How to Leverage SEO/AEO to show up on TikTok and ChatGPT? Dan Kurtz breaks down how to get your content maximized by any algorithm in 2026! - Zero Sum Game.

Zero Sum Game: Introducing Digital Marketing Expert Dan Kurtz All right. Hey everyone. Welcome back to our podcast, 0 Sum Game. For those of you who aren't familiar, what we do is we interview top voices in social commerce and e-commerce. My name is Sohan. I'm the head of go to market at Reacher. And for those of you who aren't familiar, Reacher is a end to end SAS solution that helps you find new creators, manage them and gamify those relationships. And we've driven over half a billion dollars in revenue on TikTok shop, helping grow the ecosystem as well. Over here, I've got Dan Kurtz for those of you who aren't familiar, Dan and I just met at an event recently where there was a ton of amazing business operators across the Amazon D to C TikTok shop space. And he just like absolutely blew me away on a panel where he was able to breakdown someone who's in a hot seat or someone who is requesting help from a panel of experts, broke down their business, figured out different strategies, and then put together a full solution with press releases, backlinks, AEO optimization for the brand. So I wanted to bring them on here and talk about AEO. I know it's a bit different than our typical TikTok shop strategies. But you know, without further ado, Dan, I'd love for you to maybe give a quick background on yourself for the viewers here. Speaker 2 Sure, absolutely. So hey everyone, my name is Dan Kurtz. I've worked in the digital marketing space since 2006 and I've had a chance to work inside some large companies. So companies like Nielsen, Microsoft, companies like that, working on data integration, marketing pieces, stuff like that. My day-to-day straddles what we would call like a marketing technologist or a martech. So half IT, half marketing, 100% results driven stuff. So always looking for what's going on in tech, staying ahead of trends, keeping, you know, clients in in the loop and and getting them what they're supposed to be getting. So yeah, AEO, for those of you who are unfamiliar with it yet is answer engine optimization. Also, a lot of people call it Geo generative engine optimization. Both of them are just very fancy terms for what we've been doing for forever, which is SEO search engine optimization. I'll go into how they're different as the conversation unfolds and show you guys how you can use it to your advantage. Speaker 1 Absolutely. And I think first before we dive into those, I'd love to understand how you got into the SEOAEO space. I know you worked in some pretty big, pretty big names before, but like, what led you to create your company? I think it's Miss Pepper AI. Is that what it's called? OK, yeah. So also with the update of the story behind the name. From Graphic Design to Miss Pepper AI: Dan's SEO Path Sure, absolutely. So Miss Pepper was a play on a character that's related to Tony Stark. If any of you are familiar with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, she's kind of the marketing assistant. She's fully AI trained, basically blossomed out of a project that I took out of mothballs during COVID. There was nothing else to do, nowhere to go. So nothing like opening up the old crypt and seeing what's in there. So found, found bits and pieces of a project, started putting it together, started augmenting AI to it, seeing how it was working. Lo and behold, Miss Pepper kind of came out of the genesis of, of plugging together a bunch of different endpoint software's and, and things that I developed previously and kind of birthed the the agency and started moving forward as far as getting into SEOI started doing that back in, in early college days. I was going to college for graphic design and this was at the time when India, the Philippines and Southeast Asia, a lot of the Pacific was coming online. So a lot of that was figuring out how to pivot and position and, and at the time I was reading what was the linchpin by Seth Godden or Godin, I'm not sure, but I was reading his book and it, it talked about how to become indispensable at a company and, and kind of straddling those two worlds. So I started learning SEO, broke into web design development, setting up servers, all that kind of stuff, just to kind of have a rounded tool set around digital marketing, setting up online businesses. Because remember, it's early 2000. So people are still coming online and and getting set up, you know, after the the bubble burst. But it was kind of a boom town back then. You could get away with lots of stuff that you can't get away with now, let's put it that way. Speaker 1 And what's interesting, you said you went to college for graphic design, but then you started doing all this more like technical stuff, you know, to to Gory's skill set there, like what was like the transition or like inflection point there, just out of curiosity. Speaker 2 Yeah, so previously before going to college, I was in a vocational tech school and doing a lot of web development stuff there. And I, I really dug into it and that was like my first introduction to it, you know, had a intro to web design class in high school. It's like, cool, this is what I want to do, let's do it. Got into that, started setting up web pages, building stuff out and then learning database design and all that stuff on my own. And it was always just this thing in the back of my head. Like the whole reason for going to the school I was going to was because they had a web design program. Little did I know their web design program was like 2 1/2 semesters and the rest was a Fine Arts degree. I was like, this is not what I want. This is not where the world's going. And I'm sure a lot of folks, especially now with AI and the way it is, they're probably like, I don't want to go to school for web design. I don't want to do SEO, I've got AI, I don't want to do that stuff. And it's, it's the same thing. It's just a newer iteration on it. Speaker 1 Interesting. Is Traditional SEO Still Relevant in the AI Era? Do you think like SEO is, you know, still like like with this new age of people just like using ChatGPT and everything as their search engines, especially in like more younger, like Gen. Alpha, like Jen's ears, I think, do you think SEO is still going to be as relevant or as important? Speaker 2 So the way that most people traditionally look at SEO, no, that is starting to go away. And by that I mean traditional SEO to most people means showing up somewhere in the 10 blue links that show up at the top of Google or Bing or whatever. Anybody