Why SEO Gets Ignored Inside Big Companies (And How to Fix It) w/ Ash Nallawalla

Ash Nalawala, thank you for being on the show. Yeah, thanks Edward for inviting me. Uh looking forward to sharing some thoughts with the audience. So you do enterprise SEO and SEO governance and uh you recommended to me by Gagan Gotra who's a friend of the podcast. He's been on many times. He's like you got to talk to Ash. Ash is awesome. Ash is so smart. You got to talk to Ash. And so yeah, finally here we are. Thank you again. Can you share your background uh with people? Yeah. Um I've been doing SEO for 25 26 years. Um you can't really count because I started I built my first website in 1996 for Hayes uh which was a modem company. Anyone with old dialup modems would know Hayes because they created the standard and I built websites for them even though that wasn't my job. In fact, there were no web developer jobs back then. Um, I was in corporate communications and somewhere along the way I must have picked up SEO without knowing what it was except I was doing it. And in 2002, I um was laid off from Macromedia, which is now part of Adobe. And I built a website which ranked number one for CRM consulting for many years. And um that little factoid um just happened to be picked up by a friend in America who recommended me to Ring Central, which is a listed company today, but back then it was a family business. And that's really where I started SEO, proper SEO, getting paid for it. And um then I went to an agency um the biggest in the country simply because it had uh a monopoly on selling.com.auu domains. So suddenly every business in Australia had to have a domain through them. So we had lots of SEO clients as well. And um but after that it was purely corporate. um either I was consulting to corporates or I was in inside them and sometimes I came as a consultant and they asked me to stay on as an employee. So I did that till almost 3 years ago when I um tried to retire but I kept um three private clients and early this year I said goodbye to the last of them. uh my choice because I needed to get this thing off the ground uh which I'm going to talk about. And now my only focus is to promote uh this um topic. Um um and before we get into that, I'll put it back to Edward um in case he has any uh comments. This method of marketing is so effective, I had to make sure it wasn't against Google's rules before I kept using 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 landing page is only 415 words. Compact Keywords is a 13-hour deep course on getting sales with SEO. A customer said, "Compact Keywords contributed to a $4,000 sale within the first six weeks." Another customer said, "Give it to a junior employee. Have them follow it exactly as Edwards laid out. You don't have to do anything and you're going to gain a six-f figureure SEO level employee just by having them go through this course. 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. I wanted to ask you uh you use the term visibility governance and and you've you've niched down in SEO in a way that lots of others have not niched down. So you you're you're going to be talking about something kind of different than what we normally talk about on the podcast. Oh, that's good. Um, and can you explain what visibility governance is? Yeah. So, visibility is my shorthand for SEO plus GEO, AIO, AEO, all those acronyms. I lumped them together into this word called visibility with a very specific meaning. And governance is shorthand for um documentations, rules, procedures, uh processes, everything that is not only documented but it's also monitored um measured and therefore it's known as governed governance. So I um had a lot of frustrations over these years as anyone in a large enterprise will know that it's very hard to be an SEO because there are many teams everyone wants to do well and they want to do well regardless of any other teams that might be around them and some companies are better than others in doing this And every time I thought about um why things were wrong um I could point to individuals and at the time I was simply blaming my manager or their manager or um whatever it was. But it wasn't until I finished my books um I've written a series of five books and plus a sixth one which is quite different. If you Google my name you'll find them. Uh I'm not I'm not here to sell those books. Um because as I said I want to get um to my core topic and but the books is how uh this discovery came. Um I'd written uh books aimed at two audiences. One was managers and the second was the seauite which was one level about them. And I realized that in two of the books um which is book number three and five in my series of five I um had talked about this thing um that I'd begun to call visibility governance and it was split between two books but um it wasn't until the first of those two books was published, it suddenly hit me. Um, that was the word I'd been waiting for. Um, that serendipity of, um, of the Eureka moment, uh, whatever you want to call it, that hit me. It was a lack of governance that was the core problem everywhere. um everywhere that I had those um SEO frustrations and I felt that it needed um extracting from the books and packaging it um into something and that's what I'm going to talk about. Yeah. Uh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was