In this special episode of the Buying Online Businesses podcast, Jaryd Krause sits down with Alex Birkett, co-founder of Omnisense Digital, an Organic Growth Agency that specializes in creating revenue-generating SEO and content strategies for ambitious B2B brands. Alex, who has also worked with industry leaders like HubSpot and helped scale companies like Jasper AI through their SEO campaigns, shares his insights on the evolving world of search engine optimization.
Together, Jaryd and Alex explore what’s changing in SEO, what remains constant, and where search trends may be headed. They dive into the impact of tools like ChatGPT, how AI fits into the SEO landscape, and why it’s not a case of choosing between automation and traditional methods but embracing both.
Alex also highlights the dangers of relying on easy, replicated content and offers expert advice on how businesses should approach SEO moving forward. Packed with actionable insights, this episode is a must-listen for anyone navigating the complexities of SEO today.
Tune in and hit the ‘Play” button! to uncover the latest SEO strategies and learn how to stay ahead in the ever-shifting search world!
Courses & Training
Courses & Training
Key Takeaways
➥ Alex emphasizes that SEO is a long-term, compounding effort. The early stages may show small progress, but consistent, high-quality work over time can lead to impressive results.
➥ Focusing on original research and data from your own product can differentiate you. Surveys and unique insights offer fresh content that’s hard to replicate, which can drive traffic and backlinks.
➥ Relying on AI to mass-produce content can lead to temporary success but poses long-term risks, especially for established companies. Shortcuts may work for affiliate bloggers but are risky for brands with significant reputations.
About The Guest
Alex Birkett is a co-founder of Omniscient Digital, an organic growth agency that builds revenue generating SEO and content programs for ambitious B2B brands. He’s worked for a bunch of great companies as an SEO one of which ws HubSpot and he lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Connect with Alex Birkett
Transcription:
In this podcast episode, Alex and I talk about so many amazing things. What is changing in SEO? What's not changing in SEO? The bread and the butter. Where search may go, it may not go. How many people are using ChatGPT? How many people are not using ChatGPT? And why? Why can we use both? Why is it not one or the other? We do discuss a little bit about some of the work he's done for building these larger brands.
Some of the work he has done to help build Jasper AI, which is one of the companies that he helped scale through their SEO campaigns that they've built. And we discuss how easy SEO and easy content creation—replica content creation—is scary to do moving forward and what you should be doing instead. Now there's so much value in this podcast episode; you're going to love it.
Let's dive in. Have you been lied to about how to increase organic traffic and grow your website? I too used to think that all you needed to do was add more content and gain backlinks. But this just doesn't work. More content and more links alone are not the answer.
Nor do you need to butcher your website with generic SEO changes you picked up on some crummy online tutorial, leaving with a Frankenstein website that's slow and clunky. And because I got sick of seeing great people with great websites struggle to grow them. I decided to do something about it. I created an SEO service, which is not just about publishing content and getting links. Sure, we offer that.
But first we give you quick wins, which are SEO tweaks we can make to your website that actually boost your rankings. And then we lay out a killer SEO strategy to acquire more traffic and revenue that outranks your competitors with less content and fewer links.
We've thoroughly tested this service on many websites before launching it and have achieved incredible results, which you'll see on our landing page I'm about to share with you. Now you can finally buy a business and give it to us to grow it for you.
Check out our SEO service, head to buyingonlinebusinesses.com/seo-services and book a call to chat with us to see what is the best growth strategy for you and your website. That's buyingonlinebusinesses.com/seo-services and the link will be in the description too.
Hello, to the podcast. Thanks for coming on and your time. Hello, hello. Thank you very much for having me on. Looking forward to chatting. There's a lot to cover around SEO, Google, AI, algorithms, and organic Has anything been happening in SEO recently? I haven't heard anything new. And I want to get to all that stuff, but I'll dangle that as a carrot for the audience. First of all, I want to ask you, How did you get into SEO and why did you get into SEO? As most people did, I stumbled into it.
graduated college, studying advertising, public relations through the journalism school. I didn't exactly know what I wanted to do, but I wanted to eventually build a company. So the first company I worked for out of college was an early stage startup called Lawn Starter. Precede just got out of Techstars, kind of figuring out the business model, building the product.
