Ep 307: SEO For Generative AI Search & What To Do After A Business Exit with Ben Dankiw

In this episode of the Buying Online Businesses podcast, Jaryd Krause chats with Ben Dankiw about two exciting topics: the changing world of SEO with generative AI and what it’s like to sell a business and figure out what’s next.

Ben is a PPC expert and even a mathematician, with over 12 years of experience helping big brands like Porsche and Canadian Tire succeed online. He shares his story of selling a big part of his agency, what that process was like, and how he’s planning his next steps. Jaryd also gives Ben tips on how to take time to relax, reset, and choose the right business model that fits his goals and lifestyle.

They also dive into the future of SEO and ads. With Google no longer dominating search, platforms like Bing, Reddit, and others are changing the game. Ben and Jaryd talk about how businesses can keep their websites visible and what’s next for PPC ads, including trends for platforms like Meta in the coming years.

If you own a website, are thinking about buying one, or just want to stay ahead in online business, this episode is packed with simple, practical advice to help you grow and succeed. Don’t miss it!

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Episode Highlights

04:30 Ben’s entrepreneurial journey

10:00 Do business that you love and support your lifestyle!

20:00 How to work on CRO?

28:20 How ChatGPT evolves?

36:10 Where to find Ben?

Courses & Training

Courses & Training

Key Takeaways

➥ Selling a business or a majority stake can provide freedom, but it’s important to take time to reflect and realign before starting something new. A clear vision for the future is essential. Use periods of transition to rediscover what excites and motivates you.

➥ Founders often struggle with self-worth and identity post-exit due to emotional attachment to their businesses. Recognizing and leveraging the broad range of transferable skills acquired during entrepreneurship is vital.

➥ Automation is reshaping paid search with tools like PMAX and Advantage+, emphasizing the need for strategic, full-funnel approaches.

Generative AI is likely to redefine search queries, blending detailed prompts with AI-driven answers.

About The Guest

Ben Dankiw is a trained PPC specialist and mathematician (yes, really) with 12+ years of experience. Ben has been hyper-focused on the industry changes in both SEO and Search Ads over the past 5 years and understands the value that in-depth data analysis brings to search advertising. Blending together the right mix of business acumen, digital strategy, and execution precision allows Ben to deliver for his clients and brands.

Connect with Ben Dankiw

Transcription:

What does the new landscape of AI generative search and the alpha search engines actually look like? Hi, I'm Jared Krauss. I'm the host of the Buying Online Businesses podcast and today I'm speaking with Ben Danku, who is a trained PPC specialist and mathematician.

Yes, really, mathematician. Now he's got 12-plus years of experience and Ben has been hyper-focused on the industry changes in both SEO and paid search ads over the past five years and he understands the value that in-depth data analysis brings to search advertising.

Now he blends it together with the right mix of business acumen, digital strategy, and execution precision. This actually allows Ben to deliver amazing client results for specific brands like Porsche and Canadian Tire and a bunch of other great brands that he's worked with. Now in this podcast episode, Ben and I talk about his business exits, how he's sold a majority share in his agency, and what that actually looks like for him moving forward.

And I also give him a bit of advice on what to do after you exit a business in terms of personally relaxing, chilling, and not rushing into something. And then when he does decide to do something in business, what are the things in question that he needs to get answers to to ensure that he finds a business model that he loves, it's set up for his lifestyle and what he's actually wanting to achieve in his life? There's so much value in that part of the conversation.

Then we move on to talking about SEO: why so much search has been dragged off Google and the monopoly is falling to pieces and what that looks like and where we're going to be searching moving forward and what that can look like for SEO, what we need to do to our websites to ensure that we have the right SEO to pop up in search in generative AI and other search engines like Bing, Yahoo and different ones like that, Reddit and all that sort of stuff.

We do talk about Reddit; we also talk about Reddit ads, we talk about PPC and how the experience has changed and what could come from ads in the future, especially for Meta in the next five to 10 years and then plus ads and search engines using PPC as well. Now, we do talk a lot about selling and exiting a business and what to do next and then also growing a business. This is very, very valuable stuff for somebody that has a website that is producing content.

