Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - How Extreme Specialization Created an 8-Figure Growth Machine | Chris Dreyer - Rankings.io Founder

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Lessons - How Extreme Specialization Created an 8-Figure Growth Machine | Chris Dreyer - Rankings.io Founder · Success Story with Scott Clary

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  In this lessons episode, discover how content quality is measured by how well it meets user intent.
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  Learn why bounce rates and engagement reveal if your content is truly helpful.
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  Learn how AI overviews and generative search tools are reshaping SEO strategy and learn
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  why relevance, trust signals, and human oversight still define success in today's search-driven world.
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  Say you can write good content and I'm curious actually what is good? I mean, like good is subjective.
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  Does it answer the consumer's intent? Effective. That's it. So it isn't so subjective. Well,
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  I say that is the direct answer, but let me give you some complication here.
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  A page can have multiple forms of intent that it needs to address, okay? So
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  if I had a page on car accidents, well, do they need a lawyer? Do they need to know what happens
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  after car accident? Are they wondering how many car accidents occur in a city? Do they?
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  There may be many questions that consumer asks. So that page has to answer all of those.
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  It can't answer just one version because if it only answers the one version and a different
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  consumer comes to the page and it doesn't answer their intent, they leave. Well, that's a bad signal,
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  right? Bounce rates, page on time, all those things. If someone comes to your website and it's not
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  a good piece of content and it doesn't answer intent and then they do another query similar
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  or they go to another website for the same query, it means potentially that they that this
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  website, this landing page did not help them. It wasn't helpful for them. And over time,
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  if there's enough of that, Google will stop serving you in the number one position.
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  That's that's scary because if you see a high bounce rate and low time on page,
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  then you know that it's not answering all the questions, but you don't really know.
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  Or I guess you could say, grow out what questions it's not answering. So there's always
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  asterisk, right? And it depends, right? Yeah. There are, I would say the longer the query to the more
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  specific it is, you know, what are the steps I need to take after car accident? Okay, here's the article.
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  There's no guessing. The intent is to find in the query. But there are certain situations where a
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  high bounce rate is absolutely okay, because they could come to the page, get their intent answered
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  and then leave. They don't have to go to other websites. They take something like definitions,
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  right? Nowadays, AI overviews even knows up, but define this. Okay. Well, like, do I need to write
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  10,000 words on this definition? Do I need multiple articles to explain? Do they do they need to
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  visit other page? They don't. They need to go there. They get the definition they can leave. So
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  it really depends, but
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  it depends on your goals, on what you're trying to achieve. And a lot, but at the end of the day,
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  it's great content. Does it answer that the consumers intent effectively? And is it endorsed by other
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  people? Do other people vote and think it is a good piece of content? Interesting that you mentioned
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  AI overview. So AI overview, if you Google anything, it'll give you an AI overview right at the top.
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  I'm assuming, tell me if this is a conspiracy theory, but I think that Google is doing this so that
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  your page isn't ranking as high anymore. People aren't going to the pages, so that that means that
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  your force to spend more ad dollars to get a sponsored position for your page to show up.
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  Is that the conspiracy or is that what Google is doing? Absolutely accurate.
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  They're a for-profit business. They make the majority of their publicly traded companies
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  revenue from Google ads. If they can make more money there, they're going to do it. I will say,
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  it's not like the AI overview zero click scenarios didn't exist. We had rich snippets. They were
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  zero click scenarios that showed the answer and you didn't have to click through a website.
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  They have such market share domination. I think they're finally below 90%, but still
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  that they can create a less satisfactory user experience to supplement their ad revenue.
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  What does that mean for businesses and SEO? Well, it means I'll tell you this right now,
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  I've seen a dramatic shift in the benefit of paper click ads and LSA as opposed to organic
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  and maps. Even if you look at things like above the fold on a monitor, the things that are above
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  the fold are typically local service ads and Google ads. After that, then you start getting AI
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  overviews, you start getting the maps and organic. They have the best positioning from a virtual
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  real estate perspective. What does that mean if you're a firm or a business? Well, you need to
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  reconsider Google ads if you had tried it in the past or didn't have a lot of success because
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  they're kind of forcing you to use it. Now, you got to get all your economies and metrics right
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  for cost per lead, cost per acquisition, and all those all the things. But it's become
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  and more effective because of how Google's designing Google search.
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  Now, the interesting bit about AI is that those those AI overviews or the if you're using chat GPT
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  or perplexity or I guess cloud wouldn't be used as or Gemini, I guess as a search tool. Yeah,
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  I'll grog exactly. That is obviously taking some of the traffic away from Google because people
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  are using a generative chat as search tools. But at the same time, the results in some cases are
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  referenced to websites. So now you have an SEO game through generative chat. How do you play that
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  game? Really like this question. See your dad on. So there's two things that you want to do. First,
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  focus on what I would say bottom of the funnel, the your service pages, your sales pages,
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  because it lends itself to optionality and choice, right? Back in the day, you could write a
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  what do you do after car accident and like maybe you could get a conversion out of that. But like
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  that's just like an evergreen topic and like it's going to be in the AI overview. But car accident
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  lawyer of Chicago, they're going to give you some options to review. You know, how close is this
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  firm to you? You know, what's the review rating? They're going to give you optionality. First,
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  so I would say strategically to kind of counter the AI component. The first thing is focus bottom
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  up of the funnel. Instead of the top of the funnel where you're trying to get awareness, I really
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  look at Google and search engine marketing all encompassing everything on Google as a capture
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  play more so than an awareness play. So it is it's capturing demand more so than creating demand.
