Latest / Content, Briefly / The Budget Mistake Everyone's Making with GEO with Jeremy Moser

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The Budget Mistake Everyone's Making with GEO with Jeremy Moser · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  [upbeat music] Hey everyone, Alex here. Let me tell you about Userp. That's U-S-E-R-P dot I-O.
• 0:13
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• 1:26
  That's Userp dot I-O. Hey, y'all. Alex here. Really excited to share this episode with Jeremy Moser, co-founder of Userp.
• 1:33
  You might remember we brought on Jeremy's other co-founder, Brad, last month to talk about content reporting. In the episode today, we dive into something related but a little bit different.
• 1:44
  It's actually something really specific that Jeremy is seeing across the thirty-some conversations he's having every month with teams, and that is that he sees a lot of teams moving money from SEO to GEO, and Jeremy thinks it's a terrible idea.
• 2:00
  So we dive into why that is. I really enjoyed this episode, and I hope you do too. All right. Jeremy Moser, welcome to Content Briefly.
• 2:10
  I had a great time chatting with your co-founder, Brad, last month about content reporting and some of the messed up things that he's seeing in the reporting space.
• 2:19
  And I think to some degree, this is a related topic here.
• 2:23
  I know we're gonna dive in a little bit specifically about how teams are thinking about budgets the wrong way, particularly tied to one thing that you're noticing as you kind of look across your clients and how they're approaching SEO versus AEO efforts.
• 2:36
  So welcome to the show, and would love to just kick it off by hearing a little bit about that observation that you've noted. Awesome. Yeah. Well, thanks for having me.
• 2:45
  And yeah, kind of the main thing that we've been noticing, I mean, we currently at our company have around sixty or so active clients, and then I talk to around like thirty to thirty-five new companies on a monthly basis, just from like a sales perspective, a business development perspective, talking to companies, seeing what they're doing, seeing how we can potentially help.
• 3:04
  And one of the main conversations that tends to come up centers really around like the idea that, you know, AI search, traffic leads, et cetera, referral visits tend to convert higher than SEO, and folks are saying, you know, "Our best leads are coming from AI search."
• 3:19
  Right? Like, it's way better than SEO. It's, you know, toppling traditional SEO in that sense. And what we've found is when you peel back the data there and what they're actually comparing, it's really apples to oranges.
• 3:30
  And so a lot of the times in AI search, like, really the most valuable mentions and results you can get from AI search are those bottom-of-the-funnel mentions.
• 3:38
  So typically when people talk about AI search leads, it's coming from that and not necessarily like the citation end of AI search, where it's more like more top of the funnel, more informational, more middle of the funnel even.
• 3:51
  Those citations are valuable in their own right, but they're not necessarily the same as like the traffic that folks are actually getting from AI search.
• 3:57
  So like the main times that you'll see good leads come from AI search is gonna be when somebody's asking for a solution, right?
• 4:04
  They're going in there, they're saying, "Hey, I lead a team of, you know, ten marketers in XYZ company. We're in this space. We need this kind of tool. What's the best, you know, option for us?"
• 4:13
  And then AI is gonna spit out a few different options there, and then they're gonna go and they're gonna type those into their, you know, search bar or they're gonna go to Google and type the brands in.
• 4:22
  That's really where you're seeing like the mass good quality leads come from AI search.
• 4:27
  But when you then go and compare that all to the whole bucket of SEO, which is just like anything from super top of the funnel informational to branded traffic to middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel, that comparison is really just kind of broken and flawed from the start because you're comparing only bottom of the funnel from AI search to the whole swath of SEO.
• 4:47
  And so we typically just see that there's a huge misalignment there, and then folks are making pretty massive budget decisions based on that data, when in reality if you kinda just filter back and you peel back the layers and you say, "Okay, let's just look at our bottom of the funnel stuff from an SEO perspective and just the bottom of the funnel from AI search," those leads are actually really comparative in terms of the quality, at least of what we've seen for ourselves and then for clients across the board.
• 5:10
  So there's just like a lotta sort of misinformation I think in the AI space right now in terms of just the quality of leads that are coming from them.
