How to Get AI to Recommend You

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2:08Go to horizon3.ai slash problem solvers and request your free Node Zero demo. Again, horizon3.ai slash problem solvers. No commitment required. Results in hours, not weeks. From Entrepreneur Media, this is Problem Solvers, a show that solves entrepreneurs' toughest problems. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, and each week I take a problem that you're probably dealing with and get tactical solutions from people who have been there and solved that. So let's get solving. Have you ever heard the phrase Google Zero? It's what all my peers in publishing are afraid of right now.

2:50Google Zero is the idea that one day, perhaps very soon, 0 % of a publisher's traffic will be coming from Google. Like 0 % of traffic to entrepreneur.com would come from Google. That is a big change from just a few years ago when publishers basically lived off of Google traffic, when like 70 or 80 % of a publisher's traffic came from Google. So now you hear it all the time. People are asking each other, are you prepared for Google Zero? What will happen when we reach Google Zero? But here's the thing. It is not just publishers worried about this. It's brands too. Because for decades, search traffic has been one of the primary ways to acquire customers.

3:37It's the reason why brands spend so much on optimizing their website for SEO and building up content marketing strategies that involve blog posts full of SEO optimized content and so on. And now, well, we're in the midst of a shift of traditional SEO tactics becoming more complicated and more difficult to win than they were even just 12 months ago and way harder than they were three, five, and more years than that. That is Max, and his job is basically to solve this problem. Yeah, I'm Max Damaris, Director of Strategy at Vital Design. Vital Design is a marketing agency that services all types of clients to drive more traffic, more leads, and more revenue.

4:18Vital Designs is about a 100-person agency that focuses on clients in higher ed, manufacturing, and B2B services. And these days, running a marketing strategy means being extremely on your toes and constantly figuring out how to grab people's attention in a world where the old levers just don't seem to work, or at least they don't work like they used to. And that is what we're going to talk about today on Problem Solvers. What exactly do you do if SEO doesn't work the way it used to? This isn't just something that Vital Designs helps its clients with. It's something Vital Designs has to deal with itself too, because, you know, it is also a business.

5:00that heavily leaned on SEO. Our blog traffic, our article traffic, our top of funnel keyword traffic has dropped a massive amount. We're talking to the tune of 50 to 60 % of our organic traffic is down in these areas. Yet we're seeing some of our sales ready lead counts. So that means people filling out forms like request a proposal forms or contact forms or picking up the phone and calling or speak to sales representative forms actually stay steady or go up. So we're seeing this general trend of lack of early stage traffic, a drop in early stage lead conversions, things like eBooks, downloads, white papers, webinars, yet steady or potentially increase in sales rate of lead form submissions or an increase in lead quality that we are seeing from the website.

5:48So a drop in traffic while we're seeing increase. How do you explain that? Because one would assume that this is simply a percentages and numbers game that you have to bring a certain number of people to the brand and then whatever percentage of them are then going to start filling out that form and they actually want to work with you. But now you're losing a substantial number of people at the top of the funnel, but you're still retaining the people who want to convert. So what's going on? Yeah, there's a few things that are happening in parallel. And those things that are happening in parallel?

6:21Well, that is what we're going to get into right after the break, along with Max's great advice on what you can do to make sure that you are still getting the leads you need, Google or no Google.

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7:26Visit homedepot.com, how doers get more done. All right, we're back. I'm talking with Max Damaris of Vital Design. And just before the break, he was saying this really interesting thing, which is that traffic, blog traffic, article traffic, top of funnel keyword traffic, all down, massively down. But leads coming through the website, not down. So how do you explain that? He said it is a number of factors. And here is where we pick that up. So number one is not all of that traffic drop means you've lost those eyeballs. So if you have a blog post that used to rank for 100 keywords and drive 10 ,000 visitors per month, and that only drives 5 ,000, you're still actually potentially getting a lot of exposure on the AI overviews by people researching that same topic, potentially even consuming your content through ChatGPT or perplexity or on Google's AI overview.

8:25And they may or may not be noticing that your brand actually wrote that content or was cited by it. So there's people that are actually still seeing your content and you're missing some marketing attribution because you're not even quite aware of it. And then the second thing that's happening is people are still doing this research. They're still often searching those things on Google or on other search engines or on the AI channels. And they're doing that research so that when they actually end up on your site, they've done more research than they did before. So when they do enter your website, they are further down the funnel than they previously were, creating a better environment for them to convert on sales re-lead.

