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Today’s episode dives into the cutting edge of SEO in an AI-driven world, featuring insights from Greg Brooks of SearchTides. Greg shares how businesses can avoid the trap of outdated content strategies and embrace a more focused approach to personalization and expertise. From core focus principles to the evolving landscape of search engines, Greg delivers actionable advice for marketers looking to stay competitive. If you’ve been wondering about the best ways to leverage AI and sharpen your content strategy, this episode’s for you.
How to Stay Visible in Search with AI Summary
Key Takeaways
- Personalization is Essential: AI advancements allow marketers to deliver more personalized search experiences, connecting users with relevant content tailored to their needs.
- Focus on Expertise and Experience: Avoid generic content; demonstrate expertise and share real-life insights to build a genuine connection.
- AI as a Tool, Not a Replacement: Use AI to refine and strengthen your content rather than fully automate it, keeping the human element intact.
- Embrace Core Focus for SEO: Define a single, clear focus for your website’s content to improve relevance and reduce SEO penalties.
- Navigate New Search Models: Understand the shifting landscape as platforms like ChatGPT and Google evolve, each impacting how users find information online.
How AI is Shaping the Future of SEO: Strategies for Marketers
In the evolving world of digital marketing, AI has become a game-changer for SEO, revolutionizing how businesses create content, attract customers, and build their brands. As AI-driven SEO strategies continue to grow in complexity and efficiency, marketers need to shift their focus toward more personalized search experiences and leveraging their expertise. Below, we’ll break down how SEO and a rtificial intelligence are intersecting to redefine the landscape—and the key strategies marketers need to stay ahead.
The Rise of Personalized Search Experiences
Search engines have come a long way from delivering one-size-fits-all results. Today, AI enables unprecedented levels of personalization in search, tailoring results based on user behavior, preferences, and even location. As the technology progresses, marketers will be able to cater to individual interests and provide content that resonates deeply with specific audience segments. This shift is significant: the more personalized and relevant the search results, the stronger the connection with the user.
AI-driven SEO strategies capitalize on personalization by leveraging vast amounts of user data to deliver content that feels tailor-made. This isn’t just about geographic targeting or language preferences—personalization extends into creating experiences that reflect individual tastes, industry interests, and needs. Marketers who focus on enhancing the personal relevance of their content will see improved engagement, higher conversion rates, and a stronger online presence.
Shifting Focus to Expertise and Authenticity
The importance of authenticity in SEO can’t be overstated, especially in an era where AI can generate endless streams of generic content. To stand out, marketers need to highlight their expertise and create content grounded in personal experience. While AI and large language models (LLMs) can support SEO goals, the heavy lifting of developing insightful, experience-based content still lies with humans.
By focusing on unique insights, expertise, and a distinct voice, businesses can elevate their content’s relevance and authority. Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T) factors are crucial, especially in competitive niches where audiences are skeptical of generic advice. Sharing real experiences, offering nuanced insights, and reflecting a genuine understanding of the topic are all ways marketers can set their content apart from the generic noise that AI-generated content can often create.
Leveraging AI for SEO Success
AI can supercharge SEO success when used as a support tool rather than a replacement. Marketers can use AI-powered tools to audit existing content, highlight gaps in expertise, and identify areas for improvement. This approach ensures that while AI helps optimize and streamline content, the voice, knowledge, and authority remain human.
For example, AI can analyze top-performing articles, compare them against your content, and provide suggestions to enhance relevance, structure, or focus. AI also excels at handling tasks like summarizing or finding optimal keywords, making it easier to streamline SEO strategies. Marketers who embrace AI to improve efficiency without sacrificing a human touch will maintain a competitive advantage and better connect with their audiences.
Embracing a Core Focus
In the past, content marketers could cast a wide net, covering many topics on one site. But search engines now favor websites with a clear and defined focus. This means that sites that establish a specific “core focus” and stick closely to it have an advantage. For example, rather than covering every topic in your industry, zeroing in on a specific niche and creating depth around it helps build authority and improves SEO rankings.
