Visibility Beats Visits: Rethinking Marketing For The LLM Era With Lindsay Halsey

We explore how SEO is evolving into a broader visibility strategy that spans AI overviews, chat tools, and omnichannel marketing. Lindsay Halsey shares client-ready frameworks for education, measurement, and execution that turn complexity into clear next steps.

• shift from sessions to visibility and share of voice
• client education using visuals and live data reviews
• GA4 custom channel for AI tool referrals
• AI overview tracking and imperfect but useful signals
• LLMs.txt and crawl access considerations
• content that shows human expertise and authorship
• aligning CTAs to intent to boost conversions
• redistributing effort from top-of-funnel to mid-funnel
• omnichannel support including paid social and PR
• audience research and journey mapping to guide strategy
• practical plan: what, why, how, when cadence

Guest Contact Information: 

Website:  pathfinderseo.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lindsay-halsey

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With over 5 million downloads, The Best SEO Podcast has been the go-to show for digital marketers, business owners, and entrepreneurs wanting real-world strategies to grow online.

Now, host Matthew Bertram — creator of LLM Visibility™ and the LLM Visibility Stack™, and Lead Strategist at EWR Digital — takes the conversation beyond traditional SEO into the AI era of discoverability.

Each week, Matthew dives into the tactics, frameworks, and insights that matter most in a world where search engines, large language models, and answer engines are reshaping how people find, trust, and choose businesses. From SEO and AI-driven marketing to executive-level growth strategy, you’ll hear expert interviews, deep-dive discussions, and actionable strategies to help you stay ahead of the curve. 

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Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stage: SEO’s Shift
• 1:14 Meet Lindsay And Her Two Hats
• 2:40 Change Or Evolution In Search
• 4:05 Beyond Google: LLM Visibility
• 6:20 Attribution’s Return To First Principles
• 8:43 From SEO Silo To Omnichannel
• 10:55 Educating Clients With Visuals And Data
• 14:05 Hard Conversations: What, Why, How, When
• 17:05 Practical LLM Visibility Tactics
• 20:10 Content That Shows Real Humans
• 23:05 Aligning CTAs To Intent
• 26:00 Mapping Audience And Journeys
• 28:20 Filling The Funnel Across Channels
• 30:15 The Real Secret: Do The Next Best Thing
• 31:50 Where To Find Lindsay & Closing

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

This is the unknown secret of internet marketing. Your inside guide to the top market to crack the competition. Ready to unlock your full potential. Let's get started.

SPEAKER_02: 0:14

Audi, welcome back to another fun filled episode of The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I'm your host, Matt Bertram. Got another great uh podcast for you today. I have Lindsay Hazley with uh she wears two hats. Uh she's been doing SEO for about 15 years. Uh she has uh Pathfinder SEO, which helps uh other agencies and freelancers and do all the coaching that I keep saying I'm gonna do, but haven't done yet. Uh, and then she's also a partner at Web Shine. And um I've been just doing a number of interviews where I've been bringing on um experts in the field as well as agency owners to kind of talk about all the new changes that are going on uh with SEO. And uh Lindsay's on top of the change. There's a big curve for LLM visibility uh and kind of everything beyond Google, optimize everywhere. There's a lot of other terms for it. And I thought it would be good to just bring another uh senior voice on to share her perspective of what's happening and what she's doing about it and telling people. So, Lindsay, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01: 1:22

Thanks so much, Matt. I'm excited to be here.

SPEAKER_02: 1:25

Well, let's just kind of go to set the table with what's topical for you, what's on your radar. Um, you know, how are you seeing uh the world of SEO change?

