209 - How to Optimize Your SEO for the AI-First Search Era with Ryan Doser

0:0097 % of all YouTubers have less than 10 ,000 subscribers. So technically speaking, I'm a top 3 % YouTuber, which is honestly wild to think about because I have no creativity. I still get scared talking to the camera. I know nothing about editing or graphic design, but it's my SEO background that's really fueled all of this growth. The difference between what my strategy is, I think we should first differentiate between educators versus entertainers. Most people go on YouTube to be entertainers, which in my opinion is a bad idea unless you're attractive or you have a good personality. Both people, in my opinion, should default to educators.

0:38All right, Ryan, I am really stoked to have you. When I came across your YouTube page in particular, I just thought I have to talk to this guy because you're doing incredible things and you're utilizing AI. You're showing people how to utilize AI in their business right now, especially people like me who are just trying to figure it out. They're trying to get to their first million dollars and everyone's talking about AI, but how do I actually leverage AI in a way that's going to make me money. And that's all your content is about. How do you take these tools that we currently have and figure out ways to increase distribution or to improve your brand or to repurpose content or to find a way to get another employee on board that you can't necessarily afford to have?

1:14So for those who are just listening for the first time, Ryan Doser, you've got a YouTube channel, 20 ,000 subscribers. You've got more than 10 years of experience in marketing. You've done marketing for the big boys, people.com, home and garden. You've managed multimillion dollar media budgets, even featured on all the sites. Like, uh, who were you saying? Forbes and business insider. Just Google my name. You'll find it. Yeah. Yeah. Google. Oh, dude. The Adam Newman quote, Google me. Yeah. Google me. Yeah. That's so great. So good. Okay. So you've like done some real freaking things with your life.

1:50How did you get into what you're doing right now? Well, first of all, Nick, I appreciate you having me on. You've had some very good guests and a lot of great topics that you've covered on this show. So it's an honor to be here first and foremost. I would say what really got me started, I started down the traditional path of nine to five corporate America. I was there for about 18 months or a year and a half at Meredith Corporation. You mentioned people.com. So I was running multi multi-million dollar paid marketing budgets for people, better homes and gardens, and all the other titles that now dot dash Meredith owns.

2:21So we're talking, you know, 30, 40 plus brands at this point, all very big names. From there, I really got sick of the traditional nine to five corporate lifestyle. I realized after reading the four hour work week by Tim Ferriss, that was kind of what ignited by my spark. So to say, I quickly realized that the system rewards busyness over actual production. And I didn't want to sit there for 40 years looking busy for 20 hours while I work for the other 20, because that's what I was, that's what I was doing. That was a traditional nine to five corporate, very grateful for my old boss and company for hiring me, getting my foot in the door.

2:56Don't get me wrong there. But that was what really ignited everything. And he had this quote that stuck with me in the four hour work week, which I don't know if you've read, obviously it's a very popular book. Most people choose the path of unhappiness over uncertainty because of fear of the unknown. And so that's always stuck with me is choosing uncertainty over unhappiness. And so from there, about two months into the job, I started a blog. I started learning SEO. I was like, what is this SEO thing? And I started learning SEO, affiliate marketing, email marketing, and all the other parts that go into the digital marketing umbrella.

3:28Really, I was self-taught. Combination of trial and error, combination of just kind of putting myself out there, spinning up WordPress sites, spinning up campaigns, and just seeing what happens alongside that nine to five. And then I got my first client and just kind of said, screw it, and just see what happens. that kind of took that leap of faith and were here ever since 2019. How old are you? I'm 29. 29. Okay. Married kids, no kids. Just got married last August. So coming up on the one year anniversary. Okay. And so did you make the leap before or after you got married? I made the leap in 2019.

4:01This was well before I met my current life. Okay. Okay. Okay. Cool. Dude. What I think is interesting is you, you referenced that quote, which I haven't heard from Tim Ferriss before, which is most people choose the path of unhappiness over the path of uncertainty. It's really just a rephrasing of a very old saying, which is the devil, you know, over the devil, you don't write like people choose the devil. They know because I, at least I know what to expect. If I go and try this new thing, I don't, I don't know what to expect. That's scary, but it holds a lot of people back. I mean, it holds a lot of people back from actually doing the things that they want to do.

