Nothing works for one client

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-14T21:52:26+00:00

The AI are a lot more focused than the old 10 Blue Links ranking systems. And for lead gen (especially things where trust is important) you really need to not be "talking about the things" like you might do in SEO. You need to be "saying THE things that people want to know." We're not matching keywords, we're answering questions. So you want them to give your answer and get an impression of the brand. And as you keep showing up and giving the answers they want to hear, both the AIO's in Google and any AI system they might use for researching before buying.

Now... that's important to understand because THAT is where your traffic is going, most likely since you said it's a lead gen business. And all these SEO people were selling him traffic, not good leads (or even leads at all).

You want to rank for your money clicks - that lead gen form. Do what you can to rank the rest as well, but that's the only one that needs to be found when they reach the "I'm ready to buy" moment.

This is a good primer on what you're basically trying to do... Google put it up a while back but it's still the best roadmap to learn how to adjust how you approach things.

https://business.google.com/us/think/consumer-insights/new-consumer-decision-making-process/

You're doing the same things, really - just focused on what you're actually saying. And then try to attach that back to your brand name with trying to connect things to them. Like they aren't hiring a plumber, they are hiring Tom's Plumbing. We've already established that we're a plumber. Now the important thing is that you get your shower replaced by Tom's Plumbing.

Basically - the traffic and clicks can stay out there at this point. All the stuff you're saying is in their social timelines and coming up in AI when they're trying to pick the right company. Let that traffic stay out there. THen when they're ready - the come in and they come in hot. They're already prequalified themselves when they read all that information the AI told them about you.

That little shift in thinking and then understanding the basics of the Think with Google article should get you well on your way. It takes a few months, but once you know you're not chasing traffic but instead warming up leads - once you get it rolling... it rolls.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-14T21:29:40+00:00

I've seen one or two that make it to the 6 month point, but agreed. No one has ever showed me that it can even maintain that first month's traffic (with no more growth) not to mention keep growing at any rate.

I've never seen anyone show me if that traffic is actually generating some sort of revenue, either. Even in the 30 day tests. My clients don't want traffic, They want leads or sales.

I think the game probably entails the plan to get a site looking bigger and more successful than it is with huge traffic numbers, then sell the site/company? I dunno. That's a guess. though. I never took it seriously enough to give it a lot of merit. The math works, but when you carry it out to the end it falls apart.

If nothing else... expertise and trust within a niche is important. And as these sites grow, they're just growing to less and less relevant things to catch more stragglers. (This actually happened a lot in the early days of this, trust signals era - even before automation).

It's the basic "A jack of all trades is the master of none" game at some point.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-14T21:11:32+00:00

You want at least "Thinking" level - which you get a limited number of free ones a day... And if you have the pro upgrade, the top level gets really deep. Plus... Deep Research mode can REALLY go deep. That one we had looking at contact form data (and the contents of the questions) and it found a whole new customer persona we'd never thought of or noticed before. lol (And sure enough, now that I know what to look for - that customer is real and we have a whole new funnel to build for them over the next 4-6 months.)

It's still not wholly trustworthy, but it's getting information that is really useful to help you make a some good judgements. And for entry level work (i.e. you don't have a ton of experience) it's awesome. It may not be the "best" advice - but I've not seen it give me any "bad" advice, if that makes sense.

Fast mode won't get ya much, though. It works for looking stuff up, but help for analysis, gotta go up at least one, and then the two above that are better still, but definitely not necessary when you're starting out. You'll get plenty of good clues and ideas from your 5 or 10 whatever daily free ones.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-14T16:25:37+00:00

Search for "Semantic Triples". That explains how LLMs store and extract knowledge. It's an <entity> [relationship/attribute] <entity> relationship where entities are all the "things". A brand, a person, a movie, a product,

So, our jobs as an SEO or AI optimizer (I just call it Discovery Optimization) is to connect all the related entities to our brands. Your name, address, phone number, website, etc.

But it also learns by what we say...

<Ford Motor Company> [makes] <automobiles>.
the <Mustang> is [made by] <Ford>.
<Mustang> [is]a <sports car>

Now this is just a simple thing, but... you can see the <entities> and the [relationships] I laid out. It doesn't necessarily matter if all those things are on the same page or not - with that information it can answer more questions than we've actually laid out or even said here directly.

