RSS 73: Beyond Traffic: Gaetano DiNardi on The B2B Marketer’s Guide to a Winning Search Strategy

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0:34every single day some companies around the world are generating millions of dollars on the back of referrals from chat gpt claude perplexity google they've done it for many years some companies have built up so much brand equity by building million dollar blog posts million dollar landing pages and my next guest gatano denardi is one of the people who have helped them do it And Gitano is one of the few marketers in search B2B that really understands the nuance and the elements of bottom of funnel queries and search intent that a lot of people ignore. In this episode, me and Gitano dive deep into understanding whether or not this AEO, GEO thing is a phase, a fad, or if it's something that truly will shape the way the business is done.

1:26In this episode, we dive deep into some of the playbooks that he has run to help organizations scale from 70 to 200 million, to drive 400 % growth on some of the greatest growth engines that we've seen in B2B. Folks, this episode has no hold bars. We dive deep. We call out some of the biggest claims and shifts in the industry that need to be called out for what they are. If you're playing the long game, you're in the right place. Welcome to The Ross Simmons Show.

2:10So you are one of the few brilliant minds in search discovery that also is brilliant in music. what did the music industry teach you about patience rejection and people only see the result that you still kind of use today you know you don't just make it in anything right away whether you're starting a youtube channel whether you're starting a sub stack whether you're starting a linkedin you know to grow followers a newsletter anything that you're trying to do it doesn't happen fast and in the music industry i ate mud for a long time i had the worst jobs i was an unpaid intern for a few years i was cleaning like the turtle the turtle tub you know i remember the foo fighters came in once right where i was a session intern and like the main engineers in the session were pissed that like i said what up to dave grohl you know and actually they made me run to Kmart and get Twix bars because like my job was to get Twix bars and make sure it was always stocked and like there was a shortage of Twix bars on the day someone wanted it and it was a like I had to pay hell for that wow yeah so like yeah sure I was able to produce music for some good names you know I worked with Shaggy that was like a really cool moment um I worked with a bunch of rappers too I got a placement with Fat Joe that was nice I went to Scott Storch's house with Mike King recently to play guitar on a record.

3:36But all that stuff took a long time. I ate a lot of mud. Basically, whether you're in marketing and you're someone that's striving to build a big presence and a personal brand, or even if you're a startup trying to go up against the incumbents in a tough space or whatever, it's going to take time. So that's what I've realized is you're going to have to eat mud in the beginning, no matter what you're doing. So a lot of folks see your career at this stage and they're like, okay, I want to get there. What's the path? How do I become G like in your world? You talk about eating mud. What does that mean from a professional lens in this world of discovery, marketing, et cetera?

4:12Like, could you describe what that looks like for someone who's just getting started and wants to eventually aspire to have a career as successful as yours? Well, yeah, you have to find a way in somehow. And usually the best way in is at the bottom. And so, you know, Mike King, his company, Iapol rank. I was one of the first employees. I was the second employee. And when I hit him up, it was through LinkedIn. And I basically told him, hey, I've been following you as someone I respect in SEO. I only got into SEO because I thought I could use it to grow my music brand. Really? Yeah. But then I realized it's all branded search and you can't.

4:50Right. Doing SEO for music is extremely hard. But anyway, through that process, I actually like low key fell in love with SEO and my test project for getting hired at iPoll rank was present the strategy, the marketing strategy behind my own music. Oh, wow. Yeah, that was my interview. And, you know, I passed the interview and I got hired. You know, it was it was an entry level position. But I was like, look, if I could work alongside Mike King. Right. I think I can become great if I can work with somebody like that. And so I hit him up on LinkedIn cold pitch. Cool. And, you know, it all worked out.

5:26So you got to take a shot in the dark. You got to shoot your shot. Right. Start. You know, he was starting his company at the time. Maybe the stars were aligning in a lucky moment for me there. But, you know, I also had to work really hard. So I would just say, find a way in and start at the bottom. Is there any marketing problem that you found in the world of music that aligns very closely to this world of B2B that you often operating now? Yes. Getting people to care, different differentiation, right. And distribution, right. Those, those things probably are standing out the most to me in terms of like, what problems do musicians have that B2B brands also have particularly around distribution?

6:07I know you're the distribution King, but music is all about distribution. How do you make that happen? And it's really, that's why I tried to do it through SEO and then realizing there is no inbound, right like you can't inbound yourself you can't rank for like you know best music producer 2026 i guess you can try but like you have to do that through parasite means and that doesn't really work so you know that and then getting people to care like i remember trying to promote my own music and getting such a low engagement like my friends would barely you know support it sometimes yeah you know so stuff like that would be annoying but i i think those are the hardest things.

6:45It's just how do you get people to care? How do you differentiate and stand out? And then how do you successfully figure out like a distribution play that works? You know, it's interesting. Like I never thought about this, but as a musician, you probably build a bit of a thick skin around the fact that for some posts, you're going to be met with crickets. You might not have all the supporters. You've now become a creator in this B2B world as well, right? Like you've got the sub stack, which is great. I strongly recommend folks check it out. I'll include a link in the show notes. But the idea of like being comfortable putting the word out there about your work and your own expertise is something that you probably were able to get comfortable with as a musician that carried out very well into your professional career.

7:26Was it easy? Because like you're very active on a lot of the channels and have promoted yourself for a long time, like talking about your work, talking about your expertise. Do you think the music stuff prepared you for that? Are you comfortable with it? Like how do you think of the the persona on the business side versus the music side and how you're like essentially putting yourself out there to the world. Oh yeah. So you got to get comfortable with rejection, no doubt about it. That's a obstacle that a lot of marketers struggle to overcome if they want to, you know, start a personal brand or grow a LinkedIn presence or start a YouTube channel.

8:00You know, those obstacles are like, what if people judge me? What if I look stupid? You know, all these sorts of like mental blockers, yeah but being in the music game you must overcome that like you have to shoot your shot rejection should not matter to you at all because ultimately at the end of the day it's an alignment with your icp problem there's always somebody out there in the little nooks and crannies of the internet and the world that will like your stuff right you just have to find them and so it's really all about a marketing problem like you can find people online that like the most random niche music, you know, um, it's not a matter of, you know, there's nobody out there.

