I was recently featured on the Unscripted SEO Podcast, where I spoke with Jeremy Rivera on the Evolution of SEO. Here’s the transcript!
Introduction
Jeremy Rivera: Hello, I’m Jeremy Rivera, your Unscripted SEO podcast host. I’m here with Adrian Dahlin of Search To Sale. Why don’t you give yourself an introduction focusing on what you’ve done in SEO that should make us trust you as an expert?
Adrian Dahlin: Trust me because I am relatively new to it and so what’s normal to me is what’s current and I’m not stuck doing a version from 10 years ago.
Jeremy Rivera: That’s fair. Dinosaurs like me have a lot of baggage. It’s interesting because for me, the more that it changes, the more it stays the same. But it’s always a question, a questioning periodically as the new shiny object comes out. You know, mobile gets in, Google is doing mobile first indexing. SEO is dead. It’s voice search—your iPhones are now the primary way that people are searching, SEO is dead. Google has integrated BERT, LLMs, SEO is dead. HCU came out and murdered, just stabbed a bunch of producing sites, topical sites of all qualities and we can’t figure out why, we can’t bring them back from the dead. SEO is dead.
So to have more of a fresh take into it, I think in some ways could be an advantage. I’m curious what field or practice or marketing discipline you came from before transitioning into SEO and what kind of prompted that change.
From Data Science to SEO: A Hybrid Approach
Adrian Dahlin: First I’ll say on your point about as things change, they stay the same. I think I agree that the principles stay the same, but tactics kind of change. But anyway, I have a longstanding marketing background. I’m really a left brain and right brain, creative and analytical type of person.
My best classes in school were English and math. I loved to write. I did very well at math. I am a marketer with a data science background. I got a master’s degree in applied data science, but I also really love flushing out key messaging and developing a voice and a brand. I think that actually made me a good fit for SEO. Even though I’m just a little over three years into actually focusing on SEO. You know, I love words and numbers and SEO is all about using data to help guide creative content projects.
Jeremy Rivera: I see, I can’t help but notice that your bookshelves are organized by color behind you. So there’s definitely an aspect of that left brain, right brain on display. But you’re right. I have always seen SEO as part science, part art. There is definitely a heavy data sciences aspect to it of, you know, looking at trends, looking at, you know, search volume data information, but also, you know, the artistic capability to understand the flaws in the data and understand the incredible multi-layer, multi-tiered black box that we’re playing with for organic results. And now the addition of LLM-based results, you know, who knows what will come out of the box this time, is it even within the same person doing the same search at different points in the same day? It might not be. It probably isn’t. And so all of those factors coming in means that you cannot project with hard science data protocols of confidence. If we’re looking at, you know, A-B testing, which I’ve done for, you know, a larger agency, the ability to get to those confidence levels out of those levels of clicks is just not available in SEO. So how do you leaven your data side approach with that need for interpretation?
Balancing Data and Storytelling
Adrian Dahlin: Speaking of art, did you just use the word leaven? Oh, beautiful phrasing. The catalyst ingredient that makes the bread grow. I love that. Yeah, so…
The most basic thing is just you do your data analysis, you use your science to figure out what topics are most valuable for a website. But then to succeed at actually getting traffic to your content that targets those topics, and to succeed at then converting that traffic into some type of value, takes art, it takes storytelling.
So I think that’s the simplest answer.
Jeremy Rivera: I love it. What is it about narrative and storytelling that is true today in the digital age that was also true, you know, in the 19th century? What’s the through line?
Start With Why: The Timeless Power of Authentic Communication
Adrian Dahlin: In the 19th century you said?
I’ll start with Simon Sinek. So his TED Talk, Start With Why, was one of the very first things that started to form how I thought about marketing. So I was first having to learn marketing to have a necessity for my own startup in 2011. And I encountered that TED Talk early on. And his main examples are Martin Luther King, Apple, particularly earlier Apple, and the Wright brothers about how people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.
