How to Sell AI SEO Services to Clients

Speaker A: Welcome to the Agency Growth Series, the podcast dedicated to setting, up, running, and scaling your SEO agency. Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Agency Growth Series podcast. This is the fourth episode, and today I'm joined by Ryan Shelley, CEO of SMA Marketing, who's going to talk to us about setting AI SEO services to clients. Hi, Ryan, and welcome to the show.

Speaker B: Hey, Benjamin. Thanks for having me.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's a pleasure. I really look forward to this discussion. And, uh, before I jump into my questions, I just wanted to start off with an icebreaker type of question, something that's very relevant given what everyone's really talking about. A bit of a cleaning type of conversation. But in your mind, is AEO or GEO or AI SEO the same as SEO or different? What's your opinion on this?

Speaker B: There's definitely a lot of overlapping principles, um, between all of. All of this. I mean, content is the basis for everything, right? Without content, we don't have indexes. Ah. Without content, we don't have large language models. So while there are definitely a lot of overlap and similarities, the technology behind both of these types of, um, informational retrieval systems, I guess we could call them, uh, is very different. Right. So, uh, I think those are the different nuances that we have to think a little bit differently about. Um, you know, the algorithms and, or the lack thereof, you know, also play a large role as well. So, yeah, there's. There's definitely a lot of debate online, you know, where it's, you know, you've got everything from SEO is dead to AI SEO is the exact same thing, and there's no difference at all. I think the truth is always somewhere in the middle. Um, and I think that's important for all of us to be curious, ask questions, and run our own tests and experiments to see what we know to be true for ourselves.

Speaker A: That's a good answer. And I think that leads well into my first question, which is, uh, how did your agency actually start selling AI SEO services? Was it customer demand from your clients who started asking for this type of service? Or was it a conscious business decision to diversify beyond SEO services? Because if I'm correct, sma, uh, marketing has been in the game for a long time now, since 2009, if I'm not wrong.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, just how did you actually go about, uh, selling your first AI SEO services?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think it goes back even further than that. Uh, being a smaller agency, um, and being, you know, a group of marketers who, who wanted to be maybe more. A little. Maybe more choosy. In who we do work with, um, but also intentionally staying small because honestly I just never had a desire to manage that many people. Um, I was fascinated by generative AI years ago. Um, I first started working with generative AI more so from like a knowledge graph building projects um, and using you know, GPT2, um, and using early models of BERT and T5. And how can we leverage these tools to help us maybe automate some of the larger optimization projects we had. Whether getting a first draft of titles and meta tax, you know that was kind of like the playground, um, and then showing that to my clients early on a lot of them had already bought into this, this automated approach, um, and leveraging technology to do some of these things. Even though we wouldn't necessarily publish stuff that came out of these early models, we could use them as a baseline to really help scale the work as a smaller team. Um, as ChatGPT got more popular and the brand itself kind of grew and we saw what they were doing um, with uh, citations and then obviously everything that Google was doing from featured snippet optimization, AI overviews, that's when we started to really track these things and begin to more, more M or less. It started as consulting. We work with a lot of technology companies that were already in the AI space using AI within their own programs and products and ah, we were showing this is what's happening in the world of search. This is how people are finding information. This is becoming more accessible to a broader use case and use base. So a good book that I think every entrepreneur should read whether or not you're in this space or not. It's um, crossing the chasm, uh, where it talks about how technology is adopted over time. And I still think we're very early in, in the world of AI search and not everybody's ready to cross the cabin. There's a lot of noise, there's a lot of confusion, there's a lot of people just as saying things that maybe aren't true. And what allowed our clients to actually sell or at least start to consult in this area where they would, you know, pay for that was the fact that we had built trust over the years being in the space, testing things and telling them the truth, like when we didn't know something, um, as we started to consult and we started to see some of our early work on knowledge graph building and content optimization around the knowledge graph actually having a direct impact on citations for a lot of our brands, um, we realized this is, this is something that we can, that we can Leverage from a business standpoint and actually help position these companies, ah, who are trying to make sense of this new realm amongst all the noise. So I hope that made some sense. But it was more of a conscious decision for us than a reactive decision. We already were kind of doing some of these things, um, you know, and there's a lot of names for it. But then we, we've kind of honed in on it and started to build around it specifically.

