January 25, 2026 • 54 mins
We argue that SEO isn’t dying; bad SEO is. Fundamentals still drive wins while LLMs change how answers surface, making complete, original content and smart strategy more valuable than ever.
• fundamentals over fads as LLMs shift discovery
• why pages beyond top ten fuel LLM citations
• customer journey, CRO, PR, and dev fluency as real leverage
• global markets with lower competition and faster output
• enterprise constraints, silos, and when to say no
• partnerships over one‑stop shops to deliver depth
• personalization pitfalls in tracking and sane KPI alignment
• future of agents, multimodal search, and offline attention
Guest Contact Information:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kresimir-corluka
Website: canonical.hr
Summit: croatiaseosummit.com
More from EWR and Matthew:
Leave us a review wherever you listen: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Amazon Podcast
Free SEO Consultation: www.ewrdigital.com/discovery-call
With over 5 million downloads, The Best SEO Podcast has been the go-to show for digital marketers, business owners, and entrepreneurs wanting real-world strategies to grow online.
Now, host Matthew Bertram — creator of LLM Visibility™ and the LLM Visibility Stack™, and Lead Strategist at EWR Digital — takes the conversation beyond traditional SEO into the AI era of discoverability.
Each week, Matthew dives into the tactics, frameworks, and insights that matter most in a world where search engines, large language models, and answer engines are reshaping how people find, trust, and choose businesses. From SEO and AI-driven marketing to executive-level growth strategy, you’ll hear expert interviews, deep-dive discussions, and actionable strategies to help you stay ahead of the curve.
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SPEAKER_01 (00:02):
This is the unknown secrets of internet marketing.
Your insider guide to thestrategies top marketers use to
crush the competition.
Ready to unlock your businessfull potential.
Let's get started.
SPEAKER_00 (00:17):
Howdy, welcome back to another fun-fold episode of
The Unknown Secrets of InternetMarketing, but better known as
the Best SEO podcast.
We're exploring LM visibilityand moving into the era of AI.
I uh if you listen to the lastpodcast, um I interviewed a
former uh local uh SEO agencythat kind of moved up to the
(00:39):
northeast, um, called Regx.
Okay, so the name of theiragency was Regx SEO.
Uh, I now have Keonical uh SEO,and um now this is not as close,
so he's all the way over therein Croatia.
Peter, welcome to the show.
SPEAKER_02 (00:58):
Yeah, hi, thank you very much for inviting me.
Uh for everyone listening, it'sactually Kreshmir, but uh
because it's easier for Matt topronounce because Kreshmir
basically meets means Peter, sowe'll we'll go with Peter.
SPEAKER_00 (01:12):
Yeah, we're gonna we're gonna go with Peter just
because everybody uh wants tounderstand who I'm talking to
and what I'm talking about.
And um I'm a little dyslexic,everybody, every once in a
while.
So uh apologies, but Peter, um,I I love that you reached out um
talking to a lot of differentagency owners about all the
(01:32):
changes that are happening.
Um we are talking about a lot ofwell, uh internal changes that
you're changing your playbook.
Um, people are working from aremote team since COVID.
Um, there's there's a lot ofthings on agency owners.
There's a lot of agency ownersthat also listen to this
podcast.
(01:53):
Um but man, I talk to a lot ofdifferent agency owners from
different areas, and everybody'sfocused on something different
about what's going on withGoogle.
And all the time on socialmedia, there's new studies
coming out that arecontradicting past studies, and
then things are changing, andit's like a constant um well,
(02:15):
it's a constant moving target.
And so uh I'm working onbuilding a little news bot
that's like bringing in all thenews for me to tell me what's
going on because I have clientsall the time that are like, hey,
did you see this study where umyou know it it's now it was a uh
SEM rush study, I think it was,and it's kind of surfaced a lot
more recently, but this was likemaybe a week or two ago, and
(02:38):
they're like 27% of LLMs arepicking up uh like data from
things that are not gettingindexed.
Where is that coming from?
And I was like, I don't know.
Like, I want to go look at thatstudy, that's pretty
interesting, right?
And so things like this areconstantly happening.
(02:59):
Uh, I think that the LLMs wereeven following uh more more or
less when when they introducedRAG to what Google was doing.
They were kind of relying onGoogle.
Hey, you've done this for a longtime, we're gonna lean on you,
but now they're they're notdoing that.
They're surfacing stuff from youknow searches 21 and below uh a
(03:20):
large amount of time.
I don't have the exactstatistic.
So there's just all this datathat that that's um constantly
uh I guess evolving.
And so I would love to hear kindof you set the table of kind of
how how you're viewing this, um,what you're looking at, it what
are the things that areimportant to you, and kind of
(03:40):
how how you're gonna moveforward with it.
SPEAKER_02 (03:43):
Sure.
Um, I mean, me personally, I'mkind of in the uh SCO is
basically uh LLM EO or AEO orwhatever you want to call it for
certain for LLMs optimization.
But um but I'm not I'm not deaf,uh I'm not blind.
(04:07):
I see things happening all thetime.
Maybe some things are evenchanging a little bit, but I
think that the fundamentals staythe fundamentals, and if we try
to kind of pick up every littlething that's changing all the
time, we're just gonna getparalyzed by information and by
choice.
So I think that we shouldbasically just look at the
(04:30):
fundamentals and try to get awayaway from them in a way where we
can experiment a little bit, butbase most of what we're doing on
all of the all of the thingsthat worked before that still
work.
Um like you said, uh a lot ofthe citations in LLMs come from
(04:52):
like the 20th position, the 50uh 50th position, and so on.
That is uh in part because thosethose results uh explain the
topic a bit better than the oneson the first place.
Because someone who's in thefirst position can maybe uh have
(05:12):
the best backlinks, maybe theycan have a great uh great
content, maybe a great brand,but possibly uh they don't
explain the product or theservice or whatever the the user
is searching for in a completeway, and the LLM is pulling
information from someone whomaybe doesn't have all of all of
(05:34):
those backlinks and branding andso on, but they do have like a
really contextual uh productpage or a service page or an
information like a blog post orsomething with original info,
insights, data, statistics, andso on.
Um, I could really go deep intowhat I think the fundamentals
(05:58):
are and that we should do, uh,and what we should do, but um, I
think whoever's listening tothis podcast probably knows what
those are.
Um, I think uh like generativeuh experience or whatever
optimization or LLM optimizationum is basically good SEO and bad
(06:24):
SEO is what people think isdying.
Uh yeah, yeah, people are sayingall the time like SEO is dying,
and then they list what theythink SEO is, and it's like uh
cloaking, uh black hat, it's uhwriting up like really stupid
articles that are 2,000 pluswords because of some reason,
(06:49):
uh, and so on.
And that is dying, and that hasbeen dying for a long time.
Uh, so good SEO or whatever youwant to call it is is not dying,
it's more alive than ever.
We're seeing great results withuh with all of our clients,
we're seeing great results fromother people in the space as
(07:12):
well.
Um, whoever's doing their jobright gets listed in in LLMs.
So that's not an issue.
But if you're trying to do theblack haty stuff and so on, that
can work for a while, but not uhnot long term.
So I don't know if you want meto get into something more
(07:33):
specific uh about thefundamentals or the future or
yeah, so I I really like that.
SPEAKER_00 (07:42):
The the headline that I'm walking away from is,
and I think you put it perfectlybad SEO is dying, right?
And I think that understandinglike the vocabulary that
everybody's working from isreally important because I think
a lot of people don't have agood handle on what SEO is, and
(08:05):
I think you have to have ahandle on what SEO is to
understand like the the thefuture of search and where it's
going.
Now, I think that there's otherthings you have to consider as
well.
So I think you have to have a astrong fundamental SEO
background to understand whatthese changes are or or how they
(08:28):
adapt, but you also have to havedifferent skill sets as well.
So the the areas that I thinkare important is customer
journey, like how people aresearching online, the user
experience is completelychanging, right?
Like CRO, like how people arebuying.
Okay, people are leaving Googleand they're finding stuff other
(08:49):
places.
What is it?
58.5% of traffic has leftGoogle, has gone other places,
at least where they're startingthe search.
Google's still growing.
Um it's debatable where that is,what that is, but it but it does
keep growing.
I think it's in parallel too,right?
So I think people are stillusing Google, but they're also
(09:09):
using these other um uh searchengines and platforms to to do
that as well.
And I think really understandingthat's important.
The other area where where I'vereally dived into myself and and
spent probably the last sixmonths in heavy, heavy education
on is understanding how LMswork, how they're trained, how
(09:33):
the transistors work.
You know, there was a bigarticle, the attention is
everything.
Attention is everything, likeunderstanding the fundamental
shifts in machine learning, whyLLMs are doing what they're
doing, how rag works, to uh likeyou gotta have a basis in that
as well as SEO.
So there's like different sidesor different surfaces that you
(09:54):
have to think about on how theseall roll together.
And I do agree with you, goodSEO tends to work, but also
understanding why it works andalso understanding that the LOMs
are really searching like a veryintelligent person, like they're
surfacing reviews on third-partysites that you've never heard of
(10:15):
before.
Yeah, right.
Um, AI, if you're running ads,which I'm branching out here,
just kind of giving some usecases.
I've seen ad campaigns likethere's a lot of spam that's on
the rise and you can use withAI.
Well, guess what?
Like, there's a lot of black hatstrategies where people are
getting frustrated and attackingother people.
We've been attacked.
(10:36):
Like even if someone's runningan ad and people start spamming
the ad, then it starts tooptimize for spam.
Like, like, so there's there's alot of things that you have to
consider.
There's a lot more, I guess,guardrails to know.
You gotta go, okay, is thislong-term data?
Is this like, okay, it'sconstantly changing now?
(10:58):
Chat GBT, if that's what you'reusing, is constantly um uh
citing citations now, right?
To make sure it's grounded.
Um, because there is still 27%of the callbacks or
hallucinizations.
Like there's a lot of things Ithink you have to consider in
addition to good SEO.
(11:19):
Now, if all you know how to dois good SEO, you still can win.
But I think also there's reasonswhy you're winning that you just
know that you're gonna win bydoing this.
But I'm like, I guess the personthat wants to understand why.
Right.
