The Best SEO Podcast: Unlocking the Unknown Secrets of AI, Search Rankings & Digital Marketing

The New Era of Digital Strategy & AI-Powered Growth with Matt Bertram

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Digital marketing is undergoing a transformative shift where understanding fundamentals while leveraging AI offers companies unprecedented advantages that may become insurmountable for those who fail to adapt. This golden opportunity period for digital transformation requires immediate action before the landscape dramatically changes in the next 18-36 months.

• Marketing fundamentals remain critical as the foundation for all digital strategies

• Companies must optimize for multiple platforms, including Bing, social media, and Reddit

• Visibility in large language models (LLMs)is  becoming an essential ranking factor

• Review generation is crucial for building trust and shortening sales cycles

• AI transitioning from content creation to having agency and decision-making ability

• Early adoption of new technologies provides substantial competitive advantages

• Businesses face a "Netflix or Blockbuster" moment in their marketing evolution

• Customer acquisition costs are rising while competition intensifies across channels

• Marketing packages that provide foundational elements help businesses scale faster

• Mastermind programs and fractional CMO services bridge expertise gaps

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Matt’s Contact Information: 

https://matthewbertram.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattbertramlive/

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The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing podcast is a podcast hosted by Internet marketing expert Matthew Bertram. The show provides insights and advice on digital marketing, SEO, and online business. 

Topics covered include keyword research, content optimization, link building, local SEO, and more. The show also features interviews with industry leaders and experts who share their experiences and tips. 

Additionally, Matt shares his own experiences and strategies, as well as his own successes and failures, to help listeners learn from his experiences and apply the same principles to their businesses. The show is designed to help entrepreneurs and business owners become successful online and get the most out of their digital marketing efforts.

Find more great episodes here: https://www.internetmarketingsecretspodcast.com/  

https://seo-podcast-the-unknown-secrets-of-internet-marketing.buzzsprout.com

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Speaker 1:

This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential, let's get started.

Speaker 2:

Howdy. Welcome back to another fun-filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I am your host, matt Bertram. I actually realized that. I think the reason the intros were a little bit bumpy was because my data storage on all my podcasts needs to be cleaned out. I've maxed out the capacity of StreamYard with so many podcasts. It was good I was cleaning them out. We're going to turn a lot of them into shorts, so be looking out for that. We may be changing the name, so I will announce that more.

Speaker 2:

I know we've had the unknown secrets of internet marketing for so long, so I don't know. There's just a lot happening, a lot's changing, and we did rebrand our name as the agency that was started in 1999 from eWeb results actually from eWeb style to eWeb results to now EWR. We did the KFC thing, we combined it and now it's EWR, as kind of homage to the long history and origin of our agency. That supports this podcast. It's the main supporter of this podcast. We'd ask if you like this podcast, if you've been a client in the past, you've done some consulting. Please leave us a review. There are so many different review platforms out there now, so if you have access into one of those platforms. Please leave us a review If you have done consulting with this. If you've done a call with us, please mention that specifically. It helps out with the algorithms.

Speaker 2:

But the reason I am doing this podcast is to just check in with you. We've done some great interviews. I was just like wow, wow, wow, wow. I was looking back at a lot of the past interview guests that we had, some of the new ones that are about to come on, that are scheduled. I'm just pumped up. I'm talking to some movers and shakers in the space, people that are doing things. Things are changing rapidly and so it's very important to stay on top of what is going on in the space, and I'm bringing in some of the top experts in these different areas.

Speaker 2:

I cannot be an expert at everything. I am focused in my lane but well, seo algorithms has now expanded. I know a lot about how the social media algorithms work. I know a lot about how AdWords is. I think a lot of people don't know that I actually started in AdWords. I actually started my agency career, after affiliate marketing and stuff like that, as a PPC person and then that branched out to paid social and then really, as I understood the math and the algorithms and how everything works well.

