69 Preparing for the Future of SEO - Greg Brooks Jul 25 2024

Erik Martinez: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to today's episode of the Digital Velocity Podcast. Today, Tim and I are going to be talking to Greg Brooks, who is the CMO of SearchTides, an SEO agency at the forefront of digital marketing. Greg's work is instrumental in shaping the future of effective SEO, utilizing large language models. Greg, welcome to the show.

Greg Brooks: Hey, what's going on, Erik? Hi, Tim. Thanks for having me on guys.

Tim Curtis: Glad to have you.

Erik Martinez: Yes, glad to have you. This is going to be a fun conversation, but before we get into the nuts and bolts of [00:01:00] SEO and large language models, can you give us a brief synopsis of your journey to this point?

Greg Brooks: Yeah, absolutely. I'll do my best. I used to play poker professionally, so I was doing that like through college and then after college. And then I went into starting some businesses with my brother, which failed miserably, but I got good at marketing along the way. Started doing full-service marketing, which I found was great and very reactive for me. So, I honed in on one specific type of marketing, which was SEO and search.

Long story short, SearchTides has grown to like 50 people or something like that. It's been in business for over a decade. Our number one thing is really staying at the forefront of trends and understanding what everything is going to look like. Yes, now, but also 18 months from now, five years from now, and just being really aligned with the goals of our clients, which is also to be successful. Yes, today, but also 18 months from now, [00:02:00] five years from now.

And we've recently kind of opened up. We've kind of done a lot of things behind the scenes and stored a lot of secrets ourselves and with our clients. But we've decided it's way more fun to be more public about those things. So, we talk more openly about what we know, how we think about things, what we think the future holds and we talk about that stuff on our websites, our newsletters, our socials, but ultimately, and in conversations like this. So, yeah, I'm excited to chit-chat.

Erik Martinez: Well, that's a lot to think about just in terms of the future of SEO, because it feels like about every three weeks it's different.

Greg Brooks: A new future, but wait, another new future.

Erik Martinez: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I feel like you're in Groundhog Day. A lot has been made about the idea of AI and utilizing AI, and I think, you know, in a lot of people's minds it's like, Hey, I can do all my Meta descriptions and I can do all my page titles, and I can, you know, insert keywords and the AI is this [00:03:00] magical beast that's gonna help me do my SEO much faster, which can be true.

However, I think there's also a great misunderstanding on what's happening, not only on the generation side of the information that we're trying to paste into our websites, whether that is video content, image content, written content, whatever that is versus what's going on on the algorithm side within Google and Microsoft and the integration of AI technologies there and the impact on the search results pages. So, from your perspective, what do you see as the most transformative thing that's happening now that people should be thinking about?

Greg Brooks: Great question. The fact that you're distinguishing between the two sides is really important. So, I think on one side, we'll call it production, my ability to create things and do things. I think the single biggest thing that's changing [00:04:00] is you're getting scalability. I think what people mistake that for is they mistake it for the ability to completely outsource your knowledge.

So, can you get an AI to build some Meta descriptions for you and insert keywords into your articles? Oh, I'm sure you could. You can get it to write for you too. If you're not an expert to be able to understand how these things need to be constructed, exactly how are you going to know what you have is good or not? You're basically just outsourcing your own understanding of what's good or what's a good idea.

So, the innovation is amazing because if you're knowledgeable about what you're doing, now you can produce that at scale, and I'm happy to run through like a very detailed example of how we do that for content. But the mistake that people are making is they're outsourcing their autonomy and decision making and they're just assuming that what comes back is like ideal. And that's really not necessarily true. That's actually false. It's wrong. It's the opposite. [00:05:00] That's on the creation side.

The other side of it, which I think again, it was really smart to kind of distinguish that Erik was, okay, well, now these algorithms, the search results pages are changing, people are telling us stuff, it's different than what used to be there, some of the information's terrible, what do we think of that? My reaction is we're in step one, inning one, phase one, day one of this new era, so it's going to be rocky and it's going to be inaccurate. But what we are really doing is we are entering into an era of the highest level of personalization, in terms of getting knowledge to us, us learning things in the most personalized manner ever.

So, if you take the history of Google, there was no local SEO, there was no local Google. And then that showed up one day, and then what happened? The search results were highly based off of what your physical location was. And then if you logged in on Google and you go into your [00:06:00] Gmail, now you're getting ads in your Gmail. I'm making no commentary about privacy concerns with that, but now you're getting ads in your email that are, what? Based off of the topics of your email.