AI tools can help identify which topics fall within this core focus and suggest content directions that maintain alignment. By resisting the urge to wander off-topic and instead emphasizing quality and depth within a niche, marketers improve their relevancy and reduce the risk of penalization. As search engines get smarter, so too must our content strategies.
The Future of SEO with AI: Looking Ahead
AI is poised to keep transforming SEO, making it more personal, intuitive, and efficient. As search engines grow more sophisticated in their understanding of user intent and context, the role of authentic, expertise-driven content will only increase in importance. AI-driven SEO strategies allow marketers to anticipate trends, respond quickly to shifts in search behavior, and continually refine their strategies for better engagement.
The bottom line? To leverage AI for SEO success, marketers should adopt tools that support and enhance their expertise rather than replace it. Personalized search experiences and core-focused, experience-based content will define the next era of SEO, rewarding marketers who embrace these shifts with stronger engagement, loyalty, and, ultimately, conversions.
How to Stay Visible in Search with AI Episode Transcript
Rich: My guest today is a partner at Search Tides, a firm that helps marketers generate more revenue in their most competitive channels. His work is instrumental in shaping the future of marketing strategies, leveraging large language models, aka LLMs, and navigating the AI driven era of the internet.
With a remarkable track record, he’s collaborated with industry giants like Home Depot, Zillow, Western Union, and FanDuel. So let’s dive right into it with Greg Brooks. Greg, welcome to the podcast.
Greg: What’s up, Rich? And I couldn’t help but notice we have identical last names. Coincidence?
Rich: I think not. No, actually, it’s totally a coincidence. I don’t want you to think that Greg only got on the show because we’re somehow related. No, he pitched me a great pitch and I just thought that it would be fantastic to have him on. The fact that he’s got an amazing last name is just gravy.
Now we are talking a lot about how AI is impacting SEO. And as somebody who loves SEO and also loves AI, this is a big concern to me. How do you see the future of SEO evolving with the rise of AI and personalized search experiences?
Greg: Oh, you’re starting off with a banger, huh? Okay.
Rich: Going right to it. Going for the jugular.
Greg: I think what you said at the end is a hint about the direction, which is the personalization era. There’s a lot of things that are still uncertain in the realm of what AI is going to become. But the one thing that is certain, because it aligns with the historical progression of marketing, which started off on television ads and then billboards, and then started to become a little bit more personality based off of social media. Now we do account-based marketing or ‘ABS’, and now we have insights into who’s coming to your website. So the trend of marketing is becoming more and more personalized, and therefore technology that enables that to happen more gets adopted. Which is basically AI in its current form where I can now get a searchable more about me and what’s meaningful to me.
So let’s flip that. And let’s say, okay how do we participate as a business in that era? And we think that the answer comes from basically declaring a little bit more about who you are and your values and what you stand for. So stop being the generic perfect fit for everyone. And we also think that comes from the next iteration of what we see content being online, which is what we’re ironically calling the human era of SEO.
It’s ironic, because 99.9% of all written and video content will be AI generated. So how do you stand out? And the way that you stand out is by showcasing your uniqueness and what you bring to the table.
So Google talks a lot about this thing called the EEAT. We really focus on expertise and experience for this. I find an expert, I can talk about things in a way that other people who don’t have that level of expertise can. So I should do that. If I have experience, I should talk about my experience. Both of those things are inherently very human. That’s how you participate in this. You’re just like, what am I, if I’m Greg, I’m going to have an experience in a topic that’s going to be relevant for some people, and completely unrelevant or irrelevant for other people.
I should just shout, “This is me. This is who I am. This is what I know”, my pocket of knowledge and let AI do the heavy lifting and get that into the folks who are going to most benefit from my specific understanding and my specific lens.
Rich: How do we get the AI to do the heavy lifting? What are you exactly saying when you say that?
So we all have the space of knowledge, and we are going to leverage SEO, get it out there. But where does the heavy lifting for AI come in?
Greg: The heavy lifting for the AI comes into the future of search. And so the future of search is just, it’s harder examples to do today Rich, because we have the same last name. It’s already murky waters in terms of personalization.
