From SEO in 1997 to Today: Brent Payne's Personal Journey | Saw.com - Uncomfortable with Jeffrey Gabriel

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hi, this is Jeff Gabriel, founder and CEO of
SAWcom and the host of theUncomfortable podcast.
This episode is particularlyresonant for me.
Brent, my guest today, and Iembarked on our sales careers at
a similar time in the late 90sor early 2000s.
If you really think about it,this was pre-Internet

(00:22):
Technologies time, like faxmachines were still in use,
typewriters were still in use.
I even remember DocuSign beinga marvel and it wasn't really
accepted or socially acceptablein business transactions.
Many businesses back then,including newspapers, are caught
off guard by thesetechnological shifts and many
forward-thinking ones or newones definitely took advantage

(00:45):
during those times.
Back then, sales training andsales culture was definitely a
lot different.
It was aggressive, it was loud,it was male-dominated and
Brent's sales training andexperiences mirrored mine.
We're definitely going to talkabout those a little bit.
A lot of those methods or theway that things were would not
be acceptable today.

(01:08):
What is consistent is he wasdriven, and he is driven to be
the best in sales.
What he did differently thanhis colleagues is he used SEO.
What he did was he ended upgoing from the 50th salesperson
at his company to number one injust under a year.
After that, he left and went onto establish his own successful

(01:31):
business.
However, after losing his mainclient and putting all of his
eggs in one basket, he lostabout 80% of his revenue and
almost went out of business.
But since he's bounced back,he's learned valuable lessons
along the way, which he sharesin this episode, among other

(01:51):
insights.
Again, I think this is a greatepisode.
I think it's a lot to learn.
It flows pretty well.
And remember, check us out onApple Podcasts, spotify If you
want to see my ugly mug, checkus out on YouTube and always
leave me some comments.
It's always nice to see thatpeople are enjoying the episodes
.
Or send us an email tobuzzatsacom and if you like what

(02:15):
Brent has to say, send him anemail to brentbrentus.
Thanks for listening.
Today on the UncomfortablePodcast, we have the privilege

(02:37):
of introducing Brent Payne, aseasoned SEO professional with
over two decades of experienceas an SEO consultant.
He pioneered Groupon's couponsection from the ground up,
securing the top position forhighly competitive search terms
such as Hobby Lobby coupons.
He also worked for the Tribune,a massive worldwide news
organization, where he achievedremarkable rankings for trending

(03:00):
topics like Michael JacksonDead and Hudson River Plain
Crash.
I remember those results orthose situations he also has
excelled in Amazon merchandising, affiliate marketing and social
media marketing.
His skill set encompassesin-house SEO, search engine
marketing, affiliate marketing,page search advertising, viral

(03:20):
marketing and social mediamarketing, among others.
Join us today as we explore theworld of digital marketing
again with Brent Payne, a truemaster in his field.

Speaker 2 (03:33):
So and I appreciate that.
That's a great intro.
That's awesome.

Speaker 1 (03:36):
And also the arch nemesis of all domain brokers.
We usually have some heateddebates with SEO people.
Domainers are great.

Speaker 2 (03:45):
I love you guys.
You're awesome part of theinternet.
You make the internet run.
I've had a great time with youover the past couple of years
that we've known each other sowe can figure it out once in a
while.
I hear you.

Speaker 1 (03:58):
So I got into the domain business in 2010.
And it has changed immenselyover 14 years.
And, looking at your background, I'd like to kind of wind back
the clock and I don't want to gothrough it every step of the
way.
But I see that you started yourSEO career in 1997 at Viking

(04:22):
Components.
So why don't you start thereand tell us what was SEO like
then for the history books andthe history books?
We love the internet, and thenwe can kind of get more up to
the future and what's going onnow.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
So I was a very cocky 23-year-old salesperson selling
ram chips and flash cards fordigital cameras.
I was literally grabbing aphone book calling the different
resellers computer resellersthat were in the phone book.
I had a staunch New Yorker asmy trainer.

(04:54):
His name's Mike Stein.
I loved him to death but hatedhim at the time, and I would
literally call people, ask himwho they're using for their
memory needs and then tell themand convince him to use Viking
Components instead.
If, at any point during thatcall, mike Stein did not like
the way the call was going, hewould hang up the call on me and

(05:15):
then I'd have to call him back.
So this is the type of guy thatI was dealing with.
When I had a question that Icouldn't answer, I'd have to put
them on hold because I hadanother call coming in.
I didn't have any calls comingin.
This is the game that we playedin order to get this stuff going
.
So there's the level set ofwhere I was.
I then decided that I wanted tostop calling out of the phone

(05:40):
book and focus on threedifferent companies Amazoncom,
800.com and buycom.
There's only three that Ireally wanted to focus on.
So, after some internal turmoilwhere the office got shut down
in Utah, where I was out of thetime.
I moved to Southern California,go to headquarters and I tell

(06:00):
Glenn McCusker, the CEO ofViking Components hey, I will be
your number one salesperson ina year if I can have Amazoncom,
800.com and buycom.
And he said, kid, you're number55 out of 80 salespeople.

Speaker 1 (06:17):
You're 80 grand.

Speaker 2 (06:20):
You make 80 grand a year.
Tammy Cook, who runs CompUSAright sales for CompUSA.
She makes over a milliondollars a year.
There's no way you're going tocatch up with her, there's no.
I'm like I will be your numberone salesperson and I was just
you know nothing to lose.
I was making 70 grand a year atthe time Not bad for 23.

Speaker 1 (06:41):
No not bad at all.

Speaker 2 (06:42):
I was 21 at the time, so I got to correct that I was
21 at the time.
I later became 23.
So he says fine, I'll give youthe three accounts, but if
you're not my number onesalesperson a year, I fire you.
So I start calling on Amazon800 and buycom.
Amazon doesn't even haveelectronics yet, they just have
books.

(07:02):
And I know they're going to getelectronics.
So I'm like some insideinformation.

Speaker 1 (07:08):
I can do auctions at that point too.
I'm not sure what they're doing.

Speaker 2 (07:12):
I literally knew that I had to get my flashcards and
RAM chips on there.
So I fly up to meet with ChadMcFadden at the VA hospital in
Seattle and he blows me off fora three o'clock appointment.
He blows me off completely.
I sit there until 7pm in thelobby watching the two banks of
elevators at the VA hospital,amazon original headquarters.

(07:35):
I had done some sniffing aroundon the internet, found out what
Chad kind of looked like.
He comes down the elevators.
I walk up to him like hey,brent Payne, you didn't meet
with me.
He's like that was supposed tobe at 3 o'clock, I know, but you
didn't meet with me.
I can't go back to SouthernCalifornia without meeting with
you.
So he sits down.
We meet for 30 minutes.
The only thing he allows me toput into the Amazon database or

(07:59):
set up as ASINs were flashcardsfor digital cameras.
That's it.
No RAM.
My boss wanted me to sell RAM.
Okay, whatever, we'll figure itout.
I go back.
No sales for three months.
Now I have my SKUs set up,product line, all that stuff
nothing for three months.
I get a hold of Erin JaneOliphson, who's head of

(08:19):
editorial, head of editorial onAmazon.
Okay, amazon had this process.
Back then there was like thiswhole editorial team, kind of
like an online newspaper laterbecame a tribute where they
would focus on the content ofthe pages.
They'd have a plus detail pageswith the column back then which
are like super detailed, andthen they'd have regular pages

(08:40):
etc.
So she helped us like do stuff.
Well, I started playing withthe word choices that I was
using compact flash, one word,compact flash, two words.
256 megabyte one word, 256megabyte, two words and just
started messing with this ondifferent sizes.
It was a 64, 120, and then 256at the time.
So I find out about a monthafter talking to Erin Jane and

(09:05):
getting all this editorial stufffixed, that they play well.
They placed an order with mefor $2.3 million worth of
flashcards.
Viking is so panicked aboutthis that they refuse to order
the product, to build theproducts to ship to Amazon.
And I'm pissed because I justgot a $2.3 million order.

(09:27):
That's a lot of money.
I'm a hundred percentcommission salesperson.
So Glenn McCusker says kid, yougot to go get them to prepay
that.
So Amazon prepays on a $2.3million flashcard order and then
we have no way of getting thatmuch product to them at all.
And what do I do?

(09:47):
I say, yeah, I got it in stock,no problem, we'll get it to you
.
You're going to take us about10 days to get it to you.
Yeah, I ship out what we have.
Ship out some more Bottom lineis I do the final shipment.
We have a box on my lap in anairplane seat flying to Seattle,
and that's how I land.

(10:08):
It wasn't Seattle Actually, itwas one of their distribution
centers.
That's how we end up finallydelivering the last box to them
on time.
Each time, however, I was makingmore money because the chips
were getting cheaper and cheaper, like ram and flash, and
everything was just nose divingat the time.
So what started as like a 7%margin deal ended up being like

(10:30):
a 32 point deal at the end.
I made bank that year, Bankabout six months of it, and at
the end of the year they'd cutmy pay 11 times.
Okay, actually it's over a yearand a half.
Over a year and a half, theycut my pay 11 times and I ended
up selling over 50% of thedivision's entire revenue with

(10:54):
flashcards and ram from justAmazon, because buy an 800 800
was out of business by then.
Buycom was kind of likefloundering and never really
caught up with Amazon,eventually got purchased by I
can't remember who it was.
Rakatan ended up gettingpurchased by Rakatan and I made
287 grants at age 22 and a halfto 23 and a half.

(11:17):
I'm in fat city, super happy.

Speaker 1 (11:19):
This is awesome.

Speaker 2 (11:22):
My boss tells me to go buy a new car because they
wanted to keep you broke.
It was like that type ofmentality, like boiler room.
You've seen the movie boilerroom.
Very much boiler room mentality.
Okay, want to keep you broke,want to keep you focused on the
lifestyle, like all of this.
And that's how I was trained inmy early 20s.

Speaker 1 (11:42):
So you brought up I'm sorry to interrupt you you
brought up a couple of reallyinteresting points is the first
is getting your pay cut.
As a salesperson and I haven'thad a sales job that I haven't
gotten my pay cut and I've saidthat to people getting into
sales and my friends that are insales is that if you aren't
doing good enough then your paywon't get cut.

