Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
When it comes to SEO and getting your website, your brand and your name to rank in Google and in LLMs, increasingly, there's a few people that I listen to everything they have to say, and Lars Lofgren is absolutely one of them. If you're not familiar with Lars, he's been in the SEO game for a while, working with huge brands like Ramit Sethi and I Will Teach youh To Be Rich.
And he knows a ton about SEO and what gets things to rank. And this conversation literally blew my mind, talking about really advanced strategies on and off site. So on site and places like Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, but also then maybe some, like, alternative approaches to content and inbound marketing. Lars and I talk about, like, what is this thing that we're doing that used to be called SEO? What does this even mean anymore?
And how to stand out as a brand in the AI era. So I think it fundamentally is a shift in how we think about talking about ourselves and our brand and getting that in front of our ideal audience and Persona. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Lars Lofgren all about AI SEO.
I think let's just kind of start right outta the gate with like, what are we talking about? What do we call this thing?
[00:01:24] Speaker B: What do you call this fucking AI SEO? I don't know, but I'm sick of the fucking debates. Jesus fucking. There's geo, there's LLM yo, or fucking aiso. There's like half a dozen other terms. Every day I fucking open up LinkedIn and someone's having another argument about what the term is. And I'm so let me make the opposite case. I do understand the need to name it something different. And there's one reason why not. Because the work is any different. Because if you are, if you're an SEO professional, if you're in the space, if you've done content for SEO, if you're an agency selling SEO marketing of any flavor of it at all, if you go to any client right now and you're like, oh, I specialize in SEO, their eyes immediately glaze over. They don't want to have anything to do with you. Not interested. Doesn't matter how many tens of millions of dollars is still flowing through that vertical in like old school actual or like the Google search box. Still, it's not dead yet.
It's still there.
It doesn't matter that, like all this AI shit, the foundations all just like SEO, the tactics have shifted a little bit. But it's SEO, it's still a search engine. We still have to optimize for it. None of that matters. People just don't like business owners, founders, leaders, leadership teams. No one wants to invest in SEO right now, which I do, kind of empathize with a little bit. It's like the old thing. It's everybody.
[00:02:51] Speaker A: It's like a sinking ship. Right.
[00:02:52] Speaker B: It's gonna. It's gonna die. It's shifting. I hate looking at my Google Analytics reports anymore. Like, it just sucks. So I get it.
But at the end of the day, regardless of what we call it, like, 80% of it's still the same. You have to. Our priorities shift.
We, like, certain strategies are dead and gone, but, like, a lot of it is still the same. But you can't call it SEO, because if you do, you don't get any more clients. So I get it, but I'm also sick of it. So anyway, I don't know what to call it.
[00:03:22] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay. So on this show, we're gonna call it AI SEO.
[00:03:25] Speaker B: Great. That sounds good to me. That is.
[00:03:27] Speaker A: I think it's descriptive because AEO sounds like. I don't know.
Sounds like, I don't know. Something I don't understand. But so I think at a fundamental level, to me, because, like, for context, 80% of our growth has come from content marketing and SEO. It's all that we've done. All that we've done from a content perspective that I think has worked. The other bit is like, integrations and partnerships.
[00:03:49] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:03:50] Speaker A: Which is cool. Like, as a SaaS business, that's kind of a lot of people's bread and butter.
SEO has been rough. I think we've lost about 60% of our traffic over two years ago.
A bunch of.
[00:04:05] Speaker B: It was really shitty.
That sounds normal. Everyone's going through.
I kind of look at it as two big 25 hits. Well, one was like a clear hit over when the aios rolled out on Google. And then kind of the year prior, it's just been this slow bleed out.
[00:04:22] Speaker A: There's.
[00:04:23] Speaker B: Everything's dipping a little bit month over month. And then when you actually add it all up or like the last year, there's like another 25 hit on. On top of that.
[00:04:31] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:31] Speaker B: So, yeah, that sounds right on target of everything else I'm seeing and hearing across the board. Obviously there's some exceptions in the space. There always are. But anybody that's had like a content program for the most part, if you told me, hey, we only dropped 60%, I'd be like, well, only. Yeah, that's fine. You're like, right on target. Anybody that's not dropping is actually like world class right now, which is nuts. So.
[00:04:53] Speaker A: Yeah.
And what's interesting is that all happened and our trial starts are about the same.
So. Cool. I'm like, probably a bit like HubSpot and I don't know if that's like a four letter word in your, in your world or not, but like they, they lost a bunch, right?
[00:05:08] Speaker B: Yeah, just top of funnel. It doesn't matter.
[00:05:11] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Right. It's like for us, we're a podcast hosting company. It's like best true crime podcast we launch lost a bunch of traffic on all these kind of things that like our customers are never, never going to. Like someone searching for that is never going to become our customer. I think that for me, the first place I look at this transformation, it is like the behavior and intent of a person doing a thing who will then end up at your brand.
[00:05:37] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:05:37] Speaker A: Before it was like podcast hosting platform for us or CRM and the HubSpot example or website builder or whatever. And now they're like asking a question or having a conversation with ChatGPT that then could lead them to your brand. And I guess the question is like, how do we put ourselves in front of that train?
[00:05:56] Speaker B: Yeah. So this is an excellent question and something I have. I think it's funny, everybody in the SEO space is now talking about bottom of the funnel and like all these product terms because I was like, do you all not know that affiliates exist?
Affiliate industry? And so my last business, I took it from 0 to 7 million in four or five years or something. And it was in 100% affiliate SEO play. We went after B2B. We probably did some podcasting posts at some point. It might have been going head to head with some of your stuff, but we were going after everything. We went super hard. And there is a very, very deep, like tons of experts have been doing this affiliate bottom of the funnel stuff for decades now. Like it's. None of this stuff's new.