8:39There's nobody out there that would like my stuff. It's just, you're not finding them. Right. And so that is, you know, something that I realized in the music business, you know, I would look out the window and say, Hey, out there, there is somebody that wants to hear my stuff that will like it. That's fair. I just gotta, just gotta figure out how to find them. So yeah, becoming numb to rejection was key. And then Mike told me that, you know, when he was hiring me, he thought that I would be good at certain things in marketing because I had that skill. So like at the time, link building outreach was like a bigger thing than it is today.

9:09And so, yeah, I was great at that. I was great at pitches because I knew how to pitch my music. So being able to pitch clients for like PR opportunities and stuff, I was excellent at stuff like that. Yeah. I love that. I always like to give Mike his flowers. Mike has done so much for the industry. I had had him on one of the episodes a few months back and it was a great episode. Let's go back into the time when you did work with Mike a bit. Is there anything from those years that you would say gave you a competitive advantage in terms of something that Mike may have taught you or I pull rank in general would have taught you that set you up on your way for success?

9:44Like, is there something that gave you key insights that have allowed you to have this career? 100%. Like I got a, you know, hat tip to Mike. I always give him his flowers. I always say that I'm eternally grateful for him giving me my opportunity. You know, I obviously had to work hard and earn it, but he gave me the chance, you know, and the things that I learned with him that I think were the most impactful were like, you know, those people you hire that they just have a will, they have a way to like figure shit out. Even when there's like no instruction manual, like this was pre AI days. So, you know, when it came to like doing SEO audits, a lot of times mike would just be like yo i'm testing you on this i'm not going to help you i'm not going to hold your hand just reverse engineer what i've done with this client right and get it as far as you can get and don't come to me until you're truly truly stuck that's cool yeah and so just wiring my brain like that like i can't go bug him for every little thing yeah i've yeah i've got to get as far as i can on this on my own that is a massive skill because it learned you learn how to take massive initiative.

10:47So that's big. And then like just professional standards, you know, so like never, ever missing a deadline. You just can't do that in agency life. Right. If you, if you do that, it's grounds for termination. Yeah. You know, so, so there's no way you could ever miss a deadline. You got to do what it takes to, to get that done and be focused, time management and all that. And then I think another one was like diagnosing things properly before prescribing like a recommendation. Like don't speculate. A lot of times we would see things and even I would message him on Slack and say like, hey, do you think this is seasonal?

11:22He's like, nope, it ain't seasonal. Think again. Right. So you really better, yeah, you really better diagnose this properly before you go and prescribe something to a client because if you're wrong, you're gonna look foolish and you're gonna recommend them the wrong thing. And that's actually what I see a lot of happening today from clients that I onboard that came from previous agencies I see a whole lot of speculation and misdiagnosing things that just aren't right. What do you think is leading that to that? Like, I feel like you're spot on. There's a lot of folks who are very prescriptive and are taking these firm stances on things and not necessarily always having the data or the experience to make these records.

11:59Is there something going on in search that's leading down this path? Wow. You know, I don't know for sure what could be causing that. But I think, you know, I don't want to say it's laziness. I don't want to say it's lack of competence. It could just be lack of experience. Right. You know, that could be it. But like something that comes to mind is a recent example of a client where organic traffic and demos collapsed. Completely collapsed like out of nowhere. Like I'm talking like in one month down by 50%. Wow. And the growth manager at that company proactively sounded the alarms and said, like, you know, something's wrong.

12:44You know, like out and speculated. Right. We think an algorithm change happened. Right. Right. And when I went and looked at this, my process is just more. Let me inspect every possible thing that could have happened and not just assume it's an algorithm update. What I ultimately found was it was a channel mix imbalance where paid search had overtaken what would have ordinarily flown into organic. And so that growth manager didn't go and talk to the paid team to find out that they had surged bidding on organic brand terms. Right, right. So brand search that would have ordinarily flown into branded attribution went to paid.

13:28Wow. Yeah. And so it's just, it's simple stuff like that. So if that growth manager would have paused and thought, how do I properly diagnose this before sounding the alarms? It would have been a much better situation because it caused some internal ruckus. Right. Right. Right. And so it's just, maybe it's just like a lack of experience, right? Because I just know to go and check that. Yeah. Because your experience runs deep. Like you've done a lot of things from sales hacker, IPO rank, et cetera, and more like, let's go back to that moment with sales hacker. Lots of growth, 400 % before they got acquired by Outreach.

14:02Like when you look back at that time, was there anything that you were involved with that you would point to and say, yeah, that moved the needle. And just a caveat is still applicable today and could work for brands today. Does anything stand out? You know, it's interesting. Like I think back on that time, it was an interesting time was pre-AI, but I think half of it is applicable today and half of it is not. Here's what's not applicable. Yeah. The hype train and the hype machine around organic traffic. Like even my case study on organic traffic growth from that time, basically any organic traffic growth case study is now irrelevant.

14:36Fair. Yeah. And so, you know, we had contributor led content. So I think that could be relevant for today. Yeah. Where we didn't have content writers, for example. It was just me reaching out to experts in the space saying, hey, we want to produce a guide on sales development. Who's the best person out there on sales development? Oh, it's Tito from Altisales. Let's work with him on that. So that's very applicable today. I don't think people are doing that as much. And then the other thing that's applicable was like, let's control our distribution by growing a list. True. That was the North Star KPI that the CEO told me.

15:12All we have to do is grow the list. Right. If we grow the list organically and it's high engagement, high quality people, we unlock everything we need to do. We unlock sponsorship revenue. We unlock greater engagement on webinars. We unlock more people coming to our events and finding out about our events. Right. So on and so on and so on. But that was a very smart thing. It wasn't necessarily traffic. traffic was the means of growing the list because in those days traffic was a way to get people to subscribe to your newsletter right you could grow your traffic do more pop-ups do more a-b testing on content to get more you know email signups and stuff like that right but that's yeah that that was a fun project do you still view email as one of the most like underrated but biggest opportunities for brands would you say that's fair to say or would you disagree no no i i do agree but i think my views have changed a little bit.

