Creative Ways of Getting to #1 in Google and SEO Strategy in an AI First Era

Speaker 1: 0:01

You're in the marketing world and you're looking for inspiration, or you're a business leader who wants to understand what good marketing looks like. You're busy. You don't have time to sit around listening to a rambling 3 hour podcast. We get it. This is the Remarkable Marketing Podcast, where we celebrate the marketing rock stars that deliver truly remarkable marketing, when you'll hear short interviews with marketing execs who share stories about the best marketing they've ever done, how it delivered a huge impact and how they overcame all the challenges to make it happen. If you aspire to be remarkable, you'll walk away with ideas on how to do truly epic marketing. Getting right to the content of what you need for busy professionals, this is the Remarkable. Marketing Podcast. Now your host, Eric Eden.

Speaker 3: 0:56

Welcome to the Remarkable Marketing Podcast. Our guest today is Raj Goodman Anand. He is with the company Goodman Lantern, based out of London, and he is a visionary tech and AI entrepreneur. He's going to share with us some great stories today on SEO, content marketing and AI. Welcome to the show, raj Hi Hugh, it's good to be here. You've built up a really great firm and been doing some great things in the areas of SEO and content marketing, and you have some products and innovations on AI that we can talk about a little bit. You also mentioned that you're a big driver of gender equality and tech right.

Speaker 2: 1:42

Yeah, absolutely. This is my third company. In the past I'm still a company in the space of entertainment. I've actually pursued a PhD in AI but had to drop out to pursue a passion for technology. It has been a very interesting journey so far lots of ups and downs, lots of learnings on the way. Overall, it has been fun and rewarding. One of the things I like to do is to leave a legacy, and I have a three years old daughter and I want her to come into a first society where gender equality is a norm. My company is dedicated to actually women empowerment, especially in technology and marketing. 30% plus the members in my company are women and I want to give them a platform to shine and grow, especially in technology and marketing.

Speaker 3: 2:38

That's great. You have a story you want to share with us today, a case study, if you will in the area of SEO and content marketing. You want to share with us some remarkable insights there.

Speaker 2: 2:49

Absolutely, eric. Firstly, we work primarily in the B2B space. What we're seeing quite a lot is that there's government organizations targeting telecom, manufacturing, anything which might be available. Seo is relevant today and will be relevant tomorrow, even in the dawn of AI, because when you look at the large language models and you search for real-time data effectively looking through Google or Bing like tools, so it's a very relevant subject. B2b, people actually love it and that's where they spent a lot of dollars today. My example is from a case study of a client called the EasyGrip. They are a large organization pretty much doing end-to-end products and services across different fields B2C, b2b, you name it. The space which we are. The example I'm going to give is called Easy Storage. It's basically the storage units for EasyGrip. The challenge they had is that when you look at most easy storage competitors storage units maybe, for example, in this case, in the UK, but we could look at storage units across the world, in any sector or any sort of country they tend to be physical locations, whereas Easy Storage doesn't have any locations as such. They come and collect the items to be stored in their units and so they don't have locations, so you can't actually search in Google Maps. The question was how do we help rank them without actually being able to have physical locations? When you enter the UK London storage, how do we get them to come number one? What you would see is that competitors who had physical locations in London and different boroughs of London would show up really challenging. So what we do? We actually build them hundreds of pages across different cities, villages, hounds in the UK, looking at individual pages, ranking the pages for terms around storage. So business storage, student storage, university storage, car storage, you name it. We actually built an area of sort of different type of different keywords and then build stories around that. It's hard to understand and imagine. To build hundred pages per month require a considerable team. We actually deployed about 12 team members at one time to do this kind of work, to actually do research analysis, to understand what the software should be and what do you write in these pages, because storage is not the most exciting thing to talk about. So the real estate we talk about and make consistent across and then have this in the field across the dawn before AI came into being, was challenging, but the outcome was actually do it right. In the launch. These pages at a high velocity led to the clients ranking going from eight position which is right at the bottom who number three, who is number one and the increase there, organic traffic by 25%, conversion by 4% and that is big numbers. We're looking at a 10 to 100 million dollar company. It is a big number for them. So all in all, it's a hard process. The big part that is good research, understanding how to do on PgSEO, so maybe you should. Technology behind the web pages is good. It loads faster, usability is good, then having the right inbound links coming through, right internal links, for example, as well. So it's a big long process and unfortunately there are no shortcuts to it. You have to put in the hard work and grind through it, but the reward is more sales, more inquiries.