(12:03):
If your pay has never been cut,that means you haven't knocked
it out of the park.
The point is is they a lot ofcompanies will dangle a carrot
showing you an accelerator thatthey say you can make as much as
you can and it's unlimited.
You can make $10 million andthen if you hit some sort of
number that they have to pay youmore than the CEO they hate it

(12:23):
they'll pay you that your boss.

Speaker 2 (12:25):
Actually they as soon as you start making more than
your boss usually you're on aradar you make more than your
boss's boss.
That's unacceptable, totallyunacceptable.

Speaker 1 (12:36):
And what ends up happening is is that usually
they'll pay you that amount withan argument, and then you feel
bad arguing with them to getwhat they agreed to pay you and
then it kind of I think it kindof sometimes sours the
relationship with the companyand you're pissed and then they
cut it, you know, and thenthey'll do it again and again as

(12:56):
time goes on, you know, andthat we can have a whole episode
on that.
And then the flip of it is, as Iused to say, because I've hired
countless and fired countlesssalespeople, and I always wanted
to hire salespeople.
Not necessarily I'd buy theFerrari or the car, have a
spending issue, but I want tohire a salesperson that has this

(13:20):
is their income, and they don'thave a choice they have to be
successful.
You know, because I have to besuccessful to pay my bills, I
have nothing else to rely onexcept for this.
And so when you come to workand you need to make that extra
five calls or fly to Seattle orthat distribution center or wait
until seven at night, you'regonna do it.

(13:41):
But if you have somebody or youhave like a trust fund or you
have millions of dollars in thebank, you would have fucking
left at 330.

Speaker 2 (13:49):
Of course Okay without a doubt.
I wasn't hungry enough.
No, I was a kid from a smalltown in Oregon of 800 people
called Oregon, Oregon.
My parents both got their GEDsright.
They did not get collegedegrees.
They made 60 grand a yearbetween the two of them.
Like my entire childhood, myuncle, Doug, used to take me to

(14:11):
Olive Garden.
I thought it was the coolestthing in the world.
He worked for Heel Packard atthe time and that's the shit
that really made me drivetowards, like trying to be a
capitalist, focusing on, youknow, trying to win to be able
to buy an Olive Garden mealright.

Speaker 1 (14:29):
So I'll take you there.
I'll meet you in person.
Okay, I'm on me, so I'm justgonna hold it All right.

Speaker 2 (14:35):
So, going back, how did we, how did we go from Brent
being the number 55 salespersonto being the number one
salesperson, bringing in abouthalf the revenue of the entire
division through SEO?
And that is where I becameaddicted to the search engine
optimization side of thebusiness, because before that,

(14:55):
for that first six months, fourmonths, whatever it was that you
know we're ramping sales up toI think it got to like six
million a month or something wasus buying market development
funds at 7% or buying aplacement on the Amazon
electronics homepage for $15,000.
And like doing all of theseplacement things with Amazon to

(15:18):
try and get the product sold.
And one time Eric Mewitt washis name, he called me and in
other massive order for theholidays or something, and I was
like where's all this demandcoming from?
And he's like, honestly, wedon't know.
Like it's just coming straightinto the pages.
And he said I think it might bethe search engines you know out

(15:41):
there.
And I was like wait a second.
So I stopped and I looked anddid some research, found out
that our product detail page onAmazon for the 128 Megs Smart
Media Card and the 64 megabytecompact flash card was number
one in most of the searchengines.
And keep in mind, this wasn'tjust a Google game back then.

(16:03):
It was Yahoo, excite,lightcoast, you know, dogpile,
that kind of put them alltogether and Google, which was
one of the many players at thetime, and that's when I stopped
buying this stupid homepageplacements for 15 grand and MDF
agreements for 7% of revenue andcrazy stuff like that, and I

(16:27):
guess the rest is history right,like that is.
That's where I started thesearch engine optimization stuff
and it was fun.
It's definitely my personality,jeffrey, like I love.
I was raised by my parents thatthere are no rules, there are
only guidelines, and it is myjob, even as a kid eight year

(16:49):
old kid, 10 year old kid toassess whether I choose to
follow this guideline or not,and it should be a risk reward
based off of the punishment andthe risk that's involved in that
.
And so I've managed to find acareer where it's all about risk
reward, like how far do youpush the algorithm?

(17:10):
How far do you push you knowcontent or link building or you
know social media management inorder to get more attention to
things.
And I've drawn the law to law.
I've never broken the law thatI'm aware of, or at least not
any like thing beyond amisdemeanor of some sort, and

(17:31):
maybe I haven't.
If I haven't, I didn't knowabout it, but that's where I
drew the line for me.
And so when it gets into thingslike you know choices on how we
build content, like I do, whatworks for the clients, because
they are the ones that hired usbut at the end of the day, seos
and this is why we don't get anyrespect in the industry we

(17:53):
aren't doing anything Likeliterally, our net impact to the
world is zero.
And so when I met my wife 11years ago 12 years ago now I she
was a teacher for middle schoolstudents and I was like you
know, what I love about yourrole is that you truly make an
impact to the world every day.
Like you are, you're able tochange the world.

(18:16):
You know what I do I movesomebody who was number three to
number one or number 23 tonumber one, or number 23 to
number two or four or whatever,but all I did is push someone
else's life down.
So, as my client cheers andthey're having a happy heyday,
someone else is crying in theirbucket or crying in their beer
somewhere you know.
Net impact to the world nothingthat sucks, I guess.

(18:40):
Who are we?

Speaker 1 (18:40):
really you know what I mean.
I guess I mean you know you cansay that really marginalize
anything that's more of acommercial service, that you
haven't done something.
But I think, like for my company, for example, starting from
zero miles an hour in majorityof the world, not knowing who we
are other than the people in myindustry from getting to know
me over the decade plus I'vebeen in it but to get us up in

(19:03):
certain rankings and we rankwell for certain keywords like
domain broker and domainappraiser is giving us a chance
to spread our wings and become abigger player and be able to
compete, and someone like youcan be a big part of that and I
think that's an important thing.
I just think that it's gettingto a point where we can talk
about this a little later thatin order to get there now it is

(19:26):
getting so expensive and it'sgetting so tedious that you have
to crank out so much contentand have to optimize your site
in such a way that a commonperson, a small business owner,
just can't do it and it bring ina specialist.
It's almost like it's likedoing your taxes at this point.

Speaker 2 (19:49):
Now even bringing in a specialist.
It makes it difficult for thesmall business Because they
don't have a guy that's thereall the time.

Speaker 1 (19:56):
We don't have someone that's dedicated.
You probably use some sort of atemplate that isn't SEO
friendly.
You don't have writers 10writers writing articles,
cranking things out you don'thave.
It's not easy for you to postblog articles or artists or
things, so yeah, I'm a Techstarsmentor, right, which is the

(20:18):
ultimate.

Speaker 2 (20:18):
I mean, it's the top 1% of startups, right, because
they only accept 1% of thepeople that apply.
But the startup world is veryinteresting because you do have
that scenario of the smallcompany, and Techstars is not
small in comparison to somebodywho just decides to start a
business yesterday, but still itis a scenario where the
Techstars companies are fightingup against someone who's

(20:42):
already entrenched into aspecific key phrase, a certain
taxonomy, et cetera, and it'sdifficult, even with the backing
of Techstars, to do this right.
They need the link fromTechstars, they need the links
from Techstars community, theyneed the links from all of their
angel investors, the VCinvestors, right.
Those links all matter becauseit adds so much authority and

(21:07):
sometimes relevance and trustinto the link profile.
So for a mom-pop shop like, say, a Chinese restaurant down the
road, it makes it really reallyhard.
As a matter of fact, one of thestrategies we use at Groupon.
So we were hired to come in andhelp Groupon's Coupons business

(21:28):
.
Specifically, keep in mind thatGroupon had 20 plus people on
their SEO team a lot of peopleand keep in mind that Groupon
had 20 plus people on their SEOteam alone from Seattle to
Southern California, to New York, to a couple of people in
London, et cetera.
But they brought us in becausewe could get things done faster.
Typical scenario of largeorganizations you get a lot of

(21:53):
red tape.
Oh yeah, right, and Groupon'slittle division of Coupons that
was just starting out in 2004,.
I think maybe 2005 or somewherein there.
They needed help.
So we came in and we did thatform and we grew the business so
rapidly that SEO is about 98%of their business and there's

(22:15):
$100 million business for them.
Amazing, so much fun.

Speaker 1 (22:20):
But one of the things that we did Were you at Groupon
when it was extremely popularand people were looking forward
to the new offers every day,versus what then it became.

Speaker 2 (22:28):
I was about two years behind that Okay, about two
years behind that.
So Groupon was trying differentthings to stay relevant and one
of the things they did was,instead of doing a Groupon, you
could just do a coupon instead.
So you've heard of all thecoupon sites out there coupon
cab and a good friend of mine,for example, scott Cluth, that
runs that right, but a bunch ofother companies that were out

(22:50):
there kind of run on thesecoupon businesses.
One of them was RetailMeNot andJeffrey, one of the coolest
things ever is listening toRetailMeNots Like earnings calls
and having them specificallysay that Groupon coupons is the
reason why they missed theirnumber.
So again, net impact zero.

(23:12):
But wow, it's fun when you havethat call that you hear from
your competitor or your clientscompetitor in this case that
specifically stating we did nothit our numbers this quarter
because Groupon coupon'sdivision has overtaken the
search results.

Speaker 1 (23:31):
I just destroyed our margins and it doesn't, yes, so
so fun, man so fun Anyway.

Speaker 2 (23:40):
So, but part of the strategy, get back to the
Chinese restaurant scenario wehad as we grew inside of Groupon
, we jumped out or drove over toother divisions, et cetera, and
one of them was the restaurantdivision and they were trying to
do some new, innovative thingsto restaurants.
They wanted some inbound linkscoming in.
So what we did is one of thetactics was to start a creative

(24:05):
website for the restaurants thatdidn't have websites.
Now, we made this very simpleone pager, same HTML templates
for the most part, but we had alink back inside of that HTML
template and it started offbeing for all restaurants.
But then we found out thatusually there was just Chinese
restaurants that didn't have awebsite and we set up a whole

(24:26):
system just for the Chineserestaurant industry to set up
one page websites and link backto Groupon.
And that is an example of asmall mom and pop shop, let's
say right, not being able tocompete online because they're
missing the tools and theresources that they need in
order to successfully pull thatoff.

