What to do when Organic Traffic Drops (with Kristina Frunze, Webview SEO)

0:00Hey, it's Dave. So Zoom Webinars and Events has made our recent Exit 5 Live sessions way more pro lately. But don't just take my word for it. Check this out. This is what Kelly B said. She said, I compare all other webinars now against Exit 5. I love that. And look, in a world of AI slop, we just want to make something that's actually worth going to. It's not easy to get an hour out of your day. I'm just the on-air talent though. So I'm going to kick it over to Marissa and Maria. This is our Exit 5 Live production team, our content team here at Exit 5, since they're the ones actually making this all happen.

0:29Marissa? I've been doing B2B content a long time. I know. It's hard to hold attention for more than 30 seconds, let alone a whole webinar. But Zoom webinars helps. Recently, we've had nearly 2 ,000 registrants, over 500 live, and hundreds of hours of watch time on our sessions. Maria, what would you say is driving that? It all starts with prep. We do up to seven hours per session. Choosing a topic, prep calls, building the run of show, and so much more. With Zoom webinars and events, everything's in one place. Registration, emails, polls, analytics. So it's simple to run that cycle every two weeks.

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1:32So come and check us out. See this whole thing live. And if you want to learn more about using Zoom at your company, check out zoom.com slash exit5. That's zoom.com slash exit5. Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Convertive, a B2B marketing agency that helps enterprise teams build an AI-powered go-to-market strategy. Q4 is the time of year when having a great agency partner matters more than ever. If you're shopping for a new agency, Convertive is worth looking into. They work with marketing and operations leaders to help grow revenue across the business and AEO. One of the things I know you're thinking about right now is one of their specialties.

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3:02Hey, it's Dasha. Today on the show, I'm chatting with Christina Frunze. She is the founder of an SEO agency called WebView SEO. And she sure knows SEO inside and out. We get into all of it today. She has spent the last 10 years doing SEO stuff for a bunch of clients, and she spent the last three running a bunch of experiments to figure out AI visibility in search. And so we talk about frameworks, things that she's tried that have worked, things that she's tried that have failed. And I hope you get a lot out of it. I learned a lot talking to Christina, and I hope you enjoy the episode. How is it going?

3:38Hi, Dasha. I'm doing well. How about yourself? I am good. I'm super pumped to talk to you today. This is a topic that has been on my mind and maybe even keeping me up at night. We're going to talk about all things SEO, AO, GEO. You are the founder of WebView SEO. Talk to me about what is that? What are you doing day to day? Web SEO is an SEO, AI search agency for B2B SaaS companies with a heavy focus on construction technology, prop tech, real tech, anything that is, we've started there just because that's where a lot of my focus was before with my previous agency. So this is where our, probably 90 % of our clients in the construction technology at the moment.

4:24And we help them with mostly, you know, figuring out what it is to be visible these days, because a lot of people, like you said, you know, it's pretty confusing. What is SEO? Is it still relevant? Do I need to completely switch to AEO? What do we do? Everybody's panicking. So we're kind of trying to help them figure that out. Does that mean like the tactics and the strategies we're going to talk about today are only relevant to those specific industries? Or does some of this stuff apply, you know, more broadly, no matter what industry you're in? It's definitely not just applicable to those type of companies.

4:59I would say it's applicable across all the SaaS B2B companies. And we work with different sizes as well. We have some startups, some of the enterprise companies as well, some Series D, Series A as well. So it's going to be applicable because honestly, what we're going to touch on today, some of the strategies that we have there kind of have been the foundation of SEO for such a long time that it's, if done well, it pretty much works for everybody. So it's pretty universal. Yeah, I would say so. Okay. Well, I'm excited. You've been doing this for a long time. You spent the last 10 years in SEO and the last three testing stuff with AI.

5:41So excited to dive into all of it. I think a good starting point would be to just define the acronyms that everyone is throwing around. We've got SEO, we've got AEO, we've got GEO. And depending on who you listen to or talk to, those either are all the same, don't worry about it, or no, they're completely different and you need a strategy for all three. Break it down for us. What is SEO? what is AEO and what is GEO? And is it the same thing or not? I might be biased. And that's why I'll start with SEO. Search engine optimization, that's something that has been in a different industry for quite a long time.

