From SEO in 1997 to Today: Brent Payne's Personal Journey | Saw.com

Speaker 1: 0:01

Hi, this is Jeff Gabriel, founder and CEO of SAWcom and the host of the Uncomfortable podcast. This episode is particularly resonant for me. Brent, my guest today, and I embarked on our sales careers at a similar time in the late 90s or early 2000s. If you really think about it, this was pre-Internet Technologies time, like fax machines were still in use, typewriters were still in use. I even remember DocuSign being a marvel and it wasn't really accepted or socially acceptable in business transactions. Many businesses back then, including newspapers, are caught off guard by these technological shifts and many forward-thinking ones or new ones definitely took advantage during those times. Back then, sales training and sales culture was definitely a lot different. It was aggressive, it was loud, it was male-dominated and Brent's sales training and experiences mirrored mine. We're definitely going to talk about those a little bit. A lot of those methods or the way that things were would not be acceptable today.

Speaker 1: 1:08

What is consistent is he was driven, and he is driven to be the best in sales. What he did differently than his colleagues is he used SEO. What he did was he ended up going from the 50th salesperson at his company to number one in just under a year. After that, he left and went on to establish his own successful business. However, after losing his main client and putting all of his eggs in one basket, he lost about 80% of his revenue and almost went out of business. But since he's bounced back, he's learned valuable lessons along the way, which he shares in this episode, among other insights.

Speaker 1: 1:53

Again, I think this is a great episode. I think it's a lot to learn. It flows pretty well. And remember, check us out on Apple Podcasts, spotify If you want to see my ugly mug, check us out on YouTube and always leave me some comments. It's always nice to see that people are enjoying the episodes. Or send us an email to buzzatsacom and if you like what Brent has to say, send him an email to brentbrentus. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 1: 2:34

Today on the Uncomfortable Podcast, we have the privilege of introducing Brent Payne, a seasoned SEO professional with over two decades of experience as an SEO consultant. He pioneered Groupon's coupon section from the ground up, securing the top position for highly competitive search terms such as Hobby Lobby coupons. He also worked for the Tribune, a massive worldwide news organization, where he achieved remarkable rankings for trending topics like Michael Jackson Dead and Hudson River Plain Crash. I remember those results or those situations he also has excelled in Amazon merchandising, affiliate marketing and social media marketing. His skill set encompasses in-house SEO, search engine marketing, affiliate marketing, page search advertising, viral marketing and social media marketing, among others. Join us today as we explore the world of digital marketing again with Brent Payne, a true master in his field.

Speaker 2: 3:33

So and I appreciate that. That's a great intro. That's awesome.

Speaker 1: 3:36

And also the arch nemesis of all domain brokers. We usually have some heated debates with SEO people. Domainers are great.

Speaker 2: 3:45

I love you guys. You're awesome part of the internet. You make the internet run. I've had a great time with you over the past couple of years that we've known each other so we can figure it out once in a while. I hear you.

Speaker 1: 3:58

So I got into the domain business in 2010. And it has changed immensely over 14 years. And, looking at your background, I'd like to kind of wind back the clock and I don't want to go through it every step of the way. But I see that you started your SEO career in 1997 at Viking Components. So why don't you start there and tell us what was SEO like then for the history books and the history books? We love the internet, and then we can kind of get more up to the future and what's going on now.

Speaker 2: 4:33

So I was a very cocky 23-year-old salesperson selling ram chips and flash cards for digital cameras. I was literally grabbing a phone book calling the different resellers computer resellers that were in the phone book. I had a staunch New Yorker as my trainer. His name's Mike Stein. I loved him to death but hated him at the time, and I would literally call people, ask him who they're using for their memory needs and then tell them and convince him to use Viking Components instead. If, at any point during that call, mike Stein did not like the way the call was going, he would hang up the call on me and then I'd have to call him back. So this is the type of guy that I was dealing with. When I had a question that I couldn't answer, I'd have to put them on hold because I had another call coming in. I didn't have any calls coming in.

Speaker 2: 5:27

This is the game that we played in order to get this stuff going. So there's the level set of where I was. I then decided that I wanted to stop calling out of the phone book and focus on three different companies Amazoncom, 800.com and buycom. There's only three that I really wanted to focus on. So, after some internal turmoil where the office got shut down in Utah, where I was out of the time. I moved to Southern California, go to headquarters and I tell Glenn McCusker, the CEO of Viking Components hey, I will be your number one salesperson in a year if I can have Amazoncom, 800.com and buycom. And he said, kid, you're number 55 out of 80 salespeople.

Speaker 1: 6:17

You're 80 grand.

Speaker 2: 6:20

You make 80 grand a year. Tammy Cook, who runs CompUSA right sales for CompUSA. She makes over a million dollars a year. There's no way you're going to catch up with her, there's no. I'm like I will be your number one salesperson and I was just you know nothing to lose. I was making 70 grand a year at the time Not bad for 23.

Speaker 1: 6:41

No not bad at all.

Speaker 2: 6:42

I was 21 at the time, so I got to correct that I was 21 at the time. I later became 23. So he says fine, I'll give you the three accounts, but if you're not my number one salesperson a year, I fire you. So I start calling on Amazon 800 and buycom. Amazon doesn't even have electronics yet, they just have books. And I know they're going to get electronics. So I'm like some inside information.

Speaker 1: 7:08

I can do auctions at that point too. I'm not sure what they're doing.

Speaker 2: 7:12

I literally knew that I had to get my flashcards and RAM chips on there. So I fly up to meet with Chad McFadden at the VA hospital in Seattle and he blows me off for a three o'clock appointment. He blows me off completely. I sit there until 7pm in the lobby watching the two banks of elevators at the VA hospital, amazon original headquarters. I had done some sniffing around on the internet, found out what Chad kind of looked like. He comes down the elevators. I walk up to him like hey, brent Payne, you didn't meet with me. He's like that was supposed to be at 3 o'clock, I know, but you didn't meet with me. I can't go back to Southern California without meeting with you. So he sits down. We meet for 30 minutes. The only thing he allows me to put into the Amazon database or set up as ASINs were flashcards for digital cameras. That's it. No RAM. My boss wanted me to sell RAM. Okay, whatever, we'll figure it out. I go back. No sales for three months. Now I have my SKUs set up, product line, all that stuff nothing for three months.

Speaker 2: 8:16

I get a hold of Erin Jane Oliphson, who's head of editorial, head of editorial on Amazon. Okay, amazon had this process. Back then there was like this whole editorial team, kind of like an online newspaper later became a tribute where they would focus on the content of the pages. They'd have a plus detail pages with the column back then which are like super detailed, and then they'd have regular pages etc. So she helped us like do stuff. Well, I started playing with the word choices that I was using compact flash, one word, compact flash, two words. 256 megabyte one word, 256 megabyte, two words and just started messing with this on different sizes. It was a 64, 120, and then 256 at the time.

Speaker 2: 8:59

So I find out about a month after talking to Erin Jane and getting all this editorial stuff fixed, that they play well. They placed an order with me for $2.3 million worth of flashcards. Viking is so panicked about this that they refuse to order the product, to build the products to ship to Amazon. And I'm pissed because I just got a $2.3 million order. That's a lot of money. I'm a hundred percent commission salesperson. So Glenn McCusker says kid, you got to go get them to prepay that. So Amazon prepays on a $2.3 million flashcard order and then we have no way of getting that much product to them at all. And what do I do? I say, yeah, I got it in stock, no problem, we'll get it to you. You're going to take us about 10 days to get it to you. Yeah, I ship out what we have. Ship out some more Bottom line is I do the final shipment. We have a box on my lap in an airplane seat flying to Seattle, and that's how I land. It wasn't Seattle Actually, it was one of their distribution centers. That's how we end up finally delivering the last box to them on time.

Speaker 2: 10:16

Each time, however, I was making more money because the chips were getting cheaper and cheaper, like ram and flash, and everything was just nose diving at the time. So what started as like a 7% margin deal ended up being like a 32 point deal at the end. I made bank that year, Bank about six months of it, and at the end of the year they'd cut my pay 11 times. Okay, actually it's over a year and a half. Over a year and a half, they cut my pay 11 times and I ended up selling over 50% of the division's entire revenue with flashcards and ram from just Amazon, because buy an 800 800 was out of business by then. Buycom was kind of like floundering and never really caught up with Amazon, eventually got purchased by I can't remember who it was. Rakatan ended up getting purchased by Rakatan and I made 287 grants at age 22 and a half to 23 and a half. I'm in fat city, super happy.

Speaker 1: 11:19

This is awesome.

Speaker 2: 11:22

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

Speaker 1: 11:42

So you brought up I'm sorry to interrupt you you brought up a couple of really interesting points is the first is getting your pay cut. As a salesperson and I haven't had a sales job that I haven't gotten my pay cut and I've said that to people getting into sales and my friends that are in sales is that if you aren't doing good enough then your pay won't get cut. If your pay has never been cut, that means you haven't knocked it out of the park. The point is is they a lot of companies will dangle a carrot showing you an accelerator that they say you can make as much as you can and it's unlimited. You can make $10 million and then if you hit some sort of number that they have to pay you more than the CEO they hate it they'll pay you that your boss.