Speaker 2:

Seo was super interesting. Now everything's coming together. One of the major things that we're doing at EWR is, uh, we're building like managed services of marketing packages to help businesses uh, grow their business, or give them the time back to grow, um, their business and do the things they know how to do, because today, let's face it, you have to actually become an expert in marketing to grow your business on where everything's going, or you can find a good partner, or, if you're a bigger company, you can build an integrated plan and create kind of a hub and spoke model where you have different agencies doing different things, which does have its challenges, because things get siloed and people get siloed, and so a lot of times you have and a lot of companies we work with.

Speaker 2:

There's like generalists that know a little bit about a lot of stuff, and then they're working with a handful of agencies to accomplish what they're doing. But, wow, everything's moving really fast. One of the big things we're working on at the agency is ranking our clients in the large language models, the chat, gbts One of the big things that I've talked about in the past. You've got to be working on Bing, right, so the landscape's changed. You just don't got to focus on Google. You need to have Bing master tools. You need to make sure your stuff's getting indexed. That algorithm and the weighting of different metrics works a little bit differently, and so you have to keep that in mind. And then the SEO for lack of a better word organic placement in the social media accounts. You got to incorporate that. I know I've talked about the 7-11-4 rule. I've been trying to incorporate that more. I just read another study from Google again, and it's about the zero. What is it Like? The zero buy? So in marketing, when you're buying stuff, the touch points to interact with the client. It's typically like they hear your advertising and then maybe like they're in the store and they're about to make a purchase and you have that last minute with the branding, packaging, uh, to to get them to buy now online. It's like, oh, I have a need right now, let me go search it, let me go find it, let me go find it, let me go buy it. And so that model has changed. This was an old study from Google, put out in 2011 and had some really relevant stuff in it. So what I'm seeing is the pendulum in marketing is swinging back towards the fundamentals. The fundamentals is still what the math's based on, right and marketing of how you're reaching people. You just have better tools and better visibility. Now, if you're a smaller company out there, these tools cost a lot of money, costs a lot of money. Um, I'm seeing, like, the percentage of fees for one of these platforms for the really cool stuff and I've done a couple interviews with some of these companies starts at like a million bucks a year, um, or uh. On the lower end, uh, two and a half percent, which should equal about $5,000 of the ad spend. But there's going to be this bifurcation and I have maybe talked about that before of the really advanced marketing, the people that are spending the money and to get better and better and better at it and they're going to be leveraging AI and they have kind of AI governance in their company and AI first, and they're going to leapfrog all the other companies that think that they have large moats. And if you're a small company and you can start to leverage some of these tools, you can catch up and grow exceedingly fast. We're starting to work with a lot more private equity companies right now that are looking for growth hacking and we've been able to incorporate some of the knowledge and tools and skills that we've used for bigger clients where we're wrapping around with a couple different clients to meet the threshold of using these platforms based on our relationships and my relationships with some of these platform founders. So they're letting us get in there in kind of a group by setting.

Speaker 2:

One of the things that I've been talking about for a long time that I guess I can announce it now is MatthewBertramcom. I was able to buy MatthewBertramcom not MattBertramcom, but Matt Bertram Live, which we also have but MatthewBertramcom. I'm doing a lot more CMO work for clients. I'm really coming into companies and helping them fix their marketing. A lot of it is marketing departments or different agencies are not really talking to each other and they don't have good visibility of the analytics or they don't know the new tools that are available or new ways of doing things, and getting kind of a brand refresh has been helpful.

Speaker 2:

We're doing a lot of strategy work. I really enjoy the strategy work. I've been working with some really cool brands to do that and, of course, with OGGN, oil and Gas Global Network, the storytelling that we're doing and the content creation we're doing over there. I'm behind the scenes a lot, but I do have the podcast that I do with the founder of the network, a marketing and sales podcast. That's been a lot of fun. We brought in some fantastic guests. We brought in the head of global sales for major companies to talk about how they're looking at comms and how they're looking at sales, working with marketing and marketing qualified leads. What I would like to do is start a mastermind program, which a lot of people have asked me for, to help smaller businesses access some of the tools in kind of a group purchase setting, as well as understand the strategies and have some of the best tools to give companies a competitive advantage.