And then if you look on Instagram, you say something into your phone, and then magically, who's to know why this works, but who knows, magically you get an advertisement that's about what you just said. Over time, this level of personalization is occurring and AI is really always been at the front end of that. What we're seeing right now is we're seeing the next journey, which is eventually I am going to get something that is hyper-personalized to me.

And the reason why it looks like a disaster right now a lot of times is because it's basically the beta version. But the eventual version is I'm going to get something super specific to me. And then flip that around. Now I'm a brand, now I'm a company. What does that mean? Well, that means I'm going to need to be more specific and stand for something and have an identity and be different [00:07:00] than the 10 other things that are similar to me in terms of the business that we're performing.

Erik Martinez: That's a really, really powerful statement. Tim and I have had lots of conversations both on the show and privately about the role of brand. You're kind of bringing that same concept in, right? We're just applying it to the world of SEO, highly personalized to me, content that's relevant to me, and standing out and being different from the myriad of other sources that can sell what you sell. So, what is it that makes you different and unique?

Let's push that a little bit further because I think the challenge that we're facing is we're also seeing this happen while these chatbots, these really highly sophisticated large language models are in use, and there's a lot of data saying that, hey, the generation that's coming up, they're not there [00:08:00] yet, not hugely economically important to us yet, but they will be soon, are driving more and more of their searches through these language models and not through the traditional search engines.

And so, when we talk about being unique and being in a brand and being in the right places, how do we do that in this environment? What are the steps that we have to take? For some of these older brands, it's really tough. This is a major mind shift in how we approach the market and marketing our products and talking about our products. So, what are the things that we need to do prep ourselves for that?

Greg Brooks: That's a great question. A helpful framework that I use is to think about things in as a zoomed-out a perspective as possible. So, we can say the sentence, search for something on Google, and that means something very specific. But what is [00:09:00] basically the most zoomed-out way to think about what's actually happening? You have a person who's trying to gain knowledge. You have someone who wants to know something, whether it's information, whether it's educational, whether it's something that's product-based or commercially driven. Someone wants to learn something that they don't know yet.

At the early onsets of the internet, that happened in chat rooms. That was basically like what was around, and then it happened in instant messenger, and then it happened in forums, and then it started happening on search engines. And now it has evolved to happen, yes, on the ChatGPTs of the world and Perplexity AI's of the world. But I take it a step further and say, it also appears on TikTok and on Instagram and on YouTube or like where people are, they are looking to learn and therefore they are searching.

And if we use search and SEO as phrases to mean Google specifically, we're losing sight of the fact [00:10:00] that ultimately, what this is about is people trying to learn about stuff and us needing to meet them where they are learning about things. And also understanding that like people, assumably, will never stop trying to learn about stuff. And therefore now the game is just about, well, where are people going to learn from and how do I get out ahead of it, and how do I think about the trends and how do I always basically expand?

It's the same thing that we used to have in commerce where you could make a funnel that was just like, yep, someone's going to come in, they're going to click three times, they're going to buy something, and now that doesn't really exist. That's why multi-channel marketing is so powerful because the consumer is quote everywhere. Whatever the hell that means. The consumer's quote everywhere. Who knows? So, let's have businesses be everywhere.

But it all actually just drives towards one thing, which is understanding your customer, understanding their problems, understanding how you specifically solve their problems better than the 10 other people who look and talk like you, [00:11:00] who you're perfect for within that group and who's not. And then, if you know those things, now it's easy to figure out the format, the medium, the channel that you're going to play in.

The businesses of the future that will do well are the ones that will be just customer-driven, not focused on the customer, not prioritizing the customer. Literally, there is nothing else except the customer. Not trying to be best in class service. They're just like, we're only doing things that are best for the customer. I think that's the ethos that will win tomorrow.

Tim Curtis: So, living in the world of AI, so I spent a lot of time in the MAICON community and SEO has talked a lot about. SEO has been one of those initial concepts with AI that was very early on the practical applications, even some of the technical applications were very quick to be identified.

So you fast forward and you have essentially, I don't want to say a widespread movement, but kind of an all-encompassing movement towards incorporating AI into different [00:12:00] elements of the SEO work. And when you start talking about content, right? And some of the most recent Google leak, we get a little view inside the world of how Google's algorithms are really kind of emphasizing that content creator and website owner and blah, blah, blah, and all the things we need to factor in there.

