Podcast: Play in new window | Download
As digital marketers, we often chase metrics like traffic and rankings, but what if those aren’t the best indicators of success anymore? My guest today, Wil Reynolds, CEO of Seer Interactive, challenges us to rethink how we measure impact in a world increasingly influenced by AI tools like ChatGPT. From understanding the evolving search landscape to crafting content that resonates with real people, Wil shares the insights and strategies that have made him one of the most respected voices in digital marketing. If you’re ready to prioritize quality over quantity and turn data into action, you’re in the right place.
Driving High-Quality Leads through AI and SEO Summary
Key Takeaways
- AI Traffic Quality: Learn why leads from AI tools like ChatGPT are often higher quality than traditional search traffic and how to track them effectively.
- The Shift in Search Behavior: Explore how AI reduces friction in the search journey and what that means for SEO.
- Content Customization: Discover Wil’s approach to creating content tailored by role and industry for maximum impact.
- Data-Driven Intuition: Hear how Wil hones his intuition with data to ask the right questions and uncover new opportunities.
- The Value of Social Engagement: Understand why social media interactions can yield higher conversions than traditional search traffic.
How AI is Revolutionizing Lead Generation and SEO
In today’s digital world, the way we approach marketing is shifting, especially with the rise of artificial intelligence. If you’ve been wondering how tools like ChatGPT can drive meaningful results for your business, or what the integration of AI into SEO means for marketers, you’re in the right place. Let’s explore how AI-driven lead generation, ChatGPT marketing strategies, and the evolving nature of SEO are shaping the future.
AI-Driven Lead Generation: Quality Over Quantity
Traffic numbers often grab the spotlight, but what really matters is the quality of those visitors. AI tools like ChatGPT are flipping the script by driving smaller volumes of traffic—but with far higher conversion rates. For businesses focused on B2B sales or complex buyer journeys, this shift is game-changing.
Why does this happen? AI tools simplify the decision-making process by providing highly specific, frictionless answers to user queries. When users come through these channels, they’re often further along in the buyer’s journey, making them more likely to convert into leads or customers. Tracking these leads through tools like CRMs (customer relationship management software) ensures you understand where they’re coming from and can attribute them correctly.
ChatGPT Marketing Strategies: Customization is Key
One of the most powerful ways to leverage ChatGPT is by tailoring your content to specific audiences. Instead of creating generic resources, consider dividing your content by role (e.g., CMO vs. CFO) or industry (e.g., SaaS vs. healthcare). Why? Because personalization resonates.
Imagine taking your existing blog posts, loading them into ChatGPT, and having it simulate a Q&A session tailored to a particular audience. The result? Content that speaks directly to a prospect’s pain points and goals. This targeted approach not only improves engagement but also boosts your visibility in AI-driven search experiences.
The New SEO Landscape: AI’s Impact on Search Traffic
AI isn’t just influencing traffic quality—it’s changing how people search. Instead of typing broad queries into Google, users are crafting longer, more nuanced searches on tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity. These tools don’t send users to 10 blue links; they provide immediate, context-rich answers.
This has a ripple effect on SEO. Pages that rank well in traditional search engines might not perform as effectively in AI-driven environments. Here’s what you can do to adapt:
- Benchmark Your AI Traffic: Identify which pages are being surfaced by ChatGPT or similar tools.
- Focus on Intent: Understand the types of questions your target audience is asking and ensure your content addresses them thoroughly.
- Create Industry-Specific Pages: Tailor your offerings to align with the roles or industries most relevant to your business.
These strategies ensure your content remains competitive in a world where AI is becoming the default search assistant.
Making Intuition Data-Driven
A major challenge with AI tools is the lack of traditional analytics data. While platforms like Google Analytics provide insights into traffic sources, tools like ChatGPT don’t offer the same transparency. This means marketers need to rely on CRMs, lead forms, and direct customer feedback to understand how AI-driven traffic behaves.
Here’s a pro tip: Call your leads and ask what they were searching for before they found you. This old-school method provides valuable context, helping you refine your strategies and improve your visibility in AI-driven search engines.
Balancing SEO and AI Strategies
SEO isn’t going away, but AI is pushing marketers to rethink their priorities. While search engines reward domain authority and backlinks, AI focuses on context and relevance. This means marketers need to strike a balance:
- Maintain SEO Best Practices: Continue optimizing for Google, but focus on quality content that aligns with user intent.