16:07So one of the reasons why I started a sub stack is because I realized that I don't want to leave to chance my distribution through LinkedIn or X because not everybody sees my stuff and it changes a lot from month to month, year to year or whatever. I don't know if you've noticed it, but LinkedIn engagement it seems to be going down. Yeah. Way down. Way down. Yeah. So it's like, why leave your distribution to chance? Um, I would rather know that I have a 40 % guaranteed open rate. True. That's fair. So, so, so, but for companies though, I don't know, because like, I don't know, you're going to send the email from, you know, Hey, it's, it's Bob at Optimizely.

16:48Right. Do people care about Bob Optimizely? You know, maybe not, but me, you like, you know, we have more of a affiliation with the space, more of a personal stamp behind the things that we put out. So I think it means more, but ultimately, yes, I do believe email is like a way to circumvent all these distribution problems. Absolutely. You've had some great insights in marketingadvice.substack, like your channel that you've been publishing. Some folks would say they've been some hot takes. I love them. How's been the response? Like what's been the response like from your end as the creator of all of this?

17:23Like, have you been receiving a lot of praise behind closed doors? Are you getting some haters in the DMs? What's been the vibe from the market with the content you're producing? It's been all love, man. Really, it's been all love. Yeah. I got a little bit of hate. I'll tell you about the hate, but it's been like 99 % love. I had a lot of people say, man, the stuff that you write about in your sub stack is the stuff that's internally happening at our companies. No one wants to say. That's why. I've literally had people tell me, dude, it's like you're living in my brain. right and it's only because i'm a practitioner and i'm working with a lot of companies as a person doing the work and so i see the problems happening firsthand right and so i think that gives me a little bit of a advantage because you know people want personal life anecdotes right like what's really happening in your day-to-day work which piece are you most proud of i think it was my response to reddit being overhyped yeah yeah reddit being overhyped it was it was called CMOs are freaking out about Reddit because of misleading charts.

18:28Yeah. And the backstory to it real quick is that you remember all those charts that came out from SEMrush and several other companies that said like, you know, Reddit is the number one most cited thing and one of the most important factors for like GEO success. Yeah. But the problem is that a lot of those studies are not really focused on like niche B2B categories. It's covering big, broad stuff. And so a lot of the categories that I'm working in are very niche-y. And Reddit is not always the most important third-party source. Sometimes it can be, but a lot of times it's Gartner. A lot of times it's G2.

19:06A lot of times it's YouTube. So people just by default became overly obsessed with Reddit, and then it triggers the wrong behaviors. It's like, how do we hack it? And what I explain to clients now a lot is that there is really no AEO algorithm to hack. It's true. There just isn't, you know? And so I've seen your presentation on Reddit. It's excellent. It actually changed my mind on a lot of things. Cool. But it's a lot of things that companies aren't doing and aren't willing to do. Yeah. I think the key piece of the equation that a lot of brands don't realize is that you have to look at your own situation.

19:41Yeah. The CRM and the waste management software. Right. The same. Like they're absolutely the not. Right. They might have a ton of citations for G2. one might have a ton of citations for trust radius. Then you might roll over into MarTech space and then maybe you see some Reddit or maybe you see some Gartner. And I think the issue that a lot of the marketers today have is that we read the hype in the headlines and we don't do the work to understand our own isolated situation, which is what I think your piece kind of speaks to. And I'll share the marketing advice sub stack in the show notes so folks can check it out.

20:15Thank you. Folks should definitely check it out. All right, let's go to one of your other brands that you've worked with. Nextiva. So talk about success, like huge, huge, but also a bit of a shift. Cause like, or maybe it's not, you tell me like you've, it seems like looking in, you've gotten into worlds of email community now demand gen with Nextiva, et cetera, but also thinking about it from a search lens, like how much of that engine that you built there, would you say it was demand generation versus demand capture? And then I want to ask you a little bit about inbound versus like, the actual queries and how that whole space worked.

20:52But let's start with, was that a demand gen or demand capture play? So it's a really interesting company. And at that time, the setup was really interesting too. So there was a lot of different ways to capture demand, but they weren't doing it effectively. And that's one of the main reasons they brought me in was to really focus on the demand capture aspect. But I would say that even today, it's probably 70 % brand, 30%, you know, demand capture non-brand stuff. Yeah. They had a massive partner reseller network that did tremendous numbers. Right. And so for a company like that, believe it or not, like there's a lot of these like, you know, enterprise VoIP managed solution providers type of companies that will say, hey, we recommend Nextiva for this.

21:37And then companies will go buy Nextiva because of the recommendations of those partners and resellers. Right. But I wasn't involved in that motion as much. My mandate was, dude, go capture inbound bottom of funnel demand. Just figure out how to dominate that. And so to the point you made about Reddit and knowing your niche and what's influential in your niche, there was a site. It still runs today, and I'm sure it still kills it. It was a site called Get VoIP. Okay. It was the number one affiliate in that space. Right. And so we realized all we really need to do to like crack this in a big way is have the best possible affiliate relationship with Get VoIP and have the best possible offer on Get VoIP.

22:22Do whatever it takes to pay more for leads that could potentially like make it exclusive for us to get better leads or the only kinds of leads that we want. Right. And maybe tell, you know, Get VoIP, hey, we'll pay double per lead if you don't sell leads to eight by eight. Right. You know? So it was a lot of stuff like that. That's crafty stuff. You know the concept of like SERP domination? I do. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So this was before AI, of course, but like one thing we were always tracking was for like those bottom of funnel searches. Do we have the ad? Do we have our own listing? And how many affiliates can we get to also occupy real estate so that we are the most favorable option?

23:01So we wanted to cover the SERPs as much as we could. And that's really what I focused on the most with Nextiva was bottom of funnel demand capture across all those categories of VoIP and UCAS and contact center searches on paid affiliate and organic. So there's this strategy that is often talked about called the ludicrous strategy in the world where everyone is creating things about area codes. Can you spill the tea? Does the area code strategy work? Should all of these VoIP companies have tons of landing pages, which is just like, what's the area code in this region, in this region, and 504 and 602 and 902, all of that?