If you're one of those people and you're already going to buy a business like that, this is a great podcast episode for you.

Enjoy.

Ben, hello, welcome to the pod.

Happy to be here.

Yeah, excited for this one, man. First question, just straight off the bat. Have you ever bought a business before or sold a business? I've actually been a part of one merger, the sale of half my company, and I recently sold the majority stake in my agency. Congratulations. Congratulations. And that's very recent. Before we hit the record button, you mentioned that. So how does it feel? So freeing? I've been in the agency, man.

I, so I've been in the early days and I can, happy to explore any parts of this with you, of course, but the early days of starting an agency, but really just freelancing versus that started back in 2013; that was my first company. I ended up kind of like dissolving that going back in the house. And then I started this agency in 2016. So it was like a 12-year journey with eight years of solid, full-time focus.

Absolutely. It's a good one to talk about because a lot of people get into business and are in business so long. Normally what I talk about is replacing your income, making money, setting yourself up financially, and financial independence. And when you start a business or you buy a business and you hold onto it, you typically want to grow it as fast as you can and build this thing up to make as much money from it as possible.

And typically when you're doing that, you're just reinvesting into the business. And so it's smart to take some money off the table. And most business owners, I was talking to Michael Gerber about this; I think it was Michael Gerber, that they don't take the chips off the table until they realize maybe it's too late and they sell it without wanting to sell it or being ready to sell it. And when something catastrophic might happen. So yeah, congratulations to you. How does it feel taking some chips off the table?

It feels like I still feel pretty young and I followed along your journey a little bit. I'm very intrigued by the online business, either acquiring or building. There are multiple paths, but like I, it feels great to take this chip off the table, which really is consultative services. At the end of the day, I built a pretty solid foundation at the agency, but a lot of it was an extensiome, it of retainers and I was the lead strategist, right? So through some form or another, I was like, Great cash flow business, a great business to like push me learning all these new skill sets, but it was still a trade for time.

So what feels great is I have a lot of the experience and great ideas I like to learn throughout the years at the agency where you have this exposure to hundreds of brands with budgets who want to work with you. But now I'm looking forward and, like, excited to, like, look at productized services or focus on a niche that I found specifically going to be growing over the next few years that I can really hone my specialty into and build an SOP that can hire, etc., all these different things where I'm, like, running a performance marketing agency where it was driven on how many leads and how many sales, how much sales we drew, like we actually drove for them.

It's just that you can niche, but there's just so much going on. So I'm excited about this kind of take this chip off the table and be like, All right, now, like the last two weeks, I've had some mental clarity of just, it's only literally been two weeks. So some like time to, you know, go for a walk in the park and just kind of like clear my head and not fill my day with back-to-back client meetings and try to get out of that routine of checking my email for an hour every morning.

And not to say I won't build some of those back up, but it's been pretty free. Yeah, I bet. bet. While we're on it, let's go there now in terms of where you feel you're going to go from here? So you sold the majority of the safety business partner, right? And so that's exactly what I wanted. You didn't have to list or anything. He wanted to buy it, obviously. That's a huge win for you guys.

For both of you, you had much thought about this prior to this opportunity popping up? Or has it just been the last two weeks you've been thinking about it? And where do you see this going for yourself? Like you said, maybe focus on a product or what this looks like? So I guess it's been an interesting couple of weeks. So my business partner, who's taking on the agency, he's a good friend of mine and I think he's going to do great things with it.

So, and I still have a percentage of the agency, obviously root for him and hope that I'm going to send leads and all that kind of stuff. So I feel like he's got a good vision for it. For me, it's funny because I told myself, like, Hey, slow down every single person. I'm actually in another group called Rhodium. I'm not sure if you've heard of that group. We know rhodium. know Chris very, very well. know. I actually was on Chris's podcast back in 2016.

Wow. So when he had a podcast, it was a great group and like amongst my, the advice I get from people in that group is always, and people often share it when you exit, when you change, like such a transition, slow down and don't jump into the next thing. So I've been forcing myself to slow down and not, for example, create my brand, but I am getting buzzing ideas and one, like one of them, for example, I know I didn't want to just be like, My specialty has always been in Google, specifically Google ads, but also over the last five years, SEO and Google ads.

