Jeremy Cabral on SEO and AI Search After Google's Shift

Jeremy0:00
Last time I spoke about AI and how you can use it inside your company, and I guess this is more about how AI is changing the landscape across a really important channel for a lot of companies, which is Google Search, and talking about the foundations of how you can grow with those changes in mind. Yeah, quick one. We went through this last time. You all know me by now, but yeah, one of the co-founders of Finder and, you know, grew it to some significant scale. I'm going to share a little bit about one of the channels that really helped us out at Finder, which was Google Search. Again, like I said last time, there's no real silver bullet here. Last night I was like, I wonder if I still have my university, it wasn't a thesis, but like a, it was like a 10,000 word report or 20,000 word report that I'd written back in 2006. And yeah, I just realised like how much time I've spent obsessed with the Google algorithm. And today my goal is to share as much of that knowledge with you today in a way where I'm sharing principles that apply now and forever. So that's, um, that's my hope you get a lot out of today's session. Um, I've also made a lot of mistakes. This is, I think, 2011, uh, Finder, kind of that blue line was traffic and then it kind of flatlined for nearly 2 months. And, um, yeah, I guess my main caution here is that anytime you take shortcuts, there's a penalty for doing that. Um, you might not see it now and you might get the wins along the way and get excited by that. But, uh, yeah, be careful. It applies to any channel really. It's something where no algorithm likes anybody trying to game it. So yeah, today is more about foundational, good quality advice that you can apply safely. A few things. So on that point, I don't think anybody in this call, please, is doing this, but don't ever publish straight from ChatGPT to the internet. It's the worst thing you could possibly do. I think that the hard thing is when you produce content with ChatGPT is it's probably better than what most of us could write, being honest. But we need to ask the question now, if, if that's the case, it's so easy to produce that content, you need in your mind say, okay, if that's what ChatGPT is producing, it's a 1 out of 10. So what can you do to make your content 10 out of 10? And we'll go into some of those methods today. Um, I mean, the other thing here is that ultimately people are still employed at these companies to try and build an algorithm that produces relevant and helpful results for people. So if you were employed at Google and your job was to do that, what would you do if you saw your piece of content and what would you think? And ultimately, um, try and be the customer. You know, if you can look at your content and objectively assess what you've produced, is it actually useful? Is it something that you would share to your friends? A silly trick that we did over the years at Findr was literally to print out the content and read it aloud. If it's embarrassing, the words you said, like when you're reading it out aloud, it's probably crappy content. So a little tip, try that. And again, just like last time, don't be lazy, no shortcuts. It's about rolling up your sleeves and really working hard. So I want to break down my, I guess, the pieces when I think about this. So, you know, It seems obvious, but I really like breaking down things into an atomic sense. So, you know, content is what you publish. It's, you know, it has to have a goal. You know, it's about educating, earning trust, and capturing intent. The strategy is about who you're targeting. You know, I think that it's what they care about, not just what you care about. And the ultimate goal is that you're producing content with purpose that progresses them towards an action you want them to take. Um, I think content can work hard for you as well and really qualifying your customers. And it's not just something that's there because you need some content. It's got a goal in mind. And ultimately, again, we talk about traffic, but I think that's a really weird thing because every visit to a website is ultimately human. Eventually it's going to be AI agents majority. Uh, but yeah, I think you've got to think about that as like you've worked hard to get a human to your website. How do you get them to convert? And so that's the, the ultimate goal of what we're trying to do is getting content to drive business views for your company. This is a really old concept. I'm not sharing the finer specific flywheel today, but, um, one of the guys I spoke to back in 2006 and is still a friend of mine is this guy by Rand Fishkin, and we both had this idea of producing content at scale, uh, that ultimately helps you grow your business. And it starts with first and foremost getting an understanding of your customers and publishing that content on your website, amplifying it across various channels. And the goal is to grow your authority over time. So you build a bit of brand affinity around that topic and it leads to higher conversions. And we're going to break down each of these steps in the following slides. So what does growing your authority mean? I think there's kind of 3 definitions in my mind of authority. The first is topical authority, and that's about how deep you go into a particular topic and how consistently, consistently you cover it. You know, what that looks like is publishing a cluster, like a series of content pages together that link to each other, and they need to be comprehensive and really go deep on that and not too much overlap between each of those articles as well. And the goal is to answer each, you know, question with the core intents in mind and making sure that those questions from