Podcast With Bruce Clay

SEO Pioneer Bruce Clay: 'Your Website Will Be Useless in 2 Years'

Show Notes

Discover the secrets to rank your website number 1 with Bruce Clay, the father of SEO himself! In this episode, Bruce Clay dives into nearly three decades of groundbreaking SEO strategies, sharing how he shaped the industry since founding Bruce Clay Inc. in 1996. Learn the exact steps Fortune 500 companies and small businesses alike use to drive more organic traffic, dominate search engine rankings, and stay ahead in an ever-changing digital landscape.

What inspired Bruce to launch his SEO journey before Google even existed? What are the biggest mistakes businesses still make in SEO, and how do you avoid them? How is AI transforming the future of SEO, and what skills will you need to thrive in 2025 and beyond? From actionable tactics to strategic insights, this video is packed with knowledge to help you achieve a #1 ranking and future-proof your digital presence.

Don’t miss Bruce’s expert tips, including his unique approach to SER visibility, why content is king, and how to integrate AI tools effectively. Whether you're a beginner or an experienced marketer, this step-by-step guide will help you maximize your SEO efforts and adapt to the latest trends.

Ready to take your SEO game to the next level? Watch now and unlock the keys to driving traffic, boosting visibility, and making your website an unstoppable force online. Subscribe, share, and leave a comment with your thoughts or questions! Let’s build your path to SEO success together.

Chapters:

00:00 - Intro

00:42 - What inspired the launch of Bruce Clay Inc?

05:48 - How did you navigate an emerging industry?

15:56 - What common SEO mistakes persist today?

21:00 - How has the SEO industry changed in 30 years?

27:54 - How is AI impacting SEO today?

35:27 - How does AI affect content quality and rankings?

41:26 - Will AI take jobs away from writers?

47:21 - What should SEOs do to adapt to changes?

55:00 - Why hire a true SEO expert over journalists or AI specialists?

59:50 - How do you stay ahead in the SEO field?

1:00:55 - What is an underrated SEO tool?

1:03:50 - What future skills will every SEO need?

1:07:50 - What is the most important mindset for marketers?

1:12:20 - What’s next for Bruce Clay Inc?

1:15:11 - What’s the upcoming Certification Release about?

1:15:17 - Outro

Transcript

Intro

0:00 bruce is often called the father of SEO and for good reason he founded Bruce Klay Inc c back in 1996 yes you heard it

0:08 right 1996 seo will die when Google stops changing things and all of your

0:14 competition has died is if you want to be an AI you better be in the top dozen search results

0:21 right ai is using search so instead of optimizing horizontally we're optimizing

0:29 vertically so uh I have uh I got it down to where I can optimize any of the 40

0:36 features on a Google search result page [Music] [Applause]

0:41 [Music] [Applause]

What inspired the launch of Bruce Clay Inc?

0:48 [Music] welcome to the agency insider show i am your host Navit Koshel today we have a

0:55 true pioneer and the legend in the world of digital marketing Bruce Clay bruce is

1:00 often called the father of SEO and for good reason he founded Bruce Klay Inc back in 1996 yes you heard it right 1996

1:09 and has shaped the SEO industry for nearly three decades and also contributes to lead innovation in search

1:16 content and AIdriven marketing bruce welcome to the show and it's actually an honor to have you well thank you for

1:23 having me i'm uh pleased to be here now let's talk about the origin of SEO and

1:29 of course your journey uh you've been in this game for over 25 years uh almost 30

1:34 years uh yeah almost right long before Google was a household name let's kick

1:40 off with a bit of a time capsule so now what inspired you to launch Bruce Clay

1:45 Inc back in the '9s what was the opportunity you saw well

1:52 since it was three years before Google there was Excite Alta Vista Infosek a

1:58 few a few of them uh my background is uh

2:04 I have a degree in math and computer science and an MBA and I wanted something that was uh a a business level

2:13 thing but I wanted something that also had programming feel to it and along comes this search

2:20 thing you know uh in 1996 it was just getting

2:25 going and there weren't a lot of that i mean there were websites but there

2:30 weren't that many right like 50,000 maybe wow and that's not a lot compared

2:38 to today and so I started doing it i programmed up a tool i did this i did

2:44 that i was able to get sites ranked people called me and hired me and then it just grew um but uh yeah it was it

2:53 was a lot of fun back then um and there was hardly any spamming that was the

2:59 cool part because there was no Google there was no page rank so people didn't

3:06 have to go out and try to game the system right and you just earned it and

3:12 people linked to you because you were worth linking to and it was it was a lot cleaner until Google came on the scene

3:19 but uh yeah it was a lot of fun uh the first few years were wild wild

3:24 west kind of thing uh then when Google came out everybody started trying to

3:29 game it and um we chose not to go there

3:35 because I felt that that was something that Google would fight right you know if you're doing it right Google isn't

3:42 going to fight you it's if you're doing it wrong they're going to protect themselves right so I didn't want to get

3:48 in the crosshairs of Google so I uh played white hat all the way through and

3:55 um I even avoided doing a lot of link development

4:00 um I felt that if we and we ended up with a lot of brands very large

4:07 companies and they almost always had enough links that I didn't have to worry about it right so that worked out real

4:15 well um fast forward 10 years and there's conferences and everybody's

4:21 learning how to do it but there weren't that many SEOs that knew what they were

4:26 doing agencies were still doing well fast forward another 10 to 15 years

4:33 that's like precoid um right a lot of companies had SEOs

4:39 and uh the market sort of shifted to be a heavy tool oriented people would go to

4:47 conferences in the beginning and hire agencies now they go to conferences and

4:52 subscribe to tools and uh education became conferences and then along comes

4:58 COVID and all the conferences shut down right uh you know even I uh was teaching

5:06 a classroom course on SEO and of course COVID ended that

5:13 um fortunately I have some pretty nice URLs i have SEO training.com

5:19 so I built it up as an online course and then I have SEO tools

5:25 um propagated up a new version of the tools and we've done well um then along comes AI

5:35 and AI of course is uh somewhat of a disturbance in the force we have uh a

5:45 lot of uh people guessing as to what you do and it's sort of the blind leading

How did you navigate an emerging industry?

