EP 64: The Power of Authentic Content in the Age of AI with Barb Davids
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Hey everybody, welcome back to the Acquire podcast where we're talking about lead generation, sales, marketing, and pretty much everything in between. I'm your host, Jenny Wright, lead generation specialist, and sometimes, sometimes everything. That's where I'm at right now. And I'm really excited because let's start this conversation off with today's guest. We're going to look at

SEO. Now, if anybody knows me, you know me that I love organic marketing and SEO is definitely a great way to amplify that organic marketing. So we brought in an expert and that is Barb Davids. She is the founder of Compass Digital Strategies. She's originally from Minnesota and has been traveling all over the place for the past like year. So Barb, I'm so glad you're here.

Thanks for having me, Jenny. I'm really looking forward to the conversation. Absolutely. And I think it's so cool. Like, let's just talk about the whole nomad thing for a second, like being able to travel anywhere, yet still run a business. Has that been like, how, first of all, how long have you been nomading? And how hard has it been to keep your business going?

So I've been nomading for about a year and to keep it going has not been as difficult as it has been finding a place to stay. Okay. So like the, the thing about my business was I wanted to be able to work anytime, anywhere, still be able to help people and be able to make an income while I was visiting family and friends because everybody seems to be everywhere these days.

And when I was working corporate, I'd have to take vacations. So the idea was to be able to be a little bit more fluid. And I think my job, being able to work from a laptop, makes that very doable. And then the harder part was trying to figure out where I was going to stay on top of the fact that when I first started this, I really didn't have any plans. And

The universe just threw me out there and was like, okay, you're doing this now. This is what you wanted. Here you go. So I went without a thorough thought. I just kind of was like, okay, where am I going to stay next? And usually I would go to searching for like Airbnb or actually that's all I did in the beginning, except for when I was traveling on the road, I would look for like hotels to stay for a couple nights or something like that. But I was usually using Airbnb or, or Vrbo, but

They only allow for so many things. Like I needed a certain budget, of course, to stay inside of what I was doing for normal rental. And I have a dog on top of it. And then the times that I wanted to stay really varied from city to city.

And not knowing, quite frankly, most of the cities I went to, I knew somebody. But the ones that I stayed in that I didn't really know, I didn't know if they were safe. So that was a little scary as well. And I can tell you, I'll tell you one quick story. There was a place I stayed and I called it, I deemed it the murder me motel. Oh, God.

It was so funny. And it's definitely a learning process. Like I went from one town in Indiana to visit my family and I was on my way to somewhere else now, I can't remember, but down South. And I was going to just stop at a hotel. I thought, well, I'm just going to...

just wing it. I'm just going to stop somewhere for the night when I get tired. Well, what that did was limit my options to places to stay, of course. And I ended up having to stay at the only one that was available because at that point I was really like, I don't know how much longer I can go without falling asleep. So I stayed at this one place and it was so run down and so scary. And like only a couple of people, I mean, it was just like,

I'm really, I took a couple pictures, but I don't know if I saved them, but I really, I'm really thankful I have a dog because I think that like that kind of kept me feeling a little bit safe and guarded, but yeah, it was pretty interesting. So. Yeah. And traveling alone is, I mean, traveling alone, whether you're,

like regardless of gender is always interesting, but it's a little bit more precarious if you identify as female and people see you that way and they think that they're, you know, your potential prey of some sort. But my gosh. Okay. Well, stay safe on the rest of your journey. Yes. Thank you. First of all, and enjoy it. I just have one last question on this whole thing. Are you like flying or are you driving? Driving.

Cool. I only, I only have in my car what I can, what I need or use right now. And everything's in storage in my home base in Las Vegas. And actually I'm getting ready to, in a couple months, just literally let all of that go except for my bed and some kitchen stuff. Because I thought, you know what? I haven't been using it for a whole year. Why do I need to even pick it back up? Because I'm already essentially a minimalist for the most part. So I think

I think getting rid of that, like my mindset is like, oh, this is going to feel so good. It's liberating. It's absolutely liberating. Yeah. Coming from a household that was not minimalistic. My mother loved the kitsch everywhere. Yeah. And a million, I mean, cookbooks and whatnot. And then when I moved out on my own, I was like not doing any of that.