your customers are answered clearly and consistently across the website. The second is once you've got that content base is like, how does your domain, your website build authority on this topic? And the algorithm and the way it was designed was to effectively use links to your website as a determinant of that. Um, you become more reputable on a topic, you grow your domain authority and allows that content you published before to do better. So yeah, once you've got these links in, you've got to make sure you distribute the links across the website as well to make sure they're all getting crawled frequently. Um, and the last piece is around entity authority. So an entity inside these search engines, there's a knowledge graph and effectively everything exists as a node within that. So your company, your name, um, the various subjects you write about, and it's about aligning your content on that front with your business and ensuring that your authors really are referenced across the internet in a way that it's clear to Google that your company has the most expertise on that particular topic. I wanted to tell you some extreme ways to build domain authority. So the first is, um, something we did in 2009. We actually paid a Marvel illustrator to produce a comic series, um, on personal finance bloggers in the US. And my idea was like, all right, all my competitors here in Australia are going to get links from Australia. How do I get links from the biggest websites in the US? And we went about doing that. We actually spent about 2 or 3 months becoming mates with these bloggers and ultimately they linked to us. And that was huge. We, we had this competitive event. When, you know, in my view, if all things were equal between us and our competition in terms of content quality and coverage and so on, I wanted the links to really stand out to be a reason why we could outperform our competitors. And at the time, and for many years, Finder ranked number 1 for every single credit card keyword you could imagine. So yeah, really effective. The second was pretty extreme. So we actually, I had the idea, I pulled up to the Apple Store and I just literally stood at the front. I was like, all right, I'm going to line up and sleep outside of the Apple Store to get the first iPhone 5. That led to over 200 websites around the internet, you know, media publications and so on, referencing Finder. And we went from a couple hundred visits a month to mobile phone Finder to over 128,000 in the next, I think it was 72 hours. So pretty cool. And then we even built an awards program, which, you know, in behind it all, like obviously we rate products at Finder, but for me, a big part of it was like, how do we get these links on the internet, which are difficult to replicate? On the piece of topical authority, uh, there's a guy on the top right there, Matt Cutts. So I think he was like employee number 9 at Google. He was responsible for dealing with spam. Getting all the bad things out of the index. And he spoke about something on his personal blog, which was a Japanese arcade game called Katamari Damacy. And again, if you're the Google engineer, in this case Matt Cutts, and you think about what drives this person and, you know, what he's interested in, you could build some curiosity as to why he might be interested in referencing this. And then, so I studied this game, and effectively you're this ball of energy, and you go around the table and you're like this little alien thing, I guess, gathering items. And then as you gather items, you grow in size and you can absorb bigger items.. And so it's really a way to describe how you can build topic authority. As you publish pages and you become an authority on those topics, there's adjacent topics that you can write about as well. And that will allow your site to be able to effectively perform better because you've got these content bases that when combined can produce a pretty large footprint. We did this all the way through to 23,500 pages at Finder. So it really can scale and get you to literally tens of millions of visits over time if you consistently execute. Uh, on the expertise front around the entity expertise, I think there's things you can do on your website which really matter. You know, demonstrating, you know, whether you've studied at a particular related degree at a university or whatever level of education, any qualifications where you've written, you know, any sort of tips that you can give Google that may not be public information to really ensure that Google understands that you are an expert on this topic. And then spreading that expertise over the internet, you can be a contributor to other websites, you can get referenced in articles as a quote. It really is about building your expertise across the internet to build your authority as an entity. And then there's brand. So brand really matters. I remember I was in a hotel room in— sorry, not hotel room, in the hotel at the end of a conference in the UK. It was like 6 in the morning and I was sat there with my competitors and a couple of their agencies. And ultimately they said, when you go back to Australia, if you do one thing, just focus on brand. And it really stuck with me. And so And the reason why is it drives a few things and it does drive really specific results for SEO. So firstly, when you have a brand, it builds recognition and that leads to higher click-through rate in search results. And click-through rate is a very important signal for Google as to what your preference is in terms of which website when listed that you want to get the answer from. And I think that positive experiences around your brand after they've, you know, someone's used your product can also help build that preference over time as well.