5:52 the blind uh yes I mean I read all the time about how somebody says this is what you do to

6:00 get ranked in AIO and it's wrong and everybody's following them and it it it

6:07 gets to be a problem after a while so AI is a brand new start you know just

6:14 like SEO at the beginning was really fun and exciting and you were inventing and

6:20 you know running labs and discovering and fixing and moving on uh that's where

6:26 we are with AI right now it's a lot of fun yes so So uh you said that the of course

6:35 you told the landscape how it was now how exactly did you carve your path in

6:41 an industry that didn't existed at that time like I mean how did you came up

6:47 with the industry we didn't exist is something which is um prior to getting

6:54 into this uh I had you know we all have our prior

6:59 lifetimes right yes we all as worked in Silicon Valley for mainframe companies

7:06 and my area was opt optimization um I worked for the company that had the

7:12 fastest mainframe on the market faster than IBM's and it was always a race so I

7:17 was in there optimizing operating systems and doing a lot of optimization

7:23 uh then after that I went to Acer

7:28 and I was the VP general manager of their US networking division and uh then

7:36 I decided that the internet was going to be fun and I wanted to do consulting

7:43 that's how I created Bruce Clay i mean that's what consultants do you name it after yourself i was just going to be a

7:49 consultant and uh it took on a life of its own but uh I was doing optimization

7:57 and so when I got into doing it on uh basically on the internet using search

8:04 engines uh I decided it was search engine optimization

8:09 that's what I do search engines and optimization seem to go together so I

8:14 started using the term uh others started using the term it's confusing as to who

8:20 was first or whether they were talking about optimizing a search engine or doing what we do now uh and and the

8:28 interesting thing is um in the beginning every search engine was just 10 blue

8:36 links it was just the results you do a search you get results right

8:41 pre-advertising pre you know it was just 10 blue links

8:46 but where does it actually say that search engine optimization is only

8:53 organic when it started all there was was

8:59 organic but it was really the optimization of anything on that SER right to get

9:07 traffic but what you know because there's pay-per-click and there's this and there's that and there's all these

9:14 40some features that Google can put up on a search page um it really has become

9:22 uh more of a um it it's focused

9:29 SEO has been focused on organic and I think because there is pay-per-click

9:35 right right and um if there were no pay-per-click then there'd be SEO and

9:42 SEO would just be expanding and uh it's a different different kind

9:47 of thing but yeah I uh I decided to do it and I got good at it really fast the

9:54 way it became popular uh really popular was Danny Sullivan

10:01 uh who search engine watch search engine watch yes and uh SCES strategies

10:08 conference the search engine strategies conferences um when I attended the first

10:14 one he invited in all the big shots if you will the people that were driving

10:20 SEO right right all of us all eight of us

10:26 sat at one table and had there been a natural disaster

10:32 the industry would have been wiped out it would have been that easy um but it

10:38 was a lot of fun and uh so I spoke a lot I wrote a lot I gave away a lot of

10:44 everything we did I gave away uh and the philosophy at the time was uh I'm going

10:51 to give it away until you surrender people are convinced I know what I'm

10:56 talking about they hire me right it worked i didn't have to do a lot of

11:01 anything other than get myself ranked and I did and so uh we did that and uh

11:09 it just took off i' I'd give Danny Sullivan uh the lion share of uh how did

11:18 SEO become an industry right uh I did a lot of

11:26 promotion of it um but Danny was really the one that helped make it an industry

11:32 and uh we all all of us you know owe him a lot um yes it really did work out real

11:40 well and as you know search engine strategies as a conference got pretty

11:45 big and powerful yes and uh then it was bought

11:50 and uh logically went away almost and then he started up uh search

11:57 marketing expo yes it was interesting he announced that

12:03 he's with Search Marketing Expo and the first thing I did is pick up the phone

12:09 call and became their very first sponsor i bought the very first booth i was the

12:16 very first sponsor founding sponsor kind of thing and that was what 15 years ago

12:24 right something like that and uh so the industry has grown a lot i think

12:29 conferences really uh as an education source was really significant and um so

12:38 there's a difference between hi I'm publishing a lot and I'm talking about it a lot and I'm speaking a lot and an

12:46 organization like a conference that uh brings people in to an environment

12:54 that's educational and and promotional and uh so the industry kind of shifted

13:00 there in the middle but uh yeah in the early days uh I just made a point of you

13:07 know being places and writing places i posted in newsletters i wrote blog post

13:12 i mean it was really before blogs um but I was still publishing a newsletter

13:18 newsletters were popular then yes and um I had actually started a podcast SEM

13:27 Synergy uh did 150 shows and

13:32 um but it it turned out at the time that was many years ago it turned out it

13:39 wasn't as uh productive uh from a marketing point of view as

13:45 conferences right and so publishing became more my

13:51 uh my go-to if you will so but that's how SEO got going it was uh between

13:59 conferences and people who publish and and talk about it and uh make it happen

14:05 i think that is how you make your money well Pubcon uh Brett started that he also had

14:13 webmaster world yes which was the forum that went with it so he had a good

14:18 audience to bring into that conference um it has a tendency to be technical and

14:25 it still does a lot of stuff in pubs you know like the publishers conference

14:32 was really a a pub conference and uh

14:37 yeah but Brett's doing well he's in Austin so Right right i remember you

14:43 also had uh SEO tool set if I you had an

14:49 I remember subscribing and using it it was fun that time does that still exist

14:54 yes uh the SEO tool set the way I did it is I developed the tools

15:02 and I didn't want to invent tools that other people already had

15:08 so I focused on doing tools that nobody had i wish I had a tool to do this so I made

15:15 one and then I just packaged it together a whole group of to a lot of tools into

15:22 the SEO tool set and uh I own seotools.com

15:29 right which is pretty nice URL and so that's where the tool set lives now okay

15:37 so it's in yeah but the tools in the very beginning there were no tools

15:43 I mean none there were no tools uh so I started writing some of the very first

15:48 tools that were out there and um my background is as a programmer so I

15:54 really liked it and so we programmed up uh I don't know 20 tools and put it in

What common SEO mistakes persist today?

