How AI Is Redefining Content Strategy

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1:02Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is Jon Jantz. My guest today is Manik Bond. He is the founder, CTO of Search Atlas, a cutting-edge SEO and content marketing platform designed to help marketers, agencies, and businesses drive measurable growth. With a background in engineering and entrepreneurship, Manik previously founded RankPay and has become a respected thought leader in the SEO community. So, Manik, welcome to the show. Thank you, John. Great to be here. So, let's talk a little bit about creating a search atlas. How old is search atlas now? Five years-ish, is that?

1:39I think the first line of code I wrote about seven years ago. Seven years ago. Okay. So, a lot's changed in that approach in SEO necessarily. So, how did you approach, or maybe even a better question, why did you think a tool needed to be built for SEO purposes? What was kind of your founding thinking of this? Yeah, good question. So with my first tech company, we were in the live entertainment ticketing space. And if you don't rank on Google, you don't exist in that industry. You know, it's like the largest ticketing company is actually Google. It's not Ticketmaster or StubHub, it's Google. Because you go to Google to then find those tickets.

2:17So if you're not on Google there, your business doesn't exist. So figuring out what the equation was It was something that I started trying to crack the code on over a decade ago. And what I learned very quickly in the process of trying to scale and grow that business is that other tools out there, conventional, what I call traditional or trad SEO tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush. These are analytics tools. They give us reports. They give us data. But if we don't move on that data, nothing moves, right? We're just watching through the looking glass. And so I felt what we needed really as an industry was tools that would actually help us accelerate change, like the changes to our sites, the changes to the internet that help us rank better.

3:00And that's where Search Atlas came from. So people aren't familiar with Search Atlas necessarily. You know, it basically lives on a platform, but it connects with your website. And so it actually is able to make changes on your website from that platform. That sort of took some wizardry, didn't it? It did. So there's something from back of the envelope, trying to figure out how we would do this and make it fast in real time. But we're happy that it worked. Initially, we weren't even sure if Google would be able to see the changes that we were making. So there was a lot of risk in the early days, but I believed that we would figure it out.

3:36And we did. And now I can be, I think I'm happy to say, there's over 20 ,000 sites powered by the software, over 5 ,000 agencies on the platform. And it's a case study machine. It just produces case studies constantly. And that's been great. Yeah. So you've probably seen these headlines of late. It's become very trendy to start a blog post or something with SEO is dead.

4:06So how do you see the landscape changing right now? I mean, there's no question it is evolving and changing, but certainly not dead. How do you see it? How do you see it today? Yeah, I think the problem is that some people's brains are dead and they see those headlines and that's what they click on. But the truth is search is like a basic human function. We have information demands and needs that we need to get met. And there will always be a search engine to meet us in that. The form of what that takes and how it operates and whether the modality is through text or through audio or other formats, that's going to evolve and become more interesting.

4:44But at a fundamental basis, we're essentially providing a fragment of information looking for knowledge. And that discovery process has just evolved. The landscape is now more fragmented than it used to be. The total size of search is actually bigger. and it's still Google's game but the types and ways that we're searching are changing and the kinds of people that search on different search platforms is also becoming pretty interesting there's almost like search personality almost on the other end of the computer there's an avatar there's an ICP and the ICP of the chat GPT user is someone who's willing to pay at least 20 bucks a month.

5:34Remember that, like we're paying for the subscription. Anyone can search on Google without even a dollar. It's a free platform. And so immediately there's a higher like commercial possibility from the user of chat. That's why I guess when we look at our data, we're seeing 5.5 times higher conversion rate from people that go to our site from ChatGPT than from Google, which is insane. And then even for some of our product pages, we see 1.5 to 4x higher conversion rates. So it's undeniable that the conversion likelihood is way higher from chat than it is from Google. And that's what we're seeing.