I so I I worked at uh at I Prospect under Densu. Um Okay. So I've done lots of enterprise SEO. You know, I had clients like ADP and Proctor and Gamble and Microsoft and tons of big enterprises. And so I I know exactly what you're talking about and how it can be difficult. You have some great SEO ideas and it can be difficult to to get them pushed through and you're fighting through all of these layers and and honestly even at smaller companies I think other SEOs can relate. Uh so you you have something called the visibility governance maturity model. Yeah. So this is a billable product that anyone who is in an in a large company or is consulting to a large company, they can pick it up as an new offering. And that's that's the attraction uh for anyone working in an agency or is a sole consultant or is an in-house SEO and it hasn't been offered by anyone simply because no one's talked about it. I think some people are aware of it and I've written a few things about it in search engine journal and search engine land. If you Google uh this the visibility governance maturity model or VGMM uh followed by the word SEO because there are some other types of VGMM but with SEO you will find those articles and you can look at the details of it but what this offering is it's a workshop and you can make it a one-day two-day workshop and I'll explain in uh the difference. Um you're basically selling your time and you're getting a bunch of people in the room asking them to fill out a questionnaire. And the questionnaire is designed to tease out uh the truth behind um what amounts to governance or a lack of governance. So this model has a fivelevel score, a five point score if you want to call it that. It scores the the organization's internal controls against the things that determine whether its brand will remain visible regardless of changes to search engines or AI platforms. So in that sense, it's timeless. It's futurep proofed. So today you have this thing called AI systems and large language models but 2 to 5 years from now there could be something for which we don't have words yet. So this model can adapt to that because this sets certain rules certain responsibilities and it can adapt. So the reason why it will adapt is because the model concerns approvals who approves various things ownership who's responsible for say robots.txt txt about access to um Google Search Console and what level and what happens if there is a crisis um if something breaks um are those positions written down somewhere so everyone knows where to go or if someone takes unexpected leave just before a major deployment. Is there someone who can just pick up a sheet and run with it or do they just flail their hands and um wonder what to do? So you run a workshop asking these questions and the questions cover seven uh parts of SEO. I I call them governance domains and there is this concept called the single point of failure and so you give them the score and naturally they'll want to know okay now what do we do with this knowledge so you tell them okay this needs to be fixed I can help you so that becomes a second sort of um deliverable and you can come back in 12 months and um uh do another check and see if they've improved their score. So I call this the visibility governance maturity model and um as I said you will see that there are articles written about it a third parties written about it as well. I didn't even ask them to. So you you've worked inside large enterprises. What what do in-house SEOs understand that agencies often miss? Well, agencies are usually not brought into the business strategy or if they are, it could be at the last minute. it could be after everyone's been told about the new strategy. So, um they just focus on what they know and um some agencies are very mechanical. Um hopefully um um they're in the minority but um the best way to involve the agency is to bring them in um under NDA which uh they've already signed and tell them the big picture and then um ask them questions that uh might have um irked your um imagination or just have these regular catchups where you they brief you on what's going on outside. So, uh visibility um namely AI system visibility is a hot topic and everyone's um trying their best to learn how to optimize for that. Um, but as I said before, my deliverable is not about how to do that. Uh, there's plenty of expertise out there and um I'm just making sure that the senior changes get pushed through that these that these suggestions actually get pushed through. So, most companies say that they care about organic search, but SEO still gets ignored internally. And you see this all the time. Why why does that happen? Why does why is it such a frequent thing? You It's a complaint that so many SEOs have. And so why is it so fre Why does it happen so frequently? So I've been fortunate to um to have worked at both ends of that spectrum. Uh the very first time I came across um the scrum methodology um Jira probably didn't exist back then. So we we used index cards literally pinned to um bulletin boards and we uh I think we used magnets to slide priorities and so on. And uh back then um that company had a concept known as sales dollars. So if I said I wanted um all the title tax to change for SEO reasons, they'd come back to me and say, "Okay, so