SPEAKER_01: 1:37

Good question and great place to start. And uh, and thank you for being one of the voices out there that I've been listening to uh as I listen to more podcasts, attend webinars, um, trying to understand, like we all are, how AI is reshaping search. And I really started by um asking myself one question, which was uh is SEO changing or is SEO evolving right now? And I've always kind of in the last 15 years and working in the SEO space, used the phrase SEO evolves more than it changes, because um, so much of what you see out on social and what people talk about is how much change is happening, and that if you're not constantly um learning, doing, et cetera, you're gonna get left behind, or sort of this feeling of the rug could get pulled out from under your business if you're not careful with SEO. And in working with clients over 15 years, some of which I've worked with their businesses that entire time, we haven't had the rug pulled out from underneath us because we're following kind of a holistic um real-world marketing best practices uh approach to SEO. And in this evolution, I've been kind of questioning is this still the same? Like, is it change or is it evolution? And um, we keep hearing about how AI is reshaping search, and I certainly agree with that. Um, and I'm sort of a, you know, um on both sides of the fence. On the one hand, I think um there is a lot of change and is a lot of evolution, but at the end of the day, we're still talking about the same end goal, which is helping businesses, whether they're local businesses or large brands, connect with their audience online and help them get found, help them build visibility and build that visibility uh on Google Yahoo Bing. But then also we're sort of getting this positive byproduct of also what you're doing in the world of SEO is often helping getting found and showing up in uh in AI-based tools, chat GPT, Gemini, Perplexity. So I'm kind of in this place, I'm still calling it evolution, and I really see this as a convergence and that um the hat we wear when we are thinking about um SEO and getting found on Google is actually helping propel um us and our clients' websites, et cetera, um, into this new age of of search, which uh some of which is now happening in the AI world.

SPEAKER_02: 4:01

You know, I I can see evolve. I can definitely, there's certain things I feel are certainly like evolving. I also think things are actively changing. Um, I actually think uh even on a uh a tracking standpoint, we're going back to uh the old days. And so I feel like it's almost like uh uh epoch or something like that is is happening, and we're going back to the beginning and first principles and how we need to um rethink marketing as a whole. Um, I had heard for a long time uh people talking about SEO going away uh and it's being kind of integrated into uh every capacity. And I I I do think that maybe on the long term that that's happening. But uh the analogy I use with a lot of this stuff is like uh I I go back to this because there's like a personal story here with my mom. My mom was like one of the first employees of Microsoft. And um early on when I graduated, I wanted to get these like they weren't called Red Boxes, but they were like, um, you know, I want to I I I was calling on all these pharmacies, and so I I wanted to put these up and I wanted to have like a residual business going going. And my mom was like, no, everything's gonna go streaming, everything, right? And you know, Netflix did put you know Blockbuster out of business, but you know, Redbox is still around and DVDs are still around, and there's this long tail on the adoption curve. So the bulk of people move over, um and but there's still this very long tail. And the thing I have to keep reminding myself is like we're talking about chat GPT and and and visibility, you know, it it's under 10% of the market. I think um the leads are good and it's actively growing. But when I talk to people and businesses, they're not there yet, right? And um now attribution is becoming a like a big thing too. And attribution is I I just brought on uh uh someone I I believe is a thought leader in the attribution space. And it was like, yeah, attribution's gone, like it's it's dead, like we're going back to it. Even Ran Fishkin's talking about um, well, you know, run two run two uh A B tests uh in similar cities of billboards, and then when you see the uplift on one, that's the billboard you go with. And I'm like, whoa, like it's almost like going back to the stone age. And so we're having to relearn everything and even like looking at SEO, like not not not from a two-dimensional standpoint, but from uh, well, this is machine learning. This is a large LLM that we've been speaking to, and the language and how we interact with it is the same. So there's a lot of skill sets that that you can adapt, but there's also new skill sets out there and also how people are searching online, 50% of the traffic is no longer on the website. And then you also have, you know, informational traffic is being found before they get to the website. So it's an evolution and there's certain uh uh alignments there, absolutely. Um, and then there's like a lot of new stuff that's coming in from left field and how people are evolving and and how they're searching and AI search and you know where that's going. And then, you know, you you talk about funnels, right? These two-dimensional funnels that was never really a thing. Um but it's it's just going back to like good marketing, like good digital marketing. And and I'm having a a crisis on the podcast really of our, you know, we've been talking about SEO for so long, but also the name of the podcast is internet marketing, which okay, digital marketing, internet marketing, whatever, you know, but it it's really about internet marketing and how it all works together now, and and you can't just focus on Google and and win.