Speaker 2:

I am very worried that, as AI continues to get implemented and it will take some time to get implemented from an AI governance standpoint at the larger companies. Once that starts moving, it's going to be very hard to catch up with the amount of money they can spend and the data that they're going to have. And so now is that golden time for companies that have not really done the digital transformation to start doing it and start doing it quickly. And if you don't know where to get started, reach out to DWR, reach out to me. We can help you. But do it. Find somebody that you trust, do it. I'm telling you, the landscape's going to look very different in 18 months to 36 months Dramatically different. Now there's going to be a Netflix effect, right, or a blockbuster effect right, where, when Netflix came out, everything was going to be streaming. But there's still kind of blockbuster didn't make it. But Redbox is still hanging on out there at some of the pharmacies and grocery stores, right, but the majority of the bell curve of people are streaming videos or using Netflix or something like that. Now, I think that that's going to happen with AI.

Speaker 2:

We're doing a lot of internal trainings. I'm going to a lot of conferences. I'm also in some elite masterminds myself and I'm having extended conversations with some of the guests we're bringing on specifically. I can't talk today about how that is going to be incorporated into what's going on, and some of those conversations have spilled over into the podcast. So I'd encourage you, if you haven't listened to a lot of podcasts, to listen to them. There's some really, really good people that I've brought on that are better and more equipped and better, as in they have stronger expertise in a specific area than I do.

Speaker 2:

Certainly, doing digital strategy, you have to have a breadth of knowledge than I do. Certainly, doing digital strategy, you have to have a breadth of knowledge and I do. And then I have some very deep specialties in specific areas. I am broadening those skills and also looking at all the data across the clients, and we've been launching a lot of newer campaigns or newer products or productized services within EWR to test out different things based on how the market's changing, and one of the big things that we're doing, like I said, is these marketing packages, and a lot of clients just need the foundation fundamentals. They want to run. Clients just need the foundation fundamentals. They want to run, but they're maybe crawling and they need to start walking and it's just time to take that next step.

Speaker 2:

So how do you attract more of your ideal clients online? There's a lot of analytics that you can do. There's a lot of modeling you can do. Yes, there's some guesstimation of this is my best client, but who's producing the most revenue? How fastly can you convert the clients? There's other metrics of consideration of growing the business and also how to reach them.

Speaker 2:

We're using a lot of different platforms. Like I've mentioned in some of the previous podcasts, reddit has been instrumental in reaching millions of people. So, if you look at a cost per impression, getting involved in Reddit organically is super powerful. If that's something that you're not doing. Some of these other platforms to spread your money around Everybody wants to spend on the meta and Google. Some of these other platforms don't have as many restrictions. They're certainly powerful. I can tell you Pinterest, for example. If you're selling e-commerce, I can't think of a better search engine that shows you exactly what you want to buy. Oh, you want to see other stuff? That's just like this. Here you go. It can be used in home services like remodeling to show examples, modeling to show examples. You can now use AI, of course, to generate some generative art and 3D imaging and there's just oh my gosh like Adobe's doing some crazy stuff.

Speaker 2:

So I'm trying to bring these people on. I'm going to bring more people on. I'm going to be reaching out to some people, I know. Please continue to support the podcast. But, okay, how do I attract my ideal customer online? How do I build a strong online presence? How do I increase my organic traffic to my website? How do I establish authority in my industry? These are common questions, but we've been answering these questions and we've been delivering results in these areas for a long time, but still a lot of again, going back to the basics is important for a lot of companies. I am offering some onsite trainings that I've done Two of them. I'm probably going to be increasing the pricing there because I have to travel and it takes away from a lot of stuff, but I'm doing a lot of consulting, whether it be remote, um, some fractional CMO services. Uh, if, if you would like to tap my brain and and what we're doing and have it apply to your company, we can uh, do some, uh, uh, we can do some in-depth digging in of what you have and we can figure out. What analytics do we need to set up? What platforms might you need to be on help you build a strategy, help you analyze things, help you look at the data and develop something that works.

