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What Actually Drives Citations in LLMs With Solomon Thimothy

39m 57s

What Actually Drives Citations in LLMs With Solomon Thimothy

The discussion centers on the transformative shift in digital marketing and SEO due to AI and changing user habits. The hosts note that constant change is the norm, with users now relying on AI like ChatGPT to summarize information instead of clicking through traditional search results. This evolution requires marketers to optimize for Large Language Models (LLMs) and answer engines, a concept referred to as LLM visibility or Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). The core strategy is creating high-quality, user-centric content that is meticulously organized with clean data, schema markup, and clear answers to user questions. Success hinges on a brand's ability to precisely define its services and audience, as AI tools prioritize well-structured, authoritative information. While tools and tactics are evolving, the fundamental goal remains organizing the world's information effectively to serve the user, whether through traditional SEO or emerging AI platforms.

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This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. Your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential? Let's get started. Howdy, welcome back to another Front Fold episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. We are working on new intro, so apologies everyone. We have rebranded. We are also moving on to YouTube. So if you would go check us out on YouTube, it's pretty pitiful to be honest. I would love a review. If you're getting value from this podcast, we've been doing it 12 plus years. Thank you so much for being here right now. We're doing a series with a number of different agency owners on all the different things that are changing within the SEO landscape. So I wanted to bring on another SEO owner, SEO agency owner, Solomon Timothy. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much Matt. Super excited to be here. And I love talking to veterans like yourself. So this is going to be fun. Yeah, well, why don't you just kind of set the table on what you're seeing in the changing world of digital marketing and SEO and we'll kind of get started from there. Yeah, it's funny. You've been doing this for 10 plus years. So were we and I was just saying off the stage that every year of this last 10 years, we've been seeing change. It hasn't stopped, right? So I don't see this any different from being in the in the weeds. We know that every year Google always rolled out a different update. So everything we did, we were like, Oh, screw it. That doesn't work anymore. Throw it away. We need long form content. Oh, no, we don't need that anymore. We need question answer content. We don't do that anymore. We do this now, right? It's not about the it's not about the quantity of the back. It's the intent of the back. It's this. It's that it's zero click. It's like, okay, like did we ever get a day off, you know? We got a week off. So so right now what we're dealing with is fundamentally the way that we, you know, search or look up information has changed. And I think it's a natural progression of we got tired of clicking on the blue links and doing our own assessments and our own summaries and our brains on. Well, I clicked on 10 links and 10 different things came up and nine out of the 10 was this. So I guess, you know, we were coming to a conclusions on our own. Now Chad DBT will just summarize the 10 blue links and tell you one sentence, what it is. So why would we go and do what we used to do, right? So there's a fundamental shift in the way that we changed, we changed the way we look up information, we make buying decisions. So kind of give you what I'm seeing every day is that the searches became prompts and prompts are now in three different forms, right? The top of funnel prompts, the middle of funnel prompts and then the bottom of funnel prompts. And we talk about long tail keywords. Well, we have long tail prompts and and there's no two people searching the same. It has become so different that if you listen into this podcast, you're probably the one percent of people that know what's going on with the industry. You know that sitting around anymore is not going to work. We have to change. We need to create a different experience so that LLMs can see our content, right? We understand what we're talking about and then hopefully put us in the top of the little summary of who to work with if they have this problem. Yeah, I can tell you from the clients that I've been working with that have like reached out to us. We've landed some really big clients recently at EWR, which is the sponsor of this podcast that keeps it going. Thank you for 12 plus years of sponsoring and funding this. We have a lot of people that used to run a lot of paid ads to landing pages without videos or anything on those landing pages or maybe testing it. And that used to work really well. You could just throw a lot of money at stuff. You could run ads to landing pages. Google was like the biggest part of the bucket. Maybe you run a little bit of Facebook ads. Maybe do some retargeting. You know you're talking about building a little bit of funnel here. Maybe you're dripping emails. Maybe you're not or text messages. And SEO was typically afterthought from a lot of the clients that we're seeing recently. And now you're trying to play catch up of not just like years of not doing SEO. But now you're into into TSEO. You're in the GIO. You're in the AO. I've kind of coined the term LM visibility because I think AI visibility is like the broader kind of subset of that. And then I think it's going to be multimodal in the future. It's going to be on any device. How do you get in front of people? But it's all really about and where I started if you look at like some of the books I've written. It was all about personal branding. It was about branding. It was. And so it's like amplifying that effect of who you are as an entity. And then how you do that and the execution of that is where you get into the tactics. And you know it's still in debate. I mean my LinkedIn it just blows up with just different people on different sides of like SEO is dead. You know it's all GIO. It's just the same thing. It's a little bit different like everybody's fighting about it. And it constantly is changing right. The LMS are adapting their learning like they're leaning on Google. Then they're not and then you know red. It's important that it's not like it. Yeah it's like you said