SPEAKER_01: 8:08

So yeah, I totally agree with that concept. And I mean, we've been saying for a long time that SEO isn't done in a back office. So when I started an SEO, you sort of you could operate in a back office, right? A client could pay you, a retainer, you could do things that they didn't understand behind the scenes that like didn't totally uh have a forward-facing impact on their business, meaning you couldn't always like see it on their website, et cetera. And that sort of worked. I mean, it was a little bit shortcutty even 15 years ago, but um, you could sort of operate siloed, right? And uh, and over time, we've had to come out of that silo and we've had to start doing real world marketing and uh and not operate independently. And so if you want to have um an impact on a business, it really is across channels. And so, yes, do you consider that SEO work or like what hat are you wearing, like what channel are you focused on, has become uh a lot less of the case. And more of how do you put it all together in sort of an omnichannel plan uh is is more of what we're doing and helping coach businesses do and doing in our own business, et cetera. So, you know, I think a little bit about that, like even just what we're doing in our own business at Pathfinder right now is saying, okay, a lot of people are talking about AI and SEO, and our agency is evolving, like the tasks we do, the strategy we implement for clients, how we report the value, how we track and attribute that. That's all evolving over at our agency. So lots of people are out there having these conversations. We should blog about it. So that's like starts kind of with that core principle of sharing expertise and experience online. So we should create blog posts. And then we should take those blog posts and on the same theme offer a webinar or two about it that are self-hosted webinars, right? And you're building kind of this like broader way of sharing expertise. Then we should be a guest on podcasts and get out there in the world and talk about it. We should run some paid advertising to those blog posts that have, you know, calls to actions and downloads, et cetera. And that when we lean into something these days, we don't just like write a blog post and check the box and say, okay, my SEO work is done here or my marketing work is done here, but rather we look at it as an ecosystem across paid, email, um, you know, off off your website channels, um, and so forth. And should you be on Reddit and doing all of these different things? I mean, there's so much happening now. Um, but what I like about it is it's this quality over quantity play. Instead of I better go out and do this thing four times at sort of a low value. What we really need to do is build that depth of expertise, that depth of value across these channels. And it's gonna be hard to measure the value. Um, it's not gonna be someone read a blog post and hit the buy now or the sign up type button. Um, but we're gonna be looking at our businesses. Are we on the rise as a whole? And when we talk to clients at our agency, that's the hard part. We can't always just go in and say you spent X on Google Ads, you invested Y in the management of your SEO campaign, et cetera, because it is all operating kind of under digital marketing or internet marketing, whatever you, you know, a much broader umbrella to drive success in today's era.

SPEAKER_02: 11:25

So, I mean, what how are you explaining like what is the conversations that you're having? Let's go like very tactical. And I think that other agency owners and freelancers are having a lot of hard conversations with clients about where did the traffic go? Where did the leads go? Uh, how are things changing? And clients are starting to wake up to okay, this managed service of SEO that's being done for them, of what the heck's going on? What do I need to do? Like all hands on deck. And um, you know, I think that what I'm getting uh from like requests from from audience and and and listeners is how are you having these conversations? How are you educating uh clients on the change and what happened and um what to do about it?