Speaker A: And what was some of the earliest objections and maybe some objections you still get today to when you propose these services for specific prospects or clients that you may have been working with and what do you do to overcome them? Because it's very difficult today. As you said, there's a lot of noise around this topic. So I'm guessing a lot of clients come in from the point of view, especially if they see that of skepticism regarding this new service. Again, what types of objections have you felt or had to deal with and that you overcame?

Speaker B: Actually not had many objections. I've had more information and uh, incorrect information that I've had to m. Like fix. Um, because a lot of people coming in, like I read this and it means that we can do this, or I saw this guy on LinkedIn that said we can automate this whole script and ranked overnight and you know, oh, I found this best X, Y, Z, you know, so they more come in with this preset idea of what it looks like and what they think it is. And so to me it's a lot more of like education and breaking down and almost pushing back against some of these preconceived notions. So they don't, they don't understand. Again, it's not an index. They don't understand. It's, it's not Google. A lot of brands too are like, I saw this hack that you can do xyz. But then other ones come in or like they think it, they, it just doesn't make sense. So they, they're just kind of confused. So it, they want the service. Most people are like, how, what are you doing? How are we, how are we tracking this? What, what can we do? And a lot of it's our current clients that have been like, what's going on here? But again, I think for the current clients, we've tracked really early the best we could. You know, before a lot of these tools came out, like, you know, keyword.com has their tool, which is obviously very helpful and to see what's going on. But before that I was building Python scripts with all These different API calls and running prompts manually myself just to see where my clients might be surfacing. So I also have that data now that I can also show to prospects and say, look, this is what we've been doing for the last, you know, it's this kind of stuff really for the last year. You know, it's a little bit more than a year ago that chat search came out. Right. Um, and so we have that credibility behind us. And then I am not afraid to call lies, lies, you know, and to say, look, we've got people on both sides of the spectrum. The truth is really somewhere in the middle. It's really a mixture of a lot of different things. Um, and then for myself having some further education in order to actually explain how large language models work, understanding how to kind of peel back the layers for them to see and go, this is what's actually happening. And here's the things that we can do to help increase visibility for your brand. So it's not so much objection, is it more as just like trying to, trying to actually set real expectations, what this actually is and why. It's more of a, uh, comprehensive, cohesive strategy with search, with paid with pr, with all of these other aspects and how do we bring it all together to help elevate their brand?

Speaker A: I guess this actually ties in well to one of the questions I wanted to ask you because when you talk about LLMs, a, ah, lot of it relies on working on this citation optimization and getting your content in these influential citations, which can extend beyond what we consider part of traditional SEO. A lot of it has to do with Medium, Quora, YouTube, Reddit. How has your agency adapted to these new skills, perhaps that you've had to acquire? Did you, do you maybe work with external partners? Have you hired, um, any additional people to help you with this work?

