Mike King: Owned media at Semrush. He’s broken over thirty bones, including all ten fingers, received over five hundred stitches. He lived in a remote village with fewer than a hundred people in Honduras when he was sixteen and started his first company at seven years old. That part actually doesn’t surprise me. Presenting When You Can’t Beat them, Buy them, Growing Your Audience Through Strategic Acquisition, please welcome Nick Eubanks.

Nick Eubanks: Oh, man. How’s everybody doing? Pretty good? Yeah. It’s been an amazing event. I haven’t gotten to be here as much as I wanted to be for a lot of the talks from some of the people that I look up to, but, everybody I’ve talked all the conversations I’ve had over the past few days have been amazing. I just the team that at iPullRank has just done such an incredible job. And so I won’t gush too much, but like events are really fucking hard and this is really impressive. So, as Mike said, I’m Nick. For anybody who doesn’t know me, like Mike raps, I build stuff. I usually sell it, but I definitely build a lot of it. Most of it doesn’t work, but it’s worked out a few times. So I apologize that a bunch of the stuff I’m gonna go into right now has already been talked about ad nauseam. I’m gonna try to make it a little bit different, but it’s all stuff we’re in the same industry. It’s the same theme. And we’re all asking the same question right now. Right? Which is like, what is actually happening, right, with with AIOs and LLMs and all the same shit. And so, you know, again, this is I don’t mean to make these points. They’ve been made ten times by ten other people. But the the rise of AIOs is wreaking havoc on not all search traffic, but a lot of search traffic. Some industries more than others. Definitely in the business and business services space. But like just from the start of March to the end of March, you know, AIOs doubled. They’re right. They went from 6% of global queries to 12%. They’re now back to like 9.5%, 10%. 

But in, you know, we zoom in on just the US, which a lot of us focus on as a market. You know, we’ve got some verticals that we track at Semrush where we’re seeing 50% of queries with AIOs. And it’s just doing this insane thing to traffic overall. Right? What’s actually happening for the really the first time in history is we’re seeing this decoupling of clicks and impressions where they used to be directly correlated and we’re actually seeing almost an inverse correlation to some extent with this right now. And because of that and because of the four sort of forced behaviors that are coming about as part of AIOs and people using LLMs for different types of queries, the shape of the funnel is actually starting to change. Right? We’re seeing the top of the funnel from a search perspective, at least organic, shrinking as the middle and the bottom continue to get wider but also sort of start to move. And so, you know, paying attention to where folks are starting to go is becoming increasingly difficult as attribution gets increasingly fractured and now is the time probably more than ever when the big leverage point from us as marketers with data is figuring out how on earth we get our hands on as much clickstream data as possible. And, I’m probably covered concentration of intent. So, again, these are just echoing things that I probably don’t need to echo as much. But there is some hidden nuances when it comes to LLMs. And so, the one thing I’m gonna ask from folks right now, if you don’t mind, is I wanna share some stuff with you that I’m not really allowed to share. So I’ll just ask you to put your phones away just for like the next three or four slides.

This is not gonna be on on the video. They took the slides out of my deck. Like, this is like legit, like some insider data. We will be publishing this but like probably not for another month. But it was too important to not talk about it. And so while ChatGPT relies almost exclusively on Google, what we’ve found is that, you know, it doesn’t rely on Google the way that we as SEOs would think. Right? So if you look here, what you’re seeing is that the lion’s share of the results that are showing up in AIOs are coming from page 3+ of Google. Right? It’s it’s the a Google is literally looking for results that are not on the first or second page, which is completely counterintuitive to it it broke my brain when we we found this out. And what’s interesting is we’re seeing a similar behavior with Gemini, less so. And we’re seeing it still, but again less so with Perplexity. So like 89% versus 48%. But it’s still just the fact that these results that are being pulled into these LLMs and into even the AIOs are coming from deep pages. And this is more these behaviors are more, indicative of LLMs more than AIOs. The AIO research is fractured because it’s changing so fast.

But we’re in this new era of SEO right now. And so the the way that I’d like to describe this and the way we talk about it in my team internally is, you know, we it used to be the Newtonian physics model. Right? Which is a a deterministic system with clear cause and effect relationships. We all, you know, we had some sense of what the input signals were and all the, you know, 200 influential points that might go into scoring and ranking a website. And with this new phase of SEO that we’re in, it’s it’s more, like quantum physics. And probability has come to replace certainty and there’s now all of these different states that all exist simultaneously. And so, in the wake of this, on top of all of this, on top of all this crazy shit happening with search, ad costs are continuing to rise, like, in a in a big way. Like, this this is kind of mind blowing for me that, you know, the average CPC on Facebook is up over 90% since 2020. And it’s probably not going down, but, like, it’s getting really expensive to buy the traffic that it’s getting harder for us to acquire organically. And so what is a savvy I said customer acquisition strategist because that’s what we are. But if you wanna use the word SEO, you can do that too. What are you gonna do? 

This is where own media really starts to make a lot of sense. Who here is familiar with the term own media? It’s like a general sense. So about about half okay. About half of you. So the the idea of own media is not a new idea. There’s a lot of companies that are in other industries that have been doing this for a long time. It’s it’s newish, in other verticals like the the Redfin example is a fantastic one from Andrew. I’m so glad he actually brought that up. It’s newerish for software, but media companies, publishing companies, they’ve been doing this for a long time, like a decade. This is a screenshot from an incredible article from Glenn Alsop, who everybody probably already knows who he is. But if you haven’t read this article about this sort of monopoly that’s been going on, so I’ve kind of behind the scenes, it’s a fascinating article. But this is how these companies who are doing, you know, buying and building and growing these properties are able to get traffic at this level. Right? This this is this is category creation travel traffic. And so, like I was saying, owned media is not a new strategy. Here’s some, you guys probably recognize most of the logos on the left. Here’s assets that they bought. Oh, my slide did a fun thing with the title there. These are the assets they bought on the right. And this is one of my favorite quotes that I’ve ever seen from Dharmesh, one of the founders of HubSpot, not new to marketing, but the idea that the next generation modern software companies are going to be building media companies inside of them, which is exactly what I’m doing at Semrush, and it’s what I would challenge or encourage you to start thinking of doing for your brands, your customers, is is to capture more of this. And and there’s there’s two real there’s a lot of reasons, but there’s two real reasons that, owned media is really attractive. And they are because it lowers your acquisition costs and on average, it increases your LTV. So here’s just how the owned media sort of fits into the bubble. Right? So we’ve got earned media, paid media, and owned is really that piece, that again, it’s moving out of date. So, like, websites and blogs is when how this was described when this idea first came about. It’s not necessarily that anymore. So, like, we’re buying digital assets and, no, I don’t mean crypto, but we’re buying blogs, communities, publishers, apps, newsletters, online, YouTube channels. We’re looking at podcasts. It’s where are our audience going to consume their media, on their incredibly fragmented customer journey? How do we get in front of them more? How do we create more impressions? And how do we do it without having to pay every time to do it? And this is why we’re buying these types of properties.

This is an obvious thing to an SEO audience, but what makes the assets actually valuable? It’s traffic, but more so than traffic, it’s the intent. Right? The direct intrinsic value or market value multipliers even for these assets when we buy them is what are the terms that they rank for? Everybody in here who’s ever done any kind of campaign has, you know, we’ve all leveraged paid data to get clean attribution on which keywords are driving sales. And then we we, you know, build our SEO strategies around targeting those keywords and we pay attention to who has those, you know, the the brand share, click share, impression share of those terms across our most important keywords. And if you want to think about this in terms of a market share, there’s two there’s two things that I think are interesting to consider. One is we, at least internally, are no longer talk no longer talking about total addressable market when we are looking at SEO and we’re looking at traffic and we’re looking at asset visibility. We’re now looking at total available clicks. Right? The impressions are important and they’re showing up other places that aren’t attributable to organic search. But, understanding more so that, you know, if we can’t unseat these these other people, we need to do whatever we can to buy them because the share of clicks, is getting smaller, so we need to go get more clicks. And how do we do that? It’s it’s owning more real estate. Right? It’s how do we how do we get from, move from just the first position to the first, to the second, the third, the fifth, the seventh. Like, we want them all ideally. And so, what I was saying is, you know, as organic search showed, this this graphic did not play well either. Yeah. The red line which you see going down here, this is, like, overall, of a group. So this is a big group of the portfolio that I manage. This is a bunch of those sites all put together. And this is what we’re seeing just in the past 12 months. Little less than 12 months. But if you see the red that that slow sort of death in organic, that’s attributable organic search. But that yellow line is direct. We’re also seeing, interestingly enough, which is not on here, we’re also seeing very large increases in referral. So, like, organic in some of these sites might be down 50% year over year, but the combination of direct referral and unknown may be up 60, 65%. So it’s it’s this shift, in the way that people are finding it. But, you know, whatever we can do to continue to have that yellow line, hopefully, at least go up, which is which is, driven a lot by a lot of these acquisitions, is a really important thing to understand. 