Speaker 2: 12:25

Actually they as soon as you start making more than your boss usually you're on a radar you make more than your boss's boss. That's unacceptable, totally unacceptable.

Speaker 1: 12:36

And what ends up happening is is that usually they'll pay you that amount with an argument, and then you feel bad arguing with them to get what they agreed to pay you and then it kind of I think it kind of sometimes sours the relationship with the company and you're pissed and then they cut it, you know, and then they'll do it again and again as time goes on, you know, and that we can have a whole episode on that.

Speaker 1: 13:00

And then the flip of it is, as I used to say, because I've hired countless and fired countless salespeople, and I always wanted to hire salespeople. Not necessarily I'd buy the Ferrari or the car, have a spending issue, but I want to hire a salesperson that has this is their income, and they don't have a choice they have to be successful. You know, because I have to be successful to pay my bills, I have nothing else to rely on except for this. And so when you come to work and you need to make that extra five calls or fly to Seattle or that distribution center or wait until seven at night, you're gonna do it. But if you have somebody or you have like a trust fund or you have millions of dollars in the bank, you would have fucking left at 330.

Speaker 2: 13:49

Of course Okay without a doubt.

Speaker 2: 13:51

I wasn't hungry enough. No, I was a kid from a small town in Oregon of 800 people called Oregon, Oregon. My parents both got their GEDs right. They did not get college degrees. They made 60 grand a year between the two of them. Like my entire childhood, my uncle, Doug, used to take me to Olive Garden. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. He worked for Heel Packard at the time and that's the shit that really made me drive towards, like trying to be a capitalist, focusing on, you know, trying to win to be able to buy an Olive Garden meal right.

Speaker 1: 14:29

So I'll take you there. I'll meet you in person. Okay, I'm on me, so I'm just gonna hold it All right.

Speaker 2: 14:35

So, going back, how did we, how did we go from Brent being the number 55 salesperson to being the number one salesperson, bringing in about half the revenue of the entire division through SEO? And that is where I became addicted to the search engine optimization side of the business, because before that, for that first six months, four months, whatever it was that you know we're ramping sales up to I think it got to like six million a month or something was us buying market development funds at 7% or buying a placement on the Amazon electronics homepage for $15,000. And like doing all of these placement things with Amazon to try and get the product sold. And one time Eric Mewitt was his name, he called me and in other massive order for the holidays or something, and I was like where's all this demand coming from? And he's like, honestly, we don't know. Like it's just coming straight into the pages. And he said I think it might be the search engines you know out there. And I was like wait a second. So I stopped and I looked and did some research, found out that our product detail page on Amazon for the 128 Megs Smart Media Card and the 64 megabyte compact flash card was number one in most of the search engines. And keep in mind, this wasn't just a Google game back then. It was Yahoo, excite, lightcoast, you know, dogpile, that kind of put them all together and Google, which was one of the many players at the time, and that's when I stopped buying this stupid homepage placements for 15 grand and MDF agreements for 7% of revenue and crazy stuff like that, and I guess the rest is history right, like that is. That's where I started the search engine optimization stuff and it was fun. It's definitely my personality, jeffrey, like I love.

Speaker 2: 16:40

I was raised by my parents that there are no rules, there are only guidelines, and it is my job, even as a kid eight year old kid, 10 year old kid to assess whether I choose to follow this guideline or not, and it should be a risk reward based off of the punishment and the risk that's involved in that. And so I've managed to find a career where it's all about risk reward, like how far do you push the algorithm? How far do you push you know content or link building or you know social media management in order to get more attention to things. And I've drawn the law to law. I've never broken the law that I'm aware of, or at least not any like thing beyond a misdemeanor of some sort, and maybe I haven't. If I haven't, I didn't know about it, but that's where I drew the line for me.

Speaker 2: 17:37

And so when it gets into things like you know choices on how we build content, like I do, what works for the clients, because they are the ones that hired us but at the end of the day, seos and this is why we don't get any respect in the industry we aren't doing anything Like literally, our net impact to the world is zero.

Speaker 2: 18:00

And so when I met my wife 11 years ago 12 years ago now I she was a teacher for middle school students and I was like you know, what I love about your role is that you truly make an impact to the world every day. Like you are, you're able to change the world. You know what I do I move somebody who was number three to number one or number 23 to number one, or number 23 to number two or four or whatever, but all I did is push someone else's life down. So, as my client cheers and they're having a happy heyday, someone else is crying in their bucket or crying in their beer somewhere you know. Net impact to the world nothing that sucks, I guess. Who are we?

Speaker 1: 18:40

really you know what I mean.

Speaker 1: 18:42

I guess I mean you know you can say that really marginalize anything that's more of a commercial service, that you haven't done something.

Speaker 1: 18:48

But I think, like for my company, for example, starting from zero miles an hour in majority of the world, not knowing who we are other than the people in my industry from getting to know me over the decade plus I've been in it but to get us up in certain rankings and we rank well for certain keywords like domain broker and domain appraiser is giving us a chance to spread our wings and become a bigger player and be able to compete, and someone like you can be a big part of that and I think that's an important thing. I just think that it's getting to a point where we can talk about this a little later that in order to get there now it is getting so expensive and it's getting so tedious that you have to crank out so much content and have to optimize your site in such a way that a common person, a small business owner, just can't do it and it bring in a specialist. It's almost like it's like doing your taxes at this point.

Speaker 2: 19:49

Now even bringing in a specialist. It makes it difficult for the small business Because they don't have a guy that's there all the time.

Speaker 1: 19:56

We don't have someone that's dedicated. You probably use some sort of a template that isn't SEO friendly. You don't have writers 10 writers writing articles, cranking things out you don't have. It's not easy for you to post blog articles or artists or things, so yeah, I'm a Techstars mentor, right, which is the ultimate.

Speaker 2: 20:18

I mean, it's the top 1% of startups, right, because they only accept 1% of the people that apply. But the startup world is very interesting because you do have that scenario of the small company, and Techstars is not small in comparison to somebody who just decides to start a business yesterday, but still it is a scenario where the Techstars companies are fighting up against someone who's already entrenched into a specific key phrase, a certain taxonomy, et cetera, and it's difficult, even with the backing of Techstars, to do this right. They need the link from Techstars, they need the links from Techstars community, they need the links from all of their angel investors, the VC investors, right. Those links all matter because it adds so much authority and sometimes relevance and trust into the link profile. So for a mom-pop shop like, say, a Chinese restaurant down the road, it makes it really really hard.

Speaker 2: 21:20

As a matter of fact, one of the strategies we use at Groupon. So we were hired to come in and help Groupon's Coupons business. Specifically, keep in mind that Groupon had 20 plus people on their SEO team a lot of people and keep in mind that Groupon had 20 plus people on their SEO team alone from Seattle to Southern California, to New York, to a couple of people in London, et cetera. But they brought us in because we could get things done faster. Typical scenario of large organizations you get a lot of red tape. Oh yeah, right, and Groupon's little division of Coupons that was just starting out in 2004,. I think maybe 2005 or somewhere in there. They needed help. So we came in and we did that form and we grew the business so rapidly that SEO is about 98% of their business and there's $100 million business for them. Amazing, so much fun.

Speaker 1: 22:20

But one of the things that we did Were you at Groupon when it was extremely popular and people were looking forward to the new offers every day, versus what then it became.

Speaker 2: 22:28

I was about two years behind that Okay, about two years behind that. So Groupon was trying different things to stay relevant and one of the things they did was, instead of doing a Groupon, you could just do a coupon instead.

Speaker 2: 22:41

So you've heard of all the coupon sites out there coupon cab and a good friend of mine, for example, scott Cluth, that runs that right, but a bunch of other companies that were out there kind of run on these coupon businesses. One of them was RetailMeNot and Jeffrey, one of the coolest things ever is listening to RetailMeNots Like earnings calls and having them specifically say that Groupon coupons is the reason why they missed their number. So again, net impact zero. But wow, it's fun when you have that call that you hear from your competitor or your clients competitor in this case that specifically stating we did not hit our numbers this quarter because Groupon coupon's division has overtaken the search results.

Speaker 1: 23:31

I just destroyed our margins and it doesn't, yes, so so fun, man so fun Anyway.

Speaker 2: 23:40

So, but part of the strategy, get back to the Chinese restaurant scenario we had as we grew inside of Groupon, we jumped out or drove over to other divisions, et cetera, and one of them was the restaurant division and they were trying to do some new, innovative things to restaurants. They wanted some inbound links coming in. So what we did is one of the tactics was to start a creative website for the restaurants that didn't have websites. Now, we made this very simple one pager, same HTML templates for the most part, but we had a link back inside of that HTML template and it started off being for all restaurants.