- Invest in AI Strategies: Use tools like ChatGPT to expand your reach, target new audiences, and drive higher-quality leads.
By embracing both approaches, you can future-proof your marketing efforts and stay ahead of the competition.
Final Thoughts
The integration of AI into digital marketing isn’t just a trend; it’s a transformation. By focusing on AI-driven lead generation, implementing ChatGPT marketing strategies, and adapting to the evolving SEO landscape, marketers can stay relevant and deliver real business results. Remember, it’s not about chasing vanity metrics like traffic—it’s about creating meaningful connections and driving growth.
Driving High-Quality Leads through AI and SEO Episode Transcript
Rich: My next guest is the founder and CEO of Seer Interactive, one of the most highly regarded digital marketing agencies in the U.S. A former teacher with a knack for advising, he is passionate about helping people and businesses grow. He’s been helping Fortune 500 companies develop SEO and digital marketing strategies since 1999.
He’s a sought-after keynote speaker, averaging 10-20 keynotes every year. I had the pleasure of finally seeing him speak live at MAICON this past September, blew me away. His profound knowledge and practical approach towards SEO, PPC, and digital strategy have made him a revered speaker and consultant in our industry.
He started Seer Interactive back in 2002, after his boss wouldn’t let him volunteer on his lunch break. A philanthropist at heart, he had the first few Seer team members sign contracts committing to giving back to the community.
Today, we’re going to be looking at the impact that AI is having on your search traffic and what, if anything, you can do about it with Wil Reynolds. Wil, welcome to the podcast.
Wil: Thank you for having me today. This is going to be a fun topic.
Rich: I’m excited about it. Now, as I mentioned in your bio, volunteerism is a central belief at Seer. Would you mind telling me a little bit about what you’re doing at the Covenant House Sleepout this November?
Wil: Yeah. This November, in about three and a half weeks, me and a few team members will be sleeping outside at a church with a bunch of other companies and their teams to raise money and awareness for homeless youth in our city. It is my 13th or 14th time doing this. I live in Philly, so it’s cold out there. But what warms you up are the stories of the perseverance and resilience of our youth. So anytime I can get out there and try to raise money and awareness for this issue it is a great use of me and my team’s time.
Rich: That’s awesome. I love how you made this such a big part of your business as well. If people want to learn more about it, or if they want to donate to the cause, is there a link that you can give us?
Wil: Yeah, I’ll definitely give you the link. You can put it in the show notes because it’s like a long link, of course. Nonprofits, can’t we get some Bitly’s up in this piece? But no, so I’ll send that on for sure.
And just today I recorded a video. I had a couple of people hit me up and they’re like, I’ll donate to your sleep out to the tune of $1,500 if you’ll spend an hour with our team. So I’m like, cool, let me do like 10 of those. So I’m going to also be posting a link today. And it’s basically somebody hears this, and we liked the way you’re thinking about AI, I want you to come in for an hour. I’m like, it’s a write off, donate the $1,500 bucks to my sleep out and you’ll get me for an hour to talk to your team one-on-one about whatever it is that you want to talk about.
Rich: Love it. Awesome. All right. We’ll have those links in the show notes.
So let’s shift now. Talking about AI, what’s the shift that you’ve seen in how consumers are getting answers to queries these days on the internet?
Wil: The volume is low, the impact is high, for me. What I’m finding is a lot of people are showing the traffic numbers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, et cetera, and they’re going, look how small the number is.
And it’s like, well one, if you compare ChatGPT to Google, keep in mind that their goal is not to send people to your website. So they can give you the answer right there. They’re going to give you the answer so you shouldn’t expect those things to line up. Duh. That’s the first thing.
The second thing is that my quality of conversions are a lot higher. So I’ve got like a couple hundred grand in pipeline, like pipeline, actual converted people, MQLs that came from ChatGPT. And when I compare my number of MQLs that came from search that wasn’t branded against my number of leads that came from ChatGPT over the last three months, it’s like a third of my non-branded leads are coming from ChatGPT/AI not from Google. It’s like the numbers on traffic might look low, but the impact and the lead flow, at least as a B2B, is high enough for me to get really serious about this.
Rich: Okay, so let’s, some basic questions here. So first, if some of the listeners are here and hearing what you’re saying and they’re getting excited about this, simply, how are you seeing in Google Analytics or any other tool that you’re using that this traffic that is converting is coming through these AI tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity, rather than Google or social media?
