Why Old SEO Metrics Fail And What To Track Instead With Corey Morris

We unpack how search is changing as LLMs reshape discovery and why revenue, not rankings, should anchor your strategy. Corey Morris joins Matt to map a practical path: entity clarity, brand differentiation, GA4 fixes, and forward-looking KPIs that speak C-suite.

• shifting from keyword rankings to revenue KPIs
• LLM visibility layered on modern SEO foundations
• entity clarity, consistent data, and brand trust
• quality content over AI slop with lived expertise
• GA4 configuration and custom attribution
• dashboards that follow dollars not vanity metrics
• podcasts and thought leadership as ROI channels
• forecasting, risk assumptions, and boardroom language

Guest Contact Information:

Website: coreymorris.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/coreymorris

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With over 5 million downloads, The Best SEO Podcast has been the go-to show for digital marketers, business owners, and entrepreneurs wanting real-world strategies to grow online. 

Now, host Matthew Bertram — creator of the LLM Visibility Stack™, and Lead Strategist at EWR Digital — takes the conversation beyond traditional SEO into the AI era of discoverability. 

Each week, Matthew dives into the tactics, frameworks, and insights that matter most in a world where search engines, large language models, and answer engines are reshaping how people find, trust, and choose businesses. From SEO and AI-driven marketing to executive-level growth strategy, you’ll hear expert interviews, deep-dive discussions, and actionable strategies to help you stay ahead of the curve. 

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Transcript

Setting The Stage For 2026

SPEAKER_00 0:03

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.

Guest Intro And Career Paths

SPEAKER_01 0:17

Howdy, welcome back to another funfold episode of The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I am your host, Matt Bertram. It is 2026. You're probably not going to get this podcast for about a month or two. Uh, apologies. We're uh backed up. We've been doing a lot of great interviews. Uh, I also need to change the intro. I know that. Um uh, but things are getting done. I got a whiteboard set up behind me. Um, you know, there we're we're gonna be doing some some conversational talks. Uh, we got a small group going now. Um, there's a lot of well, discussion in that group, and I'm kind of pulling some of that forward uh into the podcast because I think a lot of people are having the same questions. Uh, I've been talking to a lot of different agency owners about uh where the market's going, uh, what's happening with the AI systems, how does that uh interact with the traditional systems? I got a lot of client conversations happening. And so um the small groups have been pretty, pretty active. And I think uh, you know, kind of bringing that uh out there to to the public is is good. Uh if you're an agency owner listening and you don't know what's going on, um Matthewberchram.com. I'm getting uh some consulting going there. Um formally, I've been doing this for a long time and people have been asking me for that. But uh we do have some small groups. I do have uh Corey Morris here, um, and uh CEO of Voltage Digital. And uh Corey, welcome to the show. Uh you got a great background, love for you to share it with the audience, and we can kind of get into a discussion of uh how the market's shaping up for you.

SPEAKER_02 2:01

Yeah, sounds good. Thanks for having me, Matt. Um, yeah, much like what you just said, I've been doing this for a long time, and it's it's like, where do you start and what do you unpack? Um a little over 20 years now into my career, and it's it's wild to to take a moment and get out of the weeds and and step back and think about where things were 20 years ago, uh, let alone just three or four years ago in uh the digital marketing world. Um, but my career has spanned um going from being a project manager to digging really deep into SEO as uh as a subject matter expert and leading a team there at a previous agency, um, having paid search in my background, um, email marketing, and then you know, all of that before social media emerged, and and then being a more well-rounded digital marketer, and then starting um landing in in voltage as an employee, and eventually working up through running the agency day to day um to becoming the owner um several years ago. And so there's a lot of entrepreneurial stuff in there. There's a lot of like, you know, SEO woven in and digital marketing um is digital strategy and and SEO and all where it's going is is still a huge core part of what we do day to day.

Paid Podcasts And ROI Proof

Is LLM Visibility Just SEO?