But you know that in the future, I’m searching on the internet on Google and my search result is going to be dramatically different than what somebody else’s search result is. There’s already many versions of this SEO. If I search in a given area, I get something for that area. So that will just continue to happen more.
AI doing the heavy lifting is basically, we take quality and we put quality out on the internet, and we let AI pair it with the people – in this case with Google, the search results – paired in the search results to the people that it’s going to be most relevant from.
It’s a little difficult to think through today because we have a couple basic examples. Which is just like if I’m in a certain location and I care about restaurants, I should get results to that location. If I am scrolling through Instagram, I should probably see advertisement that’s relevant to my age group, that’s relevant to my gender or whatever, my own identity. And so we see those things. When it goes out into the future, it’s going to be that times 10. So it’s going to be all the things I don’t tell you about you, but I know are really meaningful to me, and then seeing results based off of that.
Rich: Interesting. And of course, I mentioned to you right before we started recording, I’m actually recording this from Puerto Rico. And ever since I flew down here, a lot of my search results have been in Spanish. And not just search, but a lot of the apps that I’m using default to Spanish once I’m in the Spanish speaking part of the world. So I definitely see some of that.
I want to jump into our roles as marketers and all this, but I guess I’m also curious just for a consumer or user standpoint, what role do you see platforms like Perplexity or the AI overviews from Google? How is that going to impact the way that we find information online, in your opinion?
Greg: I think that they’re going to continue. We’re at the end of an era of true centralization would search online. And that was coming from Google. Now, I think everyone and their moms, not my mom, she still searches using MapQuest, so she’s not part of this group. But everyone and their mom was basically saying, okay, all these models are going to be this thing forever. Google’s not doing blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Google’s market share and searches over the last, we’ll call it year to 18 months, the era where they should have gotten disintegrated because all these other things are coming up, has decreased from 91.55% down to 90.5 %. So a decrease? Yes. 10 percent? Yes. Still has 90% of all searches? Yes. So there is a little celebrating and prematureness going on here.
And then the flip side of that on the other side is like Perplexity. How does Perplexity search online? Let’s not talk too much about it, because they actually have a few different loopholes that allow them to get to get data that maybe sites don’t want them to get.
What about ChatGPT? ChatGPT doesn’t have access to those sorts of things, so when it doesn’t know what it needs to know, it’s going to go on to Bing. On average, ChatGPT is giving you the 14th answer in Bing, because all of the other websites are blocking ChatGPT crawlers and you’re getting bottom of the barrel.
Flip that around with Google and AI overviews. Google’s the only website and the only company in the world that the internet is like, please crawl us, please like completely know every word of our website. And so ironically, even though Google’s kind of, I think they’re messing it up currently, I think they’ve been playing this AI over this AI stuff, GPT stuff all wrong.
Ironically, they’re way best positioned to be the ultimate winner. They already have the search engine. They have access to a dataset that nobody else has, because everyone is okay with Google crawling your site. By the way, they also have YouTube non-public videos, which is bigger than almost everybody’s video data set. And I think actually, if I was going to make a prediction, I’d say that’s going to win in the future. So Google’s just going to continue to be a monopoly in terms of you finding knowledge online. That’s most likely where it’s going to go.
Now, I think what has already been replaced and will continue to be replaced is the beginning of what used to be search. There’s a first part of search sometimes for people, which is, I’m not actually sure what I’m trying to ask. I’m not actually sure what I’m trying to figure out. And that’s of the GPT models are fantastic for. They’re fantastic for them. And so that I think that is where the immediate behavior shift has occurred. That’s why that’s where I use them.
I think we’re going to see a real interesting intersection when people do I buy things, does Chat buy something for me? And do I just give them my credit card and say, “Hey, can you book this flight for me?” And then I trust it to. And then it’s the same sort of thing. Okay, why can one model do that and another one can’t? That would dictate a lot of change of behavior to him.
Rich: So have you been playing around with Perplexity? Do you like the results you’re getting when you use it? Or do you think this is just a novelty and an interesting moment in time?
Greg: Perplexity or GPT 4.0 models?