Speaker B: So, thankfully, a lot of the larger brands we work with have pretty robust teams and some of them have, you know, leaned into some of these areas. So we, we collaborate a lot either with their internal teams or their other vendors, um, in order to, to achieve some of these, these different results. I think the first thing is, is understanding which of those, you know, for most of our client base being very, very technical, YouTube still tends to be a very, very big citation engine for, for that space, especially on the Google side. Google favors YouTube a lot. We see that an AI overview is AI mode chat, not as much, but, you know, so looking at some of those other channels. So like, again, Reddit is, Reddit's a beast in its Own. Right. Um, I, I have no desire to be a, uh, expert in Reddit. You know, I looked at that years ago and realized like, I would literally have to pivot to only do Reddit in order to do it well. So. But a lot of these brands have people within them that have built their own kind of like niche in that area. So I think being open to partnerships and not, not looking in, uh, seeing yourself in a silo, I'm always one that when we get in with a client, like who is on the team, who are the other vendors we can work with, how can we partner with them? You know, if they're working with the PR agency, hey, can we do something like this, you know, and kind of collaborating? Because the reality, it's, you know, rising tides lifts all boats. You know, uh, too often we get in our little corner and we think that what we're doing is only what we're doing. But none of the things that we do online are happening in silos. They all have impacts in other areas. So we haven't hired internally, but we do look to partner and see what uh, resources that that client has. And some of the clients have, you know, limited budgets. Like they only have enough budget really for this specific thing. And so we'll try to find, okay, what are, what, what can we do that's going to make the most impact? You know, who do you have in your team? Like, have you answered questions on Quora or is there a third party site that's, that's really, really niche specific that keeps getting cited in one of these platforms that we can go build some sort of relationship with? I think to me it honestly goes back to like the, like the old days of SEO, uh, where it was a lot more about relationship building, you know, like, and I mean even before like, you know, like the PBN worlds of, you know, link acquisition. So one of my early mentors and coaches in the space was a, was a brilliant SEO, um, Eric Ward. His nickname was Link Moses. Uh, he's probably one of like the original link builders on the Internet. Um, so Eric was an amazing man. He passed away a few years ago, but I remember when he was mentoring me early on, he would always tell me, he's like, would you build that link if it had no Google value? Does it have raw, real business value? And that's kind of the principle that he, he came around with this whole links and SEO and the Internet. And uh, Eric was good at what he did. I mean anybody does a Google search, you'll see like all of the largest websites in the world. Amazon, he built Amazon's link structure in the early days. So guy knew what he was doing. And so that. That's the same principle today, right? Like, who are the relationships that I need to build with? And maybe it's another agency. You know, I do that a lot. I'm like, hey, you guys are really good at Reddit. Do you want to help us on this project? And I have other agencies that do that with me. They're like, hey, your guys are really good at the technical and, uh, the schema and the AI stuff. Can we partner on this specific project? And I think that's just what allows you to do this at scale. Too many agencies think they have to do everything, do what you're really good at, and partner with people that are good at other things. I mean, there's plenty of work to go around, so that's kind of how we approach that, I guess.

Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, I've heard that a lot from my previous discussions about working with different agencies who specialize in different types of verticals or different types of industries. It really seems like something that's a recurring theme among SEO agencies and successful ones. I'm curious to know how you actually formulate pricing around AI SEO services. How do you come up with the pricing? How do you justify the pricing behind those services? Are they different from your traditional SEO services? And maybe this could be a second question after as a follow up. What expectations do you set and what types of metrics do you communicate to your clients to say this has been successful?