So, like, the most obvious thing would be to kind of niche into, like, where I see the future of CRM and Google kind of intersecting. like a HubSpot Google kind of like consulting, but I was like, you know what, I don't want to go into that kind of field. So the two areas I've really been exploring, one of them is Reddit marketing, Reddit advertising. I think there's a huge gap in the space there. Brands don't really know how to navigate.

A lot of brands don't know how to navigate this growing community. We all know, or most of us have heard about, Google and Reddit's licensing deal where it's training all this generative AI and they want to keep facilitating all this. So I think it's only going to grow over the next five to 10 years. And there's a, I think there's a pretty big gap, similar to like Meta in 2013 and Google in 2005; people were trying to figure out these new platforms, how to advertise for it.

Like Reddit ads, it is very basic and I think they're going to start investing some money into making it a little bit more sophisticated and I want to get in there early. So I've already started creating some personalities on Reddit and building up just about a couple of domains, but nothing too crazy. haven't dove all in yet. Cool. It's such an exciting place to be. And I want to dive into Reddit, Google ads and what you have done and experienced, just for the audience.

I think you got a bunch of value out of it in terms of scaling their business. But I don't normally do this with a guess, but I have an offer or suggestion for you if it's okay to make. Yeah, I'd like to hear it. So based on what the Rhodium guys say, I totally agree. It's like you've just sold something and you've got this awesome energy of wanting to go away and do something new. I think taking space and time is a really good way to go. And I think depending on where you're at in your life, I think the most important thing to think about first is your lifestyle.

And like what sort of work you do, like what sort of work you don't like, which are two big buckets and put that and sort of like what I've done in my business and other businesses and helped other founders and business owners is like get like a F-off bucket, like stuff this work like it frustrates me. I don't want to do it when you touch it. It's just, yeah.

And then you've got this other thing you like; I really enjoy this. Like for me, it's podcasting and there are other things where I'm just like, This, some things I'm just like, Can't deal with it. In your business, you're limited because you've already got your business, right? And then you have to hire somebody to do that. But maybe when you're starting something fresh, you could just create a business model that really suits your lifestyle where you don't have to have those things.

Yeah. I think that's a very, very important step to sort of like discount what you don't like and then work out what you do like and then build a business model around that. think business model like I'm not the startup guy, right? I have done startups and I've helped people with it. But I think the business model, first working out what your lifestyle is first and then the business model after that, that could support that lifestyle mixed in with what you do like in business is like.

And then you've got your unique genius zone as well too. Yeah. Because I dare say you're really good at Google ads, right? Like you've mentioned an SEO as well over the last five years. But if you like chunking up from that, is it just the platform that you're really good at? And do you need to stick with the platform or is your unique genius actually just your strategic ideas, right?

And you can apply that strategic thinking to consultancy with specific people that are in business where you don't have to touch the Google Ads platform. You can just consult for marketing agencies or something like that. It's where you might actually really get so much enjoyment out of strategic thinking.

And I'm just pulling this out of a hat. I'm not sure if that's what your unique genius is, but just as an example, I just think it's worth sharing on the pod and maybe food for thought for you as well. I think that is very valuable advice and I appreciate that. It's like it feels therapeutic almost hearing, like, Yeah, this is great. I'm sitting here again with some of my own advice. No, I appreciate that. And it is an exciting time.

I do think taking some space and some time, because one of the things I was reflecting on is that I've spent a lot of the last two weeks reflecting. That's mostly what I've been doing: okay, what didn't I like about where I was? Like the last year, I, the last year for anyone in the agency world, that was very difficult. I mean, a lot of different communities. It's been so in business and it's just been like, obviously there's this buzz of AI and there are so many things that are amazing and productive. But in terms of revenue profitability, like growth, it has been a very difficult year for a lot of people.

And I've experienced ups and downs in the company through COVID, through this, etc. But my heart didn't really feel in it the last year. And it was kind of, it's not that my work wasn't good, but it was just, I felt like I was a little bit stuck in the last two weeks. And this reflection I've been thinking about, well, you know what?