• 5:17
  There's no denying that the quality of the leads is great, but we're comparing, you know, just the wrong things to each other. Cool.
• 5:23
  And I just wanna kind of reprocess that to make sure I'm understanding kind of the right thing here.
• 5:29
  So kinda saying, "Hey," for example, we have, you know, a, a CEO saying, "We have ten leads come in from AI, like AEO, GEO."
• 5:39
  Those are gonna be really bottom of funnel qualified because they're coming in through this kind of like tool search, versus they're looking at kind of traditional SEO and saying, "Hey, we have fifty leads come through, you know, SEO, and they're only converting at, you know, a twenty percent rate," or, you know, something that's lower than what they're seeing from the AI search, but that's because we're kinda capturing leads at an earlier stage through SEO.
• 6:02
  And so kind of the faulty reasoning that you're seeing when execs are making budget decisions here is they're saying, "Hey, we're getting fifty leads from SEO and only converting ten," versus like, "Hey, we're getting10 from AEO and converting 10, therefore, let's shift budget from SEO over to GEO, AEO, right?
• 6:23
  Yeah, exactly.
• 6:23
  And even on top of that too, what we're seeing is like a comparison of just overall total traffic and lead volume, and understanding that like, oh, we're seeing less kind of AI search leads overall come through, but more of them convert or more of them fill out forms, or more of them end up making it to become a client or a customer of ours than traditional SEO.
• 6:43
  And again, we're just kinda like looking at the data in the wrong way and making interpretations based off of that.
• 6:48
  So I think it's pretty pervasive right now, and really, like I mentioned, a lot of the good quality leads that come from AI search are also going to be hitting you in different ways.
• 6:57
  So this might not even be tracked right on your back end there.
• 7:01
  So if you don't have any like self-reported attribution, it's kinda like really the main way that folks are tracking right now from an AI search standpoint, 'cause it's a little bit disconnected. Yeah.
• 7:10
  And so like, you know, we're putting attribution on stuff that may have obviously multiple other touchpoints in there.
• 7:15
  So the water's getting murky super quick here, and so I think, you know, even in our own data, like we currently, I think, get around like 36% of our leads in a given monthly basis from AI search.
• 7:26
  So we're not like biased here in the sense that we're trying to say, "Only do traditional SEO." Like, we see really good results ourselves from AI search, but a lot of the data is murky in that.
• 7:36
  Like, yes, 36% or so have self-reported to be from AI search. But again, it's like a lot of those folks are hitting us from traditional SEO. They're also hitting us on social.
• 7:46
  Like, there's so many other areas that they're touching there.
• 7:50
  And so prescribing like only the last touchpoint that they may have had there where they remember, oh, we, we saw them on AI search and that's where we found them.
• 7:57
  But in reality it's like, okay, they touched us on like an article or a landing page or on social too before that. So a lot of decisions being made on just like kind of on a whim based on data. Yeah.
• 8:09
  That makes a lot of sense.
• 8:10
  So I'm curious when you talk about budget shifting, so like we're talking about this scenario where what you've seen is a lot of executive teams coming in saying AEO's working and saying we wanna reallocate budget away from SEO to AEO.
• 8:25
  What does that actually look like?
• 8:26
  Like, what are they pulling-- what are you seeing that they're pulling budget away from right now, and what are they dumping it into that you think is, like, not what they should be doing right now? Yeah, absolutely.
• 8:37
  I think one of the biggest things we're seeing is just like, you know, anything from freelance writers being cut across the board to investments in like technical SEO, link building.
• 8:46
  Like, it's shifted a lot more towards what I'd call practices that are sort of traditional SEO, but are a little bit more impactful on AEO side. And th- these things change pretty rapidly too.
• 8:58
  Like what we saw recently was folks saying, "Okay, we wanna cut like new content. We're finding that a lot of new content is not really performing well," et cetera, "on the SEO side, so we wanna cut a lot of that.
• 9:08
  We wanna focus on how do we show up in LLMs," you know, at the bottom of the funnel there.
• 9:13
  And a lot of that tends to be like maybe PR based stuff or maybe Reddit based stuff where they haven't traditionally been in there, but those are kind of like, you know, key source materials that LLMs are using at the moment.