It was a super early stage, but one of the core acquisition channels that they believed in early on and invested in early on was SEO. Primarily from, so it's a marketplace, right? It's like Uber for lawn care and primarily from the demand side, there's tons of local searches; they localize a lot of their content to cover things like Austin, Texas, and Washington, DC, lawn care. Right.
So it was a little bit like a local SEO play, but then we stacked on what we would call editorial SEO and content marketing as well to build up the domain rating, to build up the site and basically attract a lot of traffic. So that's really where I got my one-on-one, or really more than one-on-one, because the co-founder of Lawn Starter and Farley is an absolute genius at SEO.
So I got to work with him figuring out backlinking tactics. And this was 2014. So it was a little bit different of an SEO era. And then I joined CXL and CXL was much more leadership. We still drove the vast majority of our traffic. And I should say CXL was a big education platform for conversion rate optimization and digital marketing courses, and also a CRO agency.
So we're publishing four or five really high-quality, 5K word pieces per week, trying to attach those to SEO keywords, but really focusing on the content components. Then I joined HubSpot and that's how I saw how an SEO machine was built. Previously, we were very small businesses, and then I was, my God, like this can not just contribute to, but be a major component of a multi-billion dollar company. Absolutely, absolutely. Tell me about that.
How can all of that contribute to a multibillion-dollar company? Where did you make those connections? Well, I saw how it contributed to revenue on a small scale. I'm seeing Lawn Starter look at it as a very direct kind of response, performance marketing channel to acquire customers.
I saw Pap Laia and CXL use content marketing to attract audiences of like-minded people to sort of what we call now create demand. He was really leading the charge on a lot of the experimentation ideas that we think about today and the conversion rate optimization frameworks and ideas and concepts. But then it was at HubSpot that I had seen how you can set up a whole organization in a structure.
They had a team of—I don't even know how many writers—it was maybe a dozen more. There was an SEO department. I was working on free meme acquisition and growth. So I was mainly charged with, like, driving free meme user signups.
But I would work directly with the SEO team, with the content marketing team, and basically use that as a channel to acquire those users. But yeah, you kind of see how it's contributing to MQLs, which contribute to SQLs and revenue. My purview was the freemium signups.
like there were levers that I could pull from the conversion rate optimization side, from a templates and from the middle of the funnel content side. And then from writing a lot of listicles on basically like software categories that a lot of affiliate bloggers do now, that's kind of a common play.
But we figured out that and how to scale that through a partner network and basically do what we call the surround sound SEO strategy, eventually contributing to thousands and thousands of user signups per month. Cool. Wow.
So you've learned a lot of different things along the way through different companies you work with and different teams you worked with, right? What is it you do now? Who do you serve now? Like what sort of business owner? Do you have some examples of people that have come to you, the type of business that is and where they were when you started working with them?
Where they were after you finished working with them and some of the things you've done along the way to help them. Is it a bunch of those things you've already mentioned or is it more specific and targeted to one type of thing? Yeah, yeah. A couple of questions there.
So first off, the business that I run now is called Omniscient Digital and we are what we call an organic growth agency. So we do content marketing and SEO primarily for B2B brands and we call them ambitious B2B brands because we work at the startup level. So companies that are well-funded with grand ambitions are building them out.
through the foundational stages up to their scaling point. And then we also work with very large enterprises, most of whom I can't talk about, unfortunately. How do we work with them? You mentioned also a couple of specific examples. So we've got a couple early case studies. We've been running the business.
We started them on the side in 2019. We went full-time in 2022. So we've got a couple earlier case studies with Jasper about AI. That's one of my favorite ones because they were the perfect example of what I'm talking about when I say an ambitious B2B startup.
Right. Absolutely. saw the opportunity in front of them. They saw this future of AI. got access to the open AI API and they're like, We need to go fast because this space is going to get crowded quick. And they reached out and were like, Hey, we need to build our content engine. need to build our SEO channel. Let's go. And basically, without getting into too much nitty gritty detail, it was pretty bread and butter SEO.
It was pretty much just lines and keywords with customer journey and what we call jobs to be done phrases. So even before somebody knows, Hey, this is an AI content writer or whatever, like, keywords somebody would use now to search for that. What would they be trying to accomplish or what would they be trying to do? How to write faster, how to write a LinkedIn bio, how to write a Twitter bio, right?