SPEAKER_01: 12:22

Great question. So for us, um the number one way we like to educate clients is by actually getting on the phone and talking to them and usually having some kind of a screen share happening, right? You can create handouts and blog posts and Loom videos and all the things, but the best way in our experience is either an in-person or a Zoom type call and on a relatively regular basis because there's a lot of education that needs to happen right now because the education then turns to action. So there's like you've got to understand what's happening and why it's happening and how this impacts your business. And then we're gonna start to kind of morph and evolve the strategy. And if anything, as um agencies, we probably have to lean in closer to our clients' businesses in this era, right? We're gonna have to do more collaborative work with them to keep having an impact. So it's not like, hey, go get a Zoom call scheduled with your client for next Tuesday and then talk to them again in 2026. What we're talking about is like, okay, there's sort of this evolution of they need to understand what's happening and how we're gonna evolve our strategy and what we're seeing, and then actually start doing the work together. Um and they've got to come along in that journey. So that initial, those initial conversations um are happening over Zoom. And I'm personally, I don't know about you, Matt, but I use a lot of visuals, right? So I'm showing them, hey, these are the the you know, ways people search. This is what an AI overview is, this is AI mode, um, you know, showing them how this is impacting the search results because we we can't assume that our clients are adopting this um like we have been. And so they need to understand vocabulary, layout what's happening, um, start to see visibility, and then we can talk about some of the obvious things. Well, how do you think, you know, this impacts click-through rates on this keyword, et cetera? So we do a lot of visual storytelling, and then I like to get into some data, sometimes looking in Search Console analytics and say, hey, now that you understand the big picture of what's happening in our industry, let me show you what's happening in uh in your business's data and what we're seeing. Are you feeling that? What how's business, right? So this is a bit of an education storytelling. This is a bit of a data like, hey, this is what we're seeing. And then I want to know how's business? Like, what's going on? And this AI, everything that's happening in that is not happening in a vacuum. So they could be up or down, even though click-through rates have shifted, et cetera, because their industry isn't static either, right? They might have more demand or less demand for their product or services in today's era. So that could be happening too. Their business could be evolving. They could have launched a local business, launched a new location. So you have like multiple things that can be causing a business to be growing or not growing or seeing more sessions or less sessions. And so this education is sort of like this is one piece of this very dynamic world we're living in. Um, and helping them to understand that is sort of where I start the story, right? Like stay in the world in our in our swimming lane and stay in the world of SEO to begin with. Go ahead, Matt.

SPEAKER_02: 15:27

Oh, well, one of the things that you said that um was in a previous conversation that I had that um really keyed in for me is what you're talking about is if they're opening a new location, if they're doing other PR work, like like pulling your your SEO agency or consultant or whoever is doing it in on that because it reflects in the data. And um the idea was uh having kind of like a quarterly form that they fill out to say, hey, what are the things that are going on in your business that we might not know about that could reflect in the data? Um, we've had we've had uh all kinds of interesting stories of clients doing stuff um at conferences, or uh we had one client that had been our client for uh you know 10 plus years. They ran a TV ad and didn't even think to tell us. And we were like, what is going on? Um these things, these things affect the the analytics and the story that that's being told. And and to understand that, I think the collaborative uh efforts um with businesses are are are really critical. I would love to even go even deeper, if you will, and you don't have to give away any names of clients, but I would love to like be a fly on the wall on some of these maybe um really great uh conversations or even really difficult conversations and uh how how you uh chose or even educated your team to navigate those uh those conversations because uh we've we've actually seen with with EWR Digital, our agency, some pockets um where there was kind of big decision points that all at the same time there was uh um calls coming in of like what's going on. And uh we've had to build plans to kind of preempt some things that that are happening and even Google updates um over time of like, hey, there's a shift that's gonna happen, like you need to be prepared for it. Here's what to do, and and staying close, like you said, with with your clients. So I'd love to hear some uh real uh experience, right? If we were talking about Google Eat, right? Like what is it show me the the stories and the conversations you have with clients on on a on a real micro level uh um of of the conversations you're having. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 18:00

