Jade Nangah: Hello, all you marketers out there. Welcome back to another episode of The Algorithm Isn't Enough. I am your host, Jade Nonga, and also the founder of Voice Scale, which is an employee advocacy software for B2B teams. And today I am hosting and I am joined by David Wilson. David, thank you for coming. Please introduce yourself.
David Wilson: Jay, first of all, thank you very much for having me on. It's a pleasure. ⁓ so David Wilson. ⁓ I've spent my career sort of in different chapters. I'm currently in the agency world. I work for an agency out of Boston where I I oversee our digital marketing teams. So that's paid media, SEO, social media, data analytics and AI. Before that I was in house. I've run my own agency and for a period of time I did affiliate marketing. So played played in most of the channels that ⁓ the your audience is ⁓ is interested in.
Jade Nangah: Amazing. I love that. And I love that one of the main things you talk about is if your rankings haven't moved and your visibility is dropping, like what is happening behind the scenes? Talk to me a little bit about that.
David Wilson: Well, I think the one of the questions that's been coming up over the last eighteen months is sort of what's going on with my organic traffic? Like, you know, I still have a ranking, just just go off on a tangent. I hate people who just use ranking reports because at the end of the day is did we drive traffic to your website and did it convert? And I think it's marketers, that's what's important to us, not what our rock what our rankings is. But for a lot of companies, a lot of people it's like, look, I rank One, two, or three on page one on Google, but my traffic's dropping. What's happening? And the answer is AI mode on Google has started to take that. And we work with clients organically and paid. So you've got AI mode, it's impacting paid search because that's getting pushed down the page. And then somewhere in the bottom of the page, you've got some SEO rankings. So you can rank one, two, or three, but that visibility is really disappearing. So those top of funnel searches that you had. To bring someone in and to introduce yourself to them as they went through the buyer's journey, they're disappearing. And now as marketers, we're competing for the middle of the funnel, comparison keywords, or the bottom of the funnel by keywords. And that's the big change that that we've seen. And we've working with clients to understand how can I still be number one on Google, but my organic traffic's going down.
Jade Nangah: Exactly. Talk to me a little bit about how you're getting out of that, right? I know you use the term the AI search middleman, right? So talk to me a little bit about that and earning back and stealing back some of that organic traffic.
David Wilson: So it's for us there's there's a couple of different tactics that we're using. One is explain to clients that it's a search anywhere world or search everywhere. So for the last twenty years, we've all used the one playbook. It says Google. Whether you're in paid or you're in organic, that's what you've run with. But that's changed now. The audience has become really fragmented. So your target audience doesn't matter what vertical you're in. They're on social media, they're right, they're on TikTok, they're on Instagram, they're on YouTube. They're doing the research. That's part of their buy-in process. So, you know, the content you're putting out on these channels, ⁓ do you have bland descriptions about what it's about, or do you actually have keywords and are answering questions in the descriptions that people will come up when people are doing the searches, or the AI is going to ingest and gun that's gonna pop up for you. ⁓ and also for ⁓ For that is looking and saying is, you know, what's going on from an AI standpoint, right? What's going on in chat GDP? Where are you showing up in that? Are you being cited? Are you being mentioned for what's important to you? And if you're not, then how can we change that? Right? What are those prompts you're not showing up for, which the prompts are now the new keywords, right? So how do we then build content around that that's gonna answer that, that's gonna then get cited. in that answer when someone's doing that search in chat GDP and by the way, it'll help with your Google rankings and your Google traffic, because that's gonna help with AI overview. How can we be there and take and take advantage of what's going on there across multiple platforms?
Jade Nangah: I love that. So on top of social being descriptive and utilizing those keywords, are there any other hacks or tips and tricks that you're seeing that are leading to growth in these areas?
David Wilson: I think the the big one that we are very bullish on is is podcasts. This ⁓ and on YouTube. I think as the AI models get better and better, they'll become multimodal. Multimodal means everything that was that was ingested in the old charge ETP four point ⁓ was text-based, right? So now it now it can do voice and now it can do video, not only generation, but it can it can intake it. So from a brand standpoint. You know, you appear on podcasts and those podcasts live on YouTube. That's all data then is gonna get pulled into ⁓ YouTube search, second biggest search engine in the world. It's gonna get pulled into Google Gemini, it's gonna get pulled into Chat GDP, and it's gonna surface for you. So, you know, been able to to look at the where people are and then look and seeing how to get a presence there. And I think the hack at the moment that we're seeing is podcasts is a really good way to leverage your expertise. ⁓ in front of those audiences.