SPEAKER_01 3:20

You know, uh I don't know if you knew this, but my pathway is has been very similar to that. And so I I came on uh to to EWR when it was eWeb results uh as a a contractor, actually, and then got brought in-house and and moved up. And then we actually, uh Chris, who was my co-host who started the podcast, uh, we grew another business that's very, very successful now. Um, I'll tell you, uh, I don't want to give too much away, but we just got him on another podcast. But this is where podcasting's going, okay. We paid$23,000 or close to that, somewhere in that number for 45 minutes on a specific podcast. Okay. And he had to drive to to the location and all that. And why did we do that? Why did we do that? Well, when we were first launching the supplement brand, um he came to me and he said, like, how how do we need to what's our go-to-market? And I was like, How much money we got? It's like eight grand. And so I got him on a bunch of podcasts, and we saw huge ROI from that and uh built affiliate programs and um you know continued to to build the brand. Now he's got a book, he's got a conference, uh, he's got his own podcast. And one of the major objectives uh that we're tracking on kind of like uh experimental search, uh, in addition to like the the the main staples, our podcasts, and we found uh huge um ROI from that. And so um it's really worth the the investment. And so now he and the other partners that started EWR are doing that full time, and I had the opportunity to to buy an ownership share and looking at, you know, um uh, you know, taking out the rest of the cap table at certain point. So um, but yeah, so so I've I've kind of gone through that as well. And I would tell you that SEO was a very nice, shiny object that you said SEO, and everybody wanted that. I'm starting to feel the same way uh when we're talking about um, you know, showing up in Chat GPT or something like that. Uh, people don't really understand how the systems work. I think they're a little more hands-on with it, uh, but but I'm seeing a lot of need for it, and there's this huge debate, okay. And and I know a lot of the top SEOs and man, they I hate getting on LinkedIn because there's just too much going on uh all the time. It's pretty noisy, but there's a huge group of people that are like, it's still just SEO, right? And then there's a huge group of people going, no, it's fundamentally different. And then I look at the data and I'm like, well, there you know, is about 30 something overlap, and fundamentally they're trying to get to the same result, but how they get there is completely different. And I don't think I don't think that that's been fully realized. And and I think there's just a lot of debate around like a new name or a shiny object, but fundamentally, the more I get into learning about AI itself and how machine learning works, and then how they surface everything, it's fundamentally well improved my understanding of like it's not about following checklists, you know what I mean? It's not it like everything's been shifting, uh, and and I think everything's a lot more open and more transparent, but it's more complicated, so it's still kind of black box for a lot of people. And I just now in the last couple of months have started to see people fundamentally take the shift. I mean, maybe people are talking about it, but they're giving lip service to it. But now I'm starting to see real inroads happen in the space. And I also see these AI systems acting really, really odd. Um, they're not like just following what Google's doing anymore. So I'd be interested to hear kind of your uh take on the market itself and like what well, I know we were talking previously about KPIs and tracking and revenue and all those sort of things. I would love to see kind of how you're stacking it up today.

Strategy Over Tactics In AI Era

SPEAKER_02 7:32

Yeah, I mean, you just uh mentioned a whole bunch there in just like two minutes, and um, I'm very aligned with you on the in fact. I had to go, I had to stop and back myself out of LinkedIn for a period last year and just be in there for essential things and ignore the feed because people I know and love and trust were were giving me either frustrating me in not in a bad way, but just with where where the debate was going and the conversations were going, or giving me some FOMO where it's like, well, I'm not doing all these massive experiments and reverse engineering everything because that's not a good use of my time right now um for this fraction of maybe getting one visitor or speculating on on where this is. My my goal isn't to to break the news in the industry, it's to help help brands move forward and distill a lot of that down. So, yes, I'm testing and experimenting, but at a level that is closer to being something I can implement or my team can implement. And so I we actually wrote a uh it's not a public POV, but we wrote one last year as an exercise for us to really get around that because there was so much about people wanting to coin the new term and or talk about what it is and isn't, where I think to the point you were getting into a little bit is you know, on the on the the um traffic side of it, it's not a correlation of okay, well, maybe search traffic dropped 50, and that 50 can be accounted for over in an LLM. It's like there's this is not just a it moved type of scenario one-to-one, it's changing, and Google also obviously you know, with their AI overviews and integration and direct, you know, uh direct answers, but try changing in the most disruptive way they ever have the search results page. There's there's just a a big shift with multiple variables that is hard to quantify. And I know we're gonna talk about attribution and some of that to come, but uh philosophically, where I started was and when I was when I was starting to get asked by some colleagues at a mastermind of hey, um you guys are really like doubling down on SEO, right? When AI started to blow up, that's kind of a bold move. And I said, My my answer was and continues to be no matter what the avenue is and the platform or how it how whatever the algorithm looks like or or source is, there are brands out there that want to be found, and the game is getting even more complex now, so there's gonna be as much, if not more, demand, even even when we look at some of the short-term drops in traffic and the questions, and you know, is SEO actually finally dead after the millionth time of people asking it? Well, maybe SEO from 2020 is dead, and I think that's where we get into the nuance of what you were talking about of all those debates out there that I think are distracting. Of well, yeah, outdated SEO. There's so much nuance into that. Uh, the SEO changed so much in the last two or three years, anyway, that if you've modernized it, a lot of things are working. So maybe there's 80% of your SEO strategy, your modern, accurate, yeah, up-to-date SEO strategy does influence LLMs, but SEO in 2026 is different than SEO in 2022. And so a lot of that um applies. I was just talking to my team yesterday who we had three we've had three leads um come through that were actually real people. We talked to them as prospects through finding my agency through LLMs, and that's not through us having a dedicated separate GEO strategy versus SEO strategy, that's just through a lot of the evolution of doing the right things across the board for visibility and doing it and being able to do those things and push those forward. So that's my soapbox. Now get off of it.

