2059 – SEO Survival: Navigating the Digital Jungle with Optics In’s Nick Musica

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1:05with us right now it's nick musica nick you are the founder and ceo of optics in you are found on the web at opticsin.com nick it's great to have you thank you for joining us thank you so much josh super happy to be here this morning yeah based in san diego tell me about the work you do who you serve and who you've been able to help. Yeah. Yeah. So the work is anchored into SEO. And so what that means for folks who may not be as familiar as others is largely web search, which means we work on people's websites quite a bit. And the idea here is to raise the visibility in Google. So when someone searches for a query, a topic related to your business, that you have a chance to show up for that.

1:55Someone clicks through, they fill out a form, they buy the thing, whatever it may be. But we're largely working with small businesses. We'll say about 50 people in terms of company size, sometimes bigger. We do have some bigger clients, but largely it's 50 and below. And the range of types of clients is, it's cannabis, it's shipping, it's senior living. It is we have a range of clients that we work with. So not necessarily specific to a domain, but specific to SEO across verticals. Yeah. Well, Nick, in that this is the work that you do in the world that you live in, for those of us who are just, you know, we're just out here running our companies.

2:43You know, maybe we've had a mind for best practices of SEO. Maybe we have some simple things. Maybe we're working with an agency. Maybe we're not. Maybe we just have a VA. Um, listen, I would love it from your perspective. What is the state of the union when it comes to SEO today? There's a lot of movement in Google. Uh, there's a lot of, uh, I'd say concern, uh, I've heard over the value of SEO when more consumers are doing their research, not on Google search engine, uh, looking for a blog article to answer their question, but they're using tools like chat GPT and, and and other AI tools. So help me make sense of where we are right now.

3:25Yeah, for sure, for sure. Yeah, so SEO has been dying since roughly the day it was born. If you take a look at SEO is dying, you're going to find a bunch of articles out there that say SEO is dying. You can also pop in paid search is dying or email is dying, right? Every marketing channel has been dying since it's existed. Wow. According to the internet, right? Right, right. Which means nothing is dying. It's just shifting and changing, right? And so when we take a look at our marketing, and this includes SEO, we're taking a look at the marketing mix. And we're looking to see what is relevant in terms of the marketing mix.

4:01Where are our people? It's the Jesse James. I think he was the guy who robbed the banks, right? Right. So why are we going to the bank, Jesse? Why did you rob the bank? Because that's where the money is. So why are we doing SEO? Because people are on Google. They're doing the searches. So are less of them on Google searching because chat GPT? Maybe, because TikTok, maybe, but is that where your people are is the question. And so there's still a bunch of folks using Google, using Bing, using all the search engines to find the goods and services that people sell. So the State of the Union is, so that's the broad picture.

4:40The State of the Union is, we'll say the headline is AI. And here's how it shows up for a couple of different things. One is about two years ago, a lot of folks start to write their content solely using AI. I have an idea. I use this AI content generator, and now I have a 50-page, 500-page, 5 ,000-page article, whatever you actually asked it to write. And then you do that 100 times, and you produce it on your website. And then you cross your fingers, and you think SEO is going to grow. That didn't work for a lot of folks because Google sniffs it out, and maybe you get some up and to the right on day one, where day one could be six months, nine months.

5:20But sooner or later, Google looks at it and says, this is not quality content. And then it drops like a rock. We've seen that multiple, multiple times. So that's the State of the Union from the business owner's operating perspective. And the goal was never good content. Whenever you talk to someone, they say fast and cheap. Good was not a factor in that conversation. So if you're going to produce content solely using AI as the device to generate the content, and I'm not talking about a tool to help you build the content, but as pretty much the proxy writer, typically that doesn't work out well for SEO.

5:55To use it as a tool, fantastic. Do it all day long. Idea generation, give me an outline, help me rephrase a line or two, maybe for some programmatic SEO. These are places where can use AI as an owner operator. When we take a look at the SERP, the search engine result page on Google or Bing, which is the result, when you put a query in, you hit submit, what comes back is that SERP. You start to see some patterns at the top, AI generated, right? And that's a new thing. And it came out very strongly. And it's been rolled back a little bit. And what we don't have are the numbers from Google or other search engines of the usage of it.

6:43Well, because they're hedging their bets, is my guess. They're hedging their bets. They're trying to figure out how best to have people use it and actually be useful. But when you do a query about getting rid of kidney stones. And the AI says, here are 10 things you should do to get rid of kidney stones, X, Y, Z, also drink your urine. Maybe AI search results are not the best thing for the user, right? And so there's, you know, while they're there, what we're going for is relevant results. And so our job is to continue to play in the places where we have visibility, where we can give our clients relevant results.

7:21And search engines are certainly one of those places still. It hasn't gone away anywhere. Is there anything, Nick, that like say that someone's frustrated and maybe they've heard, listen, if you get going with SEO activity, don't expect to see much of anything for about six to 12 months. Is that true? Or are there things that we can do that might be able to move the needle a little bit faster? Yeah. So maybe. So let's break that down a little bit. So with the advent of SEO or with the AI in SEO, here's what we've seen. We've seen small publishers getting kicked in the pants. They basically been replaced by Quora and Reddit.

8:03So small publishers, which you could nest affiliates into, they've largely gone missing from the SERP, a lot of them, certainly a smaller ones, we'll still see bigger publishers like Forbes. But for Joe Blow's expert blog on topic, where Joe Blow should actually rank because he is the expert, a lot of those blogs have actually gone missing. What we're seeing, the opportunities for businesses are what we would right or wrong called a legitimate business, someone who is selling a product or a service, who may have a brick and mortar. Those are the folks who are still getting a lot, a lot of traffic through SEO.