16:01 the tool set yes um and but the intent was not to reinvent somebody else's tool

16:10 right the intent was to do the things that nobody else is doing okay and so

16:16 that had actually given us a lot of power when we can look at something and find

16:22 something that nobody else knew about i I I remember it it was fun and very

16:28 useful i I I we have used your tool so yes would go a long way of course now uh

16:35 so you work with Fortune 500s and bootstrap brands alike what consistent

16:40 SEO mistakes do you still see today well you know it's kind of interesting

16:47 uh the larger the company um the harder it is to implement

16:54 so in a large company it has the standard problem of uh I give it to them

17:01 to implement and it takes months sometimes to actually implement what we

17:06 give them in the smaller companies they're faster but in the large companies they're

17:12 slower the thing is where do they make their mistakes they don't typically

17:19 unless they're spamming they don't usually make

17:25 uh a lot of mistakes uh especially if they have an SEO that guides them where they don't uh do it

17:33 right is they don't pay attention to redirects or they don't pay attention they don't

17:39 dot the eye and cross the tea they do a partial implementation

17:46 um a big part of it uh and by the way one of the things we did early on is if

17:53 you became one of my clients part of the contract was you had to take my SEO

17:58 course i gave it to you it was free but you

18:05 actually had to come and take my course and uh what that did is it caused

18:11 everybody to understand why we do things right initially one of the problems was

18:18 every time we'd talk to a client they would ask us "Well why?" Well why and

18:24 and it it really got uh in some cases somewhat argumentative and after they

18:30 had taken the course they'll know why so uh and we still do that to this day

18:37 but you have a lot of people that didn't understand implementation i still at the

18:43 small end have the opposite problem that we work with the marketing department

18:50 and while it's a small company and they may be able to move faster

18:55 they don't understand it even with training there's only one person and

19:00 they're doing everything so the smaller firms are are harder um

19:07 and what would be a goodsized small firm like a law firm

19:12 a law firm uh has the money to do it but they're focused on case law and their

19:19 business right and this computer thing is just you know they

19:25 kind of do it so uh across the board it's an implementation is the biggest problem um

19:34 now that's just at the client level

19:39 you also have competition and the competition doesn't always play

19:45 by the rules and uh

19:50 so you'll rank in the morning and at noon you don't rank because the the volatility of the search

19:58 results right uh and most people by the way uh their failure at a search result

20:04 is they don't understand it's like the stock market your ranking is at the moment that

20:11 monitor ran an hour later it could be entirely different

20:17 right specifically this location and so many things coming in as well right right and then so you have your

20:24 competition you have yourself and then you have the search engine and then

20:30 Google uh is recently saying they change the uh algorithm 5,000 times a year

20:40 right um and even if you say okay that's 12 times a day you have to know that

20:47 half of them are fixing what they broke yesterday right but uh it's still a lot

20:56 and uh you know I'm fond of saying that SEO will die

How has the SEO industry changed in 30 years?

21:02 when Google stops changing things and all of your competition has died

21:08 until then every day it's a new battle every Monday it's a new industry and um

21:16 now there's you know not a hundred variables there's 300 variables and then

21:21 you throw in AI uh and it has it has AI I will admit AI

21:28 has caused a disturbance in the force it has uh unfortunately confused a vast

21:35 majority of the SEOs that's been a problem yep we we have a

21:41 whole session dedicated to the AI which we will be coming back and uh which actually is now uh so how have you seen

21:49 SEO industry evolve over the past almost uh 30 years and what are the biggest

21:55 changes you have witnessed in term of technology strategy and most importantly client expectations

22:02 okay so um clearly the technology has altered because Google has uh gone to a

22:11 very uh high 300 plus element uh index

22:17 the algorithm in dealing with it AI in dealing with that and then you have your intangibles like EAT and usability and

22:27 you know those kinds of things uh so it's a a very deep uh compared to on the

22:33 first days you you just put a keyword in there right and you win uh now it's very

22:39 very very much more complex and uh one of the other problems that I think we as

22:45 an industry face is the messages from Google so Google has 300 variables they

22:52 have people working on logically systems within there so I I'm responsible for

22:59 these 30 variables okay somebody else is responsible for those other variables if I say to you is

23:08 it important to get rid of 404s this system may say we don't care about

23:15 404s this other system may say we care about

23:22 trust and quality we care about 404s so dependent upon who you're talking to you

23:27 might get a different answer from Google so Google tries not to give you too many answers because they they don't want to

23:35 contradict themselves and um that has led to a lot of people guessing a lot of

23:43 guessing um and even if

23:49 like us I figure out how it works I have to retest it

23:56 i just because that's what worked last week doesn't mean it's what's going to work

24:01 this week and um Barry Schwarz does a

24:07 lot of newsletters and a lot of webinars and you know podcasts and his own and

24:14 one of the things that I've noticed is it's like every 10 days there's a

24:20 weather report saying hi something just was a disturbance

24:26 right everybody you know everybody's talking about how they lost rankings or gained them or

24:32 the volatility uh is not what used to be there in the very beginning Google would do something

24:39 called the Google dance the Google dance uh was the hokeyp pokei

24:46 i mean once a quarter or so they put in a

24:52 change and if they don't like it they took it out and then they put in a new one and then they took it out and that

24:59 was referred to as the Google dance and uh Google actually had dances at the

25:05 Google Plex and yeah Mountain View and so uh and for

25:12 years I would go and I'd get the t-shirt and you know enjoy their food but um yeah it