4:35So when you read that, did you just start, Hey, I'm going to start on the side trying to do the stuff. Or were you like, that's so true. I'm out. No, no, it was on the side for sure. And you know, I was literally sitting there at work reading it and he, he gave this example. He used to work in corporate. So he gave this example of something that I resonated to right away, where he said, if you want to be the best corporate employee, walk around with a stack of papers with your phone up to your ear and talk and act like you're talking to someone. Oh my God, that guy deserves a raise. What is he doing?

5:04He must be doing something really important, right? It's this facade of busyness. And so once I started to learn that concept, started doing my own stuff on the side, didn't dive in right away. I know people that, you know, take the leap of faith initially, instantly, and just go for it. I kind of weaved my way into it, so to say. But yeah, it's, you know, fast forward to today, I'm just a solopreneur, YouTuber, like you mentioned, run a marketing agency with more than one client now focusing on high ticket lead gen. You know, I got a lot of moving parts here and that's probably the, a good and a bad thing.

5:35Diversifies revenue, but also kind of pulls me away when it shouldn't. So I'm all over the place today, Nick, if I'm being honest. Dude, no, that's amazing. I mean, and that's the cool thing about entrepreneurship for people like you and I is I can tickle my curiosity anytime I want. Oh, I can, I could follow this project or do that thing. Cause I don't have a boss necessarily telling me what to do every second of every day. It's also the downside. It's like, sometimes you wake up and you're like, wait, what should I be working on right now? And if you're not organized or have a system that that can be scary and overwhelming.

6:05So video is cool, but I have what scientists call a face for radio. And so it's even cooler is long form audio via my podcast and my newsletter, nickonomicspod.com. Go there for free, subscribe to my newsletter. It's one email per week, super tactical. And then go to my audio podcast. I do three to five episodes a week, depending on how curious I am. And it's stuff like this. It's all free, no sleazy sales pitches, Nickonomicspod.com. When did you start messing around with AI? Yeah, my first look of AI was 2021. Well, I probably used it before that, but the most vivid memory in my mind is 2021, Jarvis AI, now Jasper AI, they got sued by Disney, had to rebrand, didn't realize what they were doing at the time, but it was the first iteration of what we now know today as rappers, AI rappers.

6:47They were using GPT-3, the API key behind the scenes on top of a fancy website. And I started using this and my mind was blown instantly. I thought, wow, okay, I need to really rethink about everything that I know currently about SEO, copywriting, and really marketing as a whole. Because once Jasper came out and it started to gain some traction, I'm sure you're familiar with Jasper. Well, then chat GPT launched, right? OpenAI launched an actual LLM or an interface where we could start using open AI's models called chat GPT in November of 2022. And that's when things really started to take off.

7:20For people who don't know, Jasper, what is, was a tool that people would use for copywriting, especially on social media. You know, you're trying to ideate, you're trying to, hey, this is something that I'm thinking about, or here's some data points. Like, can you help me write something pithy? Or can you help me write a long blog post, et cetera? Jasper AI was my first introduction to AI as well. But now we have Claude and we have Chachapiti and we have Grok and we have a plethora of different tools that we can kind of use at our disposal. So at that point you were focusing pretty heavily on SEO, I'm assuming if you're writing that much content with Jasper.

7:54Yeah, absolutely. I still do a decent amount of SEO work, but I'm kind of starting to pivot out of it. I see the writing on the wall for traditional top of funnel informational SEO with AI search and AI generated serps coming into play. But yeah, now I'm kind of focused more on the YouTube and local SEO side of things. That's a whole other conversation, but I'm very bullish on those avenues of SEO. I want to talk about both of those things. So Google, for whatever reason, waited for a really long time to have AI answers in their searches. And they've turned it on now. And they said at their IO, hey, we've figured out the monetization model.

8:27So they figured it out at this point. I think they were waiting because obviously, dude, Google search was like the most profitable business of all time. It's just like an amazing business. It's just printed money. And obviously, they don't want to cannibalize that business. So it took them a while to figure out how to, how to monetize this stuff anyways. So they've, they've figured out now how to add AI answers into each one of these searches. Yeah. But it has a lot of people scared. It has a lot of people scared because they're like, well, what does that mean for my SEO? And what does that mean for like trying to rank and how do I actually drive traffic to my website?