8:44Where we need to just keep in mind the right way we want to navigate the timeframe of results is where are the pockets of opportunity? So here's an example. I was working with a client last week and they said, we want to call our product IG thing. Doesn't even matter what the thing is. And we can imagine that people are going to start search for this project or this product using IG. What do you think? I said, well, if you have the money and the stomach to be a competitor to Instagram all day long, because when you search for IG, Instagram shows up quite a bit. That's the acronym that people use for Instagram.

9:25So if you want to play the really, really, really long game of battling Instagram, that could be a good idea. That doesn't sound productive because it's not productive, right? So we need to choose our shots and this is where strategy comes in and then we get the execution. So why are we doing what we're doing? And then we execute on what we're doing. So where there's pockets, we want to start to build momentum of that SEO traffic. But those pockets have to back into meaningful, relevant traffic. We don't want to start ranking for best blue giraffe to do a thing, right? We could rank for it tomorrow.

10:01It's not relevant for us. So we want to take a look at the areas where there's relevancy and there's low competition, start to get a foothold in there. And then once we have momentum, we build on that momentum and start to go for more competitive terms, which can take longer to get traffic on for sure. Yeah. Do you mind maybe sharing a little bit about maybe a client that you worked with? What happened? Like, how did you begin? And what was the transformation that you co-created? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, we have a process that fits well for a lot of folks who have never done SEO before. So if you just haven't stepped into it, we walk into typically a six-month engagement with a three-prong approach because we know some amount of all of these things need fine tuning.

10:50And so SEO is based on three items. Three items make SEO tick. It's technical, aka how Google can crawl and index your website. And then it's what you have on your page. and then it's how people talk about your company, your website. And those are the backlinks. So we take a look at the technical health of your website. We take a look at your content. We take a look at your backlink profile. And then we start to see where we can get those quick wins, as you said, Josh, to start to move the needle in the right direction. What we don't want to do is say, oh my goodness, your nearest competitor has a million.

11:25I'm making up the numbers to illustrate the point. They have a million backlinks. They have a million articles that rank very, very well. We should do that on a site that is technically unhealthy. We don't want to make that recommendation because every dollar that we spend on a link or on copy, we're going to get 40 to 60 cents in return by putting it on an unhealthy foundation. So we take a look at that foundation, make sure that foundation can actually support the efforts. And then we build the content on top. We build the links on top of that. So that's a typical path for the first six months.

12:02Once we get through the first six months, now we're seeing, well, what has worked better than not? We're the new opportunities because, as you pointed out, SEO shifts and changes, which shows up in SERP as an opportunity, is going to change because you're working on your website, competitors are working on their websites, and Google is making changes. So we're navigating that as we sort of tack our way to our destination. Yeah. So Nick, for our friend that's listening, I suspect that you've got maybe some resources or I don't know, for someone that's enjoyed our conversation, they're interested in learning more.

12:38Do you have any like content that you like recommending anything along those lines? Yeah, I mean, I would recommend for a lot of folks that we talk to, they don't have some simple setup on their website, right? So Google Analytics, a lot of people have Google Analytics set up on their site. What most folks do not have is Google Search Console, which is a free program. It's brought to you by Google. You create an account, you go get a tag or some other method, and you drop either an HTML file or a tag on your page. And then you start to get data directly from Google about your SEO. Search Console is all about SEO.

13:22If you've ever seen Batman from the 60s, it's your bat phone direct to Google, right? You can't get a cleaner source of information. So we highly recommend folks plug Search Console onto their website. If you know what you're doing, it takes about all but 10 minutes. That's a long time if you get distracted with a cup of coffee. And then you're going to start to see how much traffic you're getting from Google and what you're ranking for. And people are typically very, very surprised to see that they're not getting a whole bunch. And so that's a lot of times that's the wake up call too. Well, how's my SEO doing?

13:57We'll go to the source that's going to get 85, that's the 85 % of your SEO traffic and see how it's actually doing. And typically it's a surprise for folks. So start there. And at the same time, it's an educational endeavor. You can see what you're ranking for. Or you can see maybe some queries where you're ranking in position 20, and there's a chance to bring that to the first page. But you never even actually focus on a specific phrase that you're still ranking for it. So it could be a goldmine as well to dig through the data there. Yeah. You have a blog on your website as well. So if someone wants to spend some time and kind of look at some of what we're talking about, you're also, Nick, a pretty good follow on LinkedIn as well.

14:40So again, we've got all of that linked up in the show notes. Your website, opticsin.com. When somebody goes there and wants to grab a conversation with you, what would you recommend they do? Yeah, we go to the contact us form and fill out the form. Mention Josh's name so we know where you're coming from. Yeah, mention my name. Mention your name. And so what we're going to do is we're going to set up a 30 minute discovery call. So I talked about what an engagement could look like, but here's the thing. We don't move ahead with everyone. It's got to be productive for both of us, right? So we're going to take a look at the website.

15:24We're going to hear the resources that you have or don't have. We're going to hear about your goals and objectives. And if we think it's a fit, we're going to make a suggestion. And if we don't think it's a fit, we're going to also call that out. excellent nick musica again your website opticsin.com nick has been a great conversation thank you so much for joining us thank you so much josh

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