23:41Is that a valid strategy? Did you folks run that playbook? Did you create that playbook? because everyone's done it. Like, does the ludicrous strategy actually work or is it just top of funnel noise? Oh, I hate it so much. So I inherited this problem. Somebody, my predecessor launched that. Yeah. And you know what's so crazy is that they actually hit me up as a consultant years later and said, hey, we have this problem with these area code pages. We want to get your take on what we should do with them. Within one day, I just said, guys, look, it's time to rip the Band-Aid off this. If you want, like, I'll just put together an implementation plan for you on what to do, how to get rid of them properly.

24:21Correct. And so they finally actually ripped the Band-Aid off. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. They finally agreed to do it because for the longest time, it was just a traffic hype machine. That's it? All hype? It didn't drive anything. It didn't. It doesn't drive any of them. What's crazy is that Dialpad copied the strategy years later. Right. And then there was case studies published about Dialpad's traffic skyrocketing. Right. Right. But you're like, but did it drive money? Exactly. Exactly. See, I knew right away when Dialpad was doing those case studies about their traffic and everybody was like, oh, my God, they're crushing it.

24:53I knew exactly what it was. I knew exactly what it was. And, you know, I could have been a troll. Right. You know, I'm not going to do that. But like I knew very good and well what that was. But yeah, like long story short is that all those pages got ripped out and they didn't do anything. The ludic play does not work. Fair enough. It didn't work. Yeah. Like I believe one of the things that we've always been so aligned on is the importance in B2B to focus on the money keywords, the bottom of the funnel, et cetera. Can you give a playbook to the B2B SaaS CMO marketer who doesn't understand search, but needs to understand bottom of funnel and they're being measured on pipeline against like traffic and LLM visibility.

25:32What's the playbook that you would recommend they think about and try to execute within their space? How should they be thinking of bottom of funnel? Yeah, I think you have to know the surface area. Like, what are all the different ways somebody out there might be searching for VoIP solutions, for example? So we realized that there were many ways that this happened that weren't just like VoIP. It was like business phone system, business phone service, cloud VoIP, you know, cloud PBX, right? Enterprise variations of this. So then what you have to realize is how many pages do we need? What kind of pages do we need?

26:07What's the intent? what's the mix of how hard we can be trying to sell our services on these pages versus how informational they need to be. You need to figure out the intent. So there cannot be any intent mismatches. And you really need to avoid, I even think with AI today, you still need to do this. You need to avoid creating too many pages that are too overly similar. And actually, in that time, Google was treating a lot of those SERPs separately. I haven't gone and looked at those SERPs in a long time, but I could bet that a lot of them have gotten merged. Right. True. Because I've seen this with another client in the employee monitoring software space.

26:43They used to have all these long tail SEO pages that were in the umbrella of employee monitoring, but they weren't called employee monitoring. So it was called things like employee computer screenshot software, right? Right. You know, stuff like that. Remote desktop employee control tool or something like that. Right. And it worked because Google wasn't smart enough at that time to know that, all right, when people search this, what do they ultimately want? They want an employee monitoring solution. Right, right. So what I'm seeing now in the evolution of search is that these specialty niche lanes that used to work in the past, they're just getting merged into the main category in some cases.

27:26And so that's another clue is if you if those pages tank, Like the SEO marketer reaction is usually, oh no, something went wrong. A competitor out, you know, over surged us, overtook our position. Right. But sometimes it's just that the SERP changed. True. And you need to go and suss that out. So like maybe a bit of a long winded response here, but in summary for a CMO that wants to figure out bottom of funnel, it's like, know your intent, know your surface area, figure out how to create content that matters and doesn't overlap. Determine if it needs to be a guide, a landing page or whatnot. supplement it with YouTube and other kinds of media if possible, and then see if there are any domination plays available with affiliates and ads and stuff like that.

28:07Looking back at the playbook in, let's say 2022, 2021, and looking at the playbook today, 2026, 2027, maybe 2028, someone's listening to this. What's the playbook that you believe should be run? And how do you think of the goal and the objective? Like it's not organic traffic anymore. I would assume we're aligned on that. It's like, that's cool. That's important, but it's probably not going to be at the levels that it used to be. What do you see as the new playbook that should be run by a lot of these B2B brands? So remember, like you talked about the area code stuff, like that is so, that is such a stretch of the imagination, right?

28:44You need to get out of things like that and go to the root. Like you need to work closely with product marketing and really start with the buying decisions at the very root of everything you're doing. And I believe that like your AEO strategy today, SEO slash AEO strategy should start with like intake documents from product marketing and sales, because that's going to ground your strategy in reality. So if Nextiva would have done that in 2016, they would have never done those area code pages because they would have realized this is such a, like, what's our goal? Go up market and sell enterprise VoIP solutions.

29:18This is not going to do that. That's not going to do it. No. Yeah, that's not going to do that. So I, you know, of course it's going to be start at the bottom of funnel, the inverse strategy, the inverse pyramid strategy, where you start at the bottom of funnel and maybe you work your way into middle, but you avoid, I'm recommending to clients avoid top of funnel for SEO at this stage. I believe that it's moved to rented land. Interesting. We can talk about that as well. I'm sure you have a great perspective, but that's what I'm thinking about. bottom of funnel, product realm of relevance, work with product marketing and sales to get those intake documents, start building out the pages that matter, then expand with evidence and distribution.

29:53And then the measurement has to change as well. So the traffic is really just like a lucky bonus at this point. It's not going to be something that blows numbers out of the water. It's going to be more about the AI influence, right? So it has a different goal today than it did before. Is AEO and GEO the same as SEO? The way that you measure it is totally different. I suppose you could look at referral traffic from AEO as one thing, but the main difference is that there's a dark SEO funnel now, basically. So in the next Tiva day, you would just rank for business phone system. People would click that and convert right on the page.

30:34Today, that's happening less because they're asking AI assistants, you know, they're describing their situation and they're asking it for a recommendation of solutions out there. And then the AI is recommending a list of solutions. Right. From there, they may click on a citation link. They may not. Yeah. What they're far more likely to do is go deeper through Google search to validate what the LLMs are telling them. Right. So then they'll probably go and look at reviews and comparison pages. That's why you need to have the bottom of funnel covered. You need to have your us versus them versus pages, you know, done properly and good and great.

