In this episode , Gary meets with Zach Jalbert, a consultant and author of 'SEO for ROI: Navigating Online Authority for AI-driven Customer Experiences.' Zach shares his journey from launching a Wix website to becoming an industry leader in digital marketing. They discuss how AI has reshaped SEO, the importance of building authoritative and unique content, and the necessity of multimedia approaches in modern marketing. Zach also offers insights into maintaining brand authority across various digital platforms and navigating the complexities of AI-driven customer experiences.

00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome

00:30 Zach Jalbert's Journey to SEO Expertise

02:13 The Evolution of SEO in the Age of AI

04:38 Content Strategy in the AI Era

09:06 The Importance of Video and Multimedia

12:46 Maintaining Authority Across Platforms

23:16 AI in Customer Experiences

30:18 Consulting Services and Contact Information

32:43 Conclusion

https://www.amazon.com/SEO-ROI-Navigating-Authority-Experiences/dp/B0G1L3H5RQ/ref=zg_bsnr_g_6133991011_d_sccl_8/139-1997418-2011955?psc=1

https://www.linkedin.com/in/zach-jalbert/

Tekenterprise.com

[00:00:16] Zach Jalbert: Hey, Gary, awesome to be here.

But before we jump into all that. Can you just tell people a little bit, you know, about your background, how you got here, kind of tell that story of, how you became the author of, of, the new book you're launching.

And within a week I was teaching myself HTML and, redesigning product catalogs. I've always kind of had, I always had a creative spirit. And then, really the, as the technology was developing, I, I gathered more of, more of a, a role as like a technical lead. And now I, now I'm a consultant and we offer, we offer, done for you or done with you? Or also just coaching services for companies that are looking to modernize all revenue operations, nowadays. So we've expanded. We've expanded. I mean, we are very proficient in search engine, search engine marketing tactics. But we find more and more. companies really, need everything to connect.

They need the dots to, to all connect nowadays. And that's a conversation I've been having a lot on. So I wrote, SEO for ROI.

So I'm, I'm kind of curious, what are you, what are you really seeing now of how SEO is evolving to, for these large language models?

So we're in a, we're in a multitask world now where, you know, an answer is very easy to get. AI is extremely smart. It's knowledgeable. And, you know, if it's not learning something new by visiting your website, it really can just summarize the answer for users. So there's, there's a lot of differences in the way that Google's technologies have completely upgraded to, to, to make things better, make things safer. And really what that means is, the market is a lot more competitive now, and you, you really have to be authoritative. You know, you have to have, have to have a real identity and you need to offer something unique. Just not, not just with, not just with your, your product and your experience, which is extremely important, but, marketing really has to stand out.

You know, five years ago, generic content, generic blogs might've, might've moved the needle, for you. Does that less and less in competitive markets. Now we're really seeing a big shift.

[00:04:53] Zach Jalbert: Yeah just fun, just fun graphs with, with cliffs, they're really great. It may, it's really encouraging to see that all over, LinkedIn and the internet. But you know what, you, you know, SEO has, SEO has died. It has nine lives. It's like a cat and it's on, its, it's on its eighth or ninth lives, life. So, but there, yeah. I mean, we, you see that a lot. Reference is the new reach. Visibility is, is very important in markets. You know, if you're, if you're employing SEOs who are, maybe they're kind of incentivized to, to do more tricks to try and inflate rankings or inflate traffic. You know, Google, like I said, their technology is a lot better at recognizing SEO content. And it doesn't have, so easy to produce SEO content now with generative tools. I mean, imagine if Google, imagine if Google still crawled and tried to rank every single page that was optimized for SEO, I mean, it would, it would, it would just fry itself. You know, there's so much content being created. We went very quickly from helpful content a couple years ago. So ChatGPT came out, everyone started writing content, creating these long blogs. And so then this update came out called the Helpful Content Update, and we're moving really fast into, usefulness or just thought leadership, helpful, isn't helpful, has, has already been depreciated quite a bit too. So you're, we're seeing a lot of that. We're seeing a lot of traffic drop, traffic, traffic drops. We're seeing less impressions being mapped to keyword rankings. You know, you're, you, you really have to be used as a source. So there, there's a lot of changes and, and really the first thing that everyone sees. That's gonna be that disruption in metrics every time. I mean, that's, that's really the only, because once, once leadership sees that, or once, once founders see that their visibility is just dropping it, it typically does signal, exactly what we're on this podcast talk about, which is your pipeline is gonna be affected really soon.