(11:39):
And like really neural networksand like Google's just one big,
you know, LOM, like, right?
It's trying to organizeinformation, it's trying to give
you a callback to a certaindegree.
And so the better you canunderstand this stuff and how it
works, once you have thisfundamental framework of SEO,
you can start plugging thisstuff in.
(12:01):
But but I I I talk to a lot ofpeople and we're we're launching
like a certification soon.
But it's like if you have a bigbucket, like you you got to get
the water to a certain linebefore you can even have any of
these conversations.
Because if you tell somebody todo this one thing, but but they
don't understand how it fits inthe bigger piece of it, they
(12:22):
don't know why that that plugsin there and what it does.
They just know they need to dothat, and then it gets down to a
checklist.
Because I've been hiring some umSEOs that really know how to do
certain things really good, butthey don't have a full framework
or a philosophy around whatthey're doing.
So if you get off that track oryou get off optimizing with that
(12:45):
tool, like it's like they'vejust jumped into the the deep
ocean, you know what I mean?
And I'm like, no, you've beendoing SEO for seven years, like
you should understand why thisworks, I guess.
I don't know.
That's that's just my uh yeah, Iagree.
SPEAKER_02 (13:02):
I mean, uh SCO was always kind of on anachronism
for me.
Uh it was a like uh evolutionfrom uh webmasters in the early
2000s, late 90s, where youdidn't just do like on-site, you
(13:23):
you were trying to do whateveryou could, so your website is uh
known uh known about, uh, sopeople can access it, use it,
and so on.
So SEO has always uh been moregranular to me than maybe some
of the people who've been cominginto it, like okay, I just need
(13:45):
to know SEO, and that's that'sit.
You gotta know how PPC works,you gotta know how PR works, uh
uh conversion rate optimization,like whatever.
Uh, just recently we're tryingto uh employ a person for
digital PR.
Uh, that's something which Ithink we do really well.
(14:09):
And uh it's a specific skillset, you can't just ask Chat
GPT.
I mean, it can help a bit, butuh all of those AIs just pull up
pull uh all of the campaignswhich have been done before, and
we're trying for to find someonewho can get creative with it.
(14:29):
And uh we really did have somecreative campaigns.
We ended up on the on the newnational news.
We uh we made a little fightbetween hospitals, the biggest
hospitals in the country aswell, and so on.
Um, and we were trying to find aperson for that, and a lot of
people applied because oh, yeah,I know SEO, I know how to write
(14:52):
articles, I know how to uhcollect data and analyze data
and so on.
But when we tested those people,they basically just wrote like
really boring blog posts no oneno one wants to read.
They didn't understand whypeople uh read content, what
(15:13):
they want to read about, uh howlong it should be, what the
graphics should be, because youactually need to have like a
huge, huge uh collection of uhof like knowledge bases.
You gotta be in every trade atleast at least a little bit to
kind of uh apply it to otherparts of your uh strategy.
(15:36):
I can't really talk about uh PPCor to any other team.
I can't really talk toprogrammers and and devs and so
on if I don't understand howwebsites are made.
I can just tell them, okay, youneed to fix this, but but how?
Like for instance, some websitehas uh a lot of their site is in
(15:57):
uh JavaScript, and then uh theLLMs and crawlers and so on
can't really access it.
I mean they can, but a littlebit harder, and then most SEOs
just tell them, okay, removethat from the JavaScript so uh
crawlers can read them, and thenthe dev asks them, okay, but
where should I put it?
How should it look?
(16:18):
And those kinds of questions arenever answered by like the
juniors, uh like the mid-SEOs,uh, because they most of them
think they're seniors.
I've been in this business forlike like you said, like about
seven years, uh, and I would notcall myself a senior, maybe like
(16:43):
the first level, even though Iown an agency uh and I have uh
we have a lot of people workingwith us, we had some big
projects and so on.
But when you actually talk topeople who are really knee deep
knee deep into this for and havebeen for the last 20 plus years,
uh then you start to understandthat all of those checklists you
(17:07):
know are not gonna cut it.
Uh, and you have to get waydeeper into it and get into the
other channels as well.
So, yeah, I completely agree.
You gotta understand how thesystem works, you gotta
understand how basicallyeverything works, uh, not just
writing content or doingbacklinks or what I mean.
(17:28):
You can do only those things,but then you're never gonna uh
you're never gonna evolve into abetter SEO or a better marketer
or agency owner or whatever.
SPEAKER_00 (17:41):
There was uh I I've been to at a lot of conferences
this year and connecting withothers and like you know,
sharing ideas and all that kindof stuff.
And um, it was interesting.
A lot of people were like, youknow, SEO, what's the name,
right?
Like, even when you came on theshow at the beginning, you're
like all these different names,like there's a lot of noise, you
(18:01):
know.
Other people are like, Oh, likeyou're evolved, you gotta evolve
into becoming a great digitalmarketer, you gotta understand
everything.
And even uh I I did a a recentum podcast with a like an agency
coach, and you know, puttingsomebody on the phone with a
client like Facebook doesn'tsolve it, or a Google PPC person
(18:23):
is not gonna be able to answerthe breadth of questions that
somebody has.
It's really where's thatfoundation coming from?
Where's that North Star?
Like you said, how are thesethings associated with
everything else?
Because I can give somebody achecklist, they can follow a
checklist, and it will basicallywork most of the time, but there
(18:44):
are gonna be nuances to it.
There's also gonna be like, whydidn't it work?
And you know, what you know,like I I can tell you, uh, we
had a campaign recently thatlike new industry, okay, new
industry for us.
Um we had crushed the sameformat, the same playbook with
other sites.
(19:05):
We brought on an account, itwasn't audited properly, and
essentially we did all the samestuff.
We followed the playbook, andthe strategist on the account
was like, Matt, like red alert,like I don't know what's
happening, it's not working.
Like it's not working, right?
And they're like, We followedeverything, we're doing
everything the same, like we'recrushing it on these other
(19:27):
sites.
Why is this not working?
And so I I had I always come inon the problems, right?
So I always get pulled into theproblems.
I come in and I'm like, when youdid the audit, well, well, they
they signed up before we did theaudit, but when you did the
audit, did you realize that thecompetitors you're going up
(19:47):
against are like DA 70, DA 80sites?
You know, and I was like, you'reat like DA under 20 or whatever
it was, right?
And I was like You're not gonnasolve that in four months.
Like you're not gonna outcompetethese sites in that.
And that's a client expectationstandpoint.
(20:09):
And like you gotta, you gottajust like how are you supposed
to know everything?
And also clients want you toknow exactly produce these
leads, whatever.
Like, okay, what how how muchbusiness are we generating in
six months or a year?
And you know, you can puttogether models, but models are
(20:32):
just made up data.
Like, I I I don't know, I don'tknow any models.
Like it gives you like aframework to understand.
Like, we've been doing modelswhere it's like, okay, like here
could be on the high end, here'skind of what would happen,
here's what happened like lowend, maybe like if you don't do
anything.
Um, but it we're just guessing.
And until you like get into asite and work on it for a couple
months, it's very difficult tolike make those estimations on
(20:55):
the competition, the geographicarea, you know, like the search
volume of the topics you'regoing.
Like, there's so many things toconsider.
And again, like strategy iswhere all this comes in.
And I feel like over the lastcouple of years, um people have
specialized in different uhservice areas because clients
(21:19):
don't want to pay for thestrategy, right?
And it's like you want to builda house, you want to build a
digital house, a website I thinkis a digital building, and you
don't you don't want to hire anarchitect to to come up with
that.
You want to just kind of guess.
And so um these are just kind ofsome of the I guess challenges
um that that we're personallydealing with, uh, and that I'm
(21:43):
seeing happen on on, I guess,this side of the pond.
I'm curious what are some of thethings that that are working
over there?
You shared come uh some of thestories, maybe go into a little
bit more detail, and maybe someof the stuff you're really
looking at that um, you know, II think it's good to give a like
a global perspective and whatare the different conversations
(22:04):
happening at different parts ofthe world?
SPEAKER_02 (22:08):
Yeah, like I said, uh we mostly do Croatia, uh,
although we do uh have or havehad some clients from US, UK,
and so on.
Um, we do this because it's it'sway easier to compete uh here
than to compete in the US andUK, where there's like 50
(22:29):
million SEOs, SEOs who areprobably better than you.
Um I I mean I'm not saying thatyou you can't do it, uh, I'm
just saying that the inputversus output is way, way lower
uh out there.
Uh so whatever works uheverywhere else is what works in
(22:50):
in Europe as well, andespecially smaller countries
like Croatia.
And uh it basically works like20 fold.
I wouldn't even be surprised ifsome companies from the US and
so on got a whiff of this uh andsaw that you can basically make
way more money in smallercountries just because, like
(23:12):
doing a digital PR campaign,let's say, in uh in Austria or
in Slovenia and so on is wayeasier, way faster, way more
scalable.
Uh the results are way better.
Like we had uh clients in theinsurance business who've uh
gone from like 15 plus positionsto the first position, and
(23:37):
they've they've been the firstposition for the past year or
so.
Um we stopped working togetherjust because they were so happy
with the results.
We we didn't have anything elseto offer them, uh, because
they're first for everything,they have basically all of the
traps.
SPEAKER_00 (23:57):
Okay, so so I'll bring that up.
That's something that I havealways had on the back of my
head is when you do really,really good for a client and
absolutely crush it.
Your reward is you get fired andyou got to go find another
client, right?
Yeah, it's pretty wild.
Now, one of the things you saidum is absolutely true.
(24:18):
I had two clients in Costa Ricafor a long time, and I felt like
I was one of the three peoplecreating content uh in Costa
Rica because the the content wasso thin and and really like the
callbacks um as far as like thenumber of pages created, there
was just not a lot of content,so it served up your stuff
(24:39):
faster.
And so when it's lesscompetition, I absolutely see
that.
My question for you, which I Iunderstand what you're saying,
but also you got a currency uhyou got a currency differential.
Um now I know like Australia,for example, uh is you know
(24:59):
almost on par with the US as faras like expense level goes, but
I can also see maybe certainlyUK and maybe US are maybe more
mature markets than than otherareas.
I I think well with COVID, well,everybody's kind of moved moved
it forward uh online.
Um but no, I I see what you'resaying.