Jade Nangah: I love that. And obviously I do love a good podcast as well and I'm definitely seeing That shift in the market. And as I do my research, I see that these LLMs are citing LinkedIn, YouTube, and all of that most of the time is just content that's clipped up from podcasts. So there's so much power in that. And I love to hear that that's what you guys are doubling down on. ⁓ and then obviously what we're doubling down on here at Voice Scale is employee advocacy, right? And getting your a company's employees talking about the company and what they're doing at a company. Has there been any experimentation with employee advocacy on your end? And have you seen any benefit if you have have started doing that recently.
David Wilson: So yes, it's actually much harder than you would think. Well, like when when we work with clients and it's just like ⁓ you know, you did a a LinkedIn post and you had one person in your company shared it, but you have a hundred, right? So what happened with the other ninety-nine? Why isn't that going on? But it's not just LinkedIn, it's on Instagram, it's on all of the diff ⁓ the different pieces. So so we work really hard trying to understand from a company. And how can you encourage your employees to share this content without making it mandatory? Because I think if you make it mandatory, it's sort of just like I have to do this and I hate to do this. But but explain the, you know, why it's important. And also I think from a content standpoint, is no one just wants to share PR on their link on their social font, right? So can we make it authentic? Can we share behind the scenes, right? You know, this was a we did a lunch last week to celebrate this, right? And here's here's the company video, and we can share about it. You know, I did this, it was great. We went for drinks after work, we did these different activities, we did some social and what ⁓ community work outreach work that we did. This is that. ⁓ I think that's the content that companies are not leveraging enough. And I think if they double down on that. Employee advocacy becomes a little easier because it's sharing something you're proud of versus just a corporate speak PR. And that's a really hard sell.
Jade Nangah: Exactly. And that's exactly why I built Voice Scale. Throughout my career running my agency, I piloted 16 employee advocacy programs, and all but two of them failed. And those two that did somewhat well were because I was manually writing the content for each employee to post on their socials. And then I was like, okay, obviously this is not sustainable, it's not scalable, and I built a tool for my clients. And so that's what Voice Scale does. You upload a piece of company content, and from that piece of company content generates personalized LinkedIn drugs.
David Wilson: Mm-hmm.
Jade Nangah: for each employee based on their role and in their voice, pulls from their past writing samples. There's also a feature where people can say, hey, we just want to talk about our team outing we just did, even if it's not related to a company update, where they can then have that generated for them, make any edits, and then it's one click publish to LinkedIn. That's what I've seen has been the big and easiest way to get your employees in is when they don't have to stare at the blank page to themselves and start from scratch. But then also I think incentivization, incentivization.
David Wilson: Mm-hmm.
Jade Nangah: Is another big part of it, right? If your employees are helping the company grow and boosting that brand visibility, there is so much power in giving your employees gift cards or coffees or lunch paying for lunches or small wins that again makes sense. We've seen a 10% growth in organic traffic in our voice scale clients since they've gotten at least 20 employees actively posting. They should be getting paid and rewarded for that heavily, right? Like that's a huge win and a big help.
David Wilson: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Jade Nangah: So I think that's the other phase of it is like one, don't have them sound like corporate drones, but two, don't just expect them to do something outside of their day-to-day for free.
