RSS 67: AI SEO Strategy: 5 Ways to Increase LLM Visibility and Drive Better Buyers

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0:34Do you remember when you would go to Google and you type in a question like, what's the best CRM? What CRM should I use? What are the top CRMs for my industry? These types of questions were at the core of SEO. We would create blog posts, landing pages, and resources that would help people answer these questions. And some of you might be thinking to yourself, Ross, I'm still doing that. I get it. There is still some tactics and still some value in a lot of the traditional SEO efforts that we all embraced. Some of them are still very important. I'm not here to say that they are dead, not even close.

1:09I believe that SEO is still a fundamental part of the practice of AI visibility, LLM SEO, whatever you want to call it. I do believe that SEO is a key part of that equation, but I also believe that things have shifted. Things have changed. And I'm not just talking about the technology and the algorithms. I'm talking about the way in which we as humans find things, the way in which we find answers to questions, the way in which we discover products or even services. All of it has changed. 10 years ago. I would never go to TikTok to find out exactly where I should eat a meal when I am in a new city.

1:47I would never go to Instagram to discover new products and new clothing and new fashion brands that I should be wearing. But today, my discovery process has fundamentally shifted. It is no longer just about Google. Yes, I do use Google every single day for different use cases and applications, but it is not the only tool in the toolbox. You now see the rise of perplexity, of Grok, of ChatGPT, of all of these new LLMs. And some of you might be using them just for chat to have a conversation, but many of us are using them to actually solve massive problems. Folks, we live in a world where the way in which we buy has fundamentally changed.

2:29The way in which we work has fundamentally changed. And in this episode of The Ross Simmons Show, I'm going to be sharing with you five key insights that you need to know so your business, your brand can thrive in the new AI age. If you're playing the long game, you're in the right place. Welcome to The Ross Simmons Show.

3:02So as I mentioned, I'm going to be sharing with you five simple strategies that you should embrace in this new AEO, GEO, LLM, SEO era. The first thing that you need to do is understand the importance of increasing your surface area. What does that mean? Traditionally, when we would go to a marketing presentation as an SEO or a content marketer, the vast majority of the conversations fell into a few key buckets. Organic traffic to our website, how many backlinks we are generating, and maybe, depending on the brand and the sophistication internally, you might have even talked about time spent on site or domain authority, things of that nature.

3:41Now, in today's day and age, we all have gone through a massive shift where the amount of impressions that we're seeing in the SERP, aka the search engine results page, has risen, but the amount of clicks has declined. Why? Because Google has become a destination. A destination where yes it will give answers to questions but those answers aren't happening through a click to your website. People are getting answers to questions directly on Google's search page. When they ask for the best CRM, when they ask for a place to eat, the answer to their questions are there. So what does that mean for you as a website owner?

4:19It means you no longer can only care about the people who visit your site, you must be thinking about the ways in which LLMs are communicating with your potential buyers before they even get to you. So how can you do that? You increase your surface area. You see, every single day when the LLMs and Google are going out and trying to determine the answer to these questions, they're using a wide range of different sources to formulate a response. If If someone asks the question, what should I buy for my 18 year old as they go off to university, they're going to be met with a list of things in natural language directly inside of Google.

4:59The same thing happens in perplexity. The same thing happens inside of ChatGPT, Rock, you name it. But where does that information come from? It comes from training data. You want to increase your surface area so the training data is aligned with your product. For example, if the LLM is going out and looking at blogs, you want to reach out to all of those different blogs and ensure that you are mentioned. If the LLM are using YouTube videos, then you want to ensure that you are being mentioned in those YouTube videos. If the LLM is sourcing the content from a Reddit thread, then you want to show up on Reddit.

5:36You want to increase your surface area in which the brand is being talked about in alignment with the prompts and the questions that you're buyers make. The second thing that you need to understand when it comes to LLM optimization is that your website is no longer the most important thing. We can still care deeply about our websites, but we have to recognize now more than ever before, a lot of UGC content is going to impact our buyers. Affiliate sites are going to impact our buyers. Review sites are going to impact our buyers. And while the traffic to all of these places might be down, the citations and them being used as first party data or third party data to ultimately influence your buyers has never been higher.