But yeah, those terms matter more than ever. I mean, they always matter.
Like if you have an analytics tool, should you rank for best analytics tool? Yeah, like that's kind of top of the list.
The game, that game has shifted a little bit. I mean, the affiliate space has gotten like totally blown up. That's, that's a whole other thing. But for any software business, trying to go after those terms when people are like, it's, it's very in vogue in the SEO community right now. Whenever people are talking about that, I'm like, yeah, no, where the have you been? This is not new.
I mean, yes, it's, it's the, it's the one area that like hasn't been decimated and I think has long term like it's going to survive this AI transition.
So any investment into those terms or whatever the SEO is you want to do around that, which is a mix of stuff which I can talk about that I feel comfortable doing going forward or if I was brought in as some like head of marketing, VP of marketing, cmo, whatever, it's like I would do this day one and just get after it. But yeah, that stuff is all important. That is the easiest thing any company can do in order to set themselves up for an AI search world.
Those blog posts, the roundup posts, the review, there's like a whole category of terms that are all in the space, alternatives versus competitors. If you're on. If you have like an agency, it's agencies, services companies and you just, you find all the specific niches that do apply to you and then you get really focused on them and good content, tons of updates, good mix of landing pages. And we could talk about all this in specifics if you want, but that is the go to move right now. Honestly, it's not even right now. It's not even about the future. It's just you should have been doing all of that five years ago and somehow people forgot that or didn't focus on it. For me, I've done enough of it that it's just like, why would you do anything else? You start here. This is where all the money is. It's where you can like that's why all the massive affiliate businesses generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue have been going after this stuff for again, decades. So I consider it obvious. But I also agree it is going to survive this transition. So that's why everybody's talking about, about it now, even though it's not really a new thing.
[00:08:52] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean I'll just speak like from my perspective. We, we've done a bit of both. The reason we did more top of funnel stuff is it's just easier, right? Like yeah, long tail niche keywords like we, we have a pretty high doctor. We can just rank for stuff.
And that like makes you feel good. Like look, 2, 500 page views a month for this random thing.
[00:09:12] Speaker B: Traffic has value. It always did. You can build an audience, you get enough traffic, you can always convert them to an email list. And now you got this marketing flywheel moving. And SEO is straightforward and now it's not just the AI stuff. Google algorithm has gone all fucked up. I can talk about that if you want. So it's not the same game. That's. That's the biggest thing has changed regardless of what's happening with AI. Like, you can't just publish content and like rank and not even like spam content. Like you can. You can just go so hard on quality content. And even if the search volume's still there, trying to rank for that stuff is just. You'll lose your mind trying to go after it in many cases.
So pulling. You almost have to pull back on the editorial like programs because it doesn't work like it used to. So.
[00:09:57] Speaker A: Yeah, okay, so, so the playbook is like bottom of funnel versus pages comparison pages, like hardcore feature pages. I would guess listicles like best x4, y maybe even.
[00:10:09] Speaker B: Yeah. The big change that has shifted in this space that's relevant to all of your listeners. And this is all fairly tactical.
The biggest change Google has had with like the old school blue links on page one and just ranking things.
The biggest change in these bottom of the funnel terms is that Google really wants to rank specific landing pages for specific products.
It used to be even like back in 2022 that the entire first page of Google would be blog posts. Now there are some blog posts still there that are doing the like listicle roundups and reviews. They're still there, but it's not stacked like it used to be.
Now you get a ton of either home pages for products or landing pages for products.
So the trick now, or like the SEO tactical thing to do now is to actually go through your marketing site, your homepage, all your key like product pages and all that stuff, and really map it to the entire bottom of the funnel category that you're in. Any of these funnels, if you're like project management, CRM, podcasting, whatever it is, they are going to split and segment into all sorts of random stuff. There's always a few standouts like cheap and free and you know, you know, a few ones like that.
But there's. It's usually like very.
It's fragments and it's always different for every category. Right. Based on your industry and how your target market actually segments the products.
You want to go through that. You want to map out all those distinct topics, not just keywords, like actual, genuine, distinct topics. We could talk about what that means, but you go through the whole thing and then you sit down and say, okay, do we actually have a landing page that targets every single one of these like, if people are looking for free podcasting tool, do we have a landing page that is like, joined linked directly from our homepage that says free podcasting tools and this is our version of a free pie? It's not just a free plan. On our pricing page is do we have a landing page dedicated to that that will increase the odds that Google actually picks that up and says, oh, this is a product that's viable for this specific topic. Now you're in the running now. Maybe the competition is low enough that you rank immediately, maybe not, I don't know, but you actually have a shot.
And so like mapping that whole cluster and it's not just going out with blog posts, although you should probably do that too. But really going through all your landing Pages, every. Every SaaS company should be doing that right now. Again, they should be doing it.
[00:12:43] Speaker A: Tell me the difference in your mind between like a keyword and like a topic.
[00:12:48] Speaker B: Yeah, so this is something. The horror. Any hardcore SEO person will probably be very familiar with this. But like, so keywords, this is not new. This is not. Like in the last couple of years, I stopped thinking in keywords, I don't know, like a decade ago.
And when. So Google, long, long time ago, got pretty focused on the semantic stuff. You know, not just like, oh, is this singular versus plural?
That's old, old, old, old, but really going through and say, oh, when people use this word, it's basically the same as this other word. And figuring out all the random keyword combinations and basically clustering them really, really tightly. And now when you, like, go after a given topic, you're not just going after that individual keyword. You're going after hundreds, thousands of different keywords. And not just like subtopics, oh, that's a whole other version of this.