For the first time in a long time, I felt like I didn't have a vision. didn't have my long-term where I was going. And that's part of what went into my decision to make such a transition and change. I was one of the co-founders who started it, now 43, and solo operated it for close to five years. So it was really an extension of me. I always thought I would build this business up to sell for even more and sell the whole thing and be able to retire basically on it, which, you know, I mean, I'm in my mid thirties and I'm able to have some runway, but I definitely am not retiring.

So it was interesting, though, the last two weeks to be like, where is my vision? And in that, like that vision part of it, like, what do I want? What do I want with my day? Is it an agency grind? Like, was that part of what was me in my twenties when I started that journey? And I think it's, I think it's very different. So I'm going through a little bit of that exercise of identifying what I want and I'm going to look at what, like just what you said. think I need to focus on that F off what I don't want.

Yeah, for sure. It's such a different stage in your journey, which is super exciting because you're in a position now where you've got IP, you're very skilled and you're probably not going to have to do certain things. Like you don't have a strong need. It's more like you're in a luxurious position where you're like, What do I want? What do I not want versus when you're founding something, you're starting something; typically we're doing that out of, like, I want to get out of my nine to five or I want to get out of survival phase.

So you take on any work to get going, right? And you just take on clients and whatever sort of work comes in; your business model is shaped by what sort of outside leads come in and you mold yourself to suit them versus now you're in a pretty cool position where you can, like, you create the mold.

And you say no to certain clients and yes to certain clients based on what you want and don't want versus what you need, which is super exciting. And I also, I with the identity thing is, like you, when people sell their businesses, what I see is they sell their business and they've been in their business for so long, especially this is mostly for founders.

Identity can be attached to that business, and so when they sell that business, they might feel like, my God, like I've just lost a part of myself, and their self-worth might go down a little bit. This is an example; it doesn't happen to everybody. But the crazy thing is if you zoom out—and this is a really good thing for you to remember—is like you, the skills that you've learned in that business, I'm not just talking about the work as in like PPC ads, conversion rate optimization, and SEO that you're really good at that we'll get to in a second. You're good at that, but you've also been the business owner of hiring, firing, and making sure the business moves along.

You are so much more than the business, right? Like the identity thing of, like, am I a part of the business or I've seen a lot of founders that the business does really well and they're doing great in their life. They're happy. The business doesn't do so well and they're in a slump and that's a personal thing. Like there's this weird attachment to that. that for sure.

Yeah. Yeah. Me too. When I first started, like when I founded my business and that's one thing for founders to remember when they exit, like yourself, is like, you are so much more than your business. Yeah. So it's a good one to remember. That ring is very true and you can't help but feel some of those swings and when the weight of the businesses of the success and the failures of the businesses is on your shoulders at the end of the day, how can you not kind of feel that way?

Exactly. Yeah, business is tough. And like you said, the last year has been tough for a lot of people. yeah, to your point on to your point on that time, I can't remember who said this or who quoted it, but if you don't fill your time, someone will fill it for you. And like for me right now, like lending my family, filled up in my time, probably more than I would in normal, which is, I think, really nice for me right now, visiting my family and my sister and all these kinds of things.

I had, even for example, I had a couple of fractional CMO offers for part-time work, but I just have a feeling that if I take these 10-hour-a-week fractional CMO things on right now, there are other things I'll gain from that, but my mind doesn't necessarily work like that. That's not the right thing for me. It could be the thing for a lot of people, but I'll probably fill 40 hours of my week in 20 hours of consulting time, just trying to figure out what's going to work. So I kind of decided to pass on some of those opportunities, just trying to prioritize that time. Yeah, it's really cool. And maybe there are some CMO roles that are different from those ones that were sent to you that you'd like; I could sort of make that work.

I've got a friend who's a fractional CMO for like five different brands, like seven-figure, seven- to eight-figure brands. Okay. Yeah. It's Lee info selling info product space. And he just over time gets better and better and better at what he does. He's just a great strategic thinker and his clients now, he just puts his fee up every now and then. And when people say no, he just goes, That's fine.

I've got other people to work with and it's based on his terms, which is really cool. Obviously, there's risk in that model for yourself. Like he's only got five clients; lose one, and you lose 20 % of your revenue. But if you've got a list, like a short list of companies that might need that help, then it's valuable.