31:07And then from there, I think you're only going to get conversions on your website at the very end. So there's going to be less information gathering done on your corporate website. There's going to be way more information gathering done elsewhere. And they're only going to go to your corporate website when it's like time to convert. I don't know if that was a good answer to the question, Ross. That's just kind of where my brain went. No, I like it. I think it makes complete sense.

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32:36The one thing that I'm very interested in would be like a lot of the strategies that you've already talked about, even that you executed in the past, like the affiliate place with get VoIP, et cetera. That is considered by many to be like affiliate marketing or content marketing, but a good SEO, I believe, tell me if I'm wrong, would also consider it part of the SERP domination play, which is essentially AEO, GEO kind of all wrapped together and like, you're just doing SEO right. And most people just focused on, on site. Like most SEOs just said, SEO is I have to optimize this page with titles and copy and content and H1s against keywords.

33:15Not a lot of people were thinking about affiliates. That's a whole different team. YouTube, whole different team. Reddit, whole different team. G2, TrustRadius, whole different team, even though it's in the SERP. So is it fair or accurate to say that maybe one of the biggest shifts is that now SEOs are starting to see that it's beyond their site? Or would you say the good SEOs always knew that or what's your take on that? Well, yeah, you make a great point. The good SEOs were doing surround sound visibility plays, right? Let's just call it that surround sound marketing. We were doing surround sound marketing before AEO.

33:49A hundred percent. Like Ahrefs was doing YouTube long before AEO. You were doing YouTube long before AEO. Yeah. So now you're just reaping the benefits of all the good stuff you did in the past. Right. Like here's another thing, right? I'm working with a client right now that their competition is the enterprise blue chip big boys. I'm talking about Salesforce agent force, Google Gemini enterprise agent platform. Massive. Massive, right? So what I showed them is that, look, they're not doing versus pages. True. Why do you think agent force is not doing us versus them? Why do you think service now is not doing best alternatives to Google Gemini agent enterprise platform thing.

34:36They don't need to do that. True. They're just doing all brand. They're not trying to do AEO plays. No, you have to do AEO plays because you're a challenger. Yeah. You, you are not a leader like them. So you hired me to help you do all these hacky things to try and, to try and claw and scrap your way back. Right. But the reality is, if you were to compare your referring domain graph to theirs, it would be embarrassing. If you were to compare their brand mentioned versus yours, it wouldn't even be in the same stratosphere. And so the reason why a lot of companies have to do these hacky AEO plays is because they can't compete on brand.

35:16True. They just can't. So, yeah, I mean, you make a great point about the surround sound always being an important thing. The last thing I will say about AEO versus GEO, this is probably the biggest takeaway. Okay. So let's just say it was old world SEO, right? And a client was like, look, we want to go attack Zendesk. This is a real life example. So this is, all right. They wanted to rank number one for Zendesk alternatives. I'm like, all right, I got you. We can do this. So did they genuinely belong in that category? Yes. They were legitimately a Zendesk alternative option. Legitimately. So I was able to make it happen.

35:55we did a monster page, monster. It was flawless. Just imagine all the stuff that goes into a page like that. And it was chef's kiss. All of the things were done. Yeah, it followed everything to the T. Bang, right? Now what do we need? Massive backlinks. Right. Because that is a super competitive term. So we pounded the piss out of it with backlinks, dude. Just any way possible, all hands on deck. And we did the Setnextiva too. Like to get that business phone service page to rank, we had to do a lot of work to make that happen. So I applied that same strategy to the Zendesk alternatives. And then within six months, kabang, got it.

36:33Crazy. Now, this is before AEO. This is before AEO. But we got it. Boom. And it ended there. That's where the story ends. It was like conquest, top number one, sent it to the CEO. Oh, where did you find this guy? This guy is a genius. Why didn't we hire him before? This is so great. Oh, look at all the traffic going to that page. Oh, my God. And it did bring in leads, too. Right. But that's where the story ended. Right. The story ends there. There was nothing else to do. Wild. Just defend. Okay. Wild. Now in AEO, you may be able to do that again, but you may not get the AI overview recommendation.

37:13True. ChatGPT may not recommend you even if you do all that because the corresponding signals may not also be there. The digital footprint may not be there. The third party signal may not be there. The corroboration may not be there. All those other things you need may not be there. So the takeaway is that you can ground and pound your way to a classic listing, a classic listing rank, but you still may not get the AI recommendation. And that is going to be a problem. Right. I think it's interesting. Like we're now playing a bit of a probability game where more than ever, you're not trying to just dominate one spot.

37:52You're trying to increase the probability that you will show up across literally thousands of different combinations of words in size of like, not thousands, but like 10 different LLMs and systems. Like there's Cloud, there's Propexity, there's Grok, there's ChatGPT, then there's Fable, there's all of the different like models within. It's a complex game. But I did see that you were recently able to improve one of your clients' AI visibility by like 22 % by just adding prompts in topics where they already had a footprint. So talk me through what that methodology was, how you were able to execute something like that.

38:27Yeah. So when I posted that, it was a little cheeky. Okay. Okay. It was a little cheeky. Fair. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So here's the thing. Imagine the Nextiva example where you know they're strong in VoIP topics. And imagine I was just, this is pre-AEO, and imagine I was just setting up rank tracking in Ahrefs. And imagine that I didn't track any VoIP keywords. And you see where I'm going with this. And imagine that I only track things like enterprise contact center solutions where we know they're weaker. And imagine that I only presented stuff where they're weak and showed that they have low visibility.

39:08Well, this same client had that problem because the previous person that set up their profound account, and this is actually kind of a good thing. They only set up the topics where their future direction was going, where they had weak visibility. That's interesting. Yeah. And so I said, look, this visibility stat that you're, it's a blended visibility stat that you're sharing as a whole across all these platforms across every category here's your visibility yeah but you don't have your breadwinner topics in here right so i just showed them how fast that graph can change just by me stacking the deck in their favor so you said it's a probability machine game yeah it kind of is right so like once i went and added where they're strong like nobody did a topical authority analysis nobody really bothered to do that but i just said all right i guarantee you if i go and put this set of prompts in here yeah you're gonna skyrocket and i did and they were like, wow, look at our, look at our growth.