But just variants of that topic. Like, like two terms. I disagree with this, but Google mixes, like, considers them synonyms all the time, is like jobs and careers, even though they're two very different things. Like if you're in the like, career or job how to content space, which some of my clients have been, I've helped with them with some of that stuff. But Google will basically consider them synonyms all the way down. So whenever it's fucking maddening, it makes the content really difficult.
[00:14:06] Speaker A: Yeah, I can imagine.
[00:14:08] Speaker B: So what I have to, I have to constantly say, okay, is this true when I'm pulling up keywords and I'm trying to architect a blog or content or landing pages in this case, is this truly unique? Does Google truly consider this a Unique topic or am I just going to publish a bunch of junk?
It's not junk, but I'm going to publish a bunch of stuff and Google's like, it's all the same thing.
Why do I have all that stuff?
Like an easy way to go look at this is go like Nerd Wallet does a great job of keeping it clean. Investopedia too, HubSpot has done well. Go look at their popular blog posts and just look at all the crazy, crazy keyword variants that that post ranks for. It's all over the place.
So it actually takes a decent amount of work to like keep your structure clean. And whenever you're doing keywords, I always turn them into topics. That's the next step. We actually call it topic development. That's what I've called. My co founder taught me this in my last company and we, we actually had an entire process and like a full time person on just topic development to actually turn keywords into distinct topics that needed a unique landing page, blog post, whatever it is. And then you can also, the nice thing about this is this is the topic ends up being essentially your primary keyword. And it's very easy to assess the performance of that post or landing page and how much opportunity there is.
Because even if you're ranking and even if it's bringing some of this traffic on, some of this smaller stuff is like, are you winning the big thing yet? Yes or no.
And then maybe it's worth doing that investment. How far, far do you have to go?
[00:15:38] Speaker A: Right, yeah, got it. So I'm just going to paraphrase, roll up individual keywords and variants of that into an overarching topic and that topic becomes the new key phrase for that you want to write a piece of content for.
[00:15:50] Speaker B: Yeah, Just make sure it doesn't overlap with other topics. And the only way I know how to do that is check the SERPs. Just go look at Google and if there's a bunch of other random stuff that is all over the place, then it's probably not a unique topic. If everybody is like, oh, if every poster page is like on that thing, it's probably unique.
[00:16:07] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Okay.
I mean, so interestingly, I think we're still talking about Google.
Is that what you think about when.
[00:16:16] Speaker B: You do content right now? Yeah.
So let me say this. I am so glad I don't run a content agency.
Those folks. Oh man.
Yeah, I'm so glad. I don't like it. Like a client decides to end and you know, I'm doing like fractional head of marketing or head of content stuff. And if a client ends things, I'm just like, okay, move on.
But yeah, that it is, it is very difficult to justify budget in Google right now. Even though that's still where like comparatively that's where the money is. That's where even with all the hits, the 50, the 60% hits, all this stuff, it still dwarfs everything else today. Will it in the future? I don't know. Right. So I mean the other thing is, you know, when you're building like landing pages and stuff like this, you still want to work. I, I still see value in like the keywords and the, you know, the blue link rankings because that shows me how people are thinking about that product category or just that subject in general. Yeah. And yes, AR search is very different. People ask very different questions.
You know, the search behaviors are definitely evolving but it still gives me a lot of into like, okay, how, how are people segmenting this market?
What types of questions do they have? What are the primary topics when they want, when, when they're talking about a given topic, what is the real framing that they want above all else? Right. So you can get a lot of insights that, that can kind of fuel everything else that you're doing. So it's not, I still get value out, out, out of it. How long will that exist? I don't know.
[00:17:57] Speaker A: Yeah, interesting. I haven't thought of some of the value of this is the data from Google is available at least like the data from LLMs. There's some LLM tools that tell you some of this stuff, but on the whole they're not, they're much more black boxes.
Reminds me of the old days of SEO. We don't know we're trying to figure this stuff out with ranking and LLMs, but because there wasn't as much data then as there is now on Google, I want to ask about non website based content because this is something I hear more and more. It's like, hey, you got to have your content on your website and you got to have when it comes to LMS, your content, other places like Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn, YouTube for LLMs because they crawl all this stuff and they want to build like a map of your brand and your content from multiple places. Is that, do you believe that? Is that something you're doing?
[00:18:56] Speaker B: Yeah, it's not something I'm doing, but maybe I should.
Okay, so one of the ways to just make myself feel better about all of the transition that we're in is something I've been doing for like the last year.
And I want to do a lot more of it is basically go in in order. The way I figure out a new game or a new like fucking algorithm or a new world or whatever is go find the people that are pushing that system to the absolute limit and kind of work backwards from there. It's usually black hat hacker scammer.
And then because they're pushing it to the limit and they've already isolated things down to like the real inputs. Right. Like I'll give you an example from personal experience and maybe this qualifies me as like an affiliate scammer, I don't know.
But like my last business, the reason we did so well and we grew revenue so fast is we knew the Google game. And what was the loophole at Google in the past era was fucking links. That's it. That's how I can boil everything down to.
You have like a decently strong domain. You get enough links to a particular page. Yeah, you got to get the search intent right. And there's some other basic stuff you have to do. But like if there's one thing you push on harder than anything else, link building. Everybody in the affiliate space knew this. And the players that did the best were the best at link building, period.
There's a whole industry that could build up around this stuff and that's how you abuse the fuck out of Google.
So it's like, how, how is Google working links? It's that simple.
That is not true anymore.
The loopholes are definitely different. So if we work backwards from there, it's like, okay, what, who are the players that are abusing AI already and what are they doing? Well, there are scammers, maybe, maybe not even officially scammers, Just dodgy fucking companies doing things and abusing the hell out of Reddit. And that is carrying over into AI tools. Like I'm already seeing this.