Yeah.

I want to move into what we actually, this has been 18 minutes of talking about, is being a business owner and entrepreneurship, which is great. I didn't mean to get into the pod to talk about this, but I really appreciate it. I want to talk about SEO, PPC and CRO. Did you start with PPC and then move to CRO and then add on SEO? What was the progression for you when you started the agency and why?

Yeah, no, that's a great question. So I'll give you a little context. My background is like I spent five years working agency side, starting in paid search, going into some programmatic, mostly on the paid media side. I did some freelancing that included some basic SEO and I've always been adjacent to SEO, but for the most part, my experience was on the media side.

And I got to work with some great budgets and some great brands and had some big wins for the agencies I was working for in that time period. But it really gave me, like, I'm a big believer in, like, periods of your career being depth versus breadth. And that was a time of depth where I was laser-focused on paid search. So that helped me get really good at that. And I leveraged that to be, to kind of move up.

And when I was at this agency called Spark in 2014, 15, that's where I met the co-founder of now 43, who is named Tyler. He and I started together where he was the SEO director at that agency and I was the paid media director at that agency. And the two of us kind of came together and said, We can do this from both angles and you're going to leave the SEO, and I'm going to lay paid media. So we started with those two as our core services and we built the agency on us, who were essentially special. We were directors.

We had small teams of five or six employees or so, but at the end of the day, we were also still very much so executing and he and I both had side puzzles. I was running multiple clients on the side. He had multiple clients on the side and we were working on our different crafts.

So when we actually started the agency, we built up about clients in about a six-month period, just based on our results in the restaurant marketing space, because it was 2015, and restaurants had no clue how to rank on Google and no clue how to run their Google ads. So it was so easy for us to leverage our agency-side experience to run these small sets, you know, one- to two-K retainer clients, but we just built a very clear 2015 process, had those two very set services and ran on that kind of niche.

Now we eventually expanded. got a little bit bored of just doing restaurants and hindsight. It actually was a good business model. We probably should have just scaled it out and, like, not cared if we were a little bored. We could have found an operator. We decided we wanted to be more on the performance marketing side. started working with tech, but throughout that all we stayed SEO and PPC.

It was only the last, I would say, three to four years where CRO started coming into play. did some projects with some of our clients, mostly from a need. Like I'd be driving leads from both those different services, and we wouldn't be getting a good conversion rate or X, Y, Z. And they want to improve this. found the last two years for anyone listening in the agency space or marketing, you know, running digital ads, the media-buying world got a little bit. Well, it's just that there's just so much automation and anyone who's running a black campaign and Advantage Plus P Max, all these things, right. It's just, there's definitely still strategic tactics and that you can work a few strategy and tactics that you can work on.

But at the end of the day, I felt like now more than ever, we can't just be a Google Ads agency. We need to work on the whole funnel. So we introduced CRO and started working on landing pages and whatnot too. It's such a shame when you are great at ads, search ads, and your client's goal is to make more money in the business and you can do that through ads, but their funnel is lacking and letting down your ads. Like you're getting all these quality ads in, and it's just not when they get on the landing page; the offer isn't landing, or it's just not working.

So it's a no-brainer to do CRO conversion rate optimization for those who haven't guessed what CRO stands for. But that alone, like you could, instead of changing the ad budget on the PPC campaign, you could keep the ad budget the same, same quality leads, same amount of leads, but just change some of the things on the landing page or the sales pages that could get you a 20 % to 50%, maybe even more percent increase in sales, not spending more money.

I mean, it might be a little bit of money for them to hire you to do some SEO stuff, but that's like, it's a far better win for them than just like, just ads, right? So paid search, where do you see paid search going now? I want to move to SEO soon, but, like, where do you see the page? Like you mentioned, different platforms. Yeah. What was it? What was the different platform that you mentioned?

Yeah. Reddit. Do you feel like things are slowing down on Google Mentioned and more people are starting to move to Reddit? Like, why do you think things are going to change in the PBC space? Well, that's a big question. There's so much change in front of us that anyone who says they know exactly where it's going is going to be surprised. Yeah. And it's a lot; there can be a lot of speculation too, because, like, we hear things and we're like, is this true? if that happens, this can happen. So understand that.