25:22 was it was very less daily volatile but the dance was a

25:28 disturbance today it's every day every morning I could wake up and find my

25:35 rankings impacted or not um and so you know we pay a lot of attention to how

25:42 things uh alter right right and uh my view is that all

25:52 we can do to the best of our ability to do that uh is

25:59 experiment and cope with it uh I experiment on my own website a lot i'll

26:05 try something uh especially now in the AI world i'll try something and see what

26:11 it does and uh we're we're pretty good um we're

26:17 pretty good at just about everything in in reacting

26:23 right we can react very very quickly um but you see that's why you you have

26:29 experts because a novice wouldn't even know where to look right right so uh

26:37 having a lot of experience really helps but things are so volatile and AI just

26:44 and I know I keep mentioning AI and you're going to get to it but uh it really is um yes

26:52 it is not like uh any other change that has hit search

26:59 i would say it's it's more most likely a game changer it is it is and it is more

27:07 revolutionary than evolutionary right and uh a great many people don't

27:16 know how to react and I'd say probably 95% of the companies don't know how to react

27:24 um they kind of think of SEO and AIO as being disjoint separate and uh the way

27:33 it really works is if you want to be an AI you better be in the top dozen search

27:40 results yes right ai is using search

27:47 to handle the trust to handle the spidering for the most part to handle a

27:53 lot of that and then it's fed through and uh Bing for instance um if you're

How is AI impacting SEO today?

28:01 not in the top 12 you you're nowhere in AI so um it turns out that SEO is probably

28:10 more important than ever because AI depends upon you being

28:16 trusted by SEO right and a great many people uh you know if you're not in the

28:24 top two pages for sure you're you're nowhere you're nowhere

28:30 now of course uh AI let's now we come to the AI part in the SEO now

28:38 so so in your view what are the most significant way AI is impacting SEO today okay so

28:45 um and boy I can give you some numbers even um the big problem that I think we've

28:55 faced but it's been gradual is that Google is in the business of making

29:00 money and as a result they keep putting things

29:06 at the top of the search result page that if you click it they make money

29:13 and they have become more focused on intent is itformational or transactional

29:22 right but they put things at the top of the page so they can maybe make more

29:27 money correct and so that has had a dampening effect on SEO the organic

29:34 results have been pushed down pixel by pixel they've been pushed down where

29:41 they appear on the search result page and Google even in many cases only shows

29:47 eight seven organic results no longer even showing 10 so the opportunity

29:55 to make money with or traffic from people clicking on your organic listing

30:02 uh has been dampened down because of the placement of organic

30:09 results on the web page now with AIO taking 23 of the page

30:16 um organic has been pushed further so the statistics we have from 160

30:24 clients is that impressions is going up

30:29 i mean it's continuing to grow impressions continue to go up our ranking we're number one organically and

30:36 we're holding it and impressions are going up and our traffic is going down

30:43 so we just ran a an analysis um and actually it was for the last five

30:49 weeks of 160 clients and then some and

30:55 uh across all 160 clients without any

31:01 serious impact on ranking they have had a 30% traffic drop wow

31:09 and that's a lot of industries because we're not in a vertical um we're finding

31:15 statistics published by a great many people at 30 35% to 72% you know in that

31:21 range so the impact of AI on SEO really

31:27 is visibility the search engine result page visibility

31:32 is the number one issue I think SEOs are facing because they're being pushed down

31:38 now um by the way that has created a problem in general um

31:46 you see many SEO companies do SEO and PPC and content

31:53 maybe some few other things and what happened is these companies

32:01 when organic was pushed down these are foundations

32:06 of uh traffic traffic foundations their SEO and PPC and content so what people have

32:15 done including some rather uh outspoken people uh Neil Patel as an example

32:22 search anywhere optimization search optimization search everywhere

32:29 optimization um AIO SEO I mean everybody's coming up

32:35 with their own names but what it essent in essence what has happened is they

32:41 haven't uh done more in SEO they have chosen to

32:47 go broader and they're including social media right and optimization for uh Tik Tok

32:56 and optimization for YouTube and infosek and you and Facebook and LinkedIn and

33:04 etc so they're they're moving uh to what would typically be higher in

33:10 the funnel top of funnel instead of middle and they're going up in the funnel but

33:18 they're doing it horizontally by expanding the base and uh I've taken a different approach

33:27 my belief is that if Google is going to push organic results down Mhm

33:33 something's taking its place right so instead of optimizing horizontally

33:42 we're optimizing vertically so uh I have uh I got it down to where I

33:50 can optimize any of the 40 features on a Google search result page wow so I went

33:57 up and built uh the concept is uh SER uh

34:02 search engine result page visibility so SER visibility is that no matter

34:08 where somebody looks I want to be found

34:13 it isn't just organic it isn't just pay-per-click right aio is a foundation it's in there

34:22 so I want to rank in AIO and we've done a a pretty good job of being able to do

34:27 that um a lot um

34:33 we're developing methodologies for optimizing every feature and uh we have

34:41 uh audits that we can run against every feature why are you not there what do

34:46 you have to change how do you get there um we've got a a 1600page

34:56 cookbook on how to do the SER features i mean we've spent energy on doing that

35:02 and uh so my belief is that the industry really has to uh focus on that search

35:12 engine result page because there'll always be one no matter what's on it

35:17 there's always going to be a search engine result page that's the future of SEO agencies is to understand how to

35:25 rank there um can you go vertical and say "Hi I'm a YouTube

How does AI affect content quality and rankings?

