Nathan Gotch on Building AI SEO SaaS: 7,000 Product Changes, No Free Trials, and the New Search Era

I'm working really hard right now. Uh just because as you know the opportunity right now is unbelievable. I mean it's like the things that you can do it's unlimited, right? And so I'm like I feel like if I don't if I don't do this right now like I'm going to regret it, right? Like Yeah. So I was curious. I I I was literally thinking I'm like I wonder I wonder what else other than like just pure SEO you're working on. Like are you doing businesses that you're where your go to market is SEO and because you like in mark because you know what you're doing with marketing like are you doing are you doing side businesses outside of the SEO industry? I'm very careful with not branching out too much because I know how hard it is to build a business, right? And so like I just I I know what it takes and I'm like I'm not gonna do it because I know what it's going to involve and and I know that if I do that it's going to take away from my core things that I'm doing. So of course I I have endless shiny object syndrome. I see opportunity everywhere. But I've gotten a lot better at saying, "Yes, I see that and I know that would be a lot of fun, but I got to stick to this boring thing that I've been doing for a long time, and I got to stick with it." Uh, because there's always just so much more to do in any business, right? Like there's just so much. It never ends. And like going back to the balance part of this, this kind of kind of bleeds into this. Um because we have the capability to do so much now with AI, it's actually detrimental in many ways for productivity. Like the weirdest thing is this is we have more leverage than ever before. More leverage, more ability to do things. Yet, why am I working harder than I've ever worked in my entire life? I thought I thought AI was going to make my life easier and do less, but somehow I'm doing more. But it's of course a choice, right? It's a choice. Like I'm choosing to do that. But it's um what I found is like just because like you know we're developing rankability and I've got another SAS product I'm working on too and like you know we we build out all these features and then the next day comes and it we do it again and then we do it again. And so there there's never there's never a point where you sit down you're like I'm done. You're never done. Interesting thing is is you could like double down on the marketing for a single feature too and instead then by putting in more features you might even be that that could be a form of shiny object syndrome as well. Exactly. Yep. Yeah. And that's that that requires discipline too which is like the the feeling that you want to keep building more new stuff when you've already got existing stuff that needs more work. I think about that like dude if you think about some of the most successful apps they they change very slowly. Mhm. They iterate very slow and it's like maybe there's something to learn there. Like we think it's we think it's dumb like oh yeah they're just too scared there there's too much red tape but maybe there's actually like I was thinking about Dolingo and like Dolingo I I have a 1500 day streak or 1600 day streak with Dolingo and Dolingo iterates really slow now and but they are the biggest language learning app. Maybe there's something to learn with that. Yeah. There's also like there's extremes of this. So like you have Anthropic who is just pushing new feature after new feature. So there's like there's edges to this, right? there's like the slower development kind of safe but it it's just because like um I've just learned this you doing SAS now that like you have an idea for something you want to build and even if you are using AI to help you with that it's always going to be at least a hundred times harder than you ever imagined and as long as you accept that it's much easier so whenever I do something I go in with that perspective like this is going to be at least a hundred times more difficult I say I say to myself, I say it's going to take I say it's going to take two times as long. You're going 100. I dude I really I really see why people hate it cuz I am interrupting you but it's only cuz I'm so into what you're saying and it's like this is a real conversation and and the listeners complained last time and I'm like oh man like we talked for two hours last time and now I remember why. It's like yeah this guy is great. I'm having so much fun already. I mean I Yeah, I mean it's just I'm just um you know I just take a lot of action and I just learn a lot through that. So, um, like I was I think the last time we talked I was telling you that we were bringing development inhouse for rankability and we did do that and so like in the last 90 days we've made 7,000 changes to the app. Wow. So, it's taken that many changes to get it to where I want it to be. And I'm Is it where you want it to be? Um, it's No, it will never be where I want it to be. Right. Because there's always more that I want to do. there's always a vision I want to go towards, but um but it's in a place where I'm like, okay, we're like we're in a good spot. We're in a good spot. It's doing the core functions I needed to do. I'm able to execute my SEO campaign end to end with it. So um so yeah, I'd say it's in that way, but it's like it's a blessing and a curse for me. Like I just look at things and I'm like when I build it, I know in a like a month from now I'm going to go back and look at and say this is garbage. Wow. Really? It's really bad. It's a real bad thing for me. I just I don't ever um I I just keep seeing new because like you you gain experience. So when you go back and look at something you built before, it should be worse from your new perspective. So that's kind of the way that I I think about it. So this method of marketing is so effective, I had to make sure it wasn't against Google's rules before I kept doing it. It's a form of SEO I call compact keywords. Whereas most SEO focuses on putting up articles to answer questions, how, what, when, compact keywords focuses on putting up dozens of pages that sell to searchers who are actually looking to buy. These pages rank on Google and convert so much better than normal that when I discovered this years ago, I couldn't believe this was allowed. It's less work, too. The average compact keywords page is only 415 words. Compact Keywords is a 13-hour deep course on getting sales with SEO. A customer recently said, "Each lesson is dense with information. You're giving years worth of experience boiled down into 15 to 30 minute lessons with no filler or fluff. I feel like I'm gaining a new superpower. Compact Keywords is about setting up an SEO funnel that brings you sales for years and years and years. It works with AI. It's less work than traditional SEO and it makes way more money. You can get it now at compactkeywords.com. Back to the podcast. But it's fun, man. Like this is a fun time, but like yeah, I'm balances, you know, I'm also writing I don't know if I mentioned this on the last call, but I'm writing AISO for Dummies the book. So, um, so I'm writing that book. So, I'm like trying to write a book. I'm running two SAS companies of a family. I'm a T-ball coach. Like, I got a lot of stuff going. So, it's like um but it's I just I get very strict with my schedule and like when I work I work. Like I start at 5, I stop at 5. Oh, wow. Yeah. So, um and that might seem crazy to some people, but like to me it's I don't This isn't work to me. Like I just This is Oh, that's how I feel. I'm so switched on all the time. It's like I'm I can't believe how switched on I am. Like all the I'm so excited. I I I started the recording and I realized that we were supposed to be doing a screen share and uh Okay. Yeah. So, what do you want what do you want me to share? We can talk about anything. I mean um we don't have to but but I I people are really liking seeing using just how you how people are using AI to make posts to make pages to make websites. People My second most popular guest episode was somebody showing how they're using cloud co-work to do audits to do local audits. So, um, if you if you have anything prepared like that, we could do it. If not, like I'm cool with just talking. Like, I'm having so much fun right now, so it doesn't matter. Whatever you whatever you want to do. I mean, yeah, we can get into some tactical stuff. I mean, I'll just give you some context of like what my stack that I'm using right now. Um, obviously I use my own software. That goes without saying, but um, but what we did recently with both of our software businesses, we built APIs for every tier. So, and it was actually more of a selfish reason why we did this because I needed it. So, so I built out built out API capabilities for all of them because I've been using Open Claw since it came out. And um it's been rough, man. Like it's it takes a lot it takes a lot of effort to get it to to do what you need it to do. And what I discovered in kind of this process is it's horrible at using the browser. This is one area where AI sucks. It's just I don't know why they just haven't been able to figure that out quite yet. Like it's really good at using the browser. If you're doing research or you're doing bug testing, it's pretty good at that. If you're doing a CRO audit, which I'll show you here in a second that you can use a prompt, it's pretty good at that stuff. But if you ask it to go and say, "Hey, I need you to go and publish a post on X using the browser, not using API." It'll take five minutes to craft that