it's a constantly moving target. And you know what is the flavor of the day today. But the one thing that sits behind it all is if you're building high quality relevant content for the user. No matter how they're they're finding it through search whether it's social media or paid ads or SEO or you know LMS or whatever it is. They're still getting to that piece of content and you got to focus on is this a good piece of content or not. Is it help the user. So I think the user experiences change. But like what is the core of what you're offering. That really should still be the focus. It shouldn't be about like all the tips and tricks. And that's why we're really trying to change the name like the unknown secrets that are marketing should have been really like a marketing package that you bought like a Frank Kern sort of you know kit or something like that. We never ended up launching that even though a lot of people have wanted us to do that and who knows maybe it's maybe it's still in the cards but it's really about communicating effectively and keeping your data clean. So the LMS understand what's going on here you are just like the search engines and I mean that's why the LMS don't use Facebook because the data is really noisy and there's different topics and you know information is not being organized correctly. I think that's what it really comes down to is clean data. 100% definitely agree with you there. If we did proper SEO like you said there's a lot of brands that didn't do it because they were getting traffic from referrals or whatever it is. Influencers you name it but if we had schema markup really good FAQ section built it out really well meaning the answers were clear and concise then chat GPT or cloud or Gemini GROC and read it and understand and summarize it to the users. Now if you have a website that doesn't have an FAQ section that doesn't have just answering questions that your users have because even in Google. They've already said that before chat GPT she made made all those changes that you need to be answering questions you need to be answering questions. People have questions they go to Google ask questions and then they created people also asked I mean we were seeing all of this and we were answering those questions that Google said you should be answering on client's website right. It's like it kind of sort of came to a conclusion that this is where the world is going and now I think we just took it to another level. Because of the fact that prompt you can write it incorrectly put in different orders you can you know you can just be really dumb about it and not even act like you know what you're talking about and chat GPT or cloud or whatever it is perplexity will find. They'll read your mind and then give you an answer so at this moment the website owner the Webmaster has to do even a greater job explaining what you do. You have to be even more focused on the quality like you said he has to be even more granular about what you who do you serve who do you not serve. Put things in a table format you don't mean do you help hospitality then say yes. Do you help manufacturing industry say yes because then chat GPT reads and say yes they do because that's the level of details people are asking. Yeah I mean what is Google's like right right there two missions one not be evil and they remove that one and then the other one is organizing all the information in the world right and so that's what SEOs are doing is helping organize that that information out there and that's what the elements are looking for is nicely organized information. So if you can help them find that information about you you're more likely to show up and I think that that's really what the whole debate is about is you know how are you communicating like well you know also like you need to understand what your brand is and who you serve. And that's one of the things that I've seen with the elements is like you can't be an expert on everything and you can't serve everyone like pick a focus right. These are things that I feel like Google's been with the like people also ask like you said have been leading us in this direction for a long time they have the data they see where the users are going and they're trying to help. Use SEOs to organize the information on the web so that the right brand show up and so again I I mean people ask me like what do you do right because I mean I don't even think my wife understands like what I do I don't think she's like what is SEO it's like you're organizing information online to make it more useful and I think if that's like the guiding star and what you're doing. It helps you answer what you should be doing and what you shouldn't be doing and what's the quality of what you're doing and what she what which you don't have it like I can give you actually a lot of examples of things that you shouldn't be doing. And then you look at the people that are winning and you go okay they're winning in your category for what why are they winning what are they doing. How are they positioned herself like I again I don't think that there are any really secrets even L.O.M.s can give you insights though that that you wouldn't normally see or trends and so I think that how we work is is absolutely changing and taking a bunch of fractured information and that's what search did right search fractured where people are finding information all over the place. And then it's our job to like grab it all and put it back together. Yes practical tips are we cannot ignore any word on our website or any sections or the speed being mobile friendly and all the things that we already should be doing as good SEO I think you always just good SEO plus you know things that you should be doing. So let's go into that like all these different definitions what are the definitions of SEO that you're using and then how would you define a me I would just I would love to hear your vocabulary terminology. Yeah I just I love your LLM visibility I think that's a really good way of describing it but the way that we've been using it as probably people are coining it is a EO answer engine optimization because it's kind of it includes Google it includes yeah. Chat GPT cloud Gemini and all of that you can do geo generative engine optimization you can do something like that but I don't think it really truly matters as the industry like you said is not clear on what is it that they want to call it. I know for a fact that we are no longer just going and clicking on blue links that's where our clients are coming to us and say hey we need to show up in chat GPT so what we did. Is we built an engine