Ben9:55
So.

Jeremy9:56
That consistency and that expert content really does become something that even if you've got a great product, sometimes you remember for your content. So it's really, really critical that you look at that. And then lastly, I think it's that reinforcement of behaviour over time. It's like where you, you've built that loyalty towards the domain and you really are there to try and drive people towards, you know, building the habit of using your product over any other solution.

Christine10:23
Cool.

Jeremy10:24
So yeah, extreme versions of this. So after that conference in the UK, I came back and I was like, we need to do TV advertising. And the goal of that was literally to get people to type in Finder into Google search results. And so Fred created this brilliant jingle working with some sound engineers, and it literally had the goal of like type finder.com.au and the song and everything that goes with it. And it drove branded search volume for our brand. And that was remarkable. And it led to really good results in SEO. And then we have these stunts that we do. So, Raegun, everyone knew her through the Olympics and, you know, what she had done. And I guess from our side of things, like, we try to find ways to get huge amount of references to find her in a way that it just makes us top of mind always. Because you've got to think about all the brands that exist in your customers' minds and how do you get your brand to be the one that's top of mind so that they can take an action and ultimately buy your product or service when it comes to you know, what they want to do that day. How do you know what pages to publish? So this is interesting. I think, um, what I tend to do with any growth strategy or when I'm like looking to compete is simulating what would my competitor do and what's the most natural, objective, logical thing. And then how can I do everything beyond that? Because that's hygiene. If you can go and do what others are doing, that's fine. It has to be done, right? So there's tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, whatever you want to use. They all have 7-day free trials. Make sure you kill it before the trial ends and then maybe spin up a new email address. Just a little startup tip. But yeah, essentially, in my view, like, they're going to tell you what's in demand, but they don't tell you how to create demand. I think it's really important that you can use different ways to extract that information, but ultimately talking to customers is the number one thing you can do and really finding information that's not yet public and those insights and things that you can differentiate your content with. And again, I think it's, once you start writing content, you can easily get stuck into like what you want to write about, but I think you have to have a very clear mission in what you're trying to do. And the first thing you should do is try and build a topic cluster. Really go, here are the, you know, 6 to 8 guides I need to produce on this particular topic before I move on to the next thing. It needs to be logical for your customers and it needs to make sense for Google. So that's the goal there. How do you make high quality content? So, yeah, I guess, sorry, my screenshot's over the top there. But essentially, again, on that point with ChatGPT, it's so low effort. So in my mind, you have to be high effort. How do you then put extreme amounts of effort in producing content, which is what most people won't do right now? And again, you've got to zig or zag when others are zigging, whatever the saying goes. But yeah, really high effort and highly relevant. It's got to be something that that makes sense when you, when you read the content that it's on your website and not somebody else's. Um, and, and your customers understand why you wrote about it, why you're the authority on that particular topic. Um, again, make it unique and hard to replicate. You know, there's an example here where, uh, we had an NBN rollout tracker. So people might not remember on the call, but people had no idea when the NBN was going to be connected to their homes. And so we actually found a little startup that, um, had built a tracker, which I guess I'd describe it as almost like a, they had found a way to gather a lot of information and very specifically knew when people were getting the NBN at each property in Australia before the NBN was even publicly announcing it. So it was pretty wild. So everyone was coming to our website directly to get the answer and then obviously buying an NBN plan on the day they wanted the NBN. So pretty powerful. And again, there's no point publishing content unless it actually solves the customer's problem. And again, if that takes printing out the pages to really read it and ask somebody like, hey, is this useful? I think that's one way to get attention towards it because when you're looking at something on the screen, you can easily scroll and, you know, kind of skip sentences and so on. But in my mind, it's, you know, it needs to be the last page they read or the last piece of content they read before they took the action you're hoping they would take because that's the signal that really Google is looking for in determining content quality. Again, how do you create this kind of difficult to replicate content? So I'll tell a little bit of a storey here. I, um, this diagram where it's like talking about a balance transfer, we obsessed on it for literally years. And I remember sitting at Max Brenner Cafe probably in 2009 and hearing someone talking about balance transfer credit cards and like, hey, it's super simple, I'll explain it to you. And they mentioned Credit Card Finder, which was the website before it became founder and actually drew out the diagram we had on the page. And I could not believe the impact of what we were like doing ultimately as a company. But yeah, I think that guide had about 10,000 visits a month. And again, it's not a visit, it's 10,000 humans, right? And to see that person really, you know, explaining the concept to their friend, I understood the importance of every single element on a page. So if you can, you know, make it really good quality content, people that, you know, they would want to share it with their friends, I think is a good measure of that quality. I think that's key. Again, we've got this other, you know, thing on Finder, this Cash Rate Index. So we built relationships with economists and experts in the field, and ultimately each month we publish something where we are trying to get an indication of what, where people think the cash rate's going. And that's a lot of hard effort. You've got to follow up all these people, structure it all, put it on a page, but it's led to literally hundreds of references over the years since we came up with the idea and published that. So So you got to go towards content that's difficult to replicate. Google also has clear guidelines and they've been pretty consistent for about, you know, the last decade or so. So you've got those bullet points on the left and then they've got these quality rater guidelines because Google employs, um, in a kind of contract basis over 10,000 people around the world to review content. You can actually see when they visit your website. And so that's a good signal of your site's going to be reassessed and hopefully you get a bit of a traffic boost if you've got high quality content. Some of these guys are insanely long to read, but again, I printed out those guidelines so many times over the years and literally highlighted, you know, section by section and built, you know, operating procedures internally at Finder that made sure we leveraged every single factor that was in, in the, the algorithm to determine the, the Finder's content rankings. Yeah, two things here as well. So it was always this black box. Google was never very specific in terms of what they wanted to see. But thankfully they had this antitrust trial and it confirmed a bunch of things that SEOs were kind of guessing was in play. So ultimately what it revealed is that user engagement is a critical indicator. If actually it's the number one indicator of content quality. And what does that mean? So when people visit your website, if they stay on your website and ultimately