• 9:24
  And a lot of this is really a s-- it's cyclical in nature.
• 9:28
  So like if you cut off like the stuff that LLMs are really using to discover new brands, to cite new brands, to mention new brands, once that training model and data refreshes and updates, a lot of the work that you've done on the SEO front or that, rather that you haven't done because you've shifted a lot of those budgets, is gonna reshow up in that next model there, where again, your visibility is gonna take a little bit of a hit.
• 9:51
  So we're seeing like overall folks are saying, "Let's cut some of the traditional SEO work that we're doing. Let's focus on like Reddit, let's focus on PR, brand mentions, things like this."
• 10:01
  But then we see a drop off overall in those updates of like, okay, you didn't do proper SEO for the last three, six months, right?
• 10:08
  And now like you're seeing that impact when the data refreshes there because it's now changed how it works on how it cites new brands, how it sources material, how it searches and scrapes the internet.
• 10:18
  So we're seeing a lot of that.
• 10:19
  Like, okay, we pulled a lot of our SEO stuff in favor of GEO, but then on the back end, like we didn't realize, okay, that actually these systems are pulling a ton from Google search results too.
• 10:31
  So we're seeing a little bit of a hit on that end. Yeah. I wanna kinda give the other side of this and hear how you respond to this.
• 10:38
  You know, I think at the same time, I've also heard you say that a lot of really top of funnel SEO is a lot of vanity metric stuff that maybe didn't have a big impact before, but you could show, you know, website traffic going up.
• 10:51
  These days it feels even less, you know, we talk all the time about the how is-- like what is articles and that those are just, you know, fading.
• 10:59
  You obviously you're not getting the traffic from those as much anymore with AI search.
• 11:03
  So I think like the flip side of this would say, "Hey, maybe it's okay that we're pulling some of our SEO resources that were contributing to this like top of funnel that was more of a vanity metric and probably not producing the real results and shifting that into AEO."
• 11:20
  How would you respond to that critique? Yeah, for sure.
• 11:22
  I think kinda like to fill in the audience too on what we've seen across the board, like, and you've probably noticed this too, if you're in the SEO space in general or you're doing SEO at a brand in-house or whatnot, that overall traffic either sort of stayed the same or declined, yet your conversions, et cetera, remained flat overall.
• 11:40
  And that's what we saw for ourselves. It's what we saw for clients overall. Talking to a bunch of people in the space, it's kind of similar story there.
• 11:47
  And so what that really means to us is that a lot of our top of the funnel, middle of the funnel stuff is just being eaten up by AI overviews- Mm-hmm... quick searches, things like that.
• 11:57
  People are getting that information really quickly there without needing to actually click on your site. But when you notice there too, like, okay, our conversions stayed the same. They didn't fundamentally drop.
• 12:07
  We didn't lose like a ton of revenue as a, you know, from organic as a percentage there. So what's actually going on?
• 12:13
  Typically, what we see there is that a lot of that content that you had was just generating vanity traffic.
• 12:19
  And so when we get that pushback too of like, "Okay, well, if that's the case, can we just like shift those budgets around? We don'tNeed to be doing as much traditional SEO, right?
• 12:27
  Well, we find it's typically actually the opposite.
• 12:30
  And what we find there is that a lot of the stuff that we were targeting earlier on was just because there was, number one, high search volume, low keyword difficulty, et cetera.
• 12:39
  But all these things correlate with traffic in the first place that's not as valuable.
• 12:44
  And so we can see that, like, if a keyword has a ton of search volume there, it has really low difficulty, not very big players competing for it, there's probably a reason, right?
• 12:52
  There's probably a reason why big brands are saying, "Okay, this is kind of a worthless term here. We don't wanna go after it."
• 12:58
  And one of the kinda, like, core metrics we use there typically is gonna be from actually a PPC standpoint.
• 13:03
  So looking at, like, what's the cost per click of a keyword there gives us a pretty good idea of how much people are willing to bid on that from a paid perspective, and that kinda gives the correlation of, is that a keyword that's worth going after?