6:20And that's my bread and butter. And the AEO and GEO, honestly, there's just so many different acronyms. Probably there's like 10 more variations of that. I personally call it AEO. And in my mind, Oh, so AEO is AI search optimization. Oh, AI engine optimization. And then GEO is like generative engine optimization. Essentially, these two themes, the last two acronyms, they, at least to me, mean the same thing. I don't differentiate between these two, but I don't really like calling it AEO or GEO. I like calling it AI search optimization. I just spell it out just because I wish we would arrive at one acronym as an industry and keep using it.

7:06But it's just everybody keeps coming up with the new ones and it's hard to keep up. But that being said, SEO and AEO are not exactly the same thing. They overlap quite a lot, at least in my practice. There are certain differences between them. I would almost treat AEO as a layer on top of SEO, but I will never treat AEO as a different discipline that can be done separately from SEO. Got it. That makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense. So what is, if you were to define the layers, SEO is blank and then AEO is blank. What are those? Fill in the blanks for me. Right. SEO is the foundation. AEO is the roof.

7:54That's how I would say it. I love it. I love a metaphor. Okay. And then obviously AI is changing the SEO game. You're saying a lot of people are panicking. What problems specifically are you seeing marketers experience now that AI search is kind of dominating? I think honestly, there is no lack of problems that marketers face these days, especially when it comes to AI, one of them being AI reviews taking away the giant share of the organic traffic. But then also, you know, the pollution of search engine results with just AI slop and like hundreds and hundreds of AI articles that are just being pumped out.

8:36And I think at this point, there are more AI generated content, obviously, than human generated content. So I think these two at least form the basis of all the other problems that come out of them. One of the things that you're seeing happen is because AI overview is such a big thing, marketers are seeing their organic traffic. When they look at their organic traffic, I'm logging into GA4, I'm looking at my organic traffic and all of a sudden I'm seeing a trend in the wrong direction. It's going down. What should someone do in that situation? Is it cause for panic? How do you coach clients through that?

9:14I'm sure you have a lot of people coming to you saying, hey, my organic search, my organic traffic's going down. Like I need an SEO agency to help me with this. Is that the right way to be thinking about this? Should I be freaking out if that's the situation that I'm experiencing? I honestly think the way you look at this is almost like you want to kind of reframe it from being bad to it being good. It depends like how you approach it. And what I mean by that is that obviously a lot of top of funnel traffic is taken over by AR reviews. So everything that is like informational, educational, anything that is not really bottom of funnel.

9:54So that's being overtaken by AR reviews right now. And I don't think there is much to do about that. I would still produce top of funnel content. And when I see a dip, the first thing I do is check whether that dip comes from what pages. Is it coming from the bottom of funnel pages that we really care about, that are like the money pages? Or is it coming from the top of funnel pages that are blogs and like, you know, maybe some glossaries, things like that. That's kind of expected. And as long as our leads are stable throughout that month, I think there is no reason to panic, honestly, because at the end of the day, we do care about leads and not the organic.

10:36I mean, maybe somebody likes both, but at this point of time, it's very hard to have both. That makes sense. Yeah, true. I mean, if my lead volume is not going down and organic is, I might be able to live with that as long as I can explain it away and kind of have a reason why. One of the things that you've recommended to clients is this something you called the 60-20-20 output split. Talk to me about that. What does that mean? What is 60-20-20? I think it's more directional versus prescriptional, 60-20-20. So 60 stands for 60 % buffle content, 20 % middle of funnel, and then 20 % top of funnel.

11:16And this mix will depend largely on a client, on their current state. If they already have a lot of bottom of funnel content, that they might be lacking on the top of funnel content and vice versa. But typically when you come in and you see a website, it's lacking the bottom of funnel content, specifically for B2B SaaS companies. I see there's a lot of thought leadership. I see there's a lot of top of funnel content, educational content. But I think the main thing and the very first thing that we do is try to understand what kind of bottom of funnel pages we can create for them that will drive the leads.

11:59And usually these bottom of funnel pages are coming out of the content audit, meaning what it is that they are, what is their main offering? What are the use cases? What are the pain points? So for example, I would come in into a client's website and I see they have one product page and then they have all their features or solution on one product page. And Google is very picky like that in this way. They like to see one page per a focus, like one page per feature page and one page per keyword. So that's why creating those, you know, use case pages first and going hard on them, if you have those, optimizing them properly is the first thing that I would do.