Speaker 2:

We've worked with so many different industries across so many different skill sets, and a lot of their cross-pollination of strategies has been super helpful, and some of the bigger things that we're really focused on as an agency, but also independently. Some of the things that I'm starting to do more is help identify if you have a lack of brand awareness or you have low quality leads or inconsistent leads. I get a lot of people saying that sales qualified leads are way better than marketing qualified leads. I would tell you that those should be the same thing. You should be able to integrate those, and we've been able to produce $100 million plus company leads for ourselves and for clients and speed up that sales cycle dramatically by building the trust and authority online and through the storytelling that we do to get the brand promise and the message of your brand out there. And if you're suffering with low quality or inconsistent leads, that's something we need to dig in and look at.

Speaker 2:

Uh and uh, we'll take some time. I am going to uh start, like I said, this mastermind program, so you know, to engage me directly might be um time intensive on on my part, it might get a little bit expensive on your part, but, uh, but in a group setting we'll bring these things in, we'll put them in case studies and basically I'm going to be doing monthly trainings and I'm also going to bring in some of the experts from the podcast to be able to answer some of these questions. And there's more to what we're building out in the ecosystem, but the agency's running really well on its own. I've hired somebody to take over mainly the operations, so I am certainly involved on the strategy. I'm still coaching behind the scenes, but I'm not actively engaged in the business with clients, unless maybe I need to step in for one one or one one here and there. Whatever is needed, Right.

Speaker 2:

So look, website traffic's going down. If your traffic's going down, is it poor traffic? Do you have poor engagement? Is it just traffic going down? Because, again, we've talked about the concept of building the brand across the platforms and that brand should supersede any one platform. Uh, and website traffic going down? Um is scary, but you should be looking at, like, the customer acquisition costs which are going up. There's more channels, there's more competition, but, um, if you're maintaining the same level of sales and you have less traffic. It's really important to understand why that's happening and how someone's finding you and engaging you for services or to buy your product, because one the algorithms on all the platforms are constantly being tweaked and shifted, but you need to know how that's happening and get that visibility, um, get that visibility to know what parts of your marketing are working Right, and so it is very difficult to measure the ROI, um and and there's a lot more competition, um, and and there's a lot more competition, um and well, one of the biggest things that I would encourage everyone to do is get more reviews online.

Speaker 2:

Everybody doesn't have a lot of time. People shortcut that by reading reviews. Um, reviews are the number one thing you can do to drive your local uh visibility, uh, to increase uh your conversion rate, lower your conversion costs. People need somebody else, and that's why I brought on I just did an interview about influencer marketing, having somebody else say something good about your brand. You can only say it about yourself so many times. You need to build this mosaic online, uh, so people can find out what they're looking for, they can answer their question, they can engage you uh with as little friction as possible, and then, at any point where they're trying to make a decision, uh, you need to provide like FAQs, comparisons, case studies, faqs, comparisons, case studies, testimonials, reviews, video reviews to help someone get over that line. And the more you can do to improve this overall funnel, the faster your flywheel of sales will increase. And so putting all this together takes a lot, and that's why this mastermind program, I think, will be helpful for a lot of small business owners. And then I do have a advanced CMO mastermind that we're doing for companies that are targeting oil and gas right now, which a lot of those concepts are adapted for our small business mastermind.

Speaker 2:

But all I can tell you is take action, do it now, do it now, do it now. You don't want to wait. A couple months will go by. Things are moving so fast. You need to start the process to moving in that direction to be able to keep up. It's like a car that's at a standing point or at a slow point. You got to get that momentum going. You got to get the new wheels on the car, the new engine in the car, the cold air intake, whatever it is to make that car go faster, because your car is going to need to go faster because other people that have done those enhancements with their brand, with their marketing, are going to pass you by. That have done those enhancements with their brand, with their marketing, are going to pass you by. And the cost of AI is going to almost zero.

Speaker 2:

Ai agents, which is not something I've talked about a lot yet. I'm going to start talking about it more. I'm going to bring experts on there. But that means that these algorithms, which I think a lot of them have been around for a while, like AIs with agency they can make decisions is already kind of happening in the stock market. It flows to money. It's happened in chatbots. Chatbots are getting a lot more agency, but now with even what chat GBT came out, it's a 200 bucks a month.