Rich: I mostly was, well, I guess either or both.
Greg: Okay. I’m going to answer one of those. I think that like everything else, Google was not the first search engine. X, the thing in the future, was not the first GPT model. I think we’re seeing a lot of right now stuff, and I think it’s fascinating. And I also think that they’re just building blocks on top of what could come from the future.
And it’s entirely possible that open AI is around for a very long time. And I see something like Perplexity being way more challenging. There’s an old adage, which is, “a product is a really cool product until it becomes another product’s feature.” And I think that’s true for, I think Snapchat that most famously happened to when Instagram was like, cool, we’ll just do that, we’ll just do reels. And then all of a sudden that was billions of dollars of Snapchat market cap. So I wonder if OpenAI has an opportunity to do that for other LLMs. And I wonder what Google’s opportunity is to do that for GPT models.
Rich: All right. So we’ve talked a little bit about the AI overviews that Google provides. And so I know that some marketers are worried that their content is going to be scraped up. And yes, there may be a link at the bottom of that overview, but is anybody really going to check it out once they have the recipe for guacamole, or how to play blackjack, or whatever it is you’re searching?
What should we be doing differently or preparing for if we want to create the kind of content that’s going to drive traffic to our websites?
Greg: Well, unless you’re selling a course on how to count cards, what’s the genuine value of creating a piece of content that says how to play Blackjack? And the same thing with guacamole. What am I doing? What’s at the end of that?
So I think GPT models forced the exit of the era, which was a shameful era. Rich, it was a shameful era for us on the internet where we were remote, we were rewarded for writing encyclopedia-esque information. Like we were rewarded for recreating an encyclopedia online. And then we were rewarded on top of that for making it longer than it needed to be.
Rich: I think you’re thinking about recipe websites specifically right now, aren’t you?
Greg: I’m literally thinking about grandma’s cabin that we used to go to in the summer. And you’re like, no one cares. Grandma doesn’t even care. She’s like, why are you writing about that? Get that off. Talk about the freshness of my tomatoes.
So I think ultimately that era is ending. And that era is being replaced with GPT models and LLMs, as it should be. And this goes back to what we were saying at the beginning. Humans should be doing the human thing. We should be talking about our own expertise. We should be talking about our own human experience. Those are the things that we should be focusing on. And we should be doing it in a digestible format.
If somebody makes a Top 10 article, my Top 14 article is probably actually, turns out, not helpful. The helpful thing is taking that top 10 article and turning it into a top two article. And being like, I super went through all these things, and these are just the two things that you need to know. It’s respecting a reader or a watcher’s time. And that’s the era that we have now cemented ourselves in. So your unique perspective, showcased efficiently.
And at Search Tides, we use value per second and value per word as two kind of metrics that we want to keep an eye on. And that kind of respects both sides of it. How do you keep it short? How do you keep it not short, but how do you keep it efficient? And how do you keep it valuable?
Rich: So to summarize something that you’re saying, or maybe to take it in another direction. I remember back when you could make money on the internet just by publishing the time in another city, or when was George Washington born. Drive traffic to the website, sell some Google ad sense. That business went away, maybe five to 10 years ago, at least.
And now it sounds like anything, I like the term you use, encyclopedia or Britannica-type knowledge that anybody could have written. We put that content out there. We basically train the AI. That’s no longer a business model, either. And maybe it never should have been. And now we’re in this era where our experience and our expertise and our perspective becomes incredibly important. And that’s really the differentiator. That’s what we, as marketers, should be thinking about as we create this next generation of content. Is that fair to say?
Greg: Yeah. I think that’s fair to say.
Rich: I think that’s a summary of what you said, more or less.
Greg: Yeah. I think that’s a fantastic summary, and it’s really one to hone in on. And what does the future look like? I think it’s that on steroids. So I think it’ll basically become, over time, the level of expertise needed should increase. And then therefore the amount of topics that someone can be that level of expert on will decrease, because there’s only so much time in a day. Which means you’re going to basically have more fragmentation about. And it just comes down to you have to be an expert in what you’re talking about. And if you’re not, you’re playing on borrowed time.