12:46and then, you know, supporting them with the middle of funnel content and top of funnel content, that comes later. But first thing you need to fix is your bottom of funnel content. What are some other examples of bottom of funnel content pages that you see SaaS marketers missing from their website? So it sounds like use case is a great, if you've got a product and it does five things, you should have a page per use case. Any other examples that come to mind when it comes to bottom of funnel content that performs well? At this moment, there is this very talked about tactic, which is like listicles, and it falls somewhere in the middle of bottom of funnel slash middle of funnel.

13:28That tends to perform really well, you know, best X solutions or buyer's guide. Something that basically will help people to make that decision at the end of the day, the competitor comparison articles. This is something that we are still doing. You need to be very careful about how you create those, but those are still really good to create. And then another thing that I always advocate for is having, if you are a B2B SaaS company, having the list of your case studies always, you know, optimized properly. So integration pages, this is something, these two type of pages are always visited right before requesting a demo, in my experience.

14:17So like having those seen in a nav bar is a must. If you have case studies, basically make sure they're included in the nav bar. Any other spot that they should be listed that's maybe hurting you if they're not? I think the nav bar makes it really easily to access it. But then you also, another space where we use them very widely is within the blogs, always supporting the blogs by just the proof of client success. So this is something, this is another place that we use them. But other than this, I can't think of any other one. On the blog, is that you're like embedding a case study or you're linking out to it or you're, it's kind of like, okay, you've got your blog and then at the end it's like, and check out our case studies.

15:02Is there like a right way to do it or think about it? I think there is no hard rule. It depends, you know, on a blog and also on a client, But typically, I like creating custom visuals around it with, you know, like a CTA button with that particular case study. Because a lot of times people, it's very hard to spot a link within the text. So like in-text link is, nobody's going to look at it unless they're really reading. And we know that not a lot of people are reading these days. But if there's like a really prominent CTA with like a nice graphic, this is what I would usually do somewhere like maybe in the middle of the article and then once again at the end.

15:43Making it super prominent. Hey, we've got a case study. You're already on this blog. Why don't you go check that out? Yeah. I think that's a good call out because as marketers, I think most marketers listening to this, they have at least one case study and it's probably buried somewhere. Maybe it's even linked out in the nav. But you've got like a quick win. It's pretty easy. you create one kind of call to action banner, you add it to all your blogs, all of a sudden, your traffic to that case study is going to spike without you creating any net new content. I think so often we're thinking, oh, I have to create a whole bunch of new content.

16:15I mean, not necessarily. There's small wins with the existing content that you have. Okay, well, let's say your organic search traffic has dropped because AI overviews are taking over and your manager, your board, they're concerned. They're saying, Dasha, get me my traffic back. I want to get back to where we were. How do you coach them through like the new way of thinking about what matters? Is there a new way that they should be thinking about it? What do you recommend? Right. I think, honestly, it's natural for them to panic, you know, because obviously they're seeing a lot of red. And the first thing is, you know, something's wrong.

16:55But I think a lot of education is what has to happen right now from the marketers and what I've done for the clients that I'm doing. It's not always that I follow this attribution model, but it helps to kind of paint the picture. So I kind of broke it down into three layers of attribution when it comes to the visibility as a whole versus just organic traffic, because visibility is no longer just organic. it's like so mixed right now, you know, like it's, it's direct. And then there is AI, like LLM traffic, and it's all intertwined and people are switching devices and they're, you know, they would learn about your brand on LLM and then type it into Google like three days later.

17:47So there's a lot of funnel happens in the darks, which is can't be attributed. So the very first layer is the direct attribution. And that's kind of your floor. You would look at your Google Analytics. You would look at in terms of your organic traffic and then your AI traffic. It also can be tracked with Google Analytics. And you would kind of treat these two as well as your leads that are coming through organic traffic and LLMs. They can also be recorded within GA4. but you need to keep in mind whenever you're looking at GA4 that is the most the least amount of traffic that you can get because so much of it happens without any click because a lot of journeys on LLMs they just happen within those you know windows nobody even clicks through so that's I think kind of the floor that you can stand on and you can tie like a dollar amount to that floor.

18:48Like, okay, you can say, you know, this is the amount of leads. This is the closed one for those leads. And that's where usually the picture doesn't look that great because it's obviously not looking as well as it was before. So the next thing that I do is I look into, I call it influenced attribution, something that is influenced by your actions that you take towards the visibility. Like for example, you're building out content, you're working on your AEO or whatever you want to call it these days. So whatever touches your branded traffic. So if you work on your AEO and your SEO, naturally these days you will see an uptick in your direct traffic and in your branded organic traffic.