And I think underneath that is a suggestion that the most effective persuasion, the most effective communication happens when your message is in clear alignment with your personal values. So people believe that the Wright brothers cared to aspire with the fiber of their being about figuring out how to fly. And Martin Luther King was incredibly authentic in his dream. And Apple is probably the more complicated example. But at least their first 20 years, they were different.
And so when then when all of these people and organizations go out into the world trying to sell things, people believe what you’re saying because it’s in alignment with who you are. So that’s, I’ve always, I always come back to start with why I use that framework when I’m working on developing messaging with clients today. And I think that’s basically a timeless idea that any kind of communication is going to be more effective. It’s going to be more persuasive when it aligns with who you are and appeals to some core purpose.
The Paradox of Authentic Marketing
Jeremy Rivera: I love that because there is in my mind always an inherent paradox of adopting authenticity as a marketing strategy because is it your authentic self if you’re packaging it, you’re writing it and following a template to authentically go out there and say something, you know, that there’s that inherent…
Is it truly authentic if I’m intentionally crafting this messaging? There’s a manufactured element to all marketing. There’s messaging, there’s choice. So how do you deal with that inherent conundrum of the falseness of just participating in marketing versus the need for that true connection of authenticity?
Adrian Dahlin: I guess the proof is in the pudding. It’s if it works, probably, it probably was. It’s probably the best evidence that it’s kind of authentic enough that it actually appeals to an audience. And it’s durable too. It’s one thing to give people a sugary snack kind of a message that, you know, is appealing in the short term and hits some need, some kind of dopamine, you know, and that’s different than the kind of message even a more, even a self-serving, ultimately a self-serving, serving marketing message that continues to resonate for years or decades at a time. That’s going to be good evidence that it probably is authentic if it just keeps working.
Google’s Helpful Content Update and the Value Equation
Jeremy Rivera: How do you think Google has made adjustments to its algorithm, has made steps that have made it clear, particularly through the helpful content update, that it’s not just the existence of the answer to the question. And I saw a site as an example of something that was hit by the helpful content update. They had done the research and had found every people also ask about Naruto and then had created an alternate version of each of those answers and had built an entire site around Naruto and then plugged in a bunch of ads and before HCU it was ranking but it was you know it was not a known brand, it wasn’t Wired, it wasn’t even something that’s you know very popular it was something that was crafted or created because it could give an answer to it.
And Google obviously came along and was saying, you don’t actually, you don’t have a brand. People don’t know you from Adam. You’re not a Reddit. You’re not a type of site that people know. You’re not Wookiepedia for Naruto. There’s no genuine activity there. You’ve just have answered the question in a different way, which 10 years ago, totally acceptable.
So Google has basically been saying you need to have a provable brand based off of what we can measure as signals. How does that line up with your quest to be authentic, your quest to leverage good branding? How do those potentially come together for a positive outcome in your campaign?
Adrian Dahlin: Well, first off, part of being relatively new to SEO is I am not that well-educated on the technical SEO, on the algorithm of it all, and I’m not that up-to-date on changes. I rely on two members of my team who are really more technical SEO experts. So I couldn’t even really summarize for you well what the helpful content update actually changed. Do you want to describe it for me in the audience?
Jeremy Rivera: Sure, yeah. So basically, Google was being inundated about three or four years ago. It reached kind of a critical mass point of, you know, it was before the big GPT boom, but marketers have been using GPT-like tools since 2015. And so there was more and more sites that were programmatic in nature and more and more sites that were ranking that had a bunch of content and there was more and more travel bloggers and recipe sites out there kind of answering the same question.
And what really shifted is they launched their own LLM-based portion of the search that was meant to combat, first it was staged to combat other mass LLM content out there, but under the scope of, hey, if your site has a bunch of unhelpful content, then you actually get a negative penalty for the whole site. And if you have a ton of it, it will drag it down a lot. And so it was the return of a site-wide penalty, but from a very oblique, very difficult to quantify, is your content helpful or not? And so it’s been, you know, when it first came out in two iterations, two different algorithm releases, and then each periodic main core update to the algorithm has seen modifications to those sites that when there was a release, they would tank or they’d jump up.