post, right? And like in the grand scale that's not that long of course, but like you could have done it in one second. You use use cloud code and and is is cloud would cloud code do a better job than cloudbot? Um so I'm using both right now. So I'm using cloud code work and I'm using um openclaw and I actually I have a dedicated Mac Mini. So I have a Mac Mini with my open claw and a Mac Mini that has um codecs and has um cloud co-work. So just yesterday I ran a test using the APIs to see which would do better and they had their pros and their cons. Um so like OpenClaw was better at using the API to um build proper project management inside of project management software. So like it built that out. It was perfectly designed. It did that super well. But OpenClaw has like one of the biggest flaws hands down is it sucks at communication. It is like the worst. it will finish. You'll give it a you'll give it a whole batch test. So, let's say I give it like a batch of 10 articles I needed to create, right? And and it it will it will execute that flawlessly using API. It will do it well. It will put it into WordPress. It will take screenshots. I've got it pretty dialed in on that. Um, but then it just goes silent and you'll be like, you'll have to follow up. Hey, did you did you finish? Like, what's going on? They'll be like, yeah, I finished. It's like, well, I would like to know when you're done. That would be very helpful. So, I have I've I've figured out a workaround, which is like I have it update the tasks in the project management software when it's done. So, instead of me kind of following up with it, I just go and look in the project management software and see like, oh, okay, it's done. So, but still even then it would be nice to like know. So, um because like a small little detail when you're running API, when you're using API, it takes time, right? There's kind of like a process. It could take 5 minutes, 10 minutes depending on the batch and so you don't know when it's done and you need to know when it's done so you can move on to the next step. So, but I I noticed with co-work which was kind of fascinating. I ran the same exact task and when I did the same thing, it asked me it said, "Would you like me to continue to check on this task over time?" So, it actually set up a script where it just kept pinging to make to watch the API and then when it was done, it it actually did tell me. So, I was like, "Uh oh, this might be a little bit better because it actually communicated super well." Um, and so the as far as like the output, like as far as using the API, as far as getting into WordPress, as far as formatting the content, as far as taking screenshots, doing internal linking, like all of that, it's apples to apples with both of them. They're both incredibly effective at that. But it's more about the like how how you use them, which makes the difference. And I think right now I'm much more leaning towards claude co-work just because it has it seems to be better communicating which is critical when you're doing work. So yeah I I was thinking about things that I do that that I could automate things that I do the same thing every day that I could automate and it's like okay one is I create I make the podcast can't automate that but I do make titles for the podcast. I use chatpt with a prompt that I have to make a title for each podcast. I have a prompt to get the description for each podcast. Then I have to go remove m dashes and and change like the bullet style so that they work for YouTube. Uh and then I have to combine everything. I have like my different call to actions at the beginning of each podcast and the guest information in the podcast and all these different things. And I'm like, well, I feel like I could automate that. And I was thinking about using cloud code to do it. The problem with that is that I would have to give it access to Dcript, which which is literally where all of the backup recordings are, like all every single recording for my socials, for for this podcast. And I'm just terrified that it might delete something or a lot of things. And I mean, know that that's good to feel that way for sure. Is that is that a real is that a real concern? Is is there a like is there a way to give cloud code or or something else access to descript and not have and have it actually do it on its own and not worry that it's going to delete Um well I think the worry of it deleting things is always going to be there under the surface and you should always have that kind of like have a backup plan always because agents go rogue. I mean I've had plenty of agents go rogue on me. They do. I mean like I you know like I I've used I've been using Replet for about a year now aggressively and I can't tell you the amount of times where I've had to I've had to do slashs stop because it just starts doing something wild and I'm like whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa I didn't I didn't want you to do that like cuz because sometimes and then you have to undo it and you and you lose so much time undoing it. You it uh not as much as before. It's a lot better at this. Like this very this doesn't happen as much as it used to. before it was like I was always having to roll back, roll back, roll back, roll back because it kept making so many issues. This is rare. Like I it just happened maybe yesterday where it started doing something off the rails and I caught it, but when I went back and looked at my prompting, it was my fault because I gave weird context and it kind of got a little mixed up. And so if you you can always trace it back to the prompting and the context because you very rarely is it just going off the rails for no reason. There's usually some sort of issue with user uh inputs. Yeah, but it did go off the rails and that cost you a lot of time. It it did. Fortunately, it didn't cost me a lot of time because I stopped it early cuz I just know the p I know the patterns of when I know it's going off the rails because you can see you can look at its thinking process and see like, okay, why is it focused on that weird section? No, no, no, no, no. Something is going on here, so I just like cut it off. But if you're not aware of it, yeah, it can it can do some damage. How about So I actually have two questions about rankability. One, you're vibe coding it. It's all AI code ever. Okay. So all right. So question one is how do users react when you iterate so heavily? You said 7,000 iterations in 90 days cuz are user because I mean like you're a consumer of different products and like how do you feel when it's changing non-stop? So how how do users react? That's number one. Um and number two is are you concerned with vibe with vibe coding this that different things different features or or a code will be accidentally deleted and there have you have you had experienced problems with that recently or not so much anymore? Not so much anymore because I've got backups upon backups upon backups. I've got I I could just because I've been burned so many times, I've thought about like each of these worst case scenarios. So like even when you use replet for example, it has automatic backups and checkpoints that it makes, but I wouldn't just start I wouldn't just leave it there. You should also have an external backup. So I have a I have an external GitHub specifically for the application and I push all those changes out to GitHub which is independent of replet because let's say replet goes out of business tomorrow, right? Like that's a problem. So that makes sure that our application is safe and secure and we could always spin it up somewhere else if we needed to. Um so that's really important. And now also in Rep what they've added a new feature where you can do parallel tasks. So basically what happens is you have your main application it makes a copy of your main application like a fork and then you can you know work on the new feature in that fork and this adds another safety layer right because like let's say things go haywire in that fork you can just delete it no no no problems right so there's like many different so basically now we have it's pretty insane but like the way we test just because it's AI you do need to have way more testing because there's just wacky things that go on And um so the way we do is we'll we'll build out a feature in the fork, test it in the fork. Once it's working in the fork, we push it to Maine, then once it's in Maine, test it. Uh it's either me or my partner are testing it so manually. Um so we're testing it, then we move it into Maine. We test it in Maine. If it's working there, then we push it to the live website, and then we test it there as well. And then there's another layer of this. Once we've done all of our testing, human testing of course, then I open up uh Claude and I have Claude do bug testing. So, and then usually it will find things that I didn't even know existed, right, a lot of the time. And then that helps us kind of iterate on the process. So, it's basically doing that like a million times. So, it's pretty intense. Um, but you know there's a lot of like there's a lot of little details if you're doing AI coding um that are really important. So I'll give you a small little detail. So when we first launched the new product fortunately I had one of the beta testers was someone who's been part of my academy and like has we have a good relationship but he's also a coder for he does for a living and he's like hey man I just want to let you know um your API endpoints are exposed. And so he showed me and I was like, "Oh, that's a problem." So, and