who's doing SEO now will tell you, if they're paying attention to the the writing on the wall and where things are going, that a search engine is not necessarily just Google or Bing or any of these other platforms. It's any engine where you can control the outcome of the result. So optimizing for an algorithm on TikTok that's technically SEO, optimizing for something inside of Instagram, Spotify, playlists, podcasts, any of those things, they're making up the makeup of what SEO is becoming and where it's evolving to. What we're seeing a lot now is a lot of people are are a lot of the engines are focusing on brand and whether that brand can answer the questions. They want to know the breadth and the depth of your company's knowledge in what you say you're good at. And they want to see it posted everywhere because the, the buyer journey, as you know, especially with doing TikTok, it's never a straight line. It's oh, we got a question about this. Oh, I got an answer out of ChatGPT. Now I'm going to go over to TikTok and see who's making videos about that. I want to learn more than I'm going to go over to Amazon and see if that company has any products. You're bouncing from three to four different places before you finally make a decision. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. Like the customer's journey is like what? Like probably like 8 to 10 points now, honestly, it's it's, it's getting even bigger and bigger. So I guess like just to kind of dive into what you're saying a bit more. Are you saying like it's a combination of just being everywhere and not just being in one or two places now? I just want to. Speaker 2 Click it a little bit more. Yeah, absolutely. Achieving Brand Omnipresence with Audience Research Tools So it is definitely branded Omnipresence is is what's going to seal the deal for people moving forward. You need to be on channels, you need to be seeing where customers hang out. There's a ton of different tools you can use to monitor stuff like that. One that you can plug in it's, it's free to do the search. There's a company called Spark, toro.com, SPAR, ktoro.com. You can plug in what your business does or your website into their system and it will tell you who your audience is, where they're hanging out, what engines you should be paying attention to and what conversations those people are having. And it's free to do that initial search, which is enough for most people to go ahead and get started and make those accounts the one. If you want to go a step further and you want to have the response time of let's say Southwest or Wendy's or Disney, whenever they're posting stuff on social media and they get tagged, there's a larger platform called Awario AWA, rio.com that is essentially a social listening platform for the Internet. So anytime somebody mentions your brands, your competition, your whatever, you can track all those things across basically any platform. It is a bit pricey, but if you have the means to do it and you have somebody to manage that during the day, absolutely recommend it. Speaker 1 So I guess like, what's the difference between having these things like and this might be a stupid question, having these things like segmented like having a social listening tool versus having a separate, you know, SEO platform, right? Like what's the benefit in like rolling it all into one and like why is that more important now I guess? Speaker 2 Yeah. So in in rolling it all together, any of the content that you produce going out, you can multipurpose like for example this podcast, you can take it and turn into vertical reels. You can turn into a blog post, You can turn any of the key takeaways that we talked about probably into an infographic. Those are all pieces of information related to AEO answer optimization, generative engine optimization, search engine optimization that somebody can go and reference. But The thing is, is nobody's ever going to browse the same way. You and I might, you know, like if I'm in the car, I'm probably going to put on Spotify and put on, you know, a rock playlist or whatever. Go jam outgoing where I'm going. You, being a podcaster, might go listen to other podcasts for inspiration and ideas, but if somebody's listening to a podcast like this and that topic comes up, they're like, oh, this is really cool. And now they start going down the rabbit hole and finding all the rest of our stuff. Speaker 1 Interesting. Yeah, yeah, I mean it makes sense like when you explain it because you explain it really simply. But I guess for people just like trying to get started, right, I think people usually like neglect. I feel like people would neglect a lot of just like organic ranking SEO and like just making a lot of content so they can be everywhere, right? Like what? Like where do I like really like what do I do with all this information? Like how do I get started with something like this? You know, It feels like very overwhelming. Optimizing Content for Specific Platform Algorithms and Engagement So the best way to do it is start out and figure out your game plan. Like I said, you can use Spark Toro to figure out what networks you should be paying attention on and who's on those platforms. It'll give you age, demographics, all that sort of stuff, what time of day, and again, just on a free search, you don't have to pay for the platform or anything. You can get at least that much from there. I would go build out branded accounts on those platforms if I was going to try and multi purpose content. Figure out a way that your brand or however your company works, whatever your cornerstone piece of content is like for what we're doing here. Video would be a great starting point. From there you can multi purpose into other formats. There's a lot here to to digest between the actual visuals on the screen, what we're talking about, and then the the captions and sub captions that you'll get later when it gets transcribed. Those can all be turned into different forms of content. I would say focus on the types of content that those platforms and those people want to see and just start there. Figure out one platform first, then two, then three. And as you figure those platforms out, then start looking at ways to automate those platforms. You don't have to automate everything out of the gate because a shotgun message to every platform is not going to do you the justice that it's going to, you know, deserve. Facebook's different than Twitter is different than Reddit. So by having those pieces curtailed to the audience that you're currently trying to talk to, it becomes a lot easier to have that conversation on