So I wanna draw your attention to something here that’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about. It is is anybody in here an affiliate, like an affiliate marketer? No? Okay. Thank god. It’s a bad time to be an affiliate. So the the left side is a screenshot of the, you know, page one, which is inside Semrush in November of 2020, since 2023, but it’s actually 2024. And you what you can’t see up there is there are four, websites that are Semrush affiliates. Here’s a screenshot for the same keyword, which is Semrush versus Ahrefs in March of this year. Those are all sites that there’s now zero rankings on page one for affiliate websites, and those are three sites that we now own. And so, this is the the practical manifestation of exactly what I’m talking about. This is why I think this strategy is so important, because we are facing headwinds as an industry. These are what I would consider to be probably the ten biggest headwinds that I think most of us are aware of but we need to be having conversations about with our clients, stakeholders, teams, leadership, investors. The first one is that the ecosystem and the attribution around that ecosystem is shifting. Right? More impressions, lower attributable traffic, lower less clicks. The SERP is changing faster than it ever has before, and that’s not gonna slow down. The amount of tests that are happening, the the I don’t I don’t know if anybody in here has has, run a query for, like, things to do in the city. I saw one, for New York, yesterday. That was like it had to be 1800 pixels long. It was I mean, it was not just the whole page. It was like multiple scrolls. And that’s that’s again, I think that’s unlikely to change. So trying to keep up with that is something we need to be aware of. AI content and the saturation point that we’re starting to hit in some industries, it’s now getting harder to forecast. Right? So like leadership inside Semrush wants to know, hey, we have seen some organic traffic losses for these keywords. How do we how do we get this traffic back? What, you know, what when are we gonna recover this traffic that that we’ve lost on these terms for these assets? And the the real answer is we’re not. The total amount of clicks is is never coming back. It it’s it’s it’s gone in a lot of ways. The pie has physically gotten smaller.

The, volatility in the algorithm I would also say the volatility of even with AIOs. Right? Like, Google, you know, goes up 50% increase then turns it down by 25%. And these are not they don’t seem like large numbers, but they’re they’re huge when you consider, you know, the six trillion queries that Google processes every year. Budget for this. This is something that probably everybody feel is feeling right now a little more than than usual is the budget pressure and the skepticism in a lot of ways around the ROI from SEO as a channel. This has not ever been something we’ve really had to prove because the there was always some form of attribution and and the, conversion rates historically have always been so much higher from organic traffic. We’re we’re starting to see, leadership doubt, you know, sort of what’s possible right now because there’s so much uncertainty, I think, because of AI. Zero click search dominance, brand authority as a ranking currency. So, like, this is an interesting one from an own media perspective because what I think and this is kind of funny because we’re kind of going backwards in some ways. 

So one of my first ever companies, this was in 2008, one of our strategies was we would spin up microsites. We even built a little CMS to help us do it. It was like CodeIgniter and WordPress cobbled together. It was it was pretty shitty, but it worked. We just build a bunch of sites, like, targeting, like, just, like, you know, a bucket of terms, and we’d all rank back to our client sites. And that, like, microsite strategy, which is spammy, it worked though back then. I think we’re gonna see sort of the rise of microsites all over again because not everybody wants to go out or not everybody has the budget to go out and buy the the big part or the big competitors or buy the big assets in their space. But there’s it’s now easier than ever to create a website, fill it up with half decent content. Link building is changing a little bit, but I also think links are also more expense, more, important than ever before. And that all sort of feeds this narrative into this idea behind owned media. Right? The more sites you can have that are within the realm, they have visibility among your audience, especially across their customer journey. The more links you can acquire, the more mentions you can acquire. These are all things that we know we’re training LLMs and and just sort of trying to get ahead and be proactive of where search is heading. Multi-platform search fragmentation. This this number scares me. I’ve got a bunch of Gen Z siblings, and, like, the way that they look for information, it just shocks me. Like, they they it is completely normal for them to start their searches on Instagram and TikTok. It doesn’t mean they’re getting good information, but that’s the behavior that that we’re seeing. And, you know, kids are now being raised on screens. And I just saw this is this is just, like, not to me, a 56% TikTok and Instagram for product searches. It’s wild. I won’t talk about this at all because I think other people have already been up here, have already done a way better job. And if you really want to know anything about EEAT, just talk to Lily or follow Lily anyway. 

So let’s look at some of the unit economics around what I’m talking about because this is the stuff these are questions I always get are like, well, how do you how do you guys decide what this is what this is worth? And, like, some of the more interesting conversations that I get to have are when I get to talk to people about buying non monetized assets, which is just a a fun kind of quirk because you still have to figure out evaluation on them. And I’m gonna show you exactly how to do that right now. I’m gonna it’s gonna be it’s gonna be a lot of numbers, but I’ll try to talk through it. And if anybody wants to talk more about the nerdy finance shit afterwards, I’m happy to. So the commonly known acronyms, and we are an acronym industry, are that you guys will probably all be familiar with, right, is customer acquisition cost, monthly recurring revenue, lifetime value. The lesser known ones, and this is more more specifically for SaaS, but this is the this is the most practical example that I can provide, is FP. So first payment, conversion rate to first payment, and referral rate. And that referral rate number is actually extremely important. So we’ll walk through a real life opportunity. So let’s say we wanted to build a high value. Let’s say, like, $10 million plus exit value. We want to build a high value website. So let’s pick a a vertical. We’ll go I chose the payment automation software vertical because the multiples are insane in this vertical. And we said say we want our buyer target to be Tipalti. If you don’t know Tipalti, they’ve raised over $700 million – their value last valuation the last time of their raise was in ‘21 at a little over $8 billion. So we go and we look at their most valuable keywords. What are the most valuable keywords? Right? They are a mix of accounting terms, full funnel terms around tax, payments, procurement, financial calculators, whole bunch of platform comparisons. So what would I do if I was gonna build something instead of buy something with that as my target acquire acquisition? That that company is the the target acquirer. I would probably go spend a cent and register a nice dot com right here with some exact match, stuff going on. And then I would scope out what it would take me to sort of get to a minimum viable amount of traffic that I could monetize. So for these guys, let’s say spend $20,000 a month, for at $2,000 dollars an article, so five articles a month, say a $50,000  initial link budget at roughly a $1,000 per link, which is decent pricing in the finance space. Each piece of content generates will say when it’s fully baked, so five or six months after these posts are live, these pieces of content are live depending on the keyword difficulty, obviously. But let’s say we can give them each to 500 visits. So roughly 100,000 visits per month on 200 pieces of content give or take. So total initial 12 month investment to get this thing sort of seeded is about a quarter of a million dollars.

So the idea is is that, you know, we’re we’re hitting some publishing tranches. There it takes time for the pieces to start to build to build content. You hit a little bit of that flywheel assuming that you’re able to actually drive this traffic. So this is this exercise is in a little bit of a a vacuum because I’m not assuming that a lot of these terms are gonna get completely, gobbled up by AIOs, which is what’s realistically probably gonna happen. But let’s say, you know, after 30 months based on this publishing schedule, we’re at 100,000 visits and then here’s where stuff gets fun. So let’s say we have 100,000 visits per month that we’re not paying for and we have a referral rate of around 1%. So that’s like essentially the click through rate from our site, AP Automation Pro, to to palti[.]com. So how much traffic can we actually send to that site per month? It’s highly qualified traffic, though. That’s a really important part. So it’s only 1,000 visits a month, but these are people that you’re you’re driving very specifically into solutions. We’ll say that we’re able to convert them to a first payment of 0.25%. That’s reasonable. That first payment value, because this is enterprise software, is $10,000. Let’s say their LTV and their LTV is way higher than this. But just for the sake of this, we’ll say the LTV is 18 months. And so every month, that website our website is generating $25,000 dollars in first payments and adding about $450,000 in incremental LTV to this business. So here’s a if you don’t like the numbers all over the place, here’s like what that would look like in terms of a funnel. So the reason so, what that means is for every 400 visits from AP Automation Pro, right, Topology generates one new customer. And so on average, the important thing about knowing these these unit economics is we know that what the website converts to a first payment at, we know exactly how much money we can spend to acquire that visit.

For most SaaS companies in and even especially enterprise companies, 30% of LTV is about the right target. Right? We always, any SaaS person will tell you LTV to CAC is like the number one thing that management cares about, investors care about, Wall Street cares about. And so anytime we can do it, an LTV to CAC over three, we’re good. If it’s over four, we’re doing cartwheels. So if we we assume a 30% target, that means we are willing to spend or Topalti should be willing to spend $150,000 to acquire a new customer. With this, after 24 months on our traffic ramp, we’re actually able to acquire that same customer for, like, about half the cost. This is the real power behind owning more of that total brand journey and leveraging own media whether you’re building or buying. But it’s it’s buying and not always folding in, which is a strategy that I ran a playbook I ran for a long time in my previous agency life. But buying, operating, adding value, how do you how do you take up as much real estate, earn as many of those clicks that are left in the universe as you possibly can. Did anybody get any questions? Thanks.

Mike King: Next speaker is Andrew Prince. And Andrew is the senior SEO manager at Rocket. He has 13 pairs of glasses and I’ve seen all of them on Zoom calls because SEO isn’t the only thing he needs clear vision for. Andrew has lived in four states, which means he’s optimized everything except his forwarding address. He approaches SEO like a survivor challenge, outwit the algorithm, outplay the competition, outlast the updates. So today, he’s going to be talking about Navigating a $14 million Domain Migration. Everybody make some noise for Andrew Prince.

Andrew Prince: Hello. Hello. I’m gonna start off with an apology that Elton John is not here, but you do have a Rocketman. And the crowd groans it. That’s the worst joke, promise, but I had to. So this is a really, really cool opportunity to talk about a case study of a gigantic migration that we did at Rocket. So we had a mission, and it was acquire the domain name rocket[.]com, migrate a site to it by the Super Bowl, and kind of pull an Apple. Right? Rank for the term rocket and start getting the entity to change for that term. How big of a challenge would that be? Only the fourth largest domain purchase on record behind voice[.]com, chat[.]com, and nfts[.]com. So the next thing is that it was Q3. The Super Bowl is February 9th. So a very, very short timeline. And then I’m not someone who tends to look at keyword difficulty but Rocket’s a 95. 

So not easy. Also, the old owner of Rocket[.]com was an aerospace engineering company, so completely different entity. Bianca Anderson too referenced Katy Perry going to space. So also have to compete with that and Elon Musk blowing up SpaceX rockets all the time on that SERP. 