• 13:15
  Does it have high intent traffic that can convert? 'Cause if someone's paying 10, 20, 100 bucks to bid on that keyword, you can bet that the traffic coming from it is pretty high intent and qualified.
• 13:25
  And so when we're talking about budgets and, like, saying, "Okay, maybe we can, you know, take our budgets and shift it elsewhere," what we typically find is that those keywords remaining where folks click through and where there aren't as many zero click searchers tend to be bottom of the funnel.
• 13:40
  And usually speaking, those are gonna be hyper-competitive, gonna be filled with really large brands, incumbents that have been there for a decade or so, folks that have built links over the last five, six years straight.
• 13:51
  And so typically speaking, you need a lot of budget to compete in those spaces, whereas you needed actually a little bit less to compete in stuff that was more top of the funnel previously.
• 14:00
  Even though it looks better on a graph, you know, to see, okay, our traffic's 500k a month and it's going up, it's like, okay, well, maybe only, like, 10% of that traffic is actually worthwhile for you guys to rank for.
• 14:10
  And that's really what I'm pushing in conversations with a lot of brands that I speak with is, like, hone in on that traffic at the very bottom of the funnel or maybe kinda mid to bottom of the funnel, where there's comparisons, where there's opportunities for you guys to build a brand there that's showing up.
• 14:26
  Those ones are gonna be far, far less volume overall, but it makes up for it so much more in your budget and your spend in the conversion area.
• 14:33
  If taking a step back here, do you see GEO as its own real discipline separate from SEO, or do you kinda see them intertwined as, like, one thing? Yeah, such a good question. It's, uh, definitely a controversial one.
• 14:47
  I feel like if you ask any given person, there's always a different answer. My opinion is kind of mixed at the moment. I think it's a mix between traditional SEO and then some other areas.
• 14:56
  So we've seen thing-- Like, I can't call it exactly, you know, just SEO in the sense that there's other factors here at play of, like, social media, for example.
• 15:05
  Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube, et cetera, all these kinda platforms pull in citations in LLMs and are all part of it.
• 15:13
  So those are a little bit outside the lens of, like, traditional SEO as far as I see it in that, like, you're not just sorta creating content or building links to that content, then promoting it.
• 15:22
  You're also hitting on social media there too.
• 15:25
  So for example, like, I wrote a post on LinkedIn around, like, kinda link building pricing agencies and how much do you charge for a back link and what does that look like, and that shows up pretty directly in LLMs for us right now, as well as even traditional search engines too.
• 15:40
  So it's kind of a mix between the two.
• 15:42
  I see it as, like, 80% of what you can impact from GEO is traditional SEO, and then that other 20% is kinda just unique ways-- either unique ways to do SEO that you wouldn't maybe traditionally do, or it's gonna be stuff that falls just a little bit outside of, like, branding, social media, PR.
• 16:00
  Yeah. It's interesting.
• 16:00
  I mean, I think that mirrors in our community is something that we've been seeing over the past few years, which is, like, the merging of all these different things together, where we have- Yeah...
• 16:09
  folks, content marketers that, you know, were-- They wrote blog pieces and they focused on SEO.
• 16:16
  And then as all [chuckles] of these things become more intertwined, it's like, you know, now they find themselves, like, touching on, you know, LinkedIn Social and, like, where maybe five, 10 years ago, there was a very separate role for that.
• 16:30
  Like, everything is becoming much more intertwined, and then they find themselves- Hundred percent...
• 16:34
  you know, pulling on a lot of different pieces here, and I think that's where a lot of our conversations come out about, like, what is the content marketer? Like, what are the mediums?
• 16:42
  Like, what is the scope of that work? And I think it, it keeps expanding, which is, it's a really interesting conversation that we're having a lot right, right now. Absolutely. You talk to a lot of companies.
• 16:50
  I'm curious, to the extent you can share, what's the dumbest budget decision you've seen somebody make? Yeah, no.
• 16:58
  I think one of the dumbest budget decisions I've seen is gonna be around, like, basically slashing all of SEO budget there and going in on like- Yeah...