And the majority of those that tanked have really never actually been able to recover. I think it’s maybe one in a hundred have really come back and many of those are even just partial. Many companies went down entirely. Many travel bloggers are no longer able to do their thing. A large swath of the content producing population really struggled with that. And that’s developed at the same time their release of it and saying, is there helpful content kind of also came at a time of, what are they using to really measure that? Is it how the content is written that says that it’s helpful or not? Or is it actually more about the perception, the user signals for their site to confirm that they really are actually, you know, somewhere where people as the destination that people are going to and verifying.
Because for the longest time Google had lied and said, hey, click behavior doesn’t affect rankings. And it’s not a direct ranking factor. And that word direct, one of my previous interviewees, Jason Barnard said, that word direct in that sentence always gets you because if you’re newer to this, you might take Google’s statements from even John Mueller, Danny Sullivan, there’s a way that they speak and they talk about things in their algorithm that are obfuscating the truth. And so they can say the truth, it’s like fairies, they say something that’s true, but say it in a way that leads you to believe something that’s false.
Adrian Dahlin: For sure.
Jeremy Rivera: And part of that is the echo game of SEOs. Yeah, it’s like that because saying, we don’t use click behavior of how people interact with the SERPs and go through to your site. We don’t use that directly. It’s not a direct ranking factor. But in reality, the court documents that came out because Google got sued and the antitrust, they had it. You know, it’s not just in the algorithm, it’s one of the three major components of ranking. It’s content, it’s links, and it’s behavior of how people interact with your brand as they do these searches. If you show up in a search, yeah.
Adrian Dahlin: The facts are true, but the narrative is false.
Adrian Dahlin: Which I think is good. What better evidence would they have that content is actually helpful and useful to people than looking at the behavior on the site. That seems a very positive thing.
Google’s Market Position and the LLM Era
Jeremy Rivera: It seems, but again, Google is very jealously, has been, and will always be the most jealously guarding of its secrets of how its algorithm actually works because there is such monetary interest. There are people that will take anything and everything that they can to try to, you know, benefit themselves by getting things ranking very quickly through whatever shady means possible. So it’s always been that way.
And so I think, you know, LLM based search tools kind of have this moment where they’re coming onto the scene. They haven’t been fighting with spammers for so long. And so, you know, they’re kind of the new kid on the block and their method of showing, you know, sampling it is inherently, you know, a lot more difficult to game out of the box and the way that it works, but we’re still seeing, we are seeing right now a renaissance of, you know, black hats leveraging LLM tactics to try to manipulate.
And we’re also seeing, you know, Google itself acknowledge, or I think it was GPT acknowledged that, you know, with just 250 documents, you can poison a pool towards, to bias towards a particular result. So it’s kind of interesting to see the rapid development, the rapid adoption, the beta test culture acceptance of LLM tools and the error margin of these answers. I tell you, if Google had tried to roll out anything like the error rate of an LLM-based tool, even in 2010, 2011, their stock would have tanked, they would have been bankrupt because the public consumer culture, the business culture would not have accepted something that could come back to a life-challenging answer of, how far deep can you dive safely and get a wrong answer? That’s just so dangerous that it would have been business breaking, am I right?
Adrian Dahlin: I don’t think so, actually. I’m just going to dive down that rabbit hole for a moment. I think it would have been a big PR problem. Certainly there would have been less tolerance in 2010 or 2011 for inaccuracy. And I think there’s less tolerance toward Google than toward startups like OpenAI about accuracy. But I don’t think that would have tanked Google’s business or their stock long term because of the power of their position in the market.