6:12Yeah, and I think it makes a ton of sense because at least today, the snapshot in the moment, I think that the consumer's belief is, okay, chat GPT or AI or something has gone out there and done all the research for me. And so these three results that it gave me, that's all I need to look at. And I think that's really why you're seeing that. Don't you think that's why that intent and that conversion is so high? Yeah, for sure. And the other thing that happens faster on LLMs is that you're able to do your research in a more comprehensive way. So there's other prompts that they're asking refinements and they're digging in deeper.

6:47They're going and they're asking more questions. And then when they get to the final end of their journey, usually they're in a pretty close position, I think, to make the transaction happen. And they're ready. Yeah, it was a lot of those questions they used to ask a salesperson have now been answered. Yeah, exactly. Way less objections and they're way more familiar with what they're buying. And from an information processing perspective, John, like that's the other amazing thing about it is it's way easier for us to interact with ChatGPT because we know the structure. It's text and it's structured in a way and it's easy to synthesize that.

7:26Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a conversation. It feels like a conversation, right? So what do you see the biggest opportunities and maybe the biggest risks today for marketers with AI becoming so integrated into search strategies? Yeah, that's an interesting one. I think one of the biggest risks is how the platforms themselves are changing. And if you're, as an example, if you're a pure play organic search marketer that was good at creating content and you were creating a lot of informational content, that strategy is becoming more and more obsolete. Because the truth is Google and all the LMs, they already know what color an Apple is.

8:11And they know that the sky is blue. Like we don't have to like create content to show that to them. We have to create something new and different. And so some people that haven't like evolved their marketing approach in organic SEO, they're already like that methodology is already obsolete and they need to retrain. So I think that's like a risk is obsolescence. Like if you're not watching podcasts like this and reading up and actually applying the knowledge, well, you're using an obsolete blueprint that's living in, you know, hopefully not Windows 95, but like, you know, an out of date era. So that's a risk.

8:45Yeah. And the platforms themselves are changing a lot. So like what used to work two years ago on Facebook, for example, like I remember buying mobile app installs from my first tech company for less than a dollar by scraping the Facebook user IDs and running custom audiences. They closed that loophole. So just how the platforms work, their opportunities, that also changes. And it's changing faster with AI now than it was before. So you described a lot of that how-to content. The theory was very top of the funnel, get people to my website, that kind of thing. The common advice that I'm hearing a lot, a lot of folks are giving right now is that our content strategy needs to be more around winning high intent searches, which I think people would say we've always wanted to do.

9:31But that person that's out there searching for best person to do X is a better searcher. But how do we optimize our content for that type of probably more competitive search? Yeah, so it starts with really understanding the central topic or the primary keyword of your business and being really laser clear about that. So for example, for Search Atlas, some people would say it's SEO. No, it's actually non-SEO. If it's SEO, then it's SEO automation. And not just SEO automation, SEO automation software, right? Or maybe it's marketing automation software. the problem becomes first off when people begin the process from the wrong starting point and they don't really understand what is what's called like their primary keyword or their central searching time so that's the first thing and what i we do because we also have an agency and we take on a lot of projects from people that have worked with other agencies that did the content process wrong and they didn't understand what it was that this business was actually selling and they created as an example for a cardiologist in LA an article about did Donald Trump have a heart attack?

10:46Well a heart like I get the concept of a heart attack and Donald that's somehow related to cardiology but that has nothing to do with cardiology in Los Angeles or the service or the practice of it and so when people take that path and they don't do the right content strategy they confuse Google about what the site is actually about and that is the part That is devastating. When they increase the site's focus score, which is a metric Google is quantifying, when they reduce its focus score, when they increase its radius, when the site gets topical radius grows large, it becomes unable to rank for a core topic.

11:24And that's like the mathematics of how they do the demotion. That I think is the biggest problem with common strategies today. Let me ask you a few things. Do you feel like you know what differentiates your business from every other business out there? Can you confidently charge a premium for what you offer? Are you working from a plan, a marketing roadmap that allows you to know precisely what to do next? Look, don't worry if you can't answer yes to any or all of these questions. You're not alone. See, marketers today get so focused on the tactic of the week, staring them right in the face that they forget to look at the big picture.