David Wilson: Yeah, exactly. And and I think ⁓ totally agree with that. I think also the the part that companies won't f don't focus on enough is what's the impact of you having your employees post on recruitment? Because now I'm on LinkedIn and I'm ⁓ I'm an engineer and I'm looking for an engineering job in Boston and I'm looking at different companies, and I see that this engineering company, this company with engineers. It looks like they have a good time at work. It's not corporate speaker. I can see people. And I think that you know, it's not just we drove more traffic. It's I think it also plays into how does it help us from a from a recruitment standpoint, which brings all all the way back. It's like celebrate the successes that that you had, right? We got more people, we know, we have more people applied for this job, you know, you guys are doing a great work that's that share that data, not just keep it on. The HR team or the marketing team, whoever's handling the social media, right? And they just got the data. It's like celebrate it with the company. You know, go back to have pizza lunches. ⁓ if if you're in the office. If not, do something virtual and do DoorDash or Uber Eats and bring it in. So you can celebrate the successes and and get people's feedback, employees on this work. How can we make it better? Right? Tell me. What w what we can do to make this process better is to make you continue this and more likely to post next month and the month after.
Jade Nangah: Exactly. Exactly. And let's bring it even back a little bit to kind of I know ⁓ you mentioned this earlier that prompt engineering is replacing keyword strategy. Now I was like I needed to keep that in the back of my mind. I'm like, we need to go back to that at some point 'cause I do wanna dive deeper into that. Talk to me a little bit about it.
David Wilson: Yeah. So let me give you an example. My wife and I went through about six months ago. We were researching cars. My wife is petite. We knew we wanted a hybrid SUV, right? Old days, we're gonna go to Google, we're gonna type in hybrid SUVs, we're gonna get paid ads, images, all sorts of stuff. I went to Chat GDP and then said, I'm looking for a hybrid SUV, right? My wife is petite, so this is her size. I'm looking for a car that fits her. So instead of getting this blue links of 10 and page 10 links and pages and pages, I get five recommendations. These are the these are the brands, and these are the these are the ones we went and we test rode them and we bought one of them. Right? If you were not on that list, doesn't matter where you were in Google, we did not consider you at all. ⁓ And that's how it's changing. It's understanding. How are people searching for you? It's not no longer, you know, what's the best accuracy software, right? It's like, what's the best accuracy software for a nonprofit under 100 employees, right? That's the prompt that people are in. And you have to be able to understand that and see is ⁓ if that's important to me, am I showing up for it? And if, you know, am I being mentioned and not cited? ⁓ mentioned just being They mention your name on the page, but they don't link to you, which is nice. But the ultimate is you want to be mentioned inside it, because that way you're the you're the point of truth for that statement that was that was made. ⁓ so you know, that's where the direction of search is going. It's understanding these longer prompts and then being able to build content around them so you can be there to get when they those are made.
Jade Nangah: 100%. I like to refer to it as context engineering, right? Because it's all about the context of what someone's searching and why you will show up if you are creating content on that context. And actually, one of the big things that I've seen on my agency side for my clients, we've had great success with answer pages. We call these AEO answer pages. And this is a separate site of well separate page away from their blog where it's just about answers. Typically it's just whatever the site is dot com slash
David Wilson: Yes.
Jade Nangah: Answers, and this is where we can go into that context engineering and create content that goes deeply into how people search, and also the title just alone on those answer pages is: Hey, my wife is petite, and we're looking for an SUV of this size. It's exactly how someone would be asking the question: is how we title these answer pages. We've seen so much growth in rankings, sightings, and traffic from just having more and more conversations about what. what people are naturally searching for.
David Wilson: Yeah, and and it's it's a great resource for people, right? Because th that's the qu that's what they're looking for. ⁓ in the past, put my SEO hat on, we've spammed the daylights out of those pages. ⁓ and they became the is those FAQ pages that became less valuable. ⁓ hopefully with these they'll become less spammy, more valuable 'cause it's harder to put
Jade Nangah: Yeah.
David Wilson: links out to other content from them. But I love that idea and in order to to do that. And it it also allows you to to focus on what's important because you can't have a hundred answers, questions and answers on that page. You're limited to us. So it's like, you know, what are we what's really important to us? What do we really want to show up for? And it focuses the organization to really focus in on that.
Jade Nangah: Exactly. And let's talk about what's cutting through. I know you mentioned, right, that there's only so much content you can put in. There's only so many links. There's there we, you know, the spamming has been enough. What cuts through?
David Wilson: Like what what's working right now? Is that what you mean?
Jade Nangah: Yeah, what brand content it cuts through? What are you seeing that's working consistently across, especially as you and an as an agency as well, you see across many different brands. What are you seeing that's working?