Awesome. So usually when we start conversations, we we try to start with the question like how's business, what's happening in the real world, et cetera, because it's not always reflected, as we've talked about with attribution, et cetera, via the Google Analytics, Search Console, rank tracking data, et cetera. So sometimes I go into a call with my stomach in a knot because I think uh things don't look so good right now. And then I show up on the call and the client's like, business is awesome, right? And uh, and there's a disconnect between what I'm seeing in some of the data and what they're experiencing. And so the biggest thing I want to know is when I kind of come into a call, what is what is our team's, what's the agency side sort of sentiment towards how things are looking in the data and what we're seeing? And how's their real world business experience? When you start to talk about clients that are in like lead gen for you know high dollar value ticket items, real estate, uh expensive services, roofing contractors, et cetera, um, it only takes them like one or two good leads for them to think we're like amazing, right? So the data might be like, oh, your cost per lead or whatever is down, but they landed their biggest sale of the year. So they couldn't be happier, right? So we see something in the data like lower conversions or something on a website like that, but one or two of those were really high value. And so we've actually knocked it out of the park for them by getting them the targeted lead they were looking for, right? So that's the first thing I like to do is like just because my stomach might be like, ooh, this is gonna be a difficult conversation, don't just make that assumption. Go in and ask some good questions at the beginning so you understand what you're seeing and they're seeing. And then you can kind of combine things and say, okay, we're in the same, like, we're on the same trajectory. We're both in a position of this is success, or we're both in a position of, hey, things aren't looking so good. What are we gonna do differently? Or maybe we're seeing different things. But I like to set that tone like right at the beginning. Um, and uh, and then I always like to have that, you know, we just talked about like how do you provide a little education, visuals, et cetera, and try to help understand the why next. Like we just identified the what business is good, business is bad, what we're seeing in the data, whatever the what is, then we want to move into the why. And we don't always know the why when we jump on the call, right? We think we know the why, we see the ranking data, we see click-through rates shifting, et cetera. But let's also talk to the client and understand if there's anything else, like you're saying from the big picture. Why did we get more brand traffic from, you know, Google? Well, it's because you ran a TV commercial and more people are talking about your brand, um, et cetera. Oh, you brought on a PR agency that relates to us. Let me educate you what the overlap is between my wheelhouse of SEO and that team's wheelhouse of PR and talk about collaboration. So I spend a lot of time in the what and the why. And then uh we move into the how and the when, right? So the uh the how is like, okay, great, how does this change our strategy? Is there something we did that we're gonna lean into because it's going well? Is there something that we did that's not working that we should stop and try something new? Um, how is our is our strategy evolving? And that can mean anything from educating them on um, you know, building AI-based visibility and what's happening with machine learning and AI and learning language models. That could be something like, hey, let's divert some of the resource we've been putting into blogging, which is like very top of funnel, and like focus more on the mid-funnel transactional keyword space where people still are clicking through to websites, et cetera. So we talked about the how and we talked about the when, and then kind of wrap it up with a lot of collaboration. So that just general flow, um, kind of what, why, when, and how together at the end. Um, and then hey, when are we gonna meet next, et cetera? It's just sort of on repeat. Um, and so clients can expect those conversations to kind of go that way. Um, and then that little knot you had in your stomach, um, sometimes you're like, ooh, like it is things are bad. Let's go in, like, let's take action immediately. This client needs a lot of love right now. Or you walk away and say, okay, now I understand their business better and how things are going, and I can reshape what my task list looks like for that client, prioritization, et cetera. So is that helpful, Matt?

SPEAKER_02: 22:14

Sure. I would love to hear what you're doing uh from an LLM visibility. I know on your Pathfinder, you're like Google and Beyond, um, which uh uh, you know, there's some ideation with Chat GBT there. I've actually seen that come up. I think that was a good tagline. Um, I would love to hear kind of like in in inside, like what's going on internally, how you're training your team, what you're doing. I think that that's where a lot of the interest is right now, because it's oh, whoa, it's shiny new object, right? Like so everybody is gravitating to that, even though like maybe uh the market's not there yet. I I would just love to hear how you're positioning for that. What are the things you're doing? How have you changed your workflows uh or your checklist to kind of incorporate some of that stuff?