I actually just released a post yesterday on the like the Windows key license space. There's all these sketchy companies that sell very cheap gray market Windows keys, you know, your licenses for your desktop or laptop. And they sell them for like nine bucks. The normal price is like 140 bucks. Right. And huge gray market. And they are showing up in AI tools, they're showing up in chat gbt, they're showing up in Perplexity.
And actually one of a company I looked at got two huge brand mentions right off the bat. When I was asking Perplexity about how do I get a Windows key, they came up right away. And I had already gone through this company and this website to figure out, okay, right, what are they doing marketing wise to like rank in Google. And the answer is just abuse the fuck out of Reddit.
But beyond that, what else is Perplexity referencing to, like, mention these brands and these things? These brands are new. They're not. These are sketchy websites. They don't have real authentic marketing funnels or brand searches or user behavior. So they're abusing something. What are they abusing? One, they are abusing Reddit. They're like all over the place. And it's just, you get a hold of alt accounts, you seed questions, you follow up with other alt accounts and fake responses. Like, if you don't do that shady stuff, you can. And it works. It works so well. It's stupid. But even if you want to do the authentic way, it's like, okay, how do you get people in Reddit talking about your company and like, connecting your brand name to like the entity in your product space? So like describing such and such brand as a CRM, you basically need those two things, right? To get so that every LLM can basically say, like, oh, this entity is close to this entity. Right? You just do that over and over again constantly. See it. So you can do it authentically. You can do it the shitty, scammy way, whatever the other thing to do. And I'm, I'm hearing this from the local SEO folks and I'm also seeing this too.
Chat GPT, I think uses it to some degree. Perplexity. Perplexity is getting duped. They're leaning on it too hard.
Perplexity really trusts trustpilot, like the review site.
[00:23:13] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:23:14] Speaker B: And I'm hearing it from the local SEO folks. That's not just Google reviews. It's like all the other review sites, like these AI tools, they rely on these review sites super heavily. Like, did these review sites matter? Yes. But now it's all like, kind of feels like I need to do more exploration and like, see if I can fuck with this some more.
[00:23:34] Speaker A: Like they have a deal or something, huh?
[00:23:36] Speaker B: No, you just do the fake shit. Come on, Amazon. Fucking fake reviews. Like, that's not new. This has been around forever again. Nothing's really changed. It's just like the tactics have shifted a little bit. And so now if like, some website is like, lars, we want to do like the hardcore, like, sketchy stuff to just like get our fucking marketing through the moon. Should we do a bunch of link building? I'm like, no, go pay for reviews. Like, that's the simple answer.
So, yeah, go pay for. There's all sorts of companies that will just juice your trustpilot reviews and your Capterra and Trust Radius and all these other sites. Go jack up those reviews as far as you can. And if you want to do things the real way or like the authentic way, then, okay, how are you going to your extremely happy customers and asking for reviews? Are you incentivizing reviews? Are you sending them like a little mascot, like Bobblehead if they do a review for you? I don't know if you like, you have fun with it. But how can you get your real customers seating all these reviews and getting your reviews way up? Because all it takes is like one dodgy competitor in your category. If they're pushing hard on this, they're going to destroy everybody else, right?
So that is front and center. It's like reviews and then constantly seeding conversations in Reddit and any other like, social area that's cool, crawlable.
Again, the, the black hat, the sketchy folks, they're already in these spaces. They're doing it constantly and they're everywhere.
That's why you can't like trust Reddit at all, really. You got to be really careful.
But like, all the affiliate, the sketchy affiliate folks, they all moved into Reddit and they're just going to town on it. They're not even trying to do it for brand building. They're just doing it to like for the affiliate commissions. And it's still working. And it's blatant when they're doing it. Like, if I, if I was, if I could check my conscious, like at the door or just like, forget that I, like, care about doing things the right way.
The easiest agency to build right now and I'd be making so much fucking money is I would just hit every SaaS fucking marketing team out there. And what I would do is I would just have like an army of people and they'd be just be buying up Reddit accounts left and right. And we would just be seeding. We wouldn't link. We would never link. This is how you keep, like me from figuring out what you're doing. You would never, ever link and you just see comments that mention your brand here and there. You also have to be disciplined. You can't hit it too hard because then people start to figure out what's going on. But if you just start sliding quietly into all the niche subreddits, there's so many, so many. If you just slide into them and just start seeding it, you will start getting picked. Not so a few things will happen. One, you'll get all the brand impressions with the people that actually follow that community who are probably a ton of professionals that are your exact target market. So you get that hit. Two, you rank in Google like immediately because Google just trusts everything in Reddit and that's how you get like the number two spot in Google for every term on the Internet right now. So boom, you get a second hit, the third hit, all the LLM data comes in and crawls it. Now you start showing up when anybody's like asking about your industry in any of these AI tools and you hit all of them all at the same time. Like that is the best ROI on the Internet right now. You just can't have any morals, right? Like you just have to be sketchy.
[00:27:00] Speaker A: Okay, but, but, but there's you know, white hat ethical version of that which is like, hey, yes, we got, we got these accounts, we developed them, we have 15 accounts. We're going to go and we're going to work with 10 brands at a time and we're going to put all, you know, of those accounts over here and do all this kind of network, brand, brand kind of equity stuff for you.
[00:27:20] Speaker B: There is the problem with Reddit is it's so anti marketing. So there are ways to do it authentically. I know of some people that have built like very great businesses primarily off of Reddit and everybody knows what they're doing. It's all out in the open and they've done a great job at it. It's usually like founder led or like evangelist type stuff. Right. Like I'm so and so I work at this company. You're being, you're, you know, the value first. You're slowly building the brand equity not just around your brand, but also your own username and becoming. This takes years to do the right way. Like Reddit is so anti marketing that you almost have to go like crazy long term to do it the real way. Otherwise you just get shut out hard.