Wil: It’s my CRM. I’m a CEO at the end of the day. I don’t look into Google Analytics to see how my company’s doing. I look at my CRM, I’m looking at pipeline, looking at real business. Not this oh, somebody refreshed the form twice, so now it looks like I have two leads. I’m not about that. Neither is any other CEO’s. Gotta make real decisions.
So inside of my CRM, we changed our dropdown to include ChatGPT/AI. And once we did that, we’re actually able to track those users through the buying journey. Are they MQLs? Are they not? And so when I separated out all the places that people may go to get answers, you’re pretty much going to Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo for search where you’re querying something, not like Reddit or any of that stuff. Or you’re going to end up on a chat search engine. When I look at the traffic, it’s 77% to 1 ½%. When I looked at my conversions over the last three months for that were MQLs, it was like 32% for ChatGPT, 78% or so or 68% for Google.
So I’m like, all right, that’s enough actual leads coming in from my lead forum, where people are saying that I’m not going to look at the traffic numbers as my decision on how much I should jump in or not. I’m going to look at the quality of leads that are coming in.
Rich: All right. So the traffic coming in through ChatGPT may be a small amount, but that is just much higher quality is what you’re telling us, right?
Wil For my business.
Rich: Obviously your mileage may vary at home.
Wil: Your mileage may vary at home, but because so many people want this… It’s funny, man, we’ve gotten lazy in marketing. It’s like people want the answer. And I’m like, I’m not here to give you the answer because you have to do the work to look into the data yourself to determine, is my customer there? Is it a high-quality customer there? Is it just sales guys looking for a list of leads and are getting links, clicking on my website?
Like, you got to do the work yourself. Because what I’m afraid of is a lot of people may over invest in AI because it’s the new hotness, and then realize that not enough of their customers are there. And now they’ve over invested in something when they should have just been doing mostly Google and just a little bit of AI. I think too many people might come in too early.
Rich: All right, so if we do believe, if we’ve done the homework and we do believe that AI is driving traffic to our website or could be driving traffic to our website, what are some of the steps we could take to improve the opportunities we have of ChatGPT or similar services sending us traffic? What did you do once you started to see this uptick to increase the chances of you filling your pipeline?
Wil: Nothing yet. People are very surprised when I say this. It’s like, I’m not putting the cart before the horse. You can’t optimize something that you’re not tracking and baselining yet. So here’s been my workflow.
First, I connected the CRM and realized that there was real freaking leads happening. Now I’m going into analytics and saying, where are ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini driving traffic to my website?
Then I’m looking at what pages are they driving to because the page tells you a lot more about the query because there’s no data. You can’t get data out of Perplexity. You can’t get data out of ChatGPT. You can’t get out of Gemini. So there is, oh, I can go into the webmaster tools and see you’re getting zero data.
So for me, it’s very important to figure out what pages they’re driving to. So I’m getting a bunch of traffic to my blog. That’s way different than to my home page. Or my services pages. And I was shocked to see how much ChatGPT is driving to my services pages and my homepage. I think it’s 70% of the traffic I get from ChatGPT is to my homepage and my services pages. Very little of it’s my blog. For me, that’s a good thing. Because who the heck is getting like, why go to my homepage? You only going to my homepage if you’re looking for my brand, which means you were referred. And somebody said, oh, I was talking to Sierra interactive, and you Googled it and came into my homepage, or you did it on ChatGPT.
No, sorry. If you Google it, you’re going to get my brand direct. If you’re on ChatGPT looking for a company that does blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, they’re going to send you to my homepage, not a blog page. So I think the pages that people are driving to is the next thing you got to look at.
Once you do that, the next thing you’ve got to do is benchmark whether or not you’re showing up. Because people want to jump to, how do I show up? And actually we’re getting close to a point where you’re going to almost be at like a query volume of one, right? Like everybody can personalize the query so much that you got to start to look at how are people searching in ChatGPT? So when you do get those leads, call those people and ask them what they were searching for. Because you’ve got to try to get in the mind of the searcher better. Like, how long was your query? How many words did you type? How long were you typing? What kind of refinements did you do?