19:42So people will start looking for your brand name much more versus before. And I actually, later on, I'll share one of the screenshots from the clients that I have. I've seen it firsthand where you could see that they haven't done anything particular to drive their brand name up. They haven't done any digital PR. They haven't done any other initiatives, but their brand name searches suddenly started just performing so well. And that's because people have seen them like, let's say, in ChatGPT or somewhere else, and then they would just type their name into Google. And obviously that traffic performs much better because people are already searching for your name specifically.

20:29So these kinds of things, you would look at your organic traffic, at your organic branded traffic, at your direct traffic. Another thing that I look always at is the sales cycles. If the sales cycles are becoming shorter, means that people already are having their objections kind of handled during their research on LLMs. So when they come to your website, they are much warmer and it's much easier for the sales team to close them. So, you know, the sales cycles are shorter, your win rates against the competitors are also kind of improving. So this is not really a tangible direct number that you have, but it's helping you to paint a picture for how your work is actually helping the bottom line.

21:22And the last thing is probably something that has been talked about for quite a long time in the industry is the AI visibility, AI share of voice, you know, all the typical AI KPIs that people are tracking these days with the tool of their choice. And we also track those because I think those are important. I think they're not really accurate at the moment unless you go really, really granular and try to find out the best prompts. And it's just like, it's also pretty expensive to track those. So I think that last layer, it helps to build like a future mode, you know, what it is that we're building for the future.

22:08And the way I always bring it up to the management is like, not even how much it costs to run this right now, these kind of initiatives, but can we afford not to show up in LLMs like six, 12 months down the line where all the competitors will dominate those channels because we know that LLMs, well, some of them are, they have like a cutoff date knowledge base where they, you know, they just know some brands and then they will just stick to those brands and it's going to be very hard to get in there. It's probably not the best framework to have, but at least it's something that gives, you know, where we are right now, what we're doing, what it does at the moment and what we're building towards.

22:50So it's kind of, you know, painting that picture for the management. Totally. 100%. We had this debate internally at the company where I work, where I remember saying one of the things we're going to focus on is making sure that when someone asks a question related to the offering that we have that we're coming up, and someone on the leadership team said, well, is our audience on ChadGPT? Is that where they're searching? and the answer candidly at the time was like not yet but if we get in early by the time they adopt chat gpt we work in an industry where people are laggards when it comes to technology but i truly believe that at some point everyone is going to be using ai to search to some extent and so if you get in early and before your competitors do you have such a head start and i'd rather be there before anyone else's than late to the party and now all of a sudden it's 10 times harder to start ranking.

23:44I love your framework around, it's not about your traffic numbers anymore as much as it is about visibility and whether you're showing up. For the marketer that's just got GA4, how do they see their AI visibility or what's the best way to go? Where should I look to figure out what is my visibility? I think now it's much easier for marketers to do that before you needed to jump through so many hoops to actually find that traffic. You had to set up like rejects, you know, matching and like put in like a huge line of those different LLMs in there. But right now, Google is adapting. They're trying to, you know, provide tools to marketers to actually monitor that.

24:28So right now it's actually a part of, I think it's been rolled out in March of this year or April of this year, they've added another column to the usual reports where you would find all your organic traffic, direct traffic, the referrals. They called it AI assistance. So you would now, if you get enough AI traffic, you will see that populated with the users. You will see that populated with visits. And if you set up the key events tracking, which is your conversions. You will also see conversions there. And then you can actually sort it by the LLM. It breaks it down. You can see how many users from ChatGPT, Cloud, Perplexity.

25:14So it's pretty useful. But again, I don't really report on the AI traffic because it tends to fluctuate so much on a monthly basis. So it's not really reliable. I always rely more on tracking the AI visibility and share of voice. So it's not like you're tracking it in vacuum, but you're tracking it against your competitors. And it's kind of helpful to understand the performance a bit better. Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Optimizely. If you want to know what AI agents can actually do for a marketing team, Optimizely is where I'd point you to right now for a real example. Last month, we ran an Exit 5 live session where a bunch of our members showed off their best AI agent use cases and McKeel, director of AI innovation at Optimizely, actually won the whole session.

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27:51That's compoundgrowthmarketing.com slash exit5. And where are you going to figure out your share of voice? We use Peak for that. So it's one of the AI tracking tools and it's one of the typical, which I will actually share as well today, the visibility and share of voice. Some of the screenshots from Peak and it's, yeah, just one of the tools. A lot of people are using Profound and like all the different tools. There's so many right now, but I've landed on Peak so far. Have you tried the others? I think that would be interesting too for people to know, like I live in this world. I've tried all these tools.