SPEAKER_01: 23:03

So I will be the first to say that I'm like a mid-level adopter of new things, right? So I don't have the newest phone, I don't have the oldest phone. Um, and when new technology comes out, I want to stay educated and informed and hands-on, but I'm reluctant to just like drag my clients quickly down that path, right? So it's it's finding this balance, I think. And if you feel like you've got your foot on the gas, but you're not doing a lot, you're not alone, right? We're starting to educate and inform and try to weave this into our strategies. Um, but this is still emerging and new and and changing and evolving and all of the things, right? So at our agency, um, some of the things that we're starting to do or things that we we did in kind of months past that you're not too late to do are simple small things. Um, like in Google Analytics, we want to start to be able to tell our clients how much traction they're actually getting from AI tools. What kind of traffic are you getting from Chat GPT, Gemini Perplexity, et cetera? And so we can do that by creating a custom channel in Google Analytics. And uh it takes like five minutes to do, it applies retroactively. So once you layer the channel in, you can see, hey, what's happening? And you can show the client that for most of our clients, the number's pretty small, right? But this shows that A, we're trying to identify what's happening, um, we're starting to see it, and we can look at engagement quality. When somebody comes from one of these tools, are they highly engaged? Do we want more of these folks, right? And the answer is usually yes. Um, so small channel right now for most of our clients in the grand scheme of things, but it's emerging. And so we want to pull that data into our reporting. We want to start having that conversation on a regular basis. Um, the next thing we start to talk a little bit about is like, well, how do we know if we're showing up in AI mode and AI overviews beyond just doing searches ourselves? And we talk a little bit about old school SEO like rank tracking, right? And so at our agency, we use Winter and you can see how often you're kind of getting featured in the AI overviews, et cetera. And so we're starting to layer that into conversations and treating it a lot like we did, like showing up in featured snippets or the map pack or whatever, right? So starting to build, hey, this data is imperfect, but it's starting to tell us a little bit of the story. So we're weaving that into conversation data analysis, et cetera. Um, and then starting to look at sort of uh changing what's happening in our language and what we call success and moving away from everything being sessions oriented, how many sessions did we get last month from organic, how many from paid, et cetera, and starting to build into our vocabulary with clients more about visibility, how often were you part of the conversation, what's your share of voice, et cetera? If you talked to a PR agency or um some paid media agencies, this is how they already speak. So if you work with a client that has a lot of agency providers, this isn't like new to them. Like they've been paying for magazine publications based on this type of visibility and impression data for like all of their business history, right? And it's just on us a little bit that we're like, ooh, but I can't totally measure it or tell it, right? So starting to shift and weave that in. Um, and then we're starting to lean into okay, great. What other like tactical things can we actually do to drive more visibility? So at our agency, like most of our clients are on WordPress and a lot use Yoast, for example. So we're going in and building those LLMS.txt. That's like a tactical something that it's still emerging. Who knows if it really helps? Um, but we're trying to like weave in the strategic side with bits of tactical work.

SPEAKER_02: 26:43

Um, so Lindsay, just to speak to that, like the LLM.txt file, we we had tried to uh just put it in the robots.txt file. And then these rolling IPs, um, we we couldn't, we we kept blacklisting uh LLMs, like and there's the major ones, but there's actually a ton of them out there, and you don't know what bot traffic is is where. And so actually we had to set up for all our clients uh LLM.txt file just so that there's a chance to get shown up in the visibility if it if it can't read your site and that's the only place that you're heavily publishing content in a blog or something like that, it it it limits a big part of your kind of mothership strategy uh of what's going on. And so so I think that the LLM.txt file, um not everybody's doing that. And that's one of the even like one of the tools that I'm seeing that that people are proposing are like, hey, like uh put your website in here and we'll show you if if you're if you're getting blocked or not, right? And I think it's a a a good uh widget um that that people are utilizing because you know I would say over 50% of the market um d does not have that on there. Uh but I I have seen the data um back that it is working um from what it's intended to do is to say, hey, like we're gonna let these LMs come check out our stuff, right? So yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 28:13