how many sales dollars will we make?" Um, and I'd shrug my shoulders and say, "Look, uh, it'll get us to page one and, um, we'll make more sales. That's all I can tell you. I I can't tell I can't tell you how many people will buy. So, usually it didn't work." And they would deprioritize SEO and some little shiny object would get uh, priority. At the other end of the spectrum was my last job. It was a fantastic um structure. They um put me in the in one of the squads which was in charge of um a part of the website and um so it was a car selling platform. So I wasn't on the car selling side but I was on um call it a Wikipedia like database of cars. Uh so that was called the research side. Every possible car was listed there and the SE the only SEO in the whole company was part of that squad and every single um meeting a daily standup um we went through all the Jira tickets and um there was always a field for SEO input if any and sometimes there was no SEO input. It was something pretty mundane. However, when there was SEO input required, everyone listened. I don't mean in my squad, but other squads as well. Sometimes I'd be invited to their meetings. Um, that company had fully understood SEO and they respected it. And so, I'm I've given you the two extremes. And as many people know, you do hit um this big um void in the middle where um either the agency outside is not fully uh synced with uh the internal um network. So their laptops just cannot get into the Jira. Uh Jira is one of the platforms that was used. It's very common. Um there are other platforms I can't think of the names but um any of those platforms should be accessible by the external consultant or agency and I know that large companies are very fussy about which computers can connect and third party computers can't connect and so okay issue them with a corporate laptop which they use to get into the network. So once you've fixed all these um um bureaucratic hurdles then begins the real business of um teaching all the players um the role of SEO and when to call them and you get to this position um as I was in that last company um we had in-house journalists went and drove cars they wrote reviews about because they would email me privately and say, "I want to write an article about this. Uh, can you look up some keywords for me?" So I would have a conversation with them about um the concept of entities versus keywords and soon they were on board and um so that's that's really um how to get around this issue of um not um being part of the flow engineering, it whatever you call They don't run the website. They're just the mechanics who perform coding uh practices. Sales or marketing are the key players because they control sales and different companies have different ways of structuring the SEO position. In Australia, SEO is almost never in marketing. It's almost always in product, whatever you want to call product. So at the yellow pages, I was in an entity called online um yellow pages. At the bank, I was in a group called online banking and so on. But I was never part of pure marketing. However, I know that in North America and maybe in Europe, um, they're part of marketing. I feel that's a better place to be because marketing can easily ask for millions of dollars because they're spending millions on advertising. It becomes very easy to fund say a million dollars for SEO. But if you're part of product, it's very hard to get even $100,000. Um I found it very hard to get uh sent to conferences. I often paid for it myself. Wow. Um so I've only been in in one company that sent me business class all the way. I used to be a conference speaker so I didn't have to pay for the conference itself. But um only one company did that two years in a row. Others would say okay you can take um company time to go there but if you spend an extra week on holiday then that's your annual leave. So I've had uh different types of managers. Uh some just didn't have any interest in giving me time for learning. So I um realized that um what I've got in my books is this workshop um and what you do is these nine sorry well it can be up to nine but there are um five to seven uh domains. Um for example SEO is a domain content accessibility website performance AI content local SEO international SEO sometimes there are more than those it depends on the business and as I will keep saying this is very flexible you can alter it but I have uh reduced um uh this knowledge to about 80 questions and these questions are presented as statements rather than yes no questions and you bring these five or six people into a room and you put them in front of a laptop each and they just answer the as best as they can. And um then the person running the workshop uh processes processes these questions and um gives them a score. So they get a score that your score is three out of five or four out of five and um it is unique to that specific business. As I said, uh, some businesses have local SEO, some have international, some have neither. So, you cannot really compare one business that's a level three with another that's a level three. They might have different issues internally. So this was based on Carnegie Melon University's um original CMMI model and um I I had to work in that model uh when I worked at Unicus in their software division and I I don't know