Okay. But now AI has taken over the generic answer position. What should be going into the blog now? What should you be posting on your website to still, I believe you said, you know, get those references now from, from the LLMs.

And that's a big question because, you know, Google itself, you know, they own YouTube. So a lot of the times I talk to companies, I say we really, if we want to be competitive or if we want an edge, video's gonna go a long way. But in terms of, in terms of how traditional SEO content needs to evolve, you know, customers really, they really experience business through multimedia now. And credible companies have a lot of really good information and a lot of content that they can provide customers to speed up the process, speed up the sales cycle. And, and oftentimes what happens is, you know, sales has a brochure over here. Marketing has a couple of topics over here. And I, and I think more content you can create that bridges the experience of product marketing and sales together, and then if you can actually create, you know, with, with, with new, newer websites, and you can see Google actually does this on their website too, is they break the resources section down so that you can quickly navigate rows, so based on headlines. So I think one, making things usable, functional, easy to navigate, purposeful, all of these kind of intangibles. That you know, I mean, they're not, they're not gonna be tied to KPIs. You don't have a, you don't necessarily have yet, a usefulness score or a, you know, a a, a score tied to a score tied to, anything other than engagement or people liking this. But you certainly can have more ownership across the board and say, hey, you know, content seems to impact a lot of engagement and a lot of our credibility no matter where the customer interacts with us at. So then, so then that's the first part. And the second part is content needs to have, you need your own opinions, you need your own narratives. You need to be able to, to really drive the conversation to a new place, no matter whatever the topic is. AI really likes to rely on steps, data, navigating, navigating very real consequences of trade-offs related to decisions. and I mean, I guess for, for my book, there's a very clear, there's a very clear, part of the, of the book that explains that, you know, a lot of SEO content is topical and it's it's question related. but it doesn't really help customers what decisions they have to make. It doesn't, it doesn't frame outcomes of what their, of what the, what the, the, actual next steps will amount to.

So I think it's just an idea of, know, it needs to really be experience backed. And it, and it needs to clearly, clearly help someone kind of like predict the future based on what they're reading. You know it, keyword content is still gonna be important, but there's, there's kind of this next level that, that adds credibility nowadays and, and usability.

So, really, big topic, super important topic. something that not every, not, not every marketing team even has what they need to, to fulfill that mission too.

[00:13:03] Zach Jalbert: Well, well Google can see, just about anything publicly across the internet. So I'd say if you, if it can index on the search engine results page, then it's, it's impacting your brand. You know? Because people are, people are finding it, and it is usable. So I mean, I mean in terms of, in terms of marketing, you know, there's certain places that customers, depending on the industry are gonna research you. I mean, it's that, and I think it's that simple. Also, video drives like eight times. engagement than anything. So, so I, I think that, I think that one statistically is, is pretty much proven. Think it's like eight out of 10 people prefer watching a video to learn about something rather than, than reading. So that's, that's really the fastest one. And video can go everywhere. Every platform is really trying to drive video interactions. That's why we're here today. Right.

[00:14:26] Zach Jalbert: Yeah, and I mean, I, I'd say nine times outta 10 in the last year. people have asked me for audits. They said, Hey, I'm really interested in an audit. And I said, well, why don't we just skip the audit and just say you probably, you probably just need to understand that that more video is gonna be better than less. you know, we can improve content, we can improve photos, we can improve text, we can make your website prettier, but you probably want a subject matter expert out there. Speaking, speaking and, and building credibility for you. Google's, So Google is, it's so much more advanced nowadays. You know, it can really pinpoint, all the nouns tied to you and your business.

So, so yeah, I'd, say, I'd say credibility nowadays just calls for you to be where people expect. And that goes for every industry. Local services, sa, you know, SaaS, healthcare, automotive. local organizations, charities, not-for-profits. You name it. name it. People are looking for video. They're looking for the quickest way to learn about you.