transact, and Google has a very clear view of what transacting looks like across all these user journeys, if your website's helping people complete the task, it's going to rank better. So you've really got to focus on that. And this diagram on the right really I, you know, from a conference we went to demonstrates, I guess, the levels, like first and foremost, you've got to have a technical SEO strategy, which makes sure your website's getting indexed and those topic clusters, like I mentioned, are all solid and linked together. But ultimately what determines those 0 to 20 positions is the user engagement signals. How do you improve user engagement? So in my mind, it's, um, again, you've got to, like, the start of that is like, If you're in search results and you've got a whole bunch of options next, you know, side by side, pardon me, how do you write something that incentivizes to click on your website? And I think that you've got to really empathise with the customer and think about like the problem they've got or, or the objection or whatever it might be. And you've got to differentiate with your title in a way that, um, yeah, that's a terrible example. I think I needed to do that edit last night. Um, but yeah, the example I was trying to say is like best savings accounts and instead the savings accounts Australians actually stick click with. It's like another way of phrasing that particular thing. And I think it's a very powerful way to drive the click. In terms of dwell time, that's a concept where in the first 2 lines of your content, you've earned the click. They've arrived to your website. How do you get them to scroll? How do you get them to take the action? And I think that's about, um, giving the answer quickly and upfront. And that's important. And then also breaking up your page into chunks. So as they scroll give them value and kind of nudge a little bit towards the next scroll. So they ultimately ideally are reading the entire piece of content and leading to an action, which is a, you know, a call to action on the page, like completing a form or reading the next guide you've published. And that's a very important signal determining whether or not your content's going to rank. And lastly, I think it's about proving your relevance. I think tracking all these things is really critical. Again, scroll depth, you know, the time on the page and, you know, if people are navigating to the next page, you can track all these things in Google Analytics 4, GA4. And the content depth. I think it's about answering various facets of the content. You'll see a pattern amongst the pages that rank well in Google. They typically cover, you know, what it is, why, the how, the next step, and it's without fluff. You've got to make it as concise as possible. And that navigation through the page, reducing distractions, is very important to drive results for your business. Okay, everyone wants to hear about AI. So, um, What I think about is, again, what are most people going to do? It's going to be the easiest way to produce something or do something. People don't want to spend the time and effort. So therefore, what does that mean? You've got to break it down into steps instead of all in, getting it all done at once. And that's, I think, the first move. So if you're producing a piece of content, don't single-shot prompt and then copy-paste from ChatGPT. Break down all the steps required to produce that piece of content. There's some prompt templates out there that you can research. I can send you a few as well, but each step broken out and then chaining it all together to produce, I guess, the base for you to edit is important. One of the ways to use AI to, I guess, produce content that doesn't just sound generic is to ground it in information that's unique and proprietary, ideally to your company. So that could be your transcripts, research, your product data, things that ensures the output is not generic. And lastly, you cannot skip the human review. You've got to fact-check it, you've got to edit it and optimise it. And I think that I think that the combination of these 3 things are the fundamentals that ensure when you're producing content with AI, you can leverage it to make it faster to produce and do steps that you might not have done manually because you didn't have the time and you didn't want to spend the effort on that. But, you know, if you're doing these things, I think that, you know, in my experience and who I've spoken to, I travel annually to these conferences. I was just in the US in May. And ultimately, what people are saying is that it's safe to publish with AI so long as you're taking these steps. Again, a couple of prompt templates. You can ask ChatGPT to produce a prompt template for each step, like, you know, design the content cluster. So that's there on the left, the topic cluster prompt template. And then once you have each guide, ask it to give you an overview of the guide. And then you can actually even get it to do some edit and evaluation of the output as well. So again, thinking about how you would humanly approach it and thinking about a prompt per step to make it easier and more scalable for you to produce that content. That's, that's the trick here. So yeah, it's all adapting as well. So a lot of what I've been talking about works for Google Search, which is about, I'd say it's about 80% of what you need to solve for to do well in generative engine optimization or large language model optimization. Everyone's trying to figure out the acronym right now. The first and most important thing is structuring the website for LLMs. So if you've had a website that's done very well up until now, or, you know, has been in existence for a while, You can do some things to ensure that large language models will better understand your content. They have context windows, and so they want really precise and specific information. Each paragraph needs to be a single concept, a short sentence, and answer it specifically. And that's a very important thing you can do. And you can wrap these, um, you know, sections of your site, like an FAQ section, in what they call structured data or schema, which ensures, you know, not only Google, but ChatGPT can pull in that information more quickly. And, um, it helps you get more reference across these, um, models. So a very important thing to do as step one. Secondly, when there's certain queries or prompts that mean that, you know, ChatGPT and Gemini have to go to more recently published information. And so they'll go and extract or use various sources and synthesise that when providing an answer. If you can get links from those sources, your website is more likely to be referenced as part of the answers. So that's the trick. It's kind of the evolution of link building. In the past, it was like, you know, hey, let's try and get the most authoritative or most important websites on the internet referencing us. That still matters, but there's also a piece here around the very specific websites that have been consistently referenced by ChatGPT and Gemini and trying to get referenced on those. There's an example here of trying to rank for best restaurant in Sydney, try and get on Urban List and Sydney.com and Gourmet Traveller. Lastly, um, because large language models are looking, they have a problem where at this point I mean, not all of them, like, have the index that Google has. They rely on recently published information. So they're looking at the metadata of a page to understand, is your content recently updated? And that means it's most likely to have, or I guess it has a greater likelihood to be accurate because you've updated it more recently. There's an example here of a company called Descript where just by updating their content recently, uh, very frequently actually, they're able to see a 35% boost in signup growth from refreshed blog content. So there's some ways you can refresh content more quickly, some prompt templates you can use as well, some software potentially that you could use called AirOps. It's a little bit more advanced, but yeah, anything you can do to ensure your content's frequently updated will improve your performance across AI search. Yeah, that's it. I want to go through any questions you guys have as well. Happy to answer them.