David Wilson: I find we find two things. One is a one to two sentence paragraph at on the top of a page that actually explains what that page is about. ⁓ it sounds so simple. Like we all have introductory paragraphs. Most of the time it's you know, sixty to eighty words of just nonsense. Like it's just nice words, but it doesn't tell me what the page is about, right? But having a really succinct, really focused style 60 to 80 words at the top of the page, we find works really well. The other thing is we find that the LLMs have a hard time with a lot of companies understanding who they are and what they do. And where they go to get that information is the About Us page, which was the page that was the was updated when you first launched the website and no one's touched it since. And that might be five or 10 years old, right? So been able to to go back and look at the about us page and look and see is is that the description that we really want about us as a company? Can we link out to some of the press and some of our social and some of the great awards that we've won so that if ChatGDP comes to that, they can get a really good sense about who we are and what we do really well. And so to us, those are the two things that we've I find working really well, summary and the ⁓ entity. Part of SEO around the about us page.
Jade Nangah: I love that. And so let's talk about like cube rapid fire, right? What should CMO stop investing in this year?
David Wilson: Stop investing in That's a good question. Whatever's not working, right? It's it's just like it's like stop doing stuff because it feeds somebody's ego. And so I'm a big fan at the moment of digital out-of-home because I think that people got away from it because of the pandemic, which was a long time ago now. ⁓ but this there's great value in being digital out of home.
Jade Nangah: Yeah.
David Wilson: But for a lot of times people put it as a billboard up there 'cause it was a vanity, right? The CEO wanted to be able to drive down the street and s and see their billboard. So take a look at everything you're spending your money on. And if if you can't track an ROI from it, then stop doing it.
Jade Nangah: Yeah, I love that. And then let's talk about your prediction for the future, right? What is your if you had a crystal ball, right? W how do you see brand visibility looking in the next two years?
David Wilson: I would be, I am I think the next two years will be fascinating in that Chat GDP's three years old coming up on this ⁓ and look how much has changed. Look how much AI has changed in the last twelve months, right? Twelve months ago, we would bring up AI to clients and they're like, Yeah, yeah, yeah. ⁓ but about round about this time, you know, fall of last year, it took over and everyone was like, Tell us more. We've got agents coming, right? So I think as a brand, my big worry if I'm a CMO is agents are gonna come on there. How am I gonna market to them? And am I gonna lose control of my narrative? So if you go back to the cast, right? It was if I remember it was Kia, it was Hyundai, it was Honda, it was Toyota, and there was someone else, and I forget who it was. And right, but there was no Jeep, there was no Ford.
Jade Nangah: Yeah.
David Wilson: There was no GM. There's right, there's a whole bunch of different brands. We're not part of that. And if I'm a CMO, I'm really worried that that's going to happen to me, not just in cars, but across everything, because people are going to give these agents and say, go find me this. Like I wanna go on a on a vacation to Insert Beach Place. And with my family, this is what we like to do. You have my history, you know the things I like to do. Go find me something. Well, you know, all of these companies that spend years and decades building out a story, well, if the AI doesn't know it or can't read it, they're just gonna keep on going, right? So the content you're putting out as a company, it has to be agent friendly going forward. Your website's gotta be agent friendly. The content you're putting out has to be agent friendly, it's gotta be human friendly too.
Jade Nangah: Yeah.
David Wilson: So it's it's it has to work for both. But the the prediction is part of this is we're heading very rapidly into an age agentic economy. ⁓ and that has to threat that has to really worry CMOs because you will lose control of your brand voice if you're not really careful.
Jade Nangah: Exactly. I love that. David, tell the marketers out there how can they reach out to you, speak with you, connect with you, etc.
David Wilson: ⁓ easiest place is on LinkedIn. ⁓ Wilson David R ⁓ is my LinkedIn profile.
Jade Nangah: Amazing. David, thank you so much for sharing your insights and your expertise with us today. For all you marketers out there, thank you for listening to another episode of The Algorithm Isn't Enough. You heard how you can reach David. I will have his details in the show notes below. And again, for all of you out there looking to experiment with employee advocacy, Voice Scale is your one stop shop for that. Thank you for listening. We're continuing and hoping the best for all of our brands and all of our growth and all of our visibility. So we will see you guys in the next. Next one. Bye bye.