8:59So there's this bit of like marketing funnel push that's happening outside of the actual website visit. And so that's, you know, those two things are happening in parallel right now. And that's very interesting. When you gave the first answer, I didn't understand it and I was going to interrupt you. But then I decided to just let you keep going and see what happened. Because you were saying, well, people are still experiencing the things that you produced. It's just now it's coming out processed through AI and they're missing the attribution. And then I was thinking, but then what the hell is the point?

9:29Like, that doesn't help you at all. that then flows into the second point that you made, which was really interesting, which was that people are doing the research. It's not like the consumer behavior changed. If you are producing marketing copy because you have a marketing agency, there is still a demand for marketing services. So that's not disappearing. It's just that the consumption is happening in a way that's now invisible to you because it's not coming directly through your site. But this still then leads to the need to get those people once they have done the research on whatever their marketing question is that chat GPT answered instead of your blog post for them to find you instead of somebody else.

10:13So how do you make sure that they're coming to you? Yeah. So that's like the question, right? Yes, it is. So there's a couple of things that, you know, we're doing as an agency that we're doing for our clients as well. And the first is that we're not necessarily stopping that top of funnel content that we used to create, but our expectations and our tracking of success for those pieces of content have shifted. So instead of expecting that blog post to rank for a hundred keywords and drive a thousand visits per month, our expectations are different. Maybe it's going to rank for 50 keywords and it's going to drive a hundred visits per month.

10:46And that's our expectation for that. And there's probably some marketing attribution that we're going to miss because it might get featured in AI overviews or perplexity or chat GPT. that's one element and the other element is like really focusing on the the niche searcher because you consumer's behavior is shifting while they're still researching and they're still searching they are very much searching in different ways than they were previously you talk to google's data comes out on this chat gpt's data comes out on this the you know surgeon and lands are all producing data on this as well there's more searches on google than ever but there's also more long-tailed queries happening both on ChatGPT and within Google than ever before.

11:27So for us as a marketing agency, an example of that would be WordPress agency that works with Elementor, that does SEO and paid advertising and branding work. Something that never would have been searched by someone five years ago is now being searched by that super niche buyer who wants a whole list of super aggregated agencies that has all of those things. And so what we're doing is making sure that we're creating, in this case, it's very simple, service pages indicate like, first of all, we do WordPress sites. Second of all, we work with the theme Elementor. Third of all, we've got tons of success stories in the SEO space, tons of success stories in the paid advertising space.

12:08Oh, and we've got this branding arm and all these branding projects. These six pages make up that one chat GPT response to that super long form query that says Vidal is actually a good agency for this super niche person. And so historically, we'd look at all these things from a keyword perspective. People are searching X, Y, and Z. And today, those things are reducing in volume and people are actually searching this 18 word long sentence to try and find exactly who they want. So we better make sure that we're telling the AI overviews and the chat GPTs of the world that we're an agency best for those things.

12:42And the same goes for all of our clients. We really want to make sure that that information is accessible and easy for these AI ovaries to read and see, and that it exists on the web so that when people are searching those long-form queries that we're able to show up or our clients are able to show up. This is interesting. Why do you think that those queries are changing? Is that because, number one people are getting the top of funnel kind of information out of the way through more casual conversations with ai and then by the time they search for exactly what they want they're just more informed about exactly what they need i think that's one element but i think just the truth is technology is changing the way that technology can answer these queries is way different than it was a few years ago.

13:33It's to the tune of pre-internet and post-internet. That's how much the way people can get their answers is shifting. And because of that, and because the way ChatGPT and these other platforms are performing, people are getting really awesome answers and they love what they get. They're changing how they behave on the internet and researching what they want. Let me tell you literally the last thing that I plugged into ChatGPT before you and I spoke, which is that I had bought this little wireless microphones for social media content and the button on it stopped working and I wasn't exactly sure what to do.

14:12And so if I was living in a pre AI world, what I would have done is gone to Google and it would have been very hard to find an answer to my hyper specific situation. So I would have simplified the way in which I was searching. I would have settled for, let me find some help pages from this company, or maybe I can find a Reddit thread about it or something. But now I know that the technology can understand me with more granularity. So I'm going to start inputting more granular information. And therefore, I am going to expect a more detailed and informed response. So what you are doing at Vital, what your team is doing at Vital, is essentially anticipating that if people are going to be searching for a marketing firm, they're no longer going to be searching for a marketing firm, because they can get more granular now and they can trust that the machine will understand them.