6:24So you want to make sure that you are generating positive reviews. You want to ensure that Capterra, Trust Radius, G2, Yelp, etc. are saying positive things about your brand, about your business because when they do speak positively about you, it is more likely that that content will be reflected in the LLM's answer when your customer is asking a question.

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7:55The third thing that every marketer needs to know about this new AI era is that when you are looking at platforms like Claude, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Grok, you name it, it's important that we keep in mind that not all LLMs source the internet the same way. This is why it's so important to actually track the data associated with your niche. You can't just assume that what you're reading in the headlines about Reddit is no longer ranking number one in the LLMs at truth and at face value because we know from research and data that Claude doesn't really cite Reddit that often, probably because Reddit and Anthropic had a lawsuit a few months, years back, and they probably don't have perfect feelings, right?

8:38You need to understand that every platform is different and that the way in which your brand, your category, and your niche shows up is going to be different from other ones. So it is key, it is crucial that you understand your state of situation based off of your prompts and not others. The fourth thing that you need to know about the LLM optimization era is that you probably shouldn't go on to Reddit and spam it and fill it with as much comments as you possibly can. That is a fast track to not only getting banned from Reddit, but potentially having your brand completely banned and blocked out of the subreddits that you tried to manipulate.

9:16I've seen this happen. I saw a brand, I'm not going to say who, they went into Reddit and they decided that they were going to fill it up with as much comments about them as possible. I think they hired a bunch of accounts from all over the world and told them to flood it with positive stories about their brand and about their business. Just to see the mods update the subreddit and say, if you talk about this brand, you will have an automatic ban. Peace out. Wild. You do not want to astroturf Reddit. Reddit has some of the smartest spam filters in the world. So don't make that mistake. Play the long game.

9:52Engage authentically. Create your own subreddit and encourage your customers to ask questions and engage there. Build rapport there. Be a good contributor to Reddit. Ask yourself, what can you do for Reddit, not what Reddit can do for you? And if you do that, if you go in with that mentality of adding value first and maybe trying to sell something second, you'll actually be able to thrive on this platform instead of getting banned, not just your account, but your entire brand. The fifth thing to know about LLM optimization and AEO and GEO and this holistic thing is that at the end of the day, folks, one of the core principles of search still applies here.

10:30You have to start by understanding the prompts that your audience would be looking for. If you have never spent any time understanding in the philosophy and the concepts of search intent, then you might be missing out on one of the key fundamentals of this entire niche. You need to understand what commercial, transactional, informational related queries your audience would be looking for. And because we don't have access to search volume within and inside of the LLMs, the best case scenario, from my opinion, and that we use at Foundation, is to take keyword research, and then take a variance of that, multiply it by the total usage of chatGPT, claw perplexity in the grand scheme of things and assume that that's how many people are using those LLMs to ask a similar query.

11:18Let me break this down a little bit more simply so it is very clear what I'm saying. If you see that 500 people every month are looking for your category with a certain word and you're using an SEO oriented keyword research tool to give you that data, what I want you to do is to assume and estimate A smaller percentage of that amount of people are going to an LLM and asking the same question. Once you have that data, you're going to upload these prompts to your favorite prompt tracking tool. You're going to use this to get insights into what websites, what platforms are being cited by the LLMs and then reverse engineer an AEO, GEO, LLM, SEO strategy rooted in that effort.

12:01For example, if you see that YouTube videos are showing up, maybe you should create YouTube videos. If you're seeing that competitors' landing pages are showing up, maybe you too should create landing pages. If you're seeing listicles show up, maybe you should create listicles. If you're seeing comparison pages, maybe comparison pages. If you're seeing Reddit threads, maybe you need a Reddit presence. If you're seeing medium content, you get the idea. Reverse engineer what success looks like and then execute based off of that data. Folks, this episode is intended to be short and sweet. Send it to your team so they can absorb and understand some of the core principles of what needs to be done today in this AEO-GEO era.

12:40And I hope that something that I shared today sticks with you so you can not only increase your visibility in the LLMs, but that you can put pipeline into your CRM. If you want more information on this, our team at Foundation would love to chat, and I'll see you on the internet.

13:00Gotta hustle with the Disney