Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Hello. Welcome back to Rogue Startups. I'm your host, Craig Hewitt. Today it's just me. Sorry, no amazing guest, no amazing stories to tell. Just an update from me on a topic that I have been into big time over the last 10 years of building businesses. And it is SEO and content as a more broad term, which I think is really where it's applicable these days.
[00:00:25] Uh, this is going to be a pretty big update for me in terms of kind of conceptually how I'm thinking about content, how it's devolved from SEO into much more kind of broader. The term I'm using is multimodal content and how you can apply some of this into your business. So let's kind of take a step back about three years. Three years ago, the way to grow a business, especially a low price SaaS kind of product led growth, if you will, business was content marketing, blogging and SEO. Really easy kind of roadmap, bunch of keywords, content gaps, using something like Ahrefs, writing a bunch of 1500 word blog posts that were meant for Google so your audience would find you, figure out what you do, and some percentage of them would take the next action, which is to sign up for your product.
[00:01:15] And that worked really, really well. It worked really well for us at Kastos. It worked really well for a lot of people kind of in our space.
[00:01:22] When AI really kind of first came onto the roadmap or onto the scene, it started working a little less well to where now. I'm sure you saw the stuff from HubSpot, gosh, about a year ago they lost like 70% of their blog traffic.
[00:01:38] Interestingly, like, if you believe the stuff they said on their Marketing against the Grain podcast, which by the way is a fantastic example of exactly what I'm talking about, which is kind of like owning multiple different pieces of real estate in the digital ecosystem for your brand.
[00:01:54] They said, you know, they saw this coming. They saw that the transition was going to be from written content to things like podcasting and SEO. And I'll go more into like where I think that's a little incomplete in a minute and that they've been pivoting their content efforts from just regular blogging to multimodal content over the years.
[00:02:13] The fact that they had an avenue to express this opinion on is amazing. And if you haven't checked out Marketing against the Grain, it is one of three podcasts I listen to right now. So just a fair endorsement, pretty awesome.
[00:02:25] But, but, but they saw the same thing that we're seeing at Castus right. Our volume is down a lot, like 50% or more.
[00:02:32] Some of it is a loss in ranking, but a lot of it is just a decrease in search volume. And so like when is the last time you went to Google for something? Right? Like a very, very long time ago for me. And so what the, what the move is and what I'm hearing from SEO folks, what I'm hearing from just smart marketers is like content on your website is a thing, but it's not even the most important thing anymore. The most important things for your website, there's five of them, I think these days. One is YouTube, the other is podcasting. I think like podcasting YouTube go together, they're really important to make sense together. The other is LinkedIn for like long, long form content and then Reddit and Quora as the five places where I think we should be publishing content in addition to our website. But the website really is like the last thing and the thing where hopefully the conversion makes sense but is not like the only place to publish content anymore. I think from a fundamental perspective this is the big kind of divergence from an SEO website centric content approach to a multimodal be everywhere kind of approach. And I want to share how I'm thinking about those five places and my website because there's some stuff there that I think really makes sense so for the website because I think it's maybe the most simplistic and for the most part we've kind of done a lot of that in our case at least to take a half step back. Does content make sense for your business?
[00:03:58] I think if you already have quite a bit of it, yes. If you're brand new, does it make sense to invest a ton into content these days? I think if you're a low priced product, it probably is one of the only opportunities you have to grow. It's probably content and referrals or some kind of like viral social thing.
[00:04:14] If you're, if you're a higher price, you know, you're 500 bucks a month or something, you can afford outbound and sales and all that kind of stuff. But if you're lower priced product like we are, we basically have two hammers, right? One is referrals or three, maybe the other is integrations and the other is content. So we still have to play the content game, even though I think the way we did it for the first seven years doesn't work anymore.
[00:04:35] But if you're a low priced product, you kind of have to make product content work. And this is how I think about it.
[00:04:41] So on your website you should have a bunch of content. If you don't, does it still make sense? Yeah, probably. It will just take you a lot longer to get to this piece of critical mass to where you can really grow. But, but if you're a low price product, you kind of have to make content work.
[00:04:54] Your website should have all of the content that represents your brand. That's feature pages, homepages, FAQs, docs, blog posts, top, middle, middle and bottom of the funnel and the kind of five stages of buyer awareness. Right. So you need to kind of triangulate all this. I've talked a lot about content in the past, but generally like you just need to have this kind of mesh of content around topics that your ideal customer is asking. And this is really where content comes in. Now previously this was keyword based.
[00:05:24] Now it is LLM kind of search query based. Right. The new gold rush is going to be, hey, not how can I rank in Google? And one of those 10 blue links and is how can, when, when somebody chaps, types, hey, how do I start a podcast into ChatGPT or Cloud that cast us comes up. That's, that's the goal. Right?
[00:05:42] And that will happen not only by content being on your website, but by it being kind of everywhere that LLMs are indexing content. Your website could be one of those. But what I understand and what I'm experiencing is unless you have a really kick ass website that's super authoritative, and we're fortunate to at Castos because we did a bunch of the work previously to be a pretty high domain authority website, you might not be seen as an authority by LLMs. Right? So if you're just starting out, yeah, you want to put in the work, build that up. But it's probably just not going to happen for a while instead and in addition to you need to be on YouTube, podcasting, Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn, all these places.