28:27I've landed on Peak. And I guess while we're here, just talk about your tech stack in general. What do you recommend maybe for the marketer that's early to this? And then maybe for the marketer that's like, look, like I also am in this world and I'm ready to kind of take it up a notch. What stack do you recommend? I had to test so many of these AI tracking tools because I had to figure it out for my agency. What are we going to use? Because I think a lot of these AI tracking tools, they came to the market so quickly because they had to fill that gap. So they were shipping their products and it wasn't perfect.

29:06And I tried so many, like I tried Athena, I tried ZipTide Dev, I tried Otterly and Scrunch. And like, there's so many of them. The reason I landed on Peak is because it was pretty okay price-wise at that time. Now they're increasing my price as of next month, unfortunately. So, but I also liked Peak because it had a very understandable UI. So I think if you are, you know, a marketer, if you're in-house marketer, Peak probably is a good start. And I've seen a lot of companies use that. Some companies use Profound. That is a little bit more expensive. I haven't got a lot of time to play with that, again, because of the price.

29:53We have to, you know, be scrappy here. So I think a peak would be a good start there because it's, and they keep shipping new, you know, new reporting features, which are really helpful. And I like the fact that it lets you add your prompts. And I think we also, getting the prompts right is something that I struggled with a lot. And I think a lot of people are struggling with because how do you know, right? You don't have the keyword research. They usually have like Ahrefs or SEMrush. You don't have the search volume. So it was also an interesting exercise to figure that out. What do you mean when you say get the prompts right?

30:33You're saying the prompts, like you're trying to guess what prompts someone is searching and are you coming up for that prompt? Tell me more about that. When it comes to EI visibility and EI share voice, you are tracking it against certain prompts. And let's say there are 25 prompts that you share. So you kind of try to understand how you rank or show up for those. Now, when I say get them right, I would recommend starting with your bottom of funnel keywords. This is where I usually start because you don't, I mean, maybe you care about how you show up for some informational prompt, but you don't want to spend the money.

31:13Usually all my prompts are structured around like what is the best X software for X ICP. And that's, you know, the people that are searching this, they are kind of, you know, looking around, they may be ready to make a purchase. So you want to be in that prompt. So usually it's mostly there is no right or wrong prompt, but I think you would want to spend majority of your time tracking bottom of funnel prompts. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, you've got this five step bottom of funnel methodology. Let's talk about that. What is the methodology? Tell me how to create content that LLMs are going to want to cite.

31:49I think the methodology that I have is mostly coming out of the mistakes that I've made and some other people made. So it's more of a checklist versus a methodology. And when I talk about the bottom of funnel content, I mostly talk about, in this case, the comparison pages and also listicles. So I think the very first thing that you want to make sure of is to be factual, get your facts right, get your up-to-date information right, because it is so utilized right now. people are making so many of them. And if a competitor sees you showing, you know, putting out the like a versus article, like alternatives article, and if you've got something right or wrong there, you are potentially looking at like a seizing deceased letter or, you know, something like legal.

32:47So this is something that I would always make sure of, like, even if you're using AI to create your content, always double, triple check it. And all the facts that are about like the pricing, their features, things like that, you don't want to make a mistake there. So that's kind of the thing that I think a lot of articles are still making, at least what I'm seeing on some other websites. It's just the first thing that Claude gave them, they just published it without even looking at it. So this is probably the step one, get your facts straight. And then actually another very important thing of the listicles, because they're getting so overused right now.

33:30And in fact, I don't know if you've seen this on LinkedIn, but apparently ChatGPT, after the latest update, they've dropped a huge amount of listicles from their citation. So I don't know. It's not like I'm going to stop doing them just because of that, because if you are doing your listicles just because of ChatGPT, then it's a problem. So there is a right and kind of wrong way of doing listicles. And the right way is to actually create a methodology around them. So before we create any type of bottom of funnel listicle on a client website, we at first come up with the criteria or scoring methodology that we're going to be using for those because you can't just rank the competitors just how you want it.

34:19you have to actually have some foundation for it. So we come up with criteria, eight score, a list of criteria, and then we score every single competitor against those criteria. So that not only shows the user that, okay, they actually have done some research. They know what they're talking about. Maybe I should trust this listicle. But also that puts you in like a good authoritative stance with Google and LLM. So having that methodology and actually referring to it, like somewhere at the beginning of article, you would say, this article has been put together based on X methodology. Check this out.