Audience member24:41
Awesome.

Kirsten Scott24:42
Thank you very much, Jeremy. That was amazing as always. And guys, just a reminder, if you didn't get to watch session 1, make sure you go back to the video content library because it is now live. Now I can see a few questions in the chat, so I'm going to jump in. And if at any point you have any additional, because these get the thoughts going, just either put up your hand or pop it in the chat. So, Faye, you're first.

Audience member25:08
Hi, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge, first of all. So I work as an HR consultant. I have my own consulting business. I have a brand, but I feel like my personal brand is way more valuable than my business brand. And anything that I post, um, around my, um, professional development or experiences that I had that not necessarily solving anyone's problem get way more attention and shares than if I'm posting a solution or even like a guide or something that could fix someone's problem. Like like sometimes I get zero. So I'm wondering what's the best strategy here.

Jeremy25:50
Yeah, my view is, um, given the disruption that's happening in search, I think it's really important that everybody on the call has a personal brand. I think it's a way to use storytelling to build audience and ultimately give you distribution into your content. And the most important thing here is the hook. So you might publish something with a solution, but it's a storey that wraps around it to try and drive people towards that. And, um, you can cheque out my LinkedIn. I've I try and do this pretty frequently as an example of how to approach this sort of stuff. But yeah, leading with something that's relevant not only to your connections, but your second level connections, I think is critical if you're on LinkedIn. And again, you know, I spoke a little bit about Chrome traffic today and how important that is in terms of determining user engagement. But yeah, that, that is not only about publishing it on your website, it's driving traffic towards that content to get it more quickly assessed from Google. So Yeah, I personally think leading with something that has connection is going to increase the engagement with the content. People are more likely to read it. Story-based content. It's a little bit harder to go and develop, but if you naturally are doing that anyway, I think you're on the right track. So yeah, doing more of that I think should be very effective for your business.

Audience member27:01
It is very natural for me to kind of talk about myself, but it's hard to do that from a brand perspective because if I go on my LinkedIn page for my brand, it can't just be about me, me, me, me, where if I'm on my personal LinkedIn it's fine. So usually I post everything on my personal page and I share from my business page, and I'm not sure if that's the right approach.

Jeremy27:27
Definitely. I think LinkedIn has almost accidentally become a content platform, which is really fascinating. From my perspective, personal profiles far outperform company pages. I think company pages are almost like your catalog, so to speak, where you've got to post on there. So when they actually go and, you know, want to browse the business and see what it's about. It's more for that navigational traffic from your profile. But yeah, for your personal brand, I think having a mix of thought leadership, really practical solutions, and you know, it might not be that you're necessarily posting the very specific solution on LinkedIn. It's more encouraging people to connect with you and you're ultimately sharing it there privately and you might share a guide or whatever it is or get them into a newsletter. We can drip feed this content over time. Um, yeah, I think you're, you're doing the right thing. I wouldn't be questioning what you're doing at this stage. It sounds like it's, it's working.