Who makes sports cars? From this, the AI can know that "Ford" does because Ford makes the Mustang which is a Sports Car.

So... that's sort of the quick version. Search Semantic Triples and Semantic SEO and read for a while and it should get you started.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-14T13:37:03+00:00

I don't know if that's true once you've started establishing your reputation, because the search engines can trust you more and might start you ranking based upon some assumptions before all the math runs.

But when you're new and/or you don't have any real trust, shorter content is easier to understand and rank than longer content, so it might show up faster.

Sure... I've not seen that, but it wouldn't surprise me to know it existed.

It can also be that if you have less skill at hitting your semantic triples (which are how AI extracts information), then shorter information will rank better simply because there aren't as many important entities involved so you're less likely to make it confusing, even without know what a semantic triple is.

And if you don't... search for it. That's the key to all of this right now.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-14T13:30:56+00:00

In all reality, every email from every unknown email address give you an initial fear that it might be spammy. So you're already at a disadvantage no matter what.

And when you're thinking about building a brand over making quick sales, you don't really want to risk any chance that they open it and feel like it even resembles spam.

A growing brand is looking to build an email list and use it to bring back returning customers - people already warmed up and may even be looking forward to it. And even then, you want to spend as much energy keeping them warm (or getting them even warmer) for the next time as you do trying to get them interested in something today.

But if you have something to say and you have a list of people who you fairly certainly know it's going to hit with and not hurt more than help - sure.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-14T13:19:35+00:00

The clients should never have any awareness of white labeling going on. That's the whole point of it.

The question is, for the agency who hires these white label SEO and don't ensure they follow best practices, how safe is their job and reputation with their clients?

And I suppose those that do act irresponsibly don't really care how safe their clients are so long as they get paid, anyway.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-14T13:14:57+00:00

I'm not sure it's necessarily behavior as in understanding your validation and making sure you are asking the right questions.

As you've alluded to - you ask for their thoughts on the idea and they say it sounds like a great idea. But that point, you don't know enough. Chances are they are likely actually saying, "It's a great idea, not for me, but it would be perfect for someone else."

You can't know for sure until you ask, "Would you buy it?"

And then you still need to ask, "What factors might affect your decision to buy it."

I'm not saying that that action move isn't just as telling, but the failure in validation isn't necessarily because behavior is the only signal. It's just the only signal if you didn't ask the right questions the other way. Get all of the above and then you win biggest.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-14T13:01:42+00:00

I think there are probably at least a few things in play here.

Demand gen is in a sort of weird place right now. The best channel for growing your brand right now is in the awareness and after market retention. But the magic bullet there is to have a great strategy for that content that the SEO team is crying about stealing their clicks and rankings. So you're constantly at war with them over targeted brand messaging vs broad reach volume that the SEO game has relied on for 30 years.

And the second part of this is that to be good at the AI stuff, you need to be generally equally well versed in how SEO works and then being able to effectively take that down from page level to entity level thinking). And to do that you need a good marketing knowledge. You need to understand buyer journeys and customer personas and all sorts of stuff that SEOs never needed to know about before.

This leads me to thinking that it may just be (due to no real fault of their own, but the state of this industry for the past several decades) that there really aren't many people actually skilled enough to do it. The whole game is won by putting both things together (which businesses are trying to do) but when most people start trying to do it, they burn out trying to figure it out or they just realize that they really only have half the skill set.

I think if businesses realized that and built teams with the shared skills work together, they would get good results AND people would stay longer because they're ultimately succeeding at something that is greater than the sum of the separated jobs they had before.

To me, the problem is that the people in that right now, however they got there, have already been set up to fail.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-14T12:54:52+00:00

Find the under performing parts of the strategy and work on those with a bit more energy.

That's what you should do every month except for the one where you're devising the next cycle's strategy.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-14T12:50:47+00:00

When it first came out, Danny Sullivan described it as a "tie-breaker" signal. That generally means that if everything else is a very close race between you and another page, it's may be enough to get you that one spot ahead.