that platform. And they recognize you as kind of like one of their own because you're, you're using the typical lingo on that site. Like short form on Reddit is way different than short form on Twitter, stuff like that. So. Speaker 1 Interesting. I'd love to like, dive into some of those nuances because I feel like for me traditionally, like I wasn't even thinking about, you know, social media as sort of like a ranking play. I feel like maybe this is like more of like a, you know, more barbaric way to approach it. But I was just like, just put a bunch of content out there and just do enough volume until you like start picking things up. But it almost sounds like there's a way to really get your content sort of optimized and indexed. I know there's like things where it's like if you pick up broad trends and news on like, let's say, like LinkedIn, if you're following LinkedIn news, like that'll get you like picked up, right? Or if you're following trends on TikTok, that'll get you picked up. Is that more of what you mean? Or are there like different things that you're thinking about when you're trying to get that content to show up on platforms like that? Speaker 2 So there's there's two schools of thought of it. I'll give you the direct answer as a content creator and then I'll give you the weird answer as an SEO who's been doing this for 20 some odd years. So the direct answer to your question is what you're looking to do is get yourself out there, get your brand out there and publish your content on that platform. And you want to optimize for that platform's algorithm. So like Instagram, you got like 3 seconds to get their attention for the hook. And if you can't get it in that time, they're they're past you, they're scrolled on. So you got to optimize for that. I'm sure it's similar on TikTok. I don't know the exact metrics, but it's pretty much the same. Same with YouTube shorts. That's a possibility as well on something like LinkedIn, doing a LinkedIn pulse, what they they call their article blog posting platform. Doing a pulse on there is you're focusing on the B to B market, which is great if you service B to B. So if you're an E com, it might not be the best fit. It depends on your, your target audience, but you, you basically meet people where they're at. Now, the opposite side of that, the SEO answer to that is I'm going to go create every possible platform I can find and I'm going to post everything out there. And there's a reason behind that. So like, I know that for certain keywords inside of Google, the answer engines and things like that, that Google will actually rank something like a medium market or a blogspot blog or a LinkedIn Pulse at the top because there's not a lot of good answers for that question. You can also do them in Reddit posts. So there's something we discussed at Market Masters as part of my presentation was how to basically get control of Reddit or subreddits. Sorry, how how to do that and what the methodology is behind that and how you can use it for SEO to kind of build a massive presence and, and just start sending people directly to your site. It's a very long winded, convoluted thing to do, but the, you know, there's a method out there for the people that want to invest the time. So there's things like that, but for targeting platforms like that, those things show up in the search engines. Uncovering SEO Arbitrage Opportunities and Content Gaps Like Instagram now has indexable reels, meaning those things can show up in search results. So now you could potentially, if you're answering questions that people are having questions for on the Internet, you could potentially be the answer for those because the top five sites or top seven sites in Google are yours. Because a lot of a lot of the answer engines work the same way the search engines do. So they'll go ahead and look at that data and kind of formulate their own. Speaker 1 Answer. Interesting. So you're basically saying there's like an arbitrage opportunity where people are asking questions, there isn't enough sources to then answer those And that's how you can start getting awareness. Am I like understanding correctly? OK, got it. And and for it's interesting because I always hear people talk about blogging so much, but I feel like I, I rarely meet marketers who are actually going and doing blogs right. But then I hear all about SEO is just like all about blogging. Like why? Why is there like such like a disconnect between like marketers not doing blogs, Everyone just like AI writing blogs and like putting them out there, like what's going on? Speaker 2 Yeah. So there's, there's a bit of a gap and it depends on which side of the marketing fence you're on. So the SEO guys are purists. They, a lot of SE OS want to stay within the hey, if I go build all this content, it'll be valuable because the thing that Google as a search engine can read is text. It doesn't read JavaScript. It can't really read images. It's got some way to figure out what's in the image, like it knows what the Eiffel Tower is, but it's not going to be able to tell you that this is an AI generated version of the Eiffel Tower. Like things like that where there's little discrepancies. But because for so long Google was the main source of traffic on the Internet and because Google couldn't read anything that wasn't text, all the Seos were like, let's just look, you know, just hammer it in there, do whatever we can and just get it in there. Which is the same reason why Google went ahead and built closed captions and transcriptions into YouTube was because they can't really watch the video. They can only read the transcript of what's going on and figure out how that works with the way the internet's going now. It's very much user driven. So it's about Ctr. it's about dwell time. It's about how long you're on the page and, and all of those things on every platform. So on things like Instagram, how many reels are you watching? Are you clicking to that person's sub account? Are you watching all of their reels and going through trying to find the one that actually like hits with you? Like, you know, you'll see a video on on TikTok and you're like, oh, scroll stopper. And then you'll go into their channel and start looking through their stuff. Yeah, that's part of what the AIS are looking at now is, is all of that stuff as well. So those user metrics and things. But back to your point about the the content, there's a million and one ways to do content on the Internet. You could do podcasts like this, you can do videos, you can do whatever format's comfortable for you as the business owner. But the fastest