35:31 agency." Well you could but how many different flavors are there right it's

35:38 going to take a while whereas uh if you uh if I can get you to rank and

35:45 everywhere they look on that search page you're there you win

35:51 absolutely so my approach is a little different for most um and we'll see i

35:57 mean it's it's young we'll see what happens right now now many marketers now

36:04 use AI tools to generate content and I'm sure you also have one of your content

36:10 tool as well now where do you stand on that from a ranking and quality perspective

36:16 okay so that's a very good question i'm glad you asked it

36:21 the we have a product called prewriter and the name tells you the answer we

36:30 believe that when you have a a writer the best

36:36 writers are somewhat artists the problem is they're good at writing

36:44 and they're terrible at research right they have writer's block they have

36:51 experience gaps they don't want to spend the time analyzing the competition they

36:57 don't want to do that they just want to be creative and right so what we did is

37:03 we said AI is a tool not a solution

37:09 and we're going to make the best researcher there is for writers

37:14 so that's what prewriter is um it's a research tool it does uh you can give me

37:21 a keyword it does all sorts of really exotic things um and it builds uh

37:28 keyword lists and outlines and content briefs that a writer can take and finish

37:35 that has all that built into it uh and it's uh you know clearly AI but as you

37:42 pointed out the other issue that you face is quality begin right now while I

37:49 believe truly believe that if I gave a writer

37:55 something they would finish it so it would come out human but there are

38:03 lazy people in the world and we write a pretty good article so uh

38:10 to that end we created what we call the humanizer

38:17 and you run it out of um chat and you

38:22 run it through a test tool and it says it's 86% AI

38:28 those tools exist all over the place yes um and then we run it through our

38:34 humanizer and it's typically under 2% AI

38:40 wow often 100% human so we created a humanizer

38:47 and then we took our humanizer and integrated it in all our tools so that what we get out of prewriter

38:54 comes out at least it's humanish and then you give it to your writer for

39:00 finishing see the way the process historically has been somebody says I

39:07 need this keyword or article or theme or something

39:13 i need writing and then the research stage would happen and then the writing

39:19 stage would happen and then the copy editing stage would happen because it's checks and balances and then the SEO

39:26 stage and then you publish it that's the way we operate we just happen to believe

39:33 that you have to run the research tool unconditionally

39:39 or that writer is going to have gaps right they're not going to do a content gap analysis with your competition

39:47 that isn't what that isn't what writing is right so we solve that problem the

39:55 problem I think we face as an industry is that while SEO is very concerned

40:03 about the quality of the content too many people are looking to save and

40:09 they're running a tool and then publishing it right you know they don't

40:14 humanize it they just publish it and um I'm sure you know that

40:22 Google has published um in the beginning Google said if it's

40:28 machine generated it's against their terms of service

40:33 right then they changed that statement to be uh it has to be usable

40:41 right so they kind of changed that that statement and now

40:46 uh and and what happened is people thought That meant you could be AI generated

40:52 and it didn't it usability means that you're bringing something new to the

40:57 table right and chat doesn't bring anything new it just repackages

41:04 old old knowledge so um that turns out

41:10 to be an issue you have to have the writer to do the creative part right at

41:16 least today and um yeah but you have to

41:21 go through the process there's a whole process you have to go through um next

Will AI take jobs away from writers?

41:26 week I'm presenting at SMX and I have a presentation on that flow um okay but

41:33 you analyze it and you can get it pretty well organized and in a company and in

41:41 our case it turns out because we do complex um content and my content team

41:49 um we found that we could save more than half of our time creating content by

41:57 letting the research be done thoroughly right and then the writer finishes it

42:03 right uh so uh there's a lot of also there's a lot of fear among writers about AI

42:10 automating them out of job now what's your perspective on how writers and

42:17 marketers should adapt to this reality well I think it's my personal view is I

42:24 don't want the writers to be out of jobs i think I think that's going to be difficult um there's already been some

42:34 oscillation um yes I can do everything with AI no I can't do everything with AI

42:42 i can use AI for my customer service oh I'm losing my clients ai again is a tool

42:50 not a solution so for writers uh if you're thinking that you're going to

42:56 displace the writers my approach is no you need your writers then you can just produce more

43:03 absolutely right the problem I think the world is facing is that uh AI is first

43:13 tackling the simple things right the easier tasks yes but everybody

43:22 is talking about AI so the payroll system is going to have AI built into it

43:30 and you know every system in your company manufacturing and um doing

43:36 schedules and things like that uh AI is

43:42 going to do or at least be involved in and save time

43:47 uh meaning you don't need as many people the problem I think is that

43:54 before I can become a senior person at anything I had to be a novice

44:02 and all the novice jobs are going away first right there was a uh a prediction

44:10 uh an actual um speech that I saw that predicted unemployment will go over 20%

44:21 i mean that is that's a crash right because

44:26 uh AI can do all the basic jobs so in a couple years there won't be any people

44:33 really up to speed to do it they'll be unemployed they won't have an entrylevel position if AI takes over um my personal

44:42 view is AI shouldn't take over i think we need to use it intelligently

44:49 um but we should bring in the novice and have them learn how to use it

44:55 right right i think that's the way it ought to be and but I think that it it's

45:02 going to grow too fast so when you look at SEO I can say uh use like prewriter I

45:10 can use it to do the research right but I can also point it at a website and do

45:16 do an analysis right i can easily go to um right now I

45:24 can go to chat and I can say for company XYZ perform a SWAT analysis strength

45:32 weaknesses opportunity threats tell me how to beat my next best competitor in

45:38 this new topic area write the blog post for me and it will and it just will and

45:46 um you could use an intern you could then spend the time to train

45:52 them on how to do it right and everything else but I think that we're going to see a a big disturbance where

46:00 many of the things that uh an intern or a novice person would do is being done

46:06 by AI right and uh it's going to dampen

46:12 uh that level that level of uh opportunity to learn

46:19 because there'll be fewer opportunities because of AI um can AI displace

46:25 everything uh the current version of AI um can solve puzzles in ways

46:35 you know I'm going to do the 47,000 combinations that might be the right answer

46:41 a human couldn't do it that fast right you know you see these high it would

46:47 take a thousand years to do this calculation and AI did it in you know 12

46:53 seconds i mean you you hear it um is it

46:58 going to displace people sure the problem is that AI is not yet able to be

47:06 creative now some of the advanced AI is actually

47:11 already creative uh you know it it wins at go contests

47:18 coming up uh there was one example where it came up with a move that had never

What should SEOs do to adapt to changes?