(25:20):
I I think that there's there'sother things to consider when
you're working in differentcountries, like I'm working in
Canada and Mexico mostly,because we're we're like North
America and US.
Um, we have done stuff in othercountries, but but yeah, no, if
you're working in an area that'snot as competitive or or not as
(25:41):
mature, let's say, and not asmany people are into the digital
transformation yet, that likethat's what I'm seeing.
Like certain industries, uhcertain geographical areas, if
they're not into the digitaltransformation as much as like
maybe other companies, let's sayindustry-wise, like SaaS is on
top of it, right?
Like, and so SaaS is a lot morecompetitive than you know, home
(26:04):
services or something like that,right?
Because they're not they're notleaning into the digital
transformation or they haven't,uh, as maybe a small business uh
would, like a plumber might notum uh you know be working the
same way.
So, so I totally see that.
Um, what are some other insightsthat that uh you've found?
SPEAKER_02 (26:25):
Uh well, first of all, uh regarding like the
retainer size, the currencies,and so on.
I think you'd be surprised uhabout how many companies are
firstly open to doing stuff likeSEO and so on on a bigger scale.
And also uh their budgets arenot really that different from
(26:48):
uh from other countries.
I mean, they are lower, but likeI said, if you input, let's say
30 hours uh a month uh for likean expert senior SEO, and you
get uh let's say 5k dollars outof it, and if you uh and you can
(27:10):
get a jump from like the 20thposition to the fifth and then
to the third to second, first uhmonth over month, and in let's
say the UK in the same industry,you can do way less or you have
to do way more hours becauseit's more to get the yeah, to
get the same output.
SPEAKER_00 (27:29):
I I see what you're saying.
So even if you're charging adifferent size retainer, one is
companies might do a biggerretainer because they know
whatever, but also you might nothave to do as big a retainer
because uh it's not ascompetitive.
So yeah, you know, somethingthat would take 50 hours could
take 30 uh in in a in a lesscompetitive country or something
(27:50):
like that.
Yeah, here's one of the craziestthings for me and anybody
listening.
When when we started, well, youknow, we're we're getting a lot
of leads through like Chat GPTuh from everywhere.
Uh and and one of the first oneswe started working with was
again Canada and Mexico, whichwe had kind of done stuff in the
UK and other places, but notlike consistent business, I
(28:14):
guess, like it was like aone-off thing from the podcast
or whatever.
I was just surprised how littlewe needed to do as an agency to
work in another country.
Like I thought there would beall kinds of paperwork that we
would need to fill out, andthere would be like all kinds of
other issues.
And really, it's like just makesure you get paid up front
(28:38):
because uh, you know, there's nolike recourse, I guess.
And it's like a month, likeeverything's month to month and
get paid up front.
And and that was it.
Like I was shocked, and I've hadmultiple conversations with
different business owners, andwe work with a lot of like oil
companies and stuff like thatthat are in multiple countries.
I I just thought there would bea massive amount of paperwork to
(28:59):
be able to, you know, um workwith people in other areas and
it and it's really just acurrency thing, uh, which which
is shocking.
And I think even with um youknow blockchain technology, um,
that's gonna change.
I uh we were always hiringcontractors uh you know all over
the place.
Uh now it's more integrated intoour our our true like remote
(29:24):
style setup, but man, um hiringcompanies and working with
companies is the same.
And and I think that you'recalling out something big there
is really the playground is nowglobal, right?
Like I think the I I and I thinkthat countries um are now
competing globally, and it's notjust about uh a geographic area.
(29:46):
I mean, that's what the internetdid is it it it expanded like
the reach um and it expanded theconnection.
I I think it's crazy.
We're we're actually in virtualreality talking right now for
any of you watching on YouTube.
Um we're we've actually nevermet, we're actually not really
looking at each other, um, butuh we're in virtual reality and
(30:07):
and you're you're listening tothis podcast wherever you're at.
It's pretty pretty wild stuff.
SPEAKER_02 (30:11):
Yeah, and um you also asked about some insights
uh I had from from companieshere.
Well, uh, like I said, we workedfor other companies as well in
the uh UK, US, and so on market,but I think most of the issues
are present wherever, they'realways present wherever you
(30:35):
work.
Uh the biggest issue we have isespecially with big companies,
uh when they have a strategy anduh like a separate strategy
team, branding team, then theyhave like some sort of uh brand
guidelines where you can'treally do anything, uh, you
(30:57):
can't uh change anything on thewebsite, they don't want to do
link building in that specificuh way because it's I don't
know, they see it as hurtful totheir brand.
Uh they don't want to changetheir uh uh channels uh at all.
So and especially regarding liketechnical SEO, that that's a
(31:18):
huge issue because you wanna youwanna give them the option to
rank for more keywords and soon.
So you so you do like a huge uhcategorization like like uh
level up where you try to seelike all of their products and
how you can create newcategories out of those products
because that's the let's say thelow-hanging fruit, let's say
(31:40):
just like creating morecategories that works for SEO,
that works for LLMs.
Uh and then they come up andthey say, okay, but we don't
like this because so and so, andbecause of uh X and Y and
whatever.
So I think all of those issuesare the same basically anywhere,
(32:01):
and you you can kind of uh helpyourself a lot if you just give
up on some clients, like not trynot try to have all of the
clients, uh all of the workbecause of the dollar amount or
whatever.
Uh I've I've improved my life alot by not taking on any client
(32:25):
I can get my hands on because itwe had some clients who were
just like all the best about allof the X's, but um some clients
can really get all of the energyout of you, so and then we can't
work on clients who are actuallygrateful and who would be open
to maybe even expanding on thecorporation, yeah.
SPEAKER_00 (32:50):
I I think that that's uh uh issue.
Both of those issues you broughtup two things that I think are
issues everywhere.
One is um depending on uh youknow how their IT is structured,
right?
Like there's there's issues withaccess to the website, or
there's not a culture of SEO,they don't understand why you
need to make these changes, likebrands are changing, like the
(33:12):
more teams you work with, themore silos it becomes really
difficult uh with the biggerclients and really asking those
questions.
And you hit a lot of gridlock,and um that is a challenge, and
I think that that's a challengeuh well everywhere.
Um uh the second thing you saidis absolutely true.
It's like the Pareto principleof you know, you put you get 80%
(33:34):
of the results from 20% of yourenergy, but also you get the
same thing like in the reverse,or like on the negative, 20% of
the clients give you 80% of theheadaches, right?
And then they're you're suckingall your time or energy to to to
you know help try to pleasethem, which they may not be able
to be pleased, and then um yougot to make sure that you're
(33:55):
you're giving uh equal attentionto to all the other clients, and
that's why we use like internalmanagement of hours to to try to
do that.
Um and I can just tell you, uhtaking on the right kind of
clients, we passed on a numberof clients.
That's one of the things thatI'm actually gonna set up in
this like certification programand and I've developed some
(34:19):
really good referral partnersthat if the client's not the
right fit for us, it could belike, okay, there could be a
client that just needs a lot ofhelp and one-on-one attention
that doesn't have a big budget.
There are people wherever theirbusiness is at that would be
super thankful for that clientthat want like super high touch,
they want to explain everything,they want to grow together.
(34:41):
And that's the perfect fit.
And so I used to be aheadhunter, actually.
Uh that was my last company.
I had grown in my 20s, astaffing company, and and and
flipped it.
And essentially making sure thatthe match is correct between the
client and and what what you'regood at, right?
And I've been trying to reallylet clients know what we're
(35:04):
really good at and why we shouldbring in other partners for
other things.
Because one is if we doeverything, we're gonna do
everything okay.
I would rather do a few thingsreally, really good, but then
you have this, and I'm sure youhave this over there too.
A lot of people want the onestop one stop shop everything,
(35:26):
right?
And and so um we we certainlyhave done that for for a number
of years, but I've been a lotmore open to say, look, we're a
general contractor, okay?
We're gonna we have really goodpeople that do different things,
but it's not always gonna be allus.
We're gonna manage them, we'regonna make sure it's good, we're
(35:47):
gonna be responsible for it.
But we have great other agenciesthat come in and do other things
that and we're all working likeand rowing in the same
direction.
And I think I think explainingthat and kind of setting that
expectation has has worked uhpretty well.
But man, we've we've reallyhoned in on certain things and
(36:10):
specialized in certain things.
Um like we we used to have awell, we still do have, I guess,
uh for the podcast, we have afull-time uh videographer, but
we had a full-time videographerof the agency and we held on to
them as much as we could throughCOVID.
Um, but now we actually have ahandful of uh contractors uh not
(36:31):
in-house, but a handful ofcontractors that give us a lot
more reach and a lot more depth.
If someone wants to do livestreaming for a show or someone
needs to come somebody to shootor do drones or whatever, like
we now have like a bench ofdifferent people that we can we
can utilize versus we have ourone guy and we got to wait for
(36:53):
him to finish up whatever workhe's doing to work on this.
So so I think that there'strade-offs and and and
everything.
SPEAKER_02 (37:01):
Yeah, there is.
We we do that as well,basically.
We have uh like people who workdirectly with us, like our
employees, and then we have uhlike outside uh outside uh
experts who we really trust andwho we can't really employ
because they're experts in theirfield.
Um, like let's let's say, forinstance, someone who is really
(37:23):
deep into analytics.
I can't really uh be the guy forSEO and analytics and PPC and
whatever, then we hire someonelike him for just that project.
We have a couple of people uhthat we work with this way, and
I think that uh that moreagencies should stop looking at
(37:45):
everything like a zero-sum gamebecause we've all kind of lifted
each other up because we employuh that person or that person
for for something specific,which is like we have a huge
project coming on, and we're notreally uh sure we can do it
ourselves, and we hire them, andthen like two months uh go go
(38:08):
by, and then they ask us if wecan work with them on the client
they got, or they just send usthe client, like, hey, I talked
with with these guys, we can'treally figure anything out.
But here, if you want thecontact, and we basically all of
us do this, and uh well, maybeit's a different uh it's a
(38:31):
different story in like smallcountries like Croatia, Serbia,
and so on, uh, because we webasically all of us know know
each other.
Uh there's not that many of us,there's like maybe a thousand
people you see all the time.