[00:28:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:28:05] Speaker B: And yeah, you can do, you can do a little bit here and there. It's like, okay, maybe you have an employee bouncing around asking, you know, answering questions, but you, you got to be re like the line between like the community accepting you and you getting kicked out is like razor thin. That's why Reddit kind of became so popular for so long and that is around any healthy community that anti marketing bias is still there. So like publishing reports or doing lead gen funnels or anything like can't do any of that or like advertising webinars that can't do it. You gotta lead super value forward. And like if that's what I was doing, if I was building a SaaS company right now, I would probably as a founder I would be, I would figure out which communities I was going to focus on and I would start just being super healthy, helpful. But you can't just like, I, I, I've gotten a lot of marketing budget over the years and talk people out of a lot of marketing budget. I don't know how I would sell that to like most VPs of marketing or CEOs at the moment. Like, yeah, we're going to spend a bunch of time building up brand equity and you're not gonna see any results for like three years. Like good luck.
Maybe somebody else can do that.
But like a founder or CEO has to like really believe in that, which is why the founder led marketing is always like the go to. Right.
[00:29:21] Speaker A: But yeah, hey, we, we do, we do a bit of it and it comes mostly from me and I'm very open. Like hey, Craig here from Castos. Yeah, I mean we, we had, we had a post yesterday with like 50 comments.
[00:29:33] Speaker B: Great.
[00:29:34] Speaker A: I'm like, we don't get that from email. We don't get that. We sure as fuck don't get that from YouTube, which is the channel I want to like the most but is really, really hard for us at least, which is weird.
LinkedIn, I think it's just assessable like I'm there because I kind of have to be, I feel like, but I just, it has no value to me.
But yeah, like Reddit, I want to go as like hard as I can there because I think like it aligns with our type of customer a lot. Right. Like they are pretty techie, tech curious kind of folks.
They have a lot of questions. They like participating in these kind of forums and, and like it's easy for us to get like visibility there. So yeah, I mean like if I had to say we're only going to do one thing, it would be like work on the, on our site already, like to rank as well as we can and then like amplify that with Reddit. Like that, that is kind of our playbook.
[00:30:24] Speaker B: Yeah, that makes perfect sense to me. But it's also being led by you.
[00:30:27] Speaker A: Right?
[00:30:27] Speaker B: Which is why it kind of like works. Right. If you were to hire some agency to do it for you, then it like all starts to break down really fast.
[00:30:33] Speaker A: Yeah, I would, I would go a little gray hat with it. Like if we could buy old Reddit accounts and, and kind of juice some.
[00:30:39] Speaker B: Stuff in the community, it is very, very easy to do that. I know some pretty. I can't, I can't name names, but I know.
[00:30:46] Speaker A: Yeah, I'll hit you up afterwards.
[00:30:48] Speaker B: Pretty. Pretty. Major companies that brands that everybody would know are, are in Reddit and they're not doing it the authentic way. Yeah, you know, it's like the classic like viral. You know, you start fights in the community, right? Like you come out with a controversial take like podcasts are gonna die and then your alt account is like you anywhere. And then, then the whole community starts ripping itself apart and like your piece of content goes to the top. You know, it's like, yeah, people are doing that. Like so much of that is manufactured right now.
[00:31:20] Speaker A: That's crazy. Yeah, that's crazy. That's crazy.
I, I was listening to one of the HubSpot podcasts and they had a. They had their internal SEO person come out and say that their data says that their, their average website. Average customer. No, average website visitor. Average customer is. Average website Visitor is worth four times if they're coming from ChatGPT or LLM versus Google. Like the lifetime value of someone who comes from an LLM is four times what them coming from Google is. Does that make sense to you?
[00:31:54] Speaker B: Possibly.
But also it's probably just because it's like you got to be careful with these comparisons because it's not really the same.
It's not, it's not Apple to Apples. It's like comparing what is the Google or what is the value of a Google ver user versus an email or like a Google customer versus an email customer. Yeah, people have been making those comparisons for my entire career. I always thought it was so stupid because email customers are further down AI tool then hops on your site. They are way further down the buyer journey than most of the people that are hitting your site fresher from, you know, Google search directly. Yeah, same thing. While you can't really compare like what is the value of Facebook or Tick Tock or, or Twitter or you know, whatever Instagram customers. Like, that's top of funnel stuff. You can't like on roi, comparison doesn't really make sense because they're always stacked in different places of the marketing funnel. Right. So I mean, I'm not surprised.
[00:32:50] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think it's like a bit of relief though as someone who's like written a bunch of, of top of funnel stuff and worried about that a lot like to Say ah, let's just sell less important, let's focus only on bottom of funnel stuff. One, for Google, like that's great, you know, conversion. But two, if that's the shit that it matches, kind of the query intent of someone in LLM and that's how they're going to convert and that's the most important stuff. Like that's just a whole lot less that we have to worry about from like a, we got to optimize this piece of content like for a focus that's kind of nice.
[00:33:20] Speaker B: Yeah, it does provide a lot of focus. I mean I've got a SaaS client right now who has a pretty big blog that I've been overhauling. And like every three, if I was to describe how my strategy has changed in the last like year and a half, I went from, okay, let's try to, you know, kind of a standard, we're going after expansion here. We have a long, long history in this, like a ton of segments of all the marketing and I every like three, six months, I'm like, we got to pair this back even more. We got to keep it even more. Even more. Even more, yeah.
[00:33:52] Speaker A: And now even more bottom of funnel.