Speaker 2: 24:20

But then we found out that usually there was just Chinese restaurants that didn't have a website and we set up a whole system just for the Chinese restaurant industry to set up one page websites and link back to Groupon. And that is an example of a small mom and pop shop, let's say right, not being able to compete online because they're missing the tools and the resources that they need in order to successfully pull that off. And I loved it because we were helping out with these small restaurants. We're also helping out Groupon. We're getting the link that we wanted. We're a little on the slide. That's super ethical. It's not like we put that out there to the Chinese restaurant that this is what was in it for us, but it wasn't hurting them.

Speaker 1: 25:04

We're doing it for free. It was a free lunch, I mean.

Speaker 2: 25:06

they must know that Right and that was the justification for it. But we did hundreds of those and it was a fun time because it was our idea and we had to do it. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 25:17

I mean, I find it interesting, even today, speaking to some of my friends that are small business owners and aren't as technically advanced as we are, and I'll ask do you have your business website on Google Local Listings? And they'll be like, what's that? And then I'll be like, oh well, you got to go to this link and put in your company's info and just then, and there you'll get traffic because you're going to come up as the number one tire shop in a certain radius and people will see you as an option. But if you're not even on the list, you have no chance.

Speaker 2: 25:47

And even with that, there's optimization stuff to do in there. For example, you want to make sure that you have the key phrase you're trying to rank for in your company description. You want to try and get reviews from people that have a decent review background. For example, every time I go to a restaurant I take a bunch of pictures inside of the restaurant and I post them up to Google Maps. I don't know if you knew there's an option, there's a Contribute option on Google Maps, and I contribute. I'm now at a level eight, almost a level nine.

Speaker 2: 26:16

It's forever to go up to the next one, but there are 10 levels altogether. I'm at a level 8.8 or something, and if you can get reviews from those types of people, you're going to be much stronger than getting a review from somebody who's only written two reviews ever. Oh, really, yeah, oh, it makes a big difference. On who's reviewing. However, it's really important that you set up a system that allows you to filter those people out first. Filter bad people out first. I see a lot of restaurants posting those placards up on the window like write a review, write a review. Write a review on the door leaving and coming at no no, because most people only write a review when they're pissed off.

Speaker 1: 27:01

Oh, yeah, of course, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 27:03

So you have to first send them to your own form, which is what we do at Loud, by the way. We send people to our own form Once people have written a nice testimonial there. We then email them and say hey, you wrote this nice testimonial on our website. Would you mind doing it on Google? Make it super simple, stupid form. That way they can just copy and paste and you put the review in there so they can copy it. Paste it right into Google. Takes them like six seconds. That's what you're looking for.

Speaker 2: 27:31

Don't ask me to write another review from scratch. That's not going to work. The next version of that would be using AI to rewrite that review slightly and send it back to them. Then At that point, you're getting a unique review right, not just the one that was on your own website, which you should probably pull down if you write the one on Google, but you get to have a slightly different review on the Google review system and then one on your own. So some tricks.

Speaker 1: 28:01

Check in. You're trying, yeah. So from there, from working at when you were working with Viking components and then doing a little group on and kind of bouncing around a little bit, you were working with the Tribune and the Tribune of the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, baltimore Sun, orlando Sentinel, the Morning Call, daily Press, bay Herald, bay Tribune, I mean there's a bunch, it's countless. So worldwide, massive, how many eyeballs would read there? So when I started at Tribune.

Speaker 2: 28:33

It was 2008. So after Viking, I did exactly what you alluded to earlier there was a lot of bad blood, too many pay cuts, et cetera. I went to the competitor where they paid me a guaranteed salary at 240 instead of 287, but that was guaranteed. They stuck me in a closet and literally didn't give me any product ever shipped, Just wanted me not at the competition. It was hell Because I was a very excited salesperson trying to sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell and they gave me no inventory, nothing ever. I sold I think maybe $100,000 that whole year and they were totally happy with it. I couldn't handle it anymore. I left for Targus, worked for the laptop bag manufacturer.

Speaker 2: 29:18

I watched a bunch of brick and mortar retailers screw up online e-commerce for themselves or else they couldn't get out of their own way. I remember meeting with Walmart that they claimed they had to have the pricing on the web. The highest retail price in the nation had to be their price online because they would have to price match everybody in all the different late, just crazy retail focused things. And then I went to Tribune, OK, and at Tribune I got to take over all of the responsibility for all the seven newspapers first, and that was 1.3 million searches a month when I got there. No, sorry, 500,000 searches a month when I got there and when I left, three or four years later, five years later, it was 1.3 million searches per month, and so that no per day, Sorry, searches per day.

Speaker 2: 30:18

I got all those state problems, I went 1,000 per day just from Google, to 1.3 million searches per day just from Google, just in the United States. So that was a lot of fun like a ton of fun. And what was cool about it is I had so many different domains to work with, seven different domains at first, and one of the biggest things I had to do is figure out how to get all of these seven companies to work together as one unit instead of as seven separate different companies, right? So I was sitting down with the owners of the presidents or whatever they were, like GMs or I don't know what they're called them at the time the masthead of these different newspapers and slowly I figured out how to get them to work together. We had to make decisions about who was going to cover the Barack Obama inauguration, right and Chicago Jermaine and Ticket because it was local to Chicago.

Speaker 2: 31:15

And then an earthquake in LA was easy LA times. But then we fought over hurricanes hitting Florida between Orlando Sentinel and Sun Sentinel, and so I came up mainly with processes and agreements across the seven newspapers on when we would move SEO juice from one thing to another, and one of those was Michael Jackson dead a blast over two million visits to the LA Times site in an hour when he died. We were number two, not even number one. We're number two in the search results because number one was TMZ. They called his death before he actually died, which is so TMZ, okay, and we had to wait. Our LA Times had to wait until they got confirmation he was dead, which put us behind on the entire story by about 15 to 30 minutes, and that's all it took.

Speaker 1: 32:06

That's all it took. So with that and like the whole duplicate content issues of online, I'm guessing the Google algorithm and the other algorithms and the other search engines wasn't quite as strong or as good. So could you have an article written by the, by, you know, the Orlando Sentinel and then post the exact same one on the morning call and try it all the time Except.

Speaker 2: 32:29

Google did do a great job on duplicate content. Then, oh, it did, okay, it did yeah, and I actually made a. I was at a conference speaking, I think it was in San Diego or somewhere but I made a comment openly like kind of rude, as like a heckler, to the panel of the Google panel, where one of the Google engineers it may have been Matt Kats, it may have been Gary Eesh, or it may have been John Mueller one of those three was up on the panel. They're all kind of like the same people to me. And he, he said, well, there's no use case for us having a cross domain canonical. And I said, yeah, there is. And he was like who said that? And like me, like, oh, brent, like what? What is the use case? You again, yeah.

Speaker 1: 33:18

Right yeah.

Speaker 2: 33:19

Right and I said well, the use case is tribune, like we are trying to save resources, writing one article, what we want to share it across our seven newspapers, but you don't give us an ability to pass that SEO juice that you know, that canonical as they came up with a year before, to across the domains and we need to be able to do that.

Speaker 2: 33:42

We need to be able to be on the same page as CNN. Yeah, because CNN has one domain and they have all their link structure coming into that one domain. I want to be able to gather all that link structure up from, you know, chicago Tribune, la times, m call, daily press, a Suncent or Orlando Sun, etc. And put them all into one spot, because that earthquake happened in LA and I'm not going to write that story or seven, six different times. We're going to use the LA time story Absolutely. And they said okay, fine, we will thank you for the proper use case, we will go ahead and develop it. And four months later they made it. So, yeah, it was super cool. Another cool time in the industry.

Speaker 1: 34:21

But I think around that time to me, when they had issues with duplicate content and then they had issues with they called them I think they were called like content farms or click farms, and that's when you had like live strong ranking for everything, and then you had eHow ranking for a lot of things. But I find that, compared to today, I find that the content on those sites is better than most of what you're getting now, because now, like, for example, if you search domain broker, you're going to see one of Neil Patel's sites that says the top five or top 10 domain brokers and on that list are companies that are paying to be on that list and there's even companies on there, like the one I used to work for, a uniregistry that doesn't even exist anymore, so that isn't necessarily the top 10. It's not even that they've used these people. It's just now that's giving a bad example where eHow would probably write what a domain broker does and then just make a list of those in the industry and they weren't really pushing it for commercial use because they would put the ads on the sides and they didn't really care, but they wrote better content than what you're seeing in a lot of other situations.

Speaker 1: 35:33

You choose best hosting provider. It potentially is written by a company that owns multiple hosting companies and they're putting their own selves on there, one through five, and then you choose one and it just happens to have the right link to. So isn't necessarily the way to go. Maybe I'm pointing out examples. That doesn't always happen, but don't you see that change has caused issues in SEO rather than with search versus benefit?