• 17:06
  hey, we're seeing PR-based articles showing up in LLMs, or we're seeing X, Y, Z show up there, or whether it's, like, Reddit or whatever it is.
• 17:13
  Like, there's so many other ways that we can impact LLMs, and what we're seeing from a budget decision sometimes that just, like, does my head in is really, let's eliminate all of our SEO spend even though that's, like, 80% of how you show up in GEO, and focus on the kinda minute details there where we can just add on that fuel to the fire.
• 17:32
  And then, like I mentioned kinda earlier in this conversation, it's like when you go back to the training data in six to 12 months from now, if your SEO has gotten dramatically worse, your visibility in AI search is going to be also dramatically worse in the next six to twelve months.
• 17:47
  And so you're kinda cutting off your nose to spite your face in that sense of, like, you're basically removing sort of the main element there in favor of these smaller elements that give you a little bit of quicker wins there, so to speak.
• 17:58
  But when you refresh that, you take a step back, you're just gonna notice across the board your AI search tanks when, you know, it's sort of the opposite effect of what you had intended. Yeah.
• 18:08
  Do you think it's fair to kinda also look at this from a lens of, like, short-term investment versus long-term investment?
• 18:13
  Like, I-- That's another thing we talk about a lot in the community is, like, it feels really hard right now.
• 18:18
  I mean, SEO's built on this, like, kinda long-term investment, and, like, we know that this is gonna play out over three years, and if we do this the right way, like, we're gonna, you know, reap these, like, evergreen rewards.
• 18:29
  I think there's a lot these days, a lot of folks are like, "We don't know what things are gonna look like in two years or how stuff's gonna work." Totally. And so there's, like, a lack of confidence.
• 18:38
  I'm almost, like--Wondering if that's where some of this sentiment comes from, is like I think there's just such a short-term mindset- Yep...
• 18:46
  'cause there's so much confusion about where the future's headed and like so much hesitation to make-- continue to make long-term investments when it's like what happens when something changes three months from now and whatever SEO thing you were working on is now immediately irrelevant.
• 19:03
  Yeah, for sure. Do you think that's a fair lens to look at it? Yeah, 100%. I mean, it's crazy right now when you look at just like the AI stuff in general, right?
• 19:10
  Of like we're all inundated daily of like Claude releasing a new whatever update that's gonna end, you know, white collar work as we know it. Everybody's gonna lose their jobs overnight.
• 19:20
  Everybody's kinda freaking out about the state of everything, and rightfully so, right? We're just like bombarded with these messages on a daily basis.
• 19:27
  So I think it makes like looking at the long term and the future really hard and really difficult to project out.
• 19:33
  And I think, you know, from like an investment standpoint, and really, you know, there are ways that you can go about GEO and AI search in a short-term mindset that are actually productive, and there's ways that you can do it that are counterintuitive.
• 19:47
  So from like a productive angle lens is like, what are sort of the core ways that we can show up at the bottom of the funnel in AI search within the next one to two months?
• 19:57
  And so those tactics are actually stuff that I recommend because typically speaking, I think HubSpot came out with some good data on this.
• 20:04
  It was like ninety to ninety-two percent of mentions at the bottom of the funnel in AI search come from third-party sites and not your own.
• 20:12
  So what that means is, like, someone searching for, you know, the best XYZ tool for XYZ company, that mention when an LLM comes back and says, "Cool, it's gonna be HubSpot for XYZ for your business," they're not generating that mention from HubSpot itself.
• 20:28
  They're getting it from third-party sites that are saying, "These are the best tools or the best solutions for XYZ company."
• 20:35
  And so these are really good short-term tactics that do work, is getting listed on, like, various kinda software directories or if you're a service-based company, a service-based directory that's showing up there, getting a lot of reviews, ratings publicly, et cetera, getting on sort of tool listicles, roundups, service provider reviews.
• 20:52
  All these sorts of things are really short-term efforts that can have really good results in AI search.
• 20:58
  I think where people go wrong is that they take that and they extrapolate it to their own brand, and then they start to exploit these at scale, and that's where you see some of the impact on traditional SEO in a negative way, where it's gonna affect your long term in favor of the short term.