[00:33:54] Speaker B: Yeah. Like I'm just narrowing the content focus and right now so I mean with all this AI, I was like, oh, so like come down as I got like the biggest stuff fixed and now I'm like, you know what, I'm gonna flip this because I don't know where this is gonna end. I don't know if I can do like half a marketing or 30% of marketing or I'm not gonna reveal the exact categories because then I would give the company name away.
But like I don't know where I'm gonna have be able to draw the lines. I don't know how much informational content is gonna make sense.
[00:34:26] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:34:29] Speaker B: To the founders and say like, yes, I'm using your money effectively. That seems like a reasonable thing to have to say. So I'm like, okay, how, how do I make sure that regardless of what happens, I can say do a straight face to them? Yes, your money was well spent. Yes. Like we, we didn't know what was going to happen but man, we started with the stuff that had the highest potential for winning or just surviving and getting this through and provide. Let me just pretend this was a brand new SaaS startup. Like day one, what would I do? I'm like, well, bottom of the funnel. And then like this one little category, let me just go fix all the links and all the old content like just in there and there might be a world where I just have to like delete everything else. Right. Instead of trying to rescue this like big giant thing. Let me just simplify what to work on.
[00:35:18] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:35:19] Speaker B: Like yeah.
[00:35:20] Speaker A: So yeah. And I think like from a founder perspective that that's probably the hardest part. Right. Is like I got this to worry about. I got this to worry about. I got a, you know, product and marketing and sales and all this kind of stuff and like even within marketing and even within, within content to be able to say okay, it's like mostly 8020 is just bottom of funnel and like some community and authority and link building stuff. Maybe that's cool. That's less. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:35:43] Speaker B: Attention. I have posts that have like thousands of quality links, like really good links. I can't get em to rank for shit.
[00:35:51] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:35:51] Speaker B: Like yeah, the algorithm so wonky with links right now.
[00:35:55] Speaker A: So anyway, what do you think that people kind of in the SEO space or marketers who kind of think they know what they're doing with SEO, what do you think is something they believe or they're doing that is wrong?
[00:36:06] Speaker B: Aside from links talks about that as full. You know, like everybody talked about site speed for the longest time. I'm like don't matter how many times I've done site speed project and it like never impacted the site like at all. Like just make sure it's not slow as shit then you're fine. And ignore all the Google reports of like the last content paint all that fuck that shit. Right? So I had opinions about everything because I've been doing it for long enough and I tried like all of it and most of it it's a completely different algorithm them now and I hadn't really come to terms with that in that summer. I was still trying to like I was like, oh what's going on? I still was kind of in the old paradigm. I thought I was losing my mind.
And so fast forward like things kept getting worse into like 2024 and I think in early 2024 I just decided okay, the only way going forward I have to take every single S. I have to start over. Every tactic is now back on the drawing board. And if someone tells me like, I mean look, if they tell me site speed matters, I'm still going to tell them no dozens off. But like the vast majority of stuff I have to reconsider like there's a big argument right right now about like vector analysis and entities and measuring that on a content level and some people are Saying this really matters. And other people are saying, like me these days about stuff I get, I say way more. I don't knows about like tons of SEO stuff. And there's a theory of the moment in the SEO community. There always is.
My first take is like, maybe, I don't know, I'll go test it. Like I'll say right now people really aren't talking about this too much. But I feel confident about this one because I tested a bunch of times, like table of contents, like it's in the sidebar, like all the time. That's the invo design template, right?
And it shifted during this. Like a big algorithm change. It went from, everyone went from having the TOC in the body with those stupid, stupid plugins or sometimes they did it by hand. And it was well designed, but a lot of it was that one stupid plugin.
[00:38:02] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:38:02] Speaker B: And then everybody moved it into the sidebar or anybody that's like serious. All the business blogs moved it into B2B blogs moved into sidebar. And I was like, maybe that matters. Like I always thought TOCs were stupid, but maybe it matters now. I tested it on like four sites. Didn't do right. Like it just did not matter. I got it. Interesting, well designed.
And then there's some rumors, like someone at Google said like, it might actually be hurting crawling. And I'm like, Jesus Christ. So I like, if someone came to me and was like, yeah, the TOC really matters, you need to have that. Like every SEO audit I always do that. Step one, any new client I work on, I'm like, yeah, you can like do it because you believe in the design. I don't from a UX perspective, but if you do cool, go do that and then immediately move on to the next thing from a technical SEO or performance based perspective, it's not going to do anything.
And. But that, I mean, I had to figure out the hard way by doing it a bunch of times and seeing the results or not seeing any results. And now it's like I'd ignore that one.
[00:39:07] Speaker A: So anyway, I think that mirrors a lot of like what a lot of founders I'm talking to feel like just across the board. Right? Like used to be pretty clear there was the path, you know, you do this, this, this and this and then like you get customers. Now you're like, you know, AI and just like how totally changed.
[00:39:26] Speaker B: Like, yeah, everything's being ripped up and.
[00:39:28] Speaker A: I think willingness to pay and yeah, yeah, it's.
[00:39:31] Speaker B: But there are a few things that will come out of it. That actually matter.
I don't know what they are yet.
Glad I'm not building a SAS product right now. Oh, my God, I feel. Feel so bad for every SAS founder. That's just because being like, demolished by AI. Like, I feel it, I feel it.
[00:39:47] Speaker A: Yeah, it's. It's interesting. I mean, I don't know. Okay. Like, yeah, kind of zoom out a little bit. Like, we.
We've not been affected, like, negatively by AI in terms of like, growth or revenue or anything like that. I think we're relatively insulated, you know, from like, what we do, like what the job of our product is.
But, like, how do you see AI affecting kind of just like B2B in.