I mean, in my background, if anybody can see my music on video, I do have a bookcase. It is literally the only bookcase in our whole place. Oh, wow. Right. But everything else is minimalistic. I totally get it. Okay. So let's transition and talk about what we came to talk about.

which is really the organic side using SEO. You are an expert in the SEO space. I was really excited when you reached out to have a conversation because you're like me, you don't like fluff. So talk to me about getting people, you know, 256% more organic traffic on search, 20, you know, 22% more leads and 51% more sales. Like how does that work? What do you do?

So when it comes down to the nuts and bolts of it, it is really creating content around the topics that your people, your ideal audience are interested in and in such a way that Google can find it.

So like with organic search, they always talk about SEO and doing certain things to your website. And there are some technical things that you can do. But really what it's about is finding the things that people want to know about and getting in front of them. So that might be simply answering like a how-to question on the service that you're providing. So it's like a straight up really close to what you sell. But then it also could be something around marketing.

like what it's called tangential content. And one of my best examples for this is like Death Wish Coffee. So they sell coffee, but they actually did a blog post around the idea of should people like drink coffee before a workout? And they gave a whole workout routine and just talked all about it, but it wasn't directly related to their specific coffee that the content was directed at fitness folks who drink coffee. So it got to those people in front of them

And I think that a lot of times we overthink what we're supposed to be writing about. And it's really just thinking, okay, what is like, if I'm looking for somebody who's looking for organic search traffic, I might talk to them about like how to find keywords, which are essentially just people typing in queries into Google and just writing some content around that. And it's, it's,

I think people get hung up on which words to use and like how to use them. But if you just pretend like you're talking to the person that is wanting to know about it, I think that's the best way to bring it down. Yeah. I still get hung up on keywords. Yeah. For sure. Because I'm not sure what people are searching. And I know there's a lot of tools out there. How has AI changed this for you? Because the last

I don't know, 12 to 18 months has been insane. What has changed for you? So far, nothing except my sanity because there is so much information out there. It is ridiculous. And on top of it, nobody really knows what's going to happen, right? They can speculate and figure it out, but

SEO in itself and trying to get found organically is sort of a slow process. So it's kind of like, okay, well, now that you've done everything for Google organic, now what do you do to be able to be found in this whole new AI world? If somebody is using like, they're called AI overviews. So when you go into the Google search, if you see like one box and it says something about AI overviews, that's kind of like the quote new thing that's happening where they just serve up one answer and they are trying to cite the sources.

But that has actually been around for a while where they just serve up one answer that's called featured snippets. So we've always been in this rat race of trying to be that one answer that Google wants to serve up. So as it stands right now, there isn't anything necessarily to do differently. What I have been trying to...

I guess convey is that the diversity in your marketing is probably bigger now than it ever has been before. So being able to get people to your website and not only for the lead generation, but giving them something on your website that provides them value and can get them on, say, your newsletter list. So that way you can stay in touch with them more directly than trying to hope that they'll come back through organic search.

You said that you're trying to draw traffic in like multiple ways. What, I mean, should people be saying, okay, because I know that YouTube is a massive search engine. What would you recommend to people, the traffic sources that they should be using to pull people their way? The ones they should be using are the ones that they feel comfortable being on, but also that they are in front of the people that they want to serve.

So for example, one of my audience is, is coaches, whether that be a business coach or life coach. And a lot of the time they are on Instagram and I, frankly, they are on Facebook as well. However, I am not really fond of Facebook personally. So I don't spend my energy there. I only spend energy where I'm going to have fun sharing my content and sharing solutions. So I would do it on Instagram. So I wouldn't, I would say even as much as people say you have to be everywhere, you

And then there's the other philosophy that just pick one channel. I think it has to go with where your audience is at, but also that you feel good about it. Because if you have to go in there and you're just trudging along, people are going to feel that and see that in what you're outputting. Okay. That makes sense. I love a good multi-pronged strategic approach to organic growth.

So for years, and this is specifically because I couldn't run ads to save my life. I tried. I tried and I suck.