Any sort of job to be done keywords. And we basically did that research, built a roadmap, and produced the content. was high quality. We interweave the product into the content. So it's kind of like we call product-led content, built links to build up the domain and just did it consistently over time.
And that's kind of the key to it taking a long time and consistency to really see those outstanding results. The early months are going to be a lot of leading indicators and small movements. Eventually you crest above the surface and you start to see outstanding results because SEO is a compounding channel and we haven't worked with them for a year or two now, but we've got the case study on our site. And I believe we finished off with about $4 million in annual revenue attributable to the blog. Maybe we'll just check that number. Maybe we'll put a link to that in the show notes as well.
. Congratulations. That's outstanding. How long did you work with them? That's not to be thought about, like in terms of success, like that's not a time is not the best metric to measure. Right. I'm not sure that you could have done a lot more or a lot less in that time period, but how long roughly did you get work on their campaigns? Right. Yeah. I can't say the specific timeline, but I believe it was in the span of like a little over two years.
Right. Cool.
So if you were to work with a company like that now, which I'm sure you might be already, You said it's pretty bread and butter SEO, keywords, content, adding the product in with a bit of CRO, I'm sure, intermixed with that, building backlinks, building up their authority and all that sort of stuff. Moving forward from the middle of this year or the end of this year, 2024, what would you do differently with a campaign? I know that's a tricky one to answer, right? And I apologize, Alex, because each website and business is different on what you would in.
But what would be some of the tasks that you would or SEO tasks that you would implement in a campaign that you would be? That's going to help. Is it backlinks now? Is it a lot of content and keywords? right. I'll give you a boring but correct answer of how I think about things that can apply to any model.
And then I'll give you a more interesting answer that is very specific but may not apply to every situation but could be useful and tactical, et cetera. And I'll give you a couple of things not to do nowadays.
Let's start with the not to do, actually. That's more interesting, like the caveat or buyer beware. So SEO is always a cat-and-mouse game. You're essentially creating a product, which is content. You are trying to find an audience or a customer, right? Which is your audience, the end audience who's looking for that content? And you're operating through the intermediary, the channel, so to speak of Google and Google's algorithm changes,, AI comes out, right? We can mass produce content. AI optimization is a thing. Quora and Reddit are being ranked higher.
Because this is a multiplayer game, there's always arbitrage opportunities. Since the beginning of search engine optimization, since the beginning of search engines, since the beginning of commerce, probably there's people who are going to find and are going to want to find shortcuts and they work for a short amount of time.
And maybe that's with your risk profile and you want to take that risk. use my own personal website as a sandbox for a lot of these things. So it's very tempting now to say, All right, let's copy a competitor's site map, right? Let's take all their title tags. Let's take all their URLs, rewrite them using AI.
Plug them through an AI tool to basically build a content brief, mass produce them using AI, maybe polish it up a little bit, spray and pray, let's publish 200, 400 articles a month and just get out there. I would not do that. I don't do that with the brands that I work with. I think if you're an affiliate blogger and you can churn and burn a bunch of websites, whatever, there's no risk.
But if you're a public company, if you've raised a bunch of money from investors, to me, it's irresponsible to play with fire. It's Icarus flying too close to the sun because what we've seen is basically a rise very fast. You fall very fast.
That's what happened with my personal sites. I'm not throwing rocks in a glass house. did it. I know. So I can avoid anything that feels like free lunch, right? There's no such thing as a free lunch. would also say it is irresponsible to do for the good of the internet. It's just, and then you're recreating more content and just diluting the value of somebody else's content and making it harder for your user to really get value from your site as well.
Yeah. What's that? The tragedy of the commons, right? It's like the internet is a public place. No one person owns it. So if I can take more from it, I might write the incentive structure is there and then the users get screwed over. Right. I totally agree with that. All right.
Interesting answer next because of this flooding of content, because of the diluted value, potentially of purebred content marketing, pick a keyword, write an ultimate guide, and build some links. What's the flanking strategy? What's unique? What's hard to fake? What can you do? Only a couple of things that are working well right now.