Perplexity Wins A Big Client

Entity Clarity And Foundations

SPEAKER_01 11:35

Well, uh again, uh kind of a similar story. Um, I don't know if it was two years ago, two and a half years ago, something like that, but we got a call. Uh, and they're like, We're only like, so we got so I got asked to be on the call um by my sales team. So I came on the call and you know, this good client and became one of our biggest clients. It's still a client today. But essentially what happened was they called and said, the only re this is how we started the conversation. Like, I get on the call and they're like, the only reason that we're talking to you is you showed up first in perplexity. And this was two and a half years ago. And my first question, and look, like, I mean, I was a little behind the curve, I like I wasn't on the cutting edge of all this because I didn't understand it. I'm not gonna talk about it if I don't understand it. Like, I was still learning about it. I go, what is perplexity? That was my first question. So he goes, Okay, so so, but I go, great, like, great. And and then as we were talking, he was like, I recognize your voice. And he goes, I've listened to your podcast. So that was why we got the client, right? Like, so there was a discovery component of it, but there's a lot of other things that you need to do with your brand to to close the deal. And and so it could be you know a a tipping off point, but I also think we we were talking with one client about setting up custom GPTs as a like a uh, you know, a visibility component. I go, no, this is more of like a trust or an intake component. It it's it's not being used in that light. But to your point, I think that uh good SEO has evolved, right? So like if you're operating on old strategies and it moves into kind of like you know, the BERT, and then there was like a like the semantic stuff, and then there's entity, like so things have moved and they're there will continue to move. But if you're doing good work, you're creating visibility. And I think that traditional SEO, the way I see it, is it's like the layer one. It's like to it's the table stakes to get into the game. You you have to be right in the top 100, at least showing up for the keyword. If you don't show up for the keyword, like in that top 100, and that's like a good target, you're not gonna qualify for anything else, whether it is AI overviews or you know, rankings or what have you, right? So you have to be good enough and differentiate yourself enough where the machines, whether it be search engines or AI bots, understand what it is you do. So you have to be really clear about that. Um, and the clearer you can be about that kind of entity disambiguization disambiguitization of who you are versus somebody else. And like also a lot of people have data out there that like needs to be cleaned up because you know, like they just assume that I'm on this platform, this platform, and this platform, and this platform, they know it's all the same person, and and they're giving you credit for that. And I'm seeing that not being the case in a lot of instances. Um, but I I feel like traditional SEO and that foundation gets you into the game, and then there's kind of that icing on the cake, which is like the the LLM layer, yeah.

Brand, Quality, And Differentiation

SPEAKER_02 14:58

Well, and and I think several of the things you talked about with differentiation are are important. And in the era, probably the last two decades. I mean, while I've been doing this, it's there's been so much focus on well, it's digital, so we can just pump out more and all the wasted impressions. Who cares? Wasted traffic, who cares? It'll go through the funnel, we'll get what we need. When you see diminishing visibility and traffic, now it's actually pushed us back to the things we've said all along. And when we I say we, I'm pointing at myself as well, right? The things that we've said, we want to create a quality experience, we want to have brand, you know, talk about our brand in a way that stands apart, unless you're selling you're the low price leader and you're selling the widget for the cheapest price, which I've not worked with clients who are like, I just want the mass and I'm gonna undercut somebody because that's the Amazons of the world are gonna do that or whatnot as well, right? And we're not, and I haven't had them as a client, but when we actually have to to to actually do what we've said for a long time in the industry and go look back at reinvesting in brand strategy, brand development, product development, sales messaging, and process development. Because if you get we can actually get hopefully the same opportunities, but we have to be more focused in when we get that impression and what we do with it and to move it through the funnel. So we actually have to put our money where our mouth is on the quality versus quantity, focus to it and differentiate. Um, you know, I I had the opportunity to work with a publisher and write a book, and it's really just outlining my five-step process for digital marketing planning, and it's an acronym called START is my process, and it's that first six-week to two-month process we work through, like so many other agencies as well. But we we um I I was very clear there because we also niched down our service line and we stopped doing branding, we stopped doing brand strategy and all that, and and so I I talk about those things as prerequisites. You have no business, and we find out the hard way sometimes with clients. If there are big gaps, you have no business going and giving Google hundreds of thousands of dollars in Google ads and spending a year or two on SEO to find out that uh in a really expensive experiment that you had some gaps in your messaging and your product development and your roadmap, or you didn't have things that were PR worthy and some of the traditional things and and that become digital and are those influences now. So there's just so much there and so much emphasis where it's like I can't just kind of fake my way through it, and I can't just en masse scale AI generated content, throw it out there, and hope that it's gonna tell the brand story and land that part, that that diminishing amount of traffic I might be getting and convert them um or impress my AI content to go impress an AI entity.