what score we were at the time but uh the managers were constantly on our backs to do everything correct. correctly. Everything had to be commented and documented and so on. Uh so that we would um stay as high as possible on that fivepoint scale. So the only similarity is a scale of five. Um um so what I've done is the questions that you um answer are given a a percentage score. So if your total score is uh say 50% um so you're sitting in that range uh 40 to 60 because it's in jumps of uh 20 0 to 20 20 to 40 and so on and each of these represents the five levels. So if your score is 50, then uh you're going to be um right in the middle, which is um the third, so level three. what um what you do is that some of these questions are more complex. Um you may not have the right people in the room. So some of the questions can only be answered as cannot attest. There are some questions uh that are simply not applicable. The person can say na. But the three main um possibilities are fully in place, partially in place and not in place. And they carry a score of five, two or a zero. There is another really important um score that is given. It's called the single point of failure and you identify certain questions as spuffs. So as an example, a question um could be a spar such as um structured data is governed to ensure AI systems can accurately interpret organizational content. Sounds pretty complex but I have to read that. Um basically if no one is looking after structured data then that is um a single point of failure as uh you'll appreciate if um if you understand the importance of schema tags. Uh sometimes there is no named owner for SEO outcomes. Um so I've just given you a couple of um examples and um so the point I'm making it uh here is that it is a really important part of this methodology. It's not just asking 180 questions but you grade those questions in different ways. So another way that I'm I'll mention now is that certain questions carry more weight than others. Um question about documentation might have a low weight. It might just be a weight of one. But other questions uh might carry say training you might consider to be a higher level and certain other kinds of knowledge you would say that deserves a level five weight. So you take all these answers and you multiply them to get um a score where there is a genuine uh divergence in the answers. So some will fall to the bottom all those low-level documentation uh type of questions and this is customizable. So if you think documentation is really important uh in that company um by all means raise it. So you decide how important a question is and you decide how many questions to ask and what questions to ask. Um I'm not trying to say that I have the perfect answer. In fact, I'm changing this um spreadsheet every Fortnite. Uh, I did it I did it yesterday because I had feedback from someone and um I agreed with them and um um I made a change and who knows um next week um I'm running uh some uh trials in Melbourne and who knows if uh I'll get more feedback and I'll need to keep changing the formula. Oh, so what the outcome of this workshop then then what happens? Give it actually you know give an example of a best case scenario. You have the outcome of the workshop example of a realistic best case scenario. Yeah. Um they in fact most businesses that run the trial and I encourage anyone I'm happy to help anyone who wants to run the trial. I'll give you um all the questions to ask and I'll help you um with the outcome. The best case is um the business business is given bad news. Um it's found that um there is no one really responsible for many of these things and I don't mean just pure SEO. It could be website performance. um lots of things fall through the cracks um especially if you have a CDN in the mix and you didn't realize that a CDN can um throw a spanner in the works. Um an example that I found was there's no such thing as a web log. Lots of articles will tell you web blogs are really important. you should get an extract of web blogs. And to my horror, in fact, to it's horror, they said, "What web logs?" And it turns out that they used um a CDN, Amazon Web Services, who said to them, "Yeah, you can have web blogs, but you have to turn them on and you pay for them and um it will generate about 2 GB an hour or whatever the numbers were, which was like $200 an hour." And everyone simply freaked out because uh the it we had an external agency and they wanted one month's worth of logs. Could you say what site this is where that where there is so much log so many log files? Yeah, this u um car selling platform because people are buying and selling cars all the time. There's a lot of activity that people are researching cars they might want to buy. um they may not be transacting, but they're just turning pages looking at cars and not just cars, but trucks and boats and other vehicles. So, it generates um a lot of traffic. Um and with things like load balances, you've got multiple instances of the website. So, it's not just one single uh log that's generated if you turned it on. And this is the kind of gotcha that um needs to be identified and recognized as a risk. And if you recognize and accept that there will be no log, it it is no longer a single point of failure because it's a business decision. You you don't want