David Wilson: Thanks.
David Wilson: Jay, first of all, thank you very much for having me on. It's a pleasure. ⁓ so David Wilson. ⁓ I've spent my career sort of in different chapters. I'm currently in the agency world. I work for an agency out of Boston where I I oversee our digital marketing teams. So that's paid media, SEO, social media, data analytics and AI. Before that I was in house. I've run my own agency and for a period of time I did affiliate marketing. So played played in most of the channels that ⁓ the your audience is ⁓ is interested in.
Jade Nangah: Amazing. I love that. And I love that one of the main things you talk about is if your rankings haven't moved and your visibility is dropping, like what is happening behind the scenes? Talk to me a little bit about that.
David Wilson: Well, I think the one of the questions that's been coming up over the last eighteen months is sort of what's going on with my organic traffic? Like, you know, I still have a ranking, just just go off on a tangent. I hate people who just use ranking reports because at the end of the day is did we drive traffic to your website and did it convert? And I think it's marketers, that's what's important to us, not what our rock what our rankings is. But for a lot of companies, a lot of people it's like, look, I rank One, two, or three on page one on Google, but my traffic's dropping. What's happening? And the answer is AI mode on Google has started to take that. And we work with clients organically and paid. So you've got AI mode, it's impacting paid search because that's getting pushed down the page. And then somewhere in the bottom of the page, you've got some SEO rankings. So you can rank one, two, or three, but that visibility is really disappearing. So those top of funnel searches that you had. To bring someone in and to introduce yourself to them as they went through the buyer's journey, they're disappearing. And now as marketers, we're competing for the middle of the funnel, comparison keywords, or the bottom of the funnel by keywords. And that's the big change that that we've seen. And we've working with clients to understand how can I still be number one on Google, but my organic traffic's going down.
Jade Nangah: Exactly. Talk to me a little bit about how you're getting out of that, right? I know you use the term the AI search middleman, right? So talk to me a little bit about that and earning back and stealing back some of that organic traffic.
David Wilson: So it's for us there's there's a couple of different tactics that we're using. One is explain to clients that it's a search anywhere world or search everywhere. So for the last twenty years, we've all used the one playbook. It says Google. Whether you're in paid or you're in organic, that's what you've run with. But that's changed now. The audience has become really fragmented. So your target audience doesn't matter what vertical you're in. They're on social media, they're right, they're on TikTok, they're on Instagram, they're on YouTube. They're doing the research. That's part of their buy-in process. So, you know, the content you're putting out on these channels, ⁓ do you have bland descriptions about what it's about, or do you actually have keywords and are answering questions in the descriptions that people will come up when people are doing the searches, or the AI is going to ingest and gun that's gonna pop up for you. ⁓ and also for ⁓ For that is looking and saying is, you know, what's going on from an AI standpoint, right? What's going on in chat GDP? Where are you showing up in that? Are you being cited? Are you being mentioned for what's important to you? And if you're not, then how can we change that? Right? What are those prompts you're not showing up for, which the prompts are now the new keywords, right? So how do we then build content around that that's gonna answer that, that's gonna then get cited. in that answer when someone's doing that search in chat GDP and by the way, it'll help with your Google rankings and your Google traffic, because that's gonna help with AI overview. How can we be there and take and take advantage of what's going on there across multiple platforms?
Jade Nangah: I love that. So on top of social being descriptive and utilizing those keywords, are there any other hacks or tips and tricks that you're seeing that are leading to growth in these areas?
David Wilson: I think the the big one that we are very bullish on is is podcasts. This ⁓ and on YouTube. I think as the AI models get better and better, they'll become multimodal. Multimodal means everything that was that was ingested in the old charge ETP four point ⁓ was text-based, right? So now it now it can do voice and now it can do video, not only generation, but it can it can intake it. So from a brand standpoint. You know, you appear on podcasts and those podcasts live on YouTube. That's all data then is gonna get pulled into ⁓ YouTube search, second biggest search engine in the world. It's gonna get pulled into Google Gemini, it's gonna get pulled into Chat GDP, and it's gonna surface for you. So, you know, been able to to look at the where people are and then look and seeing how to get a presence there. And I think the hack at the moment that we're seeing is podcasts is a really good way to leverage your expertise. ⁓ in front of those audiences.