So that's a little bit about kind of from uh like um some of the things that we're doing. And when I say we're not like crazy early adapters of one thing or like way behind the curve, it's just sort of incrementally chipping away at this and staying up to date each month and like moving our clients through this without throwing in the towel and saying, like, stop blogging, stop doing this, go do this. It's a little bit of like, how do we just weave some of these um tactics and strategies into what we're already doing? So, for example, in the content game, one of the things that we've seen for a long time, um, but even more so today, is um making sure the human is shining through um throughout your website, right? And so right now, um that human voice and that that genuine expert and expertise trying to let that shine through. So, how do we do that in, for instance, a blog post? Sometimes blog posts start with more storytelling and first person narrative, for example, or maybe it's helping a client actually get um their authorship profile kind of built out and supporting up all of their blog posts by saying this wasn't created by brand X. It was created by Thought Leader Y, the name, not the name of the business, but the name of the thought leader behind the content. Um, coming in and reworking those intro, you know, to blog posts, adding more structure to our content because we know um Google and the learning language models, everybody kind of likes that structured approach, et cetera. So getting back into existing content um and uh and trying to eke more out of it is an example. Another thing that we've been doing with a lot of success is saying, okay, great. We did this on a couple of Pathfinder blogs as a test. Like we are we are seeing less traffic in the informational upper funnel. Space to our blogs across our website in our own business. Our clients are seeing the same. Click-through rates are down anywhere from like 30 to 50 percent, um, depending on kind of what your rankings look like, uh, all sorts of different dynamics. Um, so we're dealing with less visitors coming to our website. So we need to get more out of them. How do we get more out of them? Well, of course, great design, page speed, et cetera, but also um aligning our calls to action with the topic of whatever meets the person. So if we do win the click when somebody searches for something like SEO proposal template, which I don't even know why you search on Google for that, when you could go to Chat GPT and it'll just create one for you, and then you can customize it and add that human layer. People are still searching for it. They're not finding our blog post about it as often. But if we have a pop-up that uh on that blog post that is sign up for our e-newsletter, it has like a less than 1% conversion rate, right? So it doesn't really do a lot for us. Um, but we get a little bit of traction. But now we have, you know, let's say we were getting a thousand visitors a month to that post last year at this time. Now maybe we're getting 500 or 200 or whatever. It could have tanked. So how do I get more conversions or leads? Well, I reframe that call to action to be the thing that the person wants. In this case, they want a proposal template. So I'm gonna actually give them a download, exchange an email address, et cetera. So getting that mindset of like trying to eke a little bit more um out of every visitor is another thing that we've done to go back in to say, hey, here are my top 10 performing blogs. Let's do a call to action that matches the intent of how they got there, what they're interested in, instead of some generic like sign up for my drip series of emails, et cetera. So those are a lot of like different little things, but just um yeah, trying to keep our foot on the gas and not get the rug pulled out in terms of lead gen.

SPEAKER_02: 31:56

Yeah. So I think that that leads into kind of something that um you were reaching out uh about before was uh aligning strategy with the customer journey, right? And we we we touched on it a little bit of maybe more commercial and more transactional searches, um, and how to kind of realign that funnel visibility and then the bottom of the funnel um like content, right? Like that's what you're talking about with the downloadable, what you're talking about with the email drip um or the the newsletter. Um you're that informational layer is happening all across the web. That's where 50% of the traffic went. They've already found that. They're now in the ideation phase or selection phase. And and so you need to have more commercial content, you need to more have more transactional content. And I'm finding a lot, you really got to have those ICPs dialed in or your ideal uh customer profiles dialed in. And then mapping that customer journey is really important. I would love to hear more of like your viewpoints around that.

SPEAKER_01: 33:02

Yeah, so that concept of that ideal customer, the audience, um, that's something where even with clients we've worked with them for like 10 years, we're digging back into audience. Like, and I and I frame it as like audience matters more than ever right now. That's the thing. Like that, we have to find the right audience. So when it feels like maybe an uninformed or dumb question to ask a client something kind of basic, we're still asking it under the preface of like, I really got to get in the mindset of your ideal audience. What do they need? What challenges are they facing? What do they want? How's their world changing right now? Because as much as AI and SEO are all evolving, the whole world is going through um a lot of evolution. So, you know, understanding audience is is super key as a really good starting point uh to all of this. So I think that's um yeah, a great kind of component there.

SPEAKER_02: 33:52

We're like pulling stuff in from their CRM. Are you like you want to speak to that a little bit?