to be spending $200 an hour um if no one's going to even look at the logs for months. might someone might ask the question once every three months but it's not worth the thousands of dollars a day. Um so as a business this decision you might choose not to do certain things but in the perfect world you have identified all these risks. You've identified every person and not by name but by their job title who is responsible for every action. You make them accountable. It's not just identify them but you make them accountable um through your normal corporate uh processes. you bring it up in their um quarterly um assessments, whatever we call those um annual assessments. Uh different countries have different names for them. But by making it part of everyone's routines, um everyone just knows what part they're playing. they know what parts other people are playing so that if someone is sick, um things don't just fall apart. They know exactly what instructions to pick up, find someone else, um and you still manage to complete the job. So it's really identifying everything that needs to be known um to have this visibility going. And a key thing that I've perhaps I should have mentioned earlier, you can only govern something that's within your control, which means everything inside the corporate um reach. So you can control your own website. You cannot control a search engine or an AI platform. you can influence it um and you can build that influence mechanism in into your um set of procedures but you cannot govern those things. So that's really important. You So I I want to go to your uh just vast amount of SEO experience for a while cuz you you've done this you said for 25 years. So yeah. Um [snorts] what what do you find in SEO keeps repeating basically every decade? They well two things. um seem to come and um one is the SEO is dead. I'm not going to spend too much time on that because it's almost like a joke you can read on LinkedIn every day, but the main issue is that SEO has become complacent. Um about 15 years ago um I was hired by a couple of companies um to run training courses uh for agencies. There was one in Melbourne and um there were two in India. So they used to fly me there and I would talk to this room full of uh SEOs one company that I visited say 5 years apart, they were following exactly the same task list that they did five years earlier. and I had to give them some bad news that okay things have changed and um so they were very um honest about it. They said yeah we we know we we we read that but our white label um contact in Australia who hires us has given us this formula we just have to work on the formula. So I said, "Okay, well, you need to talk to them and say your success rate will go down if you just keep doing the old things like submitting to social bookmarking. I think they used to call that social media bookmarking was one of the tasks. If you keep doing that um you're not going to succeed and eventually you will lose your clients. So this is what I keep seeing um not personally because I'm not uh training any agencies anymore but just by observing questions to forums um Facebook I see that people are not reading what they need to be reading. So what do people need to be reading? I would say um a mixture of um the search engine magazines. So, search engine land, search engine journal, search engine roundt. I think um Brett has revived search engine world. So, read what um a lot of people are saying. You don't have to agree with everything because sometimes you might see something that uh you might disagree with but the chances of that information being accurate is greater than your gurus on uh Facebook. the many groups on Facebook and I would hazard a guess there could be thousand SEO groups there and you can't read a thousand groups so you just pick some or someone recommends something and there are two things that uh you need to um filter. One is does this group exist because the founder of the group has had a personal offering that he's trying to get everyone to accept or subscribe to or whatever the offering is. Um that's a bias. Um is there good moderation or is there no moderation? So some of these things um act as filters and the idea is to find the one where um you get the most sensible responses. So one such platform uh even though it's not used much these days and I'm a moderator there is web master world. Um over there it's almost impossible to say something that's um wrong and by wrong I mean it goes against the views of what most SEOs will say. So you need to find these places that um are populated by uh genuine SEOs who want to help other people and you not only um go to magazines, you listen to podcasts and uh this podcast is an example. I have a list out there of about 70 or 80 podcasts. some have uh stopped. Uh so I need to update my list. But um you just need to basically keep learning and that's the biggest uh issue that I've seen that keeps on repeating. People get comfortable. They think uh everything is just working and um they don't need to work any harder. It's cool that you're a you're a you said you're a mod at Webmaster World. Yeah. So, yeah, Barry Schwarz whenever he shares news about a core update in Search Engine Roundtable, he's always sharing commentary from Webmaster World and you know, I I cover uh the the Google