way to get those questions and figure out which ones you need to answer, you can use a free service like answerthepublic.com and type in your keyword and they'll tell you every question that's being asked on the Internet about that topic, and then you just pick the ones that are relevant. Speaker 1 Interesting. So in theory, you could just like, could I go to answerthepublic.com and then kind of find out, like just put a bunch of questions about TikTok Shop, for example, and then go and write blog answers for all those TikTok Shop questions, post them under the Reacher website, and then that would allow it to start getting served more. Is that essentially what you're saying? Speaker 2 Correct. And you can even do it if you want to, as being a person who does a video podcast. You can even do it as a YouTube video. Or if you want to take the shortcut out of it, make a hey Gen. avatar and have it read the script. You can do things like that. It still counts as answering the question, and it's technically you. Speaker 1 Interesting. How to Reverse Engineer AI for Content and Authority Yeah, that's, that's like make you're explaining like SEO, like so simple. I've never had it explained to me like this simply before, you know, cuz for me, I'm always like, oh, like how is the headline relevant to the search query on the website? And how is everything like coming up over there? And it's like this whole like auction on like the search result and like, that's like the way, you know, I've been thinking about it, you know, but you're basically just saying like, look, find the gap between like what the user wants to know and then just start filling up those opportunities. I'm assuming it's kind of similar to TikTok, right? Like let's say you're doing it for social media, for instance, right? If you can, you know, like there's some arbitrage where you can start gaining awareness on your accounts by answering those questions. And then you start going back to the, you know, really competitive part of like the platform and targeting those other people. Is that, is that sort of, is it a similar kind of way there for SEO and and getting things served or? Speaker 2 Absolutely. So in, in all these different engines that we've talked about, social, video, podcasts, SEO, they all serve the same primary purpose for the social. It's more of they want to keep you on for as long as possible because that drives their ad revenue for Google. And this is what I believe is going to help going forward, especially with the AI engines the way that they are. The whole point of Google having a search engine was #1 so they could serve ads because that was their primary money maker. Same thing as the social networks now, but number 2 was to terminate that search because if Google could answer that question better than anybody else, why would anybody else go to another search engine? And now the AIS are doing the same thing. GPT is now giving you an answer about whatever The thing is based on as many data points as it can pull. So like if you go type in a question into ChatGPT or Claude and you tell to do Internet research, it'll come back with a list of the websites that it went to go find that data on and which ones were the highest cited sources. So if I was, if I was a betting pert, you know, gambling guy, which I'm not, if I want to go in and reverse engineer how I would get myself into that question, I would go look at those top three to five sources and then go build the answer to that question on those same platforms, on those same websites. Speaker 1 Interesting. So just repeat that, repeat that back to me, right? So I go on chat sheet BT I want to figure out how to grow revenue for TikTok shop, right? And I get maybe one YouTube video from an influencer. I get a couple TikTok articles from like Tik Tok's, you know, affiliate center. And then I get a podcast, you know what I mean? So like what would you kind of like do do then like what's like this step by step framework from there? Speaker 2 So I would go ahead and make a offshoot podcast channel. I wouldn't use my main 1 and I would title it whatever my blog, my podcast is Q&A, and I would have every podcast title be the question that I typed into ChatGPT. And then I'll give my own answer on audio. So you can fulfill it that way. You can do the same thing by shooting, shooting the video, same as you would make the title of the video the question. Put that on YouTube and if you were working video first, you could then RIP the audio out of that YouTube file upload as a podcast and you've now done 2 for the price of 1. As far as the TikTok shop, there's not much you can do to try and rank somebody unless there's like a community feature in there, which I'm not sure like where people can answer questions. But I would leverage that and build my account up to answer those questions as best as possible and try to get myself to be the selected answer. You know, voted by the crowd. Same thing on Reddit. You try and get yourself the most up votes because you gave the best response for whatever it is. It's a lot of the AI stuff is now going towards crowd sourced versions of answers. So if you can again, answer that question better than anybody else, you get rewarded with the points. You now take over that question. That query now has all of those data points that it's using to tie it together and they go, oh, these are all so on. We're just gonna use his stuff, We're good. And that now becomes the answer inside the LLM, because you answered it more recently and more completely than everybody else. Speaker 1 Interesting. The Business Impact of Becoming a Branded Authority Online So, and I, and I guess the reason why this matters is if you can be the answer to that question there, they'll remember you remember you next time they have a related question. Like what's the significance of, let's say, if I did create a podcast where I did the Q&A of like top TikTok shop most frequently asked questions that I get all the time, right? And then I, I published that and then people found me I guess like why, what, what business impact like does that have long term? Speaker 2 So think about this from we'll, we'll go to a, a 30,000 foot view and, and kind of answer that question. So in, in your podcast settings on whatever platform you're streaming it to, or most of the platforms, you're able to set up your profile, right? And that has links to all of your other sites, your social media accounts, your channels, everything else that's in there. Again, the AI and the LLM is doing what they do. It's trust but verify. So they see you answered the question. Now