The Truth About SEO, AI, and Content in 2025

0:08Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantz. My guest today is Bruce Clay. He is known professionally as the father of SEO. He's been a world-renowned expert in the field of SEO since 1996. A lot of people couldn't spell SEO in 1996, probably, right? Bruce programmed the first webpage analysis tool. He created the search engine relationship chart, which has earned over 300 ,000 or did earn over 300 ,000 downloads in its first month. He wrote and taught how to optimize websites to be found in search, establishing bruceclay.com as the trusted source for how-to information in the field of search engine optimization.

0:50So Bruce, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Glad to be here. I would ask you to tell me about your history in involvement in SEO, but that would take it the whole show probably, right? So let's just start with what was kind of the kernel of SEO? Like 1996, a lot of people didn't have websites. So what did SEO look like when you first got started? Let me give you a little bit of background. My background is programming. You know, I have one of these degrees in math and computer science, but I also have an MBA. So I was looking for something that was marketing, but programming and along come search, which is an algorithm.

1:31So that's what really attracted me to it. in its entirety. I got in, programmed some stuff, came up with some of the first tools and started doing optimization. I have a background in mainframe optimization, so I just moved it over and started optimizing web pages. I was trying to become a consultant, right and consultants named the company after them and they do consulting and that's what consultants do right and there weren't a lot of people that were really aware of the power of marketing online but a lot of companies had websites yeah they were catching on if you remember back in 1996 that was when Al Gore invented the internet right I mean the hype was started This is where you got to be.

2:30And a few people. And by the way, I was being found not because people knew to use a search engine to find me. Right. But I was high, high activity in newsletters. Yeah. Right. So people who would stumble into a newsletter would find some of my articles and then they would call me. And the original websites were small. Let's face it. I mean, now there's thousands of pages. But back then, you know, you get a 50-page website, it's a pretty good size. Well, they were kind of brochureware, you know, is how people kind of looked at them. So it was like, we need to put our products on there. And how do people contact us?

3:16And that's it. Yeah. And quite frankly, that was my website. Sure. And when I think back about it, it was so weird because there were no rules. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And my very first website, the homepage had a logo, had a paragraph about what we do, and then a paragraph about the main topics of the website. And those paragraphs were my only navigation. Yeah. I didn't have navigation across the top or down the side. you go in, you read the paragraph, you click, you go into that section. Please tell me you had a sign my guest book link on there somewhere so you could capture an email, right? No, I wasn't even doing that.

4:02I mean, it was, I'm, my philosophy for many, many years is I answer questions until they surrender. Yeah. I gave away everything, all the information I could, But people who wanted to rank, that was why they called me. And they contacted me by email because my email was in the footer or phone number. And the very first day, it was Wild West. I mean, it was, there were no rules. Yep. Right. This is three years before Google. I mean, Excite, AltaVista, InfoSeek. AOL was in there already, I think, even. In 96, we were still on modems. Yeah, yeah. Let's fast forward. We'll go back and forth a little bit here, but I would say five.

4:52I'm going to pin it there, maybe beyond that. But not only were websites very prevalent, blogging had come on the scene. You and I were talking about podcasting. I started my podcast in 2005. And certainly SEO had become really a significant marketing channel and practice. I mean, you had SEO firms that that's all they did. So talk a little bit about maybe how important SEO had become at that point. I'm going to fast forward to where we are today. But say 20 years ago, how important it had become and how people were winning. Well, there was no effective social media. There were newsletters and email.

5:36That's always been here. but SEO on a bang for the buck was highly effective. Remember for many years, even when Google started the home, it was just 10 blue links. Sure. They weren't even promoting a lot of ad sales. So it was, it was very weird. Advertising online was just getting going on a lot of environments. But for traffic purposes, it was really, you had SEO. And it was common to have, because Google came out in 98, 99. PageRank promoted a lot of people to do links. So there was a lot of early stage spam that were up. They were buying links. There's no such thing is a bad link. Every link counts, you know, one of those kinds of things.

6:32And in fact, it was whoever dies with the most links wins. And quality didn't matter and sentiment didn't matter. I could say I hate you or I love you and it's still page rank. So it was pretty wild at those early stages. If you fast forward to today, Google has exactly the opposite. it yeah they only count your best links and the rest are ignored right going out and getting more links is usually a waste because they're not going to be the best yeah and if they're not the best google doesn't need them yeah my speculation is google only uses 20 of your links and then they only use the ones that are recent freshness of your link inventory counts so yeah what was going back then for page rank and manipulation and spamming, those days are long gone.