START Framework And Prerequisites

SPEAKER_01 18:01

Yeah, I mean, I I you know the term that everybody's using on LinkedIn is like AI slop, right? And and and I think it it is really as people get more comfortable with these tools, and when I say comfortable, I mean a foundational level with these tools, uh you're able to create tons of content at mass. And that's where I think the eat component, they added that experience layer to it, because now you can kind of trick the the search engines to think that you have a certain kind of experience. Now, to put that all together in like whatever your kind of you know customer acquisition component is, and also to match it with the brand, there's actually a lot of additional strategy work that has to happen. And to your point, that's been a struggle for for us, and and I because we can execute really well, but you know, to make you know do do fly, um, sometimes uh there's there, you know, there's certain things you have to go back and fix, right? And so if you want us to execute this, we have to do these things. And so what has kind of happened over time is me and a few of our strategists have really started to move away from the execution, okay, and and try to evaluate the business problem of what you're having. Because I I mean, many times people are coming to me and they're going, I have a I have a paid media problem. And I'm like, Well, okay, you're ranked fourth for a keyword that has huge volume. If you push that up, you could do that way less than what you're spending on paid ads, and you're going to get a much better quality. No, you have an SEO problem, right? And or like they come in and you know, there's all different kinds of scenarios, but you're right. There, there's a many times is okay. Well, you have a website structure issue, right? Or you have a brand issue. Issue, or you have no demand whatsoever, so for a keyword that no one's searching for. So SEO is not really going to work. Like, so like you got to make better decisions on the front end of what your go-to-market is or your start program is to get there. And I really like that. And one of the things I do want to talk about if we have time, this is an area I am looking into. And I don't know how much you you've you've like researched this or not. Um, I've I I was reading uh uh Dwayne's book, uh The Machine Layer uh over the over the holidays, and he was talking about which I I knew about this, but he he really put it together pretty well. I'm gonna have him on on the podcast, but um AI influence. So when we get into KPIs, AI is influenced by what you're saying, but is not referencing you, right? So your framework, like your framework, like really making sure that that's well defined and you know, potentially trademarking and all that sort of thing, is important. So you get attribution for that because it might take your framework and it might apply that framework and it might impact it, and then it never gives you credit. And so, how do you measure that? Right. And so um that that is some of the factors around trademarking the LM visibility and going, hey, y'all can fight over whatever you want to call it. This is what I believe it is, this is what we're doing. We're just gonna we're gonna just build this over here. And and if anybody that I'm talking to want to come over there and check it out, and then you know, some of the industries followed a little bit um uh in that direction, but I still think that there's you know, GAO and AEO and uh AI SEO, like all of that I think is relevant, but that where that battle is on the naming convention is distracting on the implementation of of of what's happening. Um and really what we're seeing is clients need to understand how to measure this. And and I don't think that anybody's come up with some clear KPIs, and I don't think that search rankings are the right metric anymore. And so we've been really slowly moving away from that because it's not it's not even relevant. Um, it's just like we're looking at just honestly, it's like revenue. Like, how where's the revenue? Like, and can we figure that out? And what is that and work our way backwards from that? I I and I'm not saying that that's right, I'm just saying that that's what we have done. And it's the only way in the conversation with clients to explain what's going on is just like look at your bottom line. Like, let like is what we're doing having an impact? Does it make sense? Is it logical that this is good business, this is good marketing? Like, period.

Measuring Influence Without Credit

SPEAKER_02 23:02

Yeah, no, you're uh what you're talking about is exactly what we found works has has worked really well for us. Um a few years ago, we started really uh, and some of it was because we realized no one wants to to engage with someone, whether it's an agency or hire someone who doesn't ask the right questions and works just does the work blindly for six months or a year, and then it's like, oh, I wish I would have known that, or I wish you would have told me about that KPI or how this impacts CRM or whatever. Like me, the 18 year ago starting out SEO, just wanted to do my stuff and stay in my lane and stay in my channel because I had enough to worry about there in that world and keeping up, um, versus like getting into messy corporate politics on the client side or ask questions about things that were outside of my channel or outside of my subject matter expertise. But what I my team and I realized, even though our focus, as we narrowed our focus to just search and websites and stop doing branding, social, email, and the and creative services and the 12 things we're doing, get down to just two things as an agency, we still have to we can't just hide in that silo or in that in that subject matter expertise, but we have to start with we're gonna get fired, even if it looks like all of our KPIs are up and to the right. If someone can't measure that gap between what we're doing and how it's impacting their bottom line, and it it it definitely has gotten harder, but it's also a lot easier when you can have transparent conversations, whether it's with the C-suite or whatever highest level you can to your point of working backwards, whether it's from revenue or profit and and whatnot. It's been it's been interesting when we've asked some of these questions sometimes to you know senior global directors of marketing about how their their business makes money. And it's like, well, wait a minute, I'm just asking you to about SEO. Why are you asking me some of these ROI questions about profitability? But we want we need to understand that so we can have full visibility of that to be able to help them understand. Because to your point, it's like, do we want to pour more into this, or is that an unwise decision either in this moment because you're not ready yet, because there are some other problems in the foundation of your house, or or in a couple cases, you know, uh, you don't this is not the right channel. You do not need paid search, to your point. We need a you have an SEO problem, not a paid search problem, or or even one of the stories I share in my book too about a client uh actually didn't become a client, they're a prospect, asked us to audit their paid search because they're like, Well, we feel like we're getting this level of profit, but we feel like if we outsource it to an expert, they might be able to take it even further. What we ended up finding out is they were actually they thought they were 20% profitable on those leads. They were actually 20% negative because they had attribution problems and were connecting those dots. Like, you don't need to spend anymore. Maybe you need to spend less until you get these three or four things fixed. So we probably sold ourselves out of potentially taking that on, but we would have been fired anyway when they would have we or that they would have figured it out down the road on accident or when harder questions were asked later. And so being it's it doesn't feel comfortable early on if you're deep in the weeds like I was as a channel person and just want to nerd out on one thing, but but thinking like a like a C suite or CMO or director of marketing and what they're accountable for and working backwards from there just opens up a lot of new layers to be able to be successful or navigate it together versus being you know walled off and in a silo away from the the the actual KPIs that matter.