Jade Nangah: I love that. And obviously I do love a good podcast as well and I'm definitely seeing That shift in the market. And as I do my research, I see that these LLMs are citing LinkedIn, YouTube, and all of that most of the time is just content that's clipped up from podcasts. So there's so much power in that. And I love to hear that that's what you guys are doubling down on. ⁓ and then obviously what we're doubling down on here at Voice Scale is employee advocacy, right? And getting your a company's employees talking about the company and what they're doing at a company. Has there been any experimentation with employee advocacy on your end? And have you seen any benefit if you have have started doing that recently.
David Wilson: So yes, it's actually much harder than you would think. Well, like when when we work with clients and it's just like ⁓ you know, you did a a LinkedIn post and you had one person in your company shared it, but you have a hundred, right? So what happened with the other ninety-nine? Why isn't that going on? But it's not just LinkedIn, it's on Instagram, it's on all of the diff ⁓ the different pieces. So so we work really hard trying to understand from a company. And how can you encourage your employees to share this content without making it mandatory? Because I think if you make it mandatory, it's sort of just like I have to do this and I hate to do this. But but explain the, you know, why it's important. And also I think from a content standpoint, is no one just wants to share PR on their link on their social font, right? So can we make it authentic? Can we share behind the scenes, right? You know, this was a we did a lunch last week to celebrate this, right? And here's here's the company video, and we can share about it. You know, I did this, it was great. We went for drinks after work, we did these different activities, we did some social and what ⁓ community work outreach work that we did. This is that. ⁓ I think that's the content that companies are not leveraging enough. And I think if they double down on that. Employee advocacy becomes a little easier because it's sharing something you're proud of versus just a corporate speak PR. And that's a really hard sell.
Jade Nangah: Exactly. And that's exactly why I built Voice Scale. Throughout my career running my agency, I piloted 16 employee advocacy programs, and all but two of them failed. And those two that did somewhat well were because I was manually writing the content for each employee to post on their socials. And then I was like, okay, obviously this is not sustainable, it's not scalable, and I built a tool for my clients. And so that's what Voice Scale does. You upload a piece of company content, and from that piece of company content generates personalized LinkedIn drugs.
David Wilson: Mm-hmm.
Jade Nangah: for each employee based on their role and in their voice, pulls from their past writing samples. There's also a feature where people can say, hey, we just want to talk about our team outing we just did, even if it's not related to a company update, where they can then have that generated for them, make any edits, and then it's one click publish to LinkedIn. That's what I've seen has been the big and easiest way to get your employees in is when they don't have to stare at the blank page to themselves and start from scratch. But then also I think incentivization, incentivization.
David Wilson: Mm-hmm.
Jade Nangah: Is another big part of it, right? If your employees are helping the company grow and boosting that brand visibility, there is so much power in giving your employees gift cards or coffees or lunch paying for lunches or small wins that again makes sense. We've seen a 10% growth in organic traffic in our voice scale clients since they've gotten at least 20 employees actively posting. They should be getting paid and rewarded for that heavily, right? Like that's a huge win and a big help.
David Wilson: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Jade Nangah: So I think that's the other phase of it is like one, don't have them sound like corporate drones, but two, don't just expect them to do something outside of their day-to-day for free.
David Wilson: Yeah, exactly. And and I think ⁓ totally agree with that. I think also the the part that companies won't f don't focus on enough is what's the impact of you having your employees post on recruitment? Because now I'm on LinkedIn and I'm ⁓ I'm an engineer and I'm looking for an engineering job in Boston and I'm looking at different companies, and I see that this engineering company, this company with engineers. It looks like they have a good time at work. It's not corporate speaker. I can see people. And I think that you know, it's not just we drove more traffic. It's I think it also plays into how does it help us from a from a recruitment standpoint, which brings all all the way back. It's like celebrate the successes that that you had, right? We got more people, we know, we have more people applied for this job, you know, you guys are doing a great work that's that share that data, not just keep it on. The HR team or the marketing team, whoever's handling the social media, right? And they just got the data. It's like celebrate it with the company. You know, go back to have pizza lunches. ⁓ if if you're in the office. If not, do something virtual and do DoorDash or Uber Eats and bring it in. So you can celebrate the successes and and get people's feedback, employees on this work. How can we make it better? Right? Tell me. What w what we can do to make this process better is to make you continue this and more likely to post next month and the month after.