• 21:13
  Makes a lot of sense. So we've talked about, you know, an exec coming in and reallocating budget in a way that kind of doesn't make sense to you.
• 21:21
  I'm curious if you were to just come in, if you had, let's say, a CEO or a CMO who's like, "You know what? I actually don't know what to be investing in right now."
• 21:31
  Say you've got a company that's been doing traditional SEO for the past five years. They're looking at this, like, very scary landscape right now, trying to figure out where to put their money, where to reallocate.
• 21:42
  Let's say they turn it over to you. They're like, "Everything's on the table. What should we be doing?" What's your kind of like high level allocation of where they should be investing their resources right now?
• 21:52
  Yeah, for sure.
• 21:52
  I think, you know, I can really only speak from the SEO, GEO standpoint, so if they're doing stuff on like social or kinda other marketing stuff, I'd obviously recommend, you know, if that's doing well to never- Let's call it the content marketing budget.
• 22:04
  Yeah. So from like a content marketing standpoint, I mean, I'm a fan of never turning off systems that are producing results for you right now.
• 22:12
  So for example, you might look at your data and say, "Cool, we've got a lot of good SEO leads coming in here, but we're seeing like this shiny object over here in the corner, right, that's AI search," or maybe it's Reddit or maybe it's whatever.
• 22:25
  From a content marketing standpoint, we're seeing, okay, more people are getting leads, traffic from there. We wanna kinda divert budget into that.
• 22:32
  But to do that, if you have to turn off something that's really successful for you or pull budget from that into this new area, that's going to be a hit or miss.
• 22:40
  I'm usually not a super big fan of that because you're just gonna be hindering your results long term there. But if you're looking at budgets overall and saying, "What percentage do we need to put in SEO?
• 22:50
  What percentage in AI search? What percentage in PR?"
• 22:53
  Or whatever it is, typically speaking right now, I'm recommending and what I'm talking with most companies is having around seventy percent of your budget in traditional SEO there and then having-- If you're not already established from an SEO standpoint, you need to put more of your budget into SEO than you do into other areas.
• 23:11
  And so a lot of folks will come in with like no SEO sorta, you know, success right now. Like, they're not driving a lot of leads from organic as a whole, and they want to invest in AI search.
• 23:23
  And I think it's a little bit of a mistake, is like you need to set the groundwork and the foundation there on an SEO side to actually see good results long term from GEO.
• 23:32
  So typically, if you're like a new company coming in brand new, I recommend going more on the SEO side and then doing tactics on AI search that are more short term, not on your own website.
• 23:42
  So those are sort of the things I touched on earlier of like get as many brand mentions as you can on directories, listicles, roundups, et cetera.
• 23:50
  The stuff that's working right now that's not on your own site is stuff you can leverage really quickly.
• 23:55
  But if it's kind of a more mid-tier, mid-market, more established brand, I typically recommend keeping around seventy percent of your budget in SEO, diverting the rest to GEO specific tactics, and then stuff that's a little more on the PR end 'cause we are seeing some good results from traditional PR right now.
• 24:11
  Interesting.
• 24:12
  And if you're a content marketer who's kind of navigating this murky mess right now, what's kind of the one thing you would tell a content marketer that maybe they should be spending more time on tomorrow that they're not doing right now?
• 24:25
  Yeah.
• 24:25
  I think really focusing on branded work i-is what we're seeing of like not just writing content for the sake of ranking for given keywords here, 'cause like we mentioned, a lot of the stuff that's more top of the funnel, middle of the funnel is just getting eaten up, and you're not seeing clicks or results from that work.As you were traditionally.
• 24:44
  And so I think if you're a content marketer right now, you probably already have on your company site, you probably already have proper landing pages set up that are targeting more bottom of the funnel keywords there.
• 24:53
  You probably already have a backlog of really, really good quality content there that may just need to be refreshed.
• 24:58
  And so from what we're seeing work right now, we typically recommend folks focus on the branded angle of like, how do we build an actual brand long term where people associate us with XYZ in our space?
• 25:10
  Like we're the go-to for this in our space, and how do we build content that supports that?