Once you get all that, now you can start to put in, for me, it’s going to be a couple thousand questions into a tool like Ziptie, or we have our own tool that we’ve built to then track how visible I am for those words. And then once you know how visible you are for these queries, then you can begin the process of optimizing. Which I can start to lay out my playbook for you on that, because I just started doing it about a week and a half, two weeks ago. I started saying, now that I got all those steps in place, now I’m ready to talk a little bit about what I’m going to do. But I haven’t done it yet.
Rich: Give us a little bit. Give us just a little taste of what you’re starting on right now, because I’m totally curious.
Wil: Yeah. It’s not going to be very sexy. Remember, most people weren’t around for what SEO looked like from 1999-ish to probably about 2008 or 2009. So we have a 10-year run on SEO of literally doing stuff that wasn’t very advanced and winning. And I think the more niche you are, the easier it is to get away with some of those things.
The first thing I’m thinking of is I looked at – it’s good for me to talk this out because I can walk people through my methodology so they’re not just, wow, I just made this shit up. Because everybody’s making shit up right now. Everybody’s a goddamn AI expert. So what I did is I looked at all of the documentation from Perplexity, Microsoft, and Anthropic, and OpenAI on how to prompt their generative AI bots, because these bots don’t come with any instructions. There’s no rules.
So what they realized is that if people get bad answers, they’re going to blame the LLM, not themselves for not knowing how to search. So therefore, when you read their instructions, you can see they’re oftentimes saying, give yourself a role, give yourself an industry, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And if you look closely on Perplexity and Copilot, they will start to auto populate and auto fill out the rest of your query to help you get a better query and a better prompt, to help you get better answers.
So now I’m going, all right, what are they recommending in their documentation? They’re saying you should put in your role. Great. So that means that somebody is going to put in, I’m a CMO. I’m a CFO. I’m a marketing VP. So then you got to look back at your content and go, how often am I writing content that is broken down by role?
So my first thing I’m going to start to do is look at content that we’ve written that has already performed really well so I know that people like it and care about it and start to divide it up on role. How to look at your KPIs in an AI world for the CMO is a different post. So what I’m doing is I’m taking all my posts around KPIs and AI, I’m loading them all into ChatGPT. I’m going for a run and I’m using the voice – new voice version is so freaking dope – that I’m using the voice version to just answer questions. So I’m having it be an interviewer. I’m having ChatGPT be an interviewer asking me all these tough questions about what the CMO would care about and guiding me into CMO style questions.
And then by the time I’m done my run and get home, all my answers in my own voice as an SME, not some delve in an ever-evolving landscape type crap they’re going to write up for me. It’s my actual quotes, my actual voice, my actual tone is already written up. So then I just go, all right, put it all together in a post, maintaining my quotes, my tone, my desk. And now I’ve got probably 60-70% started on how to pivot it into the CMO. And I’m basically doing the same thing for industry.
So then I’m saying, all right, where do we excel as a company? We’re strong in a few areas, SaaS, healthcare, education, let’s just say in banking. So now I’m going, oh, when I typed those words in monitoring, I’m looking for an SEO and a paid search firm good at banking industry. I’m not coming up as the answer, but I got tremendous experience there.
So then I’m like, all right, where are my case studies? Am I going to start speaking at conferences in those spaces? I started noticing we’re showing up as sources for a lot of answers on Gemini. So then you start going okay, if I want to win in education, how do I pivot my existing content around education? How do I get my people to speak and get education conferences? When we do those conferences, shouldn’t we do some PR around those conferences and saying, hey, press release, we’re going here. And then let’s also make sure we have some case studies so that we can build these verticalized pages.
So the first thing that I’m doing is I’m beginning the process of building verticalized pages, and vertical of by industry and by role, because that’s where we’re seeing the documentation telling us how we should be prompting to get the most out of it.
Rich: Wil, that is so next level. That is amazing. When you’re doing this and you’re slicing and dicing this content for the different audiences or the different industries, are you leaving the original page behind? Like are you leaving it there, or are you updating the content for those pages?
It sounds like if you want to have one piece of content that’s for the CMO versus say the CEO or some other role, that really should be two separate pages. And similarly, certainly for the industries, it seems like it should be separate as well.
Wil: So I don’t know how this is going to pan out. I’ve thought about including the one-minute CMO box at the top of a post to just feed it a little bit. But I’m finding that, because that’s the attention span, you don’t have as much time with somebody as they move up in the C suite. So I’ve played around with that idea.