Speaker 2: 36:04

And the reason why those things you can get away with those things is because they set up real link structures. It costs a lot of time and money to do it. But Neil Patel most of his clients are on those lists I've met Neil. I don't really care for him, he doesn't really care for me, but I get where he's coming from and how it works. He makes some money from the advertisements. Thway doesn't update it. Uniregistry probably paid him $5,000 or something right to be number one and probably around that price decent number, and they get an ROI for it. And even if they're not in business anymore, neil's not going to go update it until someone says something about it. That is one link building opportunity there, right? So if you were to reach out to Neil and say hey, neil, guess what? Uniregistry's been out of business for X number of years, like what the hell? Well, they're out of business.

Speaker 1: 36:55

They just don't exist because they were bought by GoDaddy.

Speaker 2: 36:59

But yeah, okay, Neil, do you really want to be funneling all this to GoDaddy? Here is SAW. This is what we do. Would you be interested in having us replace that link? Those are conversations that we use frequently. It's about a 2.5% to 5% positive return. That's about it.

Speaker 2: 37:17

There's a lot of work, but you can do that. But back to your point are the search results? Worse? Depends on the industry and depends on how much effort is being put into it. You're talking about industries that have been around for the beginning, since the beginning of the internet, right? So you have the most mature, the most interesting tactics being used. One of the things I talked about all the time at Tribune was that it was easy because all I was doing is applying knowledge from Amazon to the newspaper industry. It's like a decade of knowledge gap there, like just so far, so disparate, and that's kind of what we're having with domain is domain is just smarter. You guys have been on the internet a lot longer, yeah, so you trickier things.

Speaker 1: 38:05

So let me ask you this You're at the Tribune in 2009 for a period of time In 2009, I was looking at, before our call, that in the United States there were 46 million people that were receiving a newspaper on a weekly basis in the US, but then 10 years later, so you were there for about five years, but 10 years later, in 2019, it was less than 25 million. So you're seeing 50% less people getting newspapers delivered. The advertising revenue went from in 2006 was $49 billion for the newspapers in the United States and by 2011, it was only $26 billion, and now it's 9.7. What was it working? What was it like working at a company where the or that was happening.

Speaker 1: 39:01

Well, in an industry that has consistently grown, probably with the population for hundreds of years, is now shrinking immensely, and there is really nothing that they could do to stop it. And or they're just so far behind the times that they can't really do much to catch up and they don't want to let go of the past, their history. What was it like working there?

Speaker 2: 39:27

So it's your view is interesting. I got hired on February 14, 2008, valentine's Day. I was their Valentine's gift and I walk in and there's a stack of papers this thick from an SEO firm and there are a bunch of audits different audits for the seven different about 50 pages a piece. When I flip through them, I pick them up and I walk them over to my boss that hired me the week before and my first day I dropped them on the desk and I say I quit, just do what's in here. And he's like what? Like? I quit, just like, do what's in here. He's like let's go to lunch. So we go to lunch. He's like, brent, we didn't hire you because you like maybe had some negative information that would change our world, like maybe you do. But we hired you because we thought that you could actually get things done, so that's why we hired you. I'm like, oh, okay. I'm like, well, why can't you get these things done? Like you'll find out and sure enough I did.

Speaker 2: 40:32

I wanted to change even the URL right, the URL structure at Tribune, and I came in guns ablaze and on the URL, oh you're so dumb you guys should fix your URLs, like Sheila and you IT department pissed off half the IT team, of course, and guess what? The URL never changed in those five years, ever. Why? Because the URL determined the gateway for whether you're a registered user, a non-registered user, what accesses you have, like all of that hash tag stuff, commas and periods and all these different weird things in the URL all determined what you have the right to view and not be based off of your subscription. I didn't know that on the first day. Figured out later felt like an idiot. So that was the reason why they hired me. So things changed. It was made very clear to me. A week later he quit the company. He went and started a toys for like that are safe for the environment.

Speaker 2: 41:35

Yeah yeah, okay, and I was like, okay, that's scary. But what was scarier is that, within the first two months, all seven people that had interviewed me, I'd either been fired or quit All seven of them. So now I'm hanging out by myself. Okay, you're waiting. Fast forward through the entire scenario of what was going on at Tribune.

Speaker 2: 41:59

I went through 13 bosses and those five years I was given carte blanche control from an SEO perspective, where I could change headlines on the online newspapers. Los Angeles Times great example plain crashes into Hudson River. You know what their online headline was for that? No, two wings and a prayer. Two wings and a prayer. I was so pissed.

Speaker 2: 42:30

Now that headline the next morning when it ran in print what a pure surprise had an attached image with it, though. Made sense in their little mailboxy thingy. Oh yeah, three corner. Okay, two wings and a prayer. People hanging out on the wings made sense online. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense because two wings and a prayer without two wings and a prayer, without an image attached to it, and you're just seeing it randomly in Google News or in a search result or whatever it might be didn't make sense. So I called up the head of LA Times at the time can't remember his name and I'm like oh, sean Gallagher called Sean Gallagher and I'm like, sean, I'm going to let you change the headline or I'm going to do it myself, because this can happen.

Speaker 1: 43:17

That's some pretty big news story too. To go and change it was huge.

Speaker 2: 43:21

So we changed the story to two wings sorry, from two wings and a prayer to plane crashes into Hudson River. Now, I would have preferred a headline that said Hudson River plane crash at the time, because Google was very focused on exact match relevancy back then. Now, with the way the AI tool works and like all the other stuff they do, wouldn't matter. It wouldn't matter as much today, but back then it really mattered. But that's what we got two wings and a prayer. We ended up being in the top three, I think, for Hudson River plane crash, which was the key phrase you got to focus on Later.

Speaker 2: 43:54

Marshall Simmons, who was the head of New York Times, is SEO at the time.

Speaker 2: 44:00

He spoke at a conference a few months later and was very kind and said we were the New York Times.

Speaker 2: 44:10

I was watching the plane sink in the Hudson River from my office and yet we were not in the first 20 search results for our story because we also had an irrelevant headline that had nothing to do with Hudson River or plane crash period.

Speaker 2: 44:30

He's like, and I watched Brent and he called me up by name.

Speaker 2: 44:32

He's like, and I watched Brent and his team have the rights, have the ability to move faster and change things so that they ended up from across the country on LA Times on a rewritten AP story, beat the New York Times original coverage from, and I watched it happen while watching the plane sink from my office and it was fascinating that in the end, it was not about knowing the tricks, knowing the ways around Google, it was being able to convince people to allow me to have the power, the control, the capability, right To make quick decisions, to have the relationship with Sean Gallagher, whom I hung out with him, you know, a few months before at the Magic House in LA. Right Like having that, to be able to have the trust builds to get done. What we needed to get done and that's what the algorithm is all about is trust today. Trust and authority, trust and authority, trust and authority and that's also what, ironically, is what made me so successful at Tribune was trust and authority of my own relationships with the people that mattered.

Speaker 1: 45:55

But it took the Hudson River Plain Crash for people to trust you that the right title is gonna get you where you wanna be Correct, whereas you've probably told that person repeatedly your headlines makes sense on a news rack on the corner in Manhattan or in a bodega in Manhattan, but it doesn't make sense. I guess it wasn't mobile, but it doesn't make sense on the desktop. That is correct, and in a news aggregator and in any place like that. And that lesson was learned. But it sounds to me from looking at it 10,000 people.

Speaker 2: 46:34

I trained at Tribune.

Speaker 1: 46:36

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 46:37

And only a third of them listened.

Speaker 1: 46:39

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 46:40

But I wonder, that's all I?

Speaker 1: 46:41

needed, yeah, but the New York Times has that rich history that has kind of a level of, I would guess and I wouldn't call it arrogance, but of confidence that we are the New York Times, we are the number one news source in the world and just by our own authority and our own name, people should just come to us. That's correct, especially in situations like this, when the random small market newspaper or one that doesn't go beyond its borders of a city or a county or a state should never go above us. I mean, google should just know that by itself. Right, they should just rank the New York Times as number one because they're the best. Right?

Speaker 2: 47:18

Is that the kind of thing that it's really good at. So Google has changed its algorithm quite a bit Over the past. Well, since ever, but more so in the last year, maybe two years. They have more of a focus on the domain as a whole versus the URL itself ranking. So they're not looking at just signals to that one URL, which they used to do considerably, now they're looking at, okay, holistically. Why does this domain deserve to rank with this URL? Why? Because, like you're saying earlier, you had scenarios with big companies ranking for anything and everything.

Speaker 2: 48:01

We put belly rings on the Chicago Tribune website because some radio had, because we have like half like newspaper people, half radio people at the time that were fighting endlessly inside of Tribune and one of the radio heads decided he wanted to sell belly rings but thought that was weird. I got a phone call from Matt Cutts, an actual phone call, and he said what are you guys doing, putting belly rings on the Chicago Tribune? I'm like I don't know man, but he ended up writing a big enough email to me to tell me that it was gonna drag down traffic for all of Tribune that we pulled them off there. Now those scenarios are why Google had to write new algorithms that looked at whether or not there was enough taxonomical relevancy for a given key phrase that you may have a great article on, may have a lot of links going to it, but does it make sense to be on the New York Times?