Audience member28:17
Do you have a suggestion for what platforms I should be using? At the moment I use, uh, Instagram, has very, um, low outcomes from that, and LinkedIn, only, uh, those two. And of course, Facebook.

Jeremy28:32
Yeah, so one that, uh, everyone on the call should be looking at is Reddit, actually. So Reddit is, um, I guess, you know, it's unusual for me because I used it as like a bit of a nerd, like for various things, the most technical things you can think of. But it's really evolved to be a community of really niche things. And why it's important is Google actually did a data licencing deal for, I'm fairly sure it was around $50 million thereabouts a year or so ago. And all the AI companies are trying to mine Reddit for what do people think about a topic. And so So the trend as well, which is really fascinating, is people are actually appending Reddit on the end of Google searches. So they want to understand what are people on Reddit saying about this thing? Because they don't want to hear what the companies are saying. They want to hear like the truth, so to speak. And so engaging on Reddit in a way that you're not selling is really important. And it's actually a huge source for how answers are coming up in ChatGPT. I think it was around 28% of queries or prompts in ChatGPT are using Reddit as a source, but Perplexity is over around 90% are actually in every single search that happens. Using Reddit and other similar forums like Quora and others to actually determine what answers are showing. So building a profile, and I think that starts with first engaging and helping those communities. And then, you know, over time you can softly mention your company or find others that could mention on your behalf. That's a really powerful strategy as well.

Audience member29:55
But it's more to be seen. It doesn't really connect to your website or anything like that, does it?

Jeremy30:00
Well, it can. So you can link to your website. My wife runs a baby product rental business and on page 1 of Google, they've actually reserved a bunch of space for Reddit threads. So I don't know if anybody's noticed that depending on the query, you actually see Reddit referenced. And so if, you know, be like, should I, you know, rent this product, for example? And then in there, there's a whole bunch of people going back and forth with their experience and their journey. You can contribute and say, hey, actually, as someone that runs one of these companies, they're really good for this reason. I also, as a parent, did this and this and this. Um, here's a website if you want to cheque it out, sort of thing. Um, and so yeah, it actually can drive conversions and help your website get more reference. Referenced in the answers in these AI search engines as well.

Audience member30:44
Okay, cool. Thank you.

Jeremy30:45
Welcome.

Kirsten Scott30:48
And just to add to that, I know a lot of business owners that are now using Reddit as well, and it's even when you comment on other people's things. So for example, they'll ask a question about education and you go and put your thought leadership on that comment. It links in and you can find that in like when you do an AI search as It's— I don't know how it works in the background, but it's definitely making a lot more come to the surface. Christine, I don't know if you had a question.

Christine31:17
Hi, thank you for today. A lot of the— you know, we've got sites and they're quite— whether it be marketing agencies or web offering content like these services, and I guess just as a designer, you know, you met before, if you're producing AI content, it's important that we fact-check before it goes live, but not necessarily having tagged your page tags. I guess, how do you know that these agencies pulling AI, they might not know enough to do the topic, and then just put them on your website and I guess all they work for is the big goals on whatever topic you choose. Is it worth it to pay someone to be a really internal person company looking at, I don't know, fact-checking? Or can you trust an agency to do that?

Jeremy32:24
Look, I'm I'm a pretty detailed dude, and, uh, I think there's some great agencies out there doing some awesome work. But even if they are, um, doing awesome work, you need to have a process to be constantly checking the output. And from my standpoint, that means building a moderation step where maybe they'll do a particular part of it and you're approving the content to be written. Um, and then from that output, you can go through and go, okay, cool, here's my feedback. Um, You know, there's a concept of sampling. There's a book, High Output Management, and I think it was Andy Grove, the founder of and CEO of Intel. Every single process has an error rate, even if they're the best agency out there, right? So you've got to assume that sometimes someone's going to drop the ball. And so if you, you know, take your eye off the ball, it's going to happen. And, you know, from my standpoint, remaining involved and close to it is so critical. It's your ultimately representation of your brand on the internet. It's hard, but it's necessary. To always stay involved in that. Over time, as you scale, you definitely can hire people in-house to support that and do that sort of work. But I think it's important to understand exactly who to hire next inside your company. And it may not be that content writing is the most logical thing to go for. Yeah, so it depends on each stage of each business on the call as to what the right answer is. But in my view, you know, do your research, really try and understand and how these people are staying up to date. I think one of the risks is that often agencies are outsourcing their work to, um, very low quality, low skilled individuals doing that work. And you've got to ask that question up front. Is this your team doing it? Are you outsourcing it? Um, and show some real results of companies live. It's not a case study that's locked statically away in a deck from like a year ago. Like ask them to open up a tool now, show me how it's performing. What did you publish 2 months ago? And is that performing right now? Why is it not performing? What, you know, how are you adapting your strategy? In my view, you've got to stay really, really close to the work being done, especially initially, because it sets the foundations for that engagement with that agency. They know that you're not going to be a set and forget person. Uh, so yeah, in my mind, I don't think there's anything you can do to skip that initially, at least.