So why in the world would we want to do this? Well, Rocket has many different brands some of which you may recognise. So as the largest retail mortgage lender, we have Rocket Mortgage. All those ads of do you have subscriptions that you don’t know if you’re paying for? That’s Rocket Money. Our founder Dan Gilbert owns the Cleveland Cavaliers. There’s Rocket Arena. All these separate brands, sites, teams that we have in our ecosystem. But the main goal of Rocket is to sell homes, get mortgages, right? Many of these brands play a role in that home ownership ecosystem. Rocket Money. Let’s clean up your financial situation. Rocket Loans. Get a debt consolidation loan and get out of debt. You have RocketCard. So hey, you can get some money towards a down payment by using this credit card. There’s HomeSearch with Rocket Homes. There’s the mortgage side. So we’re maintaining all these different brands that don’t have that much cohesion but play into this end to end homeownership experience. And our issue is that Rocket Mortgage has this gigantic brand and all these other ones we spend time working on but they’re not quite at the level of mortgage. They share one thing in common and it’s this Rocket branding. So a couple of years ago, it was actually a few months before I started, the SEO team had a meeting. They’re like, Do you want to be really cool? If you just bought rocket[.]com and built this all in one homeownership platform, wouldn’t that be great? And it was kind of that SEO pipe dream of like, what if? But when you have legal challenges, you have different tech teams, different setups. Even in Detroit we have dozens of buildings downtown and some of these different teams sit in completely separate buildings. So it was a bit of a pipe dream and something we kind of shelved. Plus, in the summer of 2023, rocket[.]com got sold from an aerospace engineering company to a defense company. So it already changed hands that summer.  

So what does it actually take to be able to make a decision like this? It takes a visionary. And this man right here, Jonathan Mildenhall, is the most visionary marketer I’ve ever had the privilege to work with. He used to be the CMO at Airbnb. He led the integrated marketing teams at Coca Cola. He’s a board member of very prominent brands. And he had a vision to make Rocket one of the most culturally significant, inclusive, and optimistic brands in all of America. It’s a pretty audacious goal. So how do you make that happen? The first thing is let’s have more cohesion across all of the different Rocket brands. So have a similar font, logo, colors. Have matches across all of them. You see it, you understand that it’s Rocket. Some of our brands kind of came off like funny. We had the Rocket Homes, like Barbie and a Kendrick commercial. People are trying to buy a home. That’s really stressful. It takes a lot of time. It’s difficult. Humour in buying a home, although it’s remembered, it’s not really what we’re trying to accomplish. So we have a new voice and tone that’s a compassionate trailblazer. And then we needed a core concept, right? You look at a Nike, an Apple, things of that nature, they have this concept of like a just do it, right? So our core creative idea of owning a home is part of the American dream. So when three simple words of own the dream, when people think of Rocket, we want them to associate it with those three words. So how are we going to get into the market? We’re marketers, so a Super Bowl ad. So at the Super Bowl, we were going to announce this own the dream core creative idea. And hey, SEO team, we want to have a rocket[.]com website up. 

So we had to get to work. What in the world are we going to put on this site in only a few months? So we thought through all these various ideas. Is it just a landing page and we get people to the different Rocket brands? Is it just take all the existing sites and throw them on different subdomains and hey, they’re on the same domain but they still operate completely separately? Do we only bring a few core brands short term for this while we think about what we need to plan for longer term? We thought through all of these approaches and had to go to our leadership and say, Here’s the risk assessment tied to each of these. Here’s data for them. Here’s visuals of it because just throwing logic on a decision this big can be really hard for visual learners. So what would a site actually look like? And then SEOs can’t just make that big of a business decision as far as what goes. So talk to legal, talk to tech. What’s actually feasible? We didn’t want to recommend something, get buy in, and then it wouldn’t even be able to have legal approval and all of that in a short timeframe. And then, of course, case studies. Who’s done it well and who’s done it maybe not so well? The hard thing is when you have something of this type of size and this level of brand, it’s kind of hard to find things at the same scale, but we did the best that we could. So this was our core recommendation. Take Rocket Homes, put it onto Rocket[.]com. So things like listing pages and locations, market reports. But we needed to protect our cash cow of Rocket Mortgage, right? We couldn’t harm that. So we left that as is but took a lot of the things that are part of the homeownership ecosystem like rates calculators, like VA loans, FHA loans, those type of pages, and put them on rocket[.]com but no indexed them. So people could get from home search to mortgage and still have that ecosystem while we protect the Rocket Mortgage brand and plan for the long term. 

And so you think of the financial side of this slide that I showed earlier. We wanted to take our biggest brand, which is Rocket Mortgage, and just go one step before it to Rocket Homes and the home ownership side because it’s the next clearest step. How do we get people to mortgage? It’s not like Rocket Money, all of a sudden you get a mortgage, right? But searching for a home, getting a mortgage makes a lot more sense to connect those two. Home search, there are some big players that absolutely dominate, right? Like they get so much traffic from an SEO perspective. They have huge brands. But figuring out how mortgage works is not the easiest thing. Many of them, like Zillow, bought a mortgage company and they’re trying to figure out we have all of this brand and website traffic. How do we figure out the actual mortgage side that makes money? The cool thing is that Rocket’s figured that out. Rocket knows how to make money through mortgage. It has to figure out home search. And so that’s where the big part of Rocket[.]com’s idea was, is let’s put some investment into the home search side of things.

So we have to get started. And I simplified some of this to seven steps that I’ll go through in this talk. But when I say it wasn’t like week one, we do this. Week two. No, it was Tuesday we do this. Thursday we do this. Which as SEOs, it’s so odd because we’re used to like just so many different things. Or what if the SERPs change? Or what if this happens? Or there’s an algorithm update. This is like a business need, not an SEO need. So we need to say, by Tuesday, we’re having all of our redirects mapped out. By Thursday, we’re having our robots.txt file because we had other teams that relied on this in a very, very short time span. So the first thing we did, and I honestly think, looking back, it was the best thing that we did in this entire process, is launch a splash page. This was the old Aerojet Rocketdyne page that existed on Rocket[.]com, so quite literally a rocket ship. So we’re in homeownership. How in the world do we change the entity of Rocket[.]com in such a short time span? The first thing to do is just seed the domain and the content and make some connections that were homeownership before we actually do the gigantic migration.

So had this header of Rocket. Again, it’s not Rocket Companies. It’s not Rocket Homes. We wanted just that term Rocket, used our branding, talked about some of the different brands in the ecosystem. We had six different links to some of the various Rocket websites and brands. What I think is cool is the last line of this is a bit of an Easter egg that gave away that core creative idea we were sharing at the Super Bowl. So the American dream is owned, not rented. And so part of that own the dream kind of hidden within that. So we had some metrics we had to track. What does success look like? I had an executive a week in after the splash page launched, and he goes, Is it working? Are we starting to get traffic for it? And I said, we have a KPI actually about losing traffic and that being a positive thing instead of gaining. We want to stop showing up for Aerojet Rocketdyne terms. We want to stop showing up for aerospace engineering, and that’s a success because it means that we’re disconnecting from what the website used to be, and that was the whole point of the splash page. We also wanted to make sure our index pages were where we wanted them, meaning one, just the splash page.

We realized when L3Harris bought the site, they redirected the home page but not dozens of others. This is one of the use cases where the GSE removal tool was actually very helpful and necessary. Knowledge Panel had changes. SERP brandings, we launched the splash page, and it still said L3Harris above rocket[.]com. That was something we needed to monitor. Favicon, logos changing. So all things to monitor. Entity and linking, this is still ongoing, and this is a big part of this timeline.

I would not recommend this long term, but again, we were wondering for the term rocket, and we had a very short amount of time to be able to make it happen. So I reached out to all of our tech teams on our various sites and said, hey, in that About section in the footer, can we just throw a link that says rocket and link it to this Flash page? And some of them were like, we can put it in the main nav or put it in a prominent place on the home page. I’m like, I actually don’t want people to click this at all. It’s literally just seeding to Google that hey, this thing exists. We want to associate it with this term and it’s part of the Rocket brands. And so very quickly, in only a handful of days, I’m like, man, this is nice. Can we do these migrations more often? Because we got this implemented across all these sites in a short time span. And then one of the most robust corporation/organization schemas that I’ve ever seen. So we put ten people, Dan Gilbert, the founder, Varun Krishna, our CEO, a lot of people that we wanted associated with the Rocket brand. And then we nested underneath that eight of the Rocket organizations, so Rocket Mortgage, Rocket Money, Rocket Loans, etc., etc., and did same ads schema with their Wikipedia pages if they’re available, their social profiles, their contact information. We essentially were trying to tell a search engine as much information on this splash page about Rocket as we could to try to differentiate it from the aerospace engineering side of things.

This was really interesting. So when we launched the splash page, Aerojet Rocketdyne originally had L3 Harris in their knowledge panel. As soon as the splash page went up, it reverted back to rocket[.]com because it used to have that site and there was such a strong connection from that company to that website. So that was something where we needed to figure out how do we separate this splash page from this knowledge panel for Aerojet Rocketdyne. There’s the three vertical dots to the right of an organic listing that you can click. And it says about this source. Gives you some really great information as far as what sources Google is pulling in and what it thinks of you. So Aerojet Rocketdyne, when we launched the splash page, was originally the source. Over time, you can see on the right it switched to Rocket, but it was still showing Aerojet Rocketdyne sources. So it’s something we continue to work through, tried to figure out how do we remove those links on there, how do we update things on those sources as much as we can and track the changes over time.

Now SEMRush doesn’t impact directly what you do in search, but some of these third party tools can give you hints as to how these entities are put together. So we threw Rocket[.]com into SEMRush and realized it thought that we were Aerojet Rocketdyne. What I found out is that SEMRush just uses Crunchbase to be able to populate these. So I went to Crunchbase, went to Aerojet Rocketdyne’s, uploaded L3 Harris as their website, and then went to Rocket Companies and made it rocket[.]com and, oh, it fixed it. Does that necessarily help you directly in search? It’s incremental. And when it comes to entities, that’s a huge thing. 

Oh, boy, this one. Main navigations on sites with a couple million pages are obviously huge to figure out internal linking. And so I asked someone, do we have a Figma file of the mock ups of what the main navigation will look like that I can leave comments on? When I got this Figma file, I went in and found all sorts of other page template designs. So I started making comments to the point where they said, I think we need to have a meeting to figure out what SEO thinks about some of this. Because again, we were changing colors, fonts, logos, Didn’t realize that meant an entire redesign and not just a rebrand for Rocket[.]com. So it got to the point where I annoyed the heck out of them and they said, we’re gonna have this war room thing where everyone that goes in there needs to have an NDA. It’s gonna be a small group of people, and an hour or two every day we’re gonna get in there and bring up a page template and talk through it, and then we need approval from five teams, product, tech, design, legal, and SEO, which is awesome to be able to have sign off privileges in that process. 

We created the URL structure. It’s been communicated upfront and documented what the standards were there. We need to make sure that mortgage got no index. 1H1, I know some of you are like, well technically you could have more of the biggest font on the page. I did a talk last year about accessibility and SEO. They go hand in hand. I’m going to get on my soapbox for a moment. I think that we have a moral obligation to leave the web better than how we found it, and especially the websites that we work on. That starts first and foremost by making it accessible for everyone, including those with disabilities, seen and unseen. So make your websites accessible first, then you can worry about SEO. And so I’m going to sit up here and talk about correct header structures, not for SEO but for accessibility. And if we all thought with that mindset and we went to teams and said, we could actually get sued because we’re not accessible, that actually gets stuff done in large organizations sometimes. But it didn’t happen, right? So we set these standards. We communicated it. Some of these templates took the H1s and turned them into H2s or the main navigation wasn’t able to be crawled and the links weren’t found. Because we set those expectations and standards and got buy in upfront, it wasn’t, hey, create an argument as to why we should fix this. No, like we got buy in and standards upfront. You didn’t meet them. So now we need to make sure that they’re fixed. On a very short time span, we were able to shift engineering resources from other teams in cases where we set standards that weren’t reached and need to be fixed.

So then with QA, a lot of times it’s like, oh, does this link work? And is this H1 and title tag what they need to be? But you need metrics tied to it, too, especially when you’re dealing with a couple million pages. So we took Rocket Homes and used those metrics as benchmarks and then also set goals. So we said, absolute worst case is we want to be the same as what Rocket Homes was. But if we have more resources, if we do things a certain way, this is what we could achieve. And so when we ran crawls and understood Core Web Vitals and various page feed metrics, things of that nature, we were able to track that against it and say, well, these pages look really pretty and they look better, but they’re slower, and here’s the potential repercussions. Do we want it to perform or do we want it to look good? And how do we balance that mix? Indexation rates, when you’re dealing with a couple million, the biggest thing you can do is have the most amount of pages in the indexes you can. And then do they convert? So we set benchmarks for all those, ran a bunch of crawls, found some things like image alt text was not updated properly for some of our home listings. We found that our robots.txt file, which we actually block everything and then have an allow list rather than allow everything and block things because we found that that helps remove a lot of just the crazy crawlers and things that come in and random parameterized URLs that end up there.

And so the PR team originally said, let’s launch rocket[.]com and do brand refreshes at the same time. What they realized is that the website would overshadow a lot of the brand refreshes, and from a business perspective, the new branding needed to take precedence, so we pushed those up a week. And I don’t know, I think like I worked four overnights in like a week and a half, so my sleep schedule was all messed up. We redid Rocket Mortgage, Rocket Loans, things of that nature with the new font, logo, colors, etc. And so if we’re building an end to end homeownership platform, we used to have this global navigation where it was like, Go to this site. Go to this site. Well, we’re trying to put all of them in one place, so we killed that. The chat was up there. We’re like, Kill that. Branding’s old. So you can see more white space, more aesthetically pleasing, rounded corners. We use the AI chatbot now, so just cleaner design. 

And then January 16, this was my Super Bowl. So it was a Super Bowl project. This was my Super Bowl. We actually launched the site. And it looks pretty, honestly. We’re going to put a bunch of spends. We’re going to run a Super Bowl commercial. As an SEO sometimes, we’re like, oh, but this is going to be really slow. Like, sure. But the homepage on a two million page website, it’s going to be mostly branded. Make sure the navigation and the footer is optimized and linked well internally. We wanted people to do home search. I think we made it abundantly obvious what you’re supposed to do when you get to this page. The one thing I’ll say is that the H1 originally was Find Your Dream Home. And I was like, with Rocket, right? With Rocket? With Rocket? We’re going to put Rocket in there? And so we got that in. I got my extra two words in there. And then two days later, on that Saturday, is when we actually put the redirects live. So we had the site up for two days without any of the redirects in place because we didn’t want to launch it, have the redirects happen, have some sort of tech issue, have to redo that, and you have all sorts of cross domain issues. So we waited two days, implemented the redirects, and it worked unbelievably well. 

So how did it work? This is such a cool thing to send to executives. They love this. Put your name next to Amazon, Walmart, Google. When we looked in SEMrush, we saw out of 10 million sites for most of the first week, we were top 10 as far as most keywords gained with the rocket[.]com website. So next to nothing on that domain, right? It was a splash page, so it didn’t get a whole lot before. First week, all of a sudden, over a million keywords, 1.4 million traffic. What’s crazy is you take the Rocket Home site and then you look at this and it was doing several multiples better. So when you think of domain migrations, usually it’s like for a period of time, you’re going to lose X%, and this is our expectation. I almost had to reset expectations that we weren’t going to do this well. I was like, hold on. They’re like, oh my gosh, we solved the problem. And I was like, Google’s kind of testing us out, figuring out how we’re going to perform. But it was really cool to see the short term performance on it. And then we had the Super Bowl. So how many of you remember the Rocket commercial? Right? I won’t sing up here. That was Mike yesterday and Busta. That’s not my talent, but country roads. And I was able to be in the office for the Super Bowl, and we’re all swaying and singing, and everyone deserves their shot. The American dream. Own the dream. We put that core creative idea out there. And then, like, as an SEO, how cool is this? Like, it’s not just like Rocket, but like Rocket[.]com, like, Hey, hey, I did that thing. Then our team is just unbelievable. Was the first ever transition from a Super Bowl commercial into a live in stadium activation where they got the whole crowd timed up to sing Country Roads when it cut back from commercial. And the TV person said, a moment of unity inspired by Rocket. Which, I mean, I had chills up here. Just when I heard that that idea was happening, I’m like, I work for a pretty damn cool company that’s able to really push the boundaries on some things. And we used some of that creative from the Super Bowl commercial as our new background. I know Rand talked earlier, and he used to do that thing on a conference stage where he’s like, Pull out your phone, search this term, scroll down, click it, and then let’s see how much time it takes to jump up. Like it works. So if we wanted to rank for Rocket, that homepage only had a handful of words, big old picture, all of that. So we ranked like, I don’t know, 6th, 8th around there throughout the country. I was monitoring the night of the Super Bowl and within three minutes I looked at 10 different locations around the US and we ranked number one for the term rocket. So if you want to rank really well for a really difficult term, just spend $10+ million on a Super Bowl commercial and you’re good to go. 

Keyword research was not going to find this. No one’s writing about rocket[.]com because they didn’t know what rocket[.]com was. Right? So we anticipated the needs of our users. They knew RocketMortgage[.]com. They know RocketMoney[.]com. They don’t know what Rocket[.]com is. They just watched this commercial and learned about what it is. So Kevin, one of our content writers, wrote this What is Rocket[.]com Learning Center article. And the night of the Super Bowl, it showed up in the AI Overviews, the featured snippet. And if you put in the ChatGPT, WhatIsRocket[.]com? It all showed up. So it was a really, really great strategy by our content team to be proactive, to think about what are people going to ask and what questions are they going to have, not like, Oh, the MSV for this is X, Y, and Z. 

Now what? This came out. Gianna posted something of, hey, have your crawl rates gone down and your server response time’s gone up? Like, yeah, ours did. How’d we know that? Because we track it with dashboards now because we set those benchmarks and those goals so we’re able to get better not just because of this project but long term at the company. And Bing, even after the Super Bowl, it was kind of embarrassing, honestly. If you searched for Rocket, it would show Aerojet Rocketdyne. And our logo wasn’t there. We went into Bing Webmaster Tools and made some updates. We reached out to Fabrice Cannell. Fabrice is the best. And got us a bump up in the amount of pages that we could submit in IndexNow. So we really turned around our Bing performance. This is a oh slide, right, where, all right, we’re at 1.4 million, and then all of a sudden it’s down to 430k the following month. But look at those keywords. It went from 1.1 million to 1.4. So we realized we don’t have a visibility issue. We have a ranking issue now. So we show up for a bunch of things. Google saw that we’re not being engaged with as well as our competitors. That’s seen in a bunch of third party tools. It’s like we’ve work to do. We need to figure out how do we make it more sticky, how do we get people to stay on the rocket site.