And Google doesn’t even have to be the best search engine. Google hasn’t actually needed to be the best search engine for a long time. Just because they’re Google, because of their market share, they have too much power. They’re the aggregator of information on the internet. And consumer behavior just changes very slowly. Google is synonymous with search still.
So I think that Google’s threats are much more infrastructure, fundamental, long-term changes. Not brand or trust, unfortunately.
Jeremy Rivera: I think the proof is in the pudding the fact that they have rolled out LLM-based answers to so many of their questions.
Adrian Dahlin: And they’re not perfect, but they’re getting away with it.
Jeremy Rivera: I agree. But it does have a curious moment of some of the power, monopoly power of Google has been pulled back to a degree, not entirely. And I guess that changes based off of who you talk to. So how much do you think in reality has the coming onto the scene of GPT perplexity, Claude and others with LLM based search tools. How much has that changed the marketing game in terms of budget allocation? Is it more of just the narrative of SEO is dead, again, impacting CEOs who are then more willing to hear somebody say, we’ve got an LLM AI SEO approach versus we’re just doing SEO fundamentals?
Selling SEO in the AI Era
Adrian Dahlin: I definitely have anecdotal support for that last point where so I kind of ironically made the decision to go all in on SEO pretty much exactly as ChatGPT was coming out. Q4 2022 is when I was designed to go from more generalist marketing consulting, fractional CMO stuff to fully SEO because I’d had a bunch of success with one client doing pretty traditional blog, high volume blog output that was driving traffic and leads and 55, 60% of their customers are coming from organic Google search.
So I was pumped to focus in on something. And then ChatGPT with, what was it, 3.5 that it launched with? Was that the model they started with? That was November or something, 2022. So I’ve been focused on SEO entirely in the AI era. And it has been hard to sell SEO during this period because of uncertainty, not because the fundamentals had changed.
Maybe the fundamentals are starting to change now three years later. But certainly for the first two years, fundamentals did not change at all. But there was just fear and uncertainty. And that made decision makers just want to invest in channels they had more faith in. So it’s been hard to sell SEO. And as soon as I kind of made a shift in how I was presenting things and focusing more on AI in about July, so three months ago.
And that was partly because I just felt like I had started to wrap my head around this growing quasi consensus about kind of how GEO works. And also I got excited about the basically durability of an AI search offer that even as how the LLMs actually choose their sources and generate their answers may change. The offer of helping brands get mentioned by AI chat bots is going to be relevant for a long time.
So I made that shift in messaging and also started to shift services a little bit. Basically, I learned about Reddit and started to offer Reddit management and started to build partnerships with PR firms so that we could pull those in side by side to help brands get more mentions because we were hearing so much about how sites like Reddit, Quora, Wikipedia are driving citations and how brand mentions drive mentions.
So I had this updated offer while our actual delivery still has not changed very much. But I just got a lot more meetings. From my existing audience, people wanted to follow up, former clients, people I’ve been in touch with a long time who’d never bought from us. Just people in my audience, booked meetings when they started hearing me talk about AI. Really appreciated my help framing how things are changing and helping them wrap their heads around it. And I think ultimately the greatest reason for that was just that gave them more trust in me that I was able to talk relatively fluently about AI and even if what we ended up working on was mostly traditional SEO website content stuff.
The Convergence of Digital PR and SEO
Jeremy Rivera: That’s kind of what I’m seeing too, you know, the adoption of what should have been fantastic bedfellows all along of digital PR and SEO. Tradition, from my experience, and this may be anecdotal and you can tell me if it’s wrong, but I’d say that there is a pretty hard break between SEOs and digital PR folk and only a thin sliver of, you know, the Patrick Stocks of the world or Ahrefs would talk about, hey, you know, some of my best successes come from getting newspaper stories placed and you’d hear, you know, the Mike Kings of the world at a conference talking about, you know, these fantastic wins while everybody else is focused on, hey, can I get another guest blog placement? You know, can I find another place to do outreach to get a link and it needs to be a DR of 35, 30X, you know, hardcore focus on if it doesn’t have a DR, then it doesn’t have any value. So, you know, I think that that thankfully has kind of shifted, but would you agree that till now, digital PR and SEO have not been the best play pals?