Revenue-Based KPIs Over Rankings

SPEAKER_01 26:56

You know, Corey, one of the things that you said uh is is a discussion point in all the crazy conversation that's been going on. And I I went to more conferences last year than I've gone to in a long time, uh, because I really wanted to like talk to people and uh hear hear their stories and join some masterminds and all that sort of thing. And I would tell you that the biggest takeaway for me is that SEOs that want to stay in their lane and do their thing and actually have a lot of great data and knowledge that you know are well underpaid, uh in a in a huge like the the amount of data from traditional marketing and like the reason that people or CROs or you know executive suite throw money into paid ads is they can measure it. And SEOs haven't done a good job of tying it to revenue because it's it's a little bit abstract, right? Of like how to tie it and how it influences it. And the best case studies I have, okay, which I need to like publish them, I need to get get on that and publish them, but are really reverse case studies. Like, so I'm not I don't have as good of data of like this measured this, if like I can't tie it to to the data points. But what I can show is if you lose keyword rankings for certain keywords, or like for example, I have a um like a private equity brand, and there's a bunch of different brands, and they're like, Okay, we need to focus on this one brand. And and and I basically took all the budget and focused on that one brand and kind of let the others kind of shrink based on the the layout of the website, right? Like, like we're gonna really focus on this because it's too noisy, we don't know how to categorize it, all this kind of stuff. Their revenues dropped dramatically, and I'm like, you had other lead funnels coming in, but the but the brand, the brand presence is so important, and it's like, how do you measure like or that like a lawyer with tort or whatever? Like the like the brand being there when people research, and I'm even seeing this in um uh similar web data. People are going to the website, they're of course searching you on Google, they're checking now. One of the key sources from similar web that I'm seeing on a number of brands is like grok or chat GBT. That's like the out so people find out about you whatever way it is, but then they go research you and they want to see like where is that authority, where is that expertise, where's that trust? How are how is that website presenting it? And if you don't have those right things and you aren't, you know, hitting on the hot buttons or positioning right, um, it's affecting revenue on the backside, just like the other example with the keywords. If you lose certain keywords or categories or you know, fan out too much and and it's not focused, they feel the reverse impact a lot more than the incremental increase. You know what I mean? Uh or I don't know, it's been weird. It's been, but it's but it's these like reverse case studies where I see the value in the data of where that risk factor is if we don't do this versus here's what we would get if we do do this.

Boardroom Language For SEOs

SPEAKER_02 30:12

Well, and I think for and I'm gonna say this and make this disclaimer for anyone who's tuning in at this minute and didn't hear what we just talked about about 10 minutes ago, but I'm not advocating for old SEO, but but obviously a big part of content and context driven and authority-building SEO forever has been quality content. And so if you've got stale content, outdated content out there, even on a page that you think might get one visit a year, but it still needs to be out there because it's a service you have, or it's still a blog post for that super long tail one person right fit prospect that might come in it and it's worthy of staying on your site, make sure it's updated, make sure it's accurate because that whole complete picture still matters. And so, yeah, the the you can't go into okay, we got to prune everything, or but at the same time, we can't, like in the old days, neglect all this old content out here either, because that complete picture is is being judged exponentially more by by AI than it even was by Google, who would have to fan out and eventually see it and put the picture together in a more uh more um longer-term way.

SPEAKER_01 31:23

I think you just said it, the complete picture, right? That is what AI is doing is really grabbing the complete picture and looking at it from all these different angles. And so you have to think about everything. And then even going back to my earlier point to highlight a little bit more, when you said at the very beginning, you're like, I went through this phase, you said you that you were a digital marketer. And I I actually think it's very, very difficult today, unless you work at a very large company, uh, which there's a lot of issues with siloing and and everything as as you go bigger and red tape. But if you're not a digital marketer, at least have that surface level understanding. Like the previous experience with the agency of doing all these other things make you better at SEO, make you better at kind of like the information capture, the information organization or or or um discovery process because they all impact it, they're all woven together, they're not um siloed. And and I I just think it's SEOs really need to improve their language about how they're communicating about what they're doing. And I I I honestly think that the KPIs are what's holding everybody back and and rethinking through what the real KPIs are of how do we measure this and have more kind of boardroom language um is gonna change the game. And I feel like SEOs have the most data. Now, some of it's siloed and bringing it all together, and again, AI helps with that, but being able to articulate that data is where the gap is.