But you hear more and more about leaning into AI for that content generation. It's being scaled, right? We see it. It can look good at first pass, but there's that level, and you kind of alluded to this earlier. There's that level there in particular with AI and AI content that just doesn't really exist without the subject matter expert. There was a really good example. It was shared at MAICON in Cleveland this last year. And for those of you who don't know, MAICON is the Marketing AI Conference. It's in Cleveland, Ohio, every year.

The example was an AI writing a blog on beer, and I wish I had all the specifics of the example. It was a Canadian beer. Great Lakes Beer Company, I think was the name of the company. It basically created this [00:13:00] content around this beer, and it read like it was a beer enthusiast or crafting enthusiast. It read all of that, but it took the name and it assumed that the hops were German. Well, the reality was it wasn't and so anybody who had a high level of subject matter expertise within the beer community would immediately know that that was an incorrect assumption.

General readers probably would have read it and not really thought much about it, but it really goes back to those subject matter experts. It was an example of how you cannot walk away from content and the responsibility of content creation with AI. It really is more of that augmented intelligence where you're pulling the two together.

So, how are you tackling that? How are you telling people to tackle that when they're getting really specifically into they need that AI, again on the production side for scalability, but yet can't divorce yourself from that subject matter expertise?

Greg Brooks: Yeah, totally. That's a great question. The reason why it's a fantastic [00:14:00] question is because let's take it to where it's eventually going, and then let's still answer the question there. So yeah, these mistakes exist today, but are they going to exist when we have ChatGPT 10.0 or 15.0? What's going to happen when we have the ability to not just create writing but to create video that is also up to that standard?

The answer is 99 point whatever percent of the content on the internet is going to be AI-generated, it doesn't matter what medium it is. And how do we still thrive in that environment? So, let me answer that question, and then I actually will walk through exactly how we do content creation today in a very collaborative way with ChatGPT because everything that you're saying is true.

So, we believe that right now, if you look at SEO and you think about it as a triangle and search and the Internet works this way too, there's 3 layers. The bottom layer, you would call that the foundational layer. That's all of the associations that you have with SEO already. That's stuff like [00:15:00] Meta descriptions, links, title, tags, content creation, technical SEO, all that stuff that everybody quote knows, that's all there. We're building our all-seeing eye pyramid. The bottom is critical. That's a critical part of it.

The middle represents the era that is really today. It's called the influence era. We call it the influence era, the influence layer, whatever it is. And that's really what you just described so well, Tim. You basically require subject matter expertise to talk about things in a meaningful way, because you have to have the knowledge and you have to have an SEO, what's called EEAT experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

Authoritativeness and trustworthiness, think of those things as like your credentials. Those are your badges. That's like, yeah, you know about this stuff and that's really why you're able to. Your experience and your expertise, those are your components that make you, [00:16:00] you. So, if I go into a pharmacy and I ask the pharmacist to fill a prescription and they say, yes, I will do that, but there's this generic version that's available for 10 percent of the cost, you should have that. That's the pharmacist using their expertise. They know that that exists.

And if I go back and I say, Hey, I have this prescription. Can you fill it? And they say, yes, I can, but every time I fill that for someone, nothing happens. They come back, I give them this other thing instead, and it works perfectly. You should just do this the first time. That's the pharmacist using their experience to guide you. And that's kind of what you're alluding to with subject matter expertise.

It is the information. The hops are from Germany or, you know, Europe or whatever, I know those things. Additionally, there's this human component of my experience that I've built up filling all these prescriptions or touching all the different hops that's creating a sensory experience for me, [00:17:00] that's not able to be, the whole point of that is we can't use words to describe it because it's a sensory experience.

Which leads us to the future of SEO and really the internet, which we're calling the human era. And the reason why is because as soon as you have mass production take place in terms of factories and cars and tables and all that stuff, what becomes the most valuable? The handmade stuff. That is basically what the internet will become. Human beings will stop trying to become encyclopedias or Wikipedia's or indexes of information online.

That's exactly what AI is supposed to do, just spit the thing back to us and do it in a way that is efficient with how we digest it. Sweet. Awesome. Great. But I will now have the luxury of wanting to connect on a human level with someone and valuing that experience, which again, we can't really put into words, but when you have a conversation with somebody who you walk away [00:18:00] from and you go, I really liked talking with that person and I felt on some level, like a connection with them. That was cool. I would hang out with them again. That's a very human experience.