Adrian Dahlin: I think that’s right and they are kind of being forced together now and that’s probably a good thing.
Jeremy Rivera: I think it’s interesting because I know people like Rand Fishkin, formerly of Moz, now SparkToro, has been banging the drum on unlinked citations and brand mentions since 2007, 2012 at least. So what are some of the actual tactics, you know, that have changed, you know, strategy stays the same, boots on the ground, what’s some specific tactics that you’ve seen shift that have, you know, brought success for you or your clients?
Shifting Content Strategy and the AI Consultant Analogy
Adrian Dahlin: Two things come to mind. One is shifting the kinds of content that we focus on just away from the top of the funnel, which I can go deeper on. Another is just changing how we think about discovery online. And I use an analogy that AI is a consultant working for your customer, and you’re trying to influence how that consultant thinks, which means that everything on the web is kind of relevant.
I guess start with content. I think, pretty well-known among SEO folks, but the old blog tactics where you’d throw up an article defining an industry term, which Ryan Law at Ahrefs calls rehashed Wikipedia content, that was always kind of an awkward phenomenon where all these websites are competing to become encyclopedias just to get traffic when it’s a much better user experience for AI to just answer the question when someone’s just asking for the definition of a term.
So, you know, it’s much less helpful to have that top funnel, higher volume keywords, “what is blah blah blah jargon” that kind of blogging and so much more focus on the bottom of the funnel stuff like all the searches related to people looking for a solution. I’m mostly in B2B by the way. So definitely more focus on really optimizing well for the high intent searches where people are looking for solution.
Plus, on the educational side of things, the sliver of educational content that remains part of our strategy is the more niche stuff. Where an LLM is trained on the internet, it’s going to do a good job of synthesizing commonly available information. But for people who are looking for a really niche subject, where there isn’t a lot of good content on the web, there’s still an opportunity to kind of own that niche, own that long tail, particularly if it’s highly technical, if it’s hard for an LLM to come up with an answer on without having lots of context to train on.
If it’s deeply technical in cybersecurity or I don’t know, deep tech or something, then LLMs are probably just gonna want to cite that source and or, you know, basically use your answer and then generate an answer, mention your brand.
Jeremy Rivera: Michael McDougald of Right Thing Agency said, ChatGPT is your least trained customer service representative. So it’s detached from you and you kind of have to use a fax machine approach to get new information into it. So if you kind of treat it from that perspective of, how can you try…
Adrian Dahlin: I think about it differently. So because the customer service agent is still paid by you and accountable to you, even if they’re not trained and they’re really bad at their job. Actually, the analogy of a consultant works better for me. It really is working for the customer. You know, people subscribe, maybe they don’t pay, but they have their own ChatGPT. That’s constantly updating more personalized context for them and giving them personalized answers and is really a tool for them as an assistant for all of these decision makers out there.
And it’s our job the same way you would as a brand selling something within some niche industry you would show up at a trade show to influence the way people think knowing that there’s consultants and decision makers in that audience. It’s now our job to help an AI that’s using the internet to educate itself to think about things our way. So we’ve got to figure out where this consultant, this AI consultant is formulating its worldview and show up in those places around the web. So if it thinks our way, then it’s more likely to recommend our solution.
Writing for Robots to Write for Humans
Jeremy Rivera: Yeah. It’s fascinating because for a long time, Google has said, don’t write for search engines. Don’t write for robots, write for humans. But Matt Brooks of SEOteric just pointed out the other day, you are now writing for robots and in many cases you’re using robots to write for robots to write for humans. So it’s this robot sandwich, you know, you’ve got human over here, human over here, you’re using Claude and GPT to augment your marketing efforts to create content that’s going to be digested by GPT and then given to the human end user.