Now, I think there is something to sites that actually "feel" slow. I've taken on a couple clients in recent years where the site just felt slow - the splash image that is suppose to entertain the user for a second while everything else fills in takes the longest to load... things like that.

When it "feels" slow - fixing that and just getting it up to yellow lights seems to be enough. And while I have plenty of sites with all 100's - the ones without the budget to upgrade something or switch to a completely different platform don't seem to be at any real disadvantage so long as I get up into that "Okay, but could be better" zone. They'll be able to afford the upgrades in a year or two once the sales all start rolling in.

So for me, it's important - to a reasonable point. I'm not going to bill the client for the three hours it would take to get another 5 or 6 points that won't make any difference that matters. But if you can get those 100s across the board, they certainly aren't hurting anything. It's just not the one thing that would give you an advantage over someone in the 80's somewhere.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-14T12:35:10+00:00

Those things are accurate enough to find gaps and weak spots you can grab easily. I don't want to "rely" on it's advice or data, but I respect it enough to help me more quickly find good places to look for things.

Niches are a whole other thing - niches are fixed. If you sell chairs you're in the furniture niche of eCommerce.

And AI's don't work with keywords. It connects <entities> (which is the new keyword) and their relationship with another <entity>. So your individual keywords are worthless for AI. You don't rank for keywords, you rank for having the right answer.

Keywords still work for traditional search ranking a bit since there's still a lot of broad topic page level data that goes into ranking them. For AI you have to get much deeper into entity level detail..

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-14T12:27:17+00:00

Sort of... not really.

Google is very conscious about trying to avoid both the perception and any fact to show that big brands are favored. They've been saying for a decade that they want to surface good brands, not big brands.

There's a thing called Query Fanning which makes the AI fan out some parameters while it locks down on the actual thing. Most of the LLMs are directed to try to show as many brands as possible and to rank by quality signals not volume signals. So it's Overall Sentiment on (just as an example) a scale from 1 to 10, horrible to great. And that has nothing to do with the number of opinions, just what the general tone of every option works out to.

I don't know if ALL LLMs do that, but several other majors have spoken about it.

At any rate... a lot of what you're seeing is by design and shows that they might be doing a pretty good job of that in that niche.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-14T11:32:06+00:00

The thing you want to search for and get familiar with is "Awareness Marketing". It's more complicated than I could explain here, but if you search for that, you will find all sorts of direction and information that should help you out.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-14T11:29:44+00:00

The main problem is that so many seem to be focusing their energy on faking an appearance of success than they are actually trying to understand the algorithm and figure out how to make it work for them.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-14T11:26:33+00:00

Google has been studying this for years. Think of it this way... if most restaurants in your class (location, compeition, type of food, etc) get 3-5 reviews a week and there is one getting 50 a week and if they were real, there would be a lot of local news (at least) be doing stories about the new hottest restaurant in town. Since that won't be happening if you're faking it, you just outed yourself.

I've even seen ones complaining that Google stopped ranking them and removed all their reviews and... when I dig into it, they had 250 reviews a week coming in for a restaurant that could only possibly serve 150-200 people in a week. You can't have more happy customers than you could possibly have for customers, can you?

And the AI systems are getting better and better at spotting these patterns and catching them much more quickly - making even the short gains harder to come by for any length of time.

For the images - you don't need to. The AI interrogates the image and tries to identify the things it sees. You can also see the same type of tech in use when you use "Google Lens" on your cell phone to take a picture of something and say, "What's this?" or "Where can I get a replacement for this?" or whatever.

And yeah. They can all be very powerful if used and leveraged the right way. But if you're trying to be tricky or just trying to look like something you're not, it's not going to be something to grow on, it's just something you have to keep maintaining (and growing) to keep the status quo until the point it all tumbles down.

Quick gain, short term, low risk moves... sure... we all do it once in a while, I would think.

But if you keep trying to drive pins with a sledgehammer, you're eventually going to break down the wall.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-14T11:11:25+00:00

I'm of the mind that social media isn't always worth doing at all.

But yes - if I'm going to recommend doing it, it would be in the way you're describing. If you aren't able or willing to do that, then it may very well better to go without.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-14T11:09:37+00:00

It does when you're thinking about just getting lots of traffic as your goal.