And thank you to the conference organizers because they put myself and then Nick Eubanks. So Nick, I’m going to throw this to you. If you can’t beat them, buy them. So I had no idea that this was going to happen. We’re working on Rocket[.]com. We’re doing all this. And then they’re like, Oh, by the way, new announcement. We’re gonna buy Redfin. So where I said that HomeSearch is trying to figure out Mortgage, and Mortgage is trying to figure out HomeSearch, rather than figuring it out, like, what if you could just buy it? So it’s supposed to close in Q3. I’m so excited to think about building that end to end home ownership ecosystem and having Redfin be a part of our team. And then a week later, we just happened to spend $9+ billion on the largest loan servicer in the United States in Mr. Cooper. This is supposed to close in Q4. When it does, Rocket will service one in six mortgages in the US. Honestly, from a regulatory standpoint, for the next few years in the US, I think we’ll see a lot more of this. So I know in SEO it’s like AI inefficiencies and automation.

I think a lot more acquisitions from larger companies to scale quickly in those problems is a great way to go. I know that I personally, dealing with a company that thinks this way, every week I sit there and I think about competitive research and keyword research and things I’ve done, and I think of, If we could just buy that company, would it solve our problems? I really like the tech of how they built this thing on this site, which is what Rocket did to buy Dictionary[.]com and Thesaurus[.]com. A lot of people don’t know that Rocket owns those. They liked some of the technology and the setup of Dictionary[.]com. Did we want to be like a dictionary site? No. We wanted some of the tech. We bought it. So acquisitions can be a really great way to be able to scale things, whether it’s behind the scenes or Redfin Mr. Cooper.

So a couple of takeaways here. Build your brand. And by build your brand, build it the right way. So we were building Rocket Money, building Rocket Loans, building Rocket Mortgage, and now it’s like building Rocket. So that works for Rocket and what we’re going towards. Getting budget to claim knowledge panels and update things is not the prettiest, most fun thing in the world. But I think sometimes in SEO, there are table stakes and being able to control your entities as much as you can or putting organization scheme on your website. Are you going get a bunch of traffic and results from that? Probably not. But it’s table stakes. You need to do it. With executives, set very clear expectations, set standards up front, get their buy in so that if things don’t go the way that it’s expected, you have documentation that they said they would do it so then you don’t have to re argue it after the fact. And then have very clear roadmaps to mitigate risk. Being able to escalate things on short timelines with migrations is very important. 

Then, like, have a good time, right? I am a Pistons fan, so I won’t say too much about beating the Knicks at the garden the other night. But I was standing outside of the Garden looking at the two big video boards that were out there and seeing all the fans. I’m like, man, this is so cool. And I turn, and on the street corner is a three story high Own The Dream Rocket banner. Like, man, that’s cool. So I’m taking pictures, and I’m sending it to the marketing team because, like, I sit on the same floor as them. We’re SEOs, and sometimes dealing with other teams, it’s like, oh, we need to do this. We need to do that. We work for some really talented people. Like, I work at an awesome company. That was my favorite career project I got to work on. It was stressful as all get out, and the timeline was insane, but now I get to be on a stage talking about it because I have those opportunities at my job. So thank you. Appreciate it.

Fajr Muhammad: Hello. Hello. That’s funny that I have my emotional support water bottle here, so very apt. Hello, everybody. I’m super excited to be here, not because it’s our conference, but because I’m excited to talk about something really, really important to me. Mike kind of teased it up, I’ve been in the industry for 15+ years. And you know I’ve never really done the circuit, so you guys might not know a lot about me. So I’ll introduce myself. I’m Faja Muhammad, VP of Content Strategy and Growth at iPullRank. I’m a writer, a content strategist for the last 15 years. I was a fashion blogger. So I was a dyed in the wool internet millennial. I’m a three-peat iPullRank employee, a boomerang. And to Mike’s point, at iPullRank, we do technical SEO at the helm and behalf of Mike King. But we also deliver high performance content strategy and production at the intersection of data and creative. So what does that mean? We take our really detailed technical recommendations and we turn them into actual content and creative. And we’ve been able to do it for some really cool brands, right? We’ve done some cool shit over the years. Gonna drop some swears guys.

But things are changing, Like the last four days are any indication, content and SEO in all of the byproducts are, the forces are impacting us. And we’re gonna have to shift. So as the world shifts and audience needs evolve, we’re shifting too because if we’re nothing, we’re nothing if not flexible in our approach. We want the end goal, but how we get to that end goal is flexible. So let’s be real guys. I’m gonna hold our hands while I say this. We’ve created a content problem. Guilty. There’s too much content. And I know that’s subjective, right, because if it was good, then maybe there wouldn’t be too much of it. But between the creator economy, publishers, brands, we’re just drowning in a historic amount of content. Everything’s content to the point that nothing is content. The stats are staggering, 3.7 million YouTube videos are posted a day, 7.5 million blog posts, 34 million TikTok videos. I’m probably responsible for watching about 20 million of those. So more content doesn’t mean more attention, it actually means the inverse, right? The more stuff that we give people, the less that they can pay attention. And ultimately less attention means less engagement. And if that didn’t make matters worse, we’re in an attention recession. Right? Everything’s a recession indicator. I’m from Philly and they just announced that Philly is like the top destination to travel to this year. And somebody said that’s a recession indicator. So I don’t know how to feel about that, but attention spans are dwindling. In the last decade, spans have declined about seventy percent. And if they continue on this path, right, we are ultimately going to be what they say, the attention span of a goldfish. I asked ChatGPT in about nine seconds. So we are all ultimately going to become Dory from Finding Nemo. And we can’t make more attention, right? Like it is finite resource. And we trained audiences to skim, to bounce, to scroll, right, as a byproduct and a function of our industry. And if we want their attention, we’re going to have to earn it differently.

So there’s hope, guys. It’s not all doom and gloom. Oh, let’s go back. Oh, my meme moment. My team asked me to put a meme in, so am I the drama? I think it I think it was a fail. But there’s hope. Right? User behaviors are changing. On the opposite end of the spectrum, things like watching YouTube shorts, scrolling on TikTok, those engagements or those activities are increasing, right? Like there’s a level of ephemeralness and high frequency to those actions and engagements that may not change, right? But on the opposite end of the spectrum, we’re seeing the rise of newsletter subscriptions, right? We’re seeing the rise of sharing long form content. I think Substack just reached about three million subscribers, and they’ve got projected 20% growth. So audiences are actually asking for more in-depth, low frequency, high value actions. And as marketers, think we really should be focusing in this upper quadrant, right? You got guys like Kai Sena who are like breaking the live streaming model. 

Going live has allowed brands and creators to foster true lasting connections with their audiences. And if this is what users want, then ultimately we need to figure out a way to give it to them. And the funnel is now a flywheel or a subway map like Devin described a few days ago, or maybe it’s three kids in a trench coat, I really kind of can’t tell you. But it’s a mess essentially, right? The funnel is no longer an inverted pyramid, right? We’re no longer taking users from awareness to consideration to purchase to loyalty, right? And we’re not taking them through that journey on one platform, right? It’s multi channel at this point, it’s multi platform. We’re needing to touch them in many different ways and in many different spaces.

And the last point of setup, ultimately, and the thing that I think has brought us all here today, is that the click is in its villain era, Right? Maybe Google Google has always been the villain. Don’t don’t get me started. But the click through rate is dropping. AI overviews, zero click searches. It’s definitely changing the way in which audiences actually reach content. And it’s doing two really interesting things that I think we have to take note of, right. It’s making the click harder to get, but it’s simultaneously making that click more valuable, right? Like we still need the click, we still need to get audiences to our content, we need them to engage with our brands, but how we do that is ultimately going to be more challenging and then once we do, we’re going to need to make it more impactful. So what does that mean for content strategy and content engagement? I’m not Ms. Cleo, so I don’t have a crystal ball. I have data to support my hypotheses. And ultimately, I think that three things are happening and three shifts are going to need to happen. I think we’re going to need one, engagement metrics are changing. Content is going to be need to be worthy of the scroll. And then last, post click behavior is more valuable. So let’s get into those. Surface level metrics no longer tell the whole story, right?

Content engagement is no longer linear. We looked at the engagement reach benchmarks by platform on social and they’re abysmal, right? Between 2020 and 2024, Instagram dropped from about 90.98% engagement to about 0.36%. Even TikTok, right? The behemoth that TikTok was has declined from 5% engagement rate to about 1.7%. So people are not necessarily engaging in the same way, and the way that we measure engagement ultimately is going to have to change. Things like page views, likes, I don’t know that likes was ever really a true metric, but it was something that we measured, right, are not enough to indicate true interest. We’re going to have to think about the depth of the engagement versus the breadth. And what I think that that looks like is we’re going to have to do the old way giving way to the new way to indicate a true indicator of interest, right. Things like page views are going to give way or be deprioritized in favor of time spent, right. Things that tell us that they landed and they also stayed there. Likes, of course, like yes we want you to like the stuff that we’re creating, the content that we’re providing. But saves tells me something deeper about the psychology behind a person who’s engaging with a piece of content, right? They liked it and they enjoyed it and they want more of it. And then lastly, return visits to subscribes. Right? This is tricky because we want people to consistently come back, but the subscribe is what ultimately gives us the control to ensure that they come back.

Shift two. Content needs to stop the scroll. Now, I need you guys to walk with me a little bit. This is a little woo woo, a little less scientific. Right? This is like the creative of it all. It’s a lot of noise out there, right? Like we are dealing with a lot of stuff between the news cycle, social media, everything, everything, everything, the memes, the GIFs. And in order for our content to do this philosophical or esoteric thing of stopping the scroll, it needs to be worthy to stop the scroll, right? Like is this a piece of content that is ultimately worthy of your audience’s attention, right? Like bow down, like am I worthy? I don’t want anybody to have any content crisis, identity crisises out there. But ultimately it’s about how do we engineer the content to ultimately engage an audience on a deeper level. And where we start is really understanding who our audience is. What do they want? What do they want to see? How do they like to see it? 