And so there’s this kind of cloying game of writing how the robot thinks that humans want content to be written in a way that robots understand or can parse and can, you know, so it’s kind of reverse engineering how these LLMs think that humans think versus actually writing truly for humans.
Adrian Dahlin: Yeah, it’s a little dark. Well, I think one potential vision of the future is that websites are gonna really go down in importance and influence, and just the amount of time that humans spend looking at websites is gonna go way down. And there’s people, I hear people in e-commerce, which isn’t really my world, talking about this where they used to measure a longer session was a good thing and there’s actually now people thinking about a shorter session as being a more optimal experience for the shows that they like. They showed up with sufficient context already to make a quick decision and the website did a good job of optimizing for that quick conversion.
Disruption and New Products in the LLM Era
Jeremy Rivera: I’m wondering if that’s a good thing or a bad thing for startups or entrepreneurs like Nexen PowerTrack. They’re trying to disrupt systems with new products that don’t exist. And so I’m wondering if LLMs are more flexible. Because I did that in 2012. This guy, I had a, it was not a space heater, it was a space cooler. And it took a year just to break in and get Google used to the idea that there was a product called a space cooler instead of cooler space.
But you know, we had to, you know, do adaptive marketing of, it’s not a swamp cooler. It’s a space cooler. It’s not a space heater. It’s a space cooler. Do you think LLMs are more flexible when it comes to discovering new disruptive technology or is it more challenging because you can’t control the inputs as well?
Adrian Dahlin: Basically to phrase it another way, how quickly can you introduce new ideas into these tools outputs? Is that what you’re asking?
Jeremy Rivera: Yeah, yeah, kind of, yeah, that’s a way to put it.
Adrian Dahlin: I don’t know. I don’t think I have the experience to answer that question.
I’ve seen quick wins in GEO, particularly in less competitive spaces where you throw up a good article and or a media and maybe supported with a media interview on a good authoritative site or something and then you just dominate a niche ChatGPT query.
Jeremy Rivera: Sure.
Adrian Dahlin: So I think my answer is probably temporal, where it’s easier now, probably with AI, and as the whole industry, as basically marketing teams mature and adapt, it’s going to get super optimized. And in a few years, in a couple years, it’s going to be a lot harder to when the same way that investment grew over time in SEO and it professionalized and became very competitive. I think that will happen, but there maybe will still be a little bit more randomness with AI and unpredictability. Overall, the bigger budgets will do better, but there will be maybe more exceptions and outliers.
The Authority Crisis and LLM Citations
Jeremy Rivera: I think that’s a reasonable answer. And I’m thinking of my interview with Jason Barnard of Kalicube of his view that you have kind of within Google, he’s certain, he proposed that LLM tools are developing this as well of you have the training data set, you have their knowledge graph, and then you have the internet of citations that they can tap into and so they’re more readily, it’s more readily easy to get influenced because they’re much more apt to check for broader amounts of citations. Whereas the qualification to be, you know, cited in Google or used as a Google reference or a backlink leading to something that’s a much higher bar. So…
Adrian Dahlin: I can give an example for this actually. I myself, I have been hearing that as a rumor, I wanted to go find actual large sample research showing that.
And I googled that question, a long query, new age style query in Google, asking for research that showed this. And there was one case study. There was a blog with a case study from I forget what relatively well-known marketing agency that dominated the results. This brand was directly mentioned in the AI overview. It was the number one citation of only three citations. There was three or four different ways that this brand and this article were showing up in the AI overview and the citations. And you go and you click through to that article.
And it was a case study with one data point. This marketing agency wrote about the bump in engagement from ChatGPT for traffic for one client. And so, that’s not a good data set. We don’t want to be forming our sense of reality based on a sample of one. But Google ascribed so much authority to this one study. The cool thing, by the way, was that I got the attention accidentally of the guy who wrote the article on Reddit and he immediately added more client case studies to the article.