Speaker 2: 48:59

So you can't just rank for belly rings on the New York Times anymore. You gotta rank for news and information, whether, et cetera, instead. So should the New York Times always rank number one? No, but they should have a nice baseline for what's relevant for their taxonomy tree. Yes, and after that then you start looking at specific URL signals instead of there to determine whether or not the URL deserves the amount of perceived popularity, authority relevance, user signal, feedback loop, et cetera. That kind of feeds into that. Or, as Google likes to say now, e-e-a-t, which is their latest thing they wanna talk about, do you think Experience, expertise, authority and trust.

Speaker 1: 49:48

So in one. Someone is small I'm sorry if I scrub with the terminology, but someone with a small business like myself. I have a domain with a good number of backlinks, at least for the size of the business that I have, and when you submit, you build the website, you get the backlinks, you write in the content, you do all that fun stuff and then you add Google Analytics to it and then you submit it to Google. What is it? Webmaster or Webmaster Tools? So I'm guessing a big part of the algorithm is is, if you let them in to see that data, they know how the traffic converts when it's sending the traffic to the keywords and that should all communicate with each other.

Speaker 2: 50:24

They create a wall. They say there's a wall on Google Analytics. There probably is, because it'd be kind of dumb for them to say there is and then there's not. That'd be a massive lawsuit. Maybe we'll figure that out.

Speaker 1: 50:34

Why wouldn't they share that information? Wouldn't that make search better for everybody?

Speaker 2: 50:40

Yeah, but what they did instead is they launched this thing called Chrome. Yeah, Chrome sends all their data back to Google instead.

Speaker 2: 50:47

And since it was Google. The Chrome browser became the default browser for everybody everywhere overnight, just about Okay, and they may have done some antitrust things in order to get the Chrome browser going in there, but they aren't doing it from Google Analytics. So Chrome Android phones was another way. Right, they didn't launch these things for fun. Yeah, they launched these things to get more data that they could use to figure out what the best search results are, and that's part of the user feedback loop. You still have to start with somewhere, and it is my belief and I have no proof of it, I haven't done any records of it is that scenarios like YouTube's algorithm plays for the web. What do I mean by that? Youtube wants you to subscribe and hit the bell for a reason. That reason is that you immediately get an audience as soon as you push a video out.

Speaker 2: 51:39

Okay, mrbeast creates a video, hits save and all of a sudden, thousands of people go there. That data, that immediate feedback data, google or YouTube in this case can use, okay, to feed the rest of the algorithm. And so if you can feed your own URL, for example this video, right, or a blog post that you have, you can feed it thousands of people via an email blast, an SMS messaging service, anything old school have an airplane fly over the top of the city with a URL on it kind of joking there. But, like, if you can do these things smoke signals included do them so that you can get immediate user feedback to this article. Now make sure the article's good. It's not, you know, like immediately send nature to the text. Send negative signals, no, that's not a problem. But if it's positive, that will immediately give you a boost and get you into this next layer of the algorithm. That matters.

Speaker 2: 52:36

But Google can't trust signals on the first X number of signals that are user signals. Why? Because I can buy a bunch of residential IPs, thousands of them, I can fire them up, I can have it do the right signals and I can impact the algorithm. We can do that today. We can actually impact Google search console data and Google analytics data without Google knowing. It's just expensive and time consuming and not usually worth it. Some clients pay us to do it, but for the most part, no Right. So Google has to be careful when they allow these signals to come in to make a decision.

Speaker 2: 53:08

Now New York Times has a huge leg up. You get that notification on your phone. You click, you scroll right. Google's seeing that on your Android phone, in your Chrome browser, et cetera. So they have a leg up. If you are a small fry, you don't have that audience. You have to wait for enough people to get there, look at the information, send that back, et cetera. So you have to rely on old school stuff like link structure and content, relevancy and authority from great places that are linking to you instead of crappy little places linking to you et cetera.

Speaker 1: 53:40

Yeah, you got to do your time in the fraternity and work your way up and that's fine there you go great, you got to break through, all right.

Speaker 1: 53:47

So, like I was saying to you before, the podcast is for people usually who have kind of gone against all odds, started their own business. We've been talking for almost an hour now, so they need to pick up the pace a little bit. But so you have your own SEO company. Loud dot us is where you go for that. You've been doing this for 12 years. Tell us a quick story. I did. I have my own story. I'll tell you it another time.

Speaker 1: 54:13

But you decided to leave what you were doing. You put it all on the line and say I'm gonna finally go work for myself. I'm not gonna rely on anybody. So what? What triggered you to say you know what, fuck it? I'm sure it was in the back of your mind for a long time. It wasn't just like you woke up, quit your job and say I'm starting a new business and then tell us some Stories about, or a story about you know as some serious challenges that you've faced and and what your. You know the challenges you're facing now, and let's talk about, kind of the state of the SEO business for a few minutes and then we'll wrap it up so loud.

Speaker 2: 54:46

Interactive was started because I was making a hundred twenty thousand dollars a year a Tribune and there's a forty thousand dollar your bonus, so hundred and sixty, and there was just no way I was conceivably going to make more than two hundred thousand dollars a year ever there. And Keep in mind that I was making 287 at 23 years old and I think it's Okay. How do I even get below the 200 mark? A divorce, right? Cause me to move to Spokane, washington, for a short stint. Like it. Just life happened, right. So I was like I'm not gonna go anywhere. I got to move out of my own here. I had a contract with Tribune in writing when I took the job in 2008 that allowed me to consult on the side. I was able to consult first with legacy comm, which was partially owned by Tribune. So questionable on that, but luckily it was okay. Legacy comm, which is a Like a death the memorial site, was my first client. I built up my consulting side to be about 120 grand a year by the time I left, and that's what I did. I Jumped and immediately got some big clients summer, 15 grand a month and Within a few months I was making, you know, 283 hundred thousand dollars a year just by doing that leap. Then it was kind of easy, which I have to admit. You know I thought every business was easy, so I'll talk about those in a second. Okay, it's kind of easy. Like money is came in, clients came in. Like things worked out, things are fine. We got Groupon, which is through a Contact that I had at Tribune Thank you Sean Smith for that and you know he brought us in and we started in and we killed it, knocked it out of the park, as previously stated. Mm-hmm, 100 million on business, 98% coming from SEO was fantastic.

Speaker 2: 56:44

And then the change of the guard curd, all layers of management, kind of like, changed out. Sean wasn't there, etc. What happened? I was complacent because I'd have the account for five years. We were obviously killing it for him and I thought for sure, we would keep this client forever. And the biggest checks we got from there was five hundred thousand dollars a month from now.

Speaker 2: 57:10

Content link building, social media management, different division, some places overseas. Sean warned me that it was probably gonna go away and like dude, like just letting you know, I still Blinders on man, like not paying attention, not listening, cocky, stupid, loving the money and I Got notification that we did not Win the RFP for that quarter Like we talked about, and I phoned it in like it phoned it in every time for like the last two years at least. Just, whatever they're gonna pick us, they would pick us and I got my ass handed to me and I lost that client which was, at the time, 80% of my revenue because I had kept saying, yes, the more and more divisions which took up more time. I was up to 17 employees and we had a half a million dollars in the bank. So we're there, not a lot considering like what the numbers were.

Speaker 2: 58:11

We were spending like crazy. We're spending three thousand dollar lunches for sushi, dinners and shit. You know right. So like that's what we were doing. I Was so broke that Within three months I had to fire everybody in the company. I had to reset everything. I had clients taking advantage of me because they the 20% that were left. They're taking advantage of me because I had already. They pushed them aside all the time for Groupon. You know those 20% were not Loved as much as Groupon and they heard about it every day right.

Speaker 2: 58:45

And then, when Groupon was gone, boy, they Leap right onto that opportunity. So I saw that ugliness and I Went to making negative 250,000 dollars that year from where I was before that, which were seven figures, to native 250. It was extremely stressful. My wife was literally looking in couch cushions and like all these other places for like just to go out to McDonald's for lunch, right, because we were really getting strapped. I cranked up credit card bills 70, 80 thousand dollar credit card bills because they let you have limits like that. When you're making that much money and three or four of those, all of a sudden I'm in debt couple hundred grand. Bad year. This is 2017, late 2017. Never thought I would ever Fail because at that point I had I've been fired once from one mediocre job, but the rest of the time I'd always won, always won, always won so let me ask you this question.

Speaker 1: 59:48

Well, and you can continue with your story, I Look back at times in my life. It was never like that, but there was some. I've been laid off, and for a long period of quite a while, and you know I'd be sitting there with my bathro bon playing video games and she wasn't my wife at the time, but Melissa would come home and I would just be sitting there playing video games all day and she's like have you even brushed your teeth yet? You know, like what are you doing? Well, like when you were at the peak of the worst, you know, and usually you can remember that peak and you don't know it's the peak of the storm. You know you're like in the eye of the storm. What were you thinking? Were you starting to put your resume together and say I got to go get a job and make some money? We're like I'm gonna keep doing this until I die. I'm gonna, I'm not giving up. You know what were you doing to keep yourself in the game?