Rich: Yeah. So it’s almost like fine tuning in AI where the more niche you get, the more expertise you gain in that. Hopefully there’s enough expertise or enough interest in what you’re an expert in that you actually can generate business from it. But we really need to be narrowing our focus in terms of the content we’re creating so we’re not being replaced by AI.
Greg: Yeah, I think narrowing of focus is a really good idea. And the reason why that winds up being the case a lot of times is because we’re not talking about things that we are actually experts in. If we were talking about that stuff, then no need to narrow anything.
And then I think the other big hack that’s falling through the wayside is this stuff, so we use this thing at search sites called “core focus”. Every website has – it’s here’s just term we made up, I shouldn’t make it seem more official than it is. We name a bunch of shit. We talk about it. This is what we did for this one.
So “core focus” is just, there’s a single topic or core focus of your website. And then therefore every single thing that you talk about on your website has a distance from that core focus. And once you start going out, we use a five-point scale. Zero is the core topic. One is the closest to it. Once you start going out beyond a two.
And so a good example would be if I have a travel website and I start making, to use your example from before talking about the weather, you’re getting close. Now you would totally be able to. And then getting further out would be something about learning German. And you’re like, eh, no. Okay would be the 10 phrases in German you need to know if you’re traveling to Germany. Now, all of a sudden that’s way back inside the line.
But what a lot of sites used to do, so to use recipe sites as an example, because we’re just sauteing them today. They would just make sections on their website that was just names of food. All the foods that start with A, apple, and that goes outside the relevance, but in the past that actually generated traffic. So that’s the sort of stuff that like.
And the way that I think about this stuff in general, Rich, is there’s only so much attention at once that humans as a species can put onto something. And whenever something new comes in to take that attention. Which ChatGPT is a good example, or GPT models or whatever. Where does it take attention away from? And it’s not as simple as searching on Google and searching on LLMs. It’s like what we were talking about before, what types of searches are being replaced? What types of research is being replaced? And yeah, that’s just the raw capitalistic structure that we live in today.
Rich: So if you’ve got a website and you’ve got your, what’d you call it, core focus.
Greg: Yes.
Rich: Now I’m sure there’s a lot of businesses out there saying that’s all fine, but I’ve got so many core focuses where my business does so many things. Is there a point where you’re talking to your clients and you’re like, I don’t care, you’ve got to rein in what you’re talking about on your website. Or do you create a second site? Is there ever something like that or are you just trying to really keep them tethered to that core focus?
Greg: Big companies have core focuses, so it’s not like you have to have… Amazon has one core focus. They’re one of the largest companies in the world. Their core focus is essentially giving you anything that you want at any time, whether that’s sending it to you in the mail or allowing a server to set up for you. So it’s like you still have a core focus, but it’s just and I have no problem with that.
And if we wanted to go through a couple of examples, we could, if there’s ones that you’re thinking of, because you can… is there a type of website that you’re thinking of? It could be interesting to go through it.
Rich: Yeah, Amazon was one that popped to mind because obviously they sell everything. So some people might say that’s not really, a focus or anything like that.
But even years ago, we took on a client that makes conveyor belts and they also sell these bellows. And there was one of the products, they actually had somebody who built them three separate sites, even though the products were related, so that Google would see the focus on the website. I thought that might’ve been a little overly aggressive. So something like that, if you have a few different lines that might even appeal to different audiences, but just because of the manufacturing company you are, how do you handle something like that?
Greg: If you’re a manufacturing company, then I think your core focus is manufacturing X that does Y. So why do you not manufacture clothing, but you manufacture those other things? So you start creating content about the manufacturing process for clothes on your website. That’s further away than it appears to be.
Rich: Okay. So sometimes your core focus on an Amazon scale is going to be much bigger than it might be for a small business. And you just have to make the appropriate choices to make sure that you are keeping within your core focus.
Greg: Yeah. So the way that this actually winds up happening, and this gets into the content helpfulness penalties. Not even penalties, but just issues that people have been having with content helpfulness.