[00:15:53] Zach Jalbert: Yeah, yeah,

It's doing a lot more heavy lifting because people are more engaged. It's moving them more towards the outcome of hopefully eventually reaching out or working with you, compared to just, you know, having, having fun with the text.

[00:16:22] Gary Ruplinger: Yeah, I think it's right. I think with so much AI written content, kind of the other side of this where it's the, the bots and the people who aren't, you know, you know, real, it's, you know, just clone, clone, clone. Doing video is still, I mean, the, the, the machines are getting better at it. But yeah, it's still is.

It's, you know, this is a real person. This is somebody I can actually work with.

You know, I mean, remember, imagine how far we've gone. You could just kind of, you could create a website and it could, it could talk about the industry just in like general speak. And as long as you talked about the right topics and you were active enough and you kind of were, were you know, engaging some people in the market, that was good enough. Now, nowadays, nowadays it's, it's like saying the right thing at the right time is still very important, we've kind of moved in, we've kind of moved away from the idea that you could just, you could kind of like talk about the industry, but you didn't, like Google didn't necessarily want you to be yourself or selling yourself as much.

A lot of that has changed. Identity is, is really important. so I, yeah, I mean it's, it's, it's really fascinating when you look at some of the technical upgrades to the Google stack. and, and really I cover this stuff in my book, like what is the research that they have released in the last two or three years that that really signals next two to three decades? Because it's really clear. They've put everything out they've said, they said, hey, this is how our retrieval stacks have been upgraded. this is, this is what our content expectations are this is how, this is how, you know, multi multimodal. frameworks are, are gonna be deployed or used, and we're gonna rely more on, diverse media formats.

We can serve all of 'em. We can serve PDFs, we can serve videos, we can serve infographics, and, it's just the bars higher. And Google, Google basically has done a great job of, of really explaining to the market like it's time to move forward. the, the problem is, just keeping a lot of people up at night. That, that's the trade off. They've done a great job of explaining to everyone and, and enforcing to everyone that it's changed. It's just that now people are losing sleep because they don't know what to do.

[00:19:35] Zach Jalbert: I, I mean, hey, the PhDs are, the PhDs are out there. you know, it's funny, I was reading a study from Cornell, so DeepMind. I'm sorry, partnered with Cornell to talk about, this new upgrade to, the Google stack and, the average SEO even me, you know, it's, it's, I mean, a lot of it is over my head. you know, we're not gonna be talk. I mean, there's so many acronyms that, really do a great job of. Confusing the average person, even the average SEO. but that's, you know, my book, my book came out, to really say, hey, this is what the future is gonna look like. And this is why there's so many challenges. And you, you opened it up in the, in the beginning. I mean, I, I'm, trust me, I, I look great in black hats. I look really good at, in them, way better than I do in white hats. but, but I, I really want to help. Companies move forward in the right way. So it's just a fashion statement for me is, is the best way I can, I can, explain that one.

And, you know, that's, that's working. I'm like. This stopped working 20 years ago. So it was, it was a bad technique in 2005, much less 2025. But there must must be catching somebody. So I'm curious, what, what is the, the real, you know, what, what should you really be doing there? If you know you, you're trying to get some of those reference, references for your brand in, in an AI summary or using chat GPT that you know, they're, they're gonna reference you.

[00:23:11] Gary Ruplinger: Love it. So kind of switching gears here a little bit, just would love to cut. To get your take on AI customer experiences, because I know kind of a, a big topic from anywhere from I know.

Yeah, what,what in particular? What in particular can I answer? Because it's very new. it's, it's kind. I mean, that's a big topic.

In both cases, the front line now is now ai. It's either a chat bot or something like that, but, and I'm, I'm finding, you know what? I don't mind interacting with AI as long as you tell me that I'm interacting with ai. I think for me, it's when you're trying to pretend it's a real person. And then, you know, I'm like, is this a real person?

Are you not a real person? I'm, I'm confused now. Can you actually help me? What, what's going on? And then I get frustrated.