Speaker 2: 1:00:37

So I love my mother-in-law to death, my stepmother in law to death. She, however, every time she came over for dinner and we talked about what was going on, she would say why don't you just go get an in-house job, like you had a tribune? That should be easy. And I said, yeah, I can't. Of course I can, they will. Why don't you go do that? Like you're making like $80,000 a year right now, or whatever. The number was super low, under a hundred K. And she's like, why would you be doing this when you could go do that for like 200,000 or maybe 240? Mm-hmm, I said, cuz, that's the farthest I'll ever get again, it's 240 grand a year, like our lifestyle. No, like I can't, like I, I could, but that's, that is no, I can't do it, I can't, I can't do it. And so, telling her this all the time, they're both teachers, right, like master's degrees, and been teaching for 30 years.

Speaker 2: 1:01:36

My father-in-law won the golden apple award back in the late 90s, right, so like teacher, teacher, teachers. And they didn't get it. And my wife luckily did, and she stuck with me the whole time like, okay, we'll get it back together. And I brought in a couple of people, two people specifically that helped me rebuild the business From just me being a solopreneur to rebuild it back into what it is now with five employees not employees, because I'm taking advantage of the fact that we're all remote, so they're technically consultants, right, and 1099's. But we rebuilt it from there and that was a Very humbling experience and it has allowed me to grow up so much that Brent can do wrong. Brent can't fuck up. Brent can do these wretched, terrible things that do have consequences. Yeah, right, you can't have three thousand dollars sushi dinners or lunches Sorry, dinners, maybe lunches. No, right, you can't do these stupid things. And Thank God I learned it my 40s, because I hope my 50s will be a little smoother sailing and I can like finish out my my earning years if you would, although I plan to work until like 75 or 80 because why not the? Hopefully I can get there.

Speaker 2: 1:03:02

But looking at things this year, actually November of last year, when chat GPT became really popular, scared the shit out of me again and why we have a two million dollar your content business or we did Like last year or two years ago. Last year, ish, yeah and Boom. All of a sudden content is changing radically from 30 cents a word To. I don't know what it's defined as now, but I'm making 30 cents a word, paying out about 20 cents a word, making 30 cents a word. Good business, sometimes irritating, deal with a bunch of whiny writers, but for the most part, that's where we're at, that two million in revenue.

Speaker 2: 1:03:45

So I Picked, and then I also saw that a lot of the things that we do as SEOs can be automated or replaced by AI technology. So again, this year, I Don't know how much money we made. We probably should know that as a CEO, but I don't. Okay, I just know that it wasn't a great year. Why? Because I invested hundreds of thousands of dollars and I don't know what the exact number is. Again, I should know that as a CEO, but I don't. Right, because we all have flaws. Right, I'm a sales CEO, but go find more revenue. And so we spent a couple hundred grand, maybe a hundred grand, maybe a couple hundred grand in this AI venture To be able to stay ahead of the curve in search engine optimization.

Speaker 2: 1:04:32

Mostly in content, but also in other areas, such as even creating meta descriptions, analyzing HTML, figuring out what your call the actions are, etc. And I think we've got right. We're gonna officially launch the long-form content where we can write 2600 word blog posts at all to say content perfect is where it's gonna be dot AI, and those are the types of things that, again, kind of hit you in the gut. At least this time wasn't my fault, okay, this time it's just the industry changing, but they punch you in the gut and they make you change again, so you have to have the stomach for this entrepreneurship stuff. But it's also exciting, especially when you figure it out right.

Speaker 2: 1:05:18

When I rebuilt loud to be larger Revenue wise, profit wise than it was in 2017 again with the help of some, a couple of people, not like investors or part owners, but just Hiring the right people to fill in for my significant flaws that I have in my own business style and personality it's exciting to be able to get back to that point. And then again, this year, investment year, next year I think I get to reap that investment, as all of my peers in the industry Kind of wait it around and do much. Hopefully I'll be able to be more successful next year than the competition.

Speaker 1: 1:05:57

So so, talking about AI and your product and I fiddled around with it it's really interesting what it can do and the articles it writes and and it's quite good right. And one of the things that I've noticed is, over the last few years, is that like for myself as well as being a business owner, is I'll write a dim. I'll write an article about, like what makes a domain name valuable. You want to acquire domain? This is how you do it.

Speaker 1: 1:06:18

These are the things that you need to prove if you want to file a UDRP and you think someone's squatting on your domain name and there's only a limited number of articles that I could write, right, and when you go to a Competitor of mine, they might have like five, twenty articles. They have fifteen of the exact same topics and then five unique ones are just a different twist on it than I do, right? You know, and I think with like, when I read articles, that I've gone To chat GBT and then there's another one I like to use, called computer calm. It's actually less refined but doesn't have any filters on it and so, but I Find that there's gonna be people who are going to Go to chat GBT type in I want to write an article about Running shoes and not best ones, and then it's gonna take that, they're gonna take that, put it on their blog.

Speaker 1: 1:07:10

Kind of do a shitty job, optimizing it, just like people have done for years, like paying someone in India two bucks to write an article or five dollars to write an article and then.

Speaker 1: 1:07:19

Poorly optimize it, and then there you go, you know and I think they're still gonna be lay out levels of quality of people and One of the people I've been trying to get to do this podcast is is I live in Tampa, I live near McGill Air Force Base and I have somebody that works for the State Department in their AI division and I want to talk to you about their point of view on AI and he's like, no, I'm not gonna talk to you.

Speaker 2: 1:07:46

I got a VA from that way, the head of the VA hospital. So not head of the VA hospital, but in like the AI division, the VA hospital. Same scenario.

Speaker 1: 1:07:53

Yeah, so like he's, like you know his opinion is he says don't, don't put all your stock in AI. It's not there yet, right, and don't be afraid of it right now, because it's almost like you're having a Like a seven-year-old or a six-year-old write your articles for you.

Speaker 2: 1:08:06

You know it can point you. That's exactly the opposite of what I'm hearing for the VA hospital. Just let you know. Isn't that funny right? So he?

Speaker 1: 1:08:13

says we use AI for certain things, but not as much as you would think, and Then I didn't ask about SEO and things like that, but what I just feel like is gonna happen and it was also reaffirmed to me in the article An article that we were talking about before the call is the people who ruin the internet on the verge, which is an interesting article, is that? Scathing article towards SEO escaping, but I think it's a little over the top and I'm not going to slay or towards domain investors and domain brokers, which is just as equally ridiculous.

Speaker 1: 1:08:46

But what they did say is there will be mountains of bad content, and that's a hundred percent true. Yes, and so there's gonna be more search results that are propped up by shitty content and that more poor results in search, and Google's gonna have a massive problem they're gonna have to deal with in the next year or two when the big companies are using AI, when the little guys have solutions that are easy to implement. So what do you think about that and what do you think?

Speaker 2: 1:09:19

Here's where it's at. So we have been working on this for nine months and the reason why Google can easily find the shitty content, as you say, versus the good content and our Level of a level of depth in the content itself. So we have team will come up with a project or a process that right now, is 64 iterative back and forth steps Between editor and writer, editor and writer, editor and writer. Now, these are both a eyes. We have an editor that's an AI. We have a writer that's an AI, and they literally talk back and forth through each other via API's To improve the content and we're up to like 64 steps now for a 24 step, 24-section article.

Speaker 2: 1:10:17

Okay, so we create an article with 24 sections and it's such sections and subsections, so it's six sections with four sections and each one of them Creating them, the 24 different sections. We then have the AI go back and forth to output Information. I'm not gonna say how the AI edits and how the AI writes, but we give a decent prompts, which we got from University professors on how you should write an article Based off of you know, whatever the topic might be, the inverted pyramid and however you do it, yeah what, whatever?

Speaker 2: 1:10:50

Yeah, not gonna talk about it, okay.

Speaker 2: 1:10:52

So, yeah, great, great information on how to write a good quality article. Then we layer into that the things that Immediately made it useless for our clients. It doesn't sound like me, it doesn't sound like us. That was the first exact Problem. I'm like, okay, well, give me a brand voice doc, a what they give us, a brand voice doc. What is that? Oh my God, are you kidding me? Like, doordash gave us a 45 page brand voice doc, northwestern Hospital gave us a 23 page. You don't know what a brand voice doc is. And they're like no, okay, fine, let us go make one for you. So then we had to build the tech to go get them a brand voice doc, okay. So then we pull that in it's not 23 pages, but it is, you know, four or five paragraphs and we use that to feed into the AI and then that sounds like them. It isn't, it's not perfect and we're not putting a name on it yet. So we put, like, bethany's name on it. That would be a little more difficult, but we're getting to the point of trying to mimic everything that a human does.