And this is all like, whatever you mentioned is like, if things happen, then there's opportunities for sure. Like, I want to dig into it because there's this, like, I know it's a big crazy box that we're opening up, Candle Worms, and there's AI involved with it, which is probably going to link into search as well, which is where I want to go because people are thinking what's to come for paid search and then SEO.

Yeah, I mean, so to start, I think I would look at user behavior. User behavior is changing. I'm still very high on Meta. I think you can get amazing results on Meta right now. And I don't think that's GoMeta. change in the next five to 10 years. I think Meta is going to be a good bet. 10 plus years, not so sure, but in the next, let's say five to 10, I'm still pretty confident that there's only up to go from there.

And there's a ton of opportunity on their ad platform. Now when it comes to search, that's an interesting one. Google is definitely losing market share. And you look at any graph, not talking to you, Google, sorry. Yeah. Look at any market share graph and it's changing. ChatGPT just launched their new search bar last week.

So that's the start; now it's just essentially being dressed up, but there's also been encroaching market share, but more so than that, I do think the future of search is actually going to become less important on the platform that you're using because clearly generative AI is the future of results already started in, especially in the U.S. If you're there, they have, like, you'll find all the latest, but the amount of functionality and data and information that Google's pulling in from their knowledge graph from an ads perspective, I think it's going to change how they format it right now.

The traditional Google ads, which have been a trillion-dollar business for them. Like, who knows the number? I don't know the number off the map. It's a huge number. Yeah, decades ago, they just monopolized this incredible money printing machine based on the very simple flow of someone searching for information and then sending originally two and now four.

And actually there's even more ads on the screen nowadays. That search, I don't think that search is going to go away anytime soon. I think consumers move a lot slower than people like maybe yourself or me, who might be more in the space and using the tech and whatnot, but it is changing. alongside changes in, like I said, chat GPT is coming along. There's also a lot of different macro changes coming from hardware.

I think Meta's glasses have come a long way and even more people are going to start adopting wearable tech that they're speaking to integrate generative AI with advanced hardware. Like I find hardware is usually the lag. A lot of times the software will, I think, be ahead of time. And again, this is all speculative in my mind, not a developer or anything like that, but I just see trends where a lot of times a business is a great idea, but it's five, 10 years too early.

But once the hardware catches up to it and people, the trends catch up and people start wearing some of this tech. Like I remember talking about how the future of voice search in 2016 and how this was, everyone was going to change how they're searching and how, and whatnot. And there were some changes, but ultimately, we can't ignore how mass-adopted generative AI tools and LLMs have become and clearly they're investing in them. So from the ad side, I think they're going to be able to place those. They're already showing that they can place links and give citations on the SEO side.

I think it's going to be a way of placing different sponsored postings, similar to Google's taking over the shopping experience. So it's just about placing new shopping ads and whatever the new functionality is. PMAX and all these different performance, like automated campaign types that go across multiple channels, they're going to use search, but it's going to be in the new search and the new search of how someone does a prompt rather than how someone says best laptop near me or best restaurant near me versus you giving a 500-word prompt on exactly what you want.

So what does that look like? So with the new search, what does the new search look like basically? Let's just try and make it linear for everyone to understand. Like, what does a new search look like? And then how does that, how do we stack on PBC? So I guess we start with SEO first. I think so. The original model was we're to show you 10 results and you're going to pick which result best fits what you searched, right?

Now knowledge graphs, which for anyone who doesn't know what a knowledge graph is, if you ever search on Google and it shows the answer to your question inside on Google's page, there's usually a little box and it'll say, like, how old has it been? And it'll say my name and, or sorry, my age, or you can ask multiple questions that are more in depth or like, how do I cook an egg?

And it'll actually give you the instructions on how to cook the eggs. Most of you have seen this. Yes. That knowledge graph is going to expand and Google is going to be teetering the line for how they reward content creators. Because right now it's a really up-in-the-air place for publishers and Google.