And so, if you're not relying on those people anymore to give you the most efficient directions from point A to point B, now all of a sudden that stuff does come more front of mind. And so, I think we have an opportunity to deepen the connections that we have with each other in this next era.

Tim Curtis: This is probably a horrible description. I call it the Etsy effect or Etsyness. It's that special artisanal bespoke. It is not mass-produced. You're getting that original kind of artisanal type feeling or interaction with a product. So, flipping on that. So, I get all that and I certainly understand directionally it's amazing when you go year one to year two to year three, year after year.

For example, at MAICON, and you see and hear the advancements that have been made in AI over that period of time, a year is an eternity in AI and the impact that AI's had since the previous [00:19:00] iteration. Nowhere has that been more maybe visually evident, for example, than on creative and where you can actually really see the iterations and the video and the improving quality. It's not a new iteration of that video, it's multiple iterations better. You know, you're leapfrogging things. In a short period of time, you're taking gigantic leaps in terms of quality. So, I get all that, right?

There is this little inconvenient thing that we haven't solved for yet, and this going back to my history, I spent years as an intellectual property officer. The challenge or the fear related to AI at the moment really has to do with copyright. It's the usage of materials and insights that is going to be a challenge because there's not case law yet on AI to define, is it truly public domain. How do we handle copyrighted works, et cetera?

So, if you're stepping around, and we've talked to people before, we've had very creative steps around that where they're using much more generic approach to AI, but even if it's considered a derivative of the original AI [00:20:00] output and you've tackled a subject matter, an expert has gone in and rewritten or edited it down, it actually looks like it's still classified as a derivative of the original work, which may or may not read copyrighted.

So, where are you on the spectrum? It's a super fun party conversation, and I would recommend doing that at your next gathering or whatever, but it is something that we have a fiduciary responsibility, right, with clients. We have to bring those things up when we're talking to clients. Where are you on this fun subject?

Greg Brooks: I will answer that question, which is another good question. I'll answer that by telling you exactly how we use ChatGPT to help us create content. So, what we do is we might go into ChatGPT and say, Hey, check out the search term or the search terms or these five, six articles that we love. What are all of the different subtopics that they're talking about? What are the different sections? All those sorts of things. Okay. Can you collate them, put them in a list, look at the frequency that each of them used that? So, now I'm starting to generate an outline.

[00:21:00] We might literally paste in the helpfulness content as guidelines from Google and say, Hey, just to let you know, we're looking to adhere to these guidelines. So, everywhere that you can incorporate these, especially the EEAT stuff, whatever, whatever. So, now we have an outline, we have some guidelines. We might ask for it to write and nothing can really write like full paragraphs or anything like that, come up with different ideas and stuff like that. There's a back-and-forth.

Now we have an article and now we might feed it back in and say, can you remove the fluff from this article? So, now all the fluff's removed and we're like, 89 percent of the article just disappeared. No, I'm just kidding. Yeah, so now there's no fluff. Then I'm like, Hey, can you add some statistics or facts? What are good spots to do this? Do you know any, can we reference them? Whatever it is. Can we add in more authoritativeness? Can we add in more trustworthiness? What are examples of experience that someone might write into this article?

And so, that is very much like [00:22:00] a collaborative process that there's a back and forth. I think that's the best way to use AI right now because it can't really do it on its own. Now, in terms of the derivatives questions itself, you go back and you look at artists over the years, musical artists over the years and they talk about their most inspirational bands. And then, you go back and listen to the songs again that these artists have played and you hear it all of a sudden you're like, Oh yeah, this chord was inspired by, you know, it's the same sort of chord that's been.

And so, my question would be, where's the line? Where do we draw the line? If I sample a song, where's that on the line? If I take inspiration from a song, where's that on the line? If I use X amount of the same lyrics. Where is that? I think the big challenge in AI is, if I go and I listen to 10 musical albums, and then I make music as a result of listening to those albums, most likely there are no legal ramifications. I'm not a lawyer, but I did [00:23:00] watch like three episodes of Suits.

Tim Curtis: Only three.

Greg Brooks: No, I watched them all. I watched them all.

Tim Curtis: I'm a little, a little addicted to that show.