basically what for people that don't do this and even I had to learn this myself, which is that exposes all the information for your application. It's a really bad thing. So, this is the part that's so incredible that a lot of people don't talk about though. Okay? You'll hear people that bash AI coding is like, "Oh, you can't build a production level app. You can't do Okay, well, number one, we have a production level app. We have customers. We have people yet. Yesterday, I looked at our logs. We had one user that was used it for eight hours in one day. Eight hours. Did you Did you find out though? When I hear that, I'm like, how much of that was it wasn't working properly and how much of that was it was working properly and they were they were locked in? Well, this is the creepy part is we have recordings. Oh, great. So, no, that's that's not creepy at all. That's what you should you should be doing that like and I mean we're not doing it to spy on our users, but we're doing it to make it better. Yeah. And so, uh, if you use Post Hog, you can actually see what they're doing. So, clicks, actions, and everything. So, this wasn't an idle user. This wasn't a user that was encountering errors. It was just they were just hammering. Amazing. Yeah. So, which was cool. Um, what were they what were they doing? What what like SEO things were they doing? uh creating creating content, setting up uh reports, doing keyword research, you know, using we have this to tool called advisor, which you link in all of your data sources and your knowledge base and then you're able to communicate with the AI and it uses all that that grounding. So, a lot of people are using that a lot just like because it's it's crazy like you're linking up all the data sources gives you so much intel. Um, but yeah, but going back to like the development side of it, the craziest thing about this is, and I've done this multiple times where people say, "Oh, well, you're going to have security issues. You're going to have technical debt. Like, you're not going to be able to solve that. You're going to need a developer." No, not true. Because what we did just to prove this point is I hired a security specialist, okay? And I paid him to do an audit and he exposed all kinds of stuff that were security related issues. What do you think I did? I took all of his suggestions. I went right back into the AI and I said, "We're going to work through this checklist one by one. We're going to fix all these things." So then after that was all done, I sent an email back. I said, "Hey, will you check now?" And he's like, "Yep, all good." I have a question about that. Is is as you keep keep iterating, so you make 7,000 iterations, do you need to have security checked again 90 days later after all these iterations? Absolutely. Yeah. That's that's just like a that's just like running an SEO audit that you would run every quarter or you know maybe every two quarters like security just needs to be run all the time. Replet has built-in security measures but I don't think they're that great. I think you still need to do kind of like an extensive audit. Um but the biggest issues with with let's say Vibe coding or just using AI in general is security is a big concern obviously. So you need to be very very deliberate with that. Um, and number two is technical debt, which is something I didn't really know a whole lot about even like a year ago. Um, but just to give you some perspective on this, we had one file in the application that was 42,000 lines long. And so that's like a small novel, right? And so like basically every time that we would run a prompt, that forces the AI to read through 42,000 lines of code to know what the heck is going on, which is not a good not efficient, right? And so we actually went through the process of taking that 42,000 lines of code and refactoring it and putting it into individual files. Um, and how many days how how how long did that take to refactor all that code? Um, oh just just a sentence. No, no, no. Probably about four hours. Okay. So um and that would normally take like a normal team like a quarter. So wait, you're so you're doing so you're having security tested every quarter? Uh yes or less. That's that's that's the plan is to do it probably every quarter. Yeah. And you pay for the security audit. Uh that one's like a thousand. Wow. That's very good. We're so so uh we I just started something that I'm funding which is like I I have this amazing uh like entrepreneurial type driven like young kid who was like my previous editor and he's he's like the type you know you you meet someone and and you're like this is going to be a very successful startup founder and that's like this type of person and I'm like I want to fund this person to do something. So, we found a niche where people don't want to vibe code their own software that also has bad SEO and not great marketing. So, we can do amazing SEO and amazing marketing and people aren't going to vibe code alternatives. So, we found that niche, we vibe coded the whole thing and now we're starting on the WordPress site, which is what the SEO is going to be on. And so, I'm like asking you all these things because you have the production app and and I'm learning a ton right now from hearing what you're going through. Uh, and it's confirming things that I thought could be a problem that we're going to have to look into like um like security. Have you tried uh Google's anti-gravity at all? I haven't I've done run a few very basic little things through there, but you know, once again, like I'm I'm kind of weird like this. Like when I get something that works, I don't care about anything else. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uhhuh. Like if it's if if I got something I know if I got something cooking, I don't need to go and do another one. Like it's doing what it needs to do. If it gets to a point where it's not doing what it needs to do, then I can explore other alternatives. But Replet's been really good to me, man. Like I I I am so grateful. Like it I didn't even know about Replet. It was actually someone from my academy who like one day we're like getting off a call and he's like, "Hey, Nathan, have you heard about this Replet thing?" And I'm like, "No, never heard of it." So then I went that day and I'm like, "I'll check it out. I'll see what it's all about." And then I I I think I built out one little linkbait uh item and I was like, "Oh, now I see. Now I see. Isn't the um Isn't the founder of Replet very approachable? Like I like I feel like you could uh you could get him on on your on your channel. I mean maybe. Yeah. I mean he's he's pretty hardcore guy. Yeah. He's I mean it's very But you're you're a pretty hard you're a pretty hardcore guy. Well I mean not not at his level. No. So was was rankability it it didn't start out as as vibe coded or did it? No it did not. No. What was it like migrating that? Uh, we didn't migrate it. We started from scratch. Oh, but how did you transfer over all the all the data? I mean, I I don't know what the rankability looks like. Maybe there was no like user profiles or anything to transfer over. Well, there was there is a lot of existing user data on rankability one. Um, and so what we did is we just because I knew there was no it would have been much harder to try to rebuild the app like take all the spare pieces and try to piece it all. I was like, "No, we're just we're going from scratch." So, I literally built it from scratch. Um, and we we have both platforms still active. So, we have Rankability 1 and Rankability 2. Really? So, so the reason we did this is because I actually stole this idea from Base Camp. And this is what Base Camp did. So, when they went from Base Camp 1 to Base Camp 2, they kept Base Camp 1 alive. And so we technically are still paying to keep one alive because we just found it to be easier for the existing users. If they still want to use the old platform, they can still use it. That's up to them, but we're giving them a free migration over to the new platform. So they're not paying anything extra. We're just migrating them to the new platform. So they're actually getting a really good deal because they can use both. So technically they get double the credits to work through things. Um, so that's just, you know, maybe that's not the best way to do it, but it's working for us, right? What's the percentage split between one and two in terms of users in terms of user user base? Uh well, one technically has more just because it was around for multiple years at this point. Uh but it will be surpassed very soon. In fact, the um we've done a lot of crazy things with this new one. A lot of things that seem very counterintuitive that you would not think would work on paper. So, uh an example is I had this theory because we let's put this nicely. Um, let's just say free trial users can be hard. Let's just put it that way. Okay. Free trial free trial users. What? They're So, I'm I'm just going to guess they're they're demanding. Um, they they cost a lot. Uh, yeah, that's kind of the biggest ones. Well, yes, demanding. Uh, number two, they don't actually use the product. So, they come in with a free trial. they don't have any skin in the game, so they don't actually care about using it. Uh, number two, they cause the most support issues. And number three, they cause the most um disputes. So, of all the things, like they are the most difficult to deal with. Oh, and also, like you said, they do cost you the most money because they actually use the ones that do use the tool. Technically, it costs us obviously