In this episode of Whiteboard Friday, Ross talks about how search has changed and how we, as marketers, can navigate that change to produce quality content. With the increased use of AI and LLMs, content creation may seem more complex, but it’s still based on the fundamentals we use every day.

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Howdy Moz fans. I am super excited to be back with another Whiteboard Friday. And in today's session, we're gonna be diving into the wonderful world of AI, content, SEO, GEO, and so much more.

Get ready for this one. I'm going to be sharing pretty much everything that I have learned over the course of my career in one video, and hopefully you'll be able to take this and apply it to your business so you can unlock the opportunities that have actually never been possible until the beautiful robots of AI showed up. So let's jump into it. 

All right, so navigating this new age of content, navigating this new age of search starts with a realization that all of us have to make. And that realization is that as search marketers, we have to understand that there has been a significant shift that has taken place across all of humanity. People don't just search in Google anymore, shout to Bing, and all of those guys, and Ask Jeeves, and all of the other search engines who have been around for years fighting the good fight for search. But now search has become more fragmented.

Search is no longer just on Google. Search is now happening on TikTok, it's happening in Reddit, it's happening in Quora, it's coming out on Instagram, on Facebook, on all of the Meta properties, even WhatsApp. There is a evolution happening in search, and it's powered by the LLMs, large language models. What is that? It's essentially the technology that is behind the collection of data that is helping people get answers from these AI bots, from things like ChatGPT. And what I want you to understand is how you can influence the content that is coming out when you go to an OpenAI, a ChatGPT, and you ask it a question, how you can influence them to get answers that you would want as a business professional, as a creator, as a marketer, as an entrepreneur.

So how do you do it? How do you make OpenAI, Perplexity, AI Overviews, tell the story that you want? You start by understanding it's no longer just about blog posts. You start by understanding it's no longer just about landing pages and creating glossaries and how to posts. You start by realizing that these engines are powered by the content that has been produced on the internet for decades. And all of this content has been produced by people like you. Congratulations, well done. You provided them with a bunch of content that has been worth stealing, and they've stolen it. They have stolen the content, they've ingested it into their systems. Whether you like it or not, they've used it to inform the answers to questions with or with without bias, but they are doing it. And that's just the way it is. Yes, we can complain, we can get upset, we can get angry, but the world continues to spin. And I don't know about you, but I still want to be able to generate income while the world's spinning, so let's get down to the business side of it. 

At the end of the day, they're stealing the content. Let's just let that be. Now, how can you influence the fact that they're stealing content to give your content back to the users? You have to go to the places in which that content is being scraped, where they're stealing the information from. I know this sounds like a heist of some sort, but it's already taken place.

So what do you do? You need to ensure that when the updates happen, when they're scraping the content live, when they're launching and announcing partnerships with Reddit, with Quora, when they're making these announcements, that you have seeded enough stories, enough content to answer to the questions that your customers might be asking. That when they do ask that question to Perplexity, to OpenAI, to Google, that your answer, the question that you would've wanted your customer to ask to Google, and they would've went on your website and read a blog post that you created, that that answer is now coming through the LLM. 

How do you make that happen? You start to diversify your content. You go through a mental exercise where you are no longer thinking that you can just press publish on a blog post and call it a day. You don't pop the bubbly because you pressed publish. That is now when the job begins. The job begins because now you have to start thinking, where else would an LLM go to get insights around this question or around this query, around this problem that can help them? Where else would they go?

Well, if you're thinking about business content, they might end up on something like Seeking Alpha, which is actually a website that is dedicated to financial executives, to people who are trying to learn about stocks and trading, et cetera. They generate hundreds of thousands of visits every single day. And what you have an opportunity to do now is to start publishing articles directly on this site that you might have traditionally published on your own site, but now you share it here.

What you're looking at here is a list of sites and platforms where you can create or inspire user-generated content or brand-created content that will ultimately feed into the LLMs. Are all of these sites feeding into the LLMs? Not yet. But if I was to make one prediction, and I don't like to make predictions because they set you up for failure, but this is one that I'm willing to make, is that we are going to continue to see a trend over the next two years, and I put a timestamp on that intentionally. Over the next two years, we are going to see an increase in the number of deals that are happening with LLMs in these sites to get proprietary information that is going to feed their systems so they can provide higher-quality responses to their users.