40:02It's like, guys, that's not growth. I know that's where you, that's where you were already strong. You just didn't have the reveal of it. So, you know, it can work both ways. You know, I think that's why there could be a lot of GEO grift as well, right? Because the framing of stuff to clients, they don't know to go think how to look at that. And, you know, it can be very confusing. I don't know how much of it is grift versus is sometimes ignorance, to be honest. Like I think some people are setting up these, like we've onboarded with the client and I'll log into the profile and they're like, we own all of our prompts.

40:35And then I'm like, let's pretend the brand's name is Acme. And I'll look at the prompts and every single prompt says Acme. And they're like, we're cited. Our website is signed for every single prompt. And I'm like, of course it is. Your name is in every single prompt. And then I'm like, okay, if I tell them this, this person might get fired because they've been telling the whole org for the last few months that they are ranking number one in AI visibility in their company. And I'm like, you're kind of not. Like, what are we doing? So some of it I think is like a bit of ignorance. I don't know.

41:08Like this industry has come so fast. Yes. I would assume you remember the early days of the social medias and stuff like that. I feel like people are just figuring it out. And I think it's a shame because some people aren't like overly confident without actually knowing. but where do you think we are in the like innovation curve do you think we're at the peak of the bubble in the industry or do you think this is going to be the wave for the next like two decades like where's your perspective on where we are in this like innovation curve are we still early are we in the middle are we coming up to the end is the bubble about to pop we've seen unicorns being created like where are we from your end in this oh man dude such a good question you that you have this is such a great interview prep like you had all the questions down these are all so good they're all yeah they're all brain busters so i i think we're an early inning still i don't think it's like the first inning no but i don't think it's like the sixth or seventh inning either it's probably like the third or the fourth right we're probably somewhere in there if i had to estimate yeah so to to the point on like that client that you mentioned that had all the brand names in the prompts so that they had artificially high stats Yeah.

42:18There's a lot of that because of, I think, the practitioners or the the tactitioners, the people that are, you know, digging the dirt and they got the picks and the shovels. Yeah. They're behind the curve in terms of their knowledge of how the tools work. Right. The knowledge of how LLM systems work and just like critical thinking ability just might need sharpening. Like they need more training from from people that are really ahead of the curve. Right. And so here's another example on that. In this client's profound account, they were reporting on citation rate and their citation coverage being super, super high.

42:56And that kept coming up in like the weekly Slack and, you know, updates on AEO updates. There's an AEO update channel with wins and stuff. And like, you know, hey, we're still the number three most cited website. They brought me and I started looking at this and I said, man, number three cited website. Right. What is that? What does that mean? Yeah, my skeptical nature. I'm always questioning everything. So I go and look and I'm like, there's a number of third-sided website, but their mention rate, their visibility is one of the worst. Right. That's interesting. So why isn't that being talked about?

43:30Right. So all that's happening is AI is using your content to create answer summaries. Yep. But you're not getting recommended at all or very, very low. Why is this happening? Well, I don't want to throw anybody under the bus here. But unfortunately, this is a reflection of your content strategy decision making. Right. What this means is you way over indexed in top of funnel. That's what that means. Because AI is citing your content to supply top of funnel information. Right. But nobody's actually getting recommended from these pages because the queries that are connected to those pages don't result in vendor recommendations.

44:13Right. Because it's top of funnel. It's all stuff like what's the difference? Yeah. Yeah. What's the difference between this? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now, another client I work with is a beast in the product analytics category. They're an OG in that space. Yeah. They have pages from like 2014, 2015, 2016. That's all the what is. What is definition of this? What is, you know, what does this metric mean? What does that metric mean? And they weren't doing that to game SEO or anything. They actually thought that that was the best thing to be doing at the time. Right. And it probably works like the brand recognition back then for that type of content.

44:50It did. And paying dividends. Yeah. It did pay dividends. It did. So how is this relevant today? It's relevant because all those what is pages, they actually racked up tons and tons and tons of natural links exactly now they had a first mover advantage right they were one of the first to be putting out you know pages about you know metric trees and stuff like that cool cool so they were the beneficiaries of natural links yeah yeah now today we're doing more advanced geo strategies right but it's like we need good places on the site to link to the new pages that we want to boost yeah oh it just so happens that we have this backdrop of fat link pages here right right so we have these you know url authority 20 pages because that's insane for a content page you know so it's like anything that we link to from this beast right resource is going to do well yeah and so there's some link sculpting that can be done i don't even know how i arrived at this that's all right i like where we've gone path here, but yeah.

45:55No, this is good. I have a question for you. Recognizing how different this space is. And when I say this space, I actually mean the world. We are going through fundamental technology changes across the world. There's these agent orchestrators, there's inference management tools. There's a lot of new technologies coming up. Do you think the what is playbook can work for those new industries, recognizing that there's not a what is glossary style engine that has been created in these new categories yet? Or do you think that whole strategy is dead on arrival? I would love to know what you think as well, but I'll just give you my hot take.

46:32Because it's not a commodity and it's new and emerging and there's nothing, maybe very low amounts of information out there. And maybe these companies have a significant amount of information gain to be added. I think that you could be like the product analytics company that had a first mover advantage if you do them well. Now you shouldn't just automate them with AI and make them as lame and generic as possible. There's one company that is a competitor to one of my clients that has done a phenomenal job with this. It's a company called GetDX. They're in the developer productivity space. They have a lot of those 101 pages for developers, but they actually have inputs from researchers and stuff.

47:14They had one of the OG creators of a very popular framework to contribute to their content. That's next level. And they did podcast tours to drive backlinks to those pages. That's cool. And they are seeing residual benefit from doing that. So I am not going to totally discredit the what is play. Yeah. I am going to not recommend it in commodity categories where things have been, you know, you don't want to be the thousandth, you know, what is marketing automation page. No, I don't, yeah. Yeah. So because these AI systems already have the training, like it's already there. So, you know, forget it.

47:53100%. I think it's the same way. I think if you're in a newer space, newer category where no one has actually created the content about this topic before, you're in a ripe opportunity, especially if you can throw real academics on it. If you can throw like real researchers, like brilliant minds to create this content, I think it's a huge opportunity. You have a lot of hot takes on like content programmatic at scale. What's your thoughts on this today? Is it a opportunity for folks to just clean it all up? Or is it an opportunity for search? What's your take on programmatic content at scale? Man, I'm so torn on it because I see the appeal.