for them to use the tool. So, we had this theory. We we ran a free trial from the very beginning on Rankability 1. We did it all the way up until the end of last year. We did free trials, okay? But I was like, you know, for this new platform, we're going to we're going to do something different. We're doing no free trials. Just no free trials whatsoever. You're going to pay. If you want to if you want to do this, you got to make that investment, right? It's been night and day, man. Our support requests, the only support requests we get are from members who are just looking for new features. like we don't get any. It's crazy. But are you getting Was there an impact in how many paid users you get because you no longer have the free trial? Uh, no. We actually are getting higher quality users and we're making more money faster. Oh, fantastic. It's it's it's like it's crazy how well it's actually working. And like I said, on paper, you would say like, okay, you're going to get rid of your free trial. Like that doesn't seem like a good idea. But we actually um it's pretty crazy. We should have known this intuitively because of our academy, but like for the academy, we don't have any free trials. Like our academy, um, which is now transitioning to another platform, but it has so much friction, it's insane. Like on paper, you're like, why would you ever have that much friction? That should not work. But basically, we have them, they have to apply, then they have to get on a call. Only 30% of people get on a call. Then we they we go through discovery process. Then if they're a good fit, we send them a docu sign, a written contract that they have to sign. Then they get into the platform and um it's a high ticket investment on top of it. And like you look at all that, you're like, "No way that would work." But it's like, "Yeah, it does work. We have people paying $8,000, $10,000 for SEO training." No, I mean, they're going to take it seriously. They they are going to come pencil in hand ready to implement. Yep. Yeah. When when you pay, you pay attention. Simple. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, and that's like the same thing with the with that was the same theory we have with the tool is like, okay, if you're going to make that investment, you're probably going to go in there and be like, you know what, I'm going to try to get the most out of this that I possibly can, right? And the little se you want the little secret for us is we know that if you get the most out of it that you can and you really hammer the tool and you really use it, what's going to happen? You're going to you're going to get results. You're going to like the tool and you're going to want to keep using the tool. That's our big You're going to share it and you're going to share it. That's our big secret here is we're trying to trick you into using the tool that we know is going to help you get benefits. So, um, so anyway, that was like a big thing. And the other big change that we made was instead of targeting everyone, we only target agencies now. That's it. Oh. So, yep. Smart. 100% agency focused. We don't Smart. All of our positioning, everything, even the way we structured the platform is for agencies. So, like you go in, you set up your agency, then you set up your client workspaces. So, it's like everything is built for agencies. Wow, dude. That's so smart, man. Niching down like that, it is it is the most powerful thing. Hands down. Crazy. It's crazy how much of a difference it makes. Should we uh should we show some some automations? Sure. So, I'm going to I have to stop the Actually, I think I I think if you share your screen while we're recording, we I I don't even think I need to stop the Yeah, I don't I don't think I even need to stop it. It's going to be interesting. I was I was going to mention too, um on the subject of Dcript, it's funny you brought that up. Um I've actually been testing using OpenClaw with Dscript. Oh, yeah. And um there's a way you can do this. So you go go to Dcript and go into the settings and there's an API that you can use. So and it can actually do the edits for you. So like any of the AI edits I know you probably use the AI function to like you know bust out the edits I would imagine. No no I haven't Oh you don't use it? Well I I I do I do that automatic multicam for the for the guests but that's like one click. That's simple. But I have a I have an editor editor. Like we have crazy edits. Okay. Yeah. I don't think an AI could do his job. He uses AI, but I don't think it could replace it. Yeah. So, like the the AI tool inside of Dcript is not really designed for like comprehensive edits obviously, but it's designed to like get rid of all the junk in the in the content. So, sometimes the problem with how often do you use Dcript? Every day. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, so, so then you know the problem and I've actually talked to their developers about this is because I'm also a crazy power user is that the trans the transcriptions aren't perfect. like they're far from perfect and and because of that the AI can't do its job properly when when words are transcribed like sometimes literally two seconds after like you know how it's like sometimes sentences are transcribed literally seconds after when when the transcriptions have so many flaws the AI cannot do a good job because it doesn't think that because when somebody is speaking it doesn't think that somebody is speaking so Yep. Yep. Yeah. I know it's definitely far from perfect. That is for sure. But um I' I've definitely found like there's some So like for example, I just did a video today and I did my intro, right? And I like I botched my intro, right? So So then I did it again. And of course it was cool cuz like Dcript just caught that and said, "I'll get rid of the retake." Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's great. I've used Yeah. So the retake the retake one and then even like smaller stuff like it removing you know certain little annoying words that you might use in your normal speaking like I will say like okay or um or uh or something like that. Uh it's good at catching those things as well. So it's like it's really for those like really minor things definitely not for like full scale editing at all. Um so but anyway yeah they do have an API so it's something to maybe play with. You could you could even put the API into claude too. So you don't have to use obviously open cloud. It's very easy. what I what I need to do. I need to get the transcript and then things can be made out the transcript. I'm just so cuz you hear these horror stories of AIS having all this access and then they do dumb stuff and I don't know what it would be like to have to recover files with Dcript and to recover projects. I mean their support is very good but even then like they tell you if you delete something it's gone forever. We are warning you. I don't I don't want to take that risk. I don't I don't I wouldn't it would be probably pretty crazy for the AI to go and delete all your files. Like I haven't had that happen. I know I've heard of horror stories of people doing that but like I know uh openclaw was I think it was like someone who worked at Facebook some engineer openclaw and it and it starts deleting all their emails like y but I think that's a like real this is like you know for example with drive with self-driving cars like a self-driving car will get into an accident and people say don't do self-driving cars. I had that same thought actually comparing it to self-driving cars and how like everyone makes the biggest deal but like self-driving cars are still awesome. Yep. Exactly. So this it it's like I think the most fascinating thing about this just the last point on this before we showed this technique is like the standards that people hold AI and agents to is so much higher than the standard they hold humans to. That's true. Humans make way more mistakes. I've been working with humans my entire life. I've been working with humans since the day I started my business. I can tell you they make I've had to fire people. Why? Because they made some serious huge mistakes that honestly AI probably would not have made to be honest. So, you know, it's like I think it's it's kind of a weird situation now where it's like AI makes a mistake and people say, "Oh, AI doesn't work." Like you just you have to get in you have to get used to AI making mistakes. That's just comes with the territory and the more you you it's the more you use it, you have more of surface area to actually determine whether it's effective or not. But when you use it here, there one time there, you're never going to have enough intel to know if it actually works or not. So like like I said, 7,000 changes on our one application. When you do 7,000 changes, you'll know how AI works. And what you'll discover is like it's two things at one time. It's the smartest thing you'll ever see in your entire life and it's also the dumbest thing you'll ever see. It is it is the extremes like small little detail. You go into the you wanted to um move an exit button on a little uh light box. Okay, might seem like a simple task, right? You should be able to just knock that out. I need to go fix this little quick thing. you're there 30 minutes later still trying to get this freaking AI to put it in the right spot, right? But if I give it a I give a a PRD with the most intense requirements, it executes flawlessly. It's like I don't know. It's weird. It's weird like that. But like I said, you just got to it just comes with territory, right? all