There's way more who domarketing generally, but but
these are the people who who arewho are all on all the all of
(38:55):
the conferences and so on all ofthe meetups and so on, yeah.
SPEAKER_00 (39:00):
So so so I've realized like as we've started
to work with a lot more lawfirms uh recently, uh I've just
uh made some connections andwe've been doing some great
work, is that and associatesit's like you know, they do the
same thing, right?
They they they they go get theright person.
I I think you're right.
Um, in different areas.
(39:20):
One of the things that you saidthat resonated with me again.
So, like bad SEO is dying, likeI'm um, that's a big takeaway
for me.
Um, the other thing you justsaid is SEO is not a zero-sum
game anymore because they'lloptimize everywhere, right?
Like you gotta optimizeeverywhere.
(39:41):
And Google is still growing, butalso there's all these other
searches and all these otherplatforms that people are doing
in parallel to, right?
It's not instead of some people,it's instead of, like me.
It's like instead of.
Like I only go to Google to likecheck.
to make sure yeah that this islike legit you know but um but
(40:06):
it but it's growing and a lotmore people are using it and
there's a lot more exposure andI think to your point the what I
have seen um and and tell tellme if if if you've seen any of
this but I I worked with a avariety of different companies
over the years but we would runads one of the things we did do
(40:27):
is run ads for clients outsidethe US um doing SEO we've
started to do more of that wegot some country managers
whatever but but running ads waseasy right uh like in a
different country uh and nowit's like even easier but the
campaigns that used to work likegangbusters in the US on the B2C
side okay not so much B2B butB2C side they worked like
(40:50):
gangbusters don't work as wellin the US anymore but you go
down to South America those samecampaigns work like gangbusters
again it's like there's likethis three year delay of I think
it's like the maturity in whichpeople are searching and how
they're using the internet it'slike you can almost predict the
(41:11):
future I I felt that way with Iguess fashion I guess uh in New
York and California and it seepsto the rest of the country we're
in Texas so it takes a while toget here.
But it it probably comes fromEurope, right?
Uh UK, uh Paris, wherever, uhJapan and it it it like there's
(41:32):
a pattern there's a flow of ofhow these things go and I think
you're speaking to uh like theuse cases or the maturity of the
industry in these differentcountries.
And so I think that that wouldbe interesting to map out um
where that growth comes from onebut but two is it's not a zero
(41:55):
sum game anymore.
Everybody's using all thesedifferent technologies to figure
it out like the customer journeyis not linear.
It it more looks like a like anatom where everything's just
like going back to the centerand then people are stopping and
then people are picking it uplater.
And so attribution's been prettydifficult.
(42:15):
How are you that's one of thethings that I would love to uh
get your opinion on is how areyou looking at attribution I'm
even finding a lot of thedifferent tools which a lot of
the different like gold tiergold star tools to to to rent do
ranking or do rank tracking isdifferent.
Here's something interesting soa buddy uh that's in the space
(42:40):
was doing um did a survey like30 people and asked all 30
people to just go to chat GBT Ithink and or Claude or I think
it was probably Jat GBT andasked them to just ask the same
question about this company.
Okay and to see what the resultswere and then the company the
(43:00):
people at the company did it uhhis team did it and then like he
reached out to a bunch of peopleand did it here is the craziest
thing the client he wassearching for was showing up at
one place or another for everysearch like top bottom middle
whatever but the client who hadbeen I guess searching
(43:21):
themselves it wasn't showing itanymore.
And then what was different waswhere it was showing up for
different people it would bringin other competitors like big
clients like big competitorssome no name you never heard of
competitors and all that I thinkgoes back to the instruction
data set that you're building oflike the the persona that that
(43:44):
Google or the these LMs have onyou and and so you're always
going to get a personalizedcustom result.
And and also all these tooltrackers right like when Google
just said hey you're onlygetting the first page and then
the tool trackers like oh wellwe can go get the top 100 all
these tool trackers havedifferent data and then when I
search I get different data andit's like I'm taking like an
(44:06):
average to try to triangulatewhat's going on but it's super
frustrating for the client whenyou send a report and it's like
oh you're number one or you'renumber two and then they're like
no I'm like seven you know orwhatever it is.
And so uh I'm curious how you'redealing with attribution or how
you're looking at it.
SPEAKER_02 (44:27):
Uh I just had a talk with one of my friends uh who's
a a real data geek and he'strying to create like the
perfect SEO attribution systempossible.
But we kind of just uhcircumnavigated the issue by
just asking the clients uh whatthey're okay with because we
(44:51):
could I I guess create somereally impressive data driven
report pulling from hrefs andGoogle Search Console and
analytics and and whatever butwe just ask the clients okay
what do you want how do you wantto track it what's your KPI and
that's it most of the clientshere I think the UK and US and
(45:16):
so on is probably way waydifferent uh well assuredly but
um here people basically sayokay we want to be on the first
position for this and this or wewant to increase our organic
revenue they're fine with withit just being the basic organic
revenue report in uh Google anduh in Google Analytics and uh
(45:39):
and that's basically it that'swhat we track and uh it's the
easiest way for us because if wetry to tell them okay we have
the perfect system then what youtalked about happens.
Like we create like a reallydetailed report and then they
see in some fifth or seventh uhreport somewhere else in some
(46:03):
other tool that it's waydifferent because the SERP is
personalized or because ittracks uh clicks way different
or their traffic estimations aredifferent or or whatever.
And a lot of people are tryingto track like LLMs.
(46:23):
I don't think that works likedoing the synthetic queries or
prompts uh doesn't really workbut um people are for some
reason looking at it like atraffic channel instead of like
a visibility visibility channellike billboards or social media
or whatever so I think that youshouldn't really care about
(46:47):
attribution in the LLMs and forSEO I think it's just easier to
kind of figure out with theclient what they want and what
their uh proposed mode ofattribution is we can also look
at like first click last clickdata driven whatever that's
(47:07):
tough man last click attributionI have a client that's been
focused on that for so long andthey stopped doing everything
but paid ads like over the yearsand the numbers keep going down
and so we're we're trying tocorrect that through some some
consulting and strategy work.
Um awesome we're we're kind ofwrapping up um I'm getting uh
(47:30):
close to a hard stop my lastquestion for you is where do you
see the future of SEO going andthen how do people follow you
get in touch with you if theywant to find out more sure um
the future I think is basicallyin uh in agents for every every
(47:51):
person that that's basicallywhat you have right now you're
kind of train training chat gptor uh what whatever system to
kind of python uh how toautomate the born stuff how to
automate everything and then Ihave uh I have this is my my
light reading we got building lmpowder applications building uh
(48:16):
ai agents with lm rag andknowledge graphs llm ops applied
lm ops so uh if anybody thatwants to know what I'm doing in
my free time uh I'm readingtextbooks essentially yeah yeah
I think that's basically how thesystem will work like everyone
(48:36):
will have their little agenttheir talk to Siri or whatever
to to buy stuff and so on.
That will probably be theaverage person because the
average person doesn't reallylike the cognitive load.
I don't mind it I like uhexploring thing my uh things
myself especially products andservices um so someone like me
(48:59):
probably won't use it in thatway um but a lot of people will
because people don't really liketo waste time on on buying stuff
uh especially if it's not likefashion or something related to
taste like furniture and so on.
But those systems will eithercreate their own indexing system
(49:23):
or because they still have towork with suppliers and so on
they're they're either gonnahave their own or they're gonna
uh just use Google and Bing likethey did uh like uh until now um
the other thing I think thatwill change a little bit more is
(49:44):
that offline will become a lotmore important because offline
is where the attention is gonnabe uh especially if most of the
internet turns into AI slop andthen you have like YouTube is AI
slop and uh the the socialnetworks and so on.
So it's either gonna be that uhthe social networks completely
(50:07):
ban AI which is not really gonnahappen or it's just gonna become
so much full of slop that peopleare gonna stop using it or or
maybe not stop using but justuse it a little bit less and
then offline will be where uhyou're gonna uh be able to get
(50:29):
their attention way easier thandoing like social ads or
whatever because the quality ofthe user is gonna uh go down so
that's my uh quite dystopian uhvision i i don't know if if it's
gonna happen that way it's justhow i see things uh and yeah so
(50:51):
sco and all of the traditionalchannels are gonna do fine
they're gonna change a littlebit especially ppc i don't know
how ppc is gonna work exactly inthe llm future if llms uh uh
expand like like people proposedi oh i think i i think they're
(51:12):
gonna find a way i mean they'rethey're they've always found a
way i i know that the affiliateroute uh what perplexity was
doing with the affiliates wassuper interesting um no i i uh i
think everything's gonna gomultimodal um i think it's gonna
be like you know really yourattention but the recall how are
you gonna get in that thatlittle sidecar bot you got there
(51:35):
right like how are you gonnabreak into that um so i i think
it's just gonna continue to getmore complex i i i love your
dystopian view though i agreewith you um because i think
people are gonna tune it out ata certain point like i can i can
already tell you i i can startto see things and i you know i'm
just like ah and so so i think ii i i think that there's a lot
(51:58):
of the validity in what youshared all right so we're we're
we're really getting close totime here how do people uh find
you get more on your thoughtshow do people reach out to you
if they want to connect with youor uh connect with your agency
um canonical yeah it's canonicalhr it's canonical seo agency uh
(52:19):
like a canonical url like we'rethe original ones um uh so you
can find me on linkedin uh youcan find me at our uh SEO
conference Croatia SEO summitthat we have uh every year uh
the next one is gonna be uh inJune next year we're gonna have
(52:42):
uh Lily Ray Craig Campbell uhguest položia and and so on so
some really hard hitters uh youcan find me on SEO meets that we
do all over Croatia and theregion uh we're actually trying
to expand those SEO meets intointo other countries in Europe
(53:03):
as well because a lot of a lot alot of countries don't really
have a a live uh SEO scene likewhere you can just uh go and
have a beer with some colleaguesand talk about your um uh stuff
that's annoying annoying you atwork so yeah that's basically it
(53:24):
LinkedIn our conference uh anduh and that's it or on our
website canonical.hr uh althoughwe mostly do work in the region
we can take up uh clients inother uh regions as well but
we're not really looking toexpand into the US or or UK
(53:45):
aggressively so yeah that'sbasically it well awesome well
peter thanks so much for forcoming on um I enjoyed the
conversation uh it opened up mymind in a number of different
areas um if anybody you likethis please leave a review
please leave a comment pleaseleave a review on uh whatever
(54:06):
channel you're listening on alsowe're really trying to get our
YouTube going so um I I thinkwe're we we've almost got it all
built out please go check it outum thank you so much uh for
following along if there's atopic you would like to see
reach out to us if you want togrow your business with the
largest most powerful tool onthe planet the internet and I
(54:28):
guess now LLMs uh you know checkout uh EWR for more revenue in
your business they aresponsoring this podcast we are
pretty much North America uh socheck us out in North America um
and uh you know uh let's stay intouch Peter thanks so much
everybody for listening my nameis Matt Bertram bye bye for now
(54:50):
bye
This is the unknown secrets of internet marketing.