Original research. So you could do this, especially if you have first-party product data; that's the best kind because nobody else can collect that. Ahrefs has a bunch of data on websites and the amount of traffic they get, the amount of links they have. They put out research on that and basically they get linked to, they get traffic, people cite them, et cetera.
Hard to fake. You can also do it with surveys. So we did a report with Jasper on the state of AI and business users. Again, people like that. It's interesting, novel information. Nobody else has that information. You can write blog posts. You can post social posts about that.
Very good stuff there. The other thing is interactive tools, free tools. Those have worked. They will work. They'll continue to work. And we've seen a lot of SaaS companies start to employ those. They're best if they associate with your product. So a lot of these AI tools, like Take Copy AI and I think Jasper has a couple now. You can turn up a small feature of your product outside, especially if it has a lot of demand and search volume. And it's sort of a little taste of what your whole platform offers and offers that as a free tool. It doesn't have to be your product, though. HubSpot has a couple of these, the website, greater.
I believe Ahrefs actually drives a bunch of traffic now with some free content rewriter AI type tools. It's not what their platform does, but they spun a bunch out and it does super well. Yeah. It's just a smart thing to do. If it is close to your product or a feature of your product, you give it away for free as an asset and use that as an upsell. Exactly. Yeah. And then, I guess, associated with both of those is programmatic SEO.
And I don't want to confuse that with what I talked about before, which is basically editorial SEO done programmatically, which is just using AI to write a bunch of articles that ostensibly should have been written by a human with experience in that topic. But if your product has, let's say, a bunch of templates within it. So we've worked with several data products and data products are notoriously difficult to use because basically they're very endless.
There's no single way to get use out of it. You can build a dashboard to track your sales pipeline; you could build a dashboard to track your homepage to an e-commerce checkout funnel or something like that. So if you can flip those templates outside and do so programmatically, picking up a lot of long tail keywords and variants of those keywords, that's another great tactic nowadays. That's something that I would be looking into.
Finally, I'll give you the boring answer. the boring answer is that we always try to identify basically going back to business school, kind of one-on-one frameworks, the SWOT analysis. What are the biggest strengths that you have as a business? And then what are the biggest strengths that you have from an organic perspective?
Weaknesses as well, but also, what are the biggest opportunities that play into those strengths? So back to those examples before, do you have first party data and data analysts slash data scientists that can help you analyze that and put that into a useful format?
Do you have growth engineers or engineers who are willing to work on product features in a marketing context? So not just core product and core platform, but do you have resources that can actually flip those out and turn those into a template library, a content library, a programmatic library, et cetera? So those are going to be strengths. And if you don't have those, that's not really an opportunity.
And I would say somebody else is going to do that better than you. Similarly, it could be you have a very influential co-founder, you have influential marketing leaders, or something like that. They like being in front of a camera. They like going on podcasts and all that. Do LinkedIn, right? Like be personality-led, do the media company thing. If that's not in your DNA, it's very difficult to replicate that playbook. So when we approach a client, when we approach our own marketing, we really think about what's the secret sauce, what's going to be hard for other people to replicate.
Because the easier it is to replicate, that's the whole free lunch thing. If you could just press a button and do it, everybody's going to do it, and there's no real alpha in doing it. Absolutely. I also say this when people are acquiring a business: if you're buying a business that's easily replicable, you're selling socks on Amazon or Shopify or you're creating a content website that is easily replicable.
It's just risky. Yeah. It's such a powerful framework. We think about it all the time. Even nowadays you think, I mean, I'm kind of switching up the conversation there, so feel free to pull me back. But this idea of being hard to fake or hard to replicate is kind of a first principle that we apply to many things. So I was talking to our director of editorial and I was like, How hard is the filtering problem nowadays when we're hiring writers?
What's it like with AI and like the ubiquity of AI usage? Sometimes it's hard to detect. Sometimes we may have liability if it's something that's like AI produced and we say it's not, right? So, like, we need to make sure, I mean, we can use it intelligently, but we have to make sure we know who we're hiring. And he's like, well, there's certain things that you can do.
You can use test pieces that require say research citations or unique experiences that you can back up links and citations—things that are basically very difficult to do if you haven't done the thing. So even in our writing hiring process, we try to hire for hard-to-fake signals. like that. So somebody that has a content website—you mentioned it before being a personality, being on camera, maybe podcasting when it comes to just content.