right. I'll show a quick example here. Cool. So, not to kind of show my own stuff, but it dude show whatever you want. It will only make sense in this context. Actually, I'm going to pull that out of here so this is not all weird. Okay. So, there we are. Okay. I'm trying to see here. Okay. So, can you see can you just see this window with Claude in here? Oh, there we go. St. Louis SEO Agency for ambitious businesses seeking real growth. Correct. Okay. So, I'll give some context here. So, I'm I'm putting a bunch of prompts into our platform basically. So, users can come in here and they can just basically pull one of these prompts and use it for agents or whatever they're using. So, this is the prompt that I've used many many times and it's insanely I'll give it to your your uh your listeners as well. Um, thank you. And so, basically what it what I have the guardrails I've put on this is that to focus on just one page for CRO, right? one page, get hyperfocused on that one page. And the reason is because like you don't you you can let the AI do a full crawl and like do a full analysis. But I've just found that when you keep it focused on one page, it does a better job, right? Because then you get kind of that context bloat and then it starts to kind of lose its mind and you just don't want that. So, so I usually do one isolated focus and so homepage makes a lot of sense. Now, um you'll see here that I ran this exact exactly the prompt that I just showed you in here. Okay? And I'm using the clawed uh browser extension. I've tested this across using it directly in chat GPT like without even using it browser just like directly in the chat. I've tested it using chat GBT atlas the little you know thing up here in the browser. I've tested Gemini and I've tested Perplexity Comet using the same kind of strategy alto together. Um, if I were to rank them, I would put Claude number one. Number one, hands down. Uh, I would put Jack GBT number two. I'd probably put Perplexity number three. And I'd put honestly Gemini last, which is kind of sad to say because like Google with all the trillions of dollars they have, I mean, it's not as good. Um, it's just the it's just facts. So anyway, when we run this this example here, this is a uh a website I built in my academy probably three years ago, three or four years ago, and it still ranks for St. Louis SEO consultant, St. Louis SEO company. The funny thing about it is it's one page. So it's it's a one pager that I built. Uh obviously has the benefits of keyword-rich domain and so on and so forth, but um but it's an example. Your domain is st louisultant.com. Yeah, st louisconultant.com. SEO consultant.com. Thank you. Yep. Exactly. So you go and search that you you should find it. The page title the best St. Louis SEO consultant. Yeah. Exactly. Um so this thing dominates and like it it does well because it has a keyword rich domain but also lots of link building, right? Lots of link building. So but I haven't touched this in years. I don't touch it. I don't optimize it. It just sits here. And like it was really just an experiment. Like I actually get leads through this by the way. Like I get businesses literally contacting us and I believe it it's just it's really not good uh from this perspective but from a performance perspective from an SEO perspective it's very good. So, but from here, run this prompt and you'll see that, you know, basically no effort as long as you got the prompt, it goes through and it goes through this whole process. And you can see like what I found is like it's not going to be as good as a highlevel CRO expert, right? Like if you took the best CRO expert on the planet and had them do an audit, they're going to crush this, right? But the reason why I like doing this is because it gives me a second set of eyes because sometimes, for example, I've got a lot of stuff going on. I can't really sit down and be like, "All right, I'm going to do a CRO audit on this one page right now." Like, I just don't even want to think about doing that right now. So, a better thing for me to do to get that get the ball rolling is like, let's let's use AI to at least get us started. Get us started. Identify the lowest hanging fruits and then now we can dig in. And that's and that's really like what this does. And and honestly like a lot of it is really good stuff. Like stuff that would have taken a long time to find manually is what I'm saying, right? Do you ever do you ever have the audit have the AI do the audit and actually make the changes itself or do you like to manually approve all the changes? Oh yeah, I make it do all the changes a lot. Yeah, all the time. I'll give Yeah, I'll give you a small example. So, we have um we have like our G2 profile for rankability and it got really outdated because it had like all of our old stuff on it. So, I had it log in to my G2. So, I was logged in and then I I had it go and update everything to make it relevant. So, I gave it our website that was updated, used that as grounding and then it actually went and updated the whole profile. So, like this so much time cla Yeah. Yep. Exactly. So, and it saves so much time. So like you using cloud co-work or cloud or cloud code or or how are you doing? Uh this was claude coowwork. so cool. Um so anyway, yeah, just like a small little detail, but yeah, tons of execution. When you gave it the website, did you did you did you just give it the link to your homepage or what did you give it specific information? Yeah, I said um I said uh go and retrieve the website. So it went it opens up the website in a second tab. it will do its analysis, pull things from there, and then it will that will be its kind of grounding source, and then it goes and updates the information. And it was honestly flawless. And I was like, "Okay, good." And it's you save so much time. So much time. Like, I don't know if you've used G2 before, but their platform is rough to work through. I mean, it's really tough. Um, but it's once again, it's not without flaws because I tried to do this on Capterra and it was a nightmare, really. Right. So it's, you know, this is where it gets tricky. Like sometimes it's really good and other times it's not so good. So you got to kind of work through that. And but I think generally the best like way to think about this is like whenever you have something to do, whether it's a task or a system you need to build or whatever it is, the first thing to think about is can an agent do this? Can AI do this? Like do I need to do this at all? like you really like and that's every time I think about something like do I need to do this or can I build a system for this? Can I use AI to streamline this? Like I'm constantly thinking about that and um it's not to say I don't do manual work. I do a lot of manual work but I'm just saying I'm getting rid of the things that I don't know I no longer need to do. Um the analogy I like to give people is like for example I I I've really have written a lot of words on the internet. like I've I've written a ton of content and I just don't really write that much anymore. It's kind of crazy, you know. And um what I do more now is I use my microphone, I use Whisper Flow, and I just riff on whatever it is, and then I just have the AI clean it up. I found that that's way better. Um because then it's my voice. It sounds like me. Feels like me. Feels like you. So, you can't tell. People can't tell. Oh, no. No. I'm I'm posting content all the time on social and it's it is me, right? I'm the one speaking those thoughts. I'm the one pushing those thoughts, but I'm slaying the AI format a little bit better. Clean it up a little bit. Like, it's still tried to maintain that voice. Uh that's mine. So, um what's your what's your posting posting frequency across like all social media platforms like because now now that you have you are superpowered with AI. So, like you probably have like insane frequency. No, I don't. Oh, you don't? No, I do not have say insane frequency. No. Um, yeah, I would say like my my frequency is infrequent. So, um, and it's that's kind of by design to be honest. Like I I just I have a hard time posting just to post. Like I don't I'm not in the you know and like I see the utility of like I know you've been on a hot streak like you've been going like every day. How long has it been? How long is it your streak? Well this podcast is this is episode 995. 