Connecting Dots Across Stacks

Forward-Looking Forecasts Matter

SPEAKER_02 33:09

Yeah, no, and that's exactly it. That goes the getting, and that's the hardest part again, to get comfortable going outside of your comfort zone of this is what I know. Now I got to enter into somebody else's territory or find the gray area where nobody owns the KPIs, things are disconnected, and and to be willing to be a problem solver at a different level. Like you might have two or three months of if you're in an agency or even in a new higher-end your team, of before you actually do any SEO work or any optimist optimizing anything, just trying to troubleshoot and problem solve and connect the dots with dashboards and data that's everywhere and CRMs, things that have been neglected for years or have been built by certain teams and that aren't talking to each other. And I don't know, whether that's a Fortune 500 or a 10-person company, those things exist and those they've always existed, but it's more important than ever to get the dots connected because we can't just assume that everything's up and to the right, and I even see leads go through or e-commerce sales come through from search with a nice attribution string, that it's gonna equal somebody saying good job in the ownership or C-suite or on the client side or or in the in the stakeholder seats to actually understand that. And um, yeah, it's it has been fascinating to see how things have changed. You mentioned earlier talking about podcasts and strategy, and that's again, you know, some of the things that maybe aren't text on a page or an inbound link that you can see as an SEO from years ago, um, maybe get not don't get thought about as much because it's it doesn't feel like indexable content, but you know, all the collection of stuff is important, and how much you're willing to share knowledge and put it out there is important too. And the there are all kinds of problems and question marks on trademark and defending it. And you know, if I give more to the LLMs, are they gonna just gonna rip me off into Google? Are they gonna rip me off even more? And so there's all I'm not even I'm not even gonna wade into the legal side, how do you protect that? That's still to come um in our industry in the next few years, but there's just so much about uh considering how much do you gate and keep close to the vest and maybe not get found versus how much do you freely give away? And and I was reminded of this a little bit when you were talking about um some of the education my team yesterday was talking about um as going through interviewing and hiring um for another um search role, talking about uh the approach of most of our clients don't care about the nerdiness and the super technical parts of it. But do we hold that back and water it down where they and they don't get the impression or understanding of it enough? So we're like, we have it there, and we might give them 90 seconds of it before they you know they're check out on us and then get down to the level that they care about. And that's whether you're an agency or an in-house or whatever you're doing, I think that's important to be able to validate big pictures here. We'll take you there, and you need some forced education, even if you don't want to listen, um, versus chasing all those shiny objects and and making it feel like the snake oil or crystal ball that it isn't if you're doing it, uh doing it properly, and and to be able to demonstrate that shift. So I think that's part of the gap that we talked about too. There are people talking about it way out here on the exploratory end, and people who sound like it's outdated and you can't validate if it's outdated, or we're just making it more approachable and where that middle ground is of how we work through it, talk about it, and educate stakeholders of where we're going and how messy it is now compared to how it's never not been messy, but how it was a little bit more linear and how we measured it 10 years ago.

SPEAKER_01 37:03

Wow, you you you brought up some things that I I will have to save, or maybe we'll bring you back for another discussion. I don't want to veer off too much into data hygiene issues uh internally, uh externally. Um, but uh I would love to dive into in the kind of this last piece here about KPIs and what were the KPIs you used to use? What are the KPIs you're using now? What do you think the KPIs should be? Are there any tools that you're finding helpful? Like, let's give people like actionable steps on what they should actually be looking at. Because I'll tell you right now, all this nerdiness is exciting for me. Like, I I love digging into it. I I love the data, I love how it all connects together. Like that gets me going. So, this is this re-evolution of the industry has been fantastic, and and it's repositioning everybody at the starting gate, right? And so uh certainly uh, you know, people that have done everything right uh are you're have an advantage, but for the most part, it's a reset. And and I and I love I love that. Um and it's fun to compete. Um now, but everybody else that's not thinking that way is like, oh my gosh, I went through another learning cycle here. Uh I just went through digital transformation, I'm just now running ads since COVID, like I figured it out, and now I gotta learn it again, and I'm trying to run my business, and you know, the private equity guys don't have a clue um what is going on. They just want to dump their money into something. And so, like, how do you measure this stuff? Like, or what, yeah, just how are you dealing with with with the the KPI component of it? And I know we talked about that prior to going live.

Plugs And One Big Takeaway

SPEAKER_02 38:56

Yeah, um I'll go back to to what we talked about about starting at the the furthest endpoint we can get, whether that's revenue or or or adjusted gross income or whatever it might be of profitability and working backwards to make sure that uh for us, in many cases, our dashboards get all the if we can get attribution of search or digital marketing driven traffic, like the old days, all the way to um through leads. And in many cases, we're working B2B. Um, and so we have lead values and getting close to the sales team or or CRO or whoever it might be who's leading that and can validate that this data is clean um all the way through. Getting to that number and understanding that and customer lifetime value and all those things. So that's the holy grail. That's where we want to be, because then we can at whatever regular checkpoints, annual or more often, reevaluate that and have a pulse of are we getting enough leads? Are we getting high enough quality leads? Um Are they targeted properly and start the convers and keep the conversation there on an ongoing healthy basis and not have to keep going and re-evaluating the ultimate business goal and have and have um challenges with that? So if we can anchor to that at least at an annu on an annual basis and understand have the businesses goals changed, are the marketing goals in alignment with that? And that doesn't, again, sound like an SEO's job, but it's become more of important to validate that some of these points are in place. So for us, the deepest goals we get to typically and that we love reporting on are those agreed upon KPIs related to deals that come through or leads that come through and validate and our ability to connect into CRM or whatever levels of data we can. And we have e-commerce clients too, and that's different and feels easier uh because we get the data in real time coming back to us, but also we have to understand margins and if you're drop shipping versus where your warehouses are and what tariffs did to you or anything else, then you can't just turn off that part of the brain either and say, well, it's a four to one or 12 to 1 ROAS, or or if you're looking at from an organic perspective, how you're validating that return on um on spin of of what you're investing in SEO efforts. So whatever that is, not just trusting it for a year or two or three and saying, Okay, well, we got you 50,000 leads in the last five years. Why why is that not profitable, or why is the company shutting down or or selling off or whatever? And so that that's the KPI layer. It's it's not much different than what it's been in the past, but there's extra scrutiny on it and making sure we understand it and and not just trusting the other the other side of this too, not just trusting GA4 out of the box, right? Of course, what doesn't get talked about is that GA4 emerged a few years ago and still frustrates many, if not all, of us, um, and because it it we have assumptions that things just work and get measured properly like they did previously. Um, we wrote a great article. Um IVP of Strategy did last year that's got 15 screenshots in walking you through the 10-minute setup to go set up a the attribution you need to see LLM traffic and categorize it properly. And we've got another one coming in the next few weeks um based on a client problem we were solving yesterday um that's solvable, but not an out-of-the-box feature. And so uh the constantly revisiting and and rechecking and validating has become uh unfortunately a new time commitment to make sure the KPIs don't get taken for granted.