7:30So the actual SEO has changed. Yeah. Well, I would say 15 years ago, so moving up a little further forward, all of a sudden content became everything. That, you know, people, more content, blog content, know-how content, you know, to the point where it became ridiculous, but it still became a huge, You couldn't do SEO without new volumes of content. And that is especially true today. Yeah. However, the usability of the content has changed dramatically. And you see, I mean, I'm in the same boat as everybody else. We have clients that come to us and say, I just need content. And the answer is more of the same doesn't help.

8:18Let me help the listeners. If I want to rank for mouse, doing 20 pages on the keyword of mouse is counterproductive and actually hurts your ranking. What you need to do is build a hierarchy of mouse and then the types of mice and et cetera. You build a content expertise and the quality of each page is why the search engine wants you. But having 20 of them on mouse is not going to help you. And also, if you have a lot of pages on information that's 20 years old, that doesn't help you. Classic example. I had 6 ,000 pages on my website. But early on, I would go to conferences and I'd have a team go and we would live blog sessions, which were great.

9:20And we'd have links from the people who were speaking and it was wonderful. However, live blogging a session from 2004 on SEO does no good today. A little bit irrelevant, right? That's not relevant. And so I went through a process. I cut out, I'm down 1 ,800 blog pages, which by the way, is still a lot. Sure. But compared to 4 ,000? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I had a ton of pages that I cut off my site. And so it isn't an issue of quantity. Yeah. It actually turns out that the current issue is the quality of your page. Yeah. And the fact that you only have one of them. And so you got to build a hierarchy.

10:10You got to understand architecture. Got to understand how to build it. And now on comes AI. And I can generate a thousand pages a day. And I mean, it's crazy because those pages are terrible. Do you ever feel like TV ads are just for the big guys? Well, not anymore. Ad Critter makes it easy and affordable for small business owners to run targeted, connected TV ads that drive real results. Their full funnel approach combines high impact connected TV ads with precise digital retargeting. So you can easily reach your audience across platforms and keep your business top of mind. And the best part, Ad Critter takes care of the tricky stuff.

10:53Just upload your customer data and they handle the rest. And try it out for yourself. Right now, duct tape marketing listeners get a dollar for dollar match on any TV campaign up to$5 ,000. That means if you spend$5 ,000 on TV ads, you'll get an additional$5 ,000 to spend. Head on over to adcritter.com. That's adcritter.com and get started. So let's talk a little bit about you mentioned the word quality, and I think everybody gets that. Like that phrase, you know, quality over quantity, you know, everybody gets that fundamentally. But how do you, you know, what does quality mean? I know Google tries to give like the EAT guidelines and things like that.

11:35But like how should somebody who's trying to promote their business go about thinking about creating a quality page or quality content? You would look at the Google Quality Rater guidelines. Right. It's 160 pages. And you would go through that. And Google does a moderately good job of defining quality. That's where they've defined the EEAT definitions and things like that. However, Google also has usability, which isn't really well defined anywhere. I mean, what makes a page useful? I mean, little things that a site wouldn't do are usability factors. For instance, do I have jump links at the top of the page?

12:19That's clearly a usability factor. It's not so much an SEO factor. Do I have breadcrumbs? Clearly a usability factor. Do I have search on the page? A usability factor, right? Are my links easily seen? a usability factor. And all of those things are also part of what causes you to rank. And I can look at my keywords and do I have them in the right tags? And am I running a schema? And do I define things correctly? But that has little to do with, is it usable? Right. I mean, OK, I have the keyword in there too many times. I'm a spammer, but that isn't usable. Right. It doesn't affect usability and usability is an external factor now.

13:18So sites that used to rank number one in Vantage, that page isn't less content wise, less valuable. It's that the standards have changed. Yeah. And now usability is a big factor. AI. When AI came out, and I want to mention this, AI came out and originally Google said it has to be human created. Yeah. Then they changed it. Actually, on their website, they changed it to where it has to be useful to humans. Yeah. Right? Which is a good factor. Right. I think it's great. However, it was interpreted that AI is okay. And our tests show that if we have a bunch of pages, AI will always be last among equals.