they click through to your profile and they go, oh, this is actually a whole person. All these other accounts are all tied to his profile. This is who he is on the Internet. Then they go to your website and they read that information. They go, oh, here's a whole bunch more information. And if that website is pointing to all those other socials, it understands that as the web of you on the Internet. So it now sees you as a branded authority, an expert because of the depth. And again, go back to as deep and as wide as your content can be. It should be because you're answering all those questions. So it now is creating a library of all of your stuff because he was really good at answering these questions. What other questions has he answered? And they'll go through the rest of your YouTube videos, they'll go through your blog posts, they'll go through your social posts, see all the things that you've done, and then pull them in as reference. Speaker 1 Interesting. So it almost sounds like you have to do it in multiple places at once, right? Because it sounds like, let's say, and I could be misunderstanding this, you, you do the job well, you get your podcasts or people find you and answer that question. But then if it goes to your profile and you don't have your other sources there, you lose the opportunity to be registered or recognized as like a authority, correct? Like you need to have that same information. So I guess it it becomes a question of like having the right information for the right question across as many places as possible, right? Is that sort of it? Speaker 2 Yeah. You want to have a consensus across the board that you have completely answered this question in as many places as people would ask that. Speaker 1 Question. Interesting as many places people. OK, so you would create some like, you know, like you'd have some long form content where you're really deeply answering that question and then a bunch of like, would it count if you had like short form content that was like partially answering the question or hooking them and then driving them back to the long form content? Or would you have to completely answer that there? OK. Speaker 2 You can do it. So you can like for example, if I am creating all those pieces of content and let's say me is an SEO, I'm probably going to write a blog about it, but I go ahead and I make a YouTube video about it. I can put that YouTube video at the top of the article that I have on my website. I can go ahead and put the podcast down near the bottom. So somebody can go ahead and listen to the audio version if they want. I could take the infographic that I made and insert that directly into the middle of the blog post. Now Google and all the other AI engines are seeing that you're embedding stuff from your other web pages. They're tying that that profile together and locking it in. Speaker 1 Interesting. Yeah. Interesting. This is like, this is interesting because like an influencer marketing, right? Like people are so big on following someone who has like a theme, right? And then they're relating like theme to like focus and expertise, but you're like deconstructing it in a different way where it's like, look, there's all these like questions unanswered. There's all this like, essentially like arbitrage to be like scooped up, right? Yeah. And if you just do that, enough time and enough places that will get you expertise and authority, right? I mean, I think I feel like people, you make it sound like people are overthinking like long form content. Like, let's say for me, you know, it's like like I the first intuition would be my intuition would be like, hey, like, let's just create a step by step long form content series on like every single stage of TikTok shop, right? But you're basically saying like, like with your school of thought, I could extrapolate that that's inefficient because like these are the most top questions that want to be answered right now. And you can just create content in like a different order based off of like the order of magnitudes on like how much people are searching for those terms, right? Do you think like that's how people should go about creating long form content or starting to get awareness out there of themselves? Leveraging Niche Questions for a Snowball Effect in Traffic Absolutely. So to answer your question with, well, not really another question, but so you you mentioned something that I've noticed as well is the theme of the channels depending on whether you're TikTok, YouTube, whatever it is the same idea and same principle applies to SEO because you have this topic, whatever it is that the the big topic, right? It's the the thing that your channel overarchingly covers. But then there's all the little splinter cells in there that we can cover of different facets of that business. Like within influencer marketing, there's influencers on TikTok, influencers on YouTube, influencers and you know, people who do e-mail marketing and list swapping and influencers and whatever the space is. And then those experts show up at conferences and then there are other people that show up and do this. So there's all these little rings of information that you can do. And back to my point earlier, Answer the Public actually tells you that. It shows you all of those little ringlets that make up your topic, your theme for your channel. So you can go ahead and go as as many levels deep as you want with Answer the Public and grab all of those questions. So you can go 234 levels deep and grab every question in the market if you go high enough at the top, you know, make it broad match your channel for the same theme. But then you can drill down as hard and as far as you want and then those become sections. To your point about the long form content though, you can still do that. I would do those as like cornerstone pieces on my channel though, or like that would be my feature on my YouTube, something pinned to the top of my my Instagram channel. Here's part 1-2 and three and then four and five are linked to it in the description or whatever because you can only have 3 pins at the top for Instagram, but same process. It's, you're just covering all the little questions to build up your following and your traffic because they, they understand what you're talking about. And then you can go in and do those big boy pieces that you're talking about and then start knocking other people kind of off their throne by building those pieces because you've got the, the groundswell of doing all that, that footwork ahead of time. You did all the little questions first to build your traffic. And from