Speaker B: Yeah, so the pricing is much higher than just our core SEO services. Now, our core SEO services will result in some AI, uh, visibility. That's just the nature of the way some of these systems work. There is some overlap, but when we're doing more specific content engineering work around the AI side of things, it's much more of a heavy lift. And I'm much more involved in the process. So because I'm much more involved in the process, there's already an elevated cost there just because of my time. And then it really depends on what the client is able to do. So we kind of have like a base price that we set. Like this is the bare minimum. And the reason we have the bare minimums is we've looked at what does it cost us to do this, like, what's the lift on our side, what are our costs, what's our basic margin? And then what is the ultimate value for the client? Too many times early in my agency days you know, I would just be like, okay, what does this cost me to do? Great, that's what I'll charge them, you know, and then I would work really, really hard and realize I'm like, I'm making like $5 an hour and it's not sustainable. And then, you know, there's plenty of times where we've done something like really, really good, made somebody a lot of money and we saw no benefit. We saw no, like they were kind of like, yeah, well you're supposed to do that, you know. And I was like, ah, well, we like over delivered, you know. And so to kind of make sure that we're protected in a sense, even though it's a partnership, like what is the value that they're going to get out of this? And then from there we'll do some value based pricing. So we do have like kind of a bare bones, like, we will not go under this because it kills our margin. Um, but then from there there is a value based aspect to it. What industry are you in? What are the ROI we're looking for? Um, there's certain industries where we get one lead, they close that deal. And this has happened multiple times. It pays for us for like the next five years, right? So for that we can charge more because the value is much higher. Pricing's always hard. Pricing is always one of those complex things, you know, especially like I didn't go originally, I didn't go to business school, like I didn't have any of these assets, you know. And so then understanding, okay, what is the willingness to pay, that's a hard thing today, right? Because you have everything from people looking for free, do it yourself, or are you paying for expertise? And that's in every market, right? And you definitely pay, you get what you pay for. So when we look at the metrics, how do we prove this? How do we, how do we kind of like show our results? It's definitely difficult. The metrics have to change, right? Will Reynolds, Seer Interactive did a great article, I think it was even last year, about old SEO. Metrics aren't going to fly in this new space. So we, we really do try to tie things back to revenue. So that means setting up the right tracking. So what, what is our goal? Like, what is the client trying to achieve? And we get that on paper, we get that in writing that way. It's not this kind of, oh, I said on this call, but today it's this. And we reaffirm that on our calls. Then we make sure that we have the right tracking set up so that we can track that. So typically like form fills or E commerce and sales and then we do our best to pull that data into reporting to where we can attribute that to roi because at the end of the day that's what matters. And then we look at the leading indicators like are we ranking in certain positions in traditional search? And then what are the queries or the questions around that that might be surfacing in the LLMs. But then even today, which is really nice, thankfully like these systems have started adding referral track like linking and uh, utms to their tracking and you can pull in some of that data. I mean everything's filtered in ga, but we can actually attribute LLM visits to desired actions. So we've got E commerce clients where we can say, all right, we drove this much traffic from ChatGPT and they sold this, you sold this many products or you got these types of leads and we connect that to a CRM and we track that. You know, so we've got a client that we were able to track. They work in the government space. We were able to track them getting a very, very high level government lead through an Azure chat GPT install within the US military and we track that into their CRM. So you got to have collaboration with sales. Yep. We see the entry point. Has that person ever come before? No, we didn't know them. This is a new lead, It's a good lead. It's being worked on and so then we report on that. Obviously we want to have some credit for that win. So it really does come down with like setting tracking up right, having some analytics understanding but then also realizing, and this is huge I think for any agency, letting clients know that Google Analytics and search console are not 100% of your data, that it's all being filtered, that Google isn't giving you everything. So these are trends. But then always make sure you have some sort of CRM to back that up with. For our clients that don't, most of them do. But let's say it's a newer client. We help them get on a CRM because it's going to help us out. If we can say these many people came in, this is where they are in your CRM. Are they good leads? Are they not good leads? And we could track that down the road because roi, if you make them money, they don't mind paying you money, but you have to show them that you're making them money. So um, I think that's uh, that's an important Thing I'm still as far as like what metrics? You know, I would say visibility a lot. What does that mean? Are you being cited? Is your brand being cited within a particular topic? Can we run all of the prompts? No, there's just no way that one, that's not an ethical use of artificial intelligence. And then two, you drive yourself crazy. But let's pick some high profile questions that we know are going to be asked. Relatively common. And what's your visibility? How visible are you within those, those types of prompts? And those again I would say those are more like leading indicators because once we see that we can also track it to the page level. Did someone visit that page through an LLM? And then what actions did they take? Because I think that's where you show the whole journey and then you make like. So we work a lot of CMOs, we make them look really awesome when they go into a meeting and they're like, look at all this traffic. But look what this traffic did. And here's our business position now.

Speaker A: So beyond that, uh, visibility score, are there any other metrics that I'm thinking, for example sentiment score that you're now starting to communicate with uh, your clients? Because as we know, I mean it's not like Google doesn't just list websites, it actually describes what the brand is, what it does and what the words are associated with and that could be positive, neutral, negative. I'm curious to know about how you've actually, you started communicating this to clients and. Yeah, how they've received this specific new type of metric.

Speaker B: Yeah, so we've, you know, sentiment score we use in our in demon content creation side of things. I think that's obviously that's another really great metric because another thing that plays into visibility is brand reputation. Right. That plays a role in Google E A T like brand reputation is part of that. Right. And uh, the LLMs are going to look at that too. So again the LLMs are not crawling an index, they're crawling the content. What are people saying about it? And they, if you type in your brand name into a chat system, you know, chat GPT and it's like, you know, well, half the people hate this company. You've got a major issue, right? And that's actually something that if you can surface for a client, especially early in the engagement, say hey, you just brought us on. I don't know what you guys been doing in the past, but we've got some reputation issues that we need to handle and take care of. Um, because that May be a reason you're not ranking in the first place. So that could also impact SEO and so many other things. So I do like the sentiment score. I try to. I can get really technical and nerdy because I like this stuff, like, really quick. So I try to take these reports and these analytics, um, and kind of bring them into a term or something that they would understand. So I usually translate that into, like, here's your reputation, here's what people think of your business instead of just sediment analysis. Like, it makes you sound smart when you say that. But a lot of these people, like, I can't translate that to my, to my C level. So what does this mean? Um, so I'll take all of our reporting and then I'll. I'll kind of break it down into layman's terms, you know, and like, here's how visible you are and here's how you're being perceived. So here's how many people are seeing you, here's what those people think of you, and here's what they're doing as a result of that. So, uh, I think clients can digest that and then they can also tell their boss. Is that. So I would encourage all the nerds out there, like me, to like, keep our language in house and then translate that for the people who need to do something with it.