11:59the overarching strategy needed to consistently grow their business. Over the years, I've worked with thousands of businesses, helping them do just that, create the perfect marketing strategy and plan that gives total clarity about what to do next, confidence to charge ahead and charge more, and complete control of the marketing tactics they choose. I would love to help you and your team do the same. Look, to find out if our strategy first program is right for you, visit dtm.world slash grow and request a free consultation. That's dtm.world slash grow. Yeah, you see a lot of people that write these things and get a whole lot of eyeballs.

12:45And then when you really start drilling into it, it's like, well, these aren't people that would ever buy from us. And so it's almost like you're hurting yourself. Yeah, great, we got lots of traffic, but you're actually hurting yourself. So, so how should marketers, let's broaden beyond SEO, be thinking about AI today. And certainly as it plays into, to your tool search analysts as well. Probably the common thing anyone's going to say right now is like, learn more AI, like get more into the tools, practice it. And so I don't want to just say that. And I like to come up with kind of my own little unique flavor angle on it.

13:20And what I

13:25of people either on your team or people that you respect in the community and do your own hackathons. There's way more power when a group of people collectively approach a problem together in like in the real world, by the way, not, I'm not talking about Zoom. I'm talking about in the real world. We do hackathons with my team and I fly out all over the world to meet different clusters of our team and we lead hackathons for like four days, five days. We all stay in the same place. Then we build in at the end, we come up with a couple of different things we've created together. In the process though, we all become masters of some type of use case around AI in that process.

14:08And sometimes we'll even bring in people that I know that are experts in a particular discipline. And so if you don't know those sorts of people, go find them and make friends with them and learn as much as you can, not just from what's on online and on YouTube, but from real experts that you can become friends with. So there's a lot of common, you know, the whole idea of quality versus quantity. And I see a lot of people looking at AI and saying, oh, I can produce 10 times as much content, you know, in the same amount of time. And I think the flip side of that is I also think you can look at these tools and say, no, I can produce way better content in maybe the amount of time because I can go so much deeper.

14:53I can have access to stats. I can have access to reports that people have written and be able to pull quotes from other people. Is there a quantity versus quality kind of best practice or advice that you give people? So I'll give a controversial take. I think that webpages as we know them will be dead in less than 10 years. And the reason for this is that right now, and historically, Google have needed us to build webpages and really even Facebook to build webpages to lead people on an informational journey. That maybe also includes a conversion journey towards some sort of transaction or registration or some path like that.

15:37and they needed us to box up the information because they didn't have it. When we live in an era where creating content, you can create high quality content and lots of it where content, the value of it, whether it's a webpage or a blog post is essentially zero and high quality content is abundant. That's the future we're racing towards. And so in a world like that, essentially all the information that's knowable gets compressed into a knowledge graph. And that knowledge graph is essentially containing all of the factuality, all the information, consensus of all of the voices on the internet and the world.

16:16And then at that point, Google can just make their own webpages. They don't need us to build it for them. They just know what our query is. They have their lens and perspective on an answer or multiple answers. And so they will reconstruct the webpage experience synthetically, optimized for our exact question and the exact answer we're looking for. Yeah. Yeah. Dynamically created for that one person. Yeah. Right. Which obviously we, you know, very hard for us to do as a website owner. Yeah. All right. I guess it begs the question then like, what do we do to compete with that? Good question. Number one, build the biggest damn brand you can fast.

16:58Build that brand. And get people to know that brand and love it. Build something that they want to come back to. Use your resources to create a true brand. Ultimately, all these search systems are essentially trying to identify the brands. Larry Page said famously that the internet is a cesspool and the brands are the signal and the cesspool. That's literally what he said. And so what does a brand look like? Well, brand looks like people coming to your website, to your assets, consistently to first a single purpose and for them to have high recall amongst your competitors. Get to that point. Even through traditional methodology, just get there.