There's a lot of tension right there. Especially with, like, publishers not getting clicks to their site because the featured snippet, like you said, that knowledge bar is increasing. So yeah. Exactly. So I think that's it. And I think Google is going to have to find a way to generate that new experience or create that new experience with generative AI.

Because people are going to start wanting to actually, I don't want to look up, not always. I think at the end of the day, people are going to search differently. Not every person searches the same way. So there's going to be options. I think they'll give you some generative answers and then you can go on to see other more authentic or more traditional Google kind of responses laid out.

So that's where I think it's going. Now it's interesting to think about when, like, you have Apple or Meta, these other brands and people start searching from their agents, how that's going to look; I'm not totally sure because it's going to be like, are they just going to be licensing Bing or licensing Google and using their backend and just keep creating their own interface? Ultimately, I think the long, long, long in the future where it's going is they're all going to be kind of looking similar.

Yeah. So that means we'll have a bunch of different search engines, really. And we will use different search engines for different, I guess, queries and questions, right? How do you see this like ChatGPT search working, changing, evolving, and ads working for them evolving, and you cut out a little bit there on the question? Yes. So, ChatGPT, how do you see that evolving as a search engine and then people adopting PBC? Yeah, no, it's a great question.

They're testing it live right now and what took Google years? They're getting a lot of data really quickly. I think it's being adopted very fast. I think it'll, I don't think they're going to stray too far from what's actually currently the interface where there's a set result that kind of dictates exactly what you shared. And they're going to have citations that still point to these publisher sites. I think it's important that they still give credit to the content creators.

Because the fact of the matter is these LLMs, they've crawled a lot of the internet, and they've exhausted a lot of the content already. So they need people to keep creating. Well, there's we won't get too deep into that, but this moment they need people to continue to culturally trend-wise be ahead of the time.

It's hard for AI to find out kind of what's coming next when human nature can be so unpredictable. So they need content creators and need people who are creative to be building content. And they're going to have to cite that because they need to be monetized. And I think eventually it's going to be more expensive to use something like a chat, cheap BT. mean, they're basically burning money with all of these processing fees. And I don't know how long they obviously have a ton of VC runway, but in my opinion, the pricing model right now is as good as it's going to get for your business.

If you're creating a business around it, leverage that and take advantage of it. Yeah. Get grandfathered in for sure. Because I mean, who knows? Like maybe they do keep it the same price, but they start ties as being able to advertise on chat. GPT, make a lot more money that way and keep it free for the user. Kind of like what Google has done. Yeah. It's a very interesting one. So each of these search engines needs publishers, right?

A lot of people listening to this podcast have content websites or want to buy a content website, or they just have an e-commerce business. They want to create content for search to get more purchases. How do you see SEO evolving for publishers on their site that can allow them to show in search for in-chat GPT, Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines rather than just becoming... Because forever it's been like, let's just create great content that Google ranks. Now, you want to create great content that's seen.

Yeah. I mean, some of the traditional pillars are still really important. Like, I think it's funny because people will dress up when new things are happening and you have a new interface and you start seeing yourself rank on a generative AI search. And I see that all the time in my LinkedIn; someone's page is ranking here. Someone's got, got recommended as a result from GenAI.

They still require a lot of the same foundations. If your technical SEO is sound and you're site isn't crawlable and it's super slow, then it's not going to get found. really think becoming a topical authority in the space is really important. I think it's going to be less individually keyword focused. you don't like still having, like, what we used to do, like, well, we still do, but, like, clusters where you find a bunch of keywords that are all related to one topic and you build out an article for each piece of content and they all relate into a cluster. I think that's still a viable strategy.

You're going to be, we call it like a hub and spoke methodology where you have some sort of hub authority as well. Yeah, exactly. And, and so I think building content based on what people are searching for is still going to be a viable strategy. It's just important now, I think, to differentiate the quality of your content; the days of easy content are kind of gone. Like you can't, yes, you can generate a bunch with AI, but is it good content? Google has a crawl budget and I think there's a lot of, a lot of interesting findings recently about, like, have they just stopped indexing?