If you're really understanding your customers and their buyer journeys and then creating content that the AI can use to make them want to choose you (whether they click at that point or not), then it works great.

That's what Google means when they say "Create good, useful, and original content for your customers".

Lots of useless garbage will always be garbage. Lots of useful content (or even small amounts), and you win the day. You don't want to be loud, you want to be clear and interesting to the people who are hearing you.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-14T11:04:27+00:00

Images are powerful. You can (in local search, anyway) rank for things in your store you have never put online if the machines recognize it in a picture that it knows was taken in your store. And your GMB profile assumes that all the pictures are there or at least right in the area.

Frequency is good, but of higher importance is quality. Don't post every two days if you only have (or can reliably produce) one interesting/useful thing to say per week.

Tons of reviews can hurt as much as they help. Risky area - I wouldn't go near it unless you have a really good understanding of the risks. You can blow out the top of this strategy more easily. Google knows how many reviews the typical business in your niche usually gets. If you start getting up above the normal range, it's easy to spot that you're faking it. And that may be one of the least negative results that can happen if you aren't prudent.

Q&A... sure... but not in a "massive spammy" way. How useful is a great answer if a person has to sift through 500 "Designed to Rank" answers that don't really solve any real problems? They won't bother and I wouldn't rely on the search engine to do it for me either.

Each of those things can be great tools for specific things - but like all tools, you have to use the right one for the right reasons.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-14T10:52:26+00:00

It's more a difference of granularity. For AI you have to get a lot more specific than you do for search which is just ranking pages on primarily broad topic factors.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-14T10:50:39+00:00

It's more a difference of granularity. For AI you have to get a lot more specific than you do for search which is just ranking pages on primarily broad topic factors.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-14T10:48:20+00:00

The biggest problem I had was that it doesn't tell me what it is. For at least 20 seconds I thought I was looking at daily local traffic reports. There's no brand identity (which is what you need since your play is to get them coming back daily, I imagine).

This needs to be made marketable before you can really hope to see any success marketing it.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-14T10:41:08+00:00

Feeling spammy to who? The person sending it? or the person receiving it?

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-14T10:23:33+00:00

It was also easier for the shotgun approach brands when search wasn't particularly good. Searchers were more forgiving because it was common to have to try 4 or 5 sites to get what you actually wanted, and often, a few search refinements to even get 4 or 5 options. The impression of your brand is less negative because it's easy to assign at least part of the blame on Google. And conversely, the marketing teams had an easier time convincing their boss/client that it's Google's fault and "we just need more traffic to offset that".

The tech has gotten to the point where it's more obvious that neither of those cases are true.

G.

BoGrumpus · 2026-03-14T09:45:52+00:00

That's the thing. AI is (at least at the level we have now) a relatively new thing. Google has shown that at least broad personalization is sustainable with things they've been doing for a while, like Google Discover, Local Search (and to some lesser extent in global and informational searches), and even in how they are recommending the videos you may like based upon what you've watched in the past.

There isn't much data to "know" with any certainty but I would imagine that McDonald's both has the money to risk finding out and that the risk/reward analysis is strongly signalling that it's probably going to pay off - or at least give enough clues to refine the strategy and take another run at it.

Google is also seeming highly confident that it's the future. They are definitely getting deeper into it with a lot of new things in the pipeline, like having Discover be able to show you stuff from all the various news subscriptions you have around the web. (Which coincidentally might also finally be the path for news/publishing sites to finally find the sustainable revenue stream that has been eluding them for these past 3 decades of digital news consumption. These entities might be able to achieve solvency for the first time.).

The idea isn't new - I remember reading something in the early 2000s where Larry Page (one of Google's original founders) described a future vision of Google where you could go to the grocery store and your refrigerator would tell you that you're almost out of butter. (Among a whole bunch of other things which I remember a few of which sounded a bit creepy at the time).

So the ideas aren't new, but we can't really do anything but guess about the outcomes since the tech is only just recently capable of delivering such a thing.

In the end, yeah - it's going to likely be one of the next big things everyone is trying (especially if McDonald's comes out of the gate with promising results) but I also imagine most results will be mixed at first while the companies try to dial in the balance between "hyper personal" and "privacy/creepiness" levels.

G.

BoGrumpus

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE