AI Visibility: Why LLM Marketing Must Lead Your SEO Strategy (with Alex Drew)

James Dooley: Increasing AI visibility. Today I'm joined with Alex Drew, and I wanna talk about why we both believe that increasing AI visibility should be at the forefront of your SEO strategy. So let me dig straight into it and say that on a previous episode, we both spoke about how cold web leads convert, generally speaking, let's say on average around 5% that come through. This is across the board in hundreds of different industries. Yet we've seen that anything that's recommended from word of mouth can be up to 20 to 25%. Again, it completely depends on the industry, but it converts four to five times more, 400% more chance of conversion from a word of mouth. And we've both been seeing from a lot of data that AI visibility and AI recommendations, which is what AI does, is very, very similar to word of mouth. So why do you feel people should be looking at AI visibility a lot more than what potentially is being said in the SEO community?

Alex Drew: I think at the very core of it, we talk about properly done marketing, which LLMs have to pick, they're forced to pick. I've been calling it, I don't know, I think it's a widely known term, but internally though, this is when we started talking about LLM marketing. So basically you do the exact same marketing you've done before, except just like you would have some sort of awareness and understanding of SEO, now you have the exact same for LLM. So don't just do your marketing. If you can slightly tweak your copy in a way that it trains them for the next iteration or whenever they're going to get updated, then do it. Right, now, when it comes, obviously there is a bigger conversion rate because it's brand, because it's recommendations, because it's based on facts and it's all of these things together. But at the end of the day, AI visibility is critical because I think we're going to end up being at a point where we will be doing very little searching activity on the web ourselves. Like I've been telling you in the previous episode that I have at least, I think, seven different open call agents just in my Telegram. They're just one setup. Each one of them has their own agenda, right? So I do not interact. One of them is like travel agent. All it does, it finds my hotels and tickets and all that. And I don't even bother trying to understand how it does. I'll just look at the options and I pick the one that suits you. And I gave you access to a credit card, which is obviously within the boundaries of spending, but I mean, it does all that. Now, going back to visibility, we'll end up, I think, in a world from a recommendation and marketing point of view where if you are not visible to LLMs and to agents, you will not exist regardless how great you are. And you might have a great product or company or service or whatever. You will not exist because they have to recommend. So if all you do is just record this podcast here, but you don't talk about it, you don't market it, then nobody will know about it, right? That's fact number one. Fact number two is, in my opinion, the fact that properly done marketing has branded the core of it. Now, you are a very big into brands. So you can't be marketing a product, a service, a company, a business just by doing one thing, even that SEO. Good SEO means you're doing very good marketing overall because of the corroboration you mentioned, right? Google has to figure out, is this some kind of spam or is someone trying to just play us? Or can I find confirmations across the web or multiple platforms from YouTube to whatever that this is the real thing and exists, right? So it boils down to AI and LLM visibility. I could give you an example of our own company, Otis, which is at some point when I remember even Ahrefs launched their AI visibility sort of a tracker, all of a sudden I've noticed that we have hundreds of mentions in ChatGPT and all the other, and we didn't even try to get them there. All we did is we did our event sponsorship, we did our words, we did our marketing, we did our podcasts, we did our social media, we did some, you know, whatever, like the traditional marketing things. And so you have to do them, but now with an emphasis of actually being recommended and why. So more will go into curating the quality of the information and sort of like rephrasing what you do, just like the conversation we had prior to the podcast. It all boils down to, are you visible or not? Because if you're not, you simply do not exist.