Speaker A: That's good advice. I'm curious about the, uh, client expectations. What has been your experience with clients asking about AOGO AISCO services? Do they expect results really quickly? How do you balance fast? Maybe if they expect fast results, fast results with applying best practices for AI SEO in your mind, how long do these types of initiatives take? For example, improving the sentiment score and what has been the overall expectation from customers?

Speaker B: One of the things that I've had to learn over the years is that if I don't set expectations, they will often set unrealistic expectations. So I try to come in early and say, here's what is, uh, actually achievable within this space. And they may say, okay, well, we've got a timeline and we've got to show X result, and there are quick wins. Most sites just have, like, major issues with, like, content structure. They have, you know, issues with not covering a topic. Like they think they cover a topic, but they just don't. Or they don't have good author pages and author signals, and they're not talking about the awards and like, these little things that you can easily start to, like, add in value and talk about the business in a positive light. That could relatively quickly influence these scores. I mean, I'm, uh, not going to say this happens all the time, but I've seen changes happen in 24 hours. And if you look at AIOS and you track any of that, anybody, you'll see that literally changes daily, if not multiple times a day. Why? Because it's an lnm, not an index. So those, those positions are constantly evolving and revolving through that. And sometimes there'll be 14 citations, sometimes there'll be three. Um, and so I think putting that out and testing that, you know, we always say we have markers, at least when we get started, we have a 30, 60, 90 day checkpoint and we look at what's happening at those points and then we make adjustments and then we just keep running on these sprints, constantly making adjustments. And uh, I will say when it comes to it now, the way I talk about it is that this isn't like ranking, this isn't like you score, your page has a page score, that you're in an algorithm and that you kind of get a rank, maintain and hold. That's not what we're talking about here. It's uh, much more conversational, much more nuanced. And so while you're going to see your scores go up and down, we're looking at what are the trends telling us long term about your brand. I'll have those checkpoints. And sometimes, you know, things go well and sometimes things just go really well and we don't really know all the reasons why and it's great and sometimes we have to keep going back to the drawing board. But I think that we're building trust happens. You know, I, I've, even in the SEO space, you know, we've

Speaker A: um, we

Speaker B: had a client that stuck with us. They were really frustrating time. And the reason why they stuck with us is because we built trust and we eventually, they eventually took the gamble I wanted them to take and it paid off huge. One of those few cases where like removing content on a page actually increased rank and we haven't lost it since, um, because of the different intent signals. So I, I think ultimately managing those expectations, you have to kind of set that because the client, you know, they're in their office a lot of the time, they're having all these inputs and people coming in and saying, okay, here's what we're doing, you have to come, here's what we're doing today, here's what we're trying to achieve. This is what we actually have control over. This is what we have no control Over. And we hope we'll get picked up. So we'll do everything we can. We'll keep marching forward and we're going to have checkpoints and we're going to continue to make adjustments and tweaks and tests along the way. And just being open with them, that's the biggest thing. Like being honest, like, hey, we, we did all this work and nothing happened.

Speaker A: Um,

Speaker B: okay, what do we learn from that? All right, these may be not, these might not be the levers to pull. So here's what we're going to be doing instead. So that way they, they at least know, right? Everybody's had times where they've done things and it didn't work the way we wanted to. But when we're open and we're honest about that, I think it goes a long way. And some clients just, let's, uh, face it, we've all had it. They have unrealistic expectations or they've got pressures that they can't control. And it may be, in that case, it's just better to say, hey, maybe we're just not a good fit. We really tried. We're really sorry. Good luck.

Speaker A: Good way to lead into my next question, which is, is there a certain type of client with which you decide, okay, AI SEO is not what you should be doing right now, or on the contrary, one where you're like, actually, you're really good in SEO, but you're not being cited in ChatGPT or AI overviews and design where we can actually improve your visibility. I'm curious to know if there's any industry you're particularly fond of working in. Are there any industries that are a bit of a surprise in terms, I mean, you talked about the one, you just gave the example there for the government of the US we're starting to really think outside the box in terms of the types of industries that are gaining leads and customers through ChatGPT. Is there any one specific type of customer that you'd particularly like to work or not like to work with?

