Ethan Smith: belief

Transcript context

…First, I would figure out which questions I want to rank for. How I would figure out which questions I want to rank for, I would take my search data. I would maybe take my paid search data, like, "What are my money terms? What are my competitors' money terms?" So if I'm rippling, what is deal.com bidding all their paid search on? Then I would transform those into questions. And actually you can just give those keywords to ChatGPT and say, "Make these into questions," and it does a pretty good job. So take your competitors' paid search data or mine or your own, put it in ChatGPT, get the questions. That's step one. Step two is then track them, so put them in an AEO tracker, in an answer tracker. Third thing would be who is showing up as citations? And then have a strategy for each of those different groups of citations. The third would be make your own landing pages. So what are the kinds of landing pages that are appearing? Is it a listicle? Is it a category page? Is it an article, tool page? Figure out what page type that seem to be showing up the most, and then you make your own page for that. How do you have your page rank? Answer all the follow-up questions. So what are all the follow-up questions that someone might ask? You could go back to your search data and look for groups and themes of your keywords that are in your SEO topic. Same thing for AEO topic. Then on the offsite, so different strategies for each of those groups. And I would say that depending on the company, paying an affiliate to mention you, that's pretty easy if you have the money. So if you want to be the best credit card, you pay Forbes and then you're the best credit card. So that's strategy one, expensive, easy, controllable. The YouTube, Vimeo strategy is also actually pretty easy because there's no community saying, "I don't like your YouTube video." You make a YouTube video, you do whatever you want. Maybe people view it, maybe they don't, but you can make a YouTube video or a Vimeo video. And the interesting thing with this, especially for B2B, is that YouTube, Vimeo, other video sites, the kinds of things people make videos for are food, traveling, fun, beauty. There's not that many videos about AI-powered payment processing APIs, as interesting as that is, but it's a great money turn. So if you make a video for these really specific, high-LTV, maybe nonglamorous keywords, questions, topics, that's actually a big opportunity. Then Reddit, so I mentioned with Webflow what we did, which is just make a Reddit account, say who you are, say where you work and give a useful answer. That one is a little bit trickier because the community might say, "I don't like your answer." So you can't guarantee that your comment is there, but it is easy, so I would do that group. Oh, and then experiment design, experiment design and seeing what works. So SEO and AEO are both interesting in that the majority of the information and best practices are not correct. do that group. Oh, and then experiment design, experiment design and seeing what works. So SEO and AEO are both interesting in that the majority of the information and best practices are not correct. And the reason why is because people don't do analysis. Somebody will say something and then it will get repeated, and then it becomes best practice and no one ever did an analysis. So you did all the stuff that I just mentioned. Do an experiment and see if it worked. Maybe half the stuff I said works, maybe half it doesn't. Do your own experiment. Most best practices, most blog posts are not correct. So how do you set up an experiment? You get your questions, you turn tracking on, give it a couple of weeks. Make your changes, have a test group, have a control group. Intervene on the test group, make your changes, see if the chart went up, see if the control group did not, and now you know your particular strategy worked. So I would definitely do experiments and I would not assume that stuff you read online is correct. And then you need a team, so who's your team? Probably your team is your SEO team, or your SEO agency or your SEO consultant. Probably, hopefully they can do this stuff, and then however, what I think is hard to hire for is the offsite stuff. So most SEO people are not going to be amazing at creating YouTube videos and Reddit strategy, so you might need a different person for that. That might be a community generalist marketing person. So it would basically be your SEO team, "Please now do Answer Engine Optimization." And then marketing community team, "Please help me show up in more citations." Wow, okay. That is incredibly valuable. Thank you for sharing all that. I imagine some of this is you're just giving away a lot of amazing advice for free here. Thank you. First of all, I imagine there's a layer, there's only so far you can go on your own. And so eventually it's like, "Okay, we really need help." And that's where a team like yours comes in. Let me ask a few questions here to follow up. One is this tracker concept. So what is this tracker, it can track how often you show up? Say Lenny's Newsletter shows up and answers for the questions that I'm targeting?…

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