00:00 – 10:00
Today on The Engaging Marketeer, I am interviewing Peter Murphy Lewis from the United States. Peter is an SEO and video content marketing expert. So we’re going to be having some in-depth chats about content, how he started his business, how he fought against the big boys, and how he has literally just sold it—although, spoiler alert, he’s not going to tell me how much for, so don’t hold on for that one. And he’s also going to be asking me questions about SEO and putting me on the spot. Thanks for that one, Peter.
But let’s find out how well I do when the tables are turned with Peter Murphy Lewis.
You’re in the digital marketing space. You’re in the SEO industry. Can you tell us how you got started in that—the short version?
Peter:
Is the short version… cut it down to about three or four hours? Go on.
The short version is I ran my own travel company in South America, and it was before travel embraced digitalisation. People were still buying Frommer’s and Lonely Planet books, and that’s how people were finding me. And I think I was one of the first travel companies to have a strong website, and then the first travel company to do all the bookings online, and then the first travel company to do everything in SEO.
So I would never consider myself a professional, but I mean, I paid—I paid—I had to. I made money based off what I did well or didn’t do well, so I put my mouth where my money is—or my money where my mouth is.
Darren:
You put your mouth where your money is. I like that. But you say you don’t consider yourself a professional, but in many ways, you’ve got more experience than most professionals because you started doing it for your own business.
Peter:
That’s true. True. I feel lucky because I didn’t have a lot of strong competition back then. I was never technical. I was never an expert. I was just better than everybody else at the time.
Now, as my company grew—we got almost to 50 full-time contractors or employees in four different cities and so forth—obviously, I scaled. My role there was marketer and owner, so I ended up hiring a lot better people. And I’ve done it multiple times.
But as you know, the SEO game changes, and right now it’s in complete disarray.
Darren:
Well, I was going to ask about that because obviously SEO does change. What year was this when you started the travel company?
Peter:
2007. We opened our doors. We built the company in November 2007. We opened our doors on February 1st, 2008, with a website. And I bet by 2010, probably 80% of our customers were all buying online.
Darren:
Wow.
Peter:
And most of them—because it was a travel company, and it was in South America—most of our people were buying tours online before they travelled to Chile. So they’d buy their tours in advance and then travel there.
Darren:
Mhm. Okay, so you were targeting presumably mostly North American customers?
Peter:
North America and Western Europe.
Darren:
Okay. So who were your competitors at the time then?
Peter:
Competitors at the time were traditional bus tours. The bus tours that you’d have in London or New York or Paris. And we were doing bicycle tours, walking tours, wine tours, and then kind of high-end five-star packages—luxury packages to Atacama, Easter Island and Patagonia and those things.
To chip away at the institutional tourism chain of commissions and tour operators and hotels—our only advantage was online at the beginning.
10:00 – 20:00
Darren:
So what were you doing to give you this advantage over your competitors? What tactics were you using?
Peter:
Well, SEO at the beginning. The second thing was TripAdvisor, right? So, like, the larger companies that were doing, you know, $2 to $10 million in revenue per year didn’t even care about those things. They just had a system up. They couldn’t see.
I feel like they got slapped in the face like Blockbuster did when they were still renting out DVDs and VHS. And then after we built up the revenue and built up the team and built up our brand, then our guerrilla marketing was by far the best, right?
That’s what got us in New York Times twice. Paul McCartney booked with us twice. Beyoncé and Aerosmith. So then we kind of became really, really trendy.
I just exited this company yesterday, Darren.
Darren:
Yesterday?
Peter:
We signed the papers yesterday with my business partner, and I told him he could no longer call me partner—he could call me friend.
Darren:
And are you allowed to tell us what that deal was?
Peter:
No.
Darren:
No?
Peter:
No.
Darren:
Can you give us an indication—is it a deal that you are very, very happy with?
Peter:
I can tell you it was such a perfect deal for both of us, we didn’t need attorneys.