Kirsten Scott34:38
Yeah. Okay.

Christine34:39
And I also have another question on the pricing and this question steers away from what we just spoke about, but traditionally. Traditionally, if we talk about marketing, there was always sort of a guide, you know, say you've got a million dollar business, I would recommend you spend X on marketing. Do you think with branding becoming so much more important in the past, in the next 5 years, branding wasn't really a thing 10, 15 years ago as much as now. Do you think be upping our marketing from the traditional to really cut through, given that everyone has got content these days? You know, should we be investing more than we traditionally would have 5, 10 years ago?

Jeremy35:29
Absolutely, yes. In my view, um, it's about building connection. You know, the thing that will remain true through all this disruption is that customers will have trust and build relationships with you.. And I think if you have those relationships, whether or not, you know, they're actually someone you know face to face, but you've built a relationship in the content you're producing, people follow your journey. I've had that, you know, mentioned to me so many times, like, hey, I've been following your LinkedIn journey for, or, you know, Finder's journey through LinkedIn for the last 5 years. Um, and then they reach out eventually and be like, hey, can we have a chat? And, um, I think that's so powerful. You just don't realise how many people you're— again, it's not just visits to your profile or whatever the metric is, impressions and stuff like that. It's, it's real humans. And I think I think LinkedIn is particularly powerful right now. It's like Windows 95. It literally, as I said, this accidental content platform. And I think what they've realised is that they kind of started off with all these connections and then as people are publishing on there, it's a way to drive engagement on their platform. So they're ultimately competing with the Instagrams and all this stuff as well, right? But it's so early, companies still haven't really mastered it and figured it out. Um, and so in my mind, it is the highest leverage thing that everyone can do on the call is publish daily on LinkedIn. I know that's insane, but I kind of treat it as if like it's brushing my teeth. You just have to do it. And I publish 5 days a week on kind of professional things. And then on a weekend, it's more a personal post and building that connection in a way where maybe they're reading professional content, but it was the personal thing that they, you know, were like, oh, I've got twins too, or whatever it is that they connect on. Right. And you just never know. It's, um, the combination of all of this that I think builds influence and is very supportive toward your website content. I think that your LinkedIn can be a driver of traffic into your website. And again, that's ultimately the major thing that's being disrupted here is traffic sources with Google search changing so dramatically and the growth of ChatGPT. These things will all become a footprint of how large language models come to understand you and what you're expert on. If you're not publishing, how can it know who you are and your relative importance as a human on this planet, right? You've got to put internet, sorry, your content out onto the internet so people can understand you and so that these search engines and generative engines can actually start understanding you as well. So But that's what it's about is just create a massive footprint and, you know, these things are what, you know, the way it works is like the, what's the most probable answer, right? It's like, okay, because, you know, Christine's all over the internet on this topic, it's probably, and there's good reputation or like kind of good engagement around her content. She's probably an expert on this thing. So I'm going to safely include her as the answer as to a company I should use or suggest in this particular space. So that's how it works. And I think it's really important to build your personal brand.

Christine38:18
Okay, thank you.

Jeremy38:20
You're welcome.

Kirsten Scott38:21
Awesome, thanks Christine. Ben, you had a question?

Ben38:30
Hey Jeremy, thanks for your time today. Thanks for setting it up, Kirsten. The question I guess is like a mindset, like a way of thinking about the books you use or the titles you use for the headings for articles? I know, I know the article needs to kind of hit a pain point and solve a problem when you're speaking to them. Do you have like a way of thinking about like a formalised way that's making the headline that is the hook?