Speaker B: Yeah, so we're very much, you know, we work a lot in, in SaaS, but then we also work a lot in like, defense. Um, and believe it or not, like in those defense companies, we see quite a bit of high intent traffic coming through these, these chat systems. Um, and you'll expect it to be chat gbt because most of the people in government have to use Microsoft because Microsoft has been coined as the, the safe government approved platform. So they're all using Azure, which means they're using ChatGPT most times some copilot. But the reality is it's mostly chatgpt SaaS. We see a lot of success in it as well because the technology space tends to use these platforms before everybody else. So that's kind of a natural progression. Local businesses, there are some where we see some movement, but that's probably an area where I don't think I've seen as much uses for people finding localized services through, through chat or LLM search. Most of the LLM search, you know, typically is that very early stage informational where they're asking questions and then everybody copies the brands they find there and goes to Google and then does a Google search. So, um, I think one of the big things that is often overlooked is now the importance of brand SEO. So many people think that it's just a given. Well, my, my brand, I'm going to rank for my brand. That's just not true. Um, and that's honestly where most companies overlook and most companies will start to is like we need to do brand and LLM brand LLM optimization because if you are cited it's only from third party sources and they're not pulling information from your own site, which is not really good because you're leaving it up to somebody else's interpretation. But then when they do, when you do show up in a query and then someone goes and Googles you, you're not even there too. So like that's still it. That started in LLM and it's continuing into SEO. So this, there's a kind of the crossover. I think that's probably what the most overlooked space I see, even in, even in industries where it is really relevant. But local I would say is not the one where I'm seeing as much. An area where I was very surprised to see was actually in consumer goods. We have a client that is a large mattress maker and we've actually sold thousands of dollars of mattresses through ChatGPT. I didn't think that that would happen. I thought it would be more of an informational query that pushes people over. But because we're tracking the sources, uh, it blows me away that these people will do their whole search within the chat platform and it'll result into them coming to the site and buying a mattress or something like that. Probably was the one that I was like, okay, we're starting to jump the chasm here a little bit where a consumer now is using a platform like ChatGPT to not only research a product but follow through with a purchase. Like they trusted that search enough to do that. So

Speaker A: I'm curious to know about what you think about the future of SEO agencies with the proliferation of LLMs. Do you think that every SEO agency in the future, they'll want to stay relevant in this? I mean, uh, with everything that's going on, will have to start learning the principles of AI SEO and start offering this as a service.

Speaker B: I'm watching a lot of people dig in their heels. It's one of the reasons I've just kind of checked out on LinkedIn lately. I just, I don't know, just in, you know, just both sides of it, honestly, to where it's like it's the same thing, it's the same principles. And I will, I will agree, like the foundations are very, very similar, but we're working, like I'll say before, we're working with a completely different technology. And it's going to be interesting to see how these LLMs work moving forward and what the progression is going to be in the space. Because they're really only using training data up until, you know, November of last year. I think that's what ChatGPT5 is on. And these LLMs probably won't be going to regular indexes for that training data because there's so much AI content online and it would be foolish as an engineer to train the LLMs on AI written content to help it be better at being a human. Kind of doesn't work that way. So they're going to have to get creative in how they train. But I do think moving forward SEOs, even if you decide that you're not going to learn Python and learn API calls and understanding neural networks and all of that stuff, you should understand the basics of LLMs and how generative AI works and the fact that, you know, like, like the basic stuff, like I know SEOs that think, you know, image generation is an LLM. It's not. Image generation is done through a number of different things, whether it be a GAN or a CNN or, or, or diffusion networks or something like that. So understand and get familiar with the baselines because this is where it's going. Google yesterday was the first time I, I put a query into my Chrome browser. I didn't ask it to go into AI mode. And Google put me in AI mode immediately. I've never had that happen before. But that is what they're moving towards. They're moving towards this very personalized, very individualistic search experience using their LLMs. Um, and actually here's a. Like Google's using Diffusion models now for their LLMs, that's like a breakthrough that's happened within the AI space because diffusion models were only used for, like, image generation. That's where you get these really cool, realistic images. And so these models are changing, the technology is changing. So having a baseline understanding of what can be done, what is being done, what are the inputs, how do they read content? You know, here's a big one. Do LLMs read structured data? You know, and there's a lot of people say, yes, they do, and a lot of people say, no, they don't. Well, when an LLM goes and crawls a page, it doesn't crawl a page. It reads the text on the page. It's trained to read the text. It's not reading your HTML, it's interacting with the text like, uh, a person. So, no, it's not reading your structured data. But if you have structured data, it can influence it whether it's being pulled in the index when it does a rag search. And if you didn't understand like, rag and those things, like, familiar. Familiarize yourself with those concepts. You don't have to be an expert, but be no more than your clients do so you can have an understanding because it is shifting and changing you.