James Dooley: Yeah, I think it's really important, the third-party corroborative sources for the proof element. Everyone says they're the best at what they do. So then what's the differentiator? What other people are saying? So I think this is why they love user-generated content like Reddits, because it's allowing different peoples of opinions for what they say. Facebook groups is absolutely flying. And like, again, it's because people can comment and give opinion, no, I disagree, I think that this is better. And I think they'll like that. But when you understand what it is that they're looking for and you can influence what other people, like what the LLMs are specifically looking to try to get, at that point, they can synthesize the answers in multiple ways, saying this backs up and this backs up and this backs up. And you build the consensus to say why, oh, this is the best, the main marketplace in the world. So like, you need to keep like realising that it's not now about the 10 blue links. It's not now against ranking position number one. It's now about seeing in as many different places as possible and reemphasising why you are the best and what services you offer and why each individual service, you are the best at each individual service. Could find you being the best domain marketplace, but what if I want the best domain marketplace for branded domains? Well, that's now a different intent. I want the best domain marketplace for the most powerful domains with the highest referring domain count. Again, that's a different intent. So there's all these different elements and branches that come off what we call the reputation tree, which is like, okay, you're covering that tree element here, but there's all these other branches here that you're not covering. And the fruits from these other branches are gonna be amazing when you do it all. But I suppose everything comes from what you mentioned there, the brand, the entity, who are you? Who are you is the roots, the what you do with the branches and the why you're freaking brilliant and the flowers on the branches. And I think when you can see that and you understand that and you understand what's missing, you go back down to the claim frame and prove model. And I think so many people are good at the claiming and the framing, but they don't do the proof and they don't go and get the awards and they don't go and get the reviews. They don't go and shout about the testimonials. They don't go and shout about the case studies and what they have. And they've got them, and that's the worst part of it. Some of these have got brilliant businesses and they just don't know how to amplify it. They're the best singers in the world, but they don't know how to get that microphone to be able to sing to the crowd. Do you know what I mean? And it's like being, trying to give those amazing singers the microphone and the ones that aren't very good, moving them away from the microphone, so to speak. It's like, it's so important to increase that AI visibility. Is there anything you're doing in-house that is different than the way you was looking at marketing strategies, let's say just for SEO, that you're looking to go, okay. Cause you mentioned that internally you've spoke about LLM marketing. Are you consistently, I know the way your brain works, I know the way that you've always chasing to push the boundaries. Are you trying to get people within the team to be like, we need to be consistently improving what the LLM is saying about your multiple businesses?

Alex Drew: Well, to be honest, not really, because we've been focusing on LLM marketing from a customer perspective. How can we actually help our partners and clients and projects we do to get more AI visibility. From the Otis perspective, not really, because first of all, that is not the main traffic acquisition channel for us, at least for the time being. I may be wrong and I need to actually go back into my lab and try to figure it out because based on what we were talking about here and that has actually sparked a few new ideas, I think it actually might become, because we've built the Otis marketplace, which is what's brokering and selling premium age domain, was the first product of the company. But the truth is no, like there has been no major SEO traffic channel for the marketplace. It all been like word of mouth and recommendations and people and social and all that. There's never been a traffic channel. We did rank for like age domains, premium age domains, by age domains in multiple languages and geos, but that hasn't contributed much to the extent we kind of left all the organic part aside and focused on the social, let's say part people and such. But going back to it, now with AI it can be a different ballgame, completely different ballgame. And we actually have to pay more attention to that. But generally speaking, I think if you have the fundamentals of marketing, like marketing 101, just try to understand how LLMs will actually crawl, indexed, refer, corroborate, understand the exact same data. If you don't have any testimonials, like you said, use the Alex Hormozy method and like do some free work for someone, ask them to give you some testimonials and then just splash them across the web, rephrase, rewrite some articles, spin some of that context. And all of a sudden we'll start popping up for those queries that matter. And there is always, and I think the problem is sometimes people just focus so much on the product and service, but they forget to market it. So from the early days, we thought, well, every single piece of news or idea that can get us PR, we should use it for PR. And if you do it properly, at least understand your keyword game and having the keyword in H1 in your title and with the required references, then you can do well. If something happens in your company and it's newsworthy, just put it out there. Obviously there has to be some, ideally I think there should be a role within the company, within the marketing team that understands and kind of gives it structure, because otherwise you're just going to throw it on the web. It might not have that impact, whereas like some minor optimisations here and there.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. Everyone who's watching this, we hope you liked the episode on AI visibility. One little tip that I would say that is a myth in the industry is so many say that AI tracking tools are no good and there's no point in using the tracking tools. I completely disagree. I think that every business should have an AI tracking tool. And I think the methodology that you should be doing with regards to these AI tracking tools is share a voice. It's not keyword rankings. It's much, much different to just tracking specific keywords, because the volume of keywords are so different. However, the query find out terms that comes back from a lot of the different searches that get made are very, very similar. And I think what you should be doing is tracking. And the major part is I think that you should be looking to see where the LLM gaps are, seeing where you're not showing that you should be showing for, and then getting those prompts, those chunking, those grounding prompts on those third-party cooperative sources without tracking what can't be measured, can't be managed. And if you can measure something, you can manage it, you can then start to grow that AI visibility. Anyway, Alex, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you.

Alex Drew: Thank you, James.