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  The the next thing is your question about geo generative engine optimization, the LMS.
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  They the truth is no one really knows. But I will say that schema and some of these highly trusted
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  sites are are cited. You go look at perplexity. It will definitely tell you where the citations are
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  and chat GPT will will will give you based upon their analysis. You can start to understand where
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  they're pulling that from. I'll give an example for myself. Right now we rank like third for
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  SEO for lawyers. Above me is a competitor and then Clio. Well, I get on that and I remember before
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  I was listed on Clio, I would say, you know, who's the best personal injury SEO company and I
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  wouldn't pop up. Yet I'm on 20 other websites that say we're number one. Right clutch design,
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  rush, competitor sites, putness number one. The one article we weren't on was Clio's.
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  I get on that you go type in the same thing for GPT boom. So it's it's the trust signals for
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  certain sites are different Wikipedia is a big one for LMS. And so in different categories,
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  there are different trusted entities. It's an association and entity is an association with
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  something. So I go really down the rabbit hole here without trying to get too nerdy. I'm a sound
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  super nerdy. No, I love it. I love it because first of all, there is a lot of people that care about
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  this stuff a lot of entrepreneurs are trying to figure out this new game. They're smart. But also
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  I'm seeing I'll give you another example and then I notice now I'm playing around with the deep
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  search tools on perplexity and chat GPT and and they both chat GPT in particular. I think they both
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  actually show their workflow as they're going through this chat GPT's deep search for any query
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  eight to 11 minutes. So long comparatively. But if you open up the side bar, it shows every
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  question that it has and the source that it's going to for the answer. And I'm just so curious
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  like some of these sources like how did to pick this source and that source and it'll go through
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  like 20 to 30 different sources to come out with a very complex answer. It'll be it'll be cited
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  in the actual output, but it'll also be cited in this source column as it's thinking and showing
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  you all the websites that's navigating to. Yeah, it's it's it's unreal. It is.
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  It's changing the game and you know, even in the AI overviews it's it's citing the source right
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  where it's pulling from. So it's a combination all that and but I think again,
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  typically even when you ask it, it's still going to give you multiple answers for like a business.
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  Like who are the top whatever it typically doesn't give you one.
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  Even on who's the best car accident lawyer if we type that what was the what was the nerdy rabbit
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  hole that you were hesitant to go down. Well, I'm trying to think where where I was going to go with
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  that, you know, with your schema and signals and things like that. Yeah, I'm not sure. But I think
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  we hit it on the head. It's it's schema. It is entities. So okay, so like on the entities component.
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  They're basically entities are associations, right? And Google, if we go back to the beginning,
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  Google's job is to organize the web. LLM, it's it's to pull accurate sources, right?
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  Kind of combination of both. So you take something like St. Louis.
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  One of the first things that probably popped in your mind when you're thinking about the city of
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  St. Louis is large, right? That's an entity, right? If you can become an entity in the city,
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  there's an association that will help you contribute to trust and to rank in that respective city.
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  Is there any way for a business to become an entity in a city?
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  I think I think it's reputation. It's it's word of mouth. It's being listed in other
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  associated other entities. So you take something like a chamber of commerce, right?
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  In St. Louis, you're now listed as a business entity in this chamber. It goes back to old school,
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  you know, SEO things and listings and citations. But the quicker you can do that,
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  that's why a lot of businesses when they're expanding to their secondary market struggle.
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  Because a lot of times they're getting a satellite office. They're not getting,
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  they're not doing the full brick and mortar. They're not being a part of the community.
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  Guess what? They're not a known entity in that market. That's that's the issue.
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  Last question on this and I'm sure you get it a lot. What happens when you use a
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  generative chat tool to write content? Well, it's significantly better. There's a lot of tools,
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  surfer, jasper, others, a ton of them. And we've used it still ranks. It still ranks absolutely.
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  But it still needs human oversight. It's it's it's like a tool currently. It's not a standalone
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  still in my opinion. It's a tool to enhance productivity. So we see a lot more prompt engineering
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  editors as opposed to manually sourcing and citing writers. There's a lot a lot of things
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  that you can do here. There's even other tools to check for AI. There's for originality for voice.
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  But it also I was having a conversation with a big firm in San Antonio. And I use the language
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  like, Hey, we can do this old school because I don't really want to do it old school. I want to
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  do cutting edge, right? I didn't want to be negative and talk down. But but it is old school now.
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  Like I can prompt engineer something to look and evaluate the top ranking pages to determine
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  length things I need to include to make my article better. I can take an existing piece of article
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  and I can fill it in and say, you know, what are the weaknesses? What should I consider adding to
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  this? So right now it's in a tool and in the hands of productivity and utilization. But
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  you have to be careful because sometimes the sources are incorrect and
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  and so it's used with care. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit
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  that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this
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  conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.