Speaker A: Obviously, knowing all of this and as you said, nerding out about this topic. Has this helped you convince some of these skeptical clients about actually trying the AO services that you're providing?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I mean, uh, because they're like, oh, this guy's not just a. And if you are one of these, sorry, he's not an AI bro is what I call them, where they, they just like vibe code and, and. And make up these like, comment, comment script, and you'll get a thousand clients in the next 45 seconds. You know, it's like, oh, no, this guy's actually studying. So, like, I'm getting, I'm working towards. I'm getting my master's and working towards my doctorate in the AI space. Um, a lot for my own knowledge. I want to learn. I want to know what's. What's going on. I want to be able to teach my kids what's going on in the space. Um, so I want to have that baseline understanding. And I think when you, when you come to a client, and then they're like, oh, this guy knows what he's talking about. He's not making just, like, these random things. He's not promised me overnight success. That's something I would always tell people early on, even in SEO, is like, you don't have to go with me. But anybody that promises you that they'll get you number one ranking tomorrow, please don't hire them because they're lying to you and they're going to take your money and run. You know, there was a time where we could do that, right? Like I remember back in the day where like, man, you give me, you know, you give me a couple days and with a couple title tags and some meta keywords and good descriptions, I'm gonna get your site ranking real quick. That's not how it works anymore. Um, and it's even more nuanced now with the LLM. So having that understanding, just the baseline. So get some education, but do it from reputable sources. You know, people in this space that know what they're talking about. I think that is, that's important.

Speaker A: Could you list some resources, people, publications? I think a lot of our listeners, a lot of them will be keyword.com users and thus SEO agencies are interested in implementing these new services. They see a lot of information, as you said, it's incorrect on LinkedIn, can be perceived as snake oil type of marketing. What exactly do you think a SEO agency that's scared about the future and is thinking, I need to start doing this or I'm going to become irrelevant. What should they be following? What concrete actions should be taking to becoming an expert in this field?

Speaker B: Well, I'm writing a lot about it. I talk a lot about it on my YouTube channel. If you think that what I'm saying makes sense, please follow me there. Um, even putting together a course for marketers, generative, uh, AI course that's going to step through all of these things for marketers so that they can get just a baseline understanding of, of what it is. Brittany Mueller does a great job of, of putting out like realistic expectations. She used to be with Maz. She's, she now does a. That's what she does is AI education. I, uh, I like Dwayne Foster, if you, if anybody follows him. Um, again, very, very good information, technically sound, realistic expectations. Mike King from Ipool Rank, obviously he's been on this for, for a long time. He's telling me that I would highly recommend following reading his articles. Um, those are, those are some of the people that I, that I'll trust that I actually have like a, I have an automation set up that anytime that they post something new, it slacks me so that I can go just, just take a look at it and kind of see what's happening in the space because I trust those Those people, they've, they're proven track records. Right. Um, but they're also conscious about like the other things that are important too, like the, the ethical impacts both in, you know, the systems themselves, the inputs. How are we using this, how are we repurposing stuff, are we citing people? Like all the things that we need to really take into account when we're, when we're using this type of technology. So I would, you know, kind of find some of those voices and question everything. I think this just comes from my, you know, growing up as a skater, punk rock kid playing in punk bands, like never trusting authority. So like if anything Chat, GPT or Google is telling you, like don't, don't take it at face value, go research, study, do your own stuff. Like um, I've, I've got a uh, I've got a research paper that we're, we're going to come out here on, on AI ethics and then I've got another one on you know, ranking signals that, that we did building. You know, I built my own um, machine machine learning model and, and ran some tests and there's some interesting insights in there and applies to both SEO as well as AIO or GEO or whatever we want to call it. So um, get the data, question, question everything that everybody's doing and run tests. You know, um, that's where I've learned the most. I've, I've broken a lot of stuff, but I've learned a lot from it. Um, yeah, sometimes a fell miserably but it's, it's been really, really good. Like um, you know, recently I'm doing this kind of like, can I keep updating this content in a way and eventually my videos in the a, uh, is in the AIO always. But my blog is not ever cited. My video is always there. So I've, I've constantly made these tweaks and like with some of this new research I've done, I think I've uncovered something. So we'll see. We're going to make those changes. But I post that stuff and so people can see that hey, his blog's not ranking yet. And I'm like, yeah, I know it's not ranking yet. I'm still trying to figure this out. Maybe we can do it together. So I think that's how we learn. Follow those people. If you're interested in the YouTube videos, you can check out some of the stuff I'm doing there, ask questions if I find something, read. Um, if you really want to get nerdy I mean, uh, there's tons of books out there, you know, like, you don't have to read this one, but this one will give you a lot of understanding of how, like, the baselines of these neural networks and things that, like, work. But then there's, you know, uh, who just put one out. Sorry, I'm, like, going a thousand different directions. Eric. Inga just. They did a Generative AI SEO book that's a great book for all SEOs. You know, uh, he's. He's built and sold multiple agencies. Um, highly recommend that book. Um, because here's an SEO that's pivoted. He's been in the industry way even longer than I've been in the industry. The guy knows his stuff and he puts it in plain, like, SEO language. So there's a lot of resources out there, but, like, read it and then, like I said, challenge it.