47:24 been done before so it wasn't ba based on history it

47:30 wasn't based on you know the model was a board in this position i should do this

47:35 it invented a a move right and uh I think we're going to have a a serious

47:42 risk with AI how do you use it for SEO analysis

47:48 helping uh you integrate writing um that's where you go

47:56 right and uh so what's one piece of advice you would give SEO trying to keep

48:01 up with this fast evolving landscape uh well you have to continue to read a

48:09 lot and you have to uh experiment

48:14 okay and I mean come up with something that you wish

48:20 there was a tool for and then figure out how to do it i've been doing that for well over a

48:26 year year and a half almost two years now November and um I've invented a lot

48:34 of scripts i wrote all the basic scripts in prewriter priter is 30 different

48:40 tools um so it's got a lot of different things in it um so there's a lot of

48:47 solutions so think about what you can do see playing with chat

48:54 the advantage of that is you start thinking outside of the box

49:00 you think about things that you could do and then you try them

49:07 and sometimes you think about things that that would never work and so I

49:14 wrote them and then they work all right I'll give you a real fast

49:20 example most people are going to put in a keyword and say write a,200word article right i say take the keyword

49:29 look up the personas that might type that keyword in

49:35 look up their pain points and then extract those keywords and

49:41 write an article that solves their pain that's different from put in a keyword

49:47 get an article right right right right and I can tell it all sorts of

49:53 interesting things to do i can I can have it recursively improve its own writing

49:59 you write it and then you test it and as you test it if it fails correct it

50:06 it's self-improving its own content and if you don't do that by the way uh that's a true statement if

50:14 you don't do that what you get initially is like 100% AI

50:20 absolutely you have to have it recursively fix itself you have to have it humanized

50:27 um and then you still have to have um voice tone compliance

50:35 you know it's like having somebody somewhere remote city who knows nothing

50:42 about what your company does write a blog post for you

50:47 that's that's what AI is yes right and then you have to make it into something

50:53 that fits in your website and it it matches your mission even your voice

50:59 your tone your style um the way you would word it

51:06 uh those are the things that are the writers uh areas so you are to really

51:12 focus on being able to do that uh we learned a lot uh when I what we have

51:18 right now is you can go to prewriter.ai and sign up no credit card you get 20

51:24 tokens play with it so what we did is we put it out on a on

51:29 sort of a limited release limited uh 10,00 users

51:36 and they told us all the things they wanted improved it's interesting when we first did it we

51:42 gave too much information they we we answered every question we

51:49 thought they would ever ask and it turns out that when the writers saw it they were overloaded

51:56 we had to take data out i mean I wouldn't have thought that

52:03 you know so uh you have to tune it for what the writer is going to care about

52:09 and how they're going to view it and uh can they do it yes we can take a four

52:14 and a half five hour project down to two that's not bad

52:20 just because we give them the right data at the right level um how AI is going to change SEO is

52:28 mostly content I believe and then you're going to see it gets stronger in the

52:34 area of diagnostics those are the two areas that are going to be the first big changes right now

52:42 with so many digital channels paid ads social media influencer marketing and of

52:47 course with search everywhere optimization how do you position SEO alongside with them

52:54 well SEO uh as you know is uh onpage off- page technical right those are the

53:00 three general classifications the technical being things like servers and

53:05 redirects and you know speed and and 30

53:10 right that's not going away you still have to rank organically

53:17 um and making something usable and and

53:22 um logical is uh still a big part of the problem um and a vast majority of the

53:31 people that create uh websites don't pay attention to most

53:38 of the things you got to do as an SEO um so I'm finding that SEO as a demand is

53:45 up but um I mean it's broader i mean all

53:52 the things I've got to do now is there's a lot more so it's broader uh the big

53:58 problem I think we're going to run into is people um

54:03 right now are sort of in a wait and see they don't know exactly what it's going

54:08 to look like for AIO or any of the others um you know there isn't a clear

54:15 winner um we're doing some pretty advanced stuff

54:21 we're implementing something called Bedrock um because we program our our solution

54:28 this is not a group of prompts this is an actual application and um I think

54:36 that's going to be a gamecher for a lot of the industry uh because it's it makes

54:42 it so that one call I can deal with any LLM

54:49 it's it's so simple and uh powerful and fast

54:56 and cheaper and so we're going to be able to do a lot uh going forward i think you're going to see uh

Why hire a true SEO expert over journalists or AI specialists?

55:02 opportunities are going to open up new applications are going to just fall from the heavens um

55:10 but they're all going to be pretty limited prompts you're not I mean my prompt page is

55:17 something like 80 pages 80 word pages long for all my prompts that I've

55:23 written and um it's a bunch

55:30 so yeah you've got a lot of uh a lot of prompts

55:36 okay so uh let's talk a little bit about the need for expert SEO versus journalist

55:43 journalistic agencies now many companies think any marketing agencies can do SEO

55:49 why is it so important to have a true SEO expert on board rather than relying on journalist or AI specialists

55:56 okay so well first of all anybody that says "I'm an AI specialist," better be

56:02 an SEO specialist because if you're not ranking near the

56:07 top AI will not pay attention to you so

56:12 um while I can say I know AI my specialist is qualifying for AI to a

56:21 great extent if I can qualify I'll show up um so we want to be able to

56:27 understand that uh the cool part okay so

56:32 I I'll give it to you in in layers 30 years ago

56:39 there were only eight of us that knew how to do SEO we were in high demand 30 years later

56:45 there's a lot of people that know how to do SEO um I've been running my company

56:51 longer than many of the people have been born that are doing SEO right right so

56:58 um there's a lot of people that know how to do SEO and they're they're pretty

57:04 good but the difference is when you walk in to a website when when you a client