SPEAKER_01 42:47

Yeah, I think um GA4 is something that was kind of like when AdWords switched over to the new uh system. Like there's actually some really good components to it, but they move stuff around and you've got to do it a different way and you gotta hook certain stuff up. Um, you know, so I do think it's more powerful or useful, and a lot of stuff that might not be as useful, they're kind of going, This is not as useful, like you don't need to focus on this, but people are focused on older KPIs. I would love to hear kind of as we close out what are the tools that you're using and are the tools effective? Because okay, like in the last four months, everybody added their bolt-on AI visibility tool, right? And I mean even the traditional tools, like I'm going like, okay, are are y'all even I'm like going to my team, I'm like, are y'all even looking at the keyword tracking? Like, is it accurate? Like, you know, and everybody's going back to manual searches. That's that's a lot of what, but then manual searches are personalized if you're looking in the AIs to to to yourself. And so then it's like, okay, have the client look at it. There, there's so many different like layers or or kind of like different angles to look at this, and then like these tools are also giving you one data point, and you're like, okay, well, maybe that's pulling from over here or over there, but I can't replicate it, or the client can't replicate it, right? It's like, oh, you're ranking number one, and then nobody on your team can replicate the client can't replicate, or like, where is this number coming from? And like, is that even data valid? And then I was on a like a bigger panel discussion with a bunch of teams, and the the IT team was there, and they're like, Isn't all this data theoretical? And I was like, Yeah, a lot of it is, and they're like, So, how do we know if it's true? And I was like, We don't, and that's why we're using multiple tools to to kind of create like a GPS coordinate to to kind of validate it from different angles. And I said, These are the gold standard, this is what's out there, you know. I was like, So what what we ended up doing is uh a guy on my team and and his brother-in-law, they're like they're like coders and stuff. Uh, they built a tool called Carrot and uh and we're we're just launching that and and it's literally like all the input, and we're gonna be using this tool customized mainly for for our clients, but like it's gonna be out there, but there are tons of tools, it's just like really customized to what we need, and and um it's it's been wild, it's been just wild about what's out there, and I'm like, we paid for this tool, we're paying for this tool, and then I'm like, they're telling me different things, and then I'm like trying to talk to their their dev team, and like then they're explaining it to me, and I'm like, like it's almost going back to like your you know, you you look at the revenue number and you know what you need to do, and you know what things should be. And I mean, I've just find myself relying a little bit less on the tools as kind of a definitive answer and more kind of on um like what I see happening at where I can see it in the data, but but I don't feel like the tools have done a a great job doing that, and now it's you know, um I don't know, there's just a lot, a lot more noise out there, is what I feel like. But that's my personal, and I would love to hear your and if you don't agree with me, I would love to hear the disagreement because I I'm always learning and talking to other SEOs and trying to learn myself.

SPEAKER_02 46:33

So no, I I I love what you said, and that example you gave of being challenged on the theoretical aspect of it, it's always been theoretical. We might have been, we might have felt more comfortable with being able to see things in what I've called a linear way before, but there's always first click, last click, view went through you know, windows, Facebook taking credit for everything, right? Like all of all of that has always had problems of flaws, and every tool, when we were still focused on keywords way back when would give you wild different ranges of estimated volume. And yeah, Google was always pulling back data and trying to make it, you know, go through all their privacy things and keywords not provided, moving it to Search Console and changing how they sample data versus give you literal data, your own data, and look at you know, and then filtering out spam and bot traffic. So all of that has always been somewhat theoretical. We just got better at packaging it and feel and trusting it, and it got it did get better, but it it it definitely I I agree with you. We have yeah, we use some of the you know leading tools like hrefs and screen frog and things in our stack, but we went away from the enterprise level dashboard and report third-party dashboard and reporting tool. In fact, I couldn't, I for you know, we'd been in it in them so long that we had a 12-month contract that I didn't realize it wasn't monthly. And I'm like, oh man, we've moved away from that. I still got to pay for it for six more months on that enterprise huge ticket thing that we were paying for, because we had gone to building our own looker dashboards and our own reporting infrastructure, not in a way, not a software development way, like we would have thought about it 10 years ago, but in a practical way where there's a base of what we're pulling in. We have a lot of custom configurations in GA4, like we talked about a moment ago, to make sure we're actually getting the data in the way we need it and to be able to parse it. But all of that's connected as much as we can to that data point on revenue or sales or leads or whatever it is. And at the end of the day, it it obviously is a to a degree still theoretical conversation. And the client, or or if you're again in-house, you have to be in an environment where your brand and company is comfortable with understanding that there's this is an investment, and we hope to see a return on investment. And I use the example of like, do I go question my financial advisor um and scrutinize? There's a prospectus, there's disclaimers that say, you know, past performance doesn't guarantee future performance. It's not a big line item expenditure, or it shouldn't be. It should be looked at as an investment with an expectation of return on investment. And when we when we can look at it that way, then it's a healthy conversation, like in other categories of life or business. And know that there are ups and downs, and we're using what we know from the past and what we project for the future, and we're trying to connect the dots right here, but you know, it it'll get us there, but it might not have been exactly how we thought it would.