there, it'll start to snowball. Speaker 1 So what do you could you dive more into that point where you're like, you're using that then knock the other people's pieces like off I I think that part is like I'm not 100% clear on sure. Speaker 2 So as you, as you start doing these things, whether it's SEO, social, whatever, they will start seeing traffic coming to your channel for those things. So you wind up getting more recommended. And then as you keep building that, you start taking over smaller and smaller influences. It's that downhill snowball effect. It'll get to a point where your channel has so much engagement going on because you answered all those low level questions that knocking out a big one. Like take do your five step guide on TikTok shop. Let's say if somebody else had a piece on TikTok shop, you you can Now if somebody searches TikTok shop, you now come up as the relevant expert because you've built all of that trust by answering the little questions around it. Speaker 1 Interesting. So that, so it's like a it's, it's also just a culmination of like how many questions you've answered, not just how big of a question is it that you answered, correct, right. There's like an art there. Speaker 2 Yeah, think of it as like creative. Best way to do this is like climbing Mount Everest, right? You gotta start at base camp first. So if you get your fortification, you get your footing, you get your gear, all that stuff, you find your Sherpa, you've done the exercises, you've done the breathing stuff, you got your oxygen tank filled, you're ready to go. Now you just have to go ahead. And that, that part of what I just described is the groundwork that's answering the little questions. And then as you ascend up the mountain, it gets more difficult because the altitude gets higher. So getting to the top of Mount Everest would be knocking somebody else out with A5 part series about TikTok shop. But as you answer all those questions, it becomes easier and easier because you've done all that groundwork. You don't have that much mountain under you. Speaker 1 Interesting. OK, it makes sense. Mastering Link Building Through Multi-Platform Content Strategy Yeah. And I guess going back to it, I know like SEO experts are like so gung ho on blogs, but there's been like a huge rise in like short form video and like video based content. Like are you still having a preference towards vlogs there or are you going back to your thesis where it's like it's better to have a blog and a couple videos on on some other channels, you know? Speaker 2 Absolutely. So we do as much multi purposing as possible. I'll start with writing the blogs because I've just traditionally that's always worked for me. Like I said, been in the space for almost 2 decades now, so blogs are like second nature. So I'll start there and then I'll go ahead and create all the other versions of that content so that it goes on the socials and and everything else. So it's just taking that one piece and just reinterpreting it for the people on those other platforms and getting it out there. But they all link back to the original article. So I'm getting myself some some inbound credibility for that on the website as well. Interesting that also I should mention functions as a form of link building, so you can actually do your link building for free doing it that way. Speaker 1 Like just for the viewers watching, could you define what like link building is and like why it's why it's important? Speaker 2 Sure. So link building in the realm of SEO was one of the things that everybody said was the, the Holy Grail of, of getting your websites ranked, which if you're ignoring all the other factors out there, sure, I guess. But it's, it's very much a game of content links and technical SEO. Technical SEO is like coding and schema. There's, there's other stuff out there that you can do, but that's advanced stuff. If you're at home watching and you're in the E com space or an influencer, you don't have to get into that stuff right now. It'll become important later, but I don't recommend getting into it. Find somebody who can do it for you. Schema is a bit of an advanced thing. It's recoding your web page into a different language, but for link building. It used to be that you could rank your website using a certain number of links, and if you were abusing that too much, Google would stop counting link building as what was ranking your page. It's there too much of a good thing clause inside of their algorithm. It's called MC4 for anybody who's interested in that kind of stuff. You won't find anything public about it. But after talking with a Google Rep, he was like, Oh yeah, that's, that's MC 4. I'm like, oh, cool, now we know what that is. But so the idea behind links is that if you get enough of them and they're from authoritative credit, credible sources, it'll help to power up your website. In today's day and age, everybody has a platform because everybody can create a social. And if you're doing theming like you're talking about that website and your profile has a certain amount of authority to it. So you could like, let's say inside of the podcast episode, if you mentioned a specific page on your website, you could in the description for that episode, say this podcast episode was originally A blog post ad and put your website URL in there. And then when that goes out to be syndicated across the other podcast networks, Now you've got 1015 backlinks coming from Apple Music, Spotify, Spreaker, like all these different platforms that have a lot of credibility and authority, both with the search engines and the AI services right now. Interesting. Speaker 1 So, so that's why I always see that there like I've seen like podcast episodes where it's like honorable mentions and then they just like mention a bunch of like big names in this space or they mention a bunch of big companies. Like is that similar? Or is because I know you're talking about different platforms, right? Like where you're linking? Speaker 2 So they can. Speaker 1 Spotify. Speaker 2 So they might be doing it from an attribution standpoint kind of to be like a, you know, like a hat tip type thing for that creator. Or if they're a smaller guy, they might be using those links to try and show up inside that person's link profile. So when their SEO dude looks at their website and goes, hey, this person's talked about, it's like 400 times on their podcast, we should go talk to them. And like some people, we use that as like a way that it's a slow burn. You know, it's a slow boat to China to do it, but it's a way to do prospecting almost. Because the text that you