8:57And so what you're saying is, yeah, I've, I've kind of pivoted away from that kind of SEO to now YouTube and video. Can you talk about why? What's the thesis behind that? Absolutely. Well, first and foremost, SERPs have been busy since getting busier since, you know, 2016, 2017, 2018. Google has traditionally always been seeking what's called a zero click search experience. They want people to stay on the search engine as long as possible without giving that traffic to a third party publisher. We saw this through featured snippets. That was one of the first iterations of AI search. Then we went into AI overviews and now we have Google AI mode, right?

9:32Where it has a whole tab. It's just a generated, a whole page of AI generated results. But anyways, what you asked there, the big reason is YouTube SEO, look at YouTube as kind of your foundation for content. So YouTube SEO, in my opinion, look at the results on YouTube. They're not AI generated. In my opinion, I don't think Google's going to have AI generated YouTube results because you look at the intent of someone for searching on YouTube. They want long form video. Sure, there's a whole audience dedicated to shorts, but I am so bullish on long form YouTube videos and YouTube SEO because A, you can use it as your content foundation to repurpose it with AI for other mediums.

10:11And B, I don't see YouTube SEO going anywhere. And if you not to mention, if you look at traditional Google search, they're actually putting more YouTube videos in the search for various queries instead of traditional third party websites, because Google is an alphabet owned entity, right? So they're going to keep promoting all of their different products in traditional Google surfs as well. What's a surf? I don't know what that is. Oh, sorry. Yeah. Search engine results page. Oh, okay. Search engine results. Is there a way to show in the data that like, Oh, actually video is getting more and more of a share of the click through or of the results.

10:44Or is this a feeling that you have of like, no, I just think we're getting more of it. Like why the thesis? I don't have any concrete evidence, but if you just do general searches for different things in your niche or other niches, I almost guarantee you're going to start to see more YouTube videos pop up. If you look at the underlying thesis of SEO, what are you doing? You're building trust. You want people to trust you, but you also want Google to trust you. That's why you do backlinks. That's what like, you want to be somebody who they look at and they're like, Oh, they're reputable. They have a lot of information.

11:13There's a lot of backlinks. People look at them. We'll reference their site. In my opinion, video is probably the best way to build trust at scale because they're seeing you, they're hearing you and you're able to communicate your ideas right like if i say to you ryan you're a freaking moron or if i say right you're a freaking moron those are two very different meanings in there right and that doesn't necessarily come across and we're in written form but if i if you see a video it's like oh i like ryan he has a cool sense of humor i like nick he's quirky and so i think building trust at scale has always been the name of the game when you're this organic marketing and video, man, there's just, in my opinion, there's no better way to build trusted scale than through video.

11:56Yeah. I would say long form video. I would kind of disagree with that on the short form side. I see that more as kind of a quick dopamine hit. I also forgot to mention that YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world behind Google. So people don't even realize that YouTube is the second biggest search engine, not to mention you think of the branding behind YouTube. You have people on one camp saying TikTok sucks. We don't trust Google and this and that. But in my opinion, YouTube seems to be getting more popular and you don't really hear a lot of negativity around it. It's got a pretty good brain behind it.

12:25This is an idea that I'm literally just thinking of on the spot. I saw this interview with Elon Musk and he was like, at this point, our models have all been trained on the totality of human knowledge. So it's like, okay, we've uploaded all the books and all the studies and everything. And it's been trained now in order for AI to keep up, like going to have to ingest new information. Where's new information being published? It's like long form video. And so Google owning that platform, I think pointing people to the platform makes sense to me as well. I also totally agree. Shorts is not the best way to build trust.

12:55Shorts is a really good way to point people to your long form, but no, I, yeah, that you're not building trusted scale with shorts. I agree. It's top of funnel. Totally, totally top of funnel. So you saw that you, and you had already been doing the SEO, the pay-per-click you've been doing digital marketing. when did you decide you know what i should put my money where my mouth is and i'm going to start a youtube channel august of 2023 so it's actually been less than two years and i actually i talked to roberto blake i don't know if you know who that is i had him on my podcast he's a big time youtuber and he brought up this statistic that 97 of all youtubers have less than 10 000 subscribers so technically speaking nick i'm a top three percent youtuber which is honestly wild to think about because I have no creativity.