Jeremy39:00
Like, yeah, or is it just stating the problem or is it? Yeah, so the best signal you can look at is what people are using in their Google Ads or ads. And if they've been running those ads for like 12 months or 2 years, it's probably working. And to make ads work, they need click-through rate, right? So if you grab those insights from what people are doing their advertising and incorporate them into your copy, that's the best thing you can do. And often you'll see in search results the most plain and boring things. Uh, there's a tool called Google Search Console. It's free from Google and you can actually measure your click-through rate relative um, over time. And it's the best signal you can look at. You make a change, you literally look at making the change, follow it for 7 days. Is it outperforming the last 7 days? If not, change it again. And just constantly testing, running that process week after week. And you know, it, it's, it's something that, um, there's so many variables to optimise for, but at least trying that for a little while and looking at the other variables in play, I think that's important. There are also these really, again, hooks that have been around forever. There's a blog post where, so the canonical one I reference because it just hasn't changed. And you can't actually visit the website easily without it going continue and going through that Chrome, like watch out for security type stuff. But anyway, it's a website, this guy Stunt Double, S-T-U-N-T-D-U-B-L. He's an OG SEO. And he talks about these hooks, like the ego hook, like the controversy hook, you know, a value and resource hook. And literally literally these are the same things that work on LinkedIn, the same thing that work for ads, the same things that are going to work for your website copy. So I'm sure there's a book published in the '70s on advertising, whether it be Scientific Advertising or Breakthrough Advertising or whatever, they're going to reference these concepts. Like how do you get people to stop what they're doing? And stopping what they're doing looks like scroll stopping in 2025. So it's the same thing. It's just these psychological principles that I think drive humans to take action. So studying psychology, I would say, um, you know, again, go to ChatGPT, shortcut it. It's like, what are some like theories in psychology I can apply to copywriting and headline writing or title tags or whatever it might be to encourage click-through rate? It'll save you a bunch of time not reading the books if you don't want to do that. Um, but that, that psychology is what's driving the action for everybody that's, you know, looking at a website and search results and ultimately whether or not they transact with your company as well.

Audience member41:26
Yeah.

Ben41:26
Awesome. Thank you. And just to follow up, cause I've been hearing Reddit a lot lately. It's just like, um, I've never used this. I have no idea. About it, but from all these different random sources, people talk about, oh yeah, Reddit's actually great for advertising. Is it literally, I would start my own sort of thread thing, or is it me just engaging with people just saying, hey, self-employed home loans are a problem, it is more difficult, takes a lot longer, but there's these things that make it a lot easier, or how should I be approaching it?

Jeremy41:54
Yeah, so, um, most things I try and break down to what are the 2 or 3 actions I can take daily to dominate a channel. Um, the first thing on Reddit is what I identified, at least in Reddit Australia, was what are the most referenced publications daily and what are the storey types that will always get engagement? And the goal was to drive up my karma on Reddit, which is like an indication of your contribution to a community. And so I built a little tool that would literally, the second abc.net.au would write a storey and it was related to like politics or something that, you know, would get people fired up, I'd post it first. And literally every storey would get like 30 to 50 upvotes and people are like, yeah, that sucks and whatever. And then you have kind of two options once you've built up that karma. I think engaging on other content as well is critical. They're all moderated threads and subreddits. If you don't engage and appear to be a genuine, and you have to not appear to be, you have to actually authentically contribute. These mods will ban you and then you can't come back from that. You've got to try and convince them to unban you. It's kind of a ridiculous thing. They have a lot of control. So yeah, genuinely engaging, commenting and so on, and then occasionally referencing your company. And you can do that in two ways. There's a self-post, is like, kind of like you said, it's like, hey, da da da da, ask a question. It's kind of, you're not directly linking to your company. And then sometimes a straight post where you're posting your particular resource or asset and you just know that community is going to love that thing. Um, that's the two ways to do it. Um, experiment with both. In a self-post, you can link to your website. It's like, hey, I built this cool thing and like kind of be really vulnerable and share. It's like, I'm not sure if it's any good. We'd love your feedback. Back, but ultimately it's self-promotion of your company. And that's super effective. And, you know, I saw correlation over the years where websites that were referenced heavily on Reddit ranked well in Google, and it also increased the speed by which they were referenced in Google as well. So, it's a channel that, yeah, it takes time and effort, but, that's what this is about, right? Like, time and effort daily, like, it's honestly probably 5 minutes a day engaging on Reddit, 5 minutes that your competitors are not engaging on Reddit, and that's going to stack and compound over time that you build this influence on a platform that is driving search result rankings and also the answers in generative engines as well. So it's very powerful.

Ben44:08
Awesome. Thanks, Jeremy. Thanks, Kirsten. Appreciate it.

Jeremy44:13
Thanks, Ben.

Kirsten Scott44:14
Now, does anyone have any other questions for Jeremy? No worries, guys. Well, thank you again, Jeremy, as always, sharing the little demos for the day. Now, Jeremy is on BoA, so if you do want to reach out, or LinkedIn, please feel free to DM him. But thank you again. And if you want to rewatch it, you can watch it on the video content library. We look forward to seeing you all soon.

Jeremy44:41
Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.

Kirsten Scott44:42
Thanks, guys.

Ben44:42
Thanks, guys.