What are some of the things that can be hard to replicate? Is it what you've already mentioned, creating great tools with great resources and citations and all that sort of stuff to prevent people from being up against another competitor that's just using AI to just flood the incident with just content?
What are some of the things that we can do to hedge ourselves there with content creation in terms of. It's a hard question. You gotta be able to predict the future in some ways. And it's also very unique to the individual at hand. The first thing that came up was that I like to think of examples.
Examples are hard to fake. There's a client I work with that is in the early stages. They are building a data-related product. So a data quality-related tool, early series A-ish. even before they started the company, they had been speaking at conferences. So the co-founders had their head of marketing; they're kind of influencers within their space. It's really hard to fake that level of expertise and that credibility, right?
So when they're raising money, when they're going after their network, who probably had seen them speak at a conference or had seen them on a webinar or seen them on a podcast. There's a certain level of credibility that's really hard to build overnight. So I think it was one of those things that over the course of five, six, seven, eight years, prior to even building the company, they had done a lot of these things.
And now they're kind of reaping a lot of what they sowed. Basically, now they can go out on LinkedIn. They've got audiences. They've got a lot of, I guess, power to sway the conversation. So they're doing a lot of what I said before, which is this demand creation idea.
So their data product is kind of a new paradigm on data quality. It's a new way of looking at things and we're working on their SEO. So we're sort of trying to fit into the existing paradigm. We're using queries that people are already used to saying, Let's just say how to improve data quality, data quality issues, et cetera.
And then they're bringing that forward with their audience, their credibility. And they're saying, This is actually how we should be thinking about these things. It's not easy to do, though, right? It's not easy to do. And that's the good thing though.
Because I tell people, like you said, what's the opposite of replicable is hard. you, if you do something hard to do and it's valuable, create it because what's the goal in business is to add value and people will pay you for it. So why try and do it the easy way? Right. We've got so many people; I understand human beings are always looking for the easiest path to success or the easiest path, but at times you just let's just get to work and do something amazing. do something good.
Well, think to flip it around on you; think that podcasting is quite hard, especially when you do it for a long time consistently. People may look at it and think you're just talking to somebody, but you have to prepare a lot during the conversation. You have to be very attentive and listen to the answers and give feedback. And then there's like the editorial and producing and to do that not once, but 20, 50, a hundred, thousand times. Close to 300 episodes now.
Yeah, you know this; it's very difficult, right? And we run a podcast too and it's okay. You could do 10, but, like, do 200 episodes, right? That's kind of like our vibe. And also, nobody can replicate you specifically at least yet. Maybe there's going to be an AI avatar or something, something that can approximate it, but it's such a long way away. Right? Yeah. Well, I mean, last year I was going to create a Jared AI based on feeding all of my data and videos and everything.
into an AI that could be a knowledge base where people could do. And it is; I think the quality of it's a long way away. It's easy for people to just get on a podcast or a YouTube channel and just say, Yeah, this is, you can do this now. And it's easy. It's like to get a good quality where somebody will actually pay money to ask the Jared AI questions and get a good result—short, sharp, good result. It's a way off, isn't it?
Yeah, I think it's one of those things that's good in theory, but when it needs to be production-level or business-ready, it's not the same kind of thing, right? In practice, it's not as good. But even to the point of doing things that don't scale, like you're doing this podcast. Similarly, you could do a podcast that's not recorded. You could go and do a bunch of coffee meetups and in person meetups.
There's kind of this trend that I'm seeing in the States, at least of micro-conferences. So not these 500-person events, but a curated event of 100-200 people, maybe even less music and food and some potential clients and some existing clients and some just cool people. And those are really hard to do too. You have to be there in person.
They're not like these mass scales; plug a bunch of emails that you bought into an outbound outreach tool and just press send, right? And just spam everybody. There's almost a converse relationship, an inverse relationship between the scale and ease and maybe the effectiveness and the resonance. Not always, but a little bit. I like that. That's really good.