13:38I still get scared to pop into the camera. I know nothing about editing or graphic design, but it's my SEO background. That's really fueled all of this growth. And that's what I've learned from this whole thing. Okay. Say the number again. How, what percentage have less than 10 ,000 subscribers? 97 % of all YouTube channels have less than 10 ,000 subscribers. Holy crap, man. That's insane. So how long did it take you to go from zero to kind of that 10 ,000 mark? Zero to 10 ,000, probably between 10 and 13 months. It took me about 20 months to hit 20 ,000. Definitely a shorter period of time. The thing I've noticed about social platforms in particular is that at least the way that they're moving to is it doesn't really matter how many subscribers you have anymore, especially on Twitter.

14:25Twitter used to, when you had a lot of subscribers or followers, you could post something and most of them would see it. but now every platform is really prioritizing whether or not that content is engaging viral whatever you want to call it and so i've seen that on youtube as well now there are subscribers they have the notifications turned on you're in your big account you're obviously going to get traffic that way but there are small accounts who are just starting out and if your video is good and people are sharing it and they're liking it that algorithm is going to push you and it's going to push you for a really, really long time.

14:58So my question kind of in framing that is people are really nervous about getting onto YouTube because they're like, Oh, I don't have anything to say. And in a weird way, it's like, yeah, you need to have something good to say. Otherwise the algorithm is not going to push you, but you're not going to get good at it unless you start publishing a bunch of crap. So how did you find the balance? Like what was your thought process and getting started on YouTube? Yeah. Myself included actually, Nick, funny enough, I still get the jitters every time I hit the record button. And I don't consider myself very good on camera to this day, but really the difference between what my strategy is, I think we should first differentiate between educators versus entertainers.

15:32Most people go on YouTube to be entertainers, which in my opinion is a bad idea unless you're attractive or you have a good personality. In my opinion, should default to educators. Find a niche that you know a lot about, that you're passionate about. And to add a cherry on top, maybe a lot of people are searching for, It has a lot of high ticket affiliate opportunities or sponsorship opportunities behind it. But for me, I saw the mix of AI and marketing as being a niche that I could really dive into and go after all sorts of good keywords, right? A lot of review content, a lot of comparison content, a lot of how-to content.

16:07One of my best videos, 10 best AI tools for marketing and content creation. That's a big keyword, best AI tools for marketing. And so once you attach a keyword behind each video that you go after, I'm not saying every single video has to have a keyword behind it, but 90 to 95 % of your videos should have a target keyword behind it and optimize for that keyword in title, thumbnail, hook, whole packaging, you know, throughout the, throughout the retention and the description, I can go into all the little elements of SEO. If you want me to. So interesting, dude. But that's what I would recommend people do is focus on the education side versus the entertainment side and find a niche that you're passionate.

16:43You know, a lot about. Yeah. Yeah. When I first started getting into social media, I started on Twitter and then obviously I started a podcast and many people associate, Oh, you're doing social media. You want to be famous. And so I use different terminology. You use entertainer. I use famous. And then I use for business purposes and you use education, which yours are way better. I'm probably going to steal those. But yeah, there are people who are like, Oh, I want to be famous. And so they get into social media. But for me, it was like, no, I want to meet people. I want to network. I want to build a brand.

17:14I want to actually have an opportunity to learn. So that's why I got in to social media. I was just kind of like documenting my experience. Hey, I don't know if you remember this, but when we started this podcast, we entered into a social contract. I would spend time, energy, and money producing this podcast, interviewing these individuals and giving you insights into how to build, buy, start, grow your business. And you would like subscribe and leave me five-star review. Now, out of that, we both get to talk to really cool people and hear really cool insights. We both get a ton of value, but I just want to help you keep your word.

17:48So would you do me a favor? Will you go leave a five-star review for me on Apple or Spotify? It would really help. And if you want, even share this with a friend. And I think that many entrepreneurs still have that misconception of, well, if I'm making content, it's because I have to have the latest TikToker. I'm trying to be an entertainer. It's like, no, man, you're building a brand. And now to frame it in the context that you're saying, where you're viewing it as your modern SEO, that makes total sense because you've got the thumbnail and you've got CTR and you've got average view duration and you want to know the click-through rate of the end screen links.