But then I’ve also been like, ah, I go on these long runs and I’m giving it a bunch of stuff. It’s hard to get it down into the one-minute version. So there’s an education company that does this really well. They go, “I am a blank and I’m trying to do X.” And they basically are like, what’s your growth goal and what’s your role. And I’m thinking if I can get people to identify their role early on, then I can have them click over to a new page is what I’m thinking. That’s like, all right, here are a bunch of five minutes snippets on blah, blah, blah, blah for the CMO.
And then I get to also, if they self-select in, now my HubSot can tell what their role is. So then imagine trying to personalize the rest of their experience, because there’s a value in them giving me that information because the rest of their experience will be personalized that way. But I don’t have the content written that way yet. So I’m going through working my tail off, trying to go through my old posts and asking ChatGPT to interview me so I can just get it out at times that would otherwise be dead time, like a long run or something like that.
Rich: So I just want to envision this. So you basically are having these conversations, and they’re being recorded while you’re running because ChatGPT is interviewing you. And then that becomes the content, like you said, 60 to 70 percent of the post is done right then. And then you just refine it once you get back to the office.
Wil: That’s correct.
Rich Brilliant. Let’s talk about some other things, because this has been mind blowing for me, but I did want to touch base on a few things. Because I think a lot of people are worried that their search traffic is going down. I see this across the industries. I’ve heard a lot of concerns from people, like, I’m just not getting the search traffic I used to get. What do you tell your clients when they start saying that we’re not getting the search traffic that we experienced before?
Wil: I go and look at leads. So are leads dropping at the same level as your search traffic?
And then I look at revenue, and I say if you can give me those by month, then I can overlay that to see is this a major problem? And for some clients, they line up. For other clients, they don’t line up at all.
Like for me, I’m down 40%, I’m starting to come back a little bit. But at one point I was down 41% over where I was January 2022 for search traffic. But my revenue, my lead flow was the same and my revenue was up 2%. So what that told me is back in the day, search traffic used to be a good proxy for me of my business’s health. Now I’m realizing that’s not as much as I once thought it was. So that’s the way I’m looking at that.
Rich: Do you think it’s because a lot of the searches that AI is answering right now are these kind of low-quality informational searches, like when is Mother’s Day 2025, or when is Rosh Hoshana or whatever it may be, and we’re just not going to see traffic like that traffic is gone forever?
Wil: You know what? I think it starts basic, but we’re used to losing that traffic because that traffic’s already been mostly lost. I had a client in the greeting card space for the last 10 years, and you could just watch over time. Like the answer boxes destroyed those kinds of answers, right? Before you could write for Valentine’s day, “What day is Valentine’s day?” Number one, the answer box came in, the customer got what they needed. Why would they click on your site? So I think we’re used to those queries.
I think the thing that we’re not used to is when somebody types in a very long query, “I’m a 200 person B2B SaaS company. I have offices in X locations. I have this many salespeople. Here’s what I’m struggling with my sales team. Which three CRMs would you recommend?” I think people are not ready for that.
Once you have that experience one time and you’re like, wait a second, what just happened? I didn’t have to Google something to then click on a bunch of results. Many of which those paid search answers are dog shit. They’re not actually close to what you actually wanted. So then I had to go through that friction. Then I got to get to a bunch of websites that also have their pop ups and all the stuff they want me to do before I get the answer. There’s just so much friction between your question and the answer. And we just got used to it because it was so much better than the encyclopedia.
But now it’s, wait a second, I can avoid all that and I can put in eight different things that I’m looking for in one long query instead of CRM for SaaS. And then you’re like, okay, cool. CRM that auto updates from my email from email. Good. See me see your end that integrates with Gmail. You have to do so much work and then go through that same cycle of bullshit. That same cycle of friction with every query. You’re like I already knew what I wanted in my head. If I just could have talked it all out in a paragraph, I wouldn’t have had to do these 20 different searches and click on all these different websites with their own UX and UI. I’m trying to figure out their navigation. I’m clicking on paid ads, and I can’t really tell where the paid ads are versus the organic.
The whole process of getting people from question to answer in an AI world is just like, oh, is that what it feels like when the friction’s removed? So I think that’s where people are going to see traffic dropping over time. And remember how we opened up, my CRM is telling me that’s happening. I’m getting leads coming through MQL is coming through. Not just tire kickers, like real quality folks coming through saying, yeah, I use ChatGBT to find you guys.