(24:46):
And I loved it because we werehelping out with these small
restaurants.
We're also helping out Groupon.
We're getting the link that wewanted.
We're a little on the slide.
That's super ethical.
It's not like we put that outthere to the Chinese restaurant
that this is what was in it forus, but it wasn't hurting them.

Speaker 1 (25:04):
We're doing it for free.
It was a free lunch, I mean.

Speaker 2 (25:06):
they must know that Right and that was the
justification for it.
But we did hundreds of thoseand it was a fun time because it
was our idea and we had to doit.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (25:17):
I mean, I find it interesting, even today,
speaking to some of my friendsthat are small business owners
and aren't as technicallyadvanced as we are, and I'll ask
do you have your businesswebsite on Google Local Listings
?
And they'll be like, what'sthat?
And then I'll be like, oh well,you got to go to this link and
put in your company's info andjust then, and there you'll get

(25:38):
traffic because you're going tocome up as the number one tire
shop in a certain radius andpeople will see you as an option
.
But if you're not even on thelist, you have no chance.

Speaker 2 (25:47):
And even with that, there's optimization stuff to do
in there.
For example, you want to makesure that you have the key
phrase you're trying to rank forin your company description.
You want to try and get reviewsfrom people that have a decent
review background.
For example, every time I go toa restaurant I take a bunch of
pictures inside of therestaurant and I post them up to
Google Maps.
I don't know if you knewthere's an option, there's a

(26:09):
Contribute option on Google Maps, and I contribute.
I'm now at a level eight,almost a level nine.
It's forever to go up to thenext one, but there are 10
levels altogether.
I'm at a level 8.8 or something, and if you can get reviews
from those types of people,you're going to be much stronger
than getting a review fromsomebody who's only written two

(26:31):
reviews ever.
Oh, really, yeah, oh, it makesa big difference.
On who's reviewing.
However, it's really importantthat you set up a system that
allows you to filter thosepeople out first.
Filter bad people out first.
I see a lot of restaurantsposting those placards up on the
window like write a review,write a review.

(26:52):
Write a review on the doorleaving and coming at no no,
because most people only write areview when they're pissed off.

Speaker 1 (27:01):
Oh, yeah, of course, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:03):
So you have to first send them to your own form,
which is what we do at Loud, bythe way.
We send people to our own formOnce people have written a nice
testimonial there.
We then email them and say hey,you wrote this nice testimonial
on our website.
Would you mind doing it onGoogle?
Make it super simple, stupidform.
That way they can just copy andpaste and you put the review in

(27:24):
there so they can copy it.
Paste it right into Google.
Takes them like six seconds.
That's what you're looking for.
Don't ask me to write anotherreview from scratch.
That's not going to work.
The next version of that wouldbe using AI to rewrite that
review slightly and send it backto them.
Then At that point, you'regetting a unique review right,

(27:47):
not just the one that was onyour own website, which you
should probably pull down if youwrite the one on Google, but
you get to have a slightlydifferent review on the Google
review system and then one onyour own.
So some tricks.

Speaker 1 (28:01):
Check in.
You're trying, yeah.
So from there, from working atwhen you were working with
Viking components and then doinga little group on and kind of
bouncing around a little bit,you were working with the
Tribune and the Tribune of theLA Times, the Chicago Tribune,
baltimore Sun, orlando Sentinel,the Morning Call, daily Press,

(28:21):
bay Herald, bay Tribune, I meanthere's a bunch, it's countless.
So worldwide, massive, how manyeyeballs would read there?
So when I started at Tribune.

Speaker 2 (28:33):
It was 2008.
So after Viking, I did exactlywhat you alluded to earlier
there was a lot of bad blood,too many pay cuts, et cetera.
I went to the competitor wherethey paid me a guaranteed salary
at 240 instead of 287, but thatwas guaranteed.
They stuck me in a closet andliterally didn't give me any

(28:55):
product ever shipped, Justwanted me not at the competition
.
It was hell Because I was avery excited salesperson trying
to sell, sell, sell, sell, sell,sell and they gave me no
inventory, nothing ever.
I sold I think maybe $100,000that whole year and they were
totally happy with it.
I couldn't handle it anymore.

(29:16):
I left for Targus, worked forthe laptop bag manufacturer.
I watched a bunch of brick andmortar retailers screw up online
e-commerce for themselves orelse they couldn't get out of
their own way.
I remember meeting with Walmartthat they claimed they had to
have the pricing on the web.
The highest retail price in thenation had to be their price
online because they would haveto price match everybody in all

(29:40):
the different late, just crazyretail focused things.
And then I went to Tribune, OK,and at Tribune I got to take
over all of the responsibilityfor all the seven newspapers
first, and that was 1.3 millionsearches a month when I got
there.
No, sorry, 500,000 searches amonth when I got there and when

(30:04):
I left, three or four yearslater, five years later, it was
1.3 million searches per month,and so that no per day, Sorry,
searches per day.
I got all those state problems,I went 1,000 per day just from
Google, to 1.3 million searchesper day just from Google, just

(30:27):
in the United States.
So that was a lot of fun like aton of fun.
And what was cool about it is Ihad so many different domains
to work with, seven differentdomains at first, and one of the
biggest things I had to do isfigure out how to get all of
these seven companies to worktogether as one unit instead of
as seven separate differentcompanies, right?

(30:49):
So I was sitting down with theowners of the presidents or
whatever they were, like GMs orI don't know what they're called
them at the time the mastheadof these different newspapers
and slowly I figured out how toget them to work together.
We had to make decisions aboutwho was going to cover the
Barack Obama inauguration, rightand Chicago Jermaine and Ticket

(31:12):
because it was local to Chicago.
And then an earthquake in LA waseasy LA times.
But then we fought overhurricanes hitting Florida
between Orlando Sentinel and SunSentinel, and so I came up
mainly with processes andagreements across the seven
newspapers on when we would moveSEO juice from one thing to
another, and one of those wasMichael Jackson dead a blast

(31:36):
over two million visits to theLA Times site in an hour when he
died.
We were number two, not evennumber one.
We're number two in the searchresults because number one was
TMZ.
They called his death before heactually died, which is so TMZ,
okay, and we had to wait.
Our LA Times had to wait untilthey got confirmation he was

(31:59):
dead, which put us behind on theentire story by about 15 to 30
minutes, and that's all it took.

Speaker 1 (32:06):
That's all it took.
So with that and like the wholeduplicate content issues of
online, I'm guessing the Googlealgorithm and the other
algorithms and the other searchengines wasn't quite as strong
or as good.
So could you have an articlewritten by the, by, you know,
the Orlando Sentinel and thenpost the exact same one on the
morning call and try it all thetime Except.

Speaker 2 (32:29):
Google did do a great job on duplicate content.
Then, oh, it did, okay, it didyeah, and I actually made a.
I was at a conference speaking,I think it was in San Diego or
somewhere but I made a commentopenly like kind of rude, as
like a heckler, to the panel ofthe Google panel, where one of

(32:52):
the Google engineers it may havebeen Matt Kats, it may have
been Gary Eesh, or it may havebeen John Mueller one of those
three was up on the panel.
They're all kind of like thesame people to me.
And he, he said, well, there'sno use case for us having a
cross domain canonical.
And I said, yeah, there is.
And he was like who said that?

(33:13):
And like me, like, oh, brent,like what?
What is the use case?
You again, yeah.

Speaker 1 (33:18):
Right yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:19):
Right and I said well , the use case is tribune, like
we are trying to save resources,writing one article, what we
want to share it across ourseven newspapers, but you don't
give us an ability to pass thatSEO juice that you know, that
canonical as they came up with ayear before, to across the

(33:40):
domains and we need to be ableto do that.
We need to be able to be on thesame page as CNN.
Yeah, because CNN has onedomain and they have all their
link structure coming into thatone domain.
I want to be able to gather allthat link structure up from,
you know, chicago Tribune, latimes, m call, daily press, a
Suncent or Orlando Sun, etc.
And put them all into one spot,because that earthquake

(34:02):
happened in LA and I'm not goingto write that story or seven,
six different times.
We're going to use the LA timestory Absolutely.
And they said okay, fine, wewill thank you for the proper
use case, we will go ahead anddevelop it.
And four months later they madeit.
So, yeah, it was super cool.
Another cool time in theindustry.

Speaker 1 (34:21):
But I think around that time to me, when they had
issues with duplicate contentand then they had issues with
they called them I think theywere called like content farms
or click farms, and that's whenyou had like live strong ranking
for everything, and then youhad eHow ranking for a lot of
things.
But I find that, compared totoday, I find that the content
on those sites is better thanmost of what you're getting now,

(34:43):
because now, like, for example,if you search domain broker,
you're going to see one of NeilPatel's sites that says the top
five or top 10 domain brokersand on that list are companies
that are paying to be on thatlist and there's even companies
on there, like the one I used towork for, a uniregistry that

(35:06):
doesn't even exist anymore, sothat isn't necessarily the top
10.
It's not even that they've usedthese people.
It's just now that's giving abad example where eHow would
probably write what a domainbroker does and then just make a
list of those in the industryand they weren't really pushing
it for commercial use becausethey would put the ads on the

(35:26):
sides and they didn't reallycare, but they wrote better
content than what you're seeingin a lot of other situations.
You choose best hosting provider.
It potentially is written by acompany that owns multiple
hosting companies and they'reputting their own selves on
there, one through five, andthen you choose one and it just
happens to have the right linkto.
So isn't necessarily the way togo.

(35:50):
Maybe I'm pointing out examples.
That doesn't always happen, butdon't you see that change has
caused issues in SEO rather thanwith search versus benefit?