48:29Obviously now everybody has access to the Ferrari that can accelerate this. I tend to share the view of the lily rays of the world, the skeptic view, just because I've worked with so many brands that are feeling the pain of doing stuff like this and have now gotten manual penalties right like i actually work with one of the biggest i won't say the name but one of the biggest b2b brands out there that every single person knows that has gotten recent very recently a manual penalty wow for for something similar to the area code thing yeah crazy that's even so so that's what changes my mind about it even though when they did this playbook a long time ago.

49:10Yeah, they had a legitimate data source for doing these pages, they actually had the internal data that supported the use case for doing this, right. And that's what I would have said previously, I would have said, Look, it could be worth it if you have the long tail means of supplying the pages with meaningful data. Yeah. But what ended up happening was that data that this company had became commodity data, crazy, every company in that space ended up getting access to that same data so when the data source becomes a commodity then the content also becomes a commodity right and that's the problem the uh jason cohen from wp engine was talking about this uh with uh ross simmons on his uh not ross ross hudgins excuse me the two rosses i know there's two crosses in search it's uh yeah everyone confused yeah two two rosses two great rosses yeah so he was talking about this with siege media and he was saying that if the, he said something great.

50:08He said, if everything you do at the top of the funnel or the data that supplies a page is great, then you could actually get away with being bad at everything else and still succeed. Right. But if the data that supplies something or the top of the funnel is garbage, and then you try to optimize that on the backend, you're going to fail. Right. Right. I don't know where I was going with that, but yeah, that's my take on programmatic. Fair. So essentially to put it on a bumper sticker, programmatic works if you have non-commodity data, content, and stories to inject within it at scale, but it's still risky.

50:42However, if you try it with the commodity stuff, good luck, RIP, there's not a chance that you're going to be able to. Yeah. I think the litmus test is like, how many other companies are doing this or have already done it? Right. Right. If you're the seventh company to try and do it, good luck. Yeah, that's fair. That is fair. You wrote that most companies don't have AEO problems. They have a positioning problem. Can you talk me through what you mean by that? My perspective on this comes from a place of, imagine that you work with a lot of B2B companies that have a very concretely solidified position in something that's established.

51:19Yeah. And for a long time, they have manufactured the digital footprint, the credibility, they've got it all, right? Like, let's just say it's, you know, enterprise intranet system. They dominate it, right? Yeah. But suddenly, enterprise intranet got very unsexy. True. Or, you know, low-code automation platform became very unsexy. You know, now all of a sudden, nobody wants to be low-code anymore because it's old and ugly. Now they all want to be agentic AI application development solution, right? Agentic AI solution, whatever, right? They want to be the new thing. The problem, of course, is that if you call your new product something erroneous, like let's say you call it agentic systems engineering tool, but there's no demand for agentic systems engineering.

52:11Well, now you have to, now the burden is on you to go into a category creation play. Right. That's going to be really hard. Right. And then, you know, if you align to market demand, well, unfortunately, Google already dominates it and agent force already dominates it. and IBM already dominates it and so on and so on. So now the challenge that you must figure out as a company is where's our winnable wedge? We don't necessarily want to promote ourselves as low code because investors hate it, CEO hates it, analysts hate it. It's the old thing. But we're not going to be able to compete head to head with IBM, Google, Microsoft, and so on and so on.

52:49So is there a bridge the gap strategy somewhere in the middle? right and that's where aeo teams need to work with product marketing and you know you know cmo people who are experts in branding and positioning and stuff right and that's why i think that if you just leave it to aeo teams on their own yeah and you say hey go solve this problem aeo guy i hate that term the seo guy let's get the seo guy yeah sprinkle seo yeah sprinkle some seo on this. Sprinkle some SEO on that. Yeah. You know, so funny. I live in Miami near the Salt Bay restaurant and I always see the guy like this and I always think I always pretend that's me with SEO.

53:30That's so funny. That's so funny. Yeah. Where I was going with that is it needs to be more of a strategic initiative that has, you know, these considerations at stake with like CMO level and product marketing and even sales and stuff. It can't just be, hey, AEO guy, figure out how to crack this because it's going to be too hard. I want to talk about some of the shifts that you're seeing in the space. So you've got clients in the past, it felt like for me anyway, a lot of the clients ran on like Webflow, WordPress, et cetera. Those were like the CMSs of choice. Are you seeing clients move into a world where they're creating and using cloud powered kind of CMSs and like able to do their own updates with 401s and internal links, et cetera?

54:12Like, Are you seeing any type of shift in your work in the way in which you're able to execute with clients because of the shifts with AI? So yes and no. I would say more yes than no. Fair. So I do have like one standout example of a client that's just very AI forward. I think there may be an exception to the rule. But I do have one client that was running on WordPress for years and said, you know what? We're ripping this out entirely. we're doing our own custom built cms it's going to be fully agentic and clud code powered crazy and i was i was skeptical okay i i was like man how is i'm nervous just you saying it i'm excited to see what happens because i'm nervous yo i love it okay it's so good it works tell it they're not like yeah yeah it's live nothing tanked everything's nothing tanked nothing tanked yeah so that's another misconception is that like how big are these guys though how big is this team are we talking so yeah they're big a few thousand employees okay so they've got a technical smarts to be able to manage yeah you know hundreds of millions in revenue they're they're big cool yeah this is this is still a signal though like if a company of that size ripped it out that's that's wild and and it was all done in like a week and a half it was all done like a week yeah it was fast like believe it or not i had very little input on it fascinating the ceo of this company is like a he's a unicorn genius guy okay it was just him and one of their lead devs that just did it all wow wow did it all yeah and it's working as like the person who's overseeing inbound and growth and ai visibility aeo like when you look at that situation would you prefer a world in which that is the engine and the cms behind more of your clients?

56:00So now that I've seen it and how good it is, I'm going to say yes. Fascinating. I am going to say yes. I mean, I still got love for OG WordPress, but I do think they, you know, I think they could be in trouble like 10 to 15, 20 years down the road. So that's one example, but, and I'm not prompting clients to do this by the way, but lately, I don't know what's in the air, like three of them all at once said, Hey, we want to replatform. We want to get off WordPress. And I I think it's a strategic push from top. It's definitely not bottom up. It's definitely not people in the trenches saying, hey, I'm tired of WordPress.