So, while Google sat on the wayside and was sending people to these sites, now we have LLMs that are going to get trained on these sites. So they're going to look to lock in deals with folks like TripAdvisor. So when you go to ChatGPT and you say, "Hey, TripAdvisor, I'm going to Rome for a month. Where in the world should I go?" It will now go into TripAdvisor, go into the forums, and answer that question based off of that data. Can OpenAI do that now? No. Why? Because they don't have a licensing agreement with them set up. So my prediction is that they're going to.

So what can you do now that's gonna set you up for success in the future? You start to already start to diversify your content. You have probably already created so much valuable content, and I don't want you to think that that was for nothing. I want you to realize that if that content was worth stealing, that content is worth distributing. It's content worth promoting, worth amplifying, worth taking, and sharing it in Reddit, sharing it in Quora, sharing it in Yelp, and Cookpad. Maybe avoid 9gag, but that's a whole different story. Stack Overflow. 

Find the places where your audience is, where your people are, and start to see that content. And what you're looking at here is Reddit, Quora, and Fandom, these are sites that are generating billions of visits, literally billions of visits every single month. So I would probably lean more heavily towards them, especially Reddit and Quora because they're in cahoots with OpenAI, but I would start to lean heavily towards them, and they're in cahoots with Google.

There's a whole situation happening there, but that would be where I start. But if you have resources and you have time, then you start to think of how can we start to show up in some of these more niche channels? How can we show up on Rotten Tomatoes? How can we start to show up in Substack, right? Because Substack is essentially a site that is essentially creators creating newsletter content, long-form content, on certain topics that are interesting to them and to their audience.

And if they're publishing this content regularly and you can influence it, guess what the LLMs are now gonna be trained on? The content that you influenced. Influence the content by creating content worth stealing, take your old content, and feed it through the system so you can win. 

Now you might be thinking, "Ross, there's so much change. There's so many things happening in the world of AI and SEO, like, I'm gonna lose my job. There's this new thing called GEO, generative engine optimization, that I need to hear about. What do I do?" You stick to the fundamentals, folks. Like, as much as change is here, it's still very much a lot the same.

There's this concept in there's this recent publication that came, this journal, where these students were studying how to influence the LLMs, and they essentially were trying to ask a series of different questions. And from those questions, they wanted to see if they could influence what the output would be. So they were going out and they would create content that they would hope that the LLM would scrape, and then they'd try to modify it and adjust it and see if they can influence questions like, "Where's the best place in New York to get a pizza?" And they would change and update the content to see how it would respond. And what they found was fascinating to them, but probably not breaking news to any good SEO. They found that, essentially, the whole Double E-E-A-T thing holds true. Expertise, experience, authority, and trust were at the crux of what they had to do to their content to win. What do I mean by that? 

Well, these scientists, these journal, like these science folks, these people who created this publication, they found that there was essentially six key things that they needed to have. They found that if they wanted to influence the content that was coming out of the LLMs, it needed to include quotations. Hmm, sounds like expertise, sounds like experience. They needed to have statistics. Hmm, sounds like trustworthy content. It needed to have fluency, so it had to be written in a way that demonstrated a little bit of authority and also just have some sense of, like, “I know what I'm talking about”. That makes sense. Cited sources, so there needed to be links. Every SEO knows the value of links. It had to have technical terms. Well, of course, you can't ask someone to create a piece of content on how to change a light bulb and not be complex and related directly to the light bulb. It has to be specific, right? You have to talk about things that are related to it. And then finally, authority. The tone of the person creating it can't be passive. It has to be authoritative. And isn't that what the A means in Double E-E-A-T? So, yay, science. Thank you so much for doing this research.

It is validating, and it's kind of cool to see that our wonderful world of SEO is getting into the wonderful world of academia. But at the end of the day, it's nothing new. It's nothing new for you, and you have been learning this stuff for so long. So now you can apply those same methodologies, those same ideas, and then let it be scraped and stolen by these brands, so when your customers are asking the LLMs questions about your specific niche, your industry, your product, your offering, that they're getting questions that matter to you. 

But Ross, I don't know how to go into Reddit. Reddit hates marketers. You're right, it does. I've been blocked from Reddit about eight times in my career. I keep coming back though, and it helped me win my fantasy football league. Shout out to Reddit. Reddit is, without question, one of those places that will make marketers break out into hives. I get it. They will tell you where to go and how to get there. But through my eight times of failure, I have learned that there are a few simple things that you can do on Reddit if you want to win. And especially amidst this world where the partnerships with Google, the partnerships with the LLMs are at an all-time high. You need to be thinking about these three simple ideas.