Speaker 2 (36:04):
And the reason why those things you can get away
with those things is becausethey set up real link structures
.
It costs a lot of time andmoney to do it.
But Neil Patel most of hisclients are on those lists I've
met Neil.
I don't really care for him, hedoesn't really care for me, but
I get where he's coming fromand how it works.
He makes some money from theadvertisements.

(36:26):
Thway doesn't update it.
Uniregistry probably paid him$5,000 or something right to be
number one and probably aroundthat price decent number, and
they get an ROI for it.
And even if they're not inbusiness anymore, neil's not
going to go update it untilsomeone says something about it.
That is one link buildingopportunity there, right?
So if you were to reach out toNeil and say hey, neil, guess

(36:50):
what?
Uniregistry's been out ofbusiness for X number of years,
like what the hell?
Well, they're out of business.

Speaker 1 (36:55):
They just don't exist because they were bought by
GoDaddy.

Speaker 2 (36:59):
But yeah, okay, Neil, do you really want to be
funneling all this to GoDaddy?
Here is SAW.
This is what we do.
Would you be interested inhaving us replace that link?
Those are conversations that weuse frequently.
It's about a 2.5% to 5%positive return.
That's about it.
There's a lot of work, but youcan do that.
But back to your point are thesearch results?

(37:22):
Worse?
Depends on the industry anddepends on how much effort is
being put into it.
You're talking about industriesthat have been around for the
beginning, since the beginningof the internet, right?
So you have the most mature,the most interesting tactics
being used.
One of the things I talkedabout all the time at Tribune

(37:43):
was that it was easy because allI was doing is applying
knowledge from Amazon to thenewspaper industry.
It's like a decade of knowledgegap there, like just so far, so
disparate, and that's kind ofwhat we're having with domain is
domain is just smarter.
You guys have been on theinternet a lot longer, yeah, so

(38:03):
you trickier things.

Speaker 1 (38:05):
So let me ask you this You're at the Tribune in
2009 for a period of time In2009, I was looking at, before
our call, that in the UnitedStates there were 46 million
people that were receiving anewspaper on a weekly basis in
the US, but then 10 years later,so you were there for about

(38:29):
five years, but 10 years later,in 2019, it was less than 25
million.
So you're seeing 50% lesspeople getting newspapers
delivered.
The advertising revenue wentfrom in 2006 was $49 billion for
the newspapers in the UnitedStates and by 2011, it was only

(38:50):
$26 billion, and now it's 9.7.
What was it working?
What was it like working at acompany where the or that was
happening.
Well, in an industry that hasconsistently grown, probably
with the population for hundredsof years, is now shrinking

(39:12):
immensely, and there is reallynothing that they could do to
stop it.
And or they're just so farbehind the times that they can't
really do much to catch up andthey don't want to let go of the
past, their history.
What was it like working there?

Speaker 2 (39:27):
So it's your view is interesting.
I got hired on February 14,2008, valentine's Day.
I was their Valentine's giftand I walk in and there's a
stack of papers this thick froman SEO firm and there are a
bunch of audits different auditsfor the seven different about

(39:49):
50 pages a piece.
When I flip through them, Ipick them up and I walk them
over to my boss that hired methe week before and my first day
I dropped them on the desk andI say I quit, just do what's in
here.
And he's like what?
Like?
I quit, just like, do what's inhere.
He's like let's go to lunch.
So we go to lunch.
He's like, brent, we didn'thire you because you like maybe

(40:13):
had some negative informationthat would change our world,
like maybe you do.
But we hired you because wethought that you could actually
get things done, so that's whywe hired you.
I'm like, oh, okay.
I'm like, well, why can't youget these things done?
Like you'll find out and sureenough I did.
I wanted to change even the URLright, the URL structure at

(40:37):
Tribune, and I came in gunsablaze and on the URL, oh you're
so dumb you guys should fixyour URLs, like Sheila and you
IT department pissed off halfthe IT team, of course, and
guess what?
The URL never changed in thosefive years, ever.
Why?
Because the URL determined thegateway for whether you're a

(40:59):
registered user, anon-registered user, what
accesses you have, like all ofthat hash tag stuff, commas and
periods and all these differentweird things in the URL all
determined what you have theright to view and not be based
off of your subscription.
I didn't know that on the firstday.
Figured out later felt like anidiot.
So that was the reason why theyhired me.

(41:24):
So things changed.
It was made very clear to me.
A week later he quit thecompany.
He went and started a toys forlike that are safe for the
environment.
Yeah yeah, okay, and I was like,okay, that's scary.
But what was scarier is that,within the first two months, all
seven people that hadinterviewed me, I'd either been

(41:46):
fired or quit All seven of them.
So now I'm hanging out bymyself.
Okay, you're waiting.
Fast forward through the entirescenario of what was going on
at Tribune.
I went through 13 bosses andthose five years I was given

(42:07):
carte blanche control from anSEO perspective, where I could
change headlines on the onlinenewspapers.
Los Angeles Times great exampleplain crashes into Hudson River
.
You know what their onlineheadline was for that?
No, two wings and a prayer.
Two wings and a prayer.

(42:28):
I was so pissed.
Now that headline the nextmorning when it ran in print
what a pure surprise had anattached image with it, though.
Made sense in their littlemailboxy thingy.
Oh yeah, three corner.
Okay, two wings and a prayer.
People hanging out on the wingsmade sense online.

(42:49):
It doesn't make sense.
It doesn't make sense becausetwo wings and a prayer without
two wings and a prayer, withoutan image attached to it, and
you're just seeing it randomlyin Google News or in a search
result or whatever it might bedidn't make sense.
So I called up the head of LATimes at the time can't remember
his name and I'm like oh, seanGallagher called Sean Gallagher

(43:09):
and I'm like, sean, I'm going tolet you change the headline or
I'm going to do it myself,because this can happen.

Speaker 1 (43:17):
That's some pretty big news story too.
To go and change it was huge.

Speaker 2 (43:21):
So we changed the story to two wings sorry, from
two wings and a prayer to planecrashes into Hudson River.
Now, I would have preferred aheadline that said Hudson River
plane crash at the time, becauseGoogle was very focused on
exact match relevancy back then.
Now, with the way the AI toolworks and like all the other
stuff they do, wouldn't matter.
It wouldn't matter as muchtoday, but back then it really

(43:42):
mattered.
But that's what we got twowings and a prayer.
We ended up being in the topthree, I think, for Hudson River
plane crash, which was the keyphrase you got to focus on Later
.
Marshall Simmons, who was thehead of New York Times, is SEO
at the time.
He spoke at a conference a fewmonths later and was very kind

(44:06):
and said we were the New YorkTimes.
I was watching the plane sink inthe Hudson River from my office
and yet we were not in thefirst 20 search results for our
story because we also had anirrelevant headline that had
nothing to do with Hudson Riveror plane crash period.

(44:30):
He's like, and I watched Brentand he called me up by name.
He's like, and I watched Brentand his team have the rights,
have the ability to move fasterand change things so that they
ended up from across the countryon LA Times on a rewritten AP
story, beat the New York Timesoriginal coverage from, and I

(44:52):
watched it happen while watchingthe plane sink from my office
and it was fascinating that inthe end, it was not about
knowing the tricks, knowing theways around Google, it was being
able to convince people toallow me to have the power, the

(45:15):
control, the capability, rightTo make quick decisions, to have
the relationship with SeanGallagher, whom I hung out with
him, you know, a few monthsbefore at the Magic House in LA.
Right Like having that, to beable to have the trust builds to
get done.
What we needed to get done andthat's what the algorithm is all

(45:37):
about is trust today.
Trust and authority, trust andauthority, trust and authority
and that's also what, ironically, is what made me so successful
at Tribune was trust andauthority of my own
relationships with the peoplethat mattered.

Speaker 1 (45:55):
But it took the Hudson River Plain Crash for
people to trust you that theright title is gonna get you
where you wanna be Correct,whereas you've probably told
that person repeatedly yourheadlines makes sense on a news
rack on the corner in Manhattanor in a bodega in Manhattan, but

(46:19):
it doesn't make sense.
I guess it wasn't mobile, butit doesn't make sense on the
desktop.
That is correct, and in a newsaggregator and in any place like
that.
And that lesson was learned.
But it sounds to me fromlooking at it 10,000 people.

Speaker 2 (46:34):
I trained at Tribune.

Speaker 1 (46:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (46:37):
And only a third of them listened.

Speaker 1 (46:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (46:40):
But I wonder, that's all I?

Speaker 1 (46:41):
needed, yeah, but the New York Times has that rich
history that has kind of a levelof, I would guess and I
wouldn't call it arrogance, butof confidence that we are the
New York Times, we are thenumber one news source in the
world and just by our ownauthority and our own name,
people should just come to us.
That's correct, especially insituations like this, when the

(47:03):
random small market newspaper orone that doesn't go beyond its
borders of a city or a county ora state should never go above
us.
I mean, google should just knowthat by itself.
Right, they should just rankthe New York Times as number one
because they're the best.
Right?

Speaker 2 (47:18):
Is that the kind of thing that it's really good at.
So Google has changed itsalgorithm quite a bit Over the
past.
Well, since ever, but more soin the last year, maybe two
years.
They have more of a focus onthe domain as a whole versus the
URL itself ranking.

(47:39):
So they're not looking at justsignals to that one URL, which
they used to do considerably,now they're looking at, okay,
holistically.
Why does this domain deserve torank with this URL?
Why?
Because, like you're sayingearlier, you had scenarios with
big companies ranking foranything and everything.

(48:01):
We put belly rings on theChicago Tribune website because
some radio had, because we havelike half like newspaper people,
half radio people at the timethat were fighting endlessly
inside of Tribune and one of theradio heads decided he wanted
to sell belly rings but thoughtthat was weird.
I got a phone call from MattCutts, an actual phone call, and

(48:22):
he said what are you guys doing, putting belly rings on the
Chicago Tribune?
I'm like I don't know man, buthe ended up writing a big enough
email to me to tell me that itwas gonna drag down traffic for
all of Tribune that we pulledthem off there.
Now those scenarios are whyGoogle had to write new
algorithms that looked atwhether or not there was enough

(48:45):
taxonomical relevancy for agiven key phrase that you may
have a great article on, mayhave a lot of links going to it,
but does it make sense to be onthe New York Times?
So you can't just rank for bellyrings on the New York Times
anymore.
You gotta rank for news andinformation, whether, et cetera,

(49:06):
instead.
So should the New York Timesalways rank number one?
No, but they should have a nicebaseline for what's relevant
for their taxonomy tree.
Yes, and after that then youstart looking at specific URL
signals instead of there todetermine whether or not the URL

(49:30):
deserves the amount ofperceived popularity, authority
relevance, user signal, feedbackloop, et cetera.
That kind of feeds into that.
Or, as Google likes to say now,e-e-a-t, which is their latest
thing they wanna talk about, doyou think Experience, expertise,
authority and trust.