Your insider guide to thestrategies top marketers use to
crush the competition.
Ready to unlock your businessfull potential.
Let's get started.
SPEAKER_00 (00:17):
Howdy, welcome back to another fun-fold episode of
The Unknown Secrets of InternetMarketing, but better known as
the Best SEO podcast.
We're exploring LM visibilityand moving into the era of AI.
I uh if you listen to the lastpodcast, um I interviewed a
former uh local uh SEO agencythat kind of moved up to the
(00:39):
northeast, um, called Regx.
Okay, so the name of theiragency was Regx SEO.
Uh, I now have Keonical uh SEO,and um now this is not as close,
so he's all the way over therein Croatia.
Peter, welcome to the show.
SPEAKER_02 (00:58):
Yeah, hi, thank you very much for inviting me.
Uh for everyone listening, it'sactually Kreshmir, but uh
because it's easier for Matt topronounce because Kreshmir
basically meets means Peter, sowe'll we'll go with Peter.
SPEAKER_00 (01:12):
Yeah, we're gonna we're gonna go with Peter just
because everybody uh wants tounderstand who I'm talking to
and what I'm talking about.
And um I'm a little dyslexic,everybody, every once in a
while.
So uh apologies, but Peter, um,I I love that you reached out um
talking to a lot of differentagency owners about all the
(01:32):
changes that are happening.
Um we are talking about a lot ofwell, uh internal changes that
you're changing your playbook.
Um, people are working from aremote team since COVID.
Um, there's there's a lot ofthings on agency owners.
There's a lot of agency ownersthat also listen to this
podcast.
(01:53):
Um but man, I talk to a lot ofdifferent agency owners from
different areas, and everybody'sfocused on something different
about what's going on withGoogle.
And all the time on socialmedia, there's new studies
coming out that arecontradicting past studies, and
then things are changing, andit's like a constant um well,
(02:15):
it's a constant moving target.
And so uh I'm working onbuilding a little news bot
that's like bringing in all thenews for me to tell me what's
going on because I have clientsall the time that are like, hey,
did you see this study where umyou know it it's now it was a uh
SEM rush study, I think it was,and it's kind of surfaced a lot
more recently, but this was likemaybe a week or two ago, and
(02:38):
they're like 27% of LLMs arepicking up uh like data from
things that are not gettingindexed.
Where is that coming from?
And I was like, I don't know.
Like, I want to go look at thatstudy, that's pretty
interesting, right?
And so things like this areconstantly happening.
(02:59):
Uh, I think that the LLMs wereeven following uh more more or
less when when they introducedRAG to what Google was doing.
They were kind of relying onGoogle.
Hey, you've done this for a longtime, we're gonna lean on you,
but now they're they're notdoing that.
They're surfacing stuff from youknow searches 21 and below uh a
(03:20):
large amount of time.
I don't have the exactstatistic.
So there's just all this datathat that that's um constantly
uh I guess evolving.
And so I would love to hear kindof you set the table of kind of
how how you're viewing this, um,what you're looking at, it what
are the things that areimportant to you, and kind of
(03:40):
how how you're gonna moveforward with it.
SPEAKER_02 (03:43):
Sure.
Um, I mean, me personally, I'mkind of in the uh SCO is
basically uh LLM EO or AEO orwhatever you want to call it for
certain for LLMs optimization.
But um but I'm not I'm not deaf,uh I'm not blind.
(04:07):
I see things happening all thetime.
Maybe some things are evenchanging a little bit, but I
think that the fundamentals staythe fundamentals, and if we try
to kind of pick up every littlething that's changing all the
time, we're just gonna getparalyzed by information and by
choice.
So I think that we shouldbasically just look at the
(04:30):
fundamentals and try to get awayaway from them in a way where we
can experiment a little bit, butbase most of what we're doing on
all of the all of the thingsthat worked before that still
work.
Um like you said, uh a lot ofthe citations in LLMs come from
(04:52):
like the 20th position, the 50uh 50th position, and so on.
That is uh in part because thosethose results uh explain the
topic a bit better than the oneson the first place.
Because someone who's in thefirst position can maybe uh have
(05:12):
the best backlinks, maybe theycan have a great uh great
content, maybe a great brand,but possibly uh they don't
explain the product or theservice or whatever the the user
is searching for in a completeway, and the LLM is pulling
information from someone whomaybe doesn't have all of all of
(05:34):
those backlinks and branding andso on, but they do have like a
really contextual uh productpage or a service page or an
information like a blog post orsomething with original info,
insights, data, statistics, andso on.
Um, I could really go deep intowhat I think the fundamentals
(05:58):
are and that we should do, uh,and what we should do, but um, I
think whoever's listening tothis podcast probably knows what
those are.
Um, I think uh like generativeuh experience or whatever
optimization or LLM optimizationum is basically good SEO and bad
(06:24):
SEO is what people think isdying.
Uh yeah, yeah, people are sayingall the time like SEO is dying,
and then they list what theythink SEO is, and it's like uh
cloaking, uh black hat, it's uhwriting up like really stupid
articles that are 2,000 pluswords because of some reason,
(06:49):
uh, and so on.
And that is dying, and that hasbeen dying for a long time.
Uh, so good SEO or whatever youwant to call it is is not dying,
it's more alive than ever.
We're seeing great results withuh with all of our clients,
we're seeing great results fromother people in the space as
(07:12):
well.
Um, whoever's doing their jobright gets listed in in LLMs.
So that's not an issue.
But if you're trying to do theblack haty stuff and so on, that
can work for a while, but not uhnot long term.
So I don't know if you want meto get into something more
(07:33):
specific uh about thefundamentals or the future or
yeah, so I I really like that.
SPEAKER_00 (07:42):
The the headline that I'm walking away from is,
and I think you put it perfectlybad SEO is dying, right?
And I think that understandinglike the vocabulary that
everybody's working from isreally important because I think
a lot of people don't have agood handle on what SEO is, and
(08:05):
I think you have to have ahandle on what SEO is to
understand like the the thefuture of search and where it's
going.
Now, I think that there's otherthings you have to consider as
well.
So I think you have to have a astrong fundamental SEO
background to understand whatthese changes are or or how they
(08:28):
adapt, but you also have to havedifferent skill sets as well.
So the the areas that I thinkare important is customer
journey, like how people aresearching online, the user
experience is completelychanging, right?
Like CRO, like how people arebuying.
Okay, people are leaving Googleand they're finding stuff other
(08:49):
places.
What is it?
58.5% of traffic has leftGoogle, has gone other places,
at least where they're startingthe search.
Google's still growing.
Um it's debatable where that is,what that is, but it but it does
keep growing.
I think it's in parallel too,right?
So I think people are stillusing Google, but they're also
(09:09):
using these other um uh searchengines and platforms to to do
that as well.
And I think really understandingthat's important.
The other area where where I'vereally dived into myself and and
spent probably the last sixmonths in heavy, heavy education
on is understanding how LMswork, how they're trained, how
(09:33):
the transistors work.
You know, there was a bigarticle, the attention is
everything.
Attention is everything, likeunderstanding the fundamental
shifts in machine learning, whyLLMs are doing what they're
doing, how rag works, to uh likeyou gotta have a basis in that
as well as SEO.
So there's like different sidesor different surfaces that you
(09:54):
have to think about on how theseall roll together.
And I do agree with you, goodSEO tends to work, but also
understanding why it works andalso understanding that the LOMs
are really searching like a veryintelligent person, like they're
surfacing reviews on third-partysites that you've never heard of
(10:15):
before.
Yeah, right.
Um, AI, if you're running ads,which I'm branching out here,
just kind of giving some usecases.
I've seen ad campaigns likethere's a lot of spam that's on
the rise and you can use withAI.
Well, guess what?
Like, there's a lot of black hatstrategies where people are
getting frustrated and attackingother people.
We've been attacked.
(10:36):
Like even if someone's runningan ad and people start spamming
the ad, then it starts tooptimize for spam.
Like, like, so there's there's alot of things that you have to
consider.
There's a lot more, I guess,guardrails to know.
You gotta go, okay, is thislong-term data?
Is this like, okay, it'sconstantly changing now?
(10:58):
Chat GBT, if that's what you'reusing, is constantly um uh
citing citations now, right?
To make sure it's grounded.
Um, because there is still 27%of the callbacks or
hallucinizations.
Like there's a lot of things Ithink you have to consider in
addition to good SEO.
(11:19):
Now, if all you know how to dois good SEO, you still can win.
But I think also there's reasonswhy you're winning that you just
know that you're gonna win bydoing this.
But I'm like, I guess the personthat wants to understand why.
Right.
(11:39):
And like really neural networksand like Google's just one big,
you know, LOM, like, right?
It's trying to organizeinformation, it's trying to give
you a callback to a certaindegree.
And so the better you canunderstand this stuff and how it
works, once you have thisfundamental framework of SEO,
you can start plugging thisstuff in.
(12:01):
But but I I I talk to a lot ofpeople and we're we're launching
like a certification soon.
But it's like if you have a bigbucket, like you you got to get
the water to a certain linebefore you can even have any of
these conversations.
Because if you tell somebody todo this one thing, but but they
don't understand how it fits inthe bigger piece of it, they
(12:22):
don't know why that that plugsin there and what it does.
They just know they need to dothat, and then it gets down to a
checklist.
Because I've been hiring some umSEOs that really know how to do
certain things really good, butthey don't have a full framework
or a philosophy around whatthey're doing.