SPEAKER_01 49:40

Wow, I think that's a really good place. I want to add one more point to that, and then I want to give you an opportunity to promote whatever papers or you know, uh stuff that you you want, and we'll we'll get it in the show notes. Um, what I've seen, and I am in the same situation, actually. We, you know, at at a certain point we got locked into like a big enterprise like visualization, all this kind of stuff, and our team loved it. Okay, and they're like, it it's enterprise and it's presented to the clients and all that. And the conversation became like, are you are they seeing value in it and are they using it and is it helpful? And like they I the the so I started going on the calls, right? And we started recording. Um we we started about a year and a half ago recording all our calls and um feeding it to AI and we're getting kind of a sentiment analysis as we scale and um you know what needs to happen. And you know, I haven't fully automated it pushing into like a CRM tool yet where it just creates tasks, but I want to get I want to get there. Um, you know, there's a little bit more training that has to happen, but but I can tell you that they weren't using it and we've started to build our own dashboards and customize stuff. But the point that I'm trying to make is when I'm having those discussions with clients, they don't care about what happened. They care about forward looking, they care about where is it going, what are we doing, what can we expect? And then they want me to put stake my name on it, and then then they want to hold me to whatever I think will happen. Does that make sense? Like, that's what I'm seeing is they're like, this is what okay, what do you think will happen? Where do you think we'll be based on all this data? And then I'll tell them, and then whatever I said, that's what's gonna get measured at whatever next milestone there is. And then either that's true or false, or how close am I to that number? And that's what I'm starting to see. The forward-looking indicators is is really what the executives that I'm talking to care about. And am I right or am I wrong? So they're like, you synthesize it all, just tell us, and then we'll measure if what you said is true or not.

SPEAKER_02 52:03

And in so many cases, that's bringing them transparently and authentically into the mess with you to understand that this is not an exact science because it's you know, it it can backfire if we don't do that. Here's the flashy slide, here's exactly what you're getting in terms of revenue, and then something in the marketplace changes, but we've never had talked about the risks involved in a transparent way or what we know and don't know, and then traffic starts dropping. It's like, well, we haven't educated or talked about what we do in this case and why the why we actually expected it to start trailing off, but this number of your revenue hasn't because it's quality versus quite all those things, and so yeah, to that point, the the trust that and in an industry that unfortunately has had a lot of burned and and misplaced trust, um, like like others, but um being able to share with them the expertise and how we're bringing you along on this journey and where we're going, much like again, a financial advisor, right? You're trusting them to try to manage your money, but and do it proactively and not let something sit out there for six months and get tanked and not have a new strategy ahead. And and I think that's the cleanest example for me to take this to a different industry, but that's the the part of it where you know, if we're too buttoned up and we're always trying to sell and present, and I say this from the agency side of things, if we're always trying to just present and put another deck and put a rosy picture on something, then when something really drastic changes, we haven't built a framework where we talk about it in a problem-solving, same team, proactive way. Now we're reacting and the house is on fire and and and it's more catastrophic than it ever should have been.

SPEAKER_01 53:49

I love it. Corey, uh, you've talked about a lot of great things, y'all are doing some awesome stuff. I'd love for you to uh plug whatever you would like to plug. And I would also love for you, if there's one thing to kind of crystallize uh for for anyone listening, what is the one takeaway? What is the one unknown secret? I guess you know, I used to say of internet marketing, but just what's the one big takeaway that you would have recommended to anybody listening?

SPEAKER_02 54:17

Yeah, um uh I'll I'll come back to that. I'll first mention the the uh the areas um to find me. So my agency is Voltage, that's easily found at voltage.digital. Um, if you I I do a lot of speaking and and sharing in the industry, so you can find me at Corey Morris.com for that. Um, or go find me on Search Engine Journal or Search Engine Land for my articles there, um, or for my book, The Digital Marketing Success Plan, where I give away uh that five-step start planning process. That's a long title. Um, so I've shortened it to the DMsp.com. And you can find it there or find it on Amazon. Um, but that takeaway really is connected back to that start planning process. And it's the one where um I know it gives anxiety if I bring up the question of if you don't know or feel like you know that your marketing is producing ROI and you feel like you're just doing it because you've always done it, or somebody said you should do it, or you're buying a channel essentially of activity. Um that is where you definitely should scrutinize where it is and if you have a plan. Um, and I love to say, you know, if you don't have a plan, you're just spending money.

SPEAKER_01 55:33

I love it. Well, Corey, thank you so much for coming on. Everyone listening. This is the future of search with L Invisibility. My name is Matt Bertram. Uh bye bye for now.