Submit links

One, Redditors love links, and guess what you've created already? A bunch of content that happens to be created on a link. So take those links and submit them into relevant subreddits. I say relevant on purpose. If you have a blog that is targeting foodies, do not take that content and submit it to a subreddit that is dedicated to fantasy footballers. It's not gonna end well. You're gonna get blocked. So make sure that you are submitting it only to the relevant subreddits. And make sure that you're checking the rules and guidelines that are listed on the right-hand side of any subreddit that tell you what you can and cannot do.

Make great comments

The second thing that you want to do is go into the content that is trending and answer that content, answer the questions, have a dialogue with the people in these subreddits, and give them content that is valuable. Include in there, links to the pieces that you've created in the past. Add that in the comments, and that will also allow the LLMs to get great insight for it to be fed so it can answer the way that you want.

Inspire UGC

Finally, inspire UGC (user-generated content). Go into the communities where your audience are spending time and ask questions. If you are dying to rank for the top stereos, if you're dying to rank for the top software, if you're dying to rank for the top place to get a hotdog in New York, whatever it might be, go ask the question. Go ask the question in the subreddit, and if you've already done your job, the community will answer, you.

But if they don't, I've got a pro tip, and this is a pro tip that you will get nowhere else. You're going to allow all those comments to come in, and they're gonna sometimes even mention your competitors, and that's okay. Eventually, time's gonna fade. But that piece of content, that question that you ask, that is exactly the question that people are gonna ask the AI, is going to make it to the top of that subreddit. And you're gonna go in, and you're gonna edit that post. And at the top of your post, you're gonna say, "Thank you so much for all the comments. Check out my website." Kind of sketch, but I think you can do it. Do a quick edit, your link's now gonna show up at the top, and maybe the LLMs will plug it. I do not know if that's gonna get you banned as well. It might, but give it a go. 

All right, what else can you do? I already told you that there's other sites that you can leverage, right? Quora, another great site. It's like Yahoo Answers, but with a better design.

With Quora, you want to find the top questions that are being asked within your niche. If you go into a tool like Moz, you can very quickly go in, submit Quora's domain, type in keywords that are relevant to your industry, relevant to your niche, and start to see which of them are already generating organic traffic. If you notice that these URLs are generating organic traffic, then ching ching, you just found a piece of content that Perplexity, Google, OpenAI, are likely going to scrape to gather insight from. 

So you go into that question and you answer it, but you answer it better than everybody else in that thread. Remember, you're creating content worth stealing. If you're creating content worth stealing, you're gonna make sure that your answer is ridiculously good. So that's what you're gonna do.

And you can also leverage in Quora articles, which is essentially the functionality of instead of just answering questions, you're also creating native articles for this channel that can be scraped.

So now something magical has happened. You've created content on Reddit, you've created content on Quora. You also have this content that exists on your website. Now, they just do an update to their software where they're scraping the internet to try to get more information that it can answer when somebody asks a question. They are now giving the content and the materials that you've developed back to your ideal user. That is the playbook.

You now need to think more outside of the box. It's no longer enough to just create blog posts. You have to distribute your content. You have to optimize your content for GEO, aka Double E-E-A-T, and make sure that that content is so good that it's worth stealing. 

If you want more playbooks on how to distribute your content through these different channels, there's a great book called "Create Once, Distribute Forever," available everywhere. I encourage you to check it out. It's by yours truly. 

But before we wrap this up, let me tell you one thing. The only way that this works is if you commit to creating content that is worth reading, worth bookmarking, worth stealing, and worth scraping. The cat's out of the bag, folks. We can't go back to the way things used to be. It's no longer as simple as just build a landing page, get some links, and call it a day. It's not. Now things are much more complex.

So if you wanna navigate the next few years of this industry, of this space, you need to start thinking not just about Google, but also thinking about how people are searching in other channels and in other formats. From video to audio, to answers in questions on TripAdvisor, to Quora, to Stack Overflow, Trustpilot, SlideShare, and so much more.

May the force be with you. I am cheering for you. I am rooting for you. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Ross Simmonds. You can find me on all of your favorite platforms @TheCoolestCool. I will see you on the internet.