35:00We update it regularly. So you are the authority. So people should trust you. And I think that's something that hasn't been really done by a lot of companies, but the companies that do that. Yeah, that's so much more legit and sounds so much more objective versus subjective. I think those articles sometimes get a bad rap because it's like, okay, you're Acme software and you're saying that Acme software is the best software for Y industry. Like, of course, you're going to say that giving it a real here's exactly how we you know who does this really well is tech companies where they're ranking headphones or whatever piece of technology.

35:40They'll say, okay, we tried 100 different pairs of headphones and here's exactly what we recommend for someone who wants something comfortable versus here's for the runner and here's exactly how we evaluated it. Maybe we can learn a thing or two from tech review sites, not technology, but actually physical tech that we wear like computers or whatever. Okay, you did this for a client. I mean, I'm sure you've done it for many clients, but there's a specific client that I want to talk to you about today. You helped them with their bottom of funnel content. They were able to triple, is that right?

36:13Triple their AI overview citations in what, six months? I want to know everything you did, how you did it, what the numbers look like. Let's dive into a kind of a case study deep dive together. So at first, I will show the case study. So this is something that I just put together, the case study that I'm about to publish for them. It's redacted, so I removed all the client data from here. But essentially, this is a client that, like I said, in construction technology, they are doing time tracking in construction technology. They came to me in October 2025. and at that time they've been working with another SEO agency and I've taken over.

37:01So what we started with is kind of the very first thing that we always do is a content audit. I want to know what are the guts of the website in terms of the content. And you talk about all the content. It's blog, it's case studies, it's like any webinars, podcast, anything that they have published on their website that needs to be audited with a very critical eye. So we almost want to prune the content, like chop off the content that is irrelevant, that is no longer serving the purpose, or we de-index some content. And then what we try to do is we try to form clusters around the topics that are then mapping out the solutions.

37:50And this is probably the single most important thing that you can do on your website, like building out the content clusters. I've been talking about them for so long and I see companies still don't do it. And it's probably is what's going to like drive the majority of your growth going forward. Solely just identifying if you are, let's say, a construction time tracking software, is like you want to have a cluster, obviously, about time tracking. Maybe there is a cluster about productivity. There is a cluster about daily reporting. Anything that you have a solution for or a feature page for, you want to have a separate cluster.

38:34And then you start building out those clusters from the bottom of funnel pages. So you start with your bottom of funnel pages, you nail them down, and then you build out those clusters in a very logical way where you support them with a bunch of top of funnel content and then you all link it up to your bottom of funnel pages. So it's like, you know, you're sitting on a very logical foundation versus it's all being like random pieces of content here and there. So this was one of the main things that we've done for them, like clean that up, make sure it makes sense for Google because now Google looks on their website and says, okay, these guys actually are an authority in X, Y, and Z, and they have a lot of content supporting that.

39:17And we also know how to crawl all this. It all makes sense. So we will rank them for these keywords. And this also helps with AI visibility because as we've been doing that for them, obviously supported by the off-page content, which I will touch on as well, which is very important. We've seen their AI overviews tripled. And this is just a screenshot from SEMrush. We've started somewhere around here is when I onboarded them. And in July or like in March, even here, so this is where the six month mark, I think, they've got like three times the AI citations. And what I mean by AI citations, they're not only the top of funnel citations, but the majority of that traffic is bottom of funnel.

40:09Because we touched their bottom of funnel pages first, we looked at what are those pages? What do they need to say? What kind of FAQ sections did they need to have? And how are they most likely interlinked from the rest of the website? And this is what helped drive this AI reviews. And with the bottom of funnel, I'm not sure if it's easy to see this, Let me just open this up here. So here, this is also a screenshot from SEMrush. This is the bot. You're showing a chart that's a 92%, 93 % increase in... What are we looking at? It's actually a 46 % increase from October until... Well, this is... We are in August.

40:55And this is the visibility for the bottom of funnel keywords. So bottom of funnel keywords, everything that has like software, solution tool. So nothing that is related to like how to do this or how to do that. It's all related to their bottom of funnel and their presence organically has rose for bottom of funnel by 46 % with these changes. What concretely are some of the changes that you made? So it sounds like maybe their pages didn't have like FAQ sections. What are other changes that you found and you found yourself making to the content that they already had? With the bottom of funnel specifically, we've looked at their, so usually what Google looks at, the very first things that carry the biggest weight are the title tag and the headers on a page.