Darren:
Oh wow.
Peter:
That’s right. We started the conversation—2022. And he wanted to continue putting more money into it—post-COVID. And I said, okay, let’s test it, let’s do a first year, get it running, up and going. And then he got it up and going, and he said, “I want to take this on.” I said, “I’m out. I’m a fractional CMO at this point, I’m doing TV shows, I’m doing documentaries—let’s give it to you.”
So we came up with a very fair agreement for both of us. It was overtime and gentle. And I need to transfer the domains to him soon, Darren. When we’re done with this, I need to go get him those.
Darren:
So that’s your next step—is to transfer the domains.
Right. Okay, well speaking of domains, one of the things that you wanted to talk about specifically was domain authority. So for those listening to this that maybe don’t know what that means, can you explain what domain authority is and what it means to you?
Peter:
I’ll explain the way that I approach it when speaking to a non-marketer. So a CEO—that’s the majority of my clients, CEOs who aren’t marketers and need support in this area. They’re working with a bunch of agencies. I try to explain how people—what people’s first impression is of you as a person, as an executive, a CEO, as a founder, as your company—before they ever interact with you.
Today, that is not just SEO. That’s LinkedIn. If you have the bandwidth, that’s YouTube. It’s definitely AI, right?
Like, you know, I’m pitching a new documentary to a bunch of larger investors in Latin America, because I’ve been doing documentaries for some time now and I’m trying to move into Latin America. And I did all of the work yesterday—every single piece of the work—on AI.
And before I pitch to these investors, I then use AI and say, “Find any lawsuits, find me negative press on them. What do people talk about them on Glassdoor? What are they like to work with?” Right?
So I’m not just doing, “Who’s the person who has the opportunity for me?” I’m also checking if I actually want to work with them. And that domain authority has changed with the arrival of AI.
And now I don’t just look up a brand—I look up a person. Right? We have so much more access to people’s information.
Darren:
Yeah, and there’s quite a famous example going around right now through North America—I should explain this is being recorded in April—with a particular business, where its head, because he’s not actually the founder, is causing a lot of problems for the business by the stuff that he’s doing with the US government.
Peter:
Mr Musk.
Darren:
You’ve heard of him?
Peter:
I’ve heard of him.
Darren:
You’ve heard of him. Damaging the business because even though he’s not involved necessarily in the day-to-day, he is affecting the brand. And what he does is having a negative impact on the brand and causing problems with the share price of the business and the sales of the products across the globe.
You can have that as a founder, as a business owner, can’t you?
Peter:
Yeah. I mean, just as much as you can have a positive impact on it, right? That’s why I publish every single day on LinkedIn. You know, I’m a keynote speaker. You can have the negative impact, and the negative impact not only is faster—it’s harder to recover from.
Darren:
Yeah.
Peter:
I would love to be in the boardroom and see what his shareholders are talking to him about.
Darren:
It’s not going to be pleasant, is it?
Peter:
It’s not going to be pleasant. You know, speaking of it—I had a friend. I’m not very political, I’m pretty middle of the road and everything with politics, but I have a Democrat liberal friend last week who went to protest at Tesla stores. And he travelled like three hours for it.
So like, it’s definitely impacted his brand in some way or another.
20:00 – 30:00
Darren:
Absolutely. So when you were running this business and you were doing the SEO, you mentioned how it was easier back then because there weren’t as many people doing it. What sort of things from an SEO perspective were you doing that your competitors weren’t back in 2007–2008?
Peter:
Oh, you know, this brings up good memories. Simple things that I did well, but not knowing that they were going to have the impact that they did, which was—we had about, I would say, 100 interns come through our company in the first 10 years of existence. The company is now going on almost 20 years right now.
And 100 interns in the first—we had every single intern document their first couple weeks arriving to Santiago, Chile. So we talked about what restaurants they went to, if they stayed at a hostel, a hotel, what bus they took, what about local culture. And it ended up being kind of like the way people use Reddit today.