And now in my, one of my 12th year of business, I can, I farm that stuff out. I have an incredible person named Nicole who helps me with ads, not only for myself, but also for my clients. She's gold. I just want to like wrap her in bubble wrap and keep her safe because I don't know what I would do without her because I can't run ads. So this made me for the first 10 or so years of the business really focus on the organic side. That's how I got started.

really good at online summits and challenges and stuff and figuring out where people would be coming from the like you said be where your ideal client is and I and I and I love that you said that you don't like Facebook because I tell this to clients all the time I don't care if you don't like such and such platform if your ideal client is there you I think you should be there so one of my clients loves Instagram but her clients are not on Instagram they're all on LinkedIn

And, and so I've had to, and we can agree to, you know, have a little spat about it or not. We can be friends afterwards, but I think, I think you got to pull up your, you know, you've got to pull up your britches and just say, look, you might enjoy spending all your time on Instagram, but your client, like your ideal client isn't there. Yeah. So stop messing around and go put the time and effort where they are. Do you know what's so funny? You said that. So I had a business coach once and we were doing

For myself, it was going to LinkedIn. And at the time I was targeting photographers and I was like, this just doesn't feel good. Like I, I know that some of them are there, but most of them are not hanging out on LinkedIn. Like, why would I spend my time there if I'm not, you know? Yeah. It depends on your, your audience or maybe a segment of, but yeah.

You definitely, I mean, otherwise you're, I mean, if you're doing it, unless you're doing it just for entertainment purposes, but if you're doing it to build your business, you do have to, to be there, but not just, you know, talking to people, not trying to, unless she was just doing it to be like really entertaining instead of trying to build a business on there. No, no. Some of the clients are just having a good time out there. Yeah. Yeah.

But I always ask that question. And I'm not, I mean, I don't have your skill set. I don't know SEO as well as you do. But I know the basics enough to say, I should probably look at having my free SEMrush account

because I'm not paying for that, and see what it's looking like. I should have, obviously, my Google Analytics. I should have my Google My Business profile. Can you believe how many people don't have a Google My Business profile? It still amazes me, especially for the idea that it's free. And have you heard of Google Search Console too? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That one's a really good one. I love that one. That one's fun. Yeah, that one's fun. But I mean, why do you think...

first of all, incredibly crazy that people haven't taken advantage of these really free opportunities. So, and I'm constantly, every time I onboard a client, it's like, okay, where's your Google My Business profile? Yeah. Okay. We're going to create one. Now we're going to build one. So what other free or really low lift opportunities can people take advantage of to amplify their organic search?

I think the one that gets most underutilized is just checking their website in general. So you can do this without a tool whatsoever. If you go to Google and type in site colon your domain dot com, it will give you a list of all of the pages that Google has indexed for your website.

And it gives you a visual to be like, oh, this is what people are seeing when they type in my website. So or even just go type in maybe your best keyword and see if you pop up. But if you do site colon and your domain.com, you see a list of all of them. And then you can get a visual of, okay, what is the

What does that look like? What is my page title? Is it compelling enough to want to have somebody click through or the meta description? So you have your, your title and your description there. So if that was next to somebody else's, is it compelling enough that somebody would want to click it? I was, I was, um,

Recently, I've taken to the idea of like window shopping, like all of those SERPs are different windows for different stores. Is yours compelling enough? Does it have the right outfit or the right allure to want people to click in to shop your website to see what services you have? And there are some, I will say some technical differences.

issues about this. Like Google doesn't always keep your original one, but for the most part, you still want to enter that in because there's other search engines that use it. And when you share your pages out into the world, that page, that title and that description is usually what gets shared on social as well. So I did it while you were talking. Site colon JennyWright.com. So the first thing that shows up is home. The second thing that shows up is blog.com.

And oddly, the third thing is refund policy in terms and conditions. Oh, yeah. You got to de-index that one. Tell Google, get that out of there. I mean, yeah. I mean, wow. Okay. And then third one is one of my products. Awesome. Thank you for indexing that. And then it goes to privacy policy. Yeah. So those two need to be removed. Yeah. And to be clear, too, like in case somebody's listening to this and they are thinking, oh, I need to remove it. It's not actually remove it. Like you keep it on your website. Oh, yeah. But there's...

a box inside of usually if it's WordPress, there's a box that you can say, hey, hide this from Google, you de-index it, and then Google won't put it in there. And it'll still stay there for your people that need to know that kind of stuff. Good. Yeah, good explanation. Yeah, not deleting, just hiding. Yeah. So that it's not indexed. Because, yeah, I mean, that's, that's my third thing showing up. Okay, so I've got work to do.