we've always had our own technology that goes and can create the prompts that customers are going to type in in these three different levels top of funnel prompts what are the companies that are good at X what are the top companies right so we can go and get those props and then we will run those prompts and we can identify which brands are being shown as a result by these systems I get lead from chat GPT every single day so I create a lot of training resource around this so I said if you can figure out the prompts that's behalf the problem so top of the bottom bottom of funnel and then we find out the brands that are being mentioned and then we can go and do the same good old SEO research why are they showing up and those are citations essentially and so we can reverse engineer what they're using to get to those answers so our clients the people that you know we're called to serve can actually get the same result it is reverse engineerable but there's problem is there's no systems out there who can go track the prompts the results of the problems what ranking that the results are coming up with and how do you change the rankings of these things but the good thing is it can be changed we're doing it every single day and then once you have that information how do you track it so that you can make sure your clients are increasing right in those answers they legitimately should have the option to do it because they are good businesses is just that like I said a lot of people ignored proper SEO they could be a hundred million dollar business but the one that chat GPD shows could be a little two million dollar company with great marketing guy like you you know what I'm saying so they're like hey it's show up and they're freaking out how are all these people finding you but a hundred million dollar company has never done anything so they just waited it out yeah so I want to parse out some of the things that you said you know first like I do have a score that I've kind of been putting together and I think that we're on a similar line of thinking from a LL visibility standpoint so really the LL visibility for me is I've broken it apart and saying okay there's things that benefit SEO that also benefit AI and there's kind of this Venn diagram overlap I'm really looking at okay let's just look at the LLM's and what matters to them now certainly there's other things that you can do but I think that's where the GEO the you know AEO like it gets it gets messy and it gets blended and you know I would say GEO, see AEO, GEO like you know like GEO is kind of I would say more of what I'm doing but I'm really focusing on the generative engines I'm focused more on the LLM's and like okay let's get a score that we can focus on on how well you're doing from like an AI readiness standpoint right and there's a lot of tools out there that are starting to pop up there's a couple like a buddy of mine just got a wide commentator he's doing one of these tools as well where they basically track the rankings and average it out over the searches you know that's not even like a perfect answer in my opinion because your LLM right and okay so like if we if we scoop back a little bit and look big picture LLM's don't matter today or not as much now I think they matter on the reputation management side because I'm actually seeing some of the data from like similar web and stuff when people go to a site yes where they go right after the site where the where the referral traffic is going the referral traffic is going from the site to the main source of chat GBT or you know Gemini or whatever Proplexity so people are going to check out a site they're finding it from a ad or however you're finding it and some of them are finding it through the LLM's but they're going to check it with their chat GBT or whatever they're using there I think everybody's going to have like a personal LLM that they're going to trust and believe in okay and I think that you know really how do you get inside the training data of that LLM that you're talking to like you talked about middle of the funnel top of the funnel bottom of the funnel I think is a great kind of format and also a great kind of matching component of what you're doing but the personalization component when you're doing keyword tracking even all these tools that are coming out like your LLM if we did the same prompt search and I did the same prompt search based on my instruction set of what saved about me is going to get different results based on location based on interest based on previous searches and so attribution is probably one of the biggest or hottest topics out there of like well you know are any of these tools and all the major tools are coming out with new new ways to track stuff but already the old ways to track stuff was horrible in itself like I mean you can't trust like I had to look at three different tools and always triangulate what the answer was of what I'm going to try to do because they all don't give you the same data there's no consensus data of actually what it is and where it's pulling from and so you know I would love to understand more about you know what what are the tools we're building a couple tools that are not like we're not trying to like we're trying to sell sell the tools but we're working on on the back in for stuff we're doing internally I would love to understand kind of what you're doing some of the use cases maybe some of the case studies that you found and just kind of share notes I think that that's what people like on this call the most is you get to share notes of what's working for people and you know everything used to be very close to the best when you're doing that's the other like this strategy I don't want to get it out there but now I think everything's like out there and there's multiple points of you and so yeah so I just love to dig into that a little bit more definitely I agree everything is out there the promise would you trust what do you take is you only have limited time to implement so right now I think the tool business is relatively early there's this no tool out there that's going to give you what you need there's no sem rash or a drafts that's a you already or G already so that's my that's my take on tools we have a business that we built years and years ago it's called click X we built our own tool to onboard clients and do automated reporting and things of that nature to help us scale as a business so we have every API that you can imagine already connected to it we have chat GPT perplexity we have you know email marketing you know hub spot you name it and so we're able to just expand on to