So here’s a nifty flowchart, very simple. Ultimately, think that content creation and these questions need to start before you even jump into the actual production of a piece of content. Right? We need to be engineering the content to stop the scroll, not doing it after the fact. So some questions to ask yourself as you are developing, producing blog posts, interactives, videos, etc., etc., is, is your hook strong, right? Do you have something in the first couple of seconds that really grabs the audience? Is your key message clear? Right? Are you clear on what you are asking of this person, right? We use words like audience, user, etc. They’re ultimately a person on the other side having a human experience. And if they’re not, go back and rewrite it. I sound like the terrible English teacher that used to give me bad feedback. To go back and rewrite stuff. Are the visuals compelling? This is important and I think it’s something that we don’t spend enough time on. Marketing and creative, we are diametrically opposed, we’re mortal enemies. But it’s got to look good. It’s actually got to be visually appealing. We know we love the aesthetics. I did not wear a scarf around my neck for utility. So if it doesn’t look good, go back and redo it, make it stronger, make it more beautiful. Is it fresh, distinct, or unexpected? This is interesting, right? Because in our spaces, our industries, we’re dealing with competitors, right? Like there’s nothing quote unquote new to say. But is there a way that you can say the same thing in the way that only you can say it, right? Is your voice and tone maybe a distinction between your competitors? Do you have a particular product offering that you know stands well above and away from the other products and services in your space? And if not, go back and reassess. 

And then lastly, and perhaps most importantly, does it provide immediate value? What is in it for the person or the end user experiencing or engaging with this particular piece of content? And if that’s not clear or there isn’t an inherent takeaway, you can just go back and add it. Third, the last shift, I believe, is ultimately the thing that’s kind of the culmination of the last three days or four days that we’ve been here. Right? Post click behavior is going to be far more telling for us going forward, right? We understand that clicks are declining, and as a result traffic is declining as Mike kicked us off. We don’t know if that traffic is coming back. So what we do with the traffic that we do get is going to be extremely of the utmost importance, right? We did all of this work to get a person to our blog post, to our landing pages, to our product pages, to our videos. What are we going to do once they get there? Instead of going for the big swing, right, I think a lot of marketers and content strategists think, okay we’ve gotten the person here, let’s drive them directly to conversion. Let’s get them in the lead funnel, let’s get them into the application. And sure, if a person has indications and indicators that that is the direction that they’re going in, great. But how about we add micro conversions, right? We do email marketing of course for product, but how about the return of the content newsletter or content marketing for lead gen? I’m also really apt for social retargeting, right. We’ve gotten them on the site, let’s get them pixeled, and let’s continue to remarket and retarget them. 

So I’m going to a little Steve Jobs moment here. And I hope you guys are willing and you go along with this. But I’m curious to know what content made you stop this week. Okay. Maybe it was an article, something you read, maybe it was something that you saw here. Here it’s gone. Oh cool, yes, love you. I paid her to do that. But, yeah, like what stopped you in your tracks, right, made you read it, made you experience it all the way to the end. To you know, close your eyes, maybe don’t close your eyes, do whatever feels comfortable for you, but I’d like for you to call something to mind. And I promise there’s a payoff later. For me, I just saw Sinners and the Ryan Coogler movie, yes, great great movie. I will not spoil it, but I tried to avoid like all the trailers and the teasers because I wanted to go in fresh. And there was one YouTube video that I watched, it’s Ryan and he’s in a dark, you know dark room with the celluloid film behind him, all of the different formats, and he’s walking through, right. And he’s going through the process of shooting centers on IMAX and what that meant for him as an artist, and what that means for moviegoers, and the return to the box office, and all of those things. And if I wasn’t a content marketer, I might have missed that the video was from Kodak. Right? It was a branded piece of content from Kodak that really talked about the artistry. And I did the next thing, right? I went to see Sinner, I took the next desired action. So the the content piece that you have in your mind or the thing that you called that made you stop this week, I imagine that it has similarities in common, right? I think that there are a few common tenets of engaging content. Perhaps it was intriguing, right? Maybe it just was interesting to you or on a topic that you are looking to learn more on. Perhaps it was interactive and it requested or required you to do something, take an action to engage with it in order for the content to progress forward. Maybe it answers your questions, right? If you came from search, you did a query and you actually got a direct result that provided you with an immediate answer. Maybe it was just beautiful, like maybe it was a TikTok video shot in high res looking for travel content and you saw Italy, Portofino, and you were like, yes, adding that to list.

Notice in this list, I don’t say it ranked well, I don’t say that it drove thousands of visits. Right? It’s not necessarily about the the front end or the algorithm of it all. It’s about the experience. Humans are having experiences with content and we have to prioritize those experiences. So what that leads me to is this very mathematical equation, very scientific. SEO plus content strategy equals design or plus design equals resonance. I’m a writer guys, not a mathematician. But essentially to me, the go forward for content strategy and content marketing is experiential. It’s going to be ultimately how the end user feels about a piece of content, how they feel about the experience that you’re offering them. SEO tells us the audience demand, a user’s pain points. Content strategy tells us how to shape the story in order to alleviate those pain points. And design allows us to make it frictionless and seamless so that they have a good experience. And all of that ultimately ladders up to resonance. And Mike talked about Relevance Engineering, and maybe at IiPR we just like to make up our own words for things. We like to define and set the tone for categories. So ultimately resonance is, resonance design is the strategic architecture of content to forge connections with its intended audience, right? And strategic architecture is apt, right? Because this is not something that we can just do, publish a piece of content and pray and hope that it’ll happen.

And I’m going a bit over guys, so let’s keep going. I have got a couple of examples that we’ll breeze through. The low end of design, right. This is the Yale School of Art page. The design’s pretty bad, not really sure where to go once I land here. If I’m an artist and I’m looking to potentially enroll, this is not resonating with me, it’s not providing me with the information or the experience that I need. I have a sneaking theory that somebody’s just keeping that page up there to be funny. Nobody’s ever redesigned this page. On the moderate end, we’ve got the New York Times cooking recipe pages, right? They’re very straightforward, very clear. They got the benefit of being on the New York Times of course, right? But interactive is baked in right into the experience. If I click on this page and I’m not ready to make this pizza dough, I can bookmark it and save it for later. And then my favorite on the higher end of course is this creative types interactive quiz from Adobe. Like I mentioned at the top, I’m a writer, I’m an artist, so I always want to know what I am. What’s my zodiac? What’s my Myers Briggs? What’s my Adobe creative type? And not only is the experience beautiful, it’s straightforward, and it provides me with a great archetype while also being branded. It provides some clear product tie ins, so it’s not purely altruistic. And the performance is great. Right? Adobe owns the SERPs for creative types. The experience ranks for about 4,000 keywords and is driving about 3k monthly visits after its initial launch. So that’s the context, right? What are the forces that are shifting content strategy and content engagement? Some of the shifts that I think are on the horizon.

So what do I think the new rules are? Right? I think that there are three clear takeaways and rules for us to go forward. One, create real content. Two, engage beyond the click. And three, design for interaction over consumption. One, make content that resonates not just exist. Right? So this is just a cool framework essentially, and maybe like a middle finger to AI. Right? We’re gonna create real content, not that fake stuff. But essentially it’s a guiding force for how you actually architect a piece of content that truly resonates with your audience. So R of course very obvious, resonant, something that emotionally connects. You’ve got to understand your audience in order to know what they care about and what they engage with. E, experiential. Does it provide an interactive experience, something immersive that allows them to engage beyond just passive consumption? A, does it provide clear actionable offering, right? And this is a little different than experiential, because experiential is about the design and the experience of it, actionable is about the takeaway, right? What are we offering to them in exchange for their attention? And then L, leveraged. And this one I think we can’t neglect, right? Ultimately when we’re thinking about content, we have this if we build it, they will come mentality. And I believe if we build it, it will just stay there. A new field of dreams. So we’ve got to bake the idea of distribution repurposing and content automatization into the actual design of the content. And if we’re looking for examples, because we love examples, it doesn’t get more real than Spotify wrapped, right? Like how many people have done their Spotify wrapped every single year? Right, right, right. 2.1 million social media mentions, thousands of press mentions, It truly is a piece of content that resonates with something deeply personal for people, our music, listening taste, and history. And I hear you guys, right? You’re like, Fajr, I’m not getting any budget to do a Spotify rant. We’re not going get dev resources to develop something so experiential. We don’t even have the data to do something like that. And I think that that’s fine, right? But ultimately, you can take the framework of real and apply it to all of your content ideas, right? It doesn’t just have to be truly scalable interactive experiences, we can even put the framework to something like article content. 

Rule two, we’re going to have to engage beyond the click. I don’t know what happened to lead gen content marketing. I think we just gave it to the B2B marketers and we said here, this is for you guys, B2C, we won’t do content email, newsletters, newsletters is no longer a thing. And I think that that’s a mistake, right? Because ultimately if the click is the first point, the first inflection point of engagement, we’ve gotten them to click, they’ve landed on the content, they’ve engaged, found it interesting, intriguing, entertaining. Ultimately, we’re missing a step if we don’t capture something from that engagement. Because one, we don’t know if they’re going to click again, We know the click through rates are dropping. So I think we’ve got to seize the moment, right? We’ve got to seize this interaction every single chance we get. Because then ultimately, it just better positions us to be able to nurture and foster those connections and ultimately drive them to conversion. And email is still one of the top performing channels, right? Average open rates of about 32%, click through rates of about 3%. So we can’t shake our head at email any longer. If we’re looking for a really cool example, Morning Brew. The content is the marketing, but it’s also the product. I think that there’s this debate between content being marketing or content being product, and I ultimately think it’s both. Right? It’s your storefront, It lives on your website on dot com. Sure it lives in learning, sure it lives in a dedicated content resource section, but ultimately it is a function of a user having an experience with your website. And content grew, they’re like the model for this, right? They grew their subscription base from 100k to one million subscribers in two years, they’ve got industry high open rates of about 40%. And they continue to use a newsletter first strategy even as they move into other forms of media like video and podcasting. 