A lot of websites will take a while to index and there, there's a certain crawl budget. So if you don't have good content and you're not using other channels, I think you're doing yourself a disservice. You can still follow that SEO model and reward yourself with that organic traffic. But if you're not having a distribution channel on email and, you know, your socials, I think it's come a little bit too far to just be relying on that one channel when Google is so unpredictable right now.

Yeah. Even for Gen.ai searching for answers, they're not going to get answers from just crappy AI-generated content anyway. They're looking for the best answers in the most specific way because, particularly with Gen.ai, people are searching with, like, a prompt that has multiple things or multiple boxes that need to be ticked and answered within just one query, right? So you really want to have the quality content, not just for Google, but for all the search engines. And what we're seeing now is that when we're doing DD on just pure content websites, the publishers have created or bought and scaled the amount of traffic that's not really getting generated just from Google, like through all the different other search engines, being Yahoo and whatnot, is like that.

They're the ones that are getting most of the, they're getting traffic from other sources, not just Google now, which is actually really, it's funny because people are looking for mostly Google or traditionally we're looking for content websites that are getting most of their traffic just from Google because Google was like the place that's the number one search.

Now it's so much; it sucks because, yes, Google is still good, but fewer searches are coming from Google, less traffic I should say. But the really valuable thing is that it's kind of split pretty evenly between a bunch of a few different ones, like being in Yahoo and Reddimuch, ending on the site and all that sort of stuff. But that means you don't have a single-source dependency on just Google in terms of search; you have a split between a few different search engines.

So it makes the business typically more valuable that way versus having that risk. So it sucks that it's just not from Google or from Google because they're great, but it's also a good thing because of that risk diversification.

No, that makes a lot of sense. It kind of inspires a little bit of this next focus on Reddit. you can get, mean, Reddit clearly has a, it's like having an amazing age domain. So building content on there is part of the strategy I see moving forward.

Kind of back on your question for SEO tactics kind of thing. I still think digital PR and link building are important. I was; I never really ran a link-building shop. I was never a link-building expert, but I knew it was always an important part of our SEO strategy.

One thing I've been seeing as pretty exciting and successfully done in the last year is, let's call it digital PR, where they're building studies. You're doing outreach and you're getting qualified people to, you're finding a way to creatively get qualified people to want to contribute to your content. It requires some creative thinking. I saw a really great one from this company called Predictable Profits where they reached out and were like, We want to get your opinion on this emerging trend. And you're like, okay, I'll give you my opinion.

And then it's a five-minute interview. And then they curate the results and they build this. An authentic and new piece of content that brings in all these professionals. And then you're going to want to link to that piece of content as something that you're a part of. So, like, how can you get contributors to want to, and it's not just like spam outreach; you get building real content.

Like, I think that's something brands should be doing: looking at how they can add value to my users through Jason studies and channels and whatnot? And then you leverage that content you create to get those backlinks to then help your authority to then help your content. It's all connected. All connected. Yeah. All stuff that we've talked a lot about on the pod is like, yeah, links, link building, topical authority, quality content, EAT, super important.

So through listening, obviously SEO is not going to change. It's just that what's changing is where the traffic's coming from because Google is getting knocked in and hit and punched in from all angles, which is kind of, it's been a hit. There's been a massive hit to a lot of publishers because Google has been rocked, but it's also quite good for publishers in the long run. I'm not a fan of the monopoly that was there. getting torn down, right? As someone who is a fellow SEO and has years and years of experience, Google does not care about us and trying to hide things and try. mean, there, then again, a lot of us try to game the system too.

So yeah. Give and take, Ben. Awesome, man. Thanks so much for coming on. Really appreciate you. Where should we send people to check out more about what you or should we send them to see your agency? We should probably write. then also, like LinkedIn, where do you think people should contact?

Yeah, I'm going to be taking the last couple of weeks off, but I'm going to start getting active again on my LinkedIn and going to be announcing some things there. So that's probably the best place you can find me, Ben Danku. Of course I still endorse and I'm part of nav43.com. That's the agency that you can find. There's a great team there. They're working on Google ads, SEO, any of that kind of stuff. So trained by yours truly and feel free to check them out.

Love it, Ben. Thanks so much for your time. Appreciate it. Everybody is listening.

Thank you for listening. I'll speak to you on the next one.

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