our own tool set that we built and that's how we're figuring out what is happening in the marketplace so we could run any and all searches and perplexity clawed chat GPT and actually see the answers that it provides so then we can take that and then say hey here's where my customer is and if it's giving you one two three and four then we assume that that is what is giving to everybody you're absolutely right my LLM knows me who I am what I like and it's husband oh you're health freak and you like to eat healthy so here's your three options because it doesn't tell me the poor you know restaurants when I ask for a restaurant it does it automatically but for the most part I think we can use the generic answers to find out where our customers are and then figure out how we can ring them we already do that today and we also can see one two three or four who are the brands that are showing up the best part I think as an SEO which maybe the general public can figure out is going and finding the links that those websites have where they're mentioned those are the hard part because chat GPT doesn't have anything to go by like Google so they use something else to figure out why and what order do these things matter right so there's the the authority engine basically the recommendation engine and how do we really figure out what how do we influence this and so our research has been we have to go get the same links that the other guys that are showing up doesn't matter the size of the company they have consistent citations they have quality data and so the two things just like SEO did back in the day good quality links and frequent mentions of your brand in different places are the exact same factors that they're using it what is interesting Matt is that just because you show up in AI overview you don't automatically show up in chat GPT or buttons for flexibility we are seeing three different visibility percentages depending on the same prompt our companies are mentioned different time so one of them actually from our examples Google is like the worst chat GPT keeps showing up more and more particular brand and for black city might be less and Google is like I don't know maybe Google has more brains to show so our clients or people that were working with aren't showing up as much it has been the opposite where you're showing up so much in Google not in other places so we were under the impression that they're taking the blue links just being honest like I'm being an old school SEO and then just creating a new version of answers you know what I mean like hey people don't want to click on that they want this so let's just take all of this and just give it to them but no they're not doing that they're giving me completely different answers then what Google's AI overview is doing yeah I think it's around the logic of how they're figuring out what the value of a brand is and so now you're not thinking about and like there's been a couple study I believe is a trust that came out say it's like something like 21 or 27% of the answers that were being shown weren't even indexed okay it's like so so like I mean we know Google doesn't follow the no follow so like they're I mean and I asked chat GPT this after I saw that study and it was like no like it has to be indexed and blah blah and I'm like okay well where are where's all this data that you're coming from and a lot of it is getting ingested that might not be indexable right like that's that's in the the training sets but how they're determining what brands to show is a completely different like workflow or process I mean they're like a intelligent like they are intelligent and they're using intelligence like a really intelligent person would do to research a brand so they're finding all kinds of different stuff they're looking at they're not just mapping Google now I think at the beginning when they just opened up the grounding trading sets they started to do that because that that's kind of what you lean on you're Google like well lean on that but I but I I'm seeing the LM's even evolve into how they're searching for information and presenting information finance which is really fascinating to to follow I would love to hear more kind of case studies or things that you're seeing in the data. So going back to it it's interesting because some sometimes if the company is well known they're going to get mentions more because they're just a lot more citations of that brand out there and the consistency is there and other times if you're in a very niche market like you know we have a client that's in the they do training and equipping you know professionals for certain certifications and all of this stuff nobody does that stuff. It's not it's a very niche you know HR people look for it those people are they get found more but there's not a lot of searches so it was easy to get that particular company to get found it's either you know some of these big testing firms or bump this consulting company right so it wasn't hard for them we have executive search companies that we're helping with and and when you have a muddy I would say extremely competitive industry it's harder to break through that just like it is in Google because the bigger the brand as you said earlier it's going to it's going to be hard to beat them so what we're finding out is how do we make a small brand show up in these in these things the only thing we can control are these brand mentions that we're talking about right so one of the things that we found believe it or not this is like pure internal testing and research is this podcast right here is considered media and and so when I show up to this podcast it is actually being transcribed if you put this on Apple or on Spotify or anywhere YouTube it's getting transcribed and it's getting used in in in a training and so and it's considered another citation another brand mentioned and so if you want to follow the latest of a brand it just follow the founder like you and then listen to what they're saying so I think chat GPD is going to have better answers or plot or perplex you name it because it's actually consolidating all these things where Google wasn't doing that it's actually studying you and I as a brand and following us around and studying everything that we put out there and updating its own does that make sense because we've influenced the answers or we've influenced the order in which the companies are showing up by showing up in media so we've we've then began getting our customers and podcasts like it's like it's not a clear answer you know I wish I can just say hey you do these three things we have our own