highlight with that URL is actually the link that shows up in their website when they get a link report. So if you're putting in there, hey Wozniak, I want to be on your podcast, and that's linked to the description. You do that enough times and they're like, what the heck is this? Speaker 1 So you could technically use that as like a very hyper targeted prospecting approach through someone's like SEO Guy. Interesting. Speaker 2 Yeah. Speaker 1 So I could just like link in every podcast episode. Hey would love to chat with the CEO of Loreal. Yeah eventually Loreal CEO would like pick it up. Interesting. Miss Pepper AI: Automation, AEO Websites, and Content Optimization There's lots of cool hacks, man. I mean, I'd love to kind of dive into what you do at Miss Pepper and what your guys unique approach to this cuz you painted such a good picture on like the fundamentals and rules of SEO. Like I'd love to understand your guys's value prop and like what do you guys do there? Speaker 2 Sure. So we at Miss Pepper do a lot of the AI enabled stuff that we talked about so far today. So building out the branded profiles, creating multi purpose content, but we also specialize, especially nowadays in doing marketing automation setups. And then we do something called identity resolution, which has worked really well for our clients. So to break both of those down, marketing automation is the side of doing all those social posts that I just mentioned, but being able to do it on autopilot. So you create a YouTube video and then I have a bunch of automations that I've built to go ahead, take that transcript, take the video, chunk it out, make the vertical videos, make the reels, and then auto post it to all of your channels. You can automate stuff like that. So different things like that where if you'd normally have to hire a person, but instead you can leverage the automation in some AI and basically supplement that human capital who would normally be doing that type of work. So there's somebody at the controls watching to make sure the automation works, but also it just is well versed in both doing the production and knows how to troubleshoot if the code breaks. Little things like that. And you can use different platforms. Like one one example of a platform for that is like Zapier. A lot of people use that for business. And then some of the more advanced ones are like make.com or NA. Then they all serve on purpose. They all have different pricing models. Personally, I like NA then because you can go ahead and host it yourself for free, but that does it to have its downsides. I'm a tech guy so I don't mind troubleshooting it. Speaker 1 Yeah, that's what my our CEO was like a really good growth guy can go just create an Nan workflow from HubSpot to this and I'm just like this stuff, room for improvement there, but definitely I've heard about it. I guess just follow up questions from the content standpoint, right? They're like all these tools out there like like Opus clip, you know, and other ones that just like automatically cut them up. But I always feel like they get the videos wrong or it sounds like unnatural, you know, is there anything you guys are doing to like actually extract the relevant moments that like people would want to genuinely watch? Because like we've been experimenting with 60 seconds, but then I've been seeing like my 3 to 6 minute ones work way better on LinkedIn. Like I posted AI posted a three to six minute 1 on LinkedIn and there was like 7 1/2 hours of like watch time on this like random clip and I'm just like, what the heck is going on? Like I I posted shorts and it gets way less watch time. So how are you guys like differentiating between the length and like topic when you're like cutting these things up? Speaker 2 Right. So that's, that's the platform differentiator that I was talking about earlier. So LinkedIn, because they're B to B, they are traditionally trained to watch 8 to 10 minute videos on that platform because that's the maximum length of time that you're allotted. Like I know somebody in business who used to run a podcast that was 8 minutes and 8 seconds long and it was, you know, 6-7 questions rapid fire. And he would make it that length so that his podcast could be auto uploaded to LinkedIn and the B2B stuff could be seen just by those people. So it was short enough that they could watch an entire podcast episode. They were technically on LinkedIn, so they were at work and they're now watching a podcast about how certain people do certain things in their business. So like, that was his hook on how he did stuff. But yeah, it's the same thing. The platform's always going to be a little bit different, like B to B. They they like sitting there watching it because they're actively looking for something. Speaker 1 Got it. And so you're saying with these like other tools like like Opus versus you guys like they're not bringing in like platform context into like how they're chopping up and taking your guys's content and Miss Pepper is sort of integrated and is trained on like data from each platform to make that better or? Speaker 2 Yeah. So we trained on most of the platforms. We've got almost all of them locked down for the most part just after seeing them figuring out, you know what best of winds up going out there, what gets, you know, most matted likes, tweets, re shares, all that kind of stuff. And every six months or so we go ahead and we update and aggregate our data on those platforms because you know, algorithms change pretty quickly nowadays. So we're watching that stuff and then also doing the AEO on people's websites. So we've got a tool in house, somebody can give us their business, what services they offer. And then using their brand voice and all that other sort of stuff, we can actually go ahead and deploy a website that's fully AEO enabled within, you know, less than 30 days. And we're talking anywhere between 500 to 1000 pages plus depending on the the size of their business, Completely optimal is ready to go fully coded front to back and out-of-the-box is getting rankings. Speaker 1 Interesting. OK, so you guys help create new AEO websites, you chop up content and help it be served better for each platform that's working. Are you guys then like doing things with those transcripts like writing blog articles or like how far do you really go and like getting stuff ranked everywhere? Advanced Identity Resolution and AI-Driven Sales Outreach So it depends on, it'll depend on the client and what they want to achieve. A lot of times they come to us because we've been SEO and AEO for, since we started the company in 2020. So