and so um we we certainly have done that for for a number of years, but I've been a lot more open to say, look, we're a general contractor, okay? We're gonna we have really good people that do different things, but it's not always gonna be all us. We're gonna manage them, we're gonna make sure it's good, we're gonna be responsible for it. But we have great other agencies that come in and do other things that and we're all working like and rowing in the same direction. And I think I think explaining that and kind of setting that expectation has has worked uh pretty well. But man, we've we've really honed in on certain things and specialized in certain things. Um like we we used to have a well, we still do have, I guess, uh for the podcast, we have a full-time uh videographer, but we had a full-time videographer of the agency and we held on to them as much as we could through COVID. Um, but now we actually have a handful of uh contractors uh not in-house, but a handful of contractors that give us a lot more reach and a lot more depth. If someone wants to do live streaming for a show or someone needs to come somebody to shoot or do drones or whatever, like we now have like a bench of different people that we can we can utilize versus we have our one guy and we got to wait for him to finish up whatever work he's doing to work on this. So so I think that there's trade-offs and and and everything.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, there is. We we do that as well, basically. We have uh like people who work directly with us, like our employees, and then we have uh like outside uh outside uh experts who we really trust and who we can't really employ because they're experts in their field. Um, like let's let's say, for instance, someone who is really deep into analytics. I can't really uh be the guy for SEO and analytics and PPC and whatever, then we hire someone like him for just that project. We have a couple of people uh that we work with this way, and I think that uh that more agencies should stop looking at everything like a zero-sum game because we've all kind of lifted each other up because we employ uh that person or that person for for something specific, which is like we have a huge project coming on, and we're not really uh sure we can do it ourselves, and we hire them, and then like two months uh go go by, and then they ask us if we can work with them on the client they got, or they just send us the client, like, hey, I talked with with these guys, we can't really figure anything out. But here, if you want the contact, and we basically all of us do this, and uh well, maybe it's a different uh it's a different story in like small countries like Croatia, Serbia, and so on, uh, because we we basically all of us know know each other. Uh there's not that many of us, there's like maybe a thousand people you see all the time. There's way more who do marketing generally, but but these are the people who who are who are all on all the all of the conferences and so on all of the meetups and so on, yeah.
SPEAKER_00So so so I've realized like as we've started to work with a lot more law firms uh recently, uh I've just uh made some connections and we've been doing some great work, is that and associates it's like you know, they do the same thing, right? They they they they go get the right person. I I think you're right. Um, in different areas. One of the things that you said that resonated with me again. So, like bad SEO is dying, like I'm um, that's a big takeaway for me. Um, the other thing you just said is SEO is not a zero-sum game anymore because they'll optimize everywhere, right? Like you gotta optimize everywhere. And Google is still growing, but also there's all these other searches and all these other platforms that people are doing in parallel to, right? It's not instead of some people, it's instead of, like me. It's like instead of. Like I only go to Google to like check.
How To Connect And Closing CTA
SPEAKER_00to make sure yeah that this is like legit you know but um but it but it's growing and a lot more people are using it and there's a lot more exposure and I think to your point the what I have seen um and and tell tell me if if if you've seen any of this but I I worked with a a variety of different companies over the years but we would run ads one of the things we did do is run ads for clients outside the US um doing SEO we've started to do more of that we got some country managers whatever but but running ads was easy right uh like in a different country uh and now it's like even easier but the campaigns that used to work like gangbusters in the US on the B2C side okay not so much B2B but B2C side they worked like gangbusters don't work as well in the US anymore but you go down to South America those same campaigns work like gangbusters again it's like there's like this three year delay of I think it's like the maturity in which people are searching and how they're using the internet it's like you can almost predict the future I I felt that way with I guess fashion I guess uh in New York and California and it seeps to the rest of the country we're in Texas so it takes a while to get here. But it it probably comes from Europe, right? Uh UK, uh Paris, wherever, uh Japan and it it it like there's a pattern there's a flow of of how these things go and I think you're speaking to uh like the use cases or the maturity of the industry in these different countries. And so I think that that would be interesting to map out um where that growth comes from one but but two is it's not a zero sum game anymore. Everybody's using all these different technologies to figure it out like the customer journey is not linear. It it more looks like a like an atom where everything's just like going back to the center and then people are stopping and then people are picking it up later. And so attribution's been pretty difficult. How are you that's one of the things that I would love to uh get your opinion on is how are you looking at attribution I'm even finding a lot of the different tools which a lot of the different like gold tier gold star tools to to to rent do ranking or do rank tracking is different. Here's something interesting so a buddy uh that's in the space was doing um did a survey like 30 people and asked all 30 people to just go to chat GBT I think and or Claude or I think it was probably Jat GBT and asked them to just ask the same question about this company. Okay and to see what the results were and then the company the people at the company did it uh his team did it and then like he reached out to a bunch of people and did it here is the craziest thing the client he was searching for was showing up at one place or another for every search like top bottom middle whatever but the client who had been I guess searching themselves it wasn't showing it anymore. And then what was different was where it was showing up for different people it would bring in other competitors like big clients like big competitors some no name you never heard of competitors and all that I think goes back to the instruction data set that you're building of like the the persona that that Google or the these LMs have on you and and so you're always going to get a personalized custom result. And and also all these tool trackers right like when Google just said hey you're only getting the first page and then the tool trackers like oh well we can go get the top 100 all these tool trackers have different data and then when I search I get different data and it's like I'm taking like an average to try to triangulate what's going on but it's super frustrating for the client when you send a report and it's like oh you're number one or you're number two and then they're like no I'm like seven you know or whatever it is. And so uh I'm curious how you're dealing with attribution or how you're looking at it.