41:49And then the guts within the page, meaning like the copy that sits on the page itself. The copy on the page barely spoke about the solution itself. So you want to make sure like if you have a title tag, which is, you know, the meta title that you see in Google for any kind of page, you want to make sure that title tag actually has, if you're doing time tracking, you want to say time tracking software. Like you don't name it your product name. You don't name it anything else. You kind of make it like stupid simple for Google to understand that. And you carry that message across your headers, especially H1.

42:26and then you have the variations of that query within the copy. And most importantly, you speak to the pain point. So we kind of restructured their bottom of funnel pages to at first, when people land on their bottom of funnel page, which is like a landing page, they see, okay, this is the X software that I am on. And okay, this is the problem that they're solving. And then already you can kind of go down the list, But people usually don't scroll past 20 % of the page. So whatever you have on the top of your page is the most important. But you're right, the FAQs we've added across all the pages as well.

43:08And then something you mentioned was cluster pages. Is a cluster page a landing page? Or is a cluster page a blog page that links out to other blog pages? So cluster, it's not a page. Cluster is like, you would think about it like a group of articles. So a cluster is like a bottom of funnel page on top, and then it's all the top of funnel pages linking up to that. So it's, you're kind of creating that little group and that is a cluster. Right. So it's not something that actually exists. I've worked with SEO agencies that had said, you know, you're missing your cluster page. And that's something that always confused me.

43:49Like, is it a page that I need to have? Is a cluster something that in my mind, it's like a web of how all of our content connects? It sounds like you're saying it's the latter. It's not an actual thing on your site. It's just how you think about your content. Exactly. Well, that's how I think about it. And this is kind of, you know, almost like a site architecture, how you think about interlinking your site. So it goes a little bit deeper than just content creation, but it's also how do you then logically interlink those pages? How do you do all of this? How are you doing it for your clients to appease the AI gods, the LLMs, without creating a bunch of AI slop that a human lands on and they find unhelpful?

44:34It can actually hurt your brand if you're just pumping out a bunch of AI content for LLMs to cite without thinking about the human. How have you figured out how to strike the right balance there? it's a very timely question honestly and i think this is something that we've paid a lot of attention to because we do use ai to produce content we rely heavily on cloud but every single piece of content that comes out of cloud is already based in so we create for every single client that we have, we create a knowledge base. And that comes out of a very in-depth kickoff call where they walk us through their demo, they walk us through their offering, pain points, ICP, pretty much everything that we know about their content, about their offering goes into that knowledge base.

45:29So any objections that they face on the sales calls as well goes in there. So it's kind of, we have already a very good skeleton to work off of. And then every single piece of content, then we supplement by subject matter expert quotes. So for every single content that we put out, we come up with a number of questions. Then we then ask the subject matter experts at those companies as well. And then we use that information to help build out those articles. So every article actually has a bit of unique information that has never been published before. And this is something that I think we need to stand for because this is something that can't be replicated by AI and this is something that can't be replicated by competitors.

46:18So if this is this unique piece or point of view that you can bring to the world through your content, then it's a non-commodity content. And this is what's making it non-AI slow. And that's where you also link your case studies. So make it, you know, you talk about even if it's educational content, you still tie it back to your offering with the case studies. Let's say I'm listening to this and I'm thinking, okay, yeah, I'm convinced I probably should be investing more in bottom of funnel content, but I've got a whole bunch of top of funnel, middle of funnel content that I could use potentially.

46:59Is there a way to repurpose your top of funnel content to create bottom of funnel content? How do you think about that? So the usually how I approach it, their top of funnel content, there should be a place for it. I think you should still have your top of funnel content drive traffic and build the authority piece for you. However, if it's just top of funnel content and it sits there and it doesn't bring you any leads, the usual thing that we do is we keep that educational piece intact, but we try to match or we try to think of some kind of almost like micro conversion that can happen on that top of funnel content.

47:44Because if people are, you know, looking for going back to the time tracking piece, if people are looking for what are the challenges in time tracking, this is a top of funnel content. So obviously they're not ready for a demo, but maybe they're ready for a timesheet template or maybe they are ready for a calculator or a tool that can be helpful for them. So you almost kind of try to retrofit or reverse engineer the tool or something helpful of value that they can use at first. And that is like a micro step towards becoming your customer if they are looking in that direction. So we usually try to supplement it like we create a template or, you know, like a calculator, anything.