Speaker 1 (49:48):
So in one.
Someone is small I'm sorry if Iscrub with the terminology, but
someone with a small businesslike myself.
I have a domain with a goodnumber of backlinks, at least
for the size of the businessthat I have, and when you submit
, you build the website, you getthe backlinks, you write in the
content, you do all that funstuff and then you add Google
Analytics to it and then yousubmit it to Google.

(50:08):
What is it?
Webmaster or Webmaster Tools?
So I'm guessing a big part ofthe algorithm is is, if you let
them in to see that data, theyknow how the traffic converts
when it's sending the traffic tothe keywords and that should
all communicate with each other.

Speaker 2 (50:24):
They create a wall.
They say there's a wall onGoogle Analytics.
There probably is, because it'dbe kind of dumb for them to say
there is and then there's not.
That'd be a massive lawsuit.
Maybe we'll figure that out.

Speaker 1 (50:34):
Why wouldn't they share that information?
Wouldn't that make searchbetter for everybody?

Speaker 2 (50:40):
Yeah, but what they did instead is they launched
this thing called Chrome.
Yeah, Chrome sends all theirdata back to Google instead.
And since it was Google.
The Chrome browser became thedefault browser for everybody
everywhere overnight, just aboutOkay, and they may have done
some antitrust things in orderto get the Chrome browser going
in there, but they aren't doingit from Google Analytics.

(51:02):
So Chrome Android phones wasanother way.
Right, they didn't launch thesethings for fun.
Yeah, they launched thesethings to get more data that
they could use to figure outwhat the best search results are
, and that's part of the userfeedback loop.
You still have to start withsomewhere, and it is my belief
and I have no proof of it, Ihaven't done any records of it

(51:25):
is that scenarios like YouTube'salgorithm plays for the web.
What do I mean by that?
Youtube wants you to subscribeand hit the bell for a reason.
That reason is that youimmediately get an audience as
soon as you push a video out.
Okay, mrbeast creates a video,hits save and all of a sudden,

(51:46):
thousands of people go there.
That data, that immediatefeedback data, google or YouTube
in this case can use, okay, tofeed the rest of the algorithm.
And so if you can feed your ownURL, for example this video,
right, or a blog post that youhave, you can feed it thousands
of people via an email blast, anSMS messaging service, anything

(52:09):
old school have an airplane flyover the top of the city with a
URL on it kind of joking there.
But, like, if you can do thesethings smoke signals included do
them so that you can getimmediate user feedback to this
article.
Now make sure the article'sgood.
It's not, you know, likeimmediately send nature to the
text.
Send negative signals, no,that's not a problem.
But if it's positive, that willimmediately give you a boost

(52:32):
and get you into this next layerof the algorithm.
That matters.
But Google can't trust signalson the first X number of signals
that are user signals.
Why?
Because I can buy a bunch ofresidential IPs, thousands of
them, I can fire them up, I canhave it do the right signals and
I can impact the algorithm.
We can do that today.
We can actually impact Googlesearch console data and Google

(52:54):
analytics data without Googleknowing.
It's just expensive and timeconsuming and not usually worth
it.
Some clients pay us to do it,but for the most part, no Right.
So Google has to be carefulwhen they allow these signals to
come in to make a decision.
Now New York Times has a hugeleg up.
You get that notification onyour phone.
You click, you scroll right.

(53:15):
Google's seeing that on yourAndroid phone, in your Chrome
browser, et cetera.
So they have a leg up.
If you are a small fry, youdon't have that audience.
You have to wait for enoughpeople to get there, look at the
information, send that back, etcetera.
So you have to rely on oldschool stuff like link structure
and content, relevancy andauthority from great places that

(53:37):
are linking to you instead ofcrappy little places linking to
you et cetera.

Speaker 1 (53:40):
Yeah, you got to do your time in the fraternity and
work your way up and that's finethere you go great, you got to
break through, all right.
So, like I was saying to youbefore, the podcast is for
people usually who have kind ofgone against all odds, started
their own business.
We've been talking for almostan hour now, so they need to
pick up the pace a little bit.
But so you have your own SEOcompany.

(54:03):
Loud dot us is where you go forthat.
You've been doing this for 12years.
Tell us a quick story.
I did.
I have my own story.
I'll tell you it another time.
But you decided to leave whatyou were doing.
You put it all on the line andsay I'm gonna finally go work
for myself.
I'm not gonna rely on anybody.
So what?
What triggered you to say youknow what, fuck it?

(54:24):
I'm sure it was in the back ofyour mind for a long time.
It wasn't just like you woke up, quit your job and say I'm
starting a new business and thentell us some Stories about, or
a story about you know as someserious challenges that you've
faced and and what your.
You know the challenges you'refacing now, and let's talk about
, kind of the state of the SEObusiness for a few minutes and
then we'll wrap it up so loud.

Speaker 2 (54:46):
Interactive was started because I was making a
hundred twenty thousand dollarsa year a Tribune and there's a
forty thousand dollar your bonus, so hundred and sixty, and
there was just no way I wasconceivably going to make more
than two hundred thousanddollars a year ever there.
And Keep in mind that I wasmaking 287 at 23 years old and I

(55:07):
think it's Okay.
How do I even get below the 200mark?
A divorce, right?
Cause me to move to Spokane,washington, for a short stint.
Like it.
Just life happened, right.
So I was like I'm not gonna goanywhere.
I got to move out of my ownhere.
I had a contract with Tribunein writing when I took the job

(55:28):
in 2008 that allowed me toconsult on the side.
I was able to consult firstwith legacy comm, which was
partially owned by Tribune.
So questionable on that, butluckily it was okay.
Legacy comm, which is a Like adeath the memorial site, was my
first client.
I built up my consulting sideto be about 120 grand a year by

(55:50):
the time I left, and that's whatI did.
I Jumped and immediately gotsome big clients summer, 15
grand a month and Within a fewmonths I was making, you know,
283 hundred thousand dollars ayear just by doing that leap.
Then it was kind of easy, whichI have to admit.

(56:15):
You know I thought everybusiness was easy, so I'll talk
about those in a second.
Okay, it's kind of easy.
Like money is came in, clientscame in.
Like things worked out, thingsare fine.
We got Groupon, which isthrough a Contact that I had at
Tribune Thank you Sean Smith forthat and you know he brought us
in and we started in and wekilled it, knocked it out of the

(56:37):
park, as previously stated.
Mm-hmm, 100 million on business, 98% coming from SEO was
fantastic.
And then the change of the guardcurd, all layers of management,
kind of like, changed out.
Sean wasn't there, etc.
What happened?
I was complacent because I'dhave the account for five years.
We were obviously killing itfor him and I thought for sure,

(57:01):
we would keep this clientforever.
And the biggest checks we gotfrom there was five hundred
thousand dollars a month fromnow.
Content link building, socialmedia management, different
division, some places overseas.
Sean warned me that it wasprobably gonna go away and like
dude, like just letting you know, I still Blinders on man, like

(57:27):
not paying attention, notlistening, cocky, stupid, loving
the money and I Gotnotification that we did not Win
the RFP for that quarter Likewe talked about, and I phoned it
in like it phoned it in everytime for like the last two years
at least.
Just, whatever they're gonnapick us, they would pick us and

(57:51):
I got my ass handed to me and Ilost that client which was, at
the time, 80% of my revenuebecause I had kept saying, yes,
the more and more divisionswhich took up more time.
I was up to 17 employees and wehad a half a million dollars in
the bank.
So we're there, not a lotconsidering like what the
numbers were.

(58:11):
We were spending like crazy.
We're spending three thousanddollar lunches for sushi,
dinners and shit.
You know right.
So like that's what we weredoing.
I Was so broke that Withinthree months I had to fire
everybody in the company.
I had to reset everything.
I had clients taking advantageof me because they the 20% that

(58:35):
were left.
They're taking advantage of mebecause I had already.
They pushed them aside all thetime for Groupon.
You know those 20% were notLoved as much as Groupon and
they heard about it every dayright.
And then, when Groupon was gone,boy, they Leap right onto that
opportunity.
So I saw that ugliness and IWent to making negative 250,000

(58:58):
dollars that year from where Iwas before that, which were
seven figures, to native 250.
It was extremely stressful.
My wife was literally lookingin couch cushions and like all
these other places for like justto go out to McDonald's for
lunch, right, because we werereally getting strapped.
I cranked up credit card bills70, 80 thousand dollar credit

(59:22):
card bills because they let youhave limits like that.
When you're making that muchmoney and three or four of those
, all of a sudden I'm in debtcouple hundred grand.
Bad year.
This is 2017, late 2017.
Never thought I would ever Failbecause at that point I had
I've been fired once from onemediocre job, but the rest of

(59:44):
the time I'd always won, alwayswon, always won so let me ask
you this question.

Speaker 1 (59:48):
Well, and you can continue with your story, I Look
back at times in my life.
It was never like that, butthere was some.
I've been laid off, and for along period of quite a while,
and you know I'd be sittingthere with my bathro bon playing
video games and she wasn't mywife at the time, but Melissa
would come home and I would justbe sitting there playing video
games all day and she's likehave you even brushed your teeth

(01:00:09):
yet?
You know, like what are youdoing?
Well, like when you were at thepeak of the worst, you know,
and usually you can rememberthat peak and you don't know
it's the peak of the storm.
You know you're like in the eyeof the storm.
What were you thinking?
Were you starting to put yourresume together and say I got to
go get a job and make somemoney?
We're like I'm gonna keep doingthis until I die.