• 25:15
  And so a lot of what we're recommending now is like, you know, creating sort of custom resources and guides and studies and data sets. Like how do we become the thought leaders in our space?
• 25:25
  And a lot of that tends to be more branded content rather than SEO driven content.
• 25:30
  And when it comes to SEO driven content, we typically recommend going back and refreshing and just updating your best quality content over time, rather than focusing on how do I publish a thousand net new articles in the next year.
• 25:42
  It's really about how do I create just a really good quality library of existing content, and then how do I expand that from the branded side.
• 25:49
  And when you're talking about branded content here, can you just throw out like a few titles of like the types of content that you would suggest investing in? Yeah, absolutely.
• 25:58
  So number one would be like any sort of industry based report. So we do this for ourselves, and we've done it for a lot of clients, both in like software spaces and in consumer based spaces too as well.
• 26:09
  So this could be, you know, like an industry, industry based report where you're interviewing experts, you're creating sort of a narrative or an idea or a thesis in your space, hypothesis of like what is trending in our space right now, how is that impacting people's results or their budgets, how is that impacting like hiring decisions, et cetera, and creating basically an industry report on that.
• 26:29
  So a good example for ourselves is we do a state of backlinks report every year. So just kind of going through various data on like how do backlinks impact the search landscape right now?
• 26:39
  What do experts in the space, both in-house and at various different agencies think? How do they see backlinks as a role in their current SEO strategies? Is that budget going up?
• 26:47
  Is it going down, staying the same, et cetera.
• 26:49
  So just kind of getting a lay of the land in your space and creating really helpful, unique data I think is a really good way to stand out from a brand perspective, and we're doing this both on the consumer side as well.
• 27:00
  So that's really one of the main ways, and then I think focusing too from a content marketing perspective on distribution channels as their own content channels, rather than just a way to share your blog post around, right?
• 27:12
  So treating things like LinkedIn and Reddit as their own branded channels rather than just saying, "Cool, we published a blog post. Let's go, you know, shoot it out to X and LinkedIn," et cetera.
• 27:22
  Like, nobody clicks on that stuff anymore, right? Like, people want native content on the platform, and we're seeing a lot more of that native content become part of search results, both traditionally and in AI search.
• 27:33
  So you're just getting like so many more compounding benefits by actually posting on the platform itself for the platform itself and for the content type.
• 27:41
  So those are kind of the routes we recommend from a branded perspective right now, and just what I'm seeing personally work. And the last thing I wanna ask here, it's a question I like to ask guests when...
• 27:50
  Well, when I remember to do it.
• 27:51
  But if you're a content marketer right now thinking about the skill set you need moving forward, what's one thing that you would be investing more in from just like your own skill perspective based on the future that you see?
• 28:04
  Yeah, absolutely. I think really the number one thing is distribution right now, of like how do you get-- how do you build relationships? How do you get your content out there and get it to be seen?
• 28:13
  Because I think a lot of what we're seeing is that, and, and we'll trend more in this direction as, you know, AI tools and models get better. Obviously, writing is gonna be a little bit eaten up over time.
• 28:22
  I think you still have a bit of a competitive edge as like obviously AI tools, they're pulling from what exists on the internet, right?
• 28:28
  So like if you have proprietary stuff of like, here's how I've written, whether it's content or landing pages or social posts over time that have really performed well, a lot of that content and that data is proprietary in that sense of like, it's not traditionally accessible.
• 28:41
  And so you have some insights there on what performs better overall for you, what sort of styles and tactics are you using.
• 28:48
  But I think, yeah, as like a content marketer, if you can hone in on one skill, it's gonna be distribution of like, how do I get my content out there?
• 28:55
  Because the more that people can use AI tools to write more content, the lower the barrier to entry, the more folks are going to be using those tools to publish mass content at scale.
• 29:04
  So it's really about how do you get eyes on it? How do you build a brand that people will actually want to read your content rather than saying, "Okay, it's just another article.
• 29:11
  It's just another LinkedIn post in a sea of millions and millions," and that number is growing on a daily basis. Jeremy, thanks for coming on. Yeah, thanks for having me. [outro music]