48:27I don't think like ebooks will no longer do this because I don't know if anybody has enough patience to read this right now, but something like quick, valuable, easy to consume is the way to take advantage of your top of funnel content. And because I know someone's wondering, are you gating those lead magnets? Are they magnets? Are they ungated? So we do a mix of these. If it's a, you know, a very valuable piece, we sometimes gate it and then un-gate it, you know, after some point if it doesn't perform well, but usually it is un-gate it just to make sure that people are kind of using it and landing there.

49:06And then it's almost serving as a gateway towards a demo. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Okay. Well, before we wrap, I know you've spent the last three or so years running a bunch of AI experiments, and I wanted to make sure we talk about what you learned, the good, the bad, the ugly. So let's start with maybe what didn't work. Is there anything that you recommend a marketer skips on their journey to figuring out AI search? Yes, we've learned it the hard way. Skip Reddit as a tool that needs to be manipulated and start looking at Reddit as a tool that where you need to create genuine engagement.

49:49So we've completely overhauled our Reddit strategy since the time we started before. We would go and we would post comments saying, hey, I've used this. We would use like HDA accounts and we would say, hey, I've used X software and it was amazing, blah, blah, blah. All those comments, we've had a lot of comments for the clients. All of them essentially got removed and it's just not sustainable. It's not something that's going to stick. Right now, what we're doing for the clients is white hat, a Reddit strategy where you actually disclose your relationship with the client. So we create official client Reddit profiles, and then we engage from those Reddit profiles.

50:34It's obviously much more work, but it is genuine, sustainable, and it's going to stick. So that's probably one of them. I love it. And they're not getting deleted. No, this is something that, and you have to be very careful because you can't obviously just start, you know, going to threads and say, hey, I am this and you need to use our thing. But at first you have like a warmup phase where you don't name drop at all. And then after four weeks, you can actually name drop, but only like 15 % of the time. So there's like some guardrails that you have to set up. And yeah, Reddit is definitely becoming much more strict right now.

51:14What worked? What is something that is worth replicating, did you find? I think however overused it is, the listicles and comparison pages. But I think the biggest realization for me from experimenting these years was that SEO is still, like there is just no application for AI search without SEO as the first step. So probably skipping SEO is something that you shouldn't do. if you want long-term visibility. And that comes back to your metaphor about the foundation and the roof. Exactly. You're not going to have a roof if there's no hat to hang it on or house to hang it on. So yeah, that makes a ton of sense.

52:02Anything that you've changed your mind about in the last three years, maybe an assumption that you got wrong. I think, you know, what I've changed my mind about, I now am a believer that an iSearch is more dependent on what happens off-page versus on-page. And what I mean by that is before I, when I just started, I would think, okay, you know what? It's everything about what you put out on your website. It's all about the content and things like that. But now I see that, for example, for some of the LLMs like ChatGPT, they are very heavily reliant on third-party data. You can't possibly just start changing things on your website and hope that ChatGPT is going to cite you because it's not.

52:51You need to go into every single directory. You need to go out and do the digital PR. You need to pretty much because ChatGPT trusts the third-party data more. And however uncomfortable it is for me to acknowledge that, that is the case. And we are moving towards that right now, you know, doing more work on off page. What are all the off page kind of like G2 reviews, Keptera, directories, any other examples, PR, you said anything else? Yeah, I think more than, you know, just being on all of them, you need to make sure that it is one single message that you sent out there. Because if you send out a bunch of different messages, meaning that you kind of have to nail down your messaging for the brand and then make sure it's like unified across everything.

53:44Because if it's all different, social media profiles, LinkedIn, YouTube videos that are getting cited by LLMs as well, like you have to just increase your footprint to the extent that you are everywhere and then make sure it's all saying the same thing. Man, is it ever tough to be a marketer today? Gosh, there's so many channels and AI wants us to be on all of them. Christina, thank you for coming on the show. Thank you for talking to me for the last hour about SEO and AI and how to dominate the AI space. Really appreciate you sharing your thoughts and your knowledge that you've gotten by just running tests for the last three years.

54:24It's nice to be able to get kind of a shorter way of getting that experience without spending three years experimenting. Really appreciate you sharing your wisdom. Thank you. Thank you, Dash, for having me. It's been a pleasure. Awesome.

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