So if you get off that track oryou get off optimizing with that
(12:45):
tool, like it's like they'vejust jumped into the the deep
ocean, you know what I mean?
And I'm like, no, you've beendoing SEO for seven years, like
you should understand why thisworks, I guess.
I don't know.
That's that's just my uh yeah, Iagree.
SPEAKER_02 (13:02):
I mean, uh SCO was always kind of on anachronism
for me.
Uh it was a like uh evolutionfrom uh webmasters in the early
2000s, late 90s, where youdidn't just do like on-site, you
(13:23):
you were trying to do whateveryou could, so your website is uh
known uh known about, uh, sopeople can access it, use it,
and so on.
So SEO has always uh been moregranular to me than maybe some
of the people who've been cominginto it, like okay, I just need
(13:45):
to know SEO, and that's that'sit.
You gotta know how PPC works,you gotta know how PR works, uh
uh conversion rate optimization,like whatever.
Uh, just recently we're tryingto uh employ a person for
digital PR.
Uh, that's something which Ithink we do really well.
(14:09):
And uh it's a specific skillset, you can't just ask Chat
GPT.
I mean, it can help a bit, butuh all of those AIs just pull up
pull uh all of the campaignswhich have been done before, and
we're trying for to find someonewho can get creative with it.
(14:29):
And uh we really did have somecreative campaigns.
We ended up on the on the newnational news.
We uh we made a little fightbetween hospitals, the biggest
hospitals in the country aswell, and so on.
Um, and we were trying to find aperson for that, and a lot of
people applied because oh, yeah,I know SEO, I know how to write
(14:52):
articles, I know how to uhcollect data and analyze data
and so on.
But when we tested those people,they basically just wrote like
really boring blog posts no oneno one wants to read.
They didn't understand whypeople uh read content, what
(15:13):
they want to read about, uh howlong it should be, what the
graphics should be, because youactually need to have like a
huge, huge uh collection of uhof like knowledge bases.
You gotta be in every trade atleast at least a little bit to
kind of uh apply it to otherparts of your uh strategy.
(15:36):
I can't really talk about uh PPCor to any other team.
I can't really talk toprogrammers and and devs and so
on if I don't understand howwebsites are made.
I can just tell them, okay, youneed to fix this, but but how?
Like for instance, some websitehas uh a lot of their site is in
(15:57):
uh JavaScript, and then uh theLLMs and crawlers and so on
can't really access it.
I mean they can, but a littlebit harder, and then most SEOs
just tell them, okay, removethat from the JavaScript so uh
crawlers can read them, and thenthe dev asks them, okay, but
where should I put it?
How should it look?
(16:18):
And those kinds of questions arenever answered by like the
juniors, uh like the mid-SEOs,uh, because they most of them
think they're seniors.
I've been in this business forlike like you said, like about
seven years, uh, and I would notcall myself a senior, maybe like
(16:43):
the first level, even though Iown an agency uh and I have uh
we have a lot of people workingwith us, we had some big
projects and so on.
But when you actually talk topeople who are really knee deep
knee deep into this for and havebeen for the last 20 plus years,
uh then you start to understandthat all of those checklists you
(17:07):
know are not gonna cut it.
Uh, and you have to get waydeeper into it and get into the
other channels as well.
So, yeah, I completely agree.
You gotta understand how thesystem works, you gotta
understand how basicallyeverything works, uh, not just
writing content or doingbacklinks or what I mean.
(17:28):
You can do only those things,but then you're never gonna uh
you're never gonna evolve into abetter SEO or a better marketer
or agency owner or whatever.
SPEAKER_00 (17:41):
There was uh I I've been to at a lot of conferences
this year and connecting withothers and like you know,
sharing ideas and all that kindof stuff.
And um, it was interesting.
A lot of people were like, youknow, SEO, what's the name,
right?
Like, even when you came on theshow at the beginning, you're
like all these different names,like there's a lot of noise, you
(18:01):
know.
Other people are like, Oh, likeyou're evolved, you gotta evolve
into becoming a great digitalmarketer, you gotta understand
everything.
And even uh I I did a a recentum podcast with a like an agency
coach, and you know, puttingsomebody on the phone with a
client like Facebook doesn'tsolve it, or a Google PPC person
(18:23):
is not gonna be able to answerthe breadth of questions that
somebody has.
It's really where's thatfoundation coming from?
Where's that North Star?
Like you said, how are thesethings associated with
everything else?
Because I can give somebody achecklist, they can follow a
checklist, and it will basicallywork most of the time, but there
(18:44):
are gonna be nuances to it.
There's also gonna be like, whydidn't it work?
And you know, what you know,like I I can tell you, uh, we
had a campaign recently thatlike new industry, okay, new
industry for us.
Um we had crushed the sameformat, the same playbook with
other sites.
(19:05):
We brought on an account, itwasn't audited properly, and
essentially we did all the samestuff.
We followed the playbook, andthe strategist on the account
was like, Matt, like red alert,like I don't know what's
happening, it's not working.
Like it's not working, right?
And they're like, We followedeverything, we're doing
everything the same, like we'recrushing it on these other
(19:27):
sites.
Why is this not working?
And so I I had I always come inon the problems, right?
So I always get pulled into theproblems.
I come in and I'm like, when youdid the audit, well, well, they
they signed up before we did theaudit, but when you did the
audit, did you realize that thecompetitors you're going up
(19:47):
against are like DA 70, DA 80sites?
You know, and I was like, you'reat like DA under 20 or whatever
it was, right?
And I was like You're not gonnasolve that in four months.
Like you're not gonna outcompetethese sites in that.
And that's a client expectationstandpoint.
(20:09):
And like you gotta, you gottajust like how are you supposed
to know everything?
And also clients want you toknow exactly produce these
leads, whatever.
Like, okay, what how how muchbusiness are we generating in
six months or a year?
And you know, you can puttogether models, but models are
(20:32):
just made up data.
Like, I I I don't know, I don'tknow any models.
Like it gives you like aframework to understand.
Like, we've been doing modelswhere it's like, okay, like here
could be on the high end, here'skind of what would happen,
here's what happened like lowend, maybe like if you don't do
anything.
Um, but it we're just guessing.
And until you like get into asite and work on it for a couple
months, it's very difficult tolike make those estimations on
(20:55):
the competition, the geographicarea, you know, like the search
volume of the topics you'regoing.
Like, there's so many things toconsider.
And again, like strategy iswhere all this comes in.
And I feel like over the lastcouple of years, um people have
specialized in different uhservice areas because clients
(21:19):
don't want to pay for thestrategy, right?
And it's like you want to builda house, you want to build a
digital house, a website I thinkis a digital building, and you
don't you don't want to hire anarchitect to to come up with
that.
You want to just kind of guess.
And so um these are just kind ofsome of the I guess challenges
um that that we're personallydealing with, uh, and that I'm
(21:43):
seeing happen on on, I guess,this side of the pond.
I'm curious what are some of thethings that that are working
over there?
You shared come uh some of thestories, maybe go into a little
bit more detail, and maybe someof the stuff you're really
looking at that um, you know, II think it's good to give a like
a global perspective and whatare the different conversations
(22:04):
happening at different parts ofthe world?
SPEAKER_02 (22:08):
Yeah, like I said, uh we mostly do Croatia, uh,
although we do uh have or havehad some clients from US, UK,
and so on.
Um, we do this because it's it'sway easier to compete uh here
than to compete in the US andUK, where there's like 50
(22:29):
million SEOs, SEOs who areprobably better than you.
Um I I mean I'm not saying thatyou you can't do it, uh, I'm
just saying that the inputversus output is way, way lower
uh out there.
Uh so whatever works uheverywhere else is what works in
(22:50):
in Europe as well, andespecially smaller countries
like Croatia.
And uh it basically works like20 fold.
I wouldn't even be surprised ifsome companies from the US and
so on got a whiff of this uh andsaw that you can basically make
way more money in smallercountries just because, like
(23:12):
doing a digital PR campaign,let's say, in uh in Austria or
in Slovenia and so on is wayeasier, way faster, way more
scalable.
Uh the results are way better.
Like we had uh clients in theinsurance business who've uh
gone from like 15 plus positionsto the first position, and
(23:37):
they've they've been the firstposition for the past year or
so.
Um we stopped working togetherjust because they were so happy
with the results.
We we didn't have anything elseto offer them, uh, because
they're first for everything,they have basically all of the
traps.
SPEAKER_00 (23:57):
Okay, so so I'll bring that up.
That's something that I havealways had on the back of my
head is when you do really,really good for a client and
absolutely crush it.
Your reward is you get fired andyou got to go find another
client, right?
Yeah, it's pretty wild.
Now, one of the things you saidum is absolutely true.
(24:18):
I had two clients in Costa Ricafor a long time, and I felt like
I was one of the three peoplecreating content uh in Costa
Rica because the the content wasso thin and and really like the
callbacks um as far as like thenumber of pages created, there
was just not a lot of content,so it served up your stuff
(24:39):
faster.
And so when it's lesscompetition, I absolutely see
that.
My question for you, which I Iunderstand what you're saying,
but also you got a currency uhyou got a currency differential.
Um now I know like Australia,for example, uh is you know
(24:59):
almost on par with the US as faras like expense level goes, but
I can also see maybe certainlyUK and maybe US are maybe more
mature markets than than otherareas.
I I think well with COVID, well,everybody's kind of moved moved
it forward uh online.
Um but no, I I see what you'resaying.
(25:20):
I I think that there's there'sother things to consider when
you're working in differentcountries, like I'm working in
Canada and Mexico mostly,because we're we're like North
America and US.
Um, we have done stuff in othercountries, but but yeah, no, if
you're working in an area that'snot as competitive or or not as
(25:41):
mature, let's say, and not asmany people are into the digital
transformation yet, that likethat's what I'm seeing.
Like certain industries, uhcertain geographical areas, if
they're not into the digitaltransformation as much as like
maybe other companies, let's sayindustry-wise, like SaaS is on
top of it, right?
Like, and so SaaS is a lot morecompetitive than you know, home
(26:04):
services or something like that,right?
Because they're not they're notleaning into the digital
transformation or they haven't,uh, as maybe a small business uh
would, like a plumber might notum uh you know be working the
same way.