I mean, it's just hard to replicate authority where somebody is getting up and speaking on stage just to get on stage. Not many people get on stage, right? Can get on stage, but to get on stage and speak, it's a lot. Now I want to ask around your thoughts and we're not going to hold you accountable to it, but where the search is going.
It's interesting. And a lot of people are scared, worried, and don't know what to do or where to go. What are your thoughts moving forward to 2024 moving forward with search? Yeah, that's one of those questions that I've had to think about a lot, but I've also wanted to think about a lot because, quite frankly, it's really intellectually interesting.
You kind of need to think about it in your space. It's the future of our business. Yeah, exactly right. So I guess there's maybe a narrative that SEO is dead or SEO is dying. And I wrote an essay, not debunking that, but really talking about what people mean when they say that. And I called it something like the evolution of the death of SEO or something, or the ever evolving death of SEO.
And it's because since the inception of SEO, it has been evolving and changing. It isn't dying. There's certain parts that have died and there's certain parts that have risen and there's certain things that change and skill sets that need to change. And I think that's what we're seeing nowadays. So if we're specifically talking about AI as a search functionality, there's a couple of things that could play out.
One, human behavior shifts, which tends to take a long time. Defaults are very powerful in our lives. back to doing the easiest thing. If something has slightly less friction, you're much more likely to do it. That's such a huge lever to pull in human behavior. There's books that have been written about this, right?
Like Atomic Habits and all those like habit-forming productivity books. If you want to go to the gym, put your shoes out in the morning, or if you want to go on a run, put your shoes out in the morning. That's yourself up for success. Exactly. If you don't want to eat Oreos, don't keep them in your house, right? Make it more friction to go get the Oreos. And that's where I'm... All right.
People are pretty used to using search engines. If you're watching a movie and you want to know the actor in it and who else has been or what else they've been in, you search the movie cast, right? And then you go to IMDB and you're okay. That's the person you have a way of doing these things. So I think that's going to have some sticking power. And when you hear on LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever, I've replaced my Google usage and now I use chat GPT 75 % of the time.
That's not the norm. That's actually an extreme minority. If you look at the data, but that could shift in the future. And I think it doesn't seem like traditional search engines, which are really like inventory of content answers. It seems like that's a different mechanism by which we find information and play with information versus this more fluid, autocorrecty, more amorphous thing that is AI.
So my use is totally different for that. If I want to find specific sites or information, I'm still heavily indexed on search. And then I was writing this essay the other day and I was thinking about this concept. It's funny. It actually relates to this. I was seeing all these people saying cold email doesn't work.
I've never opened a cold email or Google search is dying. I use chat between 90 % of the time. And I was like, What is the word for that thing? That concept when, because you do something, you think everybody does it. And chat, chat, PT is like the false consensus effect. And I was like, cool, that'd be a hard thing to search in Google. But I had this idea, like, 75 % of the way in my brain. And I just needed almost like a sparring partner, a thinking partner to help me form it. Yeah.
So I could almost see like a not bifurcated, like a dual purpose for both of these systems. And then back to the search engine itself, our AI summary is going to take over. Are people just going to like search what is how to buy a business, right? And they're just going to read the summary and end all be all. That's it, right? They're not going to click on any links. Traffic is going to die. Websites are going to die. Probably not. I mean, you're smiling. You know, it's probably not true. It's a lot more complex than just seeing like a summary. And that's how to boil an egg. a bit different. Yeah. And that's where the evolution maybe takes place.
Maybe there used to be websites for what time is the presidential debate? Yes. That's a feature snippet. That's super easy for Google to just say 8pm. So those websites go away. Yeah. But I guess, like in our space, where it's a little bit more complex, there's very specialized industry knowledge. A lot of the clients we work with have a lot of that knowledge embedded not in the writers, not in the marketers.
But in the engineers, potentially in the salespeople and customer support teams, a lot of that still needs to be flipped inside out to be helpful and useful for the end user. And I see the AI summaries as being a great starting point and potentially a better user experience.
And the current data, at least with our clients, is that click-through rates are still just as high, if not higher, when you're featured in that AI summary. And how do you get featured in the AI summary? Well, there's been some data on that and it suggests that if you're in the top two pages of Google for that query, then they put you in the summary.