Greg Brooks: That show is hilarious. So, it's just like, where's the line? Where's the line on this stuff if I go watch 10 TV shows and then I make a TV show, if I put everybody in the same outfits, if I use the same names and titles? I think the challenge with AI is that if I do things manually as a human being that are very clearly on one side of IP and then that thing happens at scale because it's an AI, does that actually change the result somehow?

And my instinct, and again, I'm just an avid Suits watcher, is no, it doesn't change it. Because it's basically the equivalent of, well, what if I was able to digest information three times more than anybody else could? Does that make me infringe upon someone's [00:24:00] IP? I don't think so. Okay. Well, what about a 1000 times? So again, then it's just an arbitrary line that we're drawing based off of scalability.

I do think there is a clear line somewhere in there around commercially-gated information where it's just like, what's considered public domain and not public domain. I know when I forgot what it was. Was a Dolly that had the logos of images from Getty images or something that it had trained off of. And it was kind of, like, showing up in a lot of their drawings?

Tim Curtis: Yeah. I'm starting to remember that now. Yeah.

Greg Brooks: So, it's like that. Or, you know, OpenAI was trained off of, there's a thing called common creative and it's like a bunch of terabytes worth of data, both images, video, text, whatever. But here's an interesting question I'll throw it back to y'all. If I go onto youtube.com and I just download every video from youtube.com, which I can do, and then I train an AI on it?

Erik Martinez: You're Napster at that point.

Tim Curtis: That's what the [00:25:00] courts are trying to decide. You know, in music, there used to be an adage where there was no hard and fast rule, but it would be, you know, certain number of bars of a song you would then need copyright permission to use or derivative work or whatever. Usually it was just you had to pay some sort of a mechanical or sync license, depending on what your usage was.

Yeah, now it's going to be a little fuzzier, but those are things that the court has not yet ruled on, so we don't have definitive. But it could very easily go either way. There's indications in the court that it could be a ruling that would be in favor of the content producers. In which case, the headaches that would result, at least initially, until some sort of a clearing house system was built, is going to be pretty insurmountable for the short term. It's an unknown.

Erik Martinez: Is that really any different than our patent system today? It's really the same basic concept, right? We go out, we come up with an idea, we go patent it before anybody else can patent it, and therefore it's our idea. The reality is with 8 billion [00:26:00] people in this world, there are not that many unique, I'm not saying there aren't unique ideas, but there aren't unique ideas in terms of process.

Greg could have the same basic idea that I do, and Tim, you could have the same basic idea that I do. Which one of us is first to be able to bring it to market, monetize it, promote it, and grow it, oftentimes is the mark of who's successful. So, I think the courts have to take a look at this from that vein is like, Hey, there's a lot of patent trolls and AI could actually exacerbate that problem.

We really don't want to stymie innovation and the power of AI, in my perspective, is that we have the ability to be incredibly innovative in so many unique and interesting ways. That doesn't mean that they're completely unique ideas at the core.

Tim Curtis: You have to balance for the greater good because you also have to consider do we want real advancements in medical research [00:27:00] hung up in courts over whether or not somebody owns the rights to a concept of a medicine. Those are the kind of things that are why some of these conversations about, specifically intellectual property and AI usage and you know, there's no bigger usage of content than the SEO community.

That's really driving the bulk of that content online. So, it's a very real question, and I think it's one that we'll have to get some clarity on because until the courts rule, but to your point, and I don't think anybody's advocating for folks to stop. I don't think it's the way to do it, but be mindful of your approach and ensure that you're not clearly lifting copyrighted material with quotes and direct quotes and those kinds of things.

Erik Martinez: You need to add value to the conversation or the derivative work or whatever it is. You need to add value to it. if AI enables you to add that value in a fresh perspective. I'm not going to use the word unique anymore because I just said that it's not really unique, right? Then I think we have the answer to the problem. We're [00:28:00] really looking for that fresh perspective.

And the cool part about being in the country that we live in with all of its inequities is that we have the ability to have different viewpoints and different perspectives on the same types of problems. And that's actually healthy. We want that, right? Because there's no one way to solve any unique problem.

So, if we bring that back to the world of SEO, I think what you said about your process is, Hey, you're using AI to create content that scores high on experience, scores high on expertise, authority, and trust. You guys are adding your own element to that, your fresh perspective, so to speak, based on all the research and the work that you do for your clients and seeing what works and producing a derivative work that hopefully, most of the time, I would assume, gains traction for [00:29:00] your customer, for whatever they're trying to accomplish, whether it's selling knowledge, providing knowledge, whatever that is. That's what you're doing. That's an important activity.

