Jared Johnson

Here’s a quick way for agencies to make their RFP’s better with AI. Let’s say you just completed an RFP for a major client. Maybe you won it, maybe you didn’t. Regardless, it’s time to do a debrief, and that debrief will return a rubric that will be used to improve all future RFP’s. Get the RFP creation stakeholders together on a video call and start transcription. The transcript is the major input. Cover everything that went right and wrong: the process of creating it, the design quality of the document, the positioning of the firm, the quality of the case studies, the fullness of the response to the requirements, the client feedback, any interpersonal issues, etc. If you can, do a client feedback call as well. Take the transcripts and instruct the AI to create a rubric for RFP. The rubric should identify what went right, what went wrong, what to always do, what to never do. Have leads review the document and then make it widely available internally. If the RFP rubric already exists, add to it using this approach. For all future RFP’s, take the work-in-progress versions and have AI compare them against your rubric. With this approach AI compounds your efforts by letting you avoid past mistakes and take a shorter path to your best work. Advantages of this approach: AI compounding removes emotional bias from the process and makes everything objective. Either the RFP response is meeting the standard or it isn’t, and this forces the team to acknowledge it. AI compounding captures everything. The transcript -> summary workflow is better than most notetakers. AI compounding makes the learnings available to everyone involved. With a strong RFP response rubric, the creation of responses becomes less dependent on superstars with esoteric knowledge. 

2

I've seen several conversations about AI visibility tracking tools and their value to SEOs. In general, I think they leave major gaps and lead marketers down roads that are either ineffective or have diminishing returns. You have all of the data to show that top of funnel/informational queries (and in many cases middle of funnel, comparative queries) are going to LLM's and they are not referring traffic to your site. So why pay so much attention to the first prompt? Why aren't you optimizing for the phase where the decision is made, three to five turns into a conversation? Why aren't you focused on steering the conversation, over multiple turns, to a decision scenario that inherently favors your brand (where that's possible, and it's possible in a good many if not most cases)? I'd recommend mapping out your users' likely decision trees. Put together the most probably course of decisions your buyer is likely to be presented with. Then identify what you can influence and how. (tip: you'll need more than just SEO). Puppy tax included, because it's a week til Xmas and I'm not a total monster.

9

1 Comment

Why does AI traffic convert so much better than other organic channels? (Because it steals all of the top of funnel traffic).

3

What's up with the weird behavior in Google Search Console and 3rd party rank tracking tools over the past few days? That's the big topic of discussion in SEO forums and communities and everyone is pointing towards a change whereby Google disallows humans (and bots) from viewing 100 results in a single page load. Since Friday, GSC reports are showing big improvements in average position (meaning, you purportedly rank higher), alongside massive drops in impressions (meaning fewer people are seeing your search result). In theory, if lots of people were using a default view of 100 results per page, cutting off everything after page 1 would mean that terms for which you rank poorly (outside of the top 20) are getting lots fewer impressions, and your average ranking climbs up. Lots of SEOs are wondering if a significant chunk of lost traffic is actually bot traffic- 3rd party crawlers scanning Google's SERPs en masse. Lots of the 3rd party rank tracking tools used in SEO are trying to figure out how to report past page one, since its extremely expensive to 10x their crawling activity to recover back to 100.

23

3 Comments

GEO, AEO, LMNOPEO? WHAT???? Just focus on the content! 🤓 If you are feeling overwhelmed by the explosion of acronyms regarding AI and Search, you aren’t alone. In the latest episode of the Search Off the Record podcast, Google's John Mueller and Danny Sullivan sat down to discuss the "fancy new things" happening in search and why you might be overcomplicating your strategy. Here are the key takeaways before you tune in: 1. It’s still just SEO. Danny jokes that we should call the new fads "LNOPO" because there are so many names for them (Generative Engine Optimization, Answer Engine Optimization, etc.). But ultimately, these are just subsets of SEO. The goal remains the same: improving content for search engines to help people seek information. 2. Don't write for LLMs. The "North Star" hasn't changed. Ranking systems are designed to reward content written for human beings, not for search algorithms or LLMs. If you start optimizing for a specific system, you’ll be playing catch-up the moment that system updates. 3. Move beyond "Commodity Content." AI is great at factual, commodity information (like "What time is the Super Bowl?"). To stand out, you need to lean into your original voice and authentic perspective on the things only you can provide. 4. Think Multimodal. It's not just about text anymore. Danny shares a great story about filming geese to find out what they were eating, a perfect example of how video and images satisfy queries that text can't. 5. Focus on content: Nowadays, if you're using a popular CMS like WordPress, you don't have to worry about all the "technical details"; the technical side of things is a lot less in the foreground now, so you can really focus on your content. Don't fall for the "one weird trick", "new stuff" mentality. Instead of creating a new page for every possible sentence a user might type into a chatbot, focus on the unique value you bring to the web. 🎧 Listen to the full episode to hear their thoughts on the history of search and how to measure success in this new era. https://lnkd.in/gV5ya6_K #SEO #GoogleSearch #SearchOffTheRecord #ContentMarketing #AI

2

2 Comments