(01:00:31):
I'm gonna, I'm not giving up.
You know what were you doing tokeep yourself in the game?

Speaker 2 (01:00:37):
So I love my mother-in-law to death, my
stepmother in law to death.
She, however, every time shecame over for dinner and we
talked about what was going on,she would say why don't you just
go get an in-house job, likeyou had a tribune?
That should be easy.
And I said, yeah, I can't.
Of course I can, they will.

(01:00:58):
Why don't you go do that?
Like you're making like $80,000a year right now, or whatever.
The number was super low, undera hundred K.
And she's like, why would yoube doing this when you could go
do that for like 200,000 ormaybe 240?
Mm-hmm, I said, cuz, that's thefarthest I'll ever get again,
it's 240 grand a year, like ourlifestyle.

(01:01:18):
No, like I can't, like I, Icould, but that's, that is no, I
can't do it, I can't, I can'tdo it.
And so, telling her this allthe time, they're both teachers,
right, like master's degrees,and been teaching for 30 years.
My father-in-law won the goldenapple award back in the late 90s

(01:01:40):
, right, so like teacher,teacher, teachers.
And they didn't get it.
And my wife luckily did, andshe stuck with me the whole time
like, okay, we'll get it backtogether.
And I brought in a couple ofpeople, two people specifically
that helped me rebuild thebusiness From just me being a
solopreneur to rebuild it backinto what it is now with five

(01:02:04):
employees not employees, becauseI'm taking advantage of the
fact that we're all remote, sothey're technically consultants,
right, and 1099's.
But we rebuilt it from thereand that was a Very humbling
experience and it has allowed meto grow up so much that Brent

(01:02:25):
can do wrong.
Brent can't fuck up.
Brent can do these wretched,terrible things that do have
consequences.
Yeah, right, you can't havethree thousand dollars sushi
dinners or lunches Sorry,dinners, maybe lunches.
No, right, you can't do thesestupid things.
And Thank God I learned it my40s, because I hope my 50s will

(01:02:49):
be a little smoother sailing andI can like finish out my my
earning years if you would,although I plan to work until
like 75 or 80 because why notthe?
Hopefully I can get there.
But looking at things this year,actually November of last year,
when chat GPT became reallypopular, scared the shit out of

(01:03:10):
me again and why we have a twomillion dollar your content
business or we did Like lastyear or two years ago.
Last year, ish, yeah and Boom.
All of a sudden content ischanging radically from 30 cents
a word To.
I don't know what it's definedas now, but I'm making 30 cents

(01:03:32):
a word, paying out about 20cents a word, making 30 cents a
word.
Good business, sometimesirritating, deal with a bunch of
whiny writers, but for the mostpart, that's where we're at,
that two million in revenue.
So I Picked, and then I also sawthat a lot of the things that
we do as SEOs can be automatedor replaced by AI technology.

(01:03:55):
So again, this year, I Don'tknow how much money we made.
We probably should know that asa CEO, but I don't.
Okay, I just know that itwasn't a great year.
Why?
Because I invested hundreds ofthousands of dollars and I don't
know what the exact number is.
Again, I should know that as aCEO, but I don't.
Right, because we all haveflaws.

(01:04:16):
Right, I'm a sales CEO, but gofind more revenue.
And so we spent a couplehundred grand, maybe a hundred
grand, maybe a couple hundredgrand in this AI venture To be
able to stay ahead of the curvein search engine optimization.
Mostly in content, but also inother areas, such as even

(01:04:36):
creating meta descriptions,analyzing HTML, figuring out
what your call the actions are,etc.
And I think we've got right.
We're gonna officially launchthe long-form content where we
can write 2600 word blog postsat all to say content perfect is
where it's gonna be dot AI, andthose are the types of things

(01:04:57):
that, again, kind of hit you inthe gut.
At least this time wasn't myfault, okay, this time it's just
the industry changing, but theypunch you in the gut and they
make you change again, so youhave to have the stomach for
this entrepreneurship stuff.
But it's also exciting,especially when you figure it

(01:05:18):
out right.
When I rebuilt loud to be largerRevenue wise, profit wise than
it was in 2017 again with thehelp of some, a couple of people
, not like investors or partowners, but just Hiring the
right people to fill in for mysignificant flaws that I have in
my own business style andpersonality it's exciting to be

(01:05:39):
able to get back to that point.
And then again, this year,investment year, next year I
think I get to reap thatinvestment, as all of my peers
in the industry Kind of wait itaround and do much.
Hopefully I'll be able to bemore successful next year than
the competition.

Speaker 1 (01:05:57):
So so, talking about AI and your product and I
fiddled around with it it'sreally interesting what it can
do and the articles it writesand and it's quite good right.
And one of the things that I'venoticed is, over the last few
years, is that like for myselfas well as being a business
owner, is I'll write a dim.
I'll write an article about,like what makes a domain name
valuable.
You want to acquire domain?

(01:06:17):
This is how you do it.
These are the things that youneed to prove if you want to
file a UDRP and you thinksomeone's squatting on your
domain name and there's only alimited number of articles that
I could write, right, and whenyou go to a Competitor of mine,
they might have like five,twenty articles.
They have fifteen of the exactsame topics and then five unique
ones are just a different twiston it than I do, right?

(01:06:38):
You know, and I think with like, when I read articles, that
I've gone To chat GBT and thenthere's another one I like to
use, called computer calm.
It's actually less refined butdoesn't have any filters on it
and so, but I Find that there'sgonna be people who are going to

(01:06:59):
Go to chat GBT type in I wantto write an article about
Running shoes and not best ones,and then it's gonna take that,
they're gonna take that, put iton their blog.
Kind of do a shitty job,optimizing it, just like people
have done for years, like payingsomeone in India two bucks to
write an article or five dollarsto write an article and then.

(01:07:19):
Poorly optimize it, and thenthere you go, you know and I
think they're still gonna be layout levels of quality of people
and One of the people I've beentrying to get to do this
podcast is is I live in Tampa, Ilive near McGill Air Force Base
and I have somebody that worksfor the State Department in
their AI division and I want totalk to you about their point of

(01:07:41):
view on AI and he's like, no,I'm not gonna talk to you.

Speaker 2 (01:07:46):
I got a VA from that way, the head of the VA hospital
.
So not head of the VA hospital,but in like the AI division,
the VA hospital.
Same scenario.

Speaker 1 (01:07:53):
Yeah, so like he's, like you know his opinion is he
says don't, don't put all yourstock in AI.
It's not there yet, right, anddon't be afraid of it right now,
because it's almost like you'rehaving a Like a seven-year-old
or a six-year-old write yourarticles for you.

Speaker 2 (01:08:06):
You know it can point you.
That's exactly the opposite ofwhat I'm hearing for the VA
hospital.
Just let you know.
Isn't that funny right?
So he?

Speaker 1 (01:08:13):
says we use AI for certain things, but not as much
as you would think, and Then Ididn't ask about SEO and things
like that, but what I just feellike is gonna happen and it was
also reaffirmed to me in thearticle An article that we were
talking about before the call isthe people who ruin the
internet on the verge, which isan interesting article, is that?

(01:08:36):
Scathing article towards SEOescaping, but I think it's a
little over the top and I'm notgoing to slay or towards domain
investors and domain brokers,which is just as equally
ridiculous.
But what they did say is therewill be mountains of bad content
, and that's a hundred percenttrue.
Yes, and so there's gonna bemore search results that are

(01:08:58):
propped up by shitty content andthat more poor results in
search, and Google's gonna havea massive problem they're gonna
have to deal with in the nextyear or two when the big
companies are using AI, when thelittle guys have solutions that
are easy to implement.
So what do you think about thatand what do you think?

Speaker 2 (01:09:19):
Here's where it's at.
So we have been working on thisfor nine months and the reason
why Google can easily find theshitty content, as you say,
versus the good content and ourLevel of a level of depth in the

(01:09:41):
content itself.
So we have team will come upwith a project or a process that
right now, is 64 iterative backand forth steps Between editor
and writer, editor and writer,editor and writer.
Now, these are both a eyes.

(01:10:02):
We have an editor that's an AI.
We have a writer that's an AI,and they literally talk back and
forth through each other viaAPI's To improve the content and
we're up to like 64 steps nowfor a 24 step, 24-section
article.
Okay, so we create an articlewith 24 sections and it's such
sections and subsections, soit's six sections with four

(01:10:22):
sections and each one of themCreating them, the 24 different
sections.
We then have the AI go back andforth to output Information.
I'm not gonna say how the AIedits and how the AI writes, but
we give a decent prompts, whichwe got from University
professors on how you shouldwrite an article Based off of

(01:10:45):
you know, whatever the topicmight be, the inverted pyramid
and however you do it, yeah what, whatever?
Yeah, not gonna talk about it,okay.
So, yeah, great, greatinformation on how to write a
good quality article.
Then we layer into that thethings that Immediately made it
useless for our clients.
It doesn't sound like me, itdoesn't sound like us.

(01:11:05):
That was the first exactProblem.
I'm like, okay, well, give me abrand voice doc, a what they
give us, a brand voice doc.
What is that?
Oh my God, are you kidding me?
Like, doordash gave us a 45page brand voice doc,
northwestern Hospital gave us a23 page.
You don't know what a brandvoice doc is.
And they're like no, okay, fine, let us go make one for you.

(01:11:28):
So then we had to build thetech to go get them a brand
voice doc, okay.
So then we pull that in it'snot 23 pages, but it is, you
know, four or five paragraphsand we use that to feed into the
AI and then that sounds likethem.
It isn't, it's not perfect andwe're not putting a name on it
yet.
So we put, like, bethany's nameon it.
That would be a little moredifficult, but we're getting to

(01:11:52):
the point of trying to mimiceverything that a human does.
My writers now, granted, theseare not domain experts.
They're not domain like domainin your world, but they're not
experts in that particular field.
Let's change domain to field.
They're not experts in thatparticular field, but those

(01:12:12):
writers would look at the topthree to five search results and
write an article based off ofthat.
Our AI is looking at the top 30search results for a given
search phrase, sucking in all 30search results, grabbing all of
the content from the top 10,maybe the top 15 if we have
enough tokens to do it, and astokens get larger we can pull in

(01:12:34):
all 30.
We summarize the next 15, giveit a context for it, we feed
that into our prompt, into chat,gpt or barred, or to Claude you
know 100 K, claude, 200 K andwe pull all this stuff together
to give it enough context towrite about.
Egg is rid of hallucination,another major problem early on

(01:12:55):
nine months ago.
And we now write this articlebased off of all of this content
, the hallucination that washappening, and so we're getting
rid of the major, major problemsthat are happening and we have
a chain of density.
Thank God for Stanford, orwhoever it was, came up with
that a few months ago to help usto dig deeper, like which
entities are missing?