But in 2007, 2010, 2013, Reddit didn’t have the presence that it has today on Google. So people were just coming to our website and realising how to move around, how to get to Viña del Mar on your own. They were using us kind of like a Wikipedia.
Now, I didn’t do that 100% from an SEO strategy at the beginning. I mostly did it to make these people feel part of the team and keep our website active. But after about a year and a half, I realised that we were ranking on tons of keywords that were top of funnel—like best hotel to stay at or which vineyard can I get to by subway.
All of that had a positive impact on us from a numbers point of view.
Today, I no longer oversee the written content team. We have three people on our team who are spending almost all of their energy writing. And they’re much more technical, they’re much more advanced than me.
I can still read Ahrefs and so forth, but now what I’m into is I’m trying to figure out how we can repurpose all of that content across other channels. So our blogs—we’re turning into YouTube videos. We’re putting those on LinkedIn articles. Then we’re going in and we’re writing questions on Reddit. We’re putting an answer to the Reddit with the links over to these pages that aren’t sales pages.
And then Google obviously gives a significant percentage of its search real estate to YouTube. So as soon as you can—as soon as you can rank on YouTube—you’re going to outrank some of your competitors by doing a process like that.
I don’t have it perfect—I wouldn’t sell this to someone—but I am fine-tuning it right now.
Darren:
Yeah, so what you were doing effectively is what a lot of digital marketing companies started talking about quite heavily—when are we now? We’re in April—end of last year, middle of last year perhaps—which is employee-generated content, EGC.
Because we’ve had UGC—user-generated content—for a long time, but employee-generated content is something that only really coined its phrase last year, and yet you were doing it, what, almost 20 years ago?
Peter:
Yeah.
Darren:
Which is quite groundbreaking really to be doing that.
Peter:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean—and you know, as I said, it was luck at the beginning, mostly around culture.
Darren:
So have you seen SEO in its many forms change over the years? And did anything happen after 2007 that caused you concern?
Peter:
Well, I made some mistakes along the way, so I’ll tell you the mistakes so you and I can chuckle, and then move to how I see things changing.
Because I was in a mastermind yesterday for 90 minutes, only around SEO and AI, and there were 20 people in the room—every single one of them smarter than me.
So, my mistakes had to do with like messing up the target inside of Google Search Console and telling analytics where we wanted our traffic to grow. I don’t know who did this, but as the owner and co-founder, blame me. So whether I hired a contractor or hired a full-time SEO agency, whatever it is—or it was me—at one point in 2011 or 2012, we did something inside of Google Search Console where we told people that our majority of traffic should be from Chile.
And we completely destroyed our traffic. Destroyed our traffic.
And what was stupid about it—back then, I wasn’t the organised kind of entrepreneur that I am today. I didn’t have a scorecard following leading metrics and trailing metrics to know every single seven days what’s going up or what’s going down, to know how it’s going to impact my revenue.
I found out three months too late when I tanked my revenue. And then, you know, had to go in and make that simple adjustment back inside of Search Console. And it took a while to recover—but it did.
Darren:
So a simple change in Search Console—something that you can do in literally 30 seconds, a minute—cost you $200,000?
Peter:
Yeah. Yeah. My fault.
Darren:
But going up to—you know—speeding up to kind of how things are today. Yesterday in this mastermind—from a really cool group that I belong to called Rodium—there were just these brilliant SEO experts who have all made lots and lots of money over the last 10 years. These people own five to forty content sites and just rolling it in—rolling it in—all brilliant people.
And they’ve all seen their sites been hit in the last year to year and a half by Google updates. And yesterday they were all talking about where do we put our energy from an AI point of view. How are we telling people to read our sites? What do we want them to read? What are the tools to keep track?
And, you know, they asked me—because this is a six-week sprint—and they said, “Every two weeks we’re meeting, we want to know what you’re going to do when you’re done with the session today.” And they called out everybody.