it's, it's relatively new. But again, I've, I've been doing SEO for so long. It was just, it was a natural easy endpoint. And then the marketing automation stuff, it doesn't just have to be social. It could be back end stuff. So like a lot of folks use the CRM like High Level, we've automated that whole process that the entire onboarding sequence is completely done by the automation. So creating all the content, building out everything in the brand voice, all the things they would need for a full year's worth of marketing is fully preloaded and saved into their High Level account with us from the jump. Speaker 1 Interesting. OK. So you you're accumulating all the marketing materials they'd really need at the beginning, correct when you onboard them. And then everything else is just like we're going to build an AEO optimized website and then there's like a bunch of add-ons for like chopping up content and making that get served everywhere. Is that sort of like your guys's scope? Speaker 2 Yeah. So for right now that's that's predominantly what we're doing. And then the the identity resolution piece as well, which is a lot of fun. It's the that's where ads are going in in the next couple of years. Speaker 1 Interesting. Talk to me more about the identity resolution piece a bit more. Speaker 2 Sure. So identity resolution, to boil it down because it's a mouthful is essentially it's a pixel just like you would have from Facebook or TikTok or whatever for tracking. But if somebody visits your website, I've got about a 65% chance that I can tell you who that person is, whether it's B to B or B to C I can then feed that data into follow up campaigns, CRM, direct mail campaigns, retargeting, even sending them custom ads and custom content specific to what they do. So there's one part of that which is the Pixel which I've just described. And then there's the second part we have which is called the in market. And essentially, we have data partnerships with 450,000 websites on the Internet, so Zillow, Redfin, Cleveland Clinic, all sorts of stuff. And we can watch their browsing behavior on those sites. So we know when somebody winds up becoming in market for any of those services. So if you were to tell me a list of keywords or questions around your brand, your company, and what you did, I can tell you exactly when somebody's entering the market looking for a TikTok shop expert and then queue them up with a cold e-mail and a cold call and a LinkedIn voice note to the right person at that company for you guys to do business together. Speaker 1 Interesting. So that's also like an AISDR on steroids basically, right, because you have the partnerships with like every major website and then you or with a lot of websites and then you're able to create camp like automations that essentially help target and then put them into a funnel. Like do you guys ever go beyond like just the reach out and like optimize the funnel down to the conversion or is that sort of where you're drawing the line? Speaker 2 It depends. Like we've, we've got some stuff that we're working on internally. We've got some AI copy bots that we've built that are trained on, you know, best practices and stuff like that to build funnels. A lot of times folks will come to us and they just want delivered up to the appointment. They don't, they don't want anything past that. So we'll do all the appointment setting and everything else using both the data and the automation piece to kind of feed that together. So interesting. Yeah. Speaker 1 So how do you guys do? What's that called? Speaker 2 Oh, I was gonna say, so like all those pieces of content that we're talking about all driving towards the website means that all that work that I've done, 65% of it I'm able to recoup if they don't click through and and fill out a form. Speaker 1 Interesting, interesting. So interesting. And just one minor what one follow up question, how are you guys like doing like the voice notes? Speaker 2 Oh, so the voice notes. We're using 11 labs. Speaker 1 Got it. OK. Speaker 2 So we've got it. OK, Yeah. So we've got the script, so we'll send a regular DM first about whoever the person is. So if we're trying to sell AEO services, say, you know, hey Sohan, see you work over at XYZ company. Do you have anybody on staff right now that's focused on AEO considering that AI is all, you know, taking over at this point? And if they say no, it'll, it'll then go take the no and say, oh cool, well, that's something we happen to do. Do you want to hop on like a 15 minute call and see if we can help you guys with that? And it'll send that voice note back automatically because it's just filling in the fields with that person's info. And then and then they say yes. And then I have it where it's watching the messages coming back in and it queues up an MCP server advanced AI thing that goes and pulls my calendar for the week and tells them what time slots I have available and what they can pick from. Connecting with Miss Pepper AI and Final Thoughts Interesting. I love that. I love that making me rethink my, my sales motion here for Reacher right now. But no, this has been awesome. And I guess it's, it's funny, normally I ask like where people can find you, but I'm sure you're everywhere and you've optimized yourself to be everywhere. But I'm assuming like, people can just look up, you know, Miss Pepper, you know, on Google or look you up on LinkedIn, like, where's the best place people should reach out to you? Speaker 2 I mean, for right now, I'd say the website, we just relaunched it today in the midst of the Google update, no less. So we're, we're literally playing by the seat of our pants just to see because we're we're, you know, we're eating our own cooking with this. So we've just finished the site builder system that I was mentioning earlier. So went ahead, reran our website, rebuilt the entire thing. And Google's right now is completely up ending their algorithm like they started like four or five hours ago. And I pushed the site live this morning. So I'm like, OK, brand new website in the middle of a Google algorithm update. Let's see how we do. Speaker 1 That'll be interesting. I'll give it a look up later and see how you guys show up. I'll just search up AEO services. Speaker 2 And see, yeah, I mean, even do it in the LLMS, see if it shows up. Just for fun, yes. Speaker 1 100% Well thanks for making the time to chat today. It's like super interesting conversation. I know I learned a lot. I'm by no means an AEO or SEO expert, but absolutely loved having you on. Speaker 2 Thank you so much. I appreciate that. It was great being here.