updates and I I'm learning a lot from what Barry shares. I'm getting a lot from what Barry shares, but the the [laughter] comments from Web Master World that Barry shares are always the most negative fear, uncertainty, doubt. Oh my god, my website is down 90% today. What is happening? And I I I want to find uh if you if you have recommendations on web master world for these like gems of threads where where actually it's optimistic and it's like here's what to do and oh my god this worked really well. Please share them with me after this. I want to find those gems on web master world. I was looking Yeah. Um unfortunately um no that that website is not used as much as it used to be and that's part of the problem. A lot of the brilliant people there have decided to take the knowledge and start their own platforms mostly their own websites uh their own blogs um their own YouTube channel who who who should who from web master world should people pay attention to it's often not an individual person um but the Google um forum is is well I'd say it's the most active. So anyone who's participating there has been moderated which which means that almost everyone um or the the thread is worth reading simply because it has been moderated or commented on by an expert. So I don't want to name individuals but um just go to that um it's the most active forum in that group. it's there's not a lot of traffic um because as I've said people have gone and created their own uh platforms because they want their own mailing list whatever reasons and um I'm in the local search group which gets very little activity because um I'm not doing a lot of local search myself and I joined when I was at the yellow pages and that was my entire entire world back then. But these days um there's a lot of information um especially from um the experts who are focused on local search um if you subscribe to individuals so I'm not trying to send people in any particular direction. uh the secret is to sample everything and after a while you can unsubscribe from their newsletters. Um so for example for AI um there are two people that I follow. Um one is uh Dan Petravic. He writes at a very academic scientific level. So he's not always writing with SEO in mind but he's exploring AI at the cutting edge. So he's a lot from Dan on this show. Dan is awesome. And um I've just had a mental break. The second person. The second person. Yeah. Um he he's a Canadian in California. Um what's his name? Um yeah, I'm embarrassed. Um Oh, no. It's okay. What What are some of the things that he covers? Maybe maybe I can It's AI. Yeah, he he he [clears throat] writes about AI. And I just deleted his um yeah Dwayne Forester. Ah so Dwayne is um absolutely brilliant. Um it's his newsletter is one of the few that I do read um and I speak to him um um on um online so I know um what he's up to and why he's exploring the those parts of the website. For a small business without enterprise resources, what can they learn from enterprise SEO governance? Um, a small business um still needs procedures. So they may not have a big hierarchy of sea suite and um levels of SEO managers, what they do need is like an internal wiki um if they can set up a wiki platform of some kind or use Google Docs if if they don't want a wiki. But um I found a wiki to be an excellent tool because you can have multiple pages in it. You can uh record every decision that you took and by that I'll use an example um of migrating a website. So you would record all the steps that you took like redirects that were set up, examples of code fragments if applicable. so by doing that uh the next time this happens even if it's 2 years down the track people know where to go. um even if you have an external agency working with you by recording everything um you're making sure that um the information was not not lost in someone's email because that's the usual issue that the person working for the small company was working with the agency all the information went with their emails as soon as they left the company and he closed their account. The new person doesn't have any of that. So I would say um documentation, recording your decisions um that is common to large companies and small companies. Yeah, that's a great answer. What's uh what's an SEO belief that you held I think this is a cool question that you held 10 or 20 years ago that you've changed your mind on. I used to I used to think that um SEO is a skill that you will need for decades. I I think that SEO will always be there my um belief today is that uh SEO is no longer Okay. Wait, so you're Wait, wait, so you're jumping on the SEO is dead bandwagon. Yeah, except um I don't use that label. Um, I'm saying brand visibility optimization. So, it could be BBO and just as many SEOs are saying, there's no such thing as AEO, it's all SEO. So, it will always be a game of semantics. But what I'm saying is what I started doing as SEO in formally in 2002 is not the SEO that's going on today. So in that sense um you need to adapt. You can change the label of what you're doing but it's always going to be brand visibility. And this is why is this brand visibility across search engines or is this across across or all all platforms? Yeah. Yeah. Search engines and and AI which pulls from search engines. No, no, I'm going beyond that. So are