Rich: And are you seeing, as you look at your own analytics, that maybe the traffic to your blogs and the informational posts are getting less traffic, but the service pages and the sales pages are continuing at pretty much the same rate or even improving?
Wil: Oh, you just gave me something to look at. The blog for sure, the blog for sure. Although, it’s interesting. I don’t think it’s 41%, so that’s pretty bad, quote unquote. But ultimately, I think if you’re writing really short posts that don’t give a lot of additional context then yeah, the answer can be answered in a box. But sometimes, if you’re writing a longer post and you’re trying to understand the pros, the cons, the nuances, et cetera, I find a lot of times people are going to have to click through anyway. At least on a Perplexity and whatnot. So we’ll see about that.
What I haven’t looked at is how often does Google drive direct traffic to my services pages? I have looked at it for ChatGPT. I have not looked at it for Google, because I’m like, yeah, Google’s just going to typically rank my homepage for everything. So now I want to look at how many people directly came into my services pages from Google versus how many people came directly into my services pages from Gemini, Perplexity and ChatGPT. So that’s a good one. I’m going to take a look at that.
Rich: Yeah. I got to give a hot hat tip to Andy Crestodina on that, who also spoke at MAICOM and is a good friend of mine. And he was showing me that his blog posts don’t get the traffic it used to, but the traffic to his service pages and the branded content is just as good.
And yeah, I get it sounds like you have not seen a dip in sales because of it. So that actually brings up an important point. You and your presentation talk about the importance of brands and that brands matter when it comes to SEO. Can you explain why you think that?
Wil: Yeah. Man, so I think that Google has over dialed domain authority. There’s a time now where every time you Google anything, you’re going to see Reddit, right? High domain authority. So there’s these websites that are showing up, you’re watching people buy domains with high authority, right? People like Red Ventures or whatever, they’re buying these really high brand domains, like CNET, or you just saw it with Forbes. Forbes was building whole sections of their website that had nothing to do with business news. It was low quality affiliate stuff for buying like box fans, and Google just gave them the slap and a lot of other sites like that, the slap.
And I think what happens is Google has overweighted domains and the authority of the brand domain for so long, that now users and customers are getting more friction than ever because they’re like, why would I go to Forbes for these things? The beauty is that in an LLM world, these generative AI bots, they see your brand and they see the words that are around your brand very well so it’s much harder to fake it.
Whereas I can take a big domain today. I was just doing this with a jean search. I was showing people the search phrase, ‘ethical jeans’’, or I’m looking for environment, like ethical denim’, whatever. Shockingly, Banana Republic shows up on the first page of Google. Now that is the kind of thing, if I’m at Banana Republic, that would scare me because I know that when you think of Banana Republic, you say, what’s Banana Republic all about? You’re like, I don’t know, but it’s definitely not environmentally friendly denim and environmentally friendly practices. That’s not the core of their brand. There’s a bunch of denim brands, that is the core of their brand.
And I show the audience how Banana Republic is able to rank for these keywords because of their domain authority. So if I worked at Banana Republic today, I would be finding where are we punching above our weight because of our domain authority and Google, how much traffic is that? How much conversions is that? Because in an LLM world, unless we actually do real marketing and real PR saying that we’re that company and we do real shit, there’s a good chance that we will no longer show up.
So as our customers start to move over into this new world, it’s going to double hit us because we got away with building out pages that weren’t really what we were about. Do we have jeans? Yes. Are we about ethically friendly genes? Not really, but our domain authority has allowed us to show up. So I think that’s another thing that I’m just looking forward to with these LLMs, real freaking marketing, some real PR. Have a real freaking brand that has real beliefs, real brand beliefs. Otherwise, I think you’re going to have a harder time showing up.
Rich: That makes sense. One of the other things that I loved from your presentation is this idea of social bangers, and how you’re using social bangers to really drive qualified traffic to the website. Can you just walk us through that, please?
Wil: Yeah. It’s actually a presentation I’m working on right now. And so much of how I’ve come up with this stuff was from me losing team members on marketing and not being given budget to replace them. So then I started having to be like, all right, my traffic is dropping. I got nobody to really run marketing. It was about a six-month stint while I was running it and one of the things I started to realize is yes, my search traffic is dropping.