Speaker 3: 6:50

That's great. So it was a localized SEO strategy for a business that didn't have locations in all the local places, which is tricky in itself. And then talking about a topic that is not necessarily easy to come up with a lot of content for in terms of storage, and then doing it in such a way that you achieve the result of getting a much higher ranking so that they get more traffic or business all of that had to come together. How long did that take?

Speaker 2: 7:22

We opened the campaign that was six months solid to get their rankings up, but we saw seeing the results in the first month, month and a half.

Speaker 3: 7:30

That's great. That's great. So the hard part about it was creating all the pages. It just takes a lot of time, like you're saying. Right, it's not. There's no necessarily shortcut. You can't just push a button or do a magic trick. You have to put in the work to do that right.

Speaker 2: 7:45

Absolutely. If it was so easy, I guess you all would be ranked, the more one for the films you'd like to be ranked for. So yeah, it's not easy at all, but it is rate rewarding and as a gift I keep skipping. So until ranked number one, you stay there for a bit.

Speaker 3: 7:59

Yeah, and was that the result that the client was expecting?

Speaker 2: 8:04

Well, we surpassed the results the client was expecting. They didn't expect that for the rank for at least six months to eight months, but we had that result in a month and a half. So that is obviously the result of the client Shows ROI and there's a myth that content is a super long-term strategy. Scu is a super long-term strategy. The reality is that, yes, it is a long-term strategy, but if you don't write results, it's not a trickle in in a month or two months as well.

Speaker 3: 8:33

That's great. So you had a second story that you wanted to share that touched a little bit on some of the things that you're doing in the area of AI, right.

Speaker 2: 8:43

Yeah, as I mentioned, I pursued a PhD in AI 20 years back. Back then people didn't even know what AI was. People thought it was a study of aliens, and now we know it was just nuts. We're not alone Precisely, but over the years, seeing the theoretical stuff I studied, researched on, it'd be implemented in the form of using large GPUs and adding intelligence to computers. It's been phenomenal. It's been a regular journey to see that A big thing which people are talking about today is that all this AI, all this content generation generative AI like TATGPT, anthropic or its different tools, lola from Meta was the future of SEO. Then we just create content at scale using tools like TATGPT, put them on the website and, as I said, the UK of the uncle. The reality is perhaps not that easy and let me explain why that's the case. Behind search engines is also AI algorithm working as well, and the AI is quote unquote hungry for personal content, content which has a bias or a thought process behind it. You don't want to just get out or find garbage information. They want unique perspectives in which it's knowledge as well. So in many ways, think of AI as a human brain which is key to learn more. If we just use TATGPT to write content, there isn't much new content generated for this hungry brain which is called AI within the SEO tools, and so it doesn't add any value. If you look at experiments done for SEO, you'll notice that people like Meal Patel will talk about it and what we've done as well. Content which is human, created AI augmented, works 94% better than content generated by AI alone, and this is because there is an element of uniqueness, storytelling, a bias or insight into it which is unique to that person, and that's what makes that content rank better. In fact, if I were to just kind of leave it ranking for a bit, let's stop writing content for algorithms and search engines. This is running content for real human beings. That's the short way of ranking better for every search engine. That's Bing or Google or anything which is open source, for example. I think that's the insight which I've learned over the years, which I think has been useful for your audience as well, because the more we start to gamify things, the more we actually lose ground in the digital world.

