Lessons - How Extreme Specialization Created an 8-Figure Growth Machine | Chris Dreyer - Rankings.io Founder

In this lessons episode, discover how content quality is measured by how well it meets user intent. Learn why bounce rates and engagement reveal if your content is truly helpful. Learn how AI overviews and generative search tools are reshaping SEO strategy and learn why relevance, trust signals, and human oversight still define success in today's search-driven world. Say you can write good content and I'm curious actually what is good? I mean, like good is subjective. Does it answer the consumer's intent? Effective. That's it. So it isn't so subjective. Well, I say that is the direct answer, but let me give you some complication here. A page can have multiple forms of intent that it needs to address, okay? So if I had a page on car accidents, well, do they need a lawyer? Do they need to know what happens after car accident? Are they wondering how many car accidents occur in a city? Do they? There may be many questions that consumer asks. So that page has to answer all of those. It can't answer just one version because if it only answers the one version and a different consumer comes to the page and it doesn't answer their intent, they leave. Well, that's a bad signal, right? Bounce rates, page on time, all those things. If someone comes to your website and it's not a good piece of content and it doesn't answer intent and then they do another query similar or they go to another website for the same query, it means potentially that they that this website, this landing page did not help them. It wasn't helpful for them. And over time, if there's enough of that, Google will stop serving you in the number one position. That's that's scary because if you see a high bounce rate and low time on page, then you know that it's not answering all the questions, but you don't really know. Or I guess you could say, grow out what questions it's not answering. So there's always asterisk, right? And it depends, right? Yeah. There are, I would say the longer the query to the more specific it is, you know, what are the steps I need to take after car accident? Okay, here's the article. There's no guessing. The intent is to find in the query. But there are certain situations where a high bounce rate is absolutely okay, because they could come to the page, get their intent answered and then leave. They don't have to go to other websites. They take something like definitions, right? Nowadays, AI overviews even knows up, but define this. Okay. Well, like, do I need to write 10,000 words on this definition? Do I need multiple articles to explain? Do they do they need to visit other page? They don't. They need to go there. They get the definition they can leave. So it really depends, but it depends on your goals, on what you're trying to achieve. And a lot, but at the end of the day, it's great content. Does it answer that the consumers intent effectively? And is it endorsed by other people? Do other people vote and think it is a good piece of content? Interesting that you mentioned AI overview. So AI overview, if you Google anything, it'll give you an AI overview right at the top. I'm assuming, tell me if this is a conspiracy theory, but I think that Google is doing this so that your page isn't ranking as high anymore. People aren't going to the pages, so that that means that your force to spend more ad dollars to get a sponsored position for your page to show up. Is that the conspiracy or is that what Google is doing? Absolutely accurate. They're a for-profit business. They make the majority of their publicly traded companies revenue from Google ads. If they can make more money there, they're going to do it. I will say, it's not like the AI overview zero click scenarios didn't exist. We had rich snippets. They were zero click scenarios that showed the answer and you didn't have to click through a website. They have such market share domination. I think they're finally below 90%, but still that they can create a less satisfactory user experience to supplement their ad revenue. What does that mean for businesses and SEO? Well, it means I'll tell you this right now, I've seen a dramatic shift in the benefit of paper click ads and LSA as opposed to organic and maps. Even if you look at things like above the fold on a monitor, the things that are above the fold are typically local service ads and Google ads. After that, then you start getting AI overviews, you start getting the maps and organic. They have the best positioning from a virtual real estate perspective. What does that mean if you're a firm or a business? Well, you need to reconsider Google ads if you had tried it in the past or didn't have a lot of success because they're kind of forcing you to use it. Now, you got to get all your economies and metrics right for cost per lead, cost per acquisition, and all those all the things. But it's become and more effective because of how Google's designing Google search. Now, the interesting bit about AI is that those those AI overviews or the if you're using chat GPT or perplexity or I guess cloud wouldn't be used as or Gemini, I guess as a search tool. Yeah, I'll grog exactly. That is obviously taking some of the traffic away from Google because people are using a generative chat as search tools. But at the same time, the results in some cases are referenced to websites. So now you have an SEO game through generative chat. How do you play that game? Really like this question. See your dad on. So there's two things that you want to do. First, focus on what I would say bottom of the funnel, the your service pages, your sales pages, because it lends itself to optionality and choice, right? Back in the day, you could write a what do you do after car accident and like maybe you could get a conversion out of that. But like that's just like an evergreen topic and like it's going to be in the AI overview. But car accident lawyer of Chicago, they're going to give you some options to review. You know, how close is this firm to you? You know, what's the review rating? They're going to give you