18:24It's just sort of now an extension of that digital marketing, right? Yeah. And I think packaging is everything on YouTube. You could apply this to any marketing channel in my opinion, but it starts with target keyword, title, thumbnail, hook. If you don't have those things dialed in, say goodbye to the rest of any potential success on any video that you publish. Do you recommend the entrepreneurs, like whether or not they feel like they're good on camera should start a YouTube channel? I do. You know, I think there's a lot of things that you can learn from it. Obviously there comes the benefits of getting targeted keywords on YouTube, getting more traffic leads revenue from YouTube, but think about psychologically and mentally what that does to overcome a barrier.

19:04Hey, I'm not good on video. I'm not good on camera, but then you push yourself to actually do it, which I've seen benefits from this in the real world, networking with people and talking to people. It's overcoming that hump of being scared on camera, being scared to actually put yourself out there. I think psychologically that does a lot more and has a trickle effect to other areas of business. Yeah. I have a friend of mine who started, do you know what ADUs are? It's an additional dwelling unit and they're getting really popular in States like California where real estate's getting really expensive and people are aging and they can't necessarily put their parents in a home, but their parents can't necessarily afford to live by themselves.

19:42And so they'll build this, what's called ADU. It's, I can't remember the exact specifications for it, but it's like, let's call it a thousand square feet or less, but it's an additional dwelling unit on their property. So they can go to the bank and they can pull on their line of credit or the equity in their home to build this ADU. And it's a win-win. It adds value to the property. It allows their parents or whoever to move in. It's great. And so it's become really popular in California. And a friend of mine started an ADU company five years ago, right when COVID started, they're doing great.

20:09They do one ADU a week on average next year. They're projected to do two ADUs a week. And ADU is $300 ,000. So they're doing like$15 million a year this year in revenue. It's incredible. And he was telling me about their main marketing channels. And I was like, okay, so are you doing like pay-per-click? Are you doing like meta ads? And he was like, no, our two biggest marketing channels are one non-media. We just hold an open house. So after they build the ADU in the neighborhood, they hold an open house and then they get a ton of referrals that way. And then the second one is Instagram. He's like, we put educational content out on Instagram.

20:44He's like, oh, check out our Instagram. We have 4 ,000 followers. And I was like, oh, cool. So I, you know, I wouldn't look at backyard estates. If anyone's wondering, those two things have been like their main deal flow. And that was interesting to me. And now talking to you in that context, if these are traditional entrepreneurs and now they're starting to see like the media piece, isn't just funny TikTok dances. Like this is driving real value to people. Yeah. You know, I would encourage him to do long form YouTube and then use AI to repurpose that into short clips that he could then go down Instagram reels and TikTok and all sorts of other things.

21:16Go on. That's what my playbook is. And I've seen this work for other businesses. You start with long form video as the foundation, upload to YouTube. I mean, you can have a podcast, upload that to podcast platforms as well. And then you leverage AI. I have an automation. I mean, we can talk about that later on, how I repurpose my YouTube videos, but then you leverage AI to repurpose that long form video into short form content variations through clips for TikTok reels, you know, Facebook, et cetera, and also short form posts, whatever platform that may be right. Twitter, Facebook, text-based content, but also email content.

21:51You can repurpose that into email newsletters every week. You can repurpose this into emails for a drip sequence. These are just some of the examples that I've done. I also repurpose it into video scripts for my clone. That's just another thing you can do. If I'm an entrepreneur, let's say that I'm 80 years, right? And there's a million pain points that people could have. There could be, how do I finance them? How do I pick the right contractors? How do I know what size ADU to build? What architect should I use? Should I go through the city by myself or should I use a consultant? Those are just like five pain points.

22:23I, as somebody who owns the ADU building company, could sit down and say, I'm going to film one video educating people on the financing. And I'm going to tell them, this is how you go to the bank. This is what you talk about. This is what you present to them. These are the documents that you'll need. And it's going to be a 20 minute explainer. And I'm going to put a ton of thought into it so that I can educate people. and then from that, like you're saying, I'm going to be able to then post multiple clips. I'm going to be able to do written form. I'm going to be able to put a blog. I'm going to be able to do email.