framework but it's things like that that I'm sharing that we're seeing is influencing the results so a press release back in the day mattered because it was like a good quality link for like a day or something but a press release also is media and you can put in so I have a client who launched a brand new YouTube channel and there was no mention of this company in chat GPD after they launched a YouTube channel they put a couple of video you go to chat GPD but we put out a press release about the channel and all of this then you go to chat GPD and it knows everything about this this YouTube channel so we're like hey I think we're trying to figure out how they're doing it and the good thing is I think it's an exciting part that they wrote an algorithm so just like Google and algorithm if you configure that out right like it's not impossible to figure it out but I think it's easier than actually people make it out to be so we're doing good old outreach brain mentions right quality press mentions and podcasts interviews and things that we can influence that are then able to then change what they know about you if LLM don't know about what you do because you give it more no information you don't have structure data on your website you don't have any content right you don't have schema markup you're not answering questions then it doesn't matter we're not going to show up that's sort of like your foundational things and then from there you just got to go keep working on creating content on YouTube and making sure the same exact answers are being done it's a lot more content creation however it's totally changeable and we're seeing and we're tracking every day so we're seeing how the answers are being influenced by the activity that the brand is doing yeah I think that was great great points I think that share a voice and media is key and the easiest way for most brands to do that is YouTube you saw in the big announcement from Google they pivoted to YouTube I mean they again they see where these things are going I think that they're under a lot of pressure to come up with new subscription models with ads that are kind of moving away and they're trying to I mean I don't know if we're going to see ads in LLM's I mean they say they're not but I you know it remains to be seen yeah I think pressure leases are phenomenal as well I think there's different places to get citations and what the training sets look like a lot of educational based stuff one of the interesting things that I would consider maybe a pro tip is something that we learned recently as we were building out a new site was LLM's don't pick up iframe embeds okay so how many websites out there have a lot of really important content in an iframe embed and well it's not schema unless you you know unless you're labeling it unless maybe you have some schema markup referencing what it is that's not going to show up so schemas you know people debate on whether schema is appointed structure data it helps build trust and that's what Google is about is building that trust so I think that there's a lot of stuff that that's changing and it questions your assumptions and like I love to like know what I know and then go let me go test it let me go see if someone's different let me go kind of tweak it let me go see what see what happens and so I'm really enjoying the discovery process that you know everything's different everything's everything's new it's kind of like an unexplored land I've done a couple posts I have a newsletter on LinkedIn that I need to probably do a little bit more consistently but you know I did the post about it's kind of like you know Columbus day we just had Thanksgiving I know this will be released probably in January but we're doing this right after Thanksgiving it's new land it's new territory that that is unexposed now certain people just inherited it but if they're not really doing the things they need to do they're not going to be they're not going to maintain that ownership and also you can't just stumble on this anymore like it's it's very intentional I think a lot of a lot of what's happening you've made some really interesting points which you know doing a press release before a campaign that you launch is something that's pretty standard but seeing it in the data of you have a YouTube channel and then you're calling attention to it like there's a paper out there attention is everything that kind of kick this whole thing off with the LLMs you're calling attention to that and then LLMs are going and checking it out kind of swarm theory and then they're going and checking out the podcast and then they're indexing the whole podcast and gets the training days that's a that's a super interesting insight every single one of our clients automatically are getting this level of support it's not an add-on you don't go and say oh I won the traditional SEO and then can you give me this other thing we can't there's no way that it's all intertwined so we have the opportunity to test all of our theories against all of our existing clients as well as the ones that are coming in by me putting on a lot of resources and content you know just what we're finding every single day and it's been interesting to say the least because no one's ever this is a new territory even for the experts of the experts they're still figuring it out so back to your point that experimentation is what we do we've always done that we never knew anything until we can prove something and then and eventually it stopped working and I think the same exact thing is going to happen I believe that marketers are going to ruin chat GPC because we now know what to figure where you need to do and that means that we can trust it like we used to trust and right now it's probably clean but eventually as you know everybody can figure out how to show their brand up there and so it's going to become more harder and some other thing is going to pop up to make it harder or to actually have the quality data the more interesting thing I think is our customers do not care how what you do they want their answers so I think we need to solve for the customer we are and I don't want to be the guy that's got the secret to showing you in chat GPC that's not the that's not the thing you and I have clients and I'm hundreds of millions of companies out there they have a specific type of customer they're trying to serve they don't need everybody they just need the kind of people if you're if you make some sort of an engine for a plane that only fits these types of planes that's the only kind of customers are really going to help you you don't need everybody else