(01:13:16):
And into this content.
How can we fold that in andwe're answering all of these
issues with the content we'recreating.
Now, at the end of the day,we're still missing stuff.
Like, nine months in, it soundsgreat, but I still need a human
editor.
Why?
Not because it is writtenpoorly, not because it's boring,

(01:13:38):
not because it doesn't have thevoice, not because it
hallucinated or I had to fix allthose, but because we don't
have a quote in there.
We didn't quote anybody.
Well, shit, we got to get somequotes in our content.
We're working on it.
Hopefully we'll get quotes inthe next you know month or four.
I don't know how long it'sgonna take.
We'll get some quotes in therefrom, like, xyz person at XYZ

(01:13:59):
company.
We should be able to pull thatoff.
We're missing images.
Oh, but Brent, why don't youjust use, you know, mid journey
or use you know whatever elseyou know opportunities that are
out there?
And the answer for that isbecause it doesn't look good yet
.
Right, I'm missing aninfographic.
Oh, you can just make one ofthose.

(01:14:19):
I know you can't.
The text is there.

Speaker 1 (01:14:21):
The pictures are off.
The pictures are off, yes,right.

Speaker 2 (01:14:24):
So we're working through this, but I know it's
gonna get there, Jeffrey.
I know it's gonna.
In two, three years it will behere Like, if this is not going
away, this will happen, period,this will happen, and we will be
X number of years or monthsahead of it.
Right, and maybe I'll getsquashed by some billion dollar

(01:14:45):
company and all this will be fornot and I'll have fun trying to
be whatever.

Speaker 1 (01:14:49):
But then then another opportunity will pop up.
That's what I find.

Speaker 2 (01:14:52):
Right, hopefully right.
But that is what we're tryingto do with the content and that
is how you will havedifferentiators between hey,
chat, gpt, write me an articleabout.
You know, debating.
That doesn't work.
What we would do for SAW, as anexample, is we would take your

(01:15:13):
domain and we'd say, okay, whatdo you currently rank for?
We'd use AHRF's API to do that.
What do you currently rank for?
Okay, cool, here are the keyphrases you rank for.
What are you trying to rank for?
Or what are you trying to writean article on Domaining?
Ugh, dude, you don't have thelink structure to rank number
one for domaining.
So guess what?
You're gonna have to rank forDomaining in Wichita Kansas.

(01:15:33):
Okay, bad example, probably.
But okay, that's what we'regonna write about instead.
So then we're gonna pull in abunch of stuff that's related to
domaining in Wichita Kansas foryou, because you can actually
rank for that, because you havethe trust and the authority and
there's enough of a content gapon the internet that you can
rank for that, and there's stillsome search volume that makes
it worth it for you.
And that's step one.

(01:15:54):
And then we go write thecontent in a way that brings in
the chain of density, the levelof detail, the editing and
writing.
You know back at the start.

Speaker 1 (01:16:05):
So you just explained all this.
So what are you really afraidof?
Because a business owner likemyself would say I can just do
that with chat GVTA, go on thereand I'm like I don't know what
the fuck to do.
And it's like you know what.
I'd rather pay a guy like youto do all this, because what I
find is I've spent hours writingarticles that I thought were
pretty good and I did a lot ofresearch, and then I write the

(01:16:25):
article, I post the article.

Speaker 2 (01:16:26):
I get a bunch of thumbs up on LinkedIn.

Speaker 1 (01:16:28):
I get a decent number of readers and then it just
dies.
And then we had an SEO guy lookat it and he's like, well, you
don't have it optimized, so noone's ever gonna see it.
And it's like so if I even hadchat GVT, write the articles.
I put the blog post out,pretend that it's me or somebody
else, some fake person thatworks for my company and trick
everybody into not being a realperson.

(01:16:48):
I still don't know how to getthe most out of the article.
I don't know what a meta tag is.
I don't know how to write youknow the proper different things
to make it work.
I don't know how to link itthroughout my website to get the
link juice to go throughout.
I mean, would your AI tool beable to write the article and
understand my site enough tolink properly within the site?

Speaker 2 (01:17:12):
We just did it yesterday.

Speaker 1 (01:17:13):
You just did it yesterday.

Speaker 2 (01:17:14):
Okay, Literally, that's how much we're iterating
right now.
So we were writing high qualitycontent that still needed 15 to
30 minutes of editing 15, maybe30, maybe 50, of editing for
the last few months.
Yesterday, we finally got linksinto the articles to other

(01:17:36):
articles that are on the site.
And how did we do that?
Through APIs, through differentservices that allow us to see
which landing pages have the setamount of anchor text occurring
X number of times, so that weknow that that's there, or the
rankings, depending on what typeof page we're looking at, to
link to it.

(01:17:56):
So, yeah, we can do that now.
Okay, why am I worried?
Because this is a massivechange, Jeffrey, massive change,
and I am not going to donothing when change starts to
occur.
And if you do it the right wayI say that with air quotes right

(01:18:17):
, If you do it the right way.

Speaker 1 (01:18:18):
The right way is today's right way.
Google changes is playing heretomorrow you can't scale.

Speaker 2 (01:18:22):
You don't have enough people in the industry that
you're trying to write aboutthat has relevant knowledge
about this for 10, 15, 30 yearsor like you.
Right, you will write the bestarticle Well you have a lot of
other things to do today.

Speaker 1 (01:18:38):
Yeah, I don't have time to write them anymore.
I just don't have time.

Speaker 2 (01:18:40):
You're gonna take six hours for each blog post, and
then you already told me that alot of them flop after I don't
know a week.
A week or two.

Speaker 1 (01:18:48):
Yesterday's news is trash.
Someone might say to me coolarticle.
I really enjoyed reading it,but it's like cool, where's the
business?
Zero.
So where's the ROI on that.

Speaker 2 (01:18:57):
Zero.
You could have sold domains Imean thousands of dollars
instead of writing that blogpost for six hours.

Speaker 1 (01:19:02):
That's why I'm giving a podcast a shot too, though,
is that I think it is a goodanother opportunity to generate
leads, but there isn't really aneasy way to take the content
from this and turn it into Iguess it's a verb SEO-able
content, right?
It's not really that easyeither to but what?

Speaker 2 (01:19:21):
you're doing is you're expanding your taxonomy
tree right now because you arerelevantly mentioning domaining,
which you're already with a newtaxonomy tree.
We've mentioned other entitiesthroughout this entire call.
A lot of them are my historicalones, right, and so you're
expanding your taxonomy tree ofrelevancy.

(01:19:42):
In this podcast, you mentioneda whole new taxonomy tree SEO so
you should be able to be morerelevant for SEO-related things.
Now you probably need to startwith domaining for SEO or
SEO-domaining, and how thingschange, right?
It's us spending five minutestalking about does exact match

(01:20:03):
domaining really work today anddoes it not right?
That type of stuff would beperfect because we'd have a lot
of the interaction of the wordSEO and domaining intermingled
closely together within thewords to then allow you to rank
for domaining, seo or exactmatch domain, seo, et cetera,
inside of the context of thecall.

Speaker 1 (01:20:23):
So let's ask that question Does exact match
domains matter anymore?
I find that it's not asimportant as it used to be.
What do you think?

Speaker 2 (01:20:31):
Google tells us specifically Gary Esha said this
now several times, spelledI-L-L-Y-E-S.
But Gary Esha has told usseveral times domain name has
nothing to do with your rankings.
Bullshit, okay, and this is why.
Because the anchor text doeshave something to do with your

(01:20:52):
rankings, just as Google hassaid for years that word count
doesn't matter.
I said bullshit to them foryears on that too.
Last week or maybe last month,I realized that they are right,
but for a different reason.
It doesn't matter how manywords I get into this document.

(01:21:15):
It matters how many differententities I talk about and how in
depth I go into the entity treefor this piece of content.
That's what matters.
If it's a thousand words, whocares Did?

Speaker 1 (01:21:28):
I cover the whole subject.

Speaker 2 (01:21:28):
Yes, okay, if it's 5,000 words, because I had to go
deeper into the subject inorder to cover all of the
related entities to it andreally cover this in depth,
doesn't matter.
And so we're looking at thisand I'm going no, it has to be
2,000 words, it has to be 2,000words.
No, that's just what had tohappen for my writers that I was

(01:21:48):
paying last year and the yearbefore for them to get in depth
enough for it to rank.
Yeah, word count doesn't matter, just like domain name doesn't
matter.
It doesn't matter.
I'm going to trust Gary on this.
But the domain name mattersbecause of some other signal
coming in.
Okay, and that signal is theanchor text.

(01:22:10):
The anchor text, optimizationof owning, you know, computercom
, and ranking for the wordcomputer is going to be much
higher.
The other signal of the brandwhen you search for computer,
google doesn't know if you'relooking for the brand, if you're
looking for the website, ifyou're looking for the machine,
a computer, yep.

(01:22:31):
So what's it have to do?
It has to put in a brand.
Algo has put in an exact matchanchor text.
Algo has put in the you know,and the domain name itself
doesn't matter anymore, but itsees that there's an entity
called computer LLC probablythose got to take that into
consideration Then the domainwith the exact match relevancy

(01:22:51):
isn't exactly the issue, but theanchor text and the number of
times that anchor text occursthat matters.
And so all this flows togetherand you're like well, google
said exact match doesn't matter.
It doesn't but it does, and how?
Because of all of the otherthings around it.
And Google is trying to stoppeople from spending a million

(01:23:12):
dollars on a domain because theywant sexcom, because sexcom is
worth $3 million or whatever itis.
I saw it on the internet.
But yeah, there you go, so sothat I mean you know it was a
relevant domain, I remember theprices and so, like that is
where people will buy somethinglike that for all of the other

(01:23:35):
signals around it.
And Google can still say with astraight face the domain name
doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 (01:23:41):
Does the extension matter?
You think?