So, so I totally see that.
Um, what are some other insightsthat that uh you've found?
SPEAKER_02 (26:25):
Uh well, first of all, uh regarding like the
retainer size, the currencies,and so on.
I think you'd be surprised uhabout how many companies are
firstly open to doing stuff likeSEO and so on on a bigger scale.
And also uh their budgets arenot really that different from
(26:48):
uh from other countries.
I mean, they are lower, but likeI said, if you input, let's say
30 hours uh a month uh for likean expert senior SEO, and you
get uh let's say 5k dollars outof it, and if you uh and you can
(27:10):
get a jump from like the 20thposition to the fifth and then
to the third to second, first uhmonth over month, and in let's
say the UK in the same industry,you can do way less or you have
to do way more hours becauseit's more to get the yeah, to
get the same output.
SPEAKER_00 (27:29):
I I see what you're saying.
So even if you're charging adifferent size retainer, one is
companies might do a biggerretainer because they know
whatever, but also you might nothave to do as big a retainer
because uh it's not ascompetitive.
So yeah, you know, somethingthat would take 50 hours could
take 30 uh in in a in a lesscompetitive country or something
(27:50):
like that.
Yeah, here's one of the craziestthings for me and anybody
listening.
When when we started, well, youknow, we're we're getting a lot
of leads through like Chat GPTuh from everywhere.
Uh and and one of the first oneswe started working with was
again Canada and Mexico, whichwe had kind of done stuff in the
UK and other places, but notlike consistent business, I
(28:14):
guess, like it was like aone-off thing from the podcast
or whatever.
I was just surprised how littlewe needed to do as an agency to
work in another country.
Like I thought there would beall kinds of paperwork that we
would need to fill out, andthere would be like all kinds of
other issues.
And really, it's like just makesure you get paid up front
(28:38):
because uh, you know, there's nolike recourse, I guess.
And it's like a month, likeeverything's month to month and
get paid up front.
And and that was it.
Like I was shocked, and I've hadmultiple conversations with
different business owners, andwe work with a lot of like oil
companies and stuff like thatthat are in multiple countries.
I I just thought there would bea massive amount of paperwork to
(28:59):
be able to, you know, um workwith people in other areas and
it and it's really just acurrency thing, uh, which which
is shocking.
And I think even with um youknow blockchain technology, um,
that's gonna change.
I uh we were always hiringcontractors uh you know all over
the place.
Uh now it's more integrated intoour our our true like remote
(29:24):
style setup, but man, um hiringcompanies and working with
companies is the same.
And and I think that you'recalling out something big there
is really the playground is nowglobal, right?
Like I think the I I and I thinkthat countries um are now
competing globally, and it's notjust about uh a geographic area.
(29:46):
I mean, that's what the internetdid is it it it expanded like
the reach um and it expanded theconnection.
I I think it's crazy.
We're we're actually in virtualreality talking right now for
any of you watching on YouTube.
Um we're we've actually nevermet, we're actually not really
looking at each other, um, butuh we're in virtual reality and
(30:07):
and you're you're listening tothis podcast wherever you're at.
It's pretty pretty wild stuff.
SPEAKER_02 (30:11):
Yeah, and um you also asked about some insights
uh I had from from companieshere.
Well, uh, like I said, we workedfor other companies as well in
the uh UK, US, and so on market,but I think most of the issues
are present wherever, they'realways present wherever you
(30:35):
work.
Uh the biggest issue we have isespecially with big companies,
uh when they have a strategy anduh like a separate strategy
team, branding team, then theyhave like some sort of uh brand
guidelines where you can'treally do anything, uh, you
(30:57):
can't uh change anything on thewebsite, they don't want to do
link building in that specificuh way because it's I don't
know, they see it as hurtful totheir brand.
Uh they don't want to changetheir uh uh channels uh at all.
So and especially regarding liketechnical SEO, that that's a
(31:18):
huge issue because you wanna youwanna give them the option to
rank for more keywords and soon.
So you so you do like a huge uhcategorization like like uh
level up where you try to seelike all of their products and
how you can create newcategories out of those products
because that's the let's say thelow-hanging fruit, let's say
(31:40):
just like creating morecategories that works for SEO,
that works for LLMs.
Uh and then they come up andthey say, okay, but we don't
like this because so and so, andbecause of uh X and Y and
whatever.
So I think all of those issuesare the same basically anywhere,
(32:01):
and you you can kind of uh helpyourself a lot if you just give
up on some clients, like not trynot try to have all of the
clients, uh all of the workbecause of the dollar amount or
whatever.
Uh I've I've improved my life alot by not taking on any client
(32:25):
I can get my hands on because itwe had some clients who were
just like all the best about allof the X's, but um some clients
can really get all of the energyout of you, so and then we can't
work on clients who are actuallygrateful and who would be open
to maybe even expanding on thecorporation, yeah.
SPEAKER_00 (32:50):
I I think that that's uh uh issue.
Both of those issues you broughtup two things that I think are
issues everywhere.
One is um depending on uh youknow how their IT is structured,
right?
Like there's there's issues withaccess to the website, or
there's not a culture of SEO,they don't understand why you
need to make these changes, likebrands are changing, like the
(33:12):
more teams you work with, themore silos it becomes really
difficult uh with the biggerclients and really asking those
questions.
And you hit a lot of gridlock,and um that is a challenge, and
I think that that's a challengeuh well everywhere.
Um uh the second thing you saidis absolutely true.
It's like the Pareto principleof you know, you put you get 80%
(33:34):
of the results from 20% of yourenergy, but also you get the
same thing like in the reverse,or like on the negative, 20% of
the clients give you 80% of theheadaches, right?
And then they're you're suckingall your time or energy to to to
you know help try to pleasethem, which they may not be able
to be pleased, and then um yougot to make sure that you're
(33:55):
you're giving uh equal attentionto to all the other clients, and
that's why we use like internalmanagement of hours to to try to
do that.
Um and I can just tell you, uhtaking on the right kind of
clients, we passed on a numberof clients.
That's one of the things thatI'm actually gonna set up in
this like certification programand and I've developed some
(34:19):
really good referral partnersthat if the client's not the
right fit for us, it could belike, okay, there could be a
client that just needs a lot ofhelp and one-on-one attention
that doesn't have a big budget.
There are people wherever theirbusiness is at that would be
super thankful for that clientthat want like super high touch,
they want to explain everything,they want to grow together.
(34:41):
And that's the perfect fit.
And so I used to be aheadhunter, actually.
Uh that was my last company.
I had grown in my 20s, astaffing company, and and and
flipped it.
And essentially making sure thatthe match is correct between the
client and and what what you'regood at, right?
And I've been trying to reallylet clients know what we're
(35:04):
really good at and why we shouldbring in other partners for
other things.
Because one is if we doeverything, we're gonna do
everything okay.
I would rather do a few thingsreally, really good, but then
you have this, and I'm sure youhave this over there too.
A lot of people want the onestop one stop shop everything,
(35:26):
right?
And and so um we we certainlyhave done that for for a number
of years, but I've been a lotmore open to say, look, we're a
general contractor, okay?
We're gonna we have really goodpeople that do different things,
but it's not always gonna be allus.
We're gonna manage them, we'regonna make sure it's good, we're
(35:47):
gonna be responsible for it.
But we have great other agenciesthat come in and do other things
that and we're all working likeand rowing in the same
direction.
And I think I think explainingthat and kind of setting that
expectation has has worked uhpretty well.
But man, we've we've reallyhoned in on certain things and
(36:10):
specialized in certain things.
Um like we we used to have awell, we still do have, I guess,
uh for the podcast, we have afull-time uh videographer, but
we had a full-time videographerof the agency and we held on to
them as much as we could throughCOVID.
Um, but now we actually have ahandful of uh contractors uh not
(36:31):
in-house, but a handful ofcontractors that give us a lot
more reach and a lot more depth.
If someone wants to do livestreaming for a show or someone
needs to come somebody to shootor do drones or whatever, like
we now have like a bench ofdifferent people that we can we
can utilize versus we have ourone guy and we got to wait for
(36:53):
him to finish up whatever workhe's doing to work on this.
So so I think that there'strade-offs and and and
everything.
SPEAKER_02 (37:01):
Yeah, there is.
We we do that as well,basically.
We have uh like people who workdirectly with us, like our
employees, and then we have uhlike outside uh outside uh
experts who we really trust andwho we can't really employ
because they're experts in theirfield.
Um, like let's let's say, forinstance, someone who is really
(37:23):
deep into analytics.
I can't really uh be the guy forSEO and analytics and PPC and
whatever, then we hire someonelike him for just that project.
We have a couple of people uhthat we work with this way, and
I think that uh that moreagencies should stop looking at
(37:45):
everything like a zero-sum gamebecause we've all kind of lifted
each other up because we employuh that person or that person
for for something specific,which is like we have a huge
project coming on, and we're notreally uh sure we can do it
ourselves, and we hire them, andthen like two months uh go go
(38:08):
by, and then they ask us if wecan work with them on the client
they got, or they just send usthe client, like, hey, I talked
with with these guys, we can'treally figure anything out.
But here, if you want thecontact, and we basically all of
us do this, and uh well, maybeit's a different uh it's a
(38:31):
different story in like smallcountries like Croatia, Serbia,
and so on, uh, because we webasically all of us know know
each other.
Uh there's not that many of us,there's like maybe a thousand
people you see all the time.
There's way more who domarketing generally, but but
these are the people who who arewho are all on all the all of
(38:55):
the conferences and so on all ofthe meetups and so on, yeah.
SPEAKER_00 (39:00):
So so so I've realized like as we've started
to work with a lot more lawfirms uh recently, uh I've just
uh made some connections andwe've been doing some great
work, is that and associatesit's like you know, they do the
same thing, right?
They they they they go get theright person.
I I think you're right.
Um, in different areas.
(39:20):
One of the things that you saidthat resonated with me again.
So, like bad SEO is dying, likeI'm um, that's a big takeaway
for me.
Um, the other thing you justsaid is SEO is not a zero-sum
game anymore because they'lloptimize everywhere, right?
Like you gotta optimizeeverywhere.
(39:41):
And Google is still growing, butalso there's all these other
searches and all these otherplatforms that people are doing
in parallel to, right?