Speaker 2: 1:11:57

My writers now, granted, these are not domain experts. They're not domain like domain in your world, but they're not experts in that particular field. Let's change domain to field. They're not experts in that particular field, but those writers would look at the top three to five search results and write an article based off of that. Our AI is looking at the top 30 search results for a given search phrase, sucking in all 30 search results, grabbing all of the content from the top 10, maybe the top 15 if we have enough tokens to do it, and as tokens get larger we can pull in all 30. We summarize the next 15, give it a context for it, we feed that into our prompt, into chat, gpt or barred, or to Claude you know 100 K, claude, 200 K and we pull all this stuff together to give it enough context to write about.

Speaker 2: 1:12:53

Egg is rid of hallucination, another major problem early on nine months ago. And we now write this article based off of all of this content, the hallucination that was happening, and so we're getting rid of the major, major problems that are happening and we have a chain of density. Thank God for Stanford, or whoever it was, came up with that a few months ago to help us to dig deeper, like which entities are missing? And into this content. How can we fold that in and we're answering all of these issues with the content we're creating.

Speaker 2: 1:13:25

Now, at the end of the day, we're still missing stuff. Like, nine months in, it sounds great, but I still need a human editor. Why? Not because it is written poorly, not because it's boring, not because it doesn't have the voice, not because it hallucinated or I had to fix all those, but because we don't have a quote in there. We didn't quote anybody. Well, shit, we got to get some quotes in our content. We're working on it. Hopefully we'll get quotes in the next you know month or four. I don't know how long it's gonna take. We'll get some quotes in there from, like, xyz person at XYZ company. We should be able to pull that off. We're missing images. Oh, but Brent, why don't you just use, you know, mid journey or use you know whatever else you know opportunities that are out there? And the answer for that is because it doesn't look good yet. Right, I'm missing an infographic. Oh, you can just make one of those. I know you can't. The text is there.

Speaker 1: 1:14:21

The pictures are off. The pictures are off, yes, right.

Speaker 2: 1:14:24

So we're working through this, but I know it's gonna get there, Jeffrey. I know it's gonna. In two, three years it will be here Like, if this is not going away, this will happen, period, this will happen, and we will be X number of years or months ahead of it. Right, and maybe I'll get squashed by some billion dollar company and all this will be for not and I'll have fun trying to be whatever.

Speaker 1: 1:14:49

But then then another opportunity will pop up. That's what I find.

Speaker 2: 1:14:52

Right, hopefully right. But that is what we're trying to do with the content and that is how you will have differentiators between hey, chat, gpt, write me an article about. You know, debating. That doesn't work. What we would do for SAW, as an example, is we would take your domain and we'd say, okay, what do you currently rank for? We'd use AHRF's API to do that. What do you currently rank for? Okay, cool, here are the key phrases you rank for.

Speaker 2: 1:15:22

What are you trying to rank for? Or what are you trying to write an article on Domaining? Ugh, dude, you don't have the link structure to rank number one for domaining. So guess what? You're gonna have to rank for Domaining in Wichita Kansas. Okay, bad example, probably. But okay, that's what we're gonna write about instead. So then we're gonna pull in a bunch of stuff that's related to domaining in Wichita Kansas for you, because you can actually rank for that, because you have the trust and the authority and there's enough of a content gap on the internet that you can rank for that, and there's still some search volume that makes it worth it for you. And that's step one. And then we go write the content in a way that brings in the chain of density, the level of detail, the editing and writing. You know back at the start.

Speaker 1: 1:16:05

So you just explained all this. So what are you really afraid of? Because a business owner like myself would say I can just do that with chat GVTA, go on there and I'm like I don't know what the fuck to do. And it's like you know what. I'd rather pay a guy like you to do all this, because what I find is I've spent hours writing articles that I thought were pretty good and I did a lot of research, and then I write the article, I post the article.

Speaker 2: 1:16:26

I get a bunch of thumbs up on LinkedIn.

Speaker 1: 1:16:28

I get a decent number of readers and then it just dies. And then we had an SEO guy look at it and he's like, well, you don't have it optimized, so no one's ever gonna see it. And it's like so if I even had chat GVT, write the articles. I put the blog post out, pretend that it's me or somebody else, some fake person that works for my company and trick everybody into not being a real person. I still don't know how to get the most out of the article. I don't know what a meta tag is. I don't know how to write you know the proper different things to make it work. I don't know how to link it throughout my website to get the link juice to go throughout. I mean, would your AI tool be able to write the article and understand my site enough to link properly within the site?

Speaker 2: 1:17:12

We just did it yesterday.

Speaker 1: 1:17:13

You just did it yesterday.

Speaker 2: 1:17:14

Okay, Literally, that's how much we're iterating right now. So we were writing high quality content that still needed 15 to 30 minutes of editing 15, maybe 30, maybe 50, of editing for the last few months. Yesterday, we finally got links into the articles to other articles that are on the site. And how did we do that? Through APIs, through different services that allow us to see which landing pages have the set amount of anchor text occurring X number of times, so that we know that that's there, or the rankings, depending on what type of page we're looking at, to link to it. So, yeah, we can do that now. Okay, why am I worried? Because this is a massive change, Jeffrey, massive change, and I am not going to do nothing when change starts to occur. And if you do it the right way I say that with air quotes right, If you do it the right way.

Speaker 1: 1:18:18

The right way is today's right way. Google changes is playing here tomorrow you can't scale.

Speaker 2: 1:18:22

You don't have enough people in the industry that you're trying to write about that has relevant knowledge about this for 10, 15, 30 years or like you. Right, you will write the best article Well you have a lot of other things to do today.

Speaker 1: 1:18:38

Yeah, I don't have time to write them anymore. I just don't have time.

Speaker 2: 1:18:40

You're gonna take six hours for each blog post, and then you already told me that a lot of them flop after I don't know a week. A week or two.

Speaker 1: 1:18:48

Yesterday's news is trash. Someone might say to me cool article. I really enjoyed reading it, but it's like cool, where's the business? Zero. So where's the ROI on that.

Speaker 2: 1:18:57

Zero. You could have sold domains I mean thousands of dollars instead of writing that blog post for six hours.

Speaker 1: 1:19:02

That's why I'm giving a podcast a shot too, though, is that I think it is a good another opportunity to generate leads, but there isn't really an easy way to take the content from this and turn it into I guess it's a verb SEO-able content, right? It's not really that easy either to but what?

Speaker 2: 1:19:21

you're doing is you're expanding your taxonomy tree right now because you are relevantly mentioning domaining, which you're already with a new taxonomy tree. We've mentioned other entities throughout this entire call. A lot of them are my historical ones, right, and so you're expanding your taxonomy tree of relevancy. In this podcast, you mentioned a whole new taxonomy tree SEO so you should be able to be more relevant for SEO-related things. Now you probably need to start with domaining for SEO or SEO-domaining, and how things change, right? It's us spending five minutes talking about does exact match domaining really work today and does it not right? That type of stuff would be perfect because we'd have a lot of the interaction of the word SEO and domaining intermingled closely together within the words to then allow you to rank for domaining, seo or exact match domain, seo, et cetera, inside of the context of the call.

Speaker 1: 1:20:23

So let's ask that question Does exact match domains matter anymore? I find that it's not as important as it used to be. What do you think?

Speaker 2: 1:20:31

Google tells us specifically Gary Esha said this now several times, spelled I-L-L-Y-E-S. But Gary Esha has told us several times domain name has nothing to do with your rankings. Bullshit, okay, and this is why. Because the anchor text does have something to do with your rankings, just as Google has said for years that word count doesn't matter. I said bullshit to them for years on that too. Last week or maybe last month, I realized that they are right, but for a different reason. It doesn't matter how many words I get into this document. It matters how many different entities I talk about and how in depth I go into the entity tree for this piece of content. That's what matters. If it's a thousand words, who cares Did?

Speaker 1: 1:21:28

I cover the whole subject.

Speaker 2: 1:21:28

Yes, okay, if it's 5,000 words, because I had to go deeper into the subject in order to cover all of the related entities to it and really cover this in depth, doesn't matter. And so we're looking at this and I'm going no, it has to be 2,000 words, it has to be 2,000 words. No, that's just what had to happen for my writers that I was paying last year and the year before for them to get in depth enough for it to rank. Yeah, word count doesn't matter, just like domain name doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. I'm going to trust Gary on this.

Speaker 2: 1:22:02

But the domain name matters because of some other signal coming in. Okay, and that signal is the anchor text. The anchor text, optimization of owning, you know, computercom, and ranking for the word computer is going to be much higher. The other signal of the brand when you search for computer, google doesn't know if you're looking for the brand, if you're looking for the website, if you're looking for the machine, a computer, yep. So what's it have to do? It has to put in a brand. Algo has put in an exact match anchor text. Algo has put in the you know, and the domain name itself doesn't matter anymore, but it sees that there's an entity called computer LLC probably those got to take that into consideration Then the domain with the exact match relevancy isn't exactly the issue, but the anchor text and the number of times that anchor text occurs that matters.

Speaker 2: 1:22:58

And so all this flows together and you're like well, google said exact match doesn't matter. It doesn't but it does, and how? Because of all of the other things around it. And Google is trying to stop people from spending a million dollars on a domain because they want sexcom, because sexcom is worth $3 million or whatever it is. I saw it on the internet. But yeah, there you go, so so that I mean you know it was a relevant domain, I remember the prices and so, like that is where people will buy something like that for all of the other signals around it. And Google can still say with a straight face the domain name doesn't matter.