14:08And Google has now got a statement out that says, what we expect of your page is that it is consistent with common knowledge and creates new now. Right? They sound a little diametrically opposed. And it's because the LLM is built based upon common knowledge and consensus. But they're expecting the human touch to be, and this is my creativity component. And how it's going to work in the future is something else. But those factors, other than just usability, affect how you rank. So you mentioned earlier the idea the original Google home screen had the 10 links and nothing else on it. Well, now it's a shopping mall, right?

14:59It's got all kinds of ads on it. It's got things for local, for maps. It's got organic stuff. It's got the AI overview. So a lot of people today are screaming about this whole zero click thing is, you know, the end of SEO. I'm curious where you stand on that sort of extreme mentality. Well, yeah, that is somewhat extreme because I'm wrong. If you want to rank in social, you participate in social and you have your followers. If you want to rank in organic, you qualify based upon the SEO components that allow you to rank in organic. If you want to rank in AI, right, it isn't really so much the social component about who you are.

15:50And it isn't the SEO component about who you are. When a consensus is built, individuals are lost. it's collective information right right the problem is that the llm doesn't go out and spider websites and chase links or worry about canonicals or care about your schemas what it does is it gathers all this information puts it into an llm now it keeps track of sites but it's really consensus information. If you look at search for ChatGPT, in order to qualify to be in their search results, they rely on Bing to have previously said, you're a trusted site. AIO requires that Google has you near the top of the results so that they know you're not a spammer, you're a trusted site.

16:56And then those trusted sites are aggregated to form their results. So the LLM really has the search component as a filter. And that means that you still have to do SEO. Yeah. So if I can maybe summarize that a little bit, the keywords or keyword phrases that you're ranking for today probably makes it more likely that you're going to start seeing some chat GPT traffic, for example. You could very well. For similar searches, yeah. Right. Now, the chat, using chat GPT or AIO, either one, they're question-based. Right. They're typically information rather than transactional. Yes. And we have written a lot of tools.

17:46We have a product called PreWriter. And what it does is it analyzes the intent of the page. And then the intent of the competition and matches them, right? So you find that intent is important. Sure. All this stuff is very, very important. But what triggers all that, and this is a very complex world, what triggers it is, is it a question, a how question? And about 16 % of all searches in the Google world are how. Yeah. So that's what triggers the AIO. That means that my website has to answer questions. It means that my website to be an AIO has to have an informational bias, right? Transactional sites are harder to have an AIO even show up.

18:43So information, how do I do this type of query, that is really the trigger. So I have to have a website that qualifies for the question being asked of the chat world. I've got one final question. You're on this podcast and I've always, on top of hosting a podcast, I actually also am part owner in a podcast booking service. We book a lot of our clients on those. And I tell people all the time that being a guest on a podcast is a great, well, you get exposure, you get content, you get backlinks. I'm curious how you think about, you know, because we went through that period where everybody did guest blogging and that stuff just got buried.

19:30And I'm really trying to, you know, preach people guest podcasting. So I'm curious your take on that. Do you see that as a strong SEO play still? I think that podcasts are a massive play. Yeah. Now, so I'll come up with the next level. It turns out that since AI is all question-based and because they are not doing searches and establishing all this stuff, they're relying on the search engines, mentions are really important. And I think that podcasts are one of the best PR components that there is right now. I'm on a podcast. I believe the podcasts are going to be massive. They are exactly what the doctor ordered in order to get what's referred to as mentions.

20:25And I think that in the AI world, the brand mention is dominant. it. Ran Fishkin just did a session that I watched, and he emphasized that a lot of his traffic is from brand mentions of his name associated with certain words, and it causes him to get traffic. And I think that there's a lot of people who are concerned about with AIO, you might get less traffic from organic results. I also believe that podcasts and YouTube and all these other mechanisms out there are very, very important. And you have to be there. If you're not there in a year from now, you're going to be really sad. Yeah. You're speaking my language.

21:21Well, Bruce, I appreciate you taking a moment to drop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Where would you invite people to find out more about your work and connect with you? Well, my website, as I said, I'm a consultant, right? BruceClay.com. It was rather nice and easy to get at the time. BruceClay.com. And then I have other websites that link from there. SEOtraining.com, SEOtools.com. Great names, right? And PreWriter, I've got others, but BruceClay.com is the best way to reach me. Awesome. Well, I appreciate that. I did the same thing. I started my company. it was Jantz Communications Consulting, right?

21:58Before I went to duct tape marketing. So I get it. Again, I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road. Okay, great. Thank you.