Jade Nangah: Exactly. Exactly. And let's bring it even back a little bit to kind of I know ⁓ you mentioned this earlier that prompt engineering is replacing keyword strategy. Now I was like I needed to keep that in the back of my mind. I'm like, we need to go back to that at some point 'cause I do wanna dive deeper into that. Talk to me a little bit about it.
David Wilson: Yeah. So let me give you an example. My wife and I went through about six months ago. We were researching cars. My wife is petite. We knew we wanted a hybrid SUV, right? Old days, we're gonna go to Google, we're gonna type in hybrid SUVs, we're gonna get paid ads, images, all sorts of stuff. I went to Chat GDP and then said, I'm looking for a hybrid SUV, right? My wife is petite, so this is her size. I'm looking for a car that fits her. So instead of getting this blue links of 10 and page 10 links and pages and pages, I get five recommendations. These are the these are the brands, and these are the these are the ones we went and we test rode them and we bought one of them. Right? If you were not on that list, doesn't matter where you were in Google, we did not consider you at all. ⁓ And that's how it's changing. It's understanding. How are people searching for you? It's not no longer, you know, what's the best accuracy software, right? It's like, what's the best accuracy software for a nonprofit under 100 employees, right? That's the prompt that people are in. And you have to be able to understand that and see is ⁓ if that's important to me, am I showing up for it? And if, you know, am I being mentioned and not cited? ⁓ mentioned just being They mention your name on the page, but they don't link to you, which is nice. But the ultimate is you want to be mentioned inside it, because that way you're the you're the point of truth for that statement that was that was made. ⁓ so you know, that's where the direction of search is going. It's understanding these longer prompts and then being able to build content around them so you can be there to get when they those are made.
Jade Nangah: 100%. I like to refer to it as context engineering, right? Because it's all about the context of what someone's searching and why you will show up if you are creating content on that context. And actually, one of the big things that I've seen on my agency side for my clients, we've had great success with answer pages. We call these AEO answer pages. And this is a separate site of well separate page away from their blog where it's just about answers. Typically it's just whatever the site is dot com slash
David Wilson: Yes.
Jade Nangah: Answers, and this is where we can go into that context engineering and create content that goes deeply into how people search, and also the title just alone on those answer pages is: Hey, my wife is petite, and we're looking for an SUV of this size. It's exactly how someone would be asking the question: is how we title these answer pages. We've seen so much growth in rankings, sightings, and traffic from just having more and more conversations about what. what people are naturally searching for.
David Wilson: Yeah, and and it's it's a great resource for people, right? Because th that's the qu that's what they're looking for. ⁓ in the past, put my SEO hat on, we've spammed the daylights out of those pages. ⁓ and they became the is those FAQ pages that became less valuable. ⁓ hopefully with these they'll become less spammy, more valuable 'cause it's harder to put
Jade Nangah: Yeah.
David Wilson: links out to other content from them. But I love that idea and in order to to do that. And it it also allows you to to focus on what's important because you can't have a hundred answers, questions and answers on that page. You're limited to us. So it's like, you know, what are we what's really important to us? What do we really want to show up for? And it focuses the organization to really focus in on that.
Jade Nangah: Exactly. And let's talk about what's cutting through. I know you mentioned, right, that there's only so much content you can put in. There's only so many links. There's there we, you know, the spamming has been enough. What cuts through?
David Wilson: Like what what's working right now? Is that what you mean?
Jade Nangah: Yeah, what brand content it cuts through? What are you seeing that's working consistently across, especially as you and an as an agency as well, you see across many different brands. What are you seeing that's working?