Typically, that comes from three different things. The first thing is this thing that we call ‘entity confusion’. So to keep the line of making up words at search tides and an entity is a real thing, that’s an officially subtopic. It’s officially recognized subtopic within a broader topic. So if you have sports, NFL would be an entity. If you had NFL, specific teams would be entities. If United States of America, states would be entities, probably highways would be entities. So official topics within that.
So the first is people talk about too many things on the same page. They try to be a jack of all trades on the same page. So keeping your topics focus to one or two entities is going to prevent what we call ‘entity confusion’.
Similarly, you should not have more than one page about the same entity. Similarly, you should have lots of pages that are close to your core focus and not far away from them. And so you wind up finding… we had a client where I think we redirected 400 pages of content that they had written. So it’s a brutal process. And then we rewrote or created new, like 400 more pages of content. And the whole point is yeah, it’s a really intentional process that you need to take.
But the whole overlay of the conversation that we’re having, Rich, is like, how does all this work in the AI era? This is how it works in the AI era. It is untrue to say that you can just keep doing the same things that you used to do and get the same result. And everyone who is of that mentality has just gotten punished by two major algorithm updates. And I am truly saying how to fix that. And it feels large scale to most people, and it feels uncomfortable to most people. And those things are true. That’s why there are so many people that got negatively impacted over the last year.
Rich: And so if somebody is feeling they’ve seen not just their search volume drop, but search volume to key pages and it’s having a negative impact on their business, what are some of the first things that you might recommend that they do?
And not everybody has an entire team of SEO copywriters at their disposal. So what could a small team do, day-by-day or month-by-month to start generating that high quality search traffic again?
Greg: Here’s a quick diagnostic test and check. So the first is, how does your website’s domain authority or domain rating, using Moz or Ahrefs, how does that stack up to everybody else in your space?
Actually, let me go a step above that. Depends on if you’re a local business or if you’re a national brand. So I’m going to talk on national brand first and I’m going to do local business. So national brand first. What’s your domain authority? What’s your domain rating compared to everybody else? If on average you’re way less than everybody else, it’s entirely possible that you were just in a position that maybe you didn’t deserve to be. That’s a links problem.
So more links to your page, more links to your website of a high-quality nature. That’s really going to be your primary fix there. If it’s a specific page, meaning I have a bunch of other pages that are totally doing fine still and it’s a specific page on here, then it’s most likely an onsite issue.
So at that point, it’s okay, what’s my content look like? All the conversation points that we just had, I’d be going in and I’d be thinking about that. I’d be changing those things. I’d be like, how do I say this more efficiently?
So what you can do in that instance is you can take the tops search results, put them into to ChatGPT and say, here’s the top results for this thing. And then upload the EEAT, the content helpfulness guidelines, from Google into ChatGPT. And then say, give me all the topics., give me some ideas for what to write about. Here’s what I have already, how can I add in more expertise? How can I add in more experience? How can I add in more trustworthiness? Can you remove the fluff from this article? What are things that I’m talking about that no one else is talking about? Okay, cool. Is that valuable or is it bad? What are the things that others are talking about that I’m not that you think is valuable? So you can go through this collaborative process to refine your content that way.
On the local side of things, link building looks a lot different. If you’re a car dealership, you’re selling Audis or whatever. You’re going to want to go to your regional Audi dealership and try to get a link from them. You’re going to want to go to your local BBB company, or Chamber of Commerce, or sponsor some baseball team and get a link from there. So it’s going to be more about I am geographically relevant and I’m also topically relevant.
The content stuff, same sort of play. But most of the time on local, it’s a combination of reputation. So that’s reviews, Google My Business, Trust Pilot, whatever else is being used for reviews in your space, as well as relevancy, both topical and geographical.
National is more power. So that’s more about links are the things that are holding you back more frequently. And you can detect if that’s the problem if it’s one versus all of your pages. If you go to Ahrefs or to Moz, you’re like, tanked everywhere and we already are in line with our competition. Then you can say, okay maybe there’s something technically wrong with the website. So maybe there’s errors or issues there, or maybe all of our content is no longer being considered helpful because we’re doing all of these things that we’ve talked about, and it’s going to require a decision about how much effort to put into that.