995 days in a row with this podcast. My social videos are probably at 1300 days in a row and I'm literally followed now on social media by some of like the biggest tech entrepreneurs and it's crazy. Like if you go to my Instagram, like there's a good chance that people that you're following are following me and I'm not following them back and and because mostly the people that I follow are just people that I know in real life. And uh but it's it's you know, it's funny too because sometimes it'll be like 1:00 a.m. and I'm like, "Oh my god, I don't want to post. What am I going to talk about?" And and I'm like, "But I got to do it anyway." This happened recently. It was I like what am I going to do? And I put up this video about how you can use AI to animate your profile picture in Gmail, which everybody should be doing. Like most so much of the world uses Gmail. You can literally take your current profile picture with Gmail, drop it into uh into Gemini, into V3, V3, and have it get animated, loop it, and put it back into Gmail and it's magic. And your clickthrough rates, your open rate sort. And so I made this video and it got like five or six million views. Like Paris Paris Hilton liked it. Like the huge people like followed me because of it. And that was at 1:00 a.m. I came home from some party. I was so tired. And I'm like, I got to make the video anyway. I'm like, what? I'll just do this. And I made it. I didn't think about it. And I went to sleep. And then the next literally when I woke up, it had 500,000 views. And and that's because I make myself show up every day like we were talking about at the beginning. So, yeah, I have I have a streak as well. No, and I I I think for like most situations, I think more consistent volume is probably the best move for sure. Um it's just like for me, a lot of the content that I create is very technical and like I have a hard time like it's a lot. Like for me, like for example, you know, I posted on recently I posted on X and like Well, dude, you're crushing. You're dude, I was looking at your YouTube before this. You get you get crazy numbers on YouTube. Well, yeah, they're okay. But like this this example here, like so look at this post. Barely any engagement, right? And this one took me a long This one took me a long time to get this like squared away. Like it was a very technical post, which is why it doesn't get a lot of engagement because it's too technical usually, right? But you look at the previous post, a video I just took literally from my YouTube channel and posted it on here and like look at the engagement on this one, right? So, oh wow, you know, it just the variance is quite large, but you look at the topic, it's a lot broader, right? It's a lot bigger topic. It can capture more in that way. So, um, so like I said, you know, it's for me, I'm I'm always testing different styles, different frameworks, trying to see, but, um, I I've gone through phases where I've done like high volume. I've done that a few times and like it has paid off, but it's just been difficult. I won't say that I'm high volume cuz I I cuz putting out one video across across Tik Tok, IG reels, YouTube shorts, and LinkedIn, it's the same video. That's it. I It's I just make myself do a minimum of one a day. I don't think that's high volume. It's just showing up every day. That's consistent. You're That's consistent. Yeah. Yeah. High volume I would I would say is more is like Alex Heroszi. Like Oh yeah. He that's crazy volume. Yeah. Yeah. And and like you know I don't And it works. It works though. It works. I mean I can tell you cuz on days where I post more I grow faster. I do like I do better. I make more money. Like I need to figure out how to how to have three Edward Strms. so that I'm posting more. Yeah. And that's the thing that's been kind of messing with my mind recently is like my posting volume has gone down a lot over the last like quarter just because I've been so focused on product and like the craziest thing is that rankability has been growing faster than ever. So like that's been messing with my mind a lot where like I haven't been posting as much but we've been growing. So I'm kind of like why is that? Why is that? Yeah. Why do you think that is? I just think it's better product market fit. I just think it it I'm just attracting better people generally, right? And I think that's when that happens, I don't have to push as hard to get people into the product. People are coming into the product because the product is the marketing, right? And that's kind of like I've just my mind has shifted a lot, you know, recently. It's like, okay, I can push really hard. I can push people to the product or like I can do that, but like is that what I should be doing? Yes. Should people be joining because of me or should they be joining because the product is good? You're taking the time that you would spend doing marketing instead like talking to users, thinking deeply about why a user is doing what they're doing so you can make smarter iterations, then iterating, making them perfect, and then a week later redoing everything because you have a new insight. And and that's time that you that you could be doing marketing, but instead you're just improving the product. Yeah. And that's like a lot of the changes we make to the product. Um, some of them are from things that obviously I'm coming up with a a lot of them are, but a lot of them are feedback from users. And then we take that feedback, we obviously make sure that it's a good fit for what we're doing. And then we deploy it. And I'd say like nine out of 10 feature requests, ideas that come from users, we implement. Like there's a few that are out of scope and we're like, h, that's not a fit for what we do. But for a lot of them, they're like solid ideas that like I hadn't even thought of, right? And so we implement those and nothing's better than when you implement a new feature that a that a client wanted and they see it and they're like, whoa, they like actually did that. Like that's super cool. Um, so we make doing that. How are you soliciting feature requests? I was thinking about this a couple hours ago like with with uh what we're doing. Should we have like do we have a bar at the top like anything that you want want to see in the app or are you like Yeah, I'm curious what you're doing. You're not going to like my answer because this is extreme. I'm not saying everyone should do this, but I'll show you. So, you go in here. This is what we do. I make them email me directly. wow. Help center. Look at that. And this has been hard because I get direct emails from customers, but it's critical at this point where we are. I need to know I need to have a pulse on what's going on and I need to know how people are using the tool. So they email me directly, we put it in into development and we get it done, right? And so this won't this is not going to be the case forever. It's just not going to be possible. My inbox is getting scary. like it's been really hard and I have I have one of my team members manages my inbox and even then it's like it's a lot but it's worth it because when I see how people are using the product, the the things that they're dealing with, the way they're using it, it's so valuable. And like I even jump on calls with with agencies all the time they're using the product. I'll just jump on a call and then I'll take the transcript from the call and I'll um because I use Gemini. So Gemini will you give me the full transcript and then I'll run that transcript through the AI and ask what are some actionable things we can do to improve the product based on this call I just had. Right. Wow. And I just do that over and over. I love that. I love that. Um you're basically like cuz what you're telling me is like everything that we're planning to do and you've already done it. And so I'm hearing like the mistakes that I probably would be making, you've already made them. And uh more than I can count. Let me let me ask you. So you're you're going so deep on product, but do you think about marketing campaigns that you're excited about um for rankability? And uh like are you expanding your marketing team because you can't do all the marketing yourself because you're also doing the product or I'm curious like how you're doing that. Yeah, there's lots of gaps right now. tons of gaps. So like for example, we're we're moving so fast that we don't even have time to market the new features. So like an example of this like and we have this little section here. We show like all the we're doing. It's all internal though. We don't have this public. It's all internal change log for the members to show them, right? But like you look at the speed, it's freaking unbelievable the stuff we're pushing like and it's going so fast that we can't even translate this to marketing. It's just like cuz like we could technically backdate some of this, right? Like because it's just happening so quickly. But like this is a big gap for us right now. So I'm building out systems to have a team member handle this and do our kind of like product marketing um in that way. But like it's just one one brick at a time, man. One brick at a time. So you need to have the systems in. Yep. And it's it's and building systems is hard. It takes a lot of work to build a I'm talking about a good system, not like a thrown together type. here's a Loom video. Like, no, I'm talking like a system that like I can walk away from and never have to think about again. And if it if it doesn't achieve that goal, it's not a good system. If I have to come back and and do something in that system, it's it's a broken system, right? So, and like I know what it takes to do that and that's why it gets put on the back burner because it's so hard to do it, right? It's really, dude, it's it's so interesting. This is this is something that I personally have been thinking about so much. It's when you can iterate endlessly. When do you stop iterating and do marketing? When do you slow down like changes that you are making and focus on marketing and and like how do you balance between those? I I may I don't know if you think about it as much as I do. I think about it a lot. No, I think about it a ton. Um I but I think it's I think you go through seasons in your business and I think the season that our tool is going through is we needed to fix the product. That's that that was the that is the season that we have been in. It's not the season we're going to stay in. It just means that my my personal involvement will decrease and I'll reallocate towards marketing. Right? So it's just going to be a kind of a rebalancing. But there's always going to be it's going to be always shifting. It's a moving target in that way. And I don't think if if you're trying to find like that perfect like this is the perfect ratio at all times. It's just going to be hard. Like sometimes you got to go 100% in one area. You got to let just other stuff just other stuff just let it burn. Let it sit. How big is your team? Uh so well it's been cut down a lot because we got rid of our development team. So um so our internal team, we have three internal team members. Me, Amber, and Simon. Simon's my partner. Amber's been uh she's been one of our team members for a long time and then obviously a whole army of independent contractors. But um but yeah, those are we only have a team of three internally. Okay. Interesting. Yep. Are you are you planning any any SEO campaigns for rankability? So we have one that just kind of is passive in some ways. So like we rank for a lot of stuff like I mean you look up best content optimization tools, we're there. you I mean we rank you best and your YouTube probably ranks a lot for ranks for a lot as well. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, we just added YouTube tracking inside of Rankability. So, you can actually track your keyword performance in YouTube as well. That was my my personal selfish reason. Awesome. Um but uh but the big thing that we're focused on right now is this concept of search everywhere optimization. So, our platform like my my vision of where we're going is like truly a true search everywhere optimization platform. So, and that you know there's like I have on my whiteboard over here like I have SEO and I have it branched out and like SEO is so much more than what it used to be like you know SEO for many years was like you know traditional Google results and local pack like that was it basically for the most part for a long time but now like you know I look at my board and I've got traditional search rankings I've got AI platforms and there's you know six seven of those platforms you've got YouTube you've got local you've got ecom, which is Amazon, eBay, Etsy. Like, you've got app store optimization. I mean, there's just so much that you can do with SEO. It's unbelievable. Um, so much opportunity. And of course, it's case by case basis, but uh based on the industry that you're in, but like I was just on a call yesterday and I was telling someone like when you think of SEO, a lot of people still think about traditional SEO, right? And that still drives the bulk of traffic. when you look at our numbers like Google still drives large majority of our traffic but um but Google itself is so fragmented right like you have just within Google's traditional search results you've got AI overviews you got local pack and you got traditional I mean those are all three different products they're completely three different products then you go over to AI mode that's a different product then you open up Gemini that's a different product and like yes they're still using a lot of the same underlying technology ology. But when we run these analysis, we'll find all the time that a business is doing really well in AI overviews and then they're invisible in Gemini or they're doing well in Gemini and they're invisible in AI mode. It it's just there's a lot of disconnects which shows that these these products are because they're non-deterministic, right, the AI platforms. So, it's a it's a it's an interesting time. It's an interesting time. How much has your SEO strategy changed over the last five years? You know, it's funny. Someone asked me that yesterday and it was kind of interesting because I don't believe the fundamentals have shifted very much. That's what I'm saying. That's I say that all the time. Had some of my favorite guests say the same thing. Like Lily Ray was on like a a week and a half ago. She said that too. Like a lot of people are saying this. Yeah. Well, the fundamentals are the fundamentals. I mean like they're not they're not going to change. Like number one is like relevance. Like building a relevant page is never going to not be effective. Exactly. There's never going to be a time where Google say, you know, we want less relevant results. That's just not going to happen. And it's the same across any platform, YouTube, Tik Tok, LinkedIn, like relevance is always the most important pillar. So like that's not that doesn't matter with AI or not, right? Um, and then obviously I would say the the biggest changes I would say for me is how SEO is executed. That's obviously the biggest one. Like using AI, using leverage, using agents, like the way that I do SEO has changed dramatically, but I'm still doing a lot of the same stuff. It's just faster and easier. So, um, but I'll say like the one thing that's definitely different in some ways is the AI platforms are much more weighted on offsite signals. Reputation management. Yeah. Reputation, brand signals. Well, let me ask you this. Like, you probably considered reputation management as part of SEO before AI. Or maybe you didn't. No, I did. No, I mean offite offsite was offsite. That's what I'm saying. I I did as well. Well, like I remember when I found out that I could use I'm not even going to name the platform because it still works very well. I I mean, I'll say it. I remember when I learned, oh my god, Medium is showing up for like every query and I can use it for branded terms and uh and it's like and non-branded terms and like oh it and then like yeah, choose your branded here and it's going to show up really well. I mean like you something that I'm doing now is like my SEO course keeps getting amazing reviews and thank you to everybody and I'm taking those reviews and I'm putting them on Facebook and I'm like new compact keywords review because what do people search be when they're in the decision stage for the course? They search compact keyword review and then the Facebook and you know you you've probably experienced this a lot of people don't want to read the reviews on your site but they will happily re read the same review offsite. they will happily read the same thing offsite and that's SEO and that's reputation management and to me that's always been even before AI. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And I think I I think it's just it it's more of a mindset shift that like your website's not the most important thing. Like people for a long time is just my website, my website, my website. But it's like even before AI, I was still having the same discussions with people where I'd look I'd audit their site. They'd be like we've been doing everything for SEO. We've been publishing content. We've been doing and I look at their site and they have one backlink. And I'm like, "Wow, what do you what do you think's going to happen? You don't have any signals to prove that you deserve to be ranking well. You have no signals. You can talk about yourself all day on your website. It does not mean anything." And that's like I proved this with that St. Louis SEO consultant website. It's one page. And all I did is I spent one hour building the content on that page. and then I spent all my other time just driving links to it. What are your top uh link building methods? Um I would say right now my favorite which is kind of what I would call more of like hybrid at this point which is extracting the citations from AI platforms. So I'll pull all the citations from across all the platforms build a huge list anywhere between 500 to a thousand typically. Then I'll condense that down and find the ones that show up the most. And then I make those my prospects. Um, and the way that I'm approaching those prospects is actually not even like, hey, I want to get a link. I'm actually approaching it more from a marketing perspective, which is like, hey, we have this product. I'm wondering what it would take for us to show up on this particular list. Right? I don't even ask for a link. I say, "What is it going to take? What's the investment?" I always lead with money because unfortunately it talks. So yeah. So do you so you so the language for other people who want to do this you say what's the investment? Yeah. Yep. Exactly. Or I say um in the subject line it might say collaboration opportunity sponsorship opportunity. Um, I I treat it as if this is like, you know, kind of like influencer marketing type of situation. And and it is. I mean, because it's influencing LLM's and I mean and but it influences it influences everybody because users see those like searchers on Google see that too for sure. Yep. Exactly. So that's like that's my new type of prospecting is I prospect with the citations. But then we still do standard link building just to grow the site authority because we do want our website to be really strong be used as a citation source because it is still a good citation source. You want your own website to get decided as much as possible because you can influence the answers. But aside from that, you know that that's a big one. Um also I'm a big fan of going unfeatured and quoted and those and really um using a subject matter expert to be your core link building method. Um, I've had this advantage over the years where like I get links pretty easily just because of like so-called subject matter expertise. Um, it works really well. So, I'm always encouraging clients like, "Hey, if you've got someone, freaking use them." Like, it's your best link building technique is right there. You You are like a good example of this. Go and look at Gary Ve's website. Look at his link profile. It'll blow your mind. He is the strongest link profile. Yeah. It's insane how strong is it? Wait, Vayner Media or like his like personal No, no. I think it's I think it's Gary Veaynerchuk.com. I think it could be garyve.com. Uh