[00:06:23] Last piece for the website.
[00:06:25] A lot of us use Rank Math or Yoast or something like that to optimize their site for SEO.
[00:06:30] A link to an article that talks about this concept of like you have robots txt for crawlers on your website, you should have LLMs txt, which is a way for LLMs to better understand your website and the content on it. And so for us there's a handful of ways I'll link the article. There's a handful of ways to do this. The best way I found is just WordPress plugin, literally just install it, click A button, and it happens to me, that's kind of the 80 20. It probably uses some pretty generic kind of, you know, language and templates and stuff like that under the hood, which is fine, but literally took me like two minutes. I fussed around with like OpenAI and API calls and all this kind of shit that I don't know how to do.
[00:07:14] There is a tool suggested in here, Fire Crawl, that looks pretty sweet. I just couldn't make it work. I'm not a developer, I don't know how to make an API call. And that's probably why I could make it work.
[00:07:28] If and when we want to, like really optimize this in the future, we'll use something where it's using, you know, OpenAI kind of APIs to crawl, analyze and summarize our data for this robots Txt file. But it basically is like a sitemap for AI. I'll link to the article, but you got to have this, right? So that's the website, but the rest of them and the format and the kind of approach to content we've taken going forward is, is not keyword based, but LLM search query based. And so what I did is I took all of our existing content, I built a crawler.
[00:08:06] Amazingly, I use cursor to build a crawler, crawled our entire website, pulled out the, the title of the page or post, the URL and the full contents of it, right? Then I loaded that into, I tested Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini.
[00:08:23] ChatGPT gave me the best result, but. But Claude gave me the worst, right? So ChatGPT or Gemini, if you're on Google, you can, you can use it.
[00:08:31] I basically had it first create, hey, what are the top like hundred searches that someone would use in ChatGPT who would be an ideal customer of mine? And it gave me like how to start a podcast and how can I grow my podcast, how can I monetize my podcast, how do I build a podcast audience from zero? All these kinds of things, hundred different questions that someone would ask.
[00:08:51] I put that and the full contents of the Castos website into ChatGPT and said, hey, match these two up. Where are we doing? One of three things. One is, this is awesome, nothing needs to happen. The other is you have a piece of content there, but it's not going to match the query that someone might use one of those hundred query terms.
[00:09:12] And the other is you don't have anything you need to create a brand new piece of content.
[00:09:16] So that was a starting point and I'll actually Just link to this Google Doc in the, in the link, in the description. If you're watching on YouTube or in the podcasting player, I'll just make a copy of what it gave us and because I'll be working from there, but let's make a copy for you.
[00:09:33] So that was a starting point that covers the website side of things, right? That's like, okay, these are a hundred at least search terms and these are pieces of content. We have about a thousand pieces of content on our website. So we have a lot.
[00:09:45] Some of them, you know, are appropriate and ranking well and matter, some aren't. And so that's fine then. What I did actually just this morning is the exact same thing for YouTube. I used Apify, which is a scraping tool. Pierre and Kevin from Scraping be sorry, if you're listening, I didn't use your tool because it's like super easy. You just plop in the URL for YouTube channel. It scrapes the whole thing. So titles, descriptions, all that kind of stuff. And then I asked ChatGPT to compare that spreadsheet I had to this new Data of the 400 different YouTube videos we have on the Castlus YouTube channel to run the same analysis. And so now I have a query and then, you know, kind of status on the blog and then status on YouTube. So now I have the beginnings of this multimodal kind of content approach for blog and YouTube. And I'm going to consider that the answer to the other three is no, which is Reddit, Quora and LinkedIn.
[00:10:42] But now I'll go forward and say, okay, I want to create or update pieces across all five of these places and or six really. Right. Website, YouTube, podcast, LinkedIn, Quora, Reddit, and I'll use Claude for all of this.
[00:11:03] And so for the stuff that we already have, I probably will actually use an SEO tool like phrase and say, hey, here's the blog post we have. I want to update it to make sure we're covering these kind of search terms. Cool. That like that's pretty easy. And then I'll take that final piece and I'll create like LinkedIn, not post but like on the company page or article about it. I'll do something similar for Reddit and Quora and then I'll make a YouTube video out of it. And so I'll use Claude projects and I'll probably have different either projects or different prompts for each of these. So hey, here's the piece of content that is kind of the base context for it. Remix this into this other format because we don't want, if you think about like duplicate content, you don't want the same piece of content everywhere. You got to like remix it a little bit and into each of these different places and each has their own kind of format, right. It's like you're not going to take a LinkedIn post and put it on Twitter and put it on Instagram. All the same, you're going to kind of re vibe it for the format and the tone and the interest of the platform. So that's kind of like where I am. I feel like I'm about 65% of the way to where I want to be in terms of conceptually SEO.