56:33Let's move to more. Let's move to sanity. Right. Nobody is saying that at the operator level. It's always the executive saying, hey, you know what? We got to replatform. We just we just got to do this. This WordPress setup sucks. It's clunky. There might be complaints and chirping from people here and there, but nobody really wants to go through all that process. Right. It's a lot. So it's something's in the air. Executives. I don't know if like the marketing is getting so good for these systems that do this. But whatever they're doing is working because executives are saying, hey, whatever it is, they perceive, whether it's true or not, they perceive WordPress as old, ugly, outdated.

57:12I don't want this. Slow. Sucks. Plugins. Security risk. Blah. And then they view, you know, custom clawed powered machine as fast, innovative, you know, eliminate the dev bottlenecks, you know, no plugins, right? We control our own destiny, move fast, ship faster, more creative control, blah, blah, blah. Right. So whether we want to argue with it or not, it's happening. I love it. With your own work, how has it changed as someone who is embracing technology, working with some of the most innovative brands in the world? Like, has the way you work on a day-to-day basis fundamentally changed because of AI?

57:48Or is it like 50%, 20 %? What's it look like today for you? It's great. And I love it. So I can connect more evidence faster. I can use resources that the clients supply to me as guidelines and guardrails for things that we create. It speeds up analysis. And I don't have to spend time doing annoying reformatting work. It's just so great for so many things. And yeah, I can do faster briefs. I can do faster audits. I can do more competitive analysis faster. There's so many things that I can do faster. But ultimately, what it enables me to do is spend more time on strategic stuff. And I'm not tinkering around with little tactical nonsense, ticky-tacky things that I would have had to do previously.

58:36Now you can hook in with Ahrefs, Search Console, GA4, whatever it is. You can hook into all this stuff. SEO gets has a fantastic MCP connection as well. So like you can just do so much now and get to the strategic work. And if you're someone like me, that's very ambitious and you want to work with several clients, right? Well, now you're more free to take on more clients, right? So you can, you can scale yourself more, you know, that's just, that's just me and my perspective for agencies. I think that learn how to use these tools and, and, um, you know, standardized stuff, I think it's going to be great, but yeah, you can, you can, you know, solve more problems faster and quicker and, you know, get to the answer faster and focus on more strategic work.

59:13I love it. You mentioned the ambition. Where does that come from? Like, it seems like from the time I met you, you always had the hunger, the fire to, to win in this space and in this industry. What makes you so ambitious and want to, to win? Oh man. Yeah. I've always kind of been like that. Definitely got the Italian fire from my, my, my, my grandparents, you know, my, my grandfather, he was, he was an OG in my life And, you know, he came to this country with nothing and he's the classic immigrant story. So there's definitely a lot of that. But, you know, I became a father two years ago. And I feel that when you become a father, that's when the real dog in you unleashes, you know, that's that.

59:55So my son is like a big driving inspiration for me to grind. And, you know, I heard this saying, you don't grind for your first name, you grind for your last name. Right. I think that's so true. and you know when I see my son I look at him and I just say wow like right he doesn't even know yeah the greatness that lies ahead for him because I'm I'm gonna follow in my grandfather's footsteps and right you know my parents footsteps making sure you know I have a chance at a better life so I think it's just seeing the the immigrant background of my family you know coming here with nothing right you know my grandfather had 10 bucks in his pocket when he arrived in New York and he got robbed right so he actually started from zero that's why yeah yeah he got robbed his first day in America you got robbed.

1:00:36But yeah, I don't know that that's what it is. I think it's just being a father. You know, you're a father as well. So I'm sure you have a similar view. A hundred percent. Yeah, no, I mad respect for that. Let's fast forward 30 years. So let's pretend 30 years from now, your son finds this podcast and he's like, oh, there's a podcast with Dan. I want to listen to it and see what he had to say way back in the day. What's some advice that you would give your little one that you would want him to hear 30 years from now? Oh, wow. That's such a great one. I think it would be to appreciate and harness the power of compounding in anything that it is that you do in life.

1:01:13So whether that's getting in shape, you go to the gym, you're not going to see a result in a week or two, but you stick with it for years and you're going to see a result. Get early with investing. Get early and make mistakes in anything that you want to do and appreciate the power of compounding because the people that I see in life who are doing really well, they've stuck with things and they've stuck with them for a long time and they've had discipline and consistency. And so I know we talked about nobody's an overnight success story in the beginning with music and stuff, but I even look at you.

1:01:45When I was starting at Ipole Rank, you were already light years ahead. So you've been at this for so long. You're somebody in that category that deserves a lot of respect and, you know, flowers, because at that time, you were a big deal. Appreciate it. You had, you had paved the way at that time. So it's like, wow, you've been at this for like, what, 20 years, maybe 15, 20 years. And a few decades. Yeah. We're getting there. That's crazy. That's crazy. Cause I do it. I remember starting out and looking at your stuff and saying, wow, that was what, 10, 15 years ago, something like that. It was like 15 years ago.

1:02:18Yeah. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. Like I was looking at you, You were one of the leaders in the space at that time. And so that's what I would tell them. Look at that. Stick to it. Work hard. I love it. Thank you so much for coming on. Really appreciate it. I think your grandparents are super proud of you looking down and saying, man, we're proud of this guy. And you have represented your last name super well. Thank you for coming on. If folks want to learn more about you, they definitely should check out marketingadvice.substack. Is there anywhere else folks should go to connect with you and learn more?

1:02:45No, thank you, Ross. I mean, you can go to marketingadvice.io or marketingadvice.substack. I'm on LinkedIn and X if you want to hear more, you know, unfiltered rants, but, uh, that that's about it. You know, thank you again. You're somebody that I've always looked up to in the space, had a lot of respect for. And, uh, man, if you're ever in Miami, would love to catch up, play some basketball, whatever you want to do, man. I'll hit you up next time for sure. Awesome. Thanks again for coming. That's good. Appreciate you. Peace.