optionality. First, so I would say strategically to kind of counter the AI component. The first thing is focus bottom up of the funnel. Instead of the top of the funnel where you're trying to get awareness, I really look at Google and search engine marketing all encompassing everything on Google as a capture play more so than an awareness play. So it is it's capturing demand more so than creating demand. The the next thing is your question about geo generative engine optimization, the LMS. They the truth is no one really knows. But I will say that schema and some of these highly trusted sites are are cited. You go look at perplexity. It will definitely tell you where the citations are and chat GPT will will will give you based upon their analysis. You can start to understand where they're pulling that from. I'll give an example for myself. Right now we rank like third for SEO for lawyers. Above me is a competitor and then Clio. Well, I get on that and I remember before I was listed on Clio, I would say, you know, who's the best personal injury SEO company and I wouldn't pop up. Yet I'm on 20 other websites that say we're number one. Right clutch design, rush, competitor sites, putness number one. The one article we weren't on was Clio's. I get on that you go type in the same thing for GPT boom. So it's it's the trust signals for certain sites are different Wikipedia is a big one for LMS. And so in different categories, there are different trusted entities. It's an association and entity is an association with something. So I go really down the rabbit hole here without trying to get too nerdy. I'm a sound super nerdy. No, I love it. I love it because first of all, there is a lot of people that care about this stuff a lot of entrepreneurs are trying to figure out this new game. They're smart. But also I'm seeing I'll give you another example and then I notice now I'm playing around with the deep search tools on perplexity and chat GPT and and they both chat GPT in particular. I think they both actually show their workflow as they're going through this chat GPT's deep search for any query eight to 11 minutes. So long comparatively. But if you open up the side bar, it shows every question that it has and the source that it's going to for the answer. And I'm just so curious like some of these sources like how did to pick this source and that source and it'll go through like 20 to 30 different sources to come out with a very complex answer. It'll be it'll be cited in the actual output, but it'll also be cited in this source column as it's thinking and showing you all the websites that's navigating to. Yeah, it's it's it's unreal. It is. It's changing the game and you know, even in the AI overviews it's it's citing the source right where it's pulling from. So it's a combination all that and but I think again, typically even when you ask it, it's still going to give you multiple answers for like a business. Like who are the top whatever it typically doesn't give you one. Even on who's the best car accident lawyer if we type that what was the what was the nerdy rabbit hole that you were hesitant to go down. Well, I'm trying to think where where I was going to go with that, you know, with your schema and signals and things like that. Yeah, I'm not sure. But I think we hit it on the head. It's it's schema. It is entities. So okay, so like on the entities component. They're basically entities are associations, right? And Google, if we go back to the beginning, Google's job is to organize the web. LLM, it's it's to pull accurate sources, right? Kind of combination of both. So you take something like St. Louis. One of the first things that probably popped in your mind when you're thinking about the city of St. Louis is large, right? That's an entity, right? If you can become an entity in the city, there's an association that will help you contribute to trust and to rank in that respective city. Is there any way for a business to become an entity in a city? I think I think it's reputation. It's it's word of mouth. It's being listed in other associated other entities. So you take something like a chamber of commerce, right? In St. Louis, you're now listed as a business entity in this chamber. It goes back to old school, you know, SEO things and listings and citations. But the quicker you can do that, that's why a lot of businesses when they're expanding to their secondary market struggle. Because a lot of times they're getting a satellite office. They're not getting, they're not doing the full brick and mortar. They're not being a part of the community. Guess what? They're not a known entity in that market. That's that's the issue. Last question on this and I'm sure you get it a lot. What happens when you use a generative chat tool to write content? Well, it's significantly better. There's a lot of tools, surfer, jasper, others, a ton of them. And we've used it still ranks. It still ranks absolutely. But it still needs human oversight. It's it's it's like a tool currently. It's not a standalone still in my opinion. It's a tool to enhance productivity. So we see a lot more prompt engineering editors as opposed to manually sourcing and citing writers. There's a lot a lot of things that you can do here. There's even other tools to check for AI. There's for originality for voice. But it also I was having a conversation with a big firm in San Antonio. And I use the language like, Hey, we can do this old school because I don't really want to do it old school. I want to do cutting edge, right? I didn't want to be negative and talk down. But but it is old school now. Like I can prompt engineer something to look and evaluate the top ranking pages to determine length things I need to include to make my article better. I can take an existing piece of article and I can fill it in and say, you know, what are the weaknesses? What should I consider adding to this? So right now it's in a tool and in the hands of productivity and utilization. But you have to be careful because sometimes the sources are incorrect and and so it's used with care. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.