[00:12:22] If you're just talking about your website gone, right. Like it's just such a small part of the overall game now, but it is still pretty important, right? But it's just like table stakes. So it used to be kind of the ultimate, like, hey, if we just rank for this thing, we're good.
[00:12:38] Now that's just table stakes. It's really the beginning of getting the input content into the other five kind of places where your content should be, which is YouTube, podcasting, Reddit, Quora and LinkedIn. LinkedIn, long form, not. Not just posts.
[00:12:53] So because the places that are now the most important for search are not Google or Bing or whatever the hell, it's ChatGPT and Claude and Perplexity in Gemini and all these places, right? So that is kind of the state of search in my opinion and where we are and what we're doing.
[00:13:13] You know, I gotta say, I really like content and I really like search as a customer acquisition strategy for businesses like ours. Again, if you're 500 bucks a month, that's the last thing you need. Like you need a one page website and a whole bunch of outbound to make a good business. But like the math just doesn't work for us at our price point and the kind of scale we need. So we need to acquire customers basically for free, are on autopilot and content is one of the ways to do it. This multimodal content approach to me is it just feels right. It like worked for us before. The game's changed. This is the new game. Get our content in a bunch of different places in front of our ideal audience in the format and the tone and the style that they want. And I think it's going to be a winner. The other approach for customer acquisition that I mentioned for us is referrals, affiliates and partnerships. And that's just like, that's the other side of kind of sales and marketing that I'm doing. So these days, at least for me, sales marketing, marketing mostly is like partnerships, affiliates and integrations and content, multimodal search content. So I don't know, I got to come up with a better term for, for the, the current kind of content approach. I just want to say, like, it's not AI search entirely. I think that's important, but I think just as important is the place where that search is being sourced from, which are these kind of five platforms, right?
[00:14:42] And so just encourage you to think about if content is your game, your website really is just table stakes now, right? Because it's just so easy. Just plop a topic into Claude and it creates an article that's like 80% as good as the best human could possibly make. And so that's then good enough. Then take that, remix it and spin it into those other five formats and create those pieces of content. And most of those, if you think about LinkedIn, Reddit, Quora, are super easy. It's just a few more clicks of a button.
[00:15:08] YouTube and podcasting harder. But that's why they're winners. I think, like, if I could only do one, I would cheat and say YouTube and podcasting just because the connection, I think is so strong.
[00:15:22] The rest of it, I think is a bit this kind of like eroding sandcastle that we're building.
[00:15:30] But as of today, and what I mean by that is like search and chasing search is always going to be this like algorithmic changing game as of today. Like we at least at Castos, are kind of behind, but, but this is our plan to catch up is this multimodal approach.
[00:15:48] I think for SaaS businesses, it's pretty tough to build a podcast or a YouTube channel that's really strong. Like, I've tried a lot and, and it's really hard. Um, I think it's possible I, I think the play there would be like a personal brand kind of thing, which is a whole different discussion. And Rob Welling, if you're listening, I know that that's not the play. And, and, and I largely agree, like, I don't see a lot of personal brands that are built on the back of.
[00:16:17] I don't see a lot of SaaS companies that are built on the back of big personal brands. I think if you already have one, it makes things easier, but it's probably not the thing that's gonna make or break a lot of businesses.
[00:16:28] Instead, I think a company channel like Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn YouTube kind of is a little more. Is a little more sustainable. So a bit of a rant, but I just want to share. That's kind of where I am. That's where I am on search. I'm reinvigorated when it comes to content and search. For the first time in a long time, we're seeing an enormous amount of traffic to the Castos website from AI bots and agents.
[00:16:54] And that's encouraging. It means like we're on the roadmap, we're showing up. We don't show up as well as we'd like to. So I think it's worth putting in some effort for us to bolster our kind of digital footprint in this respect across all the places where I know our customers are hanging out anyhow. And then those get rolled up into AI results and that's kind of the strategy from here. So have been a bit off and on on the podcast recently and I apologize. I've been working on my YouTube channel a fair bit, so if you want to check that out, I'm publishing at least a video a week there a lot on kind of sales, marketing, stuff like that.
[00:17:31] It's YouTube.com hecraghewitt I'll put a link in the description below.
[00:17:37] Been publishing pretty consistently there, publishing some kind of deep dives into AI as well. So those are fun. They're just like screen shares of shit I'm doing.
[00:17:46] And my goal very much is this podcast continues and really I like a mix of the guest format and this where I just given up update about things that I'm doing and I'm thinking about. So I'd love to hear from you. Like, what do you. What do you like better? Do you like episodes like the previous one with Amar? Like, I thought that was really good. I got a lot of positive feedback from folks on that. Or do you like this where it's just me, I'm ranting, I'm caffeinated and you're just getting the raw kind of bits of kind of what. What I'm up to. So we'd love to hear it either way. Let me know. Drop a comment in below if you're watching on YouTube. If you're listening on podcasting players, hit me up on Twitter. I'm the Cray Hewitt. We just love to hear kind of what you like, what you don't and what you want to hear more of. Thanks.