And then third, design for interaction over consumption. And this is a tricky one, right? Because I don’t think, I think when we think about interactivity, we think it has to be large scale, We think it has to be quizzes, we think it has to have deep inputs. I’m thinking of like the Patagonia immersive storytelling experiences. And I think we can lower the threshold or the barrier to entry, right? And we don’t have to necessarily do either or, but we can do a blend of both, right? We do want audiences to read our content, right, and to find something valuable. But we could also provide them with the option to bookmark it. If we don’t give them that interaction, then they can’t take it. Scrolling, moving scrolling into gamification. Is there something that within the scroll or the experience of a piece of content they can actually take an action, get a badge, do something fun? And there’s nobody better than Duolingo. Right? Duolingo has changed the game on interactive content learning. I stayed up last night to maintain my streak, I don’t know about everybody else. My nephew has me beat. But they’re essentially taking the idea of gamification and building it into their product, right? They’re also the only company mascot involved in a rat beef, so they got that to their credit. So that was a lot to say about the future of content engagement and where I ultimately think that we’re going. 

And the thing that comes to mind of course is like these are some lofty ideas, Like these are some lofty brands that are investing millions of dollars and tons of resources into the creation of their content experiences, so I’m sure you guys are wondering, where do you go from here? How do you start to implement some of these things into your own content strategies and production pipelines? And I think that there are some simple steps we can take, we don’t have to jump directly into, hey guys, everybody here has got to have a duolingo gamification for your product. Like, that’s not what I’m telling you guys to do. But I think that we can start by understanding our audiences better, right? Customer data, build personas, is there customer segmentation within your organization that you can kind of really dive deeper into to understand their pain points and their needs? You can audit, we love an audit, iPullRank loves an audit. You can review, that’s good, my boss laughed. You can review your current content, right? Put it through the flow chart, put it through the paces, hold it up against the light and see if it shines. And then audit it with the new metrics, right? Like page view, sure, traffic visits, add time on-site on a page level and really see what sticks.

And then lastly, and this is probably my favorite one, ideate, brainstorm. I know we’re all busy and we’re trying to hit our quarterly goals, But you can’t put a limit on creativity and ultimately content is a byproduct of that creativity. So I would urge you guys as SEOs and content marketers to brainstorm new ideas, Think outside the box. And I know it’s like, you know, altruistic or radical to be like, don’t let budget constraints or concerns restrict you. Sure, of course, right? But if we have a cool idea, there are always ways that we can tailor that experience to be something that is applicable and works within our limitations. 

That’s it. In summary, I really believe the future of content is no longer about just getting clicks. Right? It’s about creating connections that resonate, engage, and endure, and ultimately about building lasting community. So let’s connect. Thank you.

Mike King: Sandbox SEO, building programmatic templates and tools that supercharge SEO efforts. As the product lead at Uncommon Goods, he spearheaded growth initiatives, with a focus on SEO, site search, and speed. Zack is the creator of an innovative SEO tool or innovative SEO tools like SERP analytics and site speed analytics shaping the future of SEO strategy. So one of the things I talked about in my talk was the fact that Google cannot, as a single signal, identify whether or not something is created with generative AI. And a lot of his talk today is gonna be kind of about that. So presenting LLM Experience Game, How We Climbed the Animal SERPs with a Text-based Gen AI Game, please welcome Zack Notes.

Zack Notes: Hello. Hello. Hello. Can you guys hear me okay? Awesome. First off, Mike and the iPullRank team, thank you guys so much. This has been a great conference so far, especially for the first one. It’s been like super smooth, run really well. Yeah. I’m so happy to be here with you guys today. A little bit about me. I’m Zack Notes, founder at Sandbox SEO. We do programmatic SEO, web devs, and web design. Product at Uncommon Goods, if you guys haven’t heard of Uncommon Goods, we are a retailer in the GIF space. I lead a product management team there. My team mostly focuses on SEO. We also work on prepurchase, site search. Summary is I’ve been in SEO since 2011. I’ve been in product for a little bit shorter, and I’m also sort of a Web designer. Pretty much explains me. These are my three boys, Nico, Luca, Knox. And the story of this website, Animal Matchup, that I’m going to speak about starts with them.

So it was the spring of 2023, and my kids were obsessed with these books. And for any parents out there who have young children, you’re probably familiar. Who would win pits two animals against each other in a hypothetical fight. And so they set it up with fun facts, and then they move into a fight story, and then they declare a winner. And we were probably going through five or six of these books every night at bedtime. Yes, kids. I can see. So around the same time, OpenAI had just released, GPT4. And it was fun. I was having a good time with it. I was excited. But I was what was more interesting to me was the release of their API at the same time. 

You see, at Sandbox, we’ve been doing programmatic SEO for a while, and we we wanted to build a test site that combined AI content and programmatic. And in order to do that across thousands of landing pages, which is programmatic SEO, we needed access to the API. And when I finally got it, I was very excited. So I had a few ideas that we were we were juggling with, but who would win books gave me the biggest one because it turns out that the desire for animal matchups is much bigger than just these books. The Internet loves this stuff. Some of these numbers are crazy. There are 1.2 million species of animals in the world, and that’s named animals. There’s plenty more that we haven’t discovered or haven’t named. But if you do the math, that’s 720 billion unique matchups. And nobody’s searching for a cardinal versus a gorilla. Right? So 99.99% of that is no search volume. But if you just take what’s left over, that’s still 72 million matchups. And that number is probably high. It’s probably somewhere under a million. But still, as a programmatic SEO, these are the kind of numbers that get you really excited.

So we decided to go for it. We basically wanted to take the Who Would Win books and translate those into into a website. Right? So the initial launch, I I partnered with a a web developer. Six weeks it took us to get the first MVP out. Right? We started with 100 animals. We launched with 50 matchup pages, and this is what they looked like at the time. We introduced the two animals. We gave the tail the tape where we compared stats. We sprinkled in some fun facts similar to what Who Would Win does, and then we polled for the winner. And while we’re here, show of hands, in a match between a gorilla and a grizzly bear, who takes the gorilla? Okay. And the grizzly? Yeah. So the Internet likes the grizzly bear also. It’s bigger. After the poll, we unveiled the matchup, and this is 100% AI copy generated by ChatGPT. And this right here, where you’re looking at, like, this is the crux of this site. That’s it. It’s these fight stories. And at the time when we launched, this copy was static, saved in the database. And I’m going to talk about a bit more about where we’ve come since then and how we’ve evolved. So that was two years ago. In a time since, we’ve probably had 200 launches. We’ve iterated many, many times and built a lot onto it. But this is our growth chart. It’s not amazing. It’s not like blow you away. It’s sort of slow and steady, constant growth. The majority of that 84% is organic SEO. The rest is mostly direct. And in that time, we’ve been through eight core updates. And I’m sure that you guys have noticed during that time, there’s been a lot of AI sites that have blown up and then gotten smacked down. And so for some reason, we have remained. And I don’t know why that is. I don’t think anybody knows why that is. Maybe Google does, maybe they don’t. But I have some theories as to the things that we’re doing right that are counterbalancing the weaknesses of AI content. And so I’ve taken those theories and I’ve synthesized those into the agenda for today. 

So I’m going to go over tips for creating AI content that survives. I’m going to attempt to inspire you to build better websites through LLM Experience Game. And I’m going to talk about some tools that you can use to scale AI content. And first, some caveats. Our traffic has not just been up into the right all day, every day for the last two years. We’ve taken some hits. Some algo updates have pushed us down, but we’ve always managed to bounce back. The other one, we’re not on this site, we’re not talking about four zero one k allocations or CPR techniques. It’s it’s not your money. It’s not your life. It’s animal mashups. And so I think it’s safe to say that Google sets the bar a little lower here. That said, let’s talk about AI content that survives.

My first tip is sort of AI content 101. Most of you have probably figured this out by now, but you can’t just copy and paste multi paragraph long form strings of text straight from ChatGPT into your website, and that’s because that copy is garbage. At least for the time being, human written or at least human edited copy is going to beat ChatGPT or other LLM copy, and that’s specific to long form. The longer it goes, the worse it gets. And I know it’s a smooth fucking talker and it’ll convince you that it’s great content. And maybe your site will rank with long form for a couple months, but then you’re going to get freaking smashed. And so instead, I would recommend prompting for small, digestible, bite sized copy blocks. And you want to want to intersperse them throughout diverse content types. 

And this next tip goes for AI content or otherwise. And there’s actually patents behind this. But images, GIFs, tables comparing facts, interactive elements, polls, videos, you can’t just have AI content. It has to be a mix, diverse content. Now, this is where it starts to get fun. People like to press buttons. They like like to feel empowered to skip past content that they don’t want to read. They like to share their opinion. Interactive elements are the features that make a website a website and not just a book. And, like, this is where I feel very strongly as a product person that these are the kind of interactions that are going to make for a great website. These are also the kind of interactions that are going to give you a better experience than you’re going get on AI overviews or you’re going to get it on ChatGPT. Right? Like, that’s our main competitor with this, is people that are going to ChatGPT and asking them, hey, I want to see a matchup between a gorilla and a grizzly. But if we can give buttons and experiences that elevate that, then we can offer something better.