David Wilson: I find we find two things. One is a one to two sentence paragraph at on the top of a page that actually explains what that page is about. ⁓ it sounds so simple. Like we all have introductory paragraphs. Most of the time it's you know, sixty to eighty words of just nonsense. Like it's just nice words, but it doesn't tell me what the page is about, right? But having a really succinct, really focused style 60 to 80 words at the top of the page, we find works really well. The other thing is we find that the LLMs have a hard time with a lot of companies understanding who they are and what they do. And where they go to get that information is the About Us page, which was the page that was the was updated when you first launched the website and no one's touched it since. And that might be five or 10 years old, right? So been able to to go back and look at the about us page and look and see is is that the description that we really want about us as a company? Can we link out to some of the press and some of our social and some of the great awards that we've won so that if ChatGDP comes to that, they can get a really good sense about who we are and what we do really well. And so to us, those are the two things that we've I find working really well, summary and the ⁓ entity. Part of SEO around the about us page.
Jade Nangah: I love that. And so let's talk about like cube rapid fire, right? What should CMO stop investing in this year?
David Wilson: Stop investing in That's a good question. Whatever's not working, right? It's it's just like it's like stop doing stuff because it feeds somebody's ego. And so I'm a big fan at the moment of digital out-of-home because I think that people got away from it because of the pandemic, which was a long time ago now. ⁓ but this there's great value in being digital out of home.
Jade Nangah: Yeah.
David Wilson: But for a lot of times people put it as a billboard up there 'cause it was a vanity, right? The CEO wanted to be able to drive down the street and s and see their billboard. So take a look at everything you're spending your money on. And if if you can't track an ROI from it, then stop doing it.
Jade Nangah: Yeah, I love that. And then let's talk about your prediction for the future, right? What is your if you had a crystal ball, right? W how do you see brand visibility looking in the next two years?
David Wilson: I would be, I am I think the next two years will be fascinating in that Chat GDP's three years old coming up on this ⁓ and look how much has changed. Look how much AI has changed in the last twelve months, right? Twelve months ago, we would bring up AI to clients and they're like, Yeah, yeah, yeah. ⁓ but about round about this time, you know, fall of last year, it took over and everyone was like, Tell us more. We've got agents coming, right? So I think as a brand, my big worry if I'm a CMO is agents are gonna come on there. How am I gonna market to them? And am I gonna lose control of my narrative? So if you go back to the cast, right? It was if I remember it was Kia, it was Hyundai, it was Honda, it was Toyota, and there was someone else, and I forget who it was. And right, but there was no Jeep, there was no Ford.
Jade Nangah: Yeah.
David Wilson: There was no GM. There's right, there's a whole bunch of different brands. We're not part of that. And if I'm a CMO, I'm really worried that that's going to happen to me, not just in cars, but across everything, because people are going to give these agents and say, go find me this. Like I wanna go on a on a vacation to Insert Beach Place. And with my family, this is what we like to do. You have my history, you know the things I like to do. Go find me something. Well, you know, all of these companies that spend years and decades building out a story, well, if the AI doesn't know it or can't read it, they're just gonna keep on going, right? So the content you're putting out as a company, it has to be agent friendly going forward. Your website's gotta be agent friendly. The content you're putting out has to be agent friendly, it's gotta be human friendly too.
Jade Nangah: Yeah.
David Wilson: So it's it's it has to work for both. But the the prediction is part of this is we're heading very rapidly into an age agentic economy. ⁓ and that has to threat that has to really worry CMOs because you will lose control of your brand voice if you're not really careful.
Jade Nangah: Exactly. I love that. David, tell the marketers out there how can they reach out to you, speak with you, connect with you, etc.
David Wilson: ⁓ easiest place is on LinkedIn. ⁓ Wilson David R ⁓ is my LinkedIn profile.
Jade Nangah: Amazing. David, thank you so much for sharing your insights and your expertise with us today. For all you marketers out there, thank you for listening to another episode of The Algorithm Isn't Enough. You heard how you can reach David. I will have his details in the show notes below. And again, for all of you out there looking to experiment with employee advocacy, Voice Scale is your one stop shop for that. Thank you for listening. We're continuing and hoping the best for all of our brands and all of our growth and all of our visibility. So we will see you guys in the next. Next one. Bye bye.
David Wilson: Thanks.