calling you but the problem is you need to inform these LLMs what you do and who you do it for and the specificity of your services and and and so for small businesses you can only serve a small geographic target so if somebody in Nebraska is going to help you if you're in Texas you don't need the traffic from Texas or from somewhere else so I think if we could just hone in on there's enough money to be made for everybody that's number one there's no like you're not going to miss out on it but what we are going to miss out on if you don't have enough information about you and who you want to have as a customer and if the LLMs don't know it cannot answer the product so every time we're doing this we measure the visibility before we start working with people and then we look at the visibility after we start working with people it's often that their own brain doesn't mention for the thing that you do so if you're real estate agent I have just brought on a real estate client in sound where they are they don't show up in the town they're selling luxury homes in the town that they serve for I don't know how long they don't show up and you know why because every real estate agent has a cookie cutter website Matt you know this everybody's got the same thing some kind of MLS search there's no schema mark up there's no content there's nothing about what you do they just people that know you go to your website it was never a funnel it was never a top of funnel middle of funnel and then oh I went by house like you said it's on my frame or something of MLS and so they're like some I can't I can't have this because if I sell one million dollar house it is enough to pay for your services for the whole year or whatever it is right like like I was like yeah you're right you know it's like do you see like how much money is on the table if you don't show up it's it's tens and thousands of dollars per month that you could be missing out because you didn't put anything about you on the internet because you know word of mouth referrals and whatever is how you relied on it and that person was like really frustrated because this is the reality this is the new reality you know I think marketers should do a better job of when they're presenting to clients on what the lost opportunity cost is not utilizing it I think you hit on that one of the things that I that I started to think of when you were talking and we're getting close to the in the podcast so I want to give you too bad yeah I know this has been a great discussion and I would love to keep going I just got a hard stop here but essentially I was on a speaking tour and there was like a VP of Coca-Cola I don't I don't remember her name but she said something she said a focus beam of light attracts more moss in the darkness okay and everybody understands that that analogy that when I talk to a lot of brands they're trying to be everything to everybody and they're trying to serve too big of an area or a specific area and Google looks at trust Google's like do you really have clients in this area do you really serve this here can you really do all these things excellent because I want to give the best absolute answer and so that's what I'm seeing happen with LLMs as a multiple is you need to get really really clear who you are and what you do and who you serve and you need to build content around that based on the customer journey based on the target persona that you're going after and the more you get focused you can amplify that focus but you want to like all of us want to get clients that fit the box of where we serve the clients the best the type of customers or even the type of people to people because people do business with people that we want to work with like trying to serve everybody you're going to be that jack of all trades the expert of none like that that analogy and I'm not saying that people aren't experts in multiple things but you got to prove that to the LLMs you got to prove that to the search engines and it's a lot easier to start small and expand out just like the GMBs do so I just kind of wanted to highlight that for everybody is having a focus beam of light of what you do clarifies it for search engines LLMs alike Solomon I really liked the insights you shared I would love to have you back on we can talk further as things continue to progress how do people find some of these resources fall you get in touch with you hire you absolutely now happy to give all my resources away I actually created a lot of resources around this very thing they have this ability I put a 45 minute free training out on the internet it's just a simple website they can go to 10x10x.info literally it's free you don't have to do anything the reason I do that is I want to make sure that small businesses those companies that desperately need that help maybe it can't afford a consultant or whatever else they should know what to do so they can actually do get to a place where they can start paying for services because there's so many businesses going to be lost it's going to be like internet all over again where do I start how do I do it people thought talk to me and say well I can go to training myself I said you can't they don't take what you and I say and change the training it doesn't do it people were trying to talk to AI in the beginning to like make it remember them and it doesn't so that's what I mean right so things there's some simple things we want to add value to as many people as possible so they do that they can go connect with me on social media but it's more about educating yourself learning finding the right people to help you based on the size of your businesses but yeah so if they want to email me happy to help it's all on my website 10x10x.info awesome well I'll put your links in the show notes as well thank you so much for coming on Solomon really enjoyed it everyone if you want to grow your business with the largest most powerful tool on the planet well I used to say the internet but maybe it's LLM's I don't know I think that we're going to have a AI revolution here reach out to EWR for more revenue in your business thank you so much for listening if you liked anything we said please leave a comment I do read all the comments please leave a review follow us check us out on YouTube it's really like I said it's really sad we need to do some stuff there but we're we're working hard to make that quality content for you we got shorts and all that sort of thing Solomon will give you some of those to share as well so thank you so much everybody we appreciate it until the next time my name is Matt Bertram bye bye for now [Music]