SPEAKER_01: 33:58

Yeah, so I I wish we were doing a little more pulling in from CRM to understand audience and things like that. And uh we're not uh doing that right now. So, but I do think if you're in the lead gen space, um connecting on the CRM side is super important. Um, the other thing that we're doing is talking a lot about, you know, if we're talking about audience and we're talking about um, you know, acquiring the conversion and we're talking in this funnel, this customer acquisition funnel, we're trying to do some mind mapping of like, well, how are we connecting in each of these? Like, what are the marketing um strategies that are helping us reach and how successful are they right now? So if you're not getting quite as much out of your upper funnel, like informational, you know, multiple steps ahead of their when they're ready to buy for your service because your blog isn't carrying you as far, what should we do about that? Should we invest more in social or paid social? Should we actually run some Google Ads traffic to some of our most important kind of lead generating oriented pieces that are in that upper funnel, et cetera? So sometimes saying we have to lean out of SEO a little here to say if we are if we're worried that we're not filling the funnel, do we need a commercial? Do we need print? Like what else? And it doesn't mean you have to be able to do all of those things. It means that you're coming in as an SEO consultant, you're coming in trying to help have a positive impact on their brand. You're helping them ask the right questions and understand how what you're doing and what you're seeing might influence other channels. And then in the mid-transactional space, again, like, okay, great. What kind of traction and visibility do we have when somebody actually gets ready to search for your product or your service? They're in, you're they're ready, they're, but they're not using your brand, right? So they're like not informational, but they're not brand query oriented. How are we meeting those folks? And is SEO sufficient? Do we need um to build new pages? Do we need to lean into something there? Do we need to run some paid ads again? Um, kind of layering in and going through it and thinking audience and then thinking customer acquisition funnel and thinking outside of just SEO.

SPEAKER_02: 36:06

So, Lindsay, what are some unknown secrets of internet marketing that are maybe underutilized, people don't talk about a lot, but some of the things that you're seeing that people um really need to kind of surface a little bit more?

SPEAKER_01: 36:24

Good question. Um, I think one of the biggest uh secrets to internet marketing is sort of there there aren't shortcuts. And so um, and that a lot of the fundamentals still really work. And so I think one of the secrets that I really see in businesses that are successful is they take a lot of time to think about the big picture and understand what's happening. And then they decide where will I have the biggest impact? What are the next three things to have the biggest impact? And then they take action on them. So it's not that they uncover an actual like, you know, secret or trick or something sort of relatively like short-sighted, but rather the the businesses and the you know, web designers and agencies and stuff that I think are having the biggest impact on their sites and their clients' sites are the ones that can distill all of what's happening up here in the data in the real world, distill it down into where will I have the next if the most impact, and then actually go and do the thing, right? And if you can keep looping that little cycle together, um, your brand is gonna be successful today and it's gonna be successful in six months and two years from now, no matter where things go. I I try to stay out of like the prediction game because I think especially right now, um, it's really hard to know where this is all going. But I feel good about that flywheel, right? Um, and I feel good about the time I put into my own marketing and the resources I put into my clients and what they're paying if I keep on that flywheel. Um, and uh yeah, so I don't know if that's much of a secret, but that's kind of how I think about it.

SPEAKER_02: 38:00

Awesome. Well, Lindsay, if someone wants to find out more about um what you're doing, I know you do a lot of education on the meat and potatoes of SEO and you have a great agency out there. You've been doing this a long time. What are the places that people can find you and follow more about what you're doing?

SPEAKER_01: 38:17

Uh I'm best place uh if you're looking for a quick like contact is via email. That's where I'm the most responsive. So Lindsay at pathfinderseo.com, and I'll reach back out to you. Um, but you can find us on our website uh at pathfinderseo.com uh in the community side of things and coaching, and then our agency is webshine.com. And uh and from there you can see some of our social channels and things like that and contact forms. But uh yeah, uh thanks so much, Matt. This has been fun.

SPEAKER_02: 38:46

Awesome. Well, anyone listening that is looking to get those frameworks and those fundamentals down, reach out to Lindsay. She's got a great program out there, she's been doing it a long time. So check her out. Uh until the next time, please like, follow, share. I'm bringing back the Shaiko. Uh, I guess people like that. Um, you know, that uh we need it today more than ever. So if uh you got any value, uh please like, share, follow, comment. Uh really appreciate it. And uh until the next time, my name is Matt Bertram. Bye bye for now.