There you go. I've gotten something from this. Yeah. Another thing I think that might help too, especially with AI lately, is the whole trust signal thing. So Google has a thing called EAT. Well, now they put a second E in there. There's expertise, experience, authority, and trust. And there's not like a specific...

thing or things you can do as far as Google's concerned, right? It looks at different things, but there's some things inherently that the industry says, hey, this is an indicator that somebody can trust you. So if I land on your website or if Google lands on your website, is it trustworthy? Does it look like you know what you're talking about? Can people consider you an authority in that? And one of the things that really makes a difference that, and when I say makes a difference, this is with everything, not any one thing is really going to be like, bam, all of a sudden shoot you up to page one. But

that does help is at the bottom of your blog posts, make sure you have a bio at the bottom. I think sometimes this gets forgotten depending on the templates that happen and they can be put there automatically, but it just shows that there's a real person behind the brand. And you

Even having a contact page, that's another one that I'm really surprised at that a lot of people forget to put on their website or the about page. I know you have one, so that looks great, but there's a lot of people that don't put that out there. And that just signals to Google that you're real. It even helps build that trust with somebody who's clicking around. They're like, oh, I wonder who Jenny is. And they click about and that kind of thing. I love that you mentioned the blog and having a bio. So what I do is something a little bit different, but it does incorporate a blog.

I do what is called a hybrid blog lead gen page. Okay. So I have my blog and I use, you know, all the wonderful SEO opportunities. And then at the bottom, I actually have a bio that

And then a call to action. So I will actually have, you know, how to connect with me, book a call with me, talk about my service or whatnot. So I combine the two, but I use it as a lead generation tool as well. So on every single blog, you can actually literally book a call.

That's great because that gives them the option to get in touch with you like right there. They don't have to go click around and try and figure out where it is. Nope. It's embedded right in the page. My schedule is there. Yeah, that's perfect. Yeah. Well, I didn't come up with it myself. I did learn it off of somebody else, but I love it. I've been doing it for a couple of months now and I do see that it does help. Quite a few of the calls that I do get booked do come from that, which is fantastic. So that's a really good thing. I love that. Awesome.

What's changing? What have you seen as the biggest change? What do you also maybe, if you can give me a little bit of like crystal ball prediction, what do you think is going to be coming down the pipe? Well, that is a great question. I have not been able to figure out quite what I think is going to happen. I take that back. I guess I feel like there's going to be a lot more crap content than there has been then before, because already, at least in my world, because I see a lot of that happening, like

There's been a lot of those, what do you call them? Affiliate created websites over the years. And it's getting a little bit better where they aren't kind of taking over the search engine results pages. But a lot of times, like when my clients, we see these affiliate sites get up there and they have nothing to do with the service or the product, but they're showing up above real people. And I do feel like those are going to start to go away. It might get a little worse before it gets better, but I do feel like that's going to go away in time because...

Even us as consumers and people who are buying this stuff, we are going to get so much more less, what do you want to call it? Less tolerant of websites that don't look real or that don't offer specific information. So I think the days of creating surface level content is really just going to go away.

And I also think we're going to see a lot more video and not necessarily with people in it yet. I think people are going to explore maybe doing blog posts as videos, but without their faces, because some people don't really are comfortable with that yet. But I do think that there's going to be a lot more of that happening in the future just to set our businesses apart.

I love that because then it means that I talk about this pendulum swing. Every time something new comes into the marketplace, it gets flooded. It oversaturates. It becomes a bit of a problem because spammers, scammers, whatever, try and figure out a way to amplify and use it. And then we get this almost like self-regulated sort of tick back. Yeah.

And I see that happening with AI where everybody was like, oh, this is going to replace everybody in the marketplace. Everybody's going to use AI 24-7 and everything's going to be AI generated. And now we're seeing this sort of like shift back where people are like, hey, this blog was written by a human or this email was written by a human. And I think more people are putting more weight on that human generated content. Right.

And I literally had a conversation with a client today, an onboarding call. And I said, you know what, my social VA, she does research on chat GPT, but everything is written. And that's a differentiator now. Mm-hmm.

Versus everything being written by like ChatGPT or whatever AI, you know, insert AI name here. And I think, although it's really hard to figure out what is coming next, I still think that we constantly shift back to that authentic approach.