Speaker A: I'll definitely try to link some of those resources in the description if you're willing to share them as well, as well as your YouTube channel for anyone who wishes to follow your content. But, yeah, I mean, it sounds like I need to read some of those books as well, so I'm definitely going to have to ask you about them. Uh, and what would you say, just as a final question, is the time to fluency in AI SEO, in your opinion? From the moment somebody who's decently well versed in SEO starts dedicating time to this?

Speaker B: Most of my team is not as technical as me. In fact, none. None of them really are like. And all of them are very fluent and proficient in it. Now, I started talking about it years ago, but I really started pressing them to learn it maybe the last six months. I think if you really, like, harness some time and you really devote some time to it, six to 12 months, you can be, like, really know your stuff. But even in a weekend, you can do to a point where you can talk about it, like, with. With some educated thoughts, right? Where you're not just like, kind of go, well, I think, like, well, no, this is, this is what's going on. Uh, it just takes time. So, like, the books you're reading, the books you're listening to, the videos you're watching, like, um, all of that, it plays a big role. Like, for me, I know I need the constraints. Like, if I'm not getting graded on it, I probably won't do it. Which is the one main reason why I force myself to take classes and, like, pay for them. Because if I pay for it, I know that I'm going to do the work. That's just. I have to do that for myself because I'm. I need that motivation. Um, but if you're motivated on your own, like, set it up, set some course time. Uh, Google actually has a really good course, too. Like, they're just basic generative AI course is really good, just gives you some basic understanding. You can do that in a weekend and get some really good knowledge there. And, uh, if you want, they'll even give you a few. You can pay to take a test and get a little badge. And then people think that you're really smart, um, because you've got this, uh, generative AI badge, you know, on LinkedIn. So. And then I would even, you know, Harvard Online does courses that are actually reasonable. M. MIT does classes that are reasonable. Um, all of these types of things are really important because you're learning from, like, a lot of these schools. This is where this technology came out of originally. So you're learning from these early pioneers in the space. And you'll get a foundational knowledge that'll take you a little bit longer, but, like, invest your time and energy in it, because it's not going away. It's just moving from here, so.

Speaker A: Well, it's clear that you're an expert in this topic, and this has been super insightful. I have no further questions. I just wanted to thank you for joining me on today's podcast and sharing all of your knowledge, the resources, everything you know about selling AI SEO services. I'm sure there's a lot that I'm going to do as homework following this conversation. If you have any last words that you wanted to. To share with our audience before finishing

Speaker B: this call, uh, just, I mean, thanks for having me. And yeah, if anybody has any questions and they want to reach out, um, I'm an open book, so.

Speaker A: All right, thank you very much, Ryan. Hope to see you on the next episode, too.

Speaker B: Yeah.