57:12 comes to you it's like walking into a room of smoking guns

57:18 everything nothing is perfect and everything is a little bit off and an expert who has

57:26 seen it before can say those I'm going to focus on that

57:32 whereas somebody who's never seen it before is just going to fumble through

57:37 the room right on things that don't matter so uh an expert is is more of a

57:45 the ability to focus it's like if you were to hire let's

57:52 unfortunately a family member needs brain surgery right do you hire the best brain surgeon

57:59 you can find or the cheapest best of course you don't care right

58:06 right well that website can put you out of business if it loses

58:11 everything right so to a great extent it is like

58:17 hiring a brain surgeon so what you want are people have experience that has seen that before that has fixed that before

58:25 or has talked to a colleague in the company and the company has fixed that before you don't necessarily want

58:33 somebody that is right out of college that has no experience now I I agree uh

58:42 those folks need training too and I understand it and you can train them up

58:48 but that doesn't mean they're customerf facing and it doesn't mean they're the problem solver right but uh and one

58:55 problem solver and a whole bunch of noviceses is the same as a whole bunch of noviceses um you need you need people

59:02 that have the expertise to see the real problem

59:08 right it's like the TV show here in the US is House it's about a surgeon right

59:15 and and that's what we're dealing with somebody that can look and say "Rerun

59:23 the test do this do that that's wrong." Right can

59:30 If you were to hire an SEO company yourself

59:35 put yourself I'm an a chief marketing officer somewhere i'm hiring an SEO

59:42 company what you're going to care about mostly is that they can help you right

How do you stay ahead in the SEO field?

59:50 and not that they could help you eventually right you don't have time to do it over

59:58 that's a big problem with people you know this is a competitive real time

1:00:04 competitive environment if it takes me a month to do it and it's

1:00:09 wrong it costs me money right right so you

1:00:15 really kind of need an expert to uh shortcut and and circumvent the uh how

1:00:22 long it takes to solve a problem issue and I think that's a big deal now now

1:00:28 how do you ensure your team at Bruce Clay Inc stays ahead in such a fast moving field well I I spend about two

1:00:37 hours a day staying up on it i forward articles and videos to my staff they

1:00:46 take my training every year um we have

1:00:52 uh every other week a think tank where we get to sit down and go over all the

What is an underrated SEO tool?

1:00:59 things that have changed okay every week I go over every project

1:01:05 and then we periodically have uh what we call an all eyes review where we'll have

1:01:12 the analysts sit there and analyze each other's projects okay right so by the time you do all

1:01:19 that I mean it takes a lot of time this background to work but

1:01:25 that's how you stay current okay you don't really have a choice

1:01:31 so with that we came almost uh we ran overshot our time but we came towards the end of our segment which we will be

1:01:37 talking about SEO tools workflow and future skills so uh let's geek out a bit now what's one underrated SEO tool or

1:01:44 platform your team uses that makes a big difference um

1:01:51 I don't know unrelated would be the right I mean we use uh we have about 60

1:01:57 tools that we subscribe to if it's a tool I subscribe to it and uh it may be that

1:02:07 we don't need it or it only does one thing but I still want to know what it

1:02:12 is so I have a lot of tools um and I mean the big one we use ahrefs

1:02:22 a lot um right we use all the Google tools a lot

1:02:28 okay as as upsetting as that might be

1:02:34 we use a lot of the Google stuff um you know a big you know it's interesting

1:02:42 zoom is a very big part of communication

1:02:49 and communication is a good third of client satisfaction

1:02:56 right i mean we have found that you could be the most technical person in the whole

1:03:02 world but if you cannot communicate with the customer you lose

1:03:08 and uh so we we have Zoom and upgraded Zoom uh we have all the Google products

1:03:16 uh bruce clay.com emails go through Gmail so brucecllay.com but it you know we're

1:03:24 using all the kinds of technology technology um we're tracking things in

1:03:29 HubSpot we're we're doing real business things uh you deal with a public company

1:03:36 they kind of expect that um Base Camp uh we're using Base Camp um

1:03:45 and there's a lot of things that might be better we tried Monday and didn't like it i mean there's different things

What future skills will every SEO need?

1:03:51 that you can do um but it depends on the

1:03:56 business and the people i find that being very technical uh everybody uh

1:04:02 here is pretty technical uh that sometimes you do have to bring

1:04:08 in a an intern and train them up but for the most part uh when the client asks a

1:04:14 question they expect an answer so training is is really key if you haven't

1:04:22 trained your staff you lose right right now uh what's a skill you

1:04:28 believe every SEO will need to master in the next three years well they will need to know how to do

1:04:35 prompts for AI um even if you have AI tools everywhere

1:04:43 and they're they're doing things for you uh multi-step processing uh I have one

1:04:50 uh our biggest uh page creator script is 152 steps

1:04:58 nobody could sit there and type those in right so you would use the tool to do that right take 20 minutes but you would

1:05:05 use the tool for doing that but you still need to know how to

1:05:12 manipulate output right right um

1:05:18 I would like the top 10 search results each one lists the top five keywords

1:05:26 give me the most common keyword across all the top 10 then give me a definition

1:05:33 for each and let me know uh how to write it into a title tag you know that's one

1:05:40 little application you're not likely to find a tool to do that so they're going to have to know how to do that right

1:05:47 right so I think that every every SEO is going to have to be uh aware of how to

1:05:55 do AI prompting and how to code it um

1:06:01 now there's a lot of um different ways to do it um one of the things I think is

1:06:08 going to be a disturbance in the force is AI mode and the level of personalization that it requires yes

1:06:16 we've already solved the personalization problem uh with one of our uh internal scripts

1:06:24 and uh the AI I want to wait a little bit i I think we have an answer but I

1:06:30 want to wait and see uh what it really looks like in the wild right right

1:06:36 because um after the IO conference

1:06:41 Google had an internal meeting where a lot of SEOs got together

1:06:46 physically at the location uh and it turned out that

1:06:52 there were so many questions that came out of it that Google hadn't even thought about so what really sees the

1:06:59 light of day is going to be different uh I expect

1:07:05 maybe better maybe not but AI mode we got to solve personalization

1:07:11 uh has to be solved we did it but um I can write a blog post and put an FAQ on

1:07:20 my blog post and I do and our FAQ is one

1:07:25 big FA FAQ i mean it's like four paragraphs it answers the question what

1:07:31 is it and then gives you some steps to solve it within two days of me posting a

1:07:37 blog post if you went down and copied the FAQ question just copy the question

1:07:44 of the FAQ and do a Google search i'm in AIO and featured snippet and over half

What is the most important mindset for marketers?