[00:40:11] Speaker B: General, like, operations or like company building? At what level?
[00:40:17] Speaker A: Yeah, I guess, like company building and like trajectory. Like, obviously, like smaller teams, more productive, more effective.
Like, I don't know. I don't know. Like, what, what do we. Let me ask it a different way, I guess, like, what are you kind of worried about and optimizing towards with AI in mind?
[00:40:36] Speaker B: So something that I've begun to believe in.
I. I will. Let me. Let me speak from the marketing, the content perspective. I probably had the most opinions about AI because I've been in it enough and I'm seeing there, There are playbooks that are starting to develop and I'm just. Basically, I've come to terms with the fact that I don't want to do that and that sucks, and I'm gonna go do something else. So the way content marketing is going, like building an inbound engine for your company, the way AI is impacting that is probably the most reliable path forward that'll give you the benefits without getting you burned, is a huge chunk of your content is driven by AI, but you have something original to fuel it. Right? You're not just going into AI and basically being like, give me 100 blog posts on these topics. Like, that's like, that might work a little bit for a while, but you're also like, really jacking up the risk, right? Like, there's already sites getting burned by that stuff. So just. And maybe you're doing enough quality to stay in the clear. Maybe there's a shitload of risk hanging over your head. You don't realize it that that was my company, my last company, I had this existential risk hanging above it all the time, and I didn't even know it until it started to flip, right? So that can happen. But the way to do it, the legit way, like, let's say you're A major. You're, you know, you're going for ipo, you're raising your series DC and you're doing massive content budget. Something like, what would the content team look like? Well, as you're probably taking some original content if you have a very prolific founder on the content space. Great. You have tons of material to work with.
Maybe you're, you have a few internal writers that are doing, doing really top tier stuff. Independent studies, you know, working first party data. Yeah, first party data. And that's like the fuel. Like so you get like one big study out that's basically written by hand and it's like a really, really high level. And then you take that study and you turn it into just endless LinkedIn posts, endless ads, endless funnels, endless blog posts. You update all of your blog posts with that data. Right? You can just kind of like you take that original stuff and you just, just take the volume and jack it the way up. So you get, that's sort of like the, the sweet spot. You get all the volume from AI, but then it's also unique enough that it's not just pure AI content. Yeah, it's. I think the top tier content teams are doing some version of that right now.
That sounds miserable to me.
[00:43:11] Speaker A: That sounds terrible.
[00:43:12] Speaker B: Yeah, I, I get it. And the people running it I respect.
Like it takes a lot of skill to run like to keep the quality high enough, but then also get the volume that is respectable. So I'm not talking. And it, it works. Right now it is actively working for major. So if you're. Yeah, you know, I'm not going to name names because I'll accidentally name someone I know. But if you're major brand and you want to go super hard on content in all the categories, it's like some version of that.
Now I, I've made the decision that like fuck that shit, I want to do it.
So I'm probably not going to be some VP of marketing at like the Shopify or something. I don't know if Shopify is doing this, but like some big brand.
[00:43:52] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:43:54] Speaker B: But so my theory, and maybe this pans out, maybe it doesn't. So like, you know, everything is going in that direction. And I mean B2B content marketing was already kind of going this way. It was just like human fueled. But like every, right, every block arbitrage is just different. Yeah, the arbitrage is just different. But like even the voice, the branding, like I always thought it was really funny when any like B2B content team spent A ton of time on their, like, voice guidelines was like, when's the last time you went to a blog, any blog, and it had a unique voice, right?
And that's been true for a decade, right? Like this. Nothing. It hasn't stood out for a while. And now AI is just, like, fueled that to the 10th degree. And now regardless if it's AI or C with humans, or even if it is human generated, like, it's all identical anyway. So how, like, you can't really stand out and the volume is just so high that, like, even if you could still get traction with it, like, I think everybody's brains are just going to start to gloss over. It's like all the same post, the same PDF, the same. It's like how. What Canva did, all the B2B design stuff, like, it's. It all looks the same now.
[00:45:03] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:45:04] Speaker B: So, like, well, what if. What if you lean in the exact opposite direction and say, the volume, the mass content. I'm gonna lean super, super hard into authenticity, one off content.
And when I've got something to say, I'm gonna go hard. I'm gonna make it authentic. There's gonna be typos so people can see it's real. I'm not even gonna have an editor like it. I want things to be messy. My screen shots are going to be a little janky and. But everybody, what. What I can absolutely deliver in spades is that when someone shows up or when sees any of my content, they're like, oh, that's Lars. That's real. And they can just get that feeling right off the gate. Like even Pinterest, right? It's all AI generated slop. And it all feels the same. Facebook feeds, same shit. TikTok's going this way. Everything's just generic. It's got that same stylistic vibe. What if you lean into the human, like, especially my. My bet is that everybody is just gonna, like, we're all. We're already getting overwhelmed with this AI stuff, and we're all kind of getting overwhelmed with this. These inbound funnels. We're all, like, desperate for that authentic stuff and that connection. And like, can I actually talk to somebody and actually, like, like, beyond just the insights and the tactics, can I actually connect with them at, like, a deeper level and feel like we're fucking doing something together? Right?
And what type of content is going to start to create that connection? And how do I lean into that authentic? It is hard. It is brutally hard. The other thing that makes this difficult, even though I Truly believe in this. I don't know how to sell this as like a service to some company.
[00:46:34] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:46:35] Speaker B: Because it's like I've hired so many writers. I built a ton of content teams in different industries, different businesses. And look, the brutal truth is that most people can't do that content. They just can't. They don't have it in them. No matter how much writing coaching they get, no matter how much time you spend with writer rooms and your editorial processes, hitting that bar of quality is hard. That's why like the founder led marketing still works, is because yeah, you have something to say. You can say something in your space that hasn't been said before and I'm.