you so you're talking about building a a channel on YouTube, building a channel on Tik Tok, correct? Yeah. Okay. So if people are talking about you on those additional platforms, Reddit and um Telegram and there's an infinite number of platforms out there. If people are talking about your brand, you need a way to monitor that. You can't control it because it's outside but you can come up with strategies to you can influence do something about it with the language that you use. Yeah. So if people are saying bad things about your products then obviously you need to fix your products and Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I I think that's interesting. This is something I've talked about with lots of with lots of guests, which is like I I always I always looked at how your brand was described and where your brand appeared kind of as part of SEO. And I think a a similar comparison might be parasite SEO. You want you like Reddit, perfect example. You want good things about your brand appearing on Reddit to show up on Google when people are searching your brand and to show up for LLMs when LLMs are doing due diligence on your brand. That's visibility optimization. That's also SEO. Well, that's how I looked at it. Yeah, you um you're right. Uh I'm not saying that anyone's got the perfect um definition and this is why people are saying SEO is all all the above. Um, and I'm saying to your point, I think there was a traditional list of things that SEOs did. And I think a lot of a lot of what SEOs should have been doing was thinking about SEO even further than the traditional like optimize your website. Step A, B, C, D, E. Yeah, there were always the three pillars of SEO or sometimes the four pillars of SEO. So, it was content, technical, links. Um however um those are things you can do inhouse things that are governable but everything that happens at the search engine Google and LLM platforms is outside your control. So SEO still includes that and this is where people are saying that all the things that you do to improve your AI visibility is still SEO and I don't have a strong position on on that discussion per say sure if you want to say SEO is dead say that but explain yourself so that it doesn't mean that everyone with an SEO title is suddenly redundant. Uh they're not because people are tackling this in different ways and um so I'm a little skeptical about many of these tools that are out there. Um and I'm just saying they should be Yeah. [laughter] Good luck to them. I mean, the world doesn't need 200 um AI LLM platform monitoring tools. Um, yeah, you can have a query fan out tool or see what prompts people are sending and that's fun. It's interesting, but you can't afford to buy. even if it's $5 a month, uh, whatever it is, there's a limit to it because you can't process that information and you might waste time on information overload. So, that's a huge risk. So, I don't um even comment on many of these tools that are um being launched. I guess people are excited about their own tool and they want to keep making money. That's good. But a lot of the founders of those tools don't even understand SEO. We had we had on one a few days ago. I don't know if you saw uh with David Quaid some so something this I'm going to I'm going to share this for listeners of the podcast. I you know I get pitched every day multiple people who want to come on the show. I the pitches in my inbox and in like in my inbox and in DMs are non-stop. If I have somebody pitch me on like a geoex expert wants to come on this show, I will It's kind of bad that I'm sharing this, but I'm going to share it anyway. It's really funny. Um I I will say how I will reply and say like how different do you or maybe I'm talking to the person's publicist. how how different does this person think geo is from SEO? And then they'll give me some like, oh, Gio is so different. They're entirely different. They're they're not the same at all. And I'll be like, great. And what I'll do is I'll forward the email to a friend of the podcast, David Quaid, and I'll say, David, you want to jump on this debate? Because David is one of my favorite people. He's a fantastic SEO and a really, really articulate. He's articulate and charismatic and so fun to listen to. And he'll be like, "Yeah." And so I I'll say to the person who who says that geo or AEO is so different from SEO, I'll say, "Would you like to discuss the differences between geo and SEO with somebody who believes that SEO is actually very similar to to geo?" And they're like, "Okay." And then they'll come on the show and David will will I mean if if you saw what happened there with this recent episode with this geo guy with a geo guy who had an an AEO geo platform talking to David where it's just it's crazy how he doesn't understand any basics of SEO and then it turns out at the end of the episode we ask him what his platform does. He has just built a scaled content abuse machine for for it's and so I I love I love doing those episodes and but to your point a lot of creators of these AEO geo platforms don't even understand the fundamentals of SEO and they don't even know that LLM are retrieving from search. They don't even know that. They think that they think that chat GP they think that open AAI has their own index to rival Google. Just in the last four