Like, what can I, what, who can I give my credit card to that I feel safe with? yeah. I, you know, thi this, one of the hardest things a technologist is explaining that the battle really is adoption, compliance and security. That's really the whole thing with AI. so if it, the more, the more that that people rely on AI, the harder this stuff is gonna get because it, because there's more who are trying to manipulate it. So, so that's how, that's how you know that, you know, opportunity is out there because people are trying to cut corners to get to the prize. And that is a really big problem for Silicon Valley. It's a big problem for the United States government. It's a big problem for insurance companies. anyone who deals with sensitive information, you know, or anyone who, anyone where the stakes are, are higher, there's gonna be more consequences. This, this is a big challenge. So it is a significant challenge. so I, I think that, I think naturally things are gonna get better and we're, we're not gonna be asking as many questions. We're just gonna trust things that they're gonna work more and more. and, and realistically, yeah, I mean transparency and trust and disclosure. Are, are pretty much one of the hardest things I think, I think for a sales team is really where it gets interesting for me because for instance, like so if people aren't going to your website as much anymore with zero click, right? Or if they're using agents to just summarize everything about you, but then you're, you know, all of your, all of your website content is just generic stuff that you could learn at any other website. If you, if you try to, if you try to play the game, that a lot of product led growth, uh, kind of campaigns and strategies relied on where Well, we're just gonna get 'em on the call, we're gonna make some claims. They're a little vague, but we can, but we have some case studies and we're gonna wait to disclose as much as we can on the sales call. And, well if people don't go to your website or if, if AI just finds the people who actually have pricing ready and just says, well, these are the people who have the most information out there, I think that's gonna be a real big problem. I think that's gonna be, an issue. So, I think transparency goes a long way.

I think the more you can disclose, the better. I've had a lot of conversations with, with business owners where. Yeah, you have a team of chatbot AI. but what, what, how well are the answers programmed and what do they rely on to, to solve problems? You know, who are they sending, where, where are they sending customers?

So resource sections can be real big and, you know, having your policies, having your policies outlined and the details disclosed, can save a lot of headaches and a lot of time for a business.

[00:28:45] Zach Jalbert: It's, it's like, it's like when you see a job listing and the salary's not there, you know what I'm saying? It's, it's like just, you know, there's just, there's scenarios where, is there a problem with doing that? No. No. I mean, you don't have to disclose anything if you don't want to, but, But as things get more competitive, you know, you really, you really need to understand, your place and kind of, kind of what people need to know to trust you.

And the, the, the vendor comes up with this, this idea. He is like, just take the prices off. And I said, sorry, what? I was like, the, the calls will triple. And you know what, he was right. The calls did in fact, triple by taking the prices off. Sales went to zero. We didn't sell any cars doing it that way.

[00:30:04] Gary Ruplinger: We did. The, the leads were, we had a lot of leads. That was our best lead source that month.

[00:30:13] Gary Ruplinger: But, yeah, sorry to derail you there. So, I guess for somebody who's, you know, looking for some help with, with some of this stuff, especially with everything's moving so fast and they're like, Zach, I need some help. Who should they, how should they get in touch? What, what do you guys offer for them?

We'll say, Hey, this is, this is what we see, here's where the opportunities are. and then we'll, we'll also give you. We'll also give you a plan to how you could operate and compete cost effectively by, by either by either finding vendors or collaborating or empowering your team, that you already have existing.

We're, we're there to support. We partner with, with, we with leaders in companies.

[00:32:11] Zach Jalbert: Yeah. Website's great. LinkedIn. You can find, you can just search my name, Zach Jalbert. and I'll pop up, connect with me anywhere. Connect to me on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram. I'm not shy. Love to love to meet people. So that'd be the, that'd be the best step is, Just gimme a message and let's set up a time to chat or let me know what, whatever I can, I can help point out.

[00:32:55] Zach Jalbert: That's it. That's it right now. not on the New York Times bestseller list yet, and so until then, did, it just, just, launched. yeah, I, I'd say search it. Amazon was, reached it, it did reach number one on the search engine optimization category. We, wanna get it back up there, so take a look.

[00:33:25] Zach Jalbert: Awesome, Gary. Had a great time.

[00:33:27] Zach Jalbert: Thanks again.