Speaker 2 (01:23:45):
I have not found that the extension matters, other
than when you talk about CCTLDs.
So, cctlds, you do get a bump ifyou get acouk, but mostly
because it's hard todifferentiate whether that
matters because of in-bend linkstructure or if that matters

(01:24:05):
because of the CCTLD.
We have a lot of tech stars,companies, especially now again,
I'm a mentor for them right,they break off into other
countries or they're from othercountries and I'm mentoring them
in Chicago or Seattle orBoulder or wherever it might be,
and they're not in the UnitedStates.
And because they're not in theUnited States, they keep getting

(01:24:26):
links from their local area andthey're like why is it that I
keep ranking in France?
Well, morons, because you keepgetting links in France, stop it
, but get links in the UnitedStates, they.
Well, we don't want to rank inFrance.
Then put on your website aHREF-Lang tag that specifies
when you want France traffic andwhen you don't, and send the

(01:24:48):
other stuff off to the ENUS sothat you have this and they're
not doing that.
So that's, that's where it's at.
So, cctlds, not sure it mightstill matter.

Speaker 1 (01:24:59):
Okay and then so one of the quite I wrote a just a
search Google's point of view onAI content and Google for
developers answer in theirlittle paragraphs that answer
your questions Is AI contentagainst Google search engines
guidelines?
It says appropriate use of AIor automation is not against our
guidelines.

(01:25:19):
This means that it is not usedto generate content primarily to
manipulate search rankings,which is against our spam
policies.
But like, why would anyonegenerate AI content and put it
on their website is only for thepurpose of ranking?
People aren't just doing it toinform people, so that's not
true.

Speaker 2 (01:25:39):
So not true, not true at all.
The clients we are working with, okay, we're an SEO firm too,
but they won't post our content.
If it's shit period, they won'tdo it.
They won't post shit content ontheir site, and if they do do
you know what happens to it.

Speaker 1 (01:25:56):
There's a lot of people.
There's a lot of people wholaugh at it, or there would be
no no, no, they don't even linkto it.

Speaker 2 (01:26:02):
You know why they don't link to it?
Because it's shit.
They don't want anybody to knowthat it's on the website.
And if you don't link to it,guess what happens?
It doesn't rank.
Yep, right, if it doesn't rank,then what was the point in the
whole thing in the first place?
Okay, I have a bad joke.
It's like if you don't loveyour own kids, no one else can
love them either.
That's true, so you have to dothat first, especially when

(01:26:22):
they're babies, because they'rekind of ugly when they're babies
.
So like those are things thatare really, really important
that to like love your ugly babybecause no one else will, and
then they get cuter as they goon.
But like that is core to whyyou have to have content that's
truly helpful to the user.
Okay, I'm writing about allsorts of weird crap right now

(01:26:44):
for clients, from motorcyclestats to dead dogs, to dogs with
cancer to, you know, aprons allsorts of different things right
now and we always have to comeat it from.
Is this truly helpful to theuser?
And that's why I've spent somuch time and so much money to
get the content right, becauseif it's not right, the client

(01:27:07):
doesn't link.
The client doesn't link, itdoesn't rank.
It doesn't rank.
I look bad.

Speaker 1 (01:27:11):
Well, that's what I'm trying to say to you, though,
is that all of this goes back toranking, which is Google is
saying don't use AI to try tomanipulate the search rankings,
which is you're manipulatingthem to get your client higher,
which is that they're creatingyour store.

Speaker 2 (01:27:25):
Google is a client, so Google is a user of the site.

Speaker 1 (01:27:29):
Correct.

Speaker 2 (01:27:30):
Google uses the site.
Humans use the site.
I want all the users to findthe content useful, Google being
one of them.
So, yes, do I want Google tolike my content and rank it well
?
Of course I do, but I also wantthe humans to like the content
and rank it well.
Rank it in the brain, rank itin the social media feed, rank

(01:27:51):
it in their email, rank it intheir text message to their
friends.
Right, I want the humans tolove it.
And Google has another user.
I want to love it too.
I just happen to get paid forthe Google one and we get paid
for the other ones.

Speaker 1 (01:28:05):
Got it All right.
Let's wrap it up with one finalquestion.
Okay, with the new version ofchat gbt and then you have
barred on google and I've usedbarred on google quite a bit and
using it in the search rankingsdo you foresee search changing
immensely in the next few years?
And, um, how do you foresee itchanging?

(01:28:28):
And I'm going to say to youthat I have a feeling that soon
enough, search is going to be alot more of a conversation that
you're having, rather thanresults coming up, and the seo
is going to be us almostpandering to the ai for them to
know to offer you as an optionFor, for a service.

(01:28:51):
So, for example, go back to thechinese restaurant.
Barred knows that I am on thecorner of first and fifth street
in chicago and that I, throughmy ratings of google, like a
particular type of chinese food.
And there is this.
There's four places in thisparticular area and this one
place has done certain things,like writing articles and being

(01:29:16):
pushed out in different things.
And when I say, barred, I needa chinese place in your area,
he's going to say, hey, thisplace around the corner is good
and they have really good eggrolls.
I know you love egg rolls, andthen you would end up going
there and not even seeing theresults, unless you asked for
more and it's pretty much chosenfor you.
That that's what I'menvisioning is going to end up

(01:29:37):
happening.
100, you nailed it perfectly.
And then you you're like withchat gbt4, which I've been using
the last few days and trying itout.
I am teaching my assistant Todo tasks for me, and that
assistant eventually would be mypersonal one that will learn
everything about me as anindividual and we'll know the
type of egg rolls that I like.

(01:29:58):
And it just like jeff, you'regonna try the egg rolls.
It's like your old friend.
You've got to try the egg rollsover at you know this place
dragon dynasty 88 on this atthis address Over here, and
you're like barred told me to gosee the egg you know, and so
you're just gonna go.
And it's same with seo.
Oh, this guy is the best forseo.
You should go to him.
He's great.
He's in chicago too.
You can go to his office.

(01:30:19):
Is here like whatever.

Speaker 2 (01:30:20):
It is Like I know how the seo, how the seo changes in
this.
We help you, as a businessowner, communicate what you want
to be seen online.
We help you communicate thatyour egg rolls have gotten great
, five star reviews, even thoughyour Pad Thai sucks.

(01:30:43):
And it's one star reviews, okay.
And it's like, oh, that padthai is terrible.
I didn't clean the water bowlfor like five years.
It's gross.
But, man, the egg rolls areamazing.
And this group of people onlycare about egg rolls.
They've never ordered pad thaiin their life.
Yeah, so it doesn't matter,doesn't matter.
Okay.
So we need to help you as abusiness owner to say, okay, egg

(01:31:06):
rolls, egg rolls, egg rolls,egg rolls, egg rolls.
Yes, we know our pad thai sucks.
Okay.
Or communicate with you likeyou got a bad pad thai, like
here's all the informationthat's on Whatever we call it,
the ai, the internet, the, youknow the, whatever term we end
up using for this okay, and youneed to stop Making bad pad thai

(01:31:29):
the obvious one.
Okay.
Or let's Focus on your egg rollsand we will, we will help you
optimize.
In that way.
It won't be like, hey, let'screate a bunch of content around
x, y and z.
No, it's gonna be.
Your pad thai is great, ishorrible.
Okay, you want to fix it or not?
Your egg rolls rock.

(01:31:50):
Let's do like an entire podcaston how you make your egg rolls,
why they're there, and we'regonna feed the world, which is
really the ai.
Okay, all of this detailedinformation about your specific
egg rolls and maybe we'll talkabout the history of egg rolls
and we'll get into it, okay, butbottom line is, we're gonna get

(01:32:11):
you to rank for the things thatwill stretch you the most, for
the most amount of Inquiriesthat are happening.
Okay, and we're also gonna saythat your delivery area is not
just a mile, it's 15 miles andthat's unheard of, but we'll get
it to you and it'll be there in20 minutes or less.
Right, we're gonna do thesethings as SEOs now To help you
and, frankly, it's gonna be alot better than what we're doing

(01:32:34):
today, because then we're notpushing someone else down and
pushing someone else up that areseemingly about the same.
We are going to be pushing true, high quality egg rolls, even
though they got shitty pad thai.
Yeah, and that will make mefeel better about waking up
every morning and helping peopleto get the most amount of

(01:32:55):
traffic they possibly can,because I'm not replacing a with
b and b with a.
I'm literally Pushing to theall the users that want egg
rolls, the best egg roll that'sout there.
And, yes, I'll get the clientthat says, but my pad thai needs
to sell.
Yep, our patient will change.
It'll change from Okay, let'sjust write a shit ton of

(01:33:19):
articles around pad thai To okay, but you have this negative
constant stream that you can'tstop.
That is negative about your padthai.
We got to shut down thispipeline of negativity about
your pad thai somehow, and thenwe we start going, and we do
that sometimes with restaurantsnow.
But, um, anyway, it's aninteresting time In the industry

(01:33:43):
in closing.

Speaker 1 (01:33:44):
Why don't you tell us how people can contact you and
your email address or any otherway that they can get a Holy?

Speaker 2 (01:33:51):
So, uh, brent d pain loud, interactive CEO and
founder.
Um, we have a great team of abunch of nerds that have been
doing this for 20 plus years.
Uh, we love what we do, we lovecomplicated, fun things to work
on, and we'll help out theboring stuff too.
I'm happy to do both sides.
Uh, get reach me at brent atloudus.

(01:34:11):
I get plenty of spam, so let'sthrow that email address out
there as well.
Brent at loudus.
And uh, get reaches at loudusfrom the website, our AI tools,
our content perfect dot ai.
And page perfect dot ai.
You guys want to check thoseout?
And thank you for the time.
I appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (01:34:30):
No problem, buddy, and thank you for coming.
Have a good day.

Speaker 2 (01:34:33):
Take care.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}From SEO in 1997 to Today: Brent Payne's Personal Journey | Saw.com