I was re-motivated to start to get my ideas out in the world a little bit, and I started writing and posting more. And I started watching the social traffic on the days that I was posting just going through the roof. And I’m like, huh, okay. So then it made me start to think when I might get 900 visitors in a month from LinkedIn. Okay, I’m getting 35,000 from Google. So it’s another place where you’re like, is it really worth it? It’s so much more time to write these posts, and remember they spike and then they go away. So it’s a lot of work to get a one-time hit. Which I think is another thing about repurposing and distribution, but it’s a lot of work to get that one time hit.
You know what’s so much better? Writing a post one time and just letting it rank forever and just getting all that traffic. However, what I started realizing when I stopped looking at traffic and I started looking at newsletter signups, it was the post that came from social where humans actually with their fingers clicked, liked, commented, re-shared, tagged in friends. So you knew that whatever I wrote that day, people, humans cared, not a proxy for humans, not an algorithm. Real humans saw it and said, this is good.
So then you start watching these social things start to take off, and you’re going, okay, every time we write one of those posts, they get significantly less traffic, but significantly more people signing up for the newsletter. So then you have to start to think about the whole way you’re valuing your social channel. Because if you value a visit from SEO the same way you value a visit from social, you’re probably going to undervalue social and not invest in it the right way, an organic social.
So what I’m doing is I’m saying I believe that a social visitor is worth 4x what a search visitor is. And I’m saying that a newsletter sign up to me is worth, let’s just say it’s $500. So now when I layer in those numbers against the search numbers, I can take a post that’s got 30,000 visits to one post, and beat it with a social post that only had 900 visits. Because it’s like one out of every 50 people that got to this, or one out of every 10 people that’s got to it, signed up for the newsletter. When you start adding those in, it’s different.
Those visitors also got exposure to our brand. A lot of times the search crap, like the content is so similar to each other that your brand never stands out. So I can just Google this word and it doesn’t matter whose site I really click on because they’ve all kind of followed each other’s template.
Rich: I never remember which recipe site I go to.
Wil: You know what? I’m stealing that. I have zero…. that’s a really good one. I have zero affiliation to recipe sites. You know why? Because I just Google it. Whoever gives me a good enough answer, gave me a good enough answer. If somebody gave you an answer that was really different and really valuable and really good, you might be like, when I see their domain, I’m going to click on it more often.
The problem is they’ve all followed each other down the same path with the big paragraphs of content about their grandma and the smell of apple pie before they actually get to what I’m trying to get to, because they prioritized the revenue over the relationship with the customer. So once you see the customer as a commodity for you to get cash, you’re not going to invest in building out a community. And now they’re like, oh my God, people are going to LLMs and typing in what’s in their fridge. And why would they ever visit my website? You’re like, right, because you’ve been destroying the customer experience for so long, the chickens came home to roost.
Rich: If you just bought the domain, just recipes.com, which I’m sure is not available, and all you did is just literally get people what they wanted, you probably would build your subscriber base 10x, 100x.
I watched your presentation, I’m listening to you right now, and one of the things I’ve noticed is that, especially in the presentation, you use the word ‘intuition’ a lot. And as I’m talking to you now and I see the gears move when I say something or you say something and you realize, you have this gift, I would say, of just starting to put things together and thinking about things in a new way.
I know you used to be a teacher. I love the way your brain seems to work, at least from this perspective. How do you develop your intuition? How do you start to ask the questions that get you answers that I’m not seeing other SEOs ask or answer? And that may be a kind of esoteric question, but I’m super curious about it.
Wil: It’s a really hard question to answer because it’s my natural flow state. But I have had to do the work to try to understand parts of it. We’ll just edit this down if we have to, because there might be spots where I pause a bit to get the right words. Because I’m not oftentimes asked that question, but I have done a lot of reflection on it.
One, I have a hypothesis before I do anything. So a lot of people Google shit, or they search for shit, or they go to ChatGPT and type shit in. Every time I type something in, I have a hypothesis about what I’m going to see.
What happens is over time, you start to get a feel for how good your gut is. You’re like, I believed that this search result would look like this. I probably do a thousand Google searches a week. Imagine doing that for 20 years and every time you do it, you’re trying to be like, I bet you this. So now I can intuit when my gut is off. Ooh, for the last five times I could have sworn I was going to see a result like this, and I didn’t see it. Ooh, my gut’s off there a little bit. I got to research that. So there’s that.