15:10So they're starting to plug in really hyper-specific needs, which means that you need to teach the AI as hyper-specifically as possible so that it can match up their hyper-specific queries with your hyper-specific information. It's been happening a ton for us in the last week or so. We just got an awesome lead from an education client, which is kind of what we're going for right now, that our contact form, and they said, you know, we're a higher education institution looking for an agency that has experience in higher education, that has experience in, in WordPress, in Elementor, like the example I used before.

15:47Yeah. You have a track record of success with higher education in SEO. And you also are great with Google ads, meta ads, and TikTok ads. And we historically got no leads that specific ever. Yeah. And that matching exactly what we're looking for. And we're starting to see these just happen more and more. And when you look at the referral source, sometimes those are coming directly from chat GPT. Other times it's organic on this page telling us it's probably, you know, Google's AI overview that gave us this referral here. So it's just like, this is happening more to us directly. And I'm watching it happen to our clients as well.

16:25It's super hard to measure, but it's not. So you told me a little bit about how you're actually training the AI, but can you go into more detail about that? Like what should somebody be doing? The old model is articles. I should just be pumping out articles that people can find when they're searching. What content and in what form are you producing now so that ChatGPT understands you at that level of granularity? So articles are still happening. It's just they might not be happening as frequently as you ever before. So we're still doing articles. And then secondarily, honestly, we're producing more bottom of funnel content.

17:00We're producing more for e-commerce individuals. This might be product pages. For software as a service, this might be service pages or solutions pages or industry specific pages. And for higher education, it can be program specific pages. So we're just producing more of that bottom funnel style content, product pages, service pages, things like that, that are very much more niched out than they were before. They're talking directly to an ideal customer profile of ourselves or of our clients. So this is the difference between a SEO optimized article and just like literally a product page that you could buy from.

17:36When you talk about bottom of the funnel, you're talking about just like, if I was trying to buy something, this would be the page where I would convert. Is that what you mean? Yes. I think what I mean is if I were to think about the person who's looking for a very specific thing, we have a page to indicate that we do that very specific thing. I see. The example of Vital is, historically, we'd have never created a page that said, you know, we work on Elementor because there was no search volume on Google telling us that we shouldn't do that. But nowadays we're going to create, you know, the page that says we work on Elementor, we work on all these other themes on WordPress.

18:15We do this specifically for higher education. These more niche job pages are working. So we're creating them. And our content strategy goes beyond that too. We're doing more than just creating bottom of funnel content. We're also starting to expand beyond the written content. So taking things deeper into social media, doing more bottom of funnel conversion contents of building assets to convert people into leads at higher rates. So we're just continuing to diversify the content efforts outside of the traditional SEO written content pieces. Got it. Let me just take advantage of me talking to you right now and use myself as an example.

18:49So my product, so to speak, is speaking. That's what people would pay me for is to keynote their corporate conference or whatever. And earlier this year, I got a booking from a great, very large company. I went, I did it, and they had a good time. And on the way out, I asked the woman who had originally reached out to me, I said, hey, how did you find me? I actually never asked you. And she said, ChatGPT. I found you on ChatGPT. And that was so interesting. But nobody else has said that to me yet. So it was just one time. And as you're talking, I'm thinking, well, okay, if someone's searching for speakers, and specifically, I talk on the subject of change, like how can a company or individuals navigate and thrive in times of change?

19:35So your company is going through change, your industry is going through change, so on. I have one page that does that, jasonfiverr.com slash speaking. That's it. That's it. And it's a pretty broad overview of what I have. and as you're talking i'm thinking wait a second am i totally missing this here like should i have actually eight pages about my speaking and each one of them is extremely hyper specific and i almost kind of never even expect somebody to land on that page from a search perspective but it's just there to tell chat gbt exactly what i do is that the idea here i think there's a very high likelihood that would help a lot.

20:16Okay. Particularly for you, like industries. So people are looking for, do you do this in my space? Can you do this for me? I'm unique and my situation is unique. So traditionally we would create those pages as an agency for conversion optimization. We kind of think of things as like two levers. Either you're pulling the lever and driving more traffic to a website, or you're pulling the lever to convert more people that land there into leads or into customers. And so we would create industry pages as a way to say, hey, we do exactly what you're looking for, but for your industry specifically, and here's some awesome case studies to prove our worth.