Speaker 2:

You can have it. Find products that that for you and bid and buy those products. They can do negotiations for you. You can give it specific tasks. So so they have agency. They can make they have a decision-making process internally, can make they have a decision-making process internally. I think we're going to start seeing people uh from uh therapists to um, like it's going to be online first, right, but they're going to put them in Androids soon, but, uh, or robots, right, but, but. But counseling, um, advice, uh, you know uh, science, uh, education, having like the most the smart, the combination times, whatever of all the smartest people in the world, at your fingertips and also can now do things and take action, and you can train it to do specific tasks. You can train it to do specific tasks. There's going to be people on your team, whether you're at an agency or at a company, that you'll probably be working alongside AIs, right, and you'll definitely be using AI. So it's a big focus.

Speaker 2:

I don't think people understand how much it's going to impact you and I think everything the pendulum is going back to the basics and the fundamentals, because if you understand those things and you can lay the groundwork. Ai can help you accelerate what you're doing. It can also recommend for you to completely shift what you're doing doing. It can also recommend for you to completely shift what you're doing, but that's harder for people to grasp and that's harder for implementation purposes. What you really want to do is really solidify your marketing, your target persona, your customer journey, your marketing numbers, and then use AI to speed up that flywheel to enhance what you're doing, and that's what our focus is. That's what I'm doing at MatthewBertramcom, that's what we're focused on internally at EWR for our clients and the managed service of marketing programs that we're developing for our clients is we're constantly improving. We're constantly adding new services and and enhanced services to do things better, and we've seen huge improvements.

Speaker 2:

And what I can tell you and I'll end on this is marketing is a moving target. It's, if it's not one thing, it's another thing. There's so many different changes. You've got to stay on top of it and and you want to be an early adopter. You want to be an early adopter because you're going to get the most advantage from it If you start it early. We started AI early and then we stayed at where we're at, and that's what a lot of companies do. They they start with the best technology, they start with what they know, they build a business based on what they know and then they don't update that, they don't change it. It's not like a living SOP. It's like we're doing this the same way, even if new tools come out in any industry.

Speaker 2:

I've seen that, based upon when the business was formed, I can tell you how the business probably operates, or most businesses, and I can even tell you, with mergers I've seen a lot of mergers. They don't get integrated very well. Many times there's multiple CRMs floating around. It's time to update and really digitally transform your business and I would just encourage you, however you're going to do it. If you have somebody internally that you can elevate, to give the authority internally to bring people together to do it, I encourage you to do it. If you know somebody that you trust, reach out to them. If you don't know it, learn it. Listen to some of the interviews. There's so much good information out there. There's so much good stuff. Find whatever source, whatever medium you want and spend some time every week learning it to stay up to date with what's going on, and I can tell you that for the people that do that, they're going to have unlimited growth tool on the planet which is the internet and which is AI.

Speaker 2:

This is like the dot com, right? This is when the internet came to be. Ai is the next thing, but you got to understand how it incorporates and everything else. I would just encourage you to take action, Things that you've been waiting on to do. Do it. You want to be as competitive as possible as we move forward.

Speaker 2:

I spend all my free time listening to podcasts, talking to people, doing trainings, going to conferences, learning this stuff. I absolutely love it. I would love to share it with you. Keep listening to the podcast. Please support us. Let us know how we're doing. Comment, shares, likes, reviews. Reach out to us. I am going to build, or we're in the process of building, a program where I'm going to have some downloadables and things like that, Because I don't know who a lot of you are.

Speaker 2:

You've been listening for a lot of years, but until you reach out the way that these platforms are set up, I don't. I don't know who you are. So please, please connect. Please connect on LinkedIn. Hey, I like the podcast. Saying it publicly is great, but connect. Let me know what kind of content you would see people you want me to interview. I'm building out a list of bringing more people on. I think we've really brought on some great people and looking forward to the future and how we can help not just small businesses, but $100 million businesses grow. Until the next time, my name is Matt Bertram. This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. Bye-bye for now.

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