I also think, I’ve read a book called, Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), and that book really helped me to look internally at myself. It gives great examples of how people bullshit themselves when they don’t like the reality of what’s in front of them. And the book is full of those examples. And after reading the book, it caused me to be like, oh, what causes a lot of consultants to not full throatily lean in? Is it they’re like if less people Google and I make my money on Google, then okay, let me find a new way. So then they don’t allow their brain to go to a place where what happens if Google doesn’t exist, right?
It’s that’s how I make my money. So we’re not saying that it’s going to go away tomorrow, but you have to do the mental gymnastics, right? It’s like going to the gym. Let me put my brain through the work of like, where would I go? How would I create value? People aren’t going to have fewer questions, so you do a lot of logic work. You’re like, people aren’t going to have fewer questions because Google went away. So where might they go? What data might that leave? What kind of trail might that leave? And you just got to have a bunch of people you work around where you can throw these ideas out and they sharpen steel, sharpen steel.
So I think this is the best time. If it was me, I asked this question the other day about in person versus remote on a podcast. And I’m like, this is the best time ever to be around a small group of people trying to hash this shit out. Because by its nature, just what you hear someone talk about or do, will lead you to be like, oh shit, I didn’t think about it that way. Can you talk to you about that real quick? And that’s just harder to happen when our calls, when you have a zoom, it’s very scheduled, it’s very okay, here’s the agenda we’re going to talk about this report and this and that.
But we underestimate how much of what we pick up is through osmosis and hearing other people work through problems while we’re working on our own. That’s the other thing, is I just think I’m lucky that I have a pretty sizable team of people and I can throw shit out and I’m completely open to being challenged on it, because that helps me to sharpen my own thinking. Versus I think a lot of times when people get to my level, sometimes the assumptions that they’re right, because they’ve been right so many times in their career. Whereas that’s another thing I try to exit the rooms where everybody’s telling me how smart I am because I’m never going to learn anything in that room.
Rich: Right.
Wil: If you really think about it, we phish for compliments so hard these days that we forget that the compliments are good in the sense of they tell you what to repeat. But most people aren’t in it for that. When I don’t really let many people compliment me without me saying to them what did you see that made you say that? Because I want to repeat it. It’s data, right? I want to repeat it. I don’t want to just hear, “Oh, you crushed it!” You can say to the average person, “you crushed it”. And they’re like, yes, we’ll said I crushed it. And it’s what exactly did you do that? How did we’ll see it? I don’t know. It’s then how do you know how to repeat it? I don’t know.
Whereas I’m more likely when somebody gives me kudos, feedback, good, bad, whatever, I’m like what did you see that made you say that? Ah, okay. I see the connection. So I’m always trying to understand and connect those dots. And I think that’s where that’s my flow state. And then the cheat code is I have an amazing executive team. The other day I was in a meeting with my top two execs, and they were pretty much I was trying to help them out with something. And they’re like, we already solved all those problems. And I was like, just sitting there, oh shit. Like they really don’t need me to help them with this problem that they’re working on. And I was like, that’s amazing.
And versus I think, cause then I can just stay where I’m strongest, where I help the company the most. But I think a lot of folks struggle with that as leaders feeling less needed. And I’m like, oh, I’m at my best when nobody needs me, because then I can just focus on where’s these things going? Because that’s my flow state to try to connect these dots.
Rich: That’s awesome. This has been a great conversation. I appreciate it. And after we get off, I’ll be pleased to tell you exactly where I think you crushed it, so we can talk about that afterwards.
If people want to learn more about you, if they want to learn more about Seer, if they want to learn more about the Covenant House, where can we send them?
Wil: All right. I think the best place these days is probably LinkedIn. Find me on LinkedIn, that’s where I put most of my stuff. I’m on Twitter still a bit. I’m on Threads a little bit. And then you have the Seer Interactive website where I post a bunch of content as well. So those are probably the best places to find me.
Rich: Fantastic. And all of those will be in the show notes. Wil, thank you so much for your time today. I really enjoyed myself.
Wil: Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it, Rich.
Show Notes:
Wil Reynolds is the founder and CEO of Seer Interactive, a top U.S. digital marketing agency known for its innovative approach to SEO and digital strategy. A former teacher and dedicated volunteer, Wil brings a unique perspective to the intersection of AI and marketing. Find him on LinkedIn, Threads, and Twitter/X. And if you feel a call to donate to Wil’s Covenant House fundraiser, you can do so here.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.