[00:47:06] Speaker A: The only one that can say it.
[00:47:07] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. You can't. Like how do you build like, Like I'm going to go build a content agency that promises that like. No. Like it's so hard.
And I've, I've even worked with like massive creator based businesses. And who's the only one that can like keep that business fueled? The creator. The person that started it.
[00:47:25] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:47:26] Speaker B: Right.
[00:47:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:47:26] Speaker B: And then every once in a while there's like some, there's like one other person on the team that can like hit that bar consistently, but they're unicorns. They're usually not paid enough and it's, it's a one off. Right.
So I think like going forward to kind of like give a little, put a bow on this and give something recommended. Like if you're a founder and you're an S, you like marketing, you like content.
I would, I would lean into that. If you enjoy that, whatever content medium you can, I think that'll continue to stand out. The other thing I think a really smart, cutting edge company would do if they want to like break out of this, like AI descent to the bottom or just AI descent to the generic content. That all sounds the same.
You might like the evangelist role is not new. Right. That has existed other companies and it's kind of risky because you're taking on someone full time and their whole job is basically through their own personal brand. Just rep the out of your company.
[00:48:28] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:48:28] Speaker B: What happens when they leave fair concerns? I don't think that's a problem. I think the ROI is more than there. Again, evangelist roles have been around for a while, but I think if a company really wanted to lean in to that to like really authentic comp content, you find the one person that is like already a thought leader in the space that they're willing to go hard. Like I, I'd love to, if anybody's listening to this, I'd love to work in this world. But anyway, whatever.
[00:48:54] Speaker A: We, I mean we, we tried to, we tried to hire or let someone join the company like in an equity role. Who would be the super B2B thought leader. You probably know this person come in like they're a big podcaster and they just rep the shit out of us. And I, I thought they would be worth giving up, you know, a few percent.
[00:49:12] Speaker B: I wouldn't give equity. To be fair. I would never give up equity. But yeah. Yeah. So I assume it didn't pan out.
[00:49:18] Speaker A: It didn't work. No, I mean they, they had their own thing that started really working. But yeah, I think that's part of it. So you got to find that it's like, like hiring, you know, co founder. Like you got to find that type of person at the right.
[00:49:27] Speaker B: I think more misses than not.
What was that guy that was the Apple evangelist for a number of years. He wrote like art of art of the startup.
[00:49:39] Speaker A: I don't know.
[00:49:40] Speaker B: But yeah, this was in like the 90s in the odds. Right. Like that's how you cut through now.
[00:49:45] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:49:45] Speaker B: And I think you'll have more misses than not. I wouldn't give up equity. You're probably going to have to pay quite a bit but like I think you still manage it. Like I don't think you have to pay obscene, just has to be high, not absurd. And you also have to be willing to cut ties quickly if they don't. It's like hiring like a VP of sales. Right. Like either you have an impact in the first 30 days or we walk away type of thing.
[00:50:10] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'll just like echo something you said is like for my personal kind of content, the best stuff I've done are just like selfie videos in the car or walking the dog. It's the only concept for me that works. Like I can write by hand great posts. I can, the I write with chat. GBT works way better. Like the text based stuff works way better than my, my personal writing. But if I'm walking the dog and I shoot a little self video, talking about marketing or something, it's, it performs ten times better.
[00:50:41] Speaker B: Yeah. Because it's authentic.
[00:50:42] Speaker A: It's in the moment and, and on YouTube and LinkedIn. Yeah, yeah. So I think that's why these like you see these fucking founder brand agencies everywhere.
[00:50:52] Speaker B: Yeah. And either you're going to do some version of that personal branding, whether you hire an evangelist, you founder led, whatever.
[00:50:59] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:51:00] Speaker B: It's either that or you're going to go have to pay a shitload of influencers to rep you for you.
[00:51:05] Speaker A: Right, right. Which is the kind of D to C play.
[00:51:08] Speaker B: Yeah, that's is, I think even on a B2B basis, like even like, I mean that maybe that's the arbitrage opportunity. Finding every B2B thought leader in your category and paying them a bunch of money to rep your.
Like there's no infrastructure. It's like all, it's all built out on the B2C side, but not B2B.
And like the, you know, the AI stuff is all the old like direct response channels are kind of in decline and they're getting rougher and more competitive and they're. The pie is shrinking.
But how do you get in front of everybody else now? Influencers.
[00:51:45] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:51:46] Speaker B: Or, or ads. Ads. Paid influencers. So what's the only organic method? An in house influencer of some kind. Whether it's a founder or, you know, maybe you have a small team of people that extremely high caliber. I don't know.
But the options have narrowed and yeah, it's definitely gone through a pretty big shift. So.
[00:52:06] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Well, man, this is awesome.
Folks who want to reach out. You're on LinkedIn. Is that the best place to connect?
[00:52:12] Speaker B: Yeah, I am on LinkedIn. I like it a little bit. I don't know.
[00:52:15] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:52:16] Speaker B: I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on Blue Sky. Although I have like no followers and it feels like it goes down there whenever I publish something. It's very sad. So if you're on Blue sky, follow, follow me.
And then I, I do have a Twitter account.
I feel bad every time I look at it because of Elon. And then actually the main way to stay in touch is I have a newsletter. It's@lars lofkin.com email. I don't know, every couple months or something when I've got something really important to say, that's the best way to like stay in my world.
[00:52:47] Speaker A: Stay in touch. Awesome. We'll link all that in the show notes below. Lars, this is awesome, man. Thank you very much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.
[00:52:53] Speaker B: Sure. Yeah. Had a great time, Craig.
[00:52:55] Speaker A: All right.