Rich: All of that information was great. I do want to just point out, I love what you were talking about when you’re talking about how to use AI or ChatGPT strategically, and just that idea of going back and forth, not asking it to write the content. Because then we’re getting away from the whole experience piece. We’re getting away from the whole human side. But using it as an assistant to help you do the heavy lifting and identify where your content may be weak, what you might be missing, what kind of fluff should be edited. That, I think, is some of the ways that marketers who maybe aren’t natural copywriters could really start to leverage the tool and become better writers and create content that actually will get picked up and drive traffic. So that I thought was just a fantastic point.
Greg: Thank you. Yeah, that’s really the key for AI tools. I think a lot of folks were worried about being replaced by AI. But really, what it is you’ll be replaced by is people who are good with AI tools.
Rich: Absolutely. And I have heard, I remember I was on TV and I was talking about AI, and one woman called in and she goes, “I think you’re wearing rose colored glasses, because I’m a copywriter and my boss just fired our entire department and said, ‘Why am I going to pay you when I can do have ChatGPT do it for me?’”
I’m sure that manager is regretting his decision today because he realizes that nobody cares about that AI generated content. But I do agree that the people who start to learn how to use these tools the correct way and not the lazy way, are definitely going to be the people who have better job security in the future.
Greg: Yeah. And so that’s a good example of what I would deem an overreaction. But there are scenarios where some amount of that team, it might’ve made sense to. But I just think that the skills of an individual person are underestimated when we have these models, because people just have this habit of being like, yes, I can magically make up more effort to work in a given day. So you’re like, yeah, we’re not going to have copywriters do this anymore. Somebody else will do it. And you’re like, okay, how? Like magically, they’re just going to work the same intensity for longer each day? And I think that’s a really losing attitude to take also.
And so I think you see a lot of that, but a lot of companies are going to lose in the future also, because they’re going to be replaced by one to four person companies who are AI enabled. And all these really mediocre or even sub mediocre companies. they’re just going to get their lunch taken.
Rich: Absolutely. Greg, this has been incredibly helpful. Before I let you go, just talk to me for a minute about Search Tides and what kind of clients you tend to help the most.
Greg: Search Tides, we work with a handful of different types of clients, depending on where you are. So what is search tides. We’re basically a revenue generation agency. We focus on a couple, a handful of different marketing services, because those are the ones we found have the most disproportionate value for people.
So if you’re generating any sort of meaningful organic traffic, you should be generating five times that amount immediately. It’s already producing for you. You should do more. So we help with SEO.
If you are on the paid side and you have an average cart value of say $60 or more, and paid social is not your top performing channel by far and you’re not thrilled with it. That’s a problem. You should fix it if you get 500 or so conversions on your website a month and you’re not putting real meaningful effort into conversion rate optimization every month, you should be doing that. And if you are spending all this time and effort putting out content on social organically, and you’re not seeing your followers grow, you’re not seeing if it’s generating revenue for it.
You need the right strategy, and you need the ability to execute that across all of your channels. So those are really the four services that we provide. And they’re sometimes right for some folks and sometimes not right for some folks. And we do that all the way up to Fortune 500 companies, and all the way down to companies that are in probably like seven figures of revenue and beyond.
Rich: Greg, if people want to learn more about you or Search Tides, where can we send them?
Greg: You can send them to searchtides.com or check out our stuff on YouTube, on LinkedIn, on TikTok. And I’m also on LinkedIn at Gregory B. Saying that out loud makes me feel like I should change my name on there, but that’s where I’m at today.
Rich: All right, sounds good. We’ll have all those links in the show notes. Greg, it was great catching up with you, thank you so much for sharing your expertise today.
Greg: Nice Rich, that was a good one. Thanks, sir, thanks for having me on.
Show Notes:
Greg Brooks helps businesses thrive in competitive digital landscapes by leveraging the latest in AI and personalized search. Be sure to follow him over on LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube.
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.