In your experience, as you go through this process and you look at the processes of competitors and what they're doing, the question I have is how do you maintain your edge? How do you maintain your edge in this environment? I've done some homework on you guys. I already know that you guys are experimenters, so you're always trying to teach yourself something new or learn something new.

That's relatively fresh because Tim and I, we fret all the time that our clients are so unwilling to test. They're almost afraid of it in a lot of cases and here you've built this neat little laboratory system where you're able to do that. So, how do you maintain that edge and how can other people [00:30:00] adopt, maybe not the specific technique that you're using, but adopt that mentality that allows them to maintain an edge?

Greg Brooks: I think it starts at the culture. We always viewed SEO as zero-sum, meaning if you're going to win, you are quite literally knocking down other people and reducing their traffic in the process, and therefore the biggest advantage you can have is having a better understanding of how that system works and where that system is going. If you think about it from that perspective, doing something because it's worked in the past or worked well for you, or you heard it from other people, or even it got you good results today, that is no longer part of the thought process.

The thought process is only what is the most effective. What's the most effective thing for today and also for tomorrow? And as soon as you start to [00:31:00] really believe that to be true, now you know that there is no today, there's only tomorrow. Because when you go out and seek and bring from the future, then you will just use today.

So, ultimately, like my job is to make sure that is the core ethos at SearchTides. How do we go out and see how things are going to become and then understand that better than others and more quickly than others? When we explain it from that perspective, clients are always down for it because it's talked about not in terms of experimenting with them, but in terms of like competitive advantages. Where anything that's already happening now and today. You don't have an advantage over other people.

We had a client get penalized for, so I want to say Q4, 2022, they got penalized for, [00:32:00] or they didn't get penalized, but there was an algorithm update that came out and they were negatively impacted from it. And that wound up being like, helpfulness, but content helpfulness didn't exist until the middle of 2023.

So, at that point, we essentially just said in order to figure out what's going on here, we have to look at everything holistically and essentially not have rules for things. So, we created like a 20-page guide. We called it the A+ Content Guide. Because again, helpfulness was not a word yet. It wasn't a term yet. And it was like a super long guide on all of the things that we felt, which was like what everybody in the best was doing.

We realized that this was something that was happening, not at a page level, but also at a website level, and we wound up revising like 400 pages of content with that client. And then, by the time the next major algorithm update came out, their traffic doubled. And this is still before [00:33:00] content helpfulness was a term.

And then later on, people are starting to speculate, August 2023, September 2023, there's research that starts to come out, there's helpfulness stuff people start to talk about. And we're like, yeah, we've had the playbook on that for months, since January 2023. Why are we able to do that? Because number one, that's what we've decided our edge is.

Our edge is on the product side, which means we better put a lot of time and effort into that, but it also means like, it's going to change how we think about our clients. We don't have checklist audits with our clients. We don't have the same sort of, we're going to do the same five things every single month. We are constantly doing different things. So, it's a different model that we have.

We don't want to create kind of like a McDonald's, like a kitchen style where it's just ch, ch, ch, ch, one to the next, to the next. That has weaknesses too. The weaknesses are it's a lot of processing power that you need to be doing. It's a lot of [00:34:00] analysis that you need to be doing. You need to have people spending a ton of time on actually like coming up with where things are going and you have to be talking to people about that stuff which means you spend less time on other things.

So, it's ingrained into us. The techniques or what we happen to do is the lowest amount of relevance. As a company, we have like seven different company values. I think three of them have to do with like staying ahead of the curve. Just because you got results today, doesn't entitle you to results tomorrow, staying humble no matter what, like all of these things are about doing well today. Very important for sure.

But like, ultimately, in a landscape of change, which is essentially what our modern economy is and also what technology creates, like, how do we thrive in a world where change only gets faster over time? And it's adaptability, essentially.

Erik Martinez: That's incredible. The thing I took away from that whole set of statements is we have made a [00:35:00] choice to be a certain way, and we have created a viewpoint around that choice, that's how we approach the market. And I think that's incredibly powerful. Way to go. There are a lot of organizations that do that, but not everybody really does it. I've seen your content. You guys are definitely practicing what you preach, so.

Greg Brooks: Thank you. And apologies to all of our clients from 7 years ago, who we were really slow to answer emails for you because we were choosing to put this stuff ahead of the communication.