Now, this is where it gets really fun. LLMs, and specifically the LLM APIs, like ChatGPT’s API, they allow you to really increase personalization, and you can take the inputs that the user gives you, use that to create live GenAI text, and that’s text in the session. Right? And you can even use the LLM APIs to create choices for the user, a generative a generative UI that gives options created in the session based on their feedback. And while I’m here, I want to talk about the live Gen AI text for a minute. This is something that Josh Degrasse Bousman, called this out when I was going over the slides with him. By the way, if you don’t know Josh, don’t follow him, strongly suggest on LinkedIn. Very, very smart guy. Josh pointed out, like, hey, having live Gen AI text on a website, SEOs don’t do that. That’s bad. Right? Because if you have text that’s created after the page loads, it’s not visible to Googlebot. Right? Googlebot can’t see this text. But that’s okay because if you do it right and you build something that’s useful, useful content, right, helpful for the user, then you’re giving them something that improves their experience. And if they can’t crawl it in the beginning, that’s okay. And I’m not saying that your entire web page should just be like a couple buttons in a form. Right? You need content for Google to crawl, but having live text can help improve that experience and win rankings.

So let’s go back to the growth chart for a minute. The green period here that’s highlighted, that’s when we really shifted to start using LLM features. We took those static fight stories, and we started using API calls instead to generate the fights on demand in the session. We also introduced the create your own feature. So this is a unique thing where maybe a user came to the site to see what would happen between a gorilla and a grizzly bear, but then after that match was over, they could see a gorilla versus a velociraptor. Right? Or velociraptor versus a polar bear. It was interesting. One thing that I didn’t really realize at the time that I saw looking back was we were shifting the site into a video game. And I didn’t really see it at the time, but it’s become more clear now. We see it in branded search, Google Search Console, people will be searching for animal matchup game or animal matchup video game. And it’s like, oops, I made a video game. Okay. 

So I’m going to talk a little bit more about LLM features, but first I want to cover something that’s super important for AI content. EEAT, you guys are all very familiar with it. First tip, like, we we know that AI lies. It has, you know, Fyre Fest credibility. And you have to fact check. It can be quite tedious to fact check a site with thousands and thousands of pages. So what I would recommend, focus on the high visibility pages, anything linked from the homepage, top 5%, maybe 10% percent of your best templates. But you need to take the time to fact check. I use Gemini Deep Research for this. It’s gotten better with Deep Research. It’s less manual. It’s still manual, but it’s quicker. We also cite sources as a as a part of fact checking. We’ll take the best, most relevant articles, make sure they match the content, and then we have a field in the database where we store them. I would also recommend hiring an expert author in a consulting capacity. And you don’t have to have a huge budget for this, maybe $50-$100 an hour, few hours every week at most. You’re looking for someone PhD level for most sites. You want to manage their expectations for a light engagement. And this is the actual, LinkedIn job profile that I had for our wildlife biologist that we hired. Ideally, have published work with papers in Google Scholar. Once you hire them, create a bio page linked to their Google Scholar page from the bio, link to their bio from your about page, and then coauthor a few high quality, non AI articles with them. And obviously, use author markup in that. Then you want to link to their articles prominently from the home page. And this is more for search quality evaluators. You might be wondering, like, wait a minute, dude. I thought you said this site was 100% AI. So technically, it’s 99.85% AI. We have three pages of human written content. One is our About page, the other two are co-authored articles. And then we have 2,000 of Gen AI content, mostly animal pages and matchup pages.

Okay. Back to LLM UI integration, back to the features, how we build this. Just a reminder, we’re using the API to build features like these. So the first of building block of this is prompt chains. And I’ll explain what a prompt chain is. It’s pretty simple. In a prompt chain, the output of one prompt serves as the input to another prompt. And in this case, it goes to the user. So here’s a simple UX case. First prompt, give me an apex predator in the Amazon rainforest. And let’s say the API comes with a jaguar. Right? So then second prompt, describe a jaguar emerging from a hiding spot. And then in the second prompt output, it will explain a jaguar coming out of the forest. Right? If we were to refresh this page, right now it’s a black caiman coming out of the water, or it’s a harpy eagle swooping in from the forest. So that kind of gives you an idea of the magic of LLM APIs, is you can sort of start to have something that creates on the fly, more generative. Just to be clear, this is the section that executes in the code via the API, and this is what the user sees. Let’s change this a bit. Now instead of asking the API to give us the animal, we could ask the user, enter an animal that lives in the Amazon, and then we go through the flow. This is the section that executes in the code. We can even do a generation where we use the first prompt to generate choices. Very simple example here. Generate three animals, comes up with the animals, then the user selects an animal. Their selection, let’s say cane toad, goes in the second prompt, and then the second prompt, we generate the live text, the story. Now, I give generating three animals here as an example of choices just because it’s simple and easy to understand.

In reality, this sort of problem would be much easier to solve with a database with a table of animals and randomized function. Right? It’s not the best use case in reality. We use choices as part of the gameplay. We have cards where a user can pull a card for win scenario, right, or items that the animal would use, or mutations. And so we’re using the generations here to create choices for something that’s harder to create a dataset for. That’s where choices really make sense. And with these kind of features, we can offer something called LLM Experience Gain. And now this is where we’re taking it back to SEO. With LM experience gain, you’re creating a new, unique web experience that’s not offered by existing content on the SERP, including the AI Overviews. And the the main if I if you guys take anything else away from this talk about this weird animal website, the main three things, personalization, LiveGen AI text, and user choices. These are the tools that you can use or your product managers that you work with can use to build features that improve the website and offer experience gain in the SERPs.

So let’s look at the SERPs. Right? Within the context of animal matchup, let’s say the query is gorilla versus grizzly bear. Current content, content types. At the top of the search, there’s an AI Overview. Throughout the search, including the AI Overview, there’s opinion pieces, scientific facts. People love to debate about hypothetical animal matchups. It’s crazy, there’s so many opinions on it. Like, Joe Rogan had a post about it. Forum debates. Reddit and Quora, really popular here in these SERPs. There’s images, there’s videos, YouTube, TikTok. But with an LLM, now we can offer something new and different to this SERP. Right? Personalization. They can create their own matchups. Live Gen AI text. Fight stories that display in this session. Choices. They can choose the environment, the win scenario. Right? 

Let’s leave the animal kingdom for a second and look at a different SERP. Pasta carbonara recipe. Current content types for this, pretty simple. Right? It’s recipes. With an LLM, personalization. We could offer recipe customization based on time availability. How much time do you have to cook this pasta dish? 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour? What about dietary needs? Is this gluten free, vegetarian? Choices. Allow users to request alternate ingredients. This can all be in the website that you create as part of the experience and you can do this all with LLMs. Live AI text. Once you’ve collected that information from the user, generate a custom recipe, offer interesting modifications, suggest side dishes. Right? That would crush so many so many, you know, static, simple, frozen recipes that really can’t personalize as well to people and their individual needs and tastes.

Another query, things to do in Kyoto. Current content, AI Overviews, experiences, attractions, guides, events, a map pack, Reddit forums, of course. With an LLM, you ask the user, when are you going? Who is going? How many people? Are you bringing kids? How many days are you going for? Are you already staying somewhere? Right? Choices. Which are you interested in? Temples, performances, restaurants. And the LiveJan AI text could build you a custom itinerary. You could do this like, they can do this now in ChatGPT, but you can make the experience so much better in web format with choices and buttons. Because you can make it more structured. They don’t have to type as much. Again, people like to press buttons. The chatbot is a very exhaustive format of UX. You can build something better. The ideas here are the hard part, right? There’s some SERPs where there’s probably not a great idea, but there’s some SERPs a lot of them, I think where there are good ideas to be had. So I built a custom GPT to ideate for you, and it’s on the slides. There’s a link there. You just give it a keyword and then it’ll give you ideas for features that it thinks would help build on the SERP to give you LLM experience gain. Okay. A few more minutes.

I’m going to give you all some tools to scale AI content. We’ve built a lot of images for animal matchup, probably like two or three thousand of them. And the tradition like, if you right now, before we built the CMS, the process was to go back and forth between our dataset and ChatGPT or MidJourney we used, and our prompt list, image compression, format changing, like there was all these different steps. Instead, we built a CMS for image generation. So in the CMS, the prompt’s saved here. It connects to the database. So there’s a dropdown where it says hippo. We can just choose the animal we want. We hit Run. It hits the ChatGPT API. It generates an image. If we’d like it, we hit Save, and then it’s written to the database. And we can even do bulk, right? So we can upload 100 animals at a time and just pop out 100 images. I’ll reject usually more than half of those, but it’s a lot easier than going back and forth between all the different systems.

For our stack by the way, the site is built on Firebase, React, and Vercel. That’s my favorite stack right now. Our database is Firebase. It’s cloud based, easy for nontechnical people to edit. And the reason that I bring this up for scaling aside from over other databases is that it just has a really easy UI for nontechnical people to get in there. And I use that for fact checking. I hire VAs to help with fact checking. And it’s pretty easy to find the fields, edit the fields. It’s great for that. Also, I’ve heard this mentioned a few times this week. GPT for Sheets is great for scaling the actual copy. I use it to scale the emojis as well. One specific tip here, I keep the prompt and the output in separate columns. You can use the concatenate function to wrap it in so that you can call GPT. The reason for this, you’ll have easy access to your prompts later. You don’t have to store the prompts in a separate file. You also won’t accidentally rerun ChatGPT, which will add costs and overwrite good output. So your prompts are there, your output’s there, and it’s kind of frozen, so it won’t accidentally rerun overwrite. This is a great tool. Love this. Someone else mentioned you can use GPT. Jori Ford, you can use GPT and Sheets as an AI, a checker on, like, AI overview exposure. I think that’s it. I want to thank you guys for your time.