Speaker 1: 1:23:41

Does the extension matter? You think?

Speaker 2: 1:23:45

I have not found that the extension matters, other than when you talk about CCTLDs.

Speaker 2: 1:23:51

So, cctlds, you do get a bump if you get acouk, but mostly because it's hard to differentiate whether that matters because of in-bend link structure or if that matters because of the CCTLD. We have a lot of tech stars, companies, especially now again, I'm a mentor for them right, they break off into other countries or they're from other countries and I'm mentoring them in Chicago or Seattle or Boulder or wherever it might be, and they're not in the United States. And because they're not in the United States, they keep getting links from their local area and they're like why is it that I keep ranking in France? Well, morons, because you keep getting links in France, stop it, but get links in the United States, they. Well, we don't want to rank in France. Then put on your website a HREF-Lang tag that specifies when you want France traffic and when you don't, and send the other stuff off to the ENUS so that you have this and they're not doing that. So that's, that's where it's at. So, cctlds, not sure it might still matter.

Speaker 1: 1:24:59

Okay and then so one of the quite I wrote a just a search Google's point of view on AI content and Google for developers answer in their little paragraphs that answer your questions Is AI content against Google search engines guidelines? It says appropriate use of AI or automation is not against our guidelines. This means that it is not used to generate content primarily to manipulate search rankings, which is against our spam policies. But like, why would anyone generate AI content and put it on their website is only for the purpose of ranking? People aren't just doing it to inform people, so that's not true.

Speaker 2: 1:25:39

So not true, not true at all. The clients we are working with, okay, we're an SEO firm too, but they won't post our content. If it's shit period, they won't do it. They won't post shit content on their site, and if they do do you know what happens to it.

Speaker 1: 1:25:56

There's a lot of people. There's a lot of people who laugh at it, or there would be no no, no, they don't even link to it.

Speaker 2: 1:26:02

You know why they don't link to it? Because it's shit. They don't want anybody to know that it's on the website. And if you don't link to it, guess what happens? It doesn't rank. Yep, right, if it doesn't rank, then what was the point in the whole thing in the first place?

Speaker 2: 1:26:14

Okay, I have a bad joke. It's like if you don't love your own kids, no one else can love them either. That's true, so you have to do that first, especially when they're babies, because they're kind of ugly when they're babies. So like those are things that are really, really important that to like love your ugly baby because no one else will, and then they get cuter as they go on. But like that is core to why you have to have content that's truly helpful to the user. Okay, I'm writing about all sorts of weird crap right now for clients, from motorcycle stats to dead dogs, to dogs with cancer to, you know, aprons all sorts of different things right now and we always have to come at it from. Is this truly helpful to the user? And that's why I've spent so much time and so much money to get the content right, because if it's not right, the client doesn't link. The client doesn't link, it doesn't rank. It doesn't rank. I look bad.

Speaker 1: 1:27:11

Well, that's what I'm trying to say to you, though, is that all of this goes back to ranking, which is Google is saying don't use AI to try to manipulate the search rankings, which is you're manipulating them to get your client higher, which is that they're creating your store.

Speaker 2: 1:27:25

Google is a client, so Google is a user of the site.

Speaker 1: 1:27:29

Correct.

Speaker 2: 1:27:30

Google uses the site. Humans use the site. I want all the users to find the content useful, Google being one of them. So, yes, do I want Google to like my content and rank it well? Of course I do, but I also want the humans to like the content and rank it well. Rank it in the brain, rank it in the social media feed, rank it in their email, rank it in their text message to their friends. Right, I want the humans to love it. And Google has another user. I want to love it too. I just happen to get paid for the Google one and we get paid for the other ones.

Speaker 1: 1:28:05

Got it All right. Let's wrap it up with one final question. Okay, with the new version of chat gbt and then you have barred on google and I've used barred on google quite a bit and using it in the search rankings do you foresee search changing immensely in the next few years? And, um, how do you foresee it changing? And I'm going to say to you that I have a feeling that soon enough, search is going to be a lot more of a conversation that you're having, rather than results coming up, and the seo is going to be us almost pandering to the ai for them to know to offer you as an option For, for a service. So, for example, go back to the chinese restaurant. Barred knows that I am on the corner of first and fifth street in chicago and that I, through my ratings of google, like a particular type of chinese food. And there is this. There's four places in this particular area and this one place has done certain things, like writing articles and being pushed out in different things. And when I say, barred, I need a chinese place in your area, he's going to say, hey, this place around the corner is good and they have really good egg rolls. I know you love egg rolls, and then you would end up going there and not even seeing the results, unless you asked for more and it's pretty much chosen for you. That that's what I'm envisioning is going to end up happening.

Speaker 1: 1:29:37

100, you nailed it perfectly. And then you you're like with chat gbt4, which I've been using the last few days and trying it out. I am teaching my assistant To do tasks for me, and that assistant eventually would be my personal one that will learn everything about me as an individual and we'll know the type of egg rolls that I like. And it just like jeff, you're gonna try the egg rolls. It's like your old friend. You've got to try the egg rolls over at you know this place dragon dynasty 88 on this at this address Over here, and you're like barred told me to go see the egg you know, and so you're just gonna go. And it's same with seo. Oh, this guy is the best for seo. You should go to him. He's great. He's in chicago too. You can go to his office. Is here like whatever.

Speaker 2: 1:30:20

It is Like I know how the seo, how the seo changes in this. We help you, as a business owner, communicate what you want to be seen online. We help you communicate that your egg rolls have gotten great, five star reviews, even though your Pad Thai sucks. And it's one star reviews, okay. And it's like, oh, that pad thai is terrible. I didn't clean the water bowl for like five years. It's gross. But, man, the egg rolls are amazing.

Speaker 2: 1:30:55

And this group of people only care about egg rolls. They've never ordered pad thai in their life. Yeah, so it doesn't matter, doesn't matter. Okay. So we need to help you as a business owner to say, okay, egg rolls, egg rolls, egg rolls, egg rolls, egg rolls. Yes, we know our pad thai sucks. Okay. Or communicate with you like you got a bad pad thai, like here's all the information that's on Whatever we call it, the ai, the internet, the, you know the, whatever term we end up using for this okay, and you need to stop Making bad pad thai the obvious one. Okay.

Speaker 2: 1:31:31

Or let's Focus on your egg rolls and we will, we will help you optimize. In that way. It won't be like, hey, let's create a bunch of content around x, y and z. No, it's gonna be. Your pad thai is great, is horrible. Okay, you want to fix it or not? Your egg rolls rock. Let's do like an entire podcast on how you make your egg rolls, why they're there, and we're gonna feed the world, which is really the ai. Okay, all of this detailed information about your specific egg rolls and maybe we'll talk about the history of egg rolls and we'll get into it, okay, but bottom line is, we're gonna get you to rank for the things that will stretch you the most, for the most amount of Inquiries that are happening. Okay, and we're also gonna say that your delivery area is not just a mile, it's 15 miles and that's unheard of, but we'll get it to you and it'll be there in 20 minutes or less.

Speaker 2: 1:32:26

Right, we're gonna do these things as SEOs now To help you and, frankly, it's gonna be a lot better than what we're doing today, because then we're not pushing someone else down and pushing someone else up that are seemingly about the same. We are going to be pushing true, high quality egg rolls, even though they got shitty pad thai. Yeah, and that will make me feel better about waking up every morning and helping people to get the most amount of traffic they possibly can, because I'm not replacing a with b and b with a. I'm literally Pushing to the all the users that want egg rolls, the best egg roll that's out there. And, yes, I'll get the client that says, but my pad thai needs to sell.

Speaker 2: 1:33:13

Yep, our patient will change. It'll change from Okay, let's just write a shit ton of articles around pad thai To okay, but you have this negative constant stream that you can't stop. That is negative about your pad thai. We got to shut down this pipeline of negativity about your pad thai somehow, and then we we start going, and we do that sometimes with restaurants now. But, um, anyway, it's an interesting time In the industry in closing.

Speaker 1: 1:33:44

Why don't you tell us how people can contact you and your email address or any other way that they can get a Holy?

Speaker 2: 1:33:51

So, uh, brent d pain loud, interactive CEO and founder. Um, we have a great team of a bunch of nerds that have been doing this for 20 plus years. Uh, we love what we do, we love complicated, fun things to work on, and we'll help out the boring stuff too. I'm happy to do both sides. Uh, get reach me at brent at loudus. I get plenty of spam, so let's throw that email address out there as well. Brent at loudus. And uh, get reaches at loudus from the website, our AI tools, our content perfect dot ai. And page perfect dot ai. You guys want to check those out? And thank you for the time. I appreciate it.

Speaker 1: 1:34:30

No problem, buddy, and thank you for coming. Have a good day.

Speaker 2: 1:34:33

Take care.