days, four or five days, I was approached by an SEO whom I no um I've known him for a while except I haven't known him at any great depth. Um it's like one of these um connections that you make online. and he asked if I would um beta test his uh new platform. And so I said, "Well, what does it do? Um I can't just give you a yes or no because uh my time is valuable. I'm I'm doing things." Um, so he sent me a link to this um, website and it is an audit SEO audit platform and I'm thinking, okay, so how much does it cost? And I think the cheapest level was $5 a month. Uh, I could be wrong. Um, where you get this information if um, I think number of keywords. I've forgotten all the details. I can send you the link offline, but um and the most expensive one is like $20 a month, but it had all these um gotchas. Uh in short, if you had more than 100 pages, it would become ridiculous to operate and expensive. Not only that, what I said to him is, you haven't got a word about AI visibility. There's no mention of SEO um relationship to AI visibility. Your tool doesn't even go there. How are you going to sell it to an SEO who's fully aware of uh the need to be aware of the wider world? And so I I actually refused uh to do that and he was disappointed and he said yeah I can work on these things but there are people out there who are still building tools without seemingly aware of what's out there and um so I wish him well and one of the things I said to him is do you know that every SEO uh any SEO worth their salt owns a copy of Screaming Frog. It can do everything that you're and more with this and I think a limit of 100 URLs. So there are people out there who are still they've been caught up with vibe coding. Yeah. and they just want to build something and so they think hey let's build an audit tool. I want to I want to I want to finish with this question. So Ash, if a CEO of a major company gave you 90 days to improve their company's organic visibility, which really isn't a lot of time in a major company world because things move slow. So, and you and you're given no extra h headcount. Where would you start? Um, I did exactly the this that um a major Australian bank, a top top four bank, exactly 90 days. I took a month to do an SEO audit. This was in the year 2010. So you can think about the days of um page rank toolbarss and so on. So it was in those days I tripled their organic traffic uh in 3 years. I doubled it in 8 months and I went back um 5 years later and their traffic had tripled. So what I would do um these days I would definitely do the SEO audit um to best practices today which today will include AI visibility but I would give them this um VGMM um as a deliverable because that company um worked because I was hired by a very senior level manager and I it's the only place where 100% of my recommendations were followed. I've been inside companies and the minute you're working inside a company you're not an expert anymore but at the bank I was a consultant being paid really well and uh so they followed 100% of my recommendations and that's that that's really important and the and the reason why I doubled their traffic in 8 months and tripled over 5 years is because everyone on uh around the company. I don't mean the immediate ones but ones little further away like owners of products or in marketing. They were given training for their part of the company. They were trained to do certain tasks without putting an SEO label on them. So someone doing public relations, writing press releases, they were told, "Okay, make sure that you get links not just to the homepage, but if you can get a deep link for us, uh, that would be great." And we sent them away with that kind of knowledge without putting an SEO label around things. So that's basically what I would do today. and um just leave the company um that's got all responsibilities documented and all accountabilities documented. That way the environment is set. It's only the people that you hire for positions that can make or break it. At least you've created the right the visibility, governance, maturity model. Everybody go check it out. Ash, where should where should people find you? Um, they can find me in Google. Search for my legal name, Ashoke as h Ashok Nalawala or Ash Nalawala author. You'll get my big knowledge panel. The knowledge panel will open up all the places like where I sell my books, Amazon and um little bit about me. Uh by all means connect on LinkedIn and um I'd be happy and mention the podcast because I get a lot of spam on LinkedIn but mention um Edward's um podcast. That way I will connect with you. Thank you, Ash. You are you are really well known in SEO. Uh and I I appreciate you dearly for coming on the show. Thank thank you again. And thank you to Gagen Gotra for connecting us as well. Yes. Thanks to Gagen. Yeah. Yeah. Uh all right. Cool. This is episode What episode is this? This is episode 1 177 of the Edward Show. 77 days in a row doing this podcast. That is crazy. Generational streak. That is what we are on. 1 177 days in a row with some of the coolest, some of the most interesting, some of the best SEOs in the world. Like Ash Nalawala here. Thank you, Ash. Thank you again. If you if you watch this episode on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening and I will talk to you again tomorrow.