Jeremy Rivera: Well, that’s good. It’s also as good as it is scary. It’s, hey, he had more data to back it up. But yeah, no, I had heard those rumors as well.
Adrian Dahlin: This was a Google problem, to be clear, not the website’s problem.
Jeremy Rivera: No, no, it is kind of an artifact of the day of, hey, one person said it about one thing and what would have been just treated as an anecdote because it gets cited in the LLM results in the AI overview. It’s somehow now part of the accepted knowledge graph and it would be very hard for anybody to challenge that going forward because now it will be counterfactual, you know, pushing back against an established data point.
Adrian Dahlin: And by the way, there are other studies, and there were at this point a month ago or so. There were some other articles, which I later found, people showed me, that did have the same finding about ChatGPT referral traffic and were based on larger datasets, and they didn’t show up at all in that initial Google search.
Jeremy Rivera: So it is probably more true than less true that probably that traffic is more qualified. You can follow the thread of the logic, but often, you know, just making presumptions, you know, that’s not a scientific approach. It seems like we’re becoming more prone to that as a culture of falling prey to a single data point.
Adrian Dahlin: Maybe this gets into bigger-picture challenges, just the amount of information we have access to and that none of us can handle vetting all those sources and figuring out what’s credible.
Jeremy Rivera: Yeah, it is, it used to be very simple in 2005 to tell the difference between, you know, a crackpot site on GeoCities is not a good reference point versus, you know, MIT or Harvard. But now we have diluted authority so much we have, you know, multiple inputs needed to get any particular data point out there, but also it’s way easier to fake than ever.
Hope and Opportunity in the Age of AI
Jeremy Rivera: On a bit of a downer note, but tell me what you’re hopeful for as we kind of wrap this up. What are you looking forward to in marketing, working with your clients or success or something that you’re kind of seeing that you’re excited about?
Adrian Dahlin: I’m excited about AI.
It’s an opportunity for the flexible, the adaptable, to figure out what it means for them, figure out what it means for your world, and learn and adapt. I’m excited to have the marketing, have GEO as a subfield, mature, and develop some clearer playbooks. I still feel it’s so experimental. It’s still experimental for the people who understand the very best and have access to lots of data, which means of course it’s even more experimental for us small agencies.
But I’m excited to see more studies come out and to see more hands-on, see more of these virtuous mutually supporting programs of your traditional SEO and your Reddit engagement and your digital PR, of seeing those things come together into coherent programs and see some of the positive feedback loops that you create among those tactics.
Where to Find Adrian Dahlin
Jeremy Rivera: Awesome. Tell us a little bit about where people can find you, a little bit about your company. Is there a particular social channel you hang out where people can see what you’re thinking?
Adrian Dahlin: Adrian Dahlin is my name. My company is Search to Sale – searchtosale.io is our website. In terms of social, I’m on LinkedIn the most. I co-host a podcast that’s not really focused on marketing or SEO, but it’s called The Shift to Freedom, which is a podcast for small business owners and it’s kind of oriented around mindset and strategy and personal growth.
It’s kind of a holistic podcast for small business owners and managing themselves, managing their teams, managing their lives, managing their thoughts. We talk a lot about philosophy and core values and books and self-improvement. That’s called the Shift to Freedom podcast. Everywhere you get your podcasts.
At Search to Sale, we’re a B2B full service SEO and GEO agency. And we’re particularly good at the data and strategy pieces of this puzzle. So we have our own proprietary software that pulls data from different sources, does your keyword research, and helps both plan and monitor content on your site. And then we’re great at helping marketing teams then make decisions about what is the next month’s batch of content we’re going to work on and then planning pretty tactically page by page.
We go through a whole checklist of things including how to incorporate key messaging, how to optimize for answer engine optimization, aka snippetable content, optimize for conversion and stuff. And we’re getting more into Reddit and digital PR and everything.