SPEAKER_02Uh I just had a talk with one of my friends uh who's a a real data geek and he's trying to create like the perfect SEO attribution system possible. But we kind of just uh circumnavigated the issue by just asking the clients uh what they're okay with because we could I I guess create some really impressive data driven report pulling from hrefs and Google Search Console and analytics and and whatever but we just ask the clients okay what do you want how do you want to track it what's your KPI and that's it most of the clients here I think the UK and US and so on is probably way way different uh well assuredly but um here people basically say okay we want to be on the first position for this and this or we want to increase our organic revenue they're fine with with it just being the basic organic revenue report in uh Google and uh in Google Analytics and uh and that's basically it that's what we track and uh it's the easiest way for us because if we try to tell them okay we have the perfect system then what you talked about happens. Like we create like a really detailed report and then they see in some fifth or seventh uh report somewhere else in some other tool that it's way different because the SERP is personalized or because it tracks uh clicks way different or their traffic estimations are different or or whatever. And a lot of people are trying to track like LLMs. I don't think that works like doing the synthetic queries or prompts uh doesn't really work but um people are for some reason looking at it like a traffic channel instead of like a visibility visibility channel like billboards or social media or whatever so I think that you shouldn't really care about attribution in the LLMs and for SEO I think it's just easier to kind of figure out with the client what they want and what their uh proposed mode of attribution is we can also look at like first click last click data driven whatever that's tough man last click attribution I have a client that's been focused on that for so long and they stopped doing everything but paid ads like over the years and the numbers keep going down and so we're we're trying to correct that through some some consulting and strategy work. Um awesome we're we're kind of wrapping up um I'm getting uh close to a hard stop my last question for you is where do you see the future of SEO going and then how do people follow you get in touch with you if they want to find out more sure um the future I think is basically in uh in agents for every every person that that's basically what you have right now you're kind of train training chat gpt or uh what whatever system to kind of python uh how to automate the born stuff how to automate everything and then I have uh I have this is my my light reading we got building lm powder applications building uh ai agents with lm rag and knowledge graphs llm ops applied lm ops so uh if anybody that wants to know what I'm doing in my free time uh I'm reading textbooks essentially yeah yeah I think that's basically how the system will work like everyone will have their little agent their talk to Siri or whatever to to buy stuff and so on. That will probably be the average person because the average person doesn't really like the cognitive load. I don't mind it I like uh exploring thing my uh things myself especially products and services um so someone like me probably won't use it in that way um but a lot of people will because people don't really like to waste time on on buying stuff uh especially if it's not like fashion or something related to taste like furniture and so on. But those systems will either create their own indexing system or because they still have to work with suppliers and so on they're they're either gonna have their own or they're gonna uh just use Google and Bing like they did uh like uh until now um the other thing I think that will change a little bit more is that offline will become a lot more important because offline is where the attention is gonna be uh especially if most of the internet turns into AI slop and then you have like YouTube is AI slop and uh the the social networks and so on. So it's either gonna be that uh the social networks completely ban AI which is not really gonna happen or it's just gonna become so much full of slop that people are gonna stop using it or or maybe not stop using but just use it a little bit less and then offline will be where uh you're gonna uh be able to get their attention way easier than doing like social ads or whatever because the quality of the user is gonna uh go down so that's my uh quite dystopian uh vision i i don't know if if it's gonna happen that way it's just how i see things uh and yeah so sco and all of the traditional channels are gonna do fine they're gonna change a little bit especially ppc i don't know how ppc is gonna work exactly in the llm future if llms uh uh expand like like people proposed i oh i think i i think they're gonna find a way i mean they're they're they've always found a way i i know that the affiliate route uh what perplexity was doing with the affiliates was super interesting um no i i uh i think everything's gonna go multimodal um i think it's gonna be like you know really your attention but the recall how are you gonna get in that that little sidecar bot you got there right like how are you gonna break into that um so i i think it's just gonna continue to get more complex i i i love your dystopian view though i agree with you um because i think people are gonna tune it out at a certain point like i can i can already tell you i i can start to see things and i you know i'm just like ah and so so i think i i i i think that there's a lot of the validity in what you shared all right so we're we're we're really getting close to time here how do people uh find you get more on your thoughts how do people reach out to you if they want to connect with you or uh connect with your agency um canonical yeah it's canonical hr it's canonical seo agency uh like a canonical url like we're the original ones um uh so you can find me on linkedin uh you can find me at our uh SEO conference Croatia SEO summit that we have uh every year uh the next one is gonna be uh in June next year we're gonna have uh Lily Ray Craig Campbell uh guest položia and and so on so some really hard hitters uh you can find me on SEO meets that we do all over Croatia and the region uh we're actually trying to expand those SEO meets into into other countries in Europe as well because a lot of a lot a lot of countries don't really have a a live uh SEO scene like where you can just uh go and have a beer with some colleagues and talk about your um uh stuff that's annoying annoying you at work so yeah that's basically it LinkedIn our conference uh and uh and that's it or on our website canonical.hr uh although we mostly do work in the region we can take up uh clients in other uh regions as well but we're not really looking to expand into the US or or UK aggressively so yeah that's basically it well awesome well peter thanks so much for for coming on um I enjoyed the conversation uh it opened up my mind in a number of different areas um if anybody you like this please leave a review please leave a comment please leave a review on uh whatever channel you're listening on also we're really trying to get our YouTube going so um I I think we're we we've almost got it all built out please go check it out um thank you so much uh for following along if there's a topic you would like to see reach out to us if you want to grow your business with the largest most powerful tool on the planet the internet and I guess now LLMs uh you know check out uh EWR for more revenue in your business they are sponsoring this podcast we are pretty much North America uh so check us out in North America um and uh you know uh let's stay in touch Peter thanks so much everybody for listening my name is Matt Bertram bye bye for now bye