Right. And we still stay with like organic is never going away as far as I'm concerned. I will fight that tooth and nail to the day I die. Yeah. And I love it. But I just don't think it's going to completely go away. Yeah. If you think about it too, I feel like

Some people maybe aren't clear about the AI searching as well. They feel like you need to do something different to show up in there. But as it stands right now, those are results from existing websites, existing platforms.

rankings, like it's pulling the information from somewhere. So it's not creating new content when we're talking about AI search results, but, and even AI writing, like all of it has to come up from somewhere. So being creative or at least we're not there yet. It's still where we still need human brains to come up with creativity or think in a new way because it only knows what it knows, what it's been fed and,

And so I don't think we're quite where we, we might be, you know, Jetsons flying around 20 years, although I thought we would have been 20 years ago. But I think it's important to remember that it's still pulling from somewhere. So I think just keeping, keeping true to what we're doing right now is probably the best way to just keep going, not to freak out and like change all of our plans. Cause it's still going to be doing that for quite some time.

I agree. I agree. I think it's always going to be this balance. And I think when it comes to SEO, Google is constantly trying to update itself to stay

ahead as much as possible for the things that keep happening, right? So when somebody figures out a workaround, Google's like, nah, we're going to throttle that a little bit here, or we're going to put more emphasis on such and such. And I think that's always an interesting way to make sure that we're not getting all the bots doing all the work and causing all the problems. Yeah. It'll be interesting to see where it goes. I know my head is flooded with information for sure. I don't even...

And because too, there's a lot of people out there that have their perspective, their opinion, their biases. I think that it's hard to, it's a little bit challenging to sift through and figure out, okay, is this really real or just somebody who is like having a bad day and they're just tired of hearing all this crap? Yeah. I mean, before we wrap up, talk to me about something like a really advanced strategy that just, if you could geek out all day on, you would. Yeah.

I think using video is going to be the big one and using it in such a way that it's not just, hey, let's put together some summary of the blog post. I think being really intentional and thinking, okay, what can I do differently is really going to

be the thing that we need to talk about. And I've been saying this one for a little while lately, I feel like more than normal, just, we always have said, well, let's think outside the box. But I don't think it could be any more important than it can be right now. So having a way to do something differently, to be able to say, okay, this person actually knows what they're talking about, it actually looks different. It's not just the same old, you know, what it like, if I were to

I've been trying to do this myself, obviously, but I'm trying to do it in such a way that it's not just the same old thing with SEO. And so you can do this and you can do that. But if you sit down and do your content to like think, okay, if somebody were to land on this page,

What would I want them to know? And so I'm going to be looking at the layout. Like if I'm looking at it, what do I hope is happening? Well, I sure as hope that it's not going to be just paragraph after paragraph after paragraph. I'm hoping that maybe they'll put in some slider images or maybe they'll put in like, um, uh, a sentence. I've seen this a couple of times and it really gets my eye a sentence with one word that changes a little bit or changing the color of things. And I think, um,

That is one thing I could probably sit and just brainstorm all day with people about. I just, I love thinking about like new ways to do things. Me too. Me too. I think we need a like digital geek squad. Yeah. I interviewed, I interviewed somebody by the name of Steph Blake yesterday and she, she's pretty much the episode just before this one. And she,

Mm-hmm.

And how to customize it by adding in really cool snippets and all this kind of stuff, right? And I can geek out for days now. I can't code for my life, don't ask me. I can change a color and I can change like the padding and kind of those kinds of things, but I can't code. And to talk about it, it's just kind of fun. So I think we need to have a little group of people just kind of having geeky conversations. That would be fun. There we go. I'm down for that. Absolutely. Awesome. Where can people connect with you, find out more about you? Yeah.

The easiest way is to go to compassdigitalstrategies.com. There's all kinds of information there. Yeah, I love your website, actually. It's really, really cool. And then I get, I love the picture of Stone. Oh, so cute. Australian Kelpie dog. Oh, so adorable. Yeah, he's my little running buddy. He's pretty funny. He travels really well, too. He just kind of sits in the car and every once in a while he'll be laying in the back and he'll come up in the middle and he'll be like, okay, where are we? And then he'll go back and sleep. Yeah.

Dogs getting to see the whole country. Yep. Yep. Oh, that's amazing. Well, if your nomadic lifestyle gets you up into Canada, definitely let me know. I'll show you around Toronto. Absolutely. That would be right. All

All right, everybody. Thank you so much for listening. This podcast is obviously brought to you by the Oddphonic Podcast Network. Thank you so much to our guest, Barb Davids. And also you can find her everywhere. We will put everything into the show notes. So go and check that out. And if you want to find out more about what it is that I do and how I can support you, go to JennyWright.com. If you type in just Jenny Wright, you'll get me and an actress from the 80s, but you'll find me because Google has indexed me pretty high.

because there's only two of us. So go and do that. We'll talk to you all soon. Take care.