but I think it's garyvechuck.com. Okay. Gary Vaynerchuk. Yeah. But it's like if you go on HFS or whatever your preferred link building tool is um and you'll see he's got like an insane insanely strong link profile. So pulling it up right now. Oh my god. Yeah. Wow. And his DA his domain authority is 77. I'm I'm I'm looking on Moz. I see 20,000 linking domains, 1.2 million inbound links, man. That's what's up. Yeah. I mean, the the best link building technique is a personal brand. For podcast, too. Yep. And so, and you know, these days like you don't even need to get a link to influency AI. So that's kind of the cool part is like it's really just about if you're doing brand marketing like getting the brand mentioned on the courses sources of retrieval. You know that's the most important thing right now I think personally and then of course using your standard link building to grow your own authority. So um I'll tell you my favorite link building technique which is the funniest one that I've been using forh I actually just talked about today since 2015 I've been using this technique still works here. Oh yeah we're getting to magic. Um, I called it the merger technique and it's one of my favorites. When I first started doing it, I used expired domains. So, we would find relevant expired domains and we would 301 redirect them. Um, but it's funny, I actually discovered this technique kind of by accident because I was working with a client and they would go and acquire data centers all throughout the United States. So, they would go and acquire a data center and then they would redirect it to their main like data center website. And we started doing this and it it finally hit me because we took this Dallas data center, we redirected it to the Dallas data center landing page on their main site and the the performance after that was insane. I was like, whoa, that really worked so well. And then it if I finally got the light bulb, I'm like, huh, makes perfect sense. Driving relevant high authority links to one page works really well. So, and then I started to think about like, well, how else can I do this? Then I started testing it with like a yacht rental business and I tested it with all kinds of other things and it just kept working over and over and over. And so I've I've adapt I've adapted the strategy over the years and like so now my focus is find an existing website that's currently alive like alive. You don't want it to be an expired domain. go and find one that's like a blog that's gone dormant, a little micro tool that no one really uses anymore and the creator kind of forgot about it, but for some ungodly unknown reason has a DR of 70. So then you go and you know you put an acquisition offer, right? And so I just send out these little emails. Hey, you know, are you open to an acquisition? I just send that and let's see who bites. So and then we'll acquire it. Then we'll 301 redirect it and it just works. you set up and the most I've actually it's funny because I talked about this on the show cuz I I I have friends who have made apps they put them out on product hunt that went number one went viral they don't know SEO and so they don't know what to do after that and then slowly the app dies and they stop caring about it and then they give up the domains and I'm like what are you doing and it's and it's and so what you're what you're doing is you are finding things like that and then you are putting up a relevant page on your site to redirect it to so that the the redirects stick when people are actually going to the page and then they get to this page and you can redirect them to different pages on your site. You can actually turning Yeah. Internal linking. Yep. And you can Yeah. Yeah. And um so and you're only doing that with expired tools or or dormant sites in your niche. It's kind of like it's kind of like if you're a value investor, right? That's kind of the way I'm looking at it's like I'm looking for depressed assets. That people don't care about, but I know they have value. They just don't realize it. Right. And so I'll actually do a calculation of their link profile. So I'll assign a value to the link quality and then I'll get a like total link value number and then that's when I go with my offer. And of course if I know the link value number, they don't know that link value number. So I'm going to go as low as I can to try to acquire that. Um, but that's how I, you know, the valuation for me is based on the quality of that link profile. So, we did something similar where we also put out a um, we did that, but we also put out a press release about like the the merger. I don't know if you remember like to make official. Yeah, that's a good idea. Yeah. And I mean like I've done it a few different ways where we'll like we'll put a dedicated landing page. It's like, hey, we've acquired this business and then I redirect there and then use internal linking to flood it to the rest of the site. Um, but also the best type of merger is just acquiring a tool and then putting that tool on your website, right? So like our uh, you know, Neil Patel has done this quite a few times. He did this with Uber Suggest, right? He took Uber Suggest, put it on neilpel.com and then 301 redirected that. Uh, funny enough, he actually uh, I got a random phone call one day. This is like probably around 2015, 2016. And like I pick up the phone, he's like he's like, "Hey, this is Neil Patel." And I'm like, "This is Neil Patel." Like, "This is Neil Patel." Like, and at the time, like, I was just starting out. So, I'm like, "Neil Patel is like a god, right?" And uh and it was him and he was actually calling me to ask me about the merger technique specifically. So, uh yeah, so we were like brainstorming that and then funny enough, couple like couple weeks later, he he executed that change and, you know, it's paid off for him. That's amazing. It has paid off. I'm a I'm a I'm a fan of Neil. That's that's amazing. Yeah. So, but anyway, yeah, that's that's probably one of my favorites because you get the most bang for your buck. So, because like overnight you get authority and like Rankability has a DR, I think on HR of like 73. You get authority but also traffic like real traffic. Traffic and authority. Yep. Yeah. So, I redirected got seo.com which was a DR of 70s something to rankability and it's cut quite an advantage, right? So, yeah, dude, you're crushing. I'm I'm super hyped for you. Are you um Yeah, I'm just I'm I'm hyped. Also, I'm c I'm I'm excited to see what you do when you start amping up your marketing and you pro and you expand your marketing team and it's like because there's so much that you can do. Yeah, there is a lot. And that's the challenge is like where to focus that effort. But for me, like I'm even looking at like all the projects we're working on and when in doubt, the best thing to do is focus on what we're best at. And there's a so many marketing channels. There's endless amounts that you can focus on, but like the things that we do best, obviously SEO. So, we're going to double down on SEO, YouTube, and probably email marketing. Like for us, like those are the three core things that we do best. And like yes, I think I I've got a little bit of traction on X and LinkedIn, sure, but like you know, I haven't found that they're that effective for driving what we need just because they're low intent channels, right? So like I'm a big fan of high intent channels, Google, AI, uh YouTube, and of course, email is the king when you know how to use it. So um so yeah, I mean I think it's just a focus on the things that we do best. Um it's always tempting though when you look at all these other channels like oh I want to get on Tik Tok and I want to get on Instagram like you you it seems attractive right to do it but the reality is like you know this every channel is hard man like every channel is hard and they all require focus and effort and thought and strategy and iteration and it takes a lot so it does take a lot well it takes a it takes consistency that too that too yep and that's a part of it too like I don't want to get into channel that I know I'm not going to be consistent on. Right. That's the biggest waste of time if you just start and stop. And that's what most people do. Exactly. Yep. So, yeah, it's just focusing on channels where the barrier to action is a lot lower. So, like for me to do SEO, it's like it's like riding a bike. I don't, you know, there's no there's there's no thought. I just know what to do. It's like very systematic. Same thing with YouTube. Same thing with, you know, let me let me ask you this. How do you find your experience doing SEO in the SEO niche where you are competing with other very savvy SEOs? I mean, it's nothing harder, right? It's the hardest thing that you can That's what I'm saying. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this like some of the smartest people like I mean, for example, like I'm competing on keywords where HFS and Semrush are competing. I know. I know you are. Like Seamrush has been around since 2008. So, and they make $300 million a year. So, you know, whatever whatever amount they make, it's some ungodly amount of money. Um, so yeah, it's it's it's interesting, but you know, at the same time, like you can have a lot of money, but that doesn't mean you're necessarily going to win at SEO. So, um, and so there's ways to beat them. And you're moving fast. You're moving probably a lot faster than they are. Yeah. I mean, they move fast. HS faster than HS. Yeah, they they do. HRS…

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