1:07:51 of them in two days and you can go down my entire blog uh

1:07:58 page and all of them show up that way now we're doing that and we're applying

1:08:05 it to personalization and uh SER visibility and all the things that we're

1:08:12 working on we're going to do the same thing okay and um yeah it's going to be

1:08:18 an interesting time right right i'd say say just like old times

1:08:25 yes now my last question is for agency owners and marketers listening today what's the single most important mindset

1:08:31 or skill they should develop to thrive in the next let's say 5 years or 10 years

1:08:37 well other than I as I mentioned everybody has to become familiar with AI

1:08:43 prompts um I think that the entire concept

1:08:51 uh of where the where it's going there's going to be voice search

1:08:56 there's going to be um more the Star Trek computer kind of a thing we're

1:09:03 going to find um that the what we're used to as u

1:09:11 search which is on a a computer right maybe on a phone but it's on a computer

1:09:18 that's going to be on other devices I mean my TV will do it my

1:09:26 you know coffee pot will do it I mean you're gonna find that uh recipes are

1:09:34 all over the kitchen any device can answer a question right right we already

1:09:39 know uh that there's a lot of um you know

1:09:46 anywhere approaches that can be taken um the my car has a navigation system but

1:09:53 it's pretty primitive compared to what it will be in five years um I think uh ordering things and

1:10:03 having it show up amazon is uh amazing uh I can order anything and it shows up

1:10:10 the next morning and right when you start doing that and then you can say to

1:10:17 Amazon I have this problem what is the best solution and it says

1:10:25 "Here's your three best solutions and you can pick from it." I mean you know

1:10:30 in the old days you would type a word into Google and get 10 links and then you'd have to type in a different one

1:10:36 and get 10 links and it would take you all day to figure something out now it's

1:10:42 going to just happen if But here's here's the thing

1:10:48 if you believe that we're going to be doing a lot more voice which I believe

1:10:56 if you believe by the way that we're going to be doing a lot more pretty creative videos which we will if you

1:11:04 believe that your product name better be easily said

1:11:13 right and uh if you do a voice search for your

1:11:18 product name and you can't find it you got a problem

1:11:24 right right and there's a lot of words that are difficult to pronounce or uh

1:11:32 aren't clear or have a lot of synonyms and um we're going to have to

1:11:41 understand that the search engine that we're used to is going away

1:11:47 it it's going to be an answer engine and right that's its goal and we have to

1:11:56 have our company our materials our website

1:12:01 i'll tell you this right now clients when I talk to clients and I say "Your

1:12:06 website is going to have to be totally redone at a technology level within two

1:12:13 years," they look at me like I'm crazy they have so much money invested in

1:12:19 their website they don't want to redo it right they

What’s next for Bruce Clay Inc?

1:12:24 don't they can't afford to redo it right and I think that that is going to

1:12:33 be where we run as an industry as an agency structure all agencies are going

1:12:39 to run into that where I to do it right you have to re-engineer this and they're

1:12:46 not going to like that idea okay uh with that now um so where can people follow

1:12:54 your work and what's coming up next for Bruce Clay Inc okay so uh we are just about to release

1:13:06 an actual application approach to the SER anywhere

1:13:11 um which is really that overall structure now that we know how to do it

1:13:17 um and uh pre-writer uh is improving we

1:13:23 do a release every two weeks and it's still available with the 20 free tokens for people to try so okay

1:13:31 prewriter.ai uh it it changes daily i create two or

1:13:37 three scripts a week solutions to a problem i take a problem and I make a

1:13:42 solution and so that is there um I think

1:13:48 those two things are going to be very very large i'm working on a re-release

1:13:53 of our tools um our training okay I'm gonna tell you

1:14:00 my online training one of the problems that you we faced is that it took so

1:14:05 long because we had to get me in front of a green screen to re-record

1:14:11 uh that uh we couldn't change it fast enough because as you know everything's

1:14:16 changing like daily um so what we did is

1:14:22 the instructor for my entire online course is my avatar

1:14:28 oh just like Hayden okay

1:14:34 just like and um so that avatar is actually teaching my online course which

1:14:42 is of course uh slides that I use in the classroom when I do the classroom course

1:14:48 right the difference is uh the online course doesn't tell my jokes

1:14:54 they don't see some of my videos and you know it's a different environment um

1:15:00 right and uh within a week I think we're

1:15:05 going to be putting up our certification course our our exam

What’s the upcoming Certification Release about?

1:15:11 okay uh it's a little hard uh it's over uh 1,800 questions

Outro

1:15:17 wow we select 100 randomly okay it resorts the answers and

1:15:24 everything and then you have one hour to take a 100 questions

1:15:29 and if you pass it then you can be certified for uh six months

1:15:34 okay and then you retake it but by then you should know it

1:15:40 um so we're having a certification release uh coming up um lots of fun

1:15:45 stuff okay glad to find stuff okay uh Bruce

1:15:51 thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and stories with us and it's been an absolute privilege to our listeners

1:15:57 as well as to me and uh if you have enjoyed this episode please subscribe share and leave us a review and once

1:16:04 again thank you Bruce uh for giving your valuable time uh and to our listeners

1:16:10 this is Agency Insider Show see you next time thank you