17:39Because ultimately, that's the signal you can't fake. One of the things that I'm seeing a lot going on, I've been doing this for a very long time. The first round of digital was like, once these other platforms started popping up, it was like, go there, top of the funnel, get some exposure, but drive everybody back to your own property, your website. your email list, right? I'm seeing a lot more people that are investing in YouTube channels and in LinkedIn newsletters that are kind of rented space, but that the entire conversion journey is actually happening in some of those rented places without necessarily, you know, sending people back to your home.

18:21So how do you feel about that kind of rented versus owned change that seems to be going on. Yeah, I think we've always lived in a rented world. It's always been rented and we just maybe didn't want to believe it. Because even ranking on Google, that's also rented, right? We're renting it. We could lose it if we make a mistake. The exception to this would be Amazon. But even Amazon has parts of its business that are rented. And so I think it's becoming comfortable with the fact that across all areas that we have visibility, we will always be competing with our competitors there. So that means at the core of what we're doing, we can't just use crony marketing techniques to box out, you know, the bad guys and just keep in the good guys.

19:02Good guys have to become better. Good guys have to like keep evolving the state of the art in our craft so that we stay competitive. And like, I mean, that sounds like the most obvious thing, right? Like we just can't, you know, but I think that's what it is. And there's no silver bullet in that though. No, there's not. It's different depending on what industry you're in. But ultimately, I guess, you know, and I always hated like the Kevin Costner, if you build it, they will come like mentality that Google have. Like I've always hated it. But ultimately it is like in this perspective, it's true that if you build something of value, people will come back to it.

19:38And, you know, the only other thing I want to add to that is also, I think because of this, we're going to see people move back toward community, like real face to face spaces that are free of like digital operations. advertising and just people that now feel like they're being misled by what they see online. They feel like everything's been gamed and can be gamed. And there's an increasing amount of people that are looking for a recommendation from another person, not from the internet. So last question. I always love to end on kind of a personal question. Looking back at kind of your entrepreneurial journey, any lesson that you wish you'd learned a little earlier as a founder?

20:21don't be afraid to fail and fail more like fail harder uh you know i think i i had my days of like couch surfing and crashing in new york city in uh the early part of my startup journey when i had no money and i had zero twice and like i think we need to celebrate that more and like be comfortable and support people who are there and i'll say like every single person i know that's that was in startups, you're building on their entrepreneurial journey a decade ago, every single one of them has landed someplace amazing. Like not just financially, but also just happy with like where they are in the world.

20:58And I feel like, you know, anyone who's listening to this and is in that early part of their journey, absolutely like commit to it, keep going and like, don't give up. You know, you'll get there. Like it will happen. Gotta keep taking swings, right? Right. So Manik, is there some place, I appreciate you dropping by today. Is there some place you'd invite people to connect with you, learn more about Search Atlas, everything you're up to? Yeah. Easy person to find online. You can find me on Instagram at MonikBahn, at MonikBahn. I've also got a YouTube channel. If you look up Search Atlas on YouTube, we do like weekly webinars and Google challenges and train people how to get better rankings on Google using holistic SEO.

21:41Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road. Awesome. Thanks, John. Appreciate it.

21:59Let me ask you a few things. You feel like you know what differentiates your business from every other business out there? Can you confidently charge a premium for what you offer? Are you working from a plan, a marketing roadmap that allows you to know precisely what to do next. Look, don't worry if you can't answer yes to any or all of these questions. You're not alone. See, marketers today get so focused on the tactic of the week, staring them right in the face that they forget to look at the big picture, the overarching strategy needed to consistently grow their business. Over the years, I've worked with thousands of businesses, helping them do just that.

22:37Create the perfect marketing strategy and plan that gives total clarity about what to do next, confidence to charge ahead and charge more, and complete control of the marketing tactics they choose. I would love to help you and your team do the same. Look, to find out if our strategy first program is right for you, visit dtm.world slash grow and request a free consultation. That's dtm.world.grow.