So it's like, okay, good content and links. Absolutely. The foundation's still there. The foundation is the bread and butter, like you said. And also coming back, what we talked about is like easily replicable. Creating a site on how to boil things is more easily replicable than how to buy a business or how to do it. Build out a great SEO campaign. And when we have a featured snippet.
What we can do is either way I look at it, it's the same as that free resource or that free asset using that snippet as a free asset to get clicks to the website and structuring that snippet in a way that you mentioned one or two things, but the most important things are numbers three and four, which they need to click on the website to get. So you can increase your click-through rate that way. Right. Almost like a billboard of sorts. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. tripwire content-wise. Yeah.
I like that.you said based on the data, it's not 75 % of people using AI. mean, using that GPT over Google. What does the data say last time you checked it? Because there isn't a big misconception that people are just, nobody uses Google anymore. I mean, like you said, there's one way to get information. There's another way to get information. I am going to completely destroy the interpretation of this data because I don't remember exactly what it said. like Ran Fishkin put out this data.
Ran Fishkin was Spark Toro. And I think he partnered with a company called Dato's, something like that. my memory says that basically Google is sending the vast majority of traffic to websites. And then they looked at how much traffic these AI tools perplexity, a chat, and GPT are sending, which would make sense. Traffic's not the metric here because you're going for an answer in those tools. They did another analysis on the usage of those tools. And again, this is where you should link to this because I might warp this a little bit, but basically the usage.
Like the cohort analysis of a Google user was strong and steady across time. And with chat, GPT and other AI tools, it would spike and then drop very precipitously. So Google has that staying power. It's got that power of defaults. again, linked to the research because I'm probably totally warping this. Yeah. Well, it just makes sense. I use mostly Google. I pretty much don't use chat GPT much at all. I don't have it on my phone.
I don't have the app downloaded anywhere. If I am to use it, I'm using it through the web browser. It's very rare that I would use it. I used to use it more. Maybe I was, I don't know, curious and it was more like a playground back in the day. I wonder what I could do with this.
And then I would make it into a sonnet for a friend whose birthday it is. It's funny; it's kind of back to your library, your AI library use case. Like in theory, it's kind of a fun tool, but it didn't apply to any business utility for me.
Yeah. Okay.
Outside of like brainstorming, like the sparring partner stuff where I'm like, what's the word for this thing? Or, like, what's another way to phrase this? What's an analogy I could use? And you could probably do that with a really smart friend. That's what it's approximating. But yeah, I think a lot of my use cases ended up being pretty frivolous, which is fine. Also, when I was using chat GPT and had used it, sometimes I needed to put multiple prompts in to get the actual answer that I wanted in the way that I wanted it, versus if I'm using Google, normally I can.
Like two words. Yeah. Information quicker. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I also don't know if this is because I've just got some perfectionism or idiosyncratic editorial lens, but I have tried using it for my own content. Blog posts maybe are a little bit easier if you're doing more formulaic stuff and definitional content, which again, who knows the longevity of that first place? What is a keyword, right? That's the definition piece. But say for LinkedIn, when I'm writing thought leadership, ostensibly I have enough data that I can train it on.
So I've tried to do that and uploaded past drafts and very successful ones. I've given it drafts for instructions using Claude. Claude's really good for this. I've tried, I've tweaked it and I've looked at other influencers who are; they give you the templates and it's okay. But like, I'll publish the thing and I kind of feel bad about it. That's not how I would actually write it. Do you know what I mean?
Exactly. There's not something you actually want to put out, like put your name. I don't know if other people notice it, but I do. And I'm like, I feel like it's not, which is enough, right?
If you're putting your brand behind, it's got to be something you want to stand by for sure. Alex, thank you so much for coming on. Really appreciate you and all the sharing that you did. So where can we send people to find out more about what you're up to? Yeah. Thank you so much.
My agency's website is beomniscient .com, which is impossible to spell. Best of luck. And then we run a podcast too. Yeah. Link to it, please. And then at the long game podcast, we're doing.
Typically a weekly episode interviews more SEO and growth leaders. And sometimes we do kitchen sides where it's just us founders riffing on stuff like the future of SEO and AI, whatever's on our plates that week. check that out. Everybody that is listening. Thank you for listening and I'll speak to you guys soon.
Thanks Alex. Thank you.
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