Tim Curtis: Ahead of it. Yeah.

Price, quality service. Pick two.

Greg Brooks: Now we're lucky enough we get to do it all. That was not true for a hundred percent of the time.

Tim Curtis: That's awesome. Thanks for today and for the show and sharing your knowledge really about the process, about where you kind of view things. Before we close it out, is there any last piece of advice you would give the listeners?

Greg Brooks: In the theme and the ethos of what we've talked about here today, I would say that no change is the riskiest form of [00:36:00] behavior that exists. The challenge is understanding where the line between adopting and being flexible is, and then what's too far over the line, which is change for the sake of change. That's too far. So, how do you stay in the middle of those things? And it really comes from deprioritization. Where you get stuck is when you try to do it all.

I was talking to a buddy today and he's like, here's one of the worst analogies that I ever gave someone. And he said it and I was like, nah, that was good. So, this is so good I'm turning around and using it about four hours from now. And he was like, business is like someone's holding a knife to your neck.

And I was like, okay, go on. And he said, what's the one thing that you would focus on in that case? And I was like, getting the knife off my neck. And he's like, exactly. That's what it's about. And I was like, all right, well, you know, I don't really know. Okay. Now saying it out loud and seeing y'all's reactions, maybe it's not the best [00:37:00] metaphor. Turns out. It turns out it's not the best.

Erik Martinez: It's great. It's actually, I was thinking about it.

Greg Brooks: Well, you know, this is good. This is like before you get the tight five, this is like the loose five. We're testing stuff out, we're in the basement on a Tuesday night at The Late Night Show. The better way of thinking about it is like, what's the one thing right now that's the most important thing for evolution to occur in your business? And then, how do you do it in a way that leapfrogs what already exists?

Because it's going to take time and energy to build out the solution that you want. So, guess what? If you look at how things work today, and then you build out the thing for how things works today, because stuff always takes longer than we want it to, or than we expected to, or than we our best guesses are, by the time you build it out, it will be a worse version of what exists tomorrow.

So, how do you go out and grab the most leading edge thing that you can get your hands on, by the time you [00:38:00] understand and incorporate it, it'll be part of the zeitgeist. You won't be super unique or special for doing it anymore, but at least you'll still be relevant. And then, when you earn and use that muscle and form that muscle from doing that a few different times or multiple times, now you get an instinct for how far out in the future you have to go.

And so, I'll close on our example from a search perspective. SEO and the future model, for us, is optimizing for some chatbot somewhere that we've never heard of and that we'll never see and that we don't know exists, but we're showing up as the answer. So, if that's what we're aiming for, think about all of the things that we're going to hit on the way there.

We're going to hit the ChatGPTs. We're going to hit the social media networks. We're going to have understandings of all of these algorithms and how they operate such that when these evolutions happen, we already have deep understanding of [00:39:00] them. We are going to no matter what, understand how people will seek out knowledge online. The where is irrelevant. It'll just be like everything else that's happened in the past, and that's where we'll be.

And so, if that's our one focus, and if that's our one focus and all of a sudden product offerings fall into place, all of a sudden sales conversations fall into place, how you talk about things with your clients, all of a sudden internal training, what your expectations with your teams are, what they need to learn, what they need to get good at, who is more relevant in the future, who won't be more relevant in the future. By focusing on that one thing and understanding it, all of these other things fall into place.

Or I could just get caught up on the best, like customer management platform or something like that, and think that's the best way to evolve my business, but it's not a knife. Sorry. I had to go back to it. I had to go back to it.

Tim Curtis: Well, good. What's the best way to get ahold of you?

Greg Brooks: You can follow us at [00:40:00] searchtides.com. We have a newsletter on LinkedIn at SearchTides, YouTube at SearchTides. I'm floating around LinkedIn somewhere, but really we talk about this stuff and as it pertains to search all the time. So, we have monthly events, we do the newsletters, we post on socials, all that fun stuff. That's how you can find us.

Erik Martinez: The videos are good.

Tim Curtis: Good. Well, thanks again for coming on the show today. It was a pleasure to have you. The spirited conversation, always good. Love that we covered the topics that we did. So, that is it for today's episode of the Digital Velocity Podcast. I am Tim Curtis from CohereOne.

Erik Martinez: I'm Erik Martinez from Blue Tangerine. [00:41:00]