Speaker 3: 11:34

That makes a lot of sense. Write content for human beings, not for other AI. I'm actually seeing that a lot. I'm a big user of AI. I use it to write things, but what I find is that I often end up writing 30 or 40% of it, and the AI writes 60% of it. How good it is really depends on how much I coach it, how well I direct it and how well I edit. The final thing Ultimately, like you're saying, for human consumption, not just other AI is. One of the biggest examples I see of people creating content with AI and then sending it to other AI is people writing their resume with AI tools and then sending it to other tools which are using AI to analyze the resumes. It's just like AI talking to AI. People's main takeaway from that is that there's no good result that comes from it. You're saying a very similar thing for SEO is like it's in a logarithm. If you're using a logarithm to write to the logarithm, it's just not that interesting. It doesn't create the right result.

Speaker 2: 12:39

Absolutely. In fact, today I was watching a BBC news article that someone wrote their resume or the CV using the chatGBT light tool. They got that out. It was read by another at the clients and it's also an AI tool as well. They interviewed them with video chat and they were selected because their hand gestures and their sort of body language was not in the right way for a hairdresser. I think this reliance on AI has to be moderated to some extent. It has to be made useful that it really is and not overlying on it. It actually causes more discomfort or more pain in their lives. I feel like at this point in time, is it ever launch of different tools coming out and you want to use them all? But there has to be a good balance between using AI and then real humans working on it as well.

Speaker 3: 13:37

That makes sense. I had one more question about AI and SEO and, being an expert, I just thought you could share your view on this. I've been reading a lot about how, as humans, instead of asking Google a question, a lot of people are asking chat GPT a question. Our expectation is that we just get the answer from chat GPT, not that we have to search through 100 pages to try to find the answer. As a result, google, trying to compete in the AI space, is started to make the search results more like a chat experience, where people ask a question and they just get right to what they think the answer is. Some people are saying that's changing the way that SEO works with Google. Have you seen that? Do you think that's the case?

Speaker 2: 14:29

Yeah, it's actually a great question, narek. Thank you for asking. When you do a search using the AI GPT tools, there are two kinds of answers there. One is which is built into the AI as part of this training. For example, if you ask a question from history, that question is going to be built into the training of the that GPT like tool. For example, who's Henry the first? That would be something we will know the answer from his training. If I ask a question based on what happened yesterday in the world, it has to go to do a real-time search. In tools like chat GPT it goes to Bing. The Bing search in Baud or Gemini, which is Google's tool, was the Google. What's interesting is that in the core part of the search, in real-time search today, it still uses search engines. Yes, the interface might be different. Maybe we prefer today to actually use that interface and maybe toward it becomes more ad gestures, for example, or drawing, what you can do to get answers. The core is still the same. It's still based on the search engine and that's powering the search. In fact, if we look at the core of Google and Bing, it's also an AI tool effectively inside. Obviously, it has new restrictions, new behavior changes to make sure that it can react the right way for customers. But effectively it's all the same sort of style of things, it's just that gives a different way.

Speaker 3: 16:16

That's a good way to think about it. The user interface and the experience is changing, but at the back end, it's always been AI. That's a good perspective. Before we wrap up, I think you've also written a book on the topic of AI. Is that right?

Speaker 2: 16:32

Yes, I've written a book called the AI Era. It's available on Amazon. The book's proceeds go all to charity, except the processing fee from Amazon with the charge. With the charge that was to charity based in India to help empower women. It's a big mission of mine, as I mentioned before. That's one book I've written already. I'm writing another book right now called the AI First Mindset. This book is about how do we change our perspective and thoughts to use AI first in whatever we do with this for business, family or personal. Just an example I went to a semi-posh or I'll say posh tea shop in Bangkok and they had 100 different teas on the menu. I can't have lactose in my thing, but I do milky teas. I asked that hey, do you have any unique teas for your cry? It gave me three options which I could never get otherwise, because if you ask the waiter, they are giving you the most expensive tea on the menu, but this one would give me customized answers. What I'm going to say is AI can do more than just writing content, making images. It can become a pal to make our lives much easier. This is the way the market is going. We're going to see some really interesting AI first opportunities in the coming years. Hence the book, and hence the book, coming book as well.

Speaker 3: 18:05

Awesome. Well, thank you for sharing these insights with us today and stories, Raj. We appreciate it. Thanks for being on the podcast. Thank you, Eric for the opportunity.

Speaker 1: 18:18

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