It's not instead of some people,it's instead of, like me.
It's like instead of.
Like I only go to Google to likecheck.
to make sure yeah that this islike legit you know but um but
(40:06):
it but it's growing and a lotmore people are using it and
there's a lot more exposure andI think to your point the what I
have seen um and and tell tellme if if if you've seen any of
this but I I worked with a avariety of different companies
over the years but we would runads one of the things we did do
(40:27):
is run ads for clients outsidethe US um doing SEO we've
started to do more of that wegot some country managers
whatever but but running ads waseasy right uh like in a
different country uh and nowit's like even easier but the
campaigns that used to work likegangbusters in the US on the B2C
side okay not so much B2B butB2C side they worked like
(40:50):
gangbusters don't work as wellin the US anymore but you go
down to South America those samecampaigns work like gangbusters
again it's like there's likethis three year delay of I think
it's like the maturity in whichpeople are searching and how
they're using the internet it'slike you can almost predict the
(41:11):
future I I felt that way with Iguess fashion I guess uh in New
York and California and it seepsto the rest of the country we're
in Texas so it takes a while toget here.
But it it probably comes fromEurope, right?
Uh UK, uh Paris, wherever, uhJapan and it it it like there's
(41:32):
a pattern there's a flow of ofhow these things go and I think
you're speaking to uh like theuse cases or the maturity of the
industry in these differentcountries.
And so I think that that wouldbe interesting to map out um
where that growth comes from onebut but two is it's not a zero
(41:55):
sum game anymore.
Everybody's using all thesedifferent technologies to figure
it out like the customer journeyis not linear.
It it more looks like a like anatom where everything's just
like going back to the centerand then people are stopping and
then people are picking it uplater.
And so attribution's been prettydifficult.
(42:15):
How are you that's one of thethings that I would love to uh
get your opinion on is how areyou looking at attribution I'm
even finding a lot of thedifferent tools which a lot of
the different like gold tiergold star tools to to to rent do
ranking or do rank tracking isdifferent.
Here's something interesting soa buddy uh that's in the space
(42:40):
was doing um did a survey like30 people and asked all 30
people to just go to chat GBT Ithink and or Claude or I think
it was probably Jat GBT andasked them to just ask the same
question about this company.
Okay and to see what the resultswere and then the company the
(43:00):
people at the company did it uhhis team did it and then like he
reached out to a bunch of peopleand did it here is the craziest
thing the client he wassearching for was showing up at
one place or another for everysearch like top bottom middle
whatever but the client who hadbeen I guess searching
(43:21):
themselves it wasn't showing itanymore.
And then what was different waswhere it was showing up for
different people it would bringin other competitors like big
clients like big competitorssome no name you never heard of
competitors and all that I thinkgoes back to the instruction
data set that you're building oflike the the persona that that
(43:44):
Google or the these LMs have onyou and and so you're always
going to get a personalizedcustom result.
And and also all these tooltrackers right like when Google
just said hey you're onlygetting the first page and then
the tool trackers like oh wellwe can go get the top 100 all
these tool trackers havedifferent data and then when I
search I get different data andit's like I'm taking like an
(44:06):
average to try to triangulatewhat's going on but it's super
frustrating for the client whenyou send a report and it's like
oh you're number one or you'renumber two and then they're like
no I'm like seven you know orwhatever it is.
And so uh I'm curious how you'redealing with attribution or how
you're looking at it.
SPEAKER_02 (44:27):
Uh I just had a talk with one of my friends uh who's
a a real data geek and he'strying to create like the
perfect SEO attribution systempossible.
But we kind of just uhcircumnavigated the issue by
just asking the clients uh whatthey're okay with because we
(44:51):
could I I guess create somereally impressive data driven
report pulling from hrefs andGoogle Search Console and
analytics and and whatever butwe just ask the clients okay
what do you want how do you wantto track it what's your KPI and
that's it most of the clientshere I think the UK and US and
(45:16):
so on is probably way waydifferent uh well assuredly but
um here people basically sayokay we want to be on the first
position for this and this or wewant to increase our organic
revenue they're fine with withit just being the basic organic
revenue report in uh Google anduh in Google Analytics and uh
(45:39):
and that's basically it that'swhat we track and uh it's the
easiest way for us because if wetry to tell them okay we have
the perfect system then what youtalked about happens.
Like we create like a reallydetailed report and then they
see in some fifth or seventh uhreport somewhere else in some
(46:03):
other tool that it's waydifferent because the SERP is
personalized or because ittracks uh clicks way different
or their traffic estimations aredifferent or or whatever.
And a lot of people are tryingto track like LLMs.
(46:23):
I don't think that works likedoing the synthetic queries or
prompts uh doesn't really workbut um people are for some
reason looking at it like atraffic channel instead of like
a visibility visibility channellike billboards or social media
or whatever so I think that youshouldn't really care about
(46:47):
attribution in the LLMs and forSEO I think it's just easier to
kind of figure out with theclient what they want and what
their uh proposed mode ofattribution is we can also look
at like first click last clickdata driven whatever that's
(47:07):
tough man last click attributionI have a client that's been
focused on that for so long andthey stopped doing everything
but paid ads like over the yearsand the numbers keep going down
and so we're we're trying tocorrect that through some some
consulting and strategy work.
Um awesome we're we're kind ofwrapping up um I'm getting uh
(47:30):
close to a hard stop my lastquestion for you is where do you
see the future of SEO going andthen how do people follow you
get in touch with you if theywant to find out more sure um
the future I think is basicallyin uh in agents for every every
(47:51):
person that that's basicallywhat you have right now you're
kind of train training chat gptor uh what whatever system to
kind of python uh how toautomate the born stuff how to
automate everything and then Ihave uh I have this is my my
light reading we got building lmpowder applications building uh
(48:16):
ai agents with lm rag andknowledge graphs llm ops applied
lm ops so uh if anybody thatwants to know what I'm doing in
my free time uh I'm readingtextbooks essentially yeah yeah
I think that's basically how thesystem will work like everyone
(48:36):
will have their little agenttheir talk to Siri or whatever
to to buy stuff and so on.
That will probably be theaverage person because the
average person doesn't reallylike the cognitive load.
I don't mind it I like uhexploring thing my uh things
myself especially products andservices um so someone like me
(48:59):
probably won't use it in thatway um but a lot of people will
because people don't really liketo waste time on on buying stuff
uh especially if it's not likefashion or something related to
taste like furniture and so on.
But those systems will eithercreate their own indexing system
(49:23):
or because they still have towork with suppliers and so on
they're they're either gonnahave their own or they're gonna
uh just use Google and Bing likethey did uh like uh until now um
the other thing I think thatwill change a little bit more is
(49:44):
that offline will become a lotmore important because offline
is where the attention is gonnabe uh especially if most of the
internet turns into AI slop andthen you have like YouTube is AI
slop and uh the the socialnetworks and so on.
So it's either gonna be that uhthe social networks completely
(50:07):
ban AI which is not really gonnahappen or it's just gonna become
so much full of slop that peopleare gonna stop using it or or
maybe not stop using but justuse it a little bit less and
then offline will be where uhyou're gonna uh be able to get
(50:29):
their attention way easier thandoing like social ads or
whatever because the quality ofthe user is gonna uh go down so
that's my uh quite dystopian uhvision i i don't know if if it's
gonna happen that way it's justhow i see things uh and yeah so
(50:51):
sco and all of the traditionalchannels are gonna do fine
they're gonna change a littlebit especially ppc i don't know
how ppc is gonna work exactly inthe llm future if llms uh uh
expand like like people proposedi oh i think i i think they're
(51:12):
gonna find a way i mean they'rethey're they've always found a
way i i know that the affiliateroute uh what perplexity was
doing with the affiliates wassuper interesting um no i i uh i
think everything's gonna gomultimodal um i think it's gonna
be like you know really yourattention but the recall how are
you gonna get in that thatlittle sidecar bot you got there
(51:35):
right like how are you gonnabreak into that um so i i think
it's just gonna continue to getmore complex i i i love your
dystopian view though i agreewith you um because i think
people are gonna tune it out ata certain point like i can i can
already tell you i i can startto see things and i you know i'm
just like ah and so so i think ii i i think that there's a lot
(51:58):
of the validity in what youshared all right so we're we're
we're really getting close totime here how do people uh find
you get more on your thoughtshow do people reach out to you
if they want to connect with youor uh connect with your agency
um canonical yeah it's canonicalhr it's canonical seo agency uh
(52:19):
like a canonical url like we'rethe original ones um uh so you
can find me on linkedin uh youcan find me at our uh SEO
conference Croatia SEO summitthat we have uh every year uh
the next one is gonna be uh inJune next year we're gonna have
(52:42):
uh Lily Ray Craig Campbell uhguest položia and and so on so
some really hard hitters uh youcan find me on SEO meets that we
do all over Croatia and theregion uh we're actually trying
to expand those SEO meets intointo other countries in Europe
(53:03):
as well because a lot of a lot alot of countries don't really
have a a live uh SEO scene likewhere you can just uh go and
have a beer with some colleaguesand talk about your um uh stuff
that's annoying annoying you atwork so yeah that's basically it
(53:24):
LinkedIn our conference uh anduh and that's it or on our
website canonical.hr uh althoughwe mostly do work in the region
we can take up uh clients inother uh regions as well but
we're not really looking toexpand into the US or or UK
(53:45):
aggressively so yeah that'sbasically it well awesome well
peter thanks so much for forcoming on um I enjoyed the
conversation uh it opened up mymind in a number of different
areas um if anybody you likethis please leave a review
please leave a comment pleaseleave a review on uh whatever
(54:06):
channel you're listening on alsowe're really trying to get our
YouTube going so um I I thinkwe're we we've almost got it all
built out please go check it outum thank you so much uh for
following along if there's atopic you would like to see
reach out to us if you want togrow your business with the
largest most powerful tool onthe planet the internet and I
(54:28):
guess now LLMs uh you know checkout uh EWR for more revenue in
your business they aresponsoring this podcast we are
pretty much North America uh socheck us out in North America um
and uh you know uh let's stay intouch Peter thanks so much
everybody for listening my nameis Matt Bertram bye bye for now
(54:50):
bye
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