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. The digital marketing and SEO landscape is undergoing constant, fundamental change, driven by AI and shifting user behavior away from traditional search.
  2. Success now depends on optimizing for Large Language Models (LLMs) and answer engines by creating high-quality, well-structured, and user-focused content.
  3. Key strategies include organizing clean data, using schema markup, answering specific user questions, and clearly defining a brand's niche to improve AI visibility.
  4. The industry is debating new terminologies like AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and LLM visibility, but the core principle remains providing valuable, organized information.

Summary:

The discussion centers on the transformative shift in digital marketing and SEO due to AI and changing user habits. The hosts note that constant change is the norm, with users now relying on AI like ChatGPT to summarize information instead of clicking through traditional search results. This evolution requires marketers to optimize for Large Language Models (LLMs) and answer engines, a concept referred to as LLM visibility or Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).

The core strategy is creating high-quality, user-centric content that is meticulously organized with clean data, schema markup, and clear answers to user questions. Success hinges on a brand's ability to precisely define its services and audience, as AI tools prioritize well-structured, authoritative information. While tools and tactics are evolving, the fundamental goal remains organizing the world's information effectively to serve the user, whether through traditional SEO or emerging AI platforms.

FAQs

LLM visibility refers to how well your content is recognized and served by large language models like ChatGPT or Gemini. It's important because these models increasingly influence how users find information and make decisions, so optimizing for them helps your brand appear in AI-generated answers and summaries.

SEO has shifted from focusing on traditional keywords and backlinks to optimizing for prompts and user intent. Now, it's crucial to create high-quality, well-structured content that answers specific questions, as AI models prioritize clear, organized information to generate accurate responses.

The three types are top-of-funnel, middle-of-funnel, and bottom-of-funnel prompts. These correspond to different stages of the buyer's journey, from initial research to final decision-making, and require tailored content strategies to address user needs at each stage.

Clean data, such as proper schema markup and well-organized FAQs, helps search engines and AI models understand and summarize your content accurately. This increases the likelihood of your brand being recommended in AI-generated answers, improving visibility and trust.

AEO focuses on optimizing content for AI-driven answer engines like ChatGPT or Gemini, which provide direct answers instead of just blue links. It emphasizes clarity, conciseness, and structured information to meet the needs of prompt-based searches, whereas traditional SEO often targets broader keyword rankings.

Businesses should create detailed, question-and-answer style content that clearly defines their services and target audience. Using formats like tables and FAQs, and ensuring data is clean and well-organized, helps AI models accurately interpret and promote their offerings.

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