20:49Those industry pages are traditionally conversion rate optimization tactics. They still do that, so they help establish trust, but we're starting to see that they also, because behavior is changing in how people search, they're actually going to search for people that speak in this specific industry about change. So you can use those industry pages as a great way to drive net. How interesting. And just to go a level deeper there, so let's just pick a subject, which is I get hired by a lot of HR departments at large companies. So the HR department has its own conference, right? For this large company, thousands and thousands and thousands of people, they've got an HR team and the HR team has its own conference.

21:32And I get booked for that. Now, that just seems to happen on its own. That's just the market telling me something. So what you're saying is that I should create a page that is very specifically about my relevance to HR teams. And is that page linked anywhere on my website or is it just like live so that ChatGPT can consume it? Yeah, I would probably, that's a bit of an unknown. I would say it needs to be linked to some from somewhere like the search engines need to be able to crawl it and the ChatGPTs of the world need to be able to crawl it. So generally what we're doing is if it's important, putting it in the main menu so that it's going to be found for sure.

22:06If we're really hesitant to show it to the average website visitor, we might bury it a little bit, say like one level down from your service page, your primary service page, your talk page might be linked to in the menu, but you might have some sub links on that page linking to those sub industry pages that will very likely tell Google and search engine and other crawlers that these pages exist and we should crawl them. So So it depends upon the situation, but definitely linked to it. Super interesting. All right. And now let me back up and pick up on the other thing that you had said there before I just selfishly made this about me, which was all this lead magnet stuff.

22:44So you're thinking now, essentially, how can you more dynamically engage people on social media? Because they're still there. I assume AI has not swallowed up social media engagement. And so now you're producing what more of those free courses or white papers, just the kind of stuff that people tend to trade an email address for. Yeah, exactly. We call it premium content, but whatever you want to call it, something where you can add enough value that you can get an email out of it and turn that individual into a lead. We always used to do that. We used to always create custom pieces of content based off of the page that would drive the most traffic.

23:23So what can we create for people searching on this thing that's going to convert them into a lead at the highest possible rate? We still do that. But I think there's just more of a focus on this. How do we convert people that are entering our website that are more in the mid funnel or the bottom of funnel, but maybe aren't quite ready to speak to sales yet, but they're still finding us and landing on this page, probably because they came from a different source, rather than not traditional Google search. They may have come this time from an AI overview or a GPT search or what's happening more frequently now, even in the B2B space.

23:53They didn't see a social media type engagement and then they found us somewhere. Has any of these shifts changed how you also approach paid marketing? Yeah. So if anything, budgets across paid seem to continue to rise. So where people are finding lack of success or maybe just increased competition SEO side of things, they tend to absorb some of that into their paid advertising strategies. So we're seeing more budget shift towards paid, which means it's also getting more competitive and sometimes harder to win in certain spaces. In terms of a strategic shift on the paid advertising side of things, it honestly hasn't changed that much.

24:33It's just becoming more and more important to be super dialed in your targeting, in your conversion offers. We're like way past the days where you can afford to run keywords on Google and not be extremely dialed in the keywords you're targeting. And then secondarily, not have custom landing pages for those keywords to convert those people at the highest possible rate. It's so competitive now that if you're not doing those like highly optimized everything in that paid advertising process, it's really hard to be profitable and earn a positive return on investment from those ads. So just becoming harder to win, you better be doing it right.

25:11That being said, I think there is just a general shift to like, there's more channels popping up, there's more ability to promote perplexities launching ads, the social media channels are becoming their own search engines. I think TikTok as a massive search engine now, obviously, that doesn't apply to a lot of B2B type businesses, but definitely to schools and universities, definitely to direct to consumer companies. And the same thing goes for LinkedIn and other social channels and Reddit. I'm sure you're aware of exploding in terms of organic traffic. Yeah. Reddit ads. So all these additional channels represent opportunities for us to expand our paid advertising strategy.

25:49So I would say the other thing that's happened is a shift towards paid advertising budget, but then also a diversification of that paid advertising budget. We're doing the same or more paid search, but we're doing more paid social. We're doing more Reddit ads and we're doing more like OTT and streaming service ads because that's where you can find inventory and get in front of the right people and win. Okay, that's super interesting. I'm going to go back for a second just because as you were talking, I realized there was one other thing I wanted to ask you about those bottom of funnel pages that are training AI, which is I was using myself as an example of like a service provider, but I have of like a very flexible product.