I said, “I’m here to know what I can do less of.” Because I am—I feel like I’m throwing paint at the wall trying to solve and fix SEO problems for different clients that have been hit over time.
And I said, “We’re doing too much. We just need to slow down and do one or two things.” I don’t have the answer to that—hopefully I’ll know in six weeks.
But man, if this is confusing to a marketer like me—maybe it’s a lot less so to you, Darren—but if it’s confusing to a marketer, think about what it’s like for a non-marketer.
Darren:
Right.
Peter:
Like the CEO who saw their traffic—like HubSpot—who got their traffic hit in the last six months. What does their board think of that?
Darren:
No, I mean, you’re absolutely right. They won’t have a clue. Well, no reason to know what’s going on. They’ll be doing the same thing they’ve always done, and something just suddenly changed.
“What happened? What changed? Why did it happen? Why did it happen to us? What have we done wrong?” It’s like—they haven’t changed anything.
“How do we fix it?” That’s the key.
And the vast majority of people are not going to have a clue—especially when the experts are looking around to see what is it we’re going to do. Nobody seems to know.
30:00 – 40:00
Darren:
Nobody seems to know what’s going to happen. It’s very much up in the air. It’s like—we’ve been travelling—we’ve been fighting a lot lately with Google’s AI Overview, because that came in—when was it? Back end of last—or sorry, the beginning of last year I think that started to get a bit of traction.
We’ve always had Google Featured Snippets for clients, bringing thousands and thousands of visitors for one particular piece of content through a Featured Snippet per year. And that has just suddenly gone, because it’s now all AI Overview.
How do you replace that? What can you do?
Peter:
I don’t think there’s anything you can do to replace that traffic.
Darren:
I don’t think so either.
Peter:
I—you know—there’s, I can tell you that there’s one simple—
It sounds like you’re an SEO expert, or at least part of your team dabbles in this—one thing that has worked for us for the last nine months very effectively, and I don’t think that this is going to change in the near term, which is having a PR backlink strategy that’s legitimate.
Right? So we send—every Wednesday—we send an email that goes out. We send out three different emails with three different pitches to a thousand different journalists. And we’re getting three to fifteen backlinks with my quotes, with my voice, with my name, that are being done by my team. And we see our domain rating going up and up and up, despite the fact we don’t know 100% what’s working and not working from an SEO point of view.
And so that—that process—that’s actionable, right? Like if you’re a small entrepreneur with a four-man team, that process—I don’t think that the serious backlinks that you can get from new media and traditional media—I don’t imagine Google punishing anyone for doing legitimate work in the next two years.
Darren:
No, I’d agree with that. I’d agree with that. And PR outreach has always been a superb way to build domain authority. It’s just a question for most business owners on time.
How do they spend the time doing it? How do they find the right sites to go to?
And you said you’re sending—was it three different versions out to a thousand journalists?
Peter:
Yes.
Darren:
How are you—I mean, maybe this is your trade secret, I don’t know—but how are you finding a thousand journalists to send them out to?
Peter:
There are tools. So—I don’t remember the names of them. One of them is Press Jockey. So there’s like five different versions of tools like Press Jockey or competitive companies that do like Helping a Reporter Out. There’s a whole bunch of those in that space now.
Darren:
Oh yeah. HARO.
Peter:
Yeah. So journalists—those journalists are giving their email away. So you’re not going to be flagged for cold email. Their emails—and as long as your pitch is good, and you’re not hounding them over and over and over—they’re not going to mark you.
And we get positive replies.
Now, back to your question like “Do you have the time?” Honestly, I didn’t have any time to do this until a year ago. But what I can tell you is, if I knew what I know now, I just would have hired someone to do it.
I think that you could, in theory, find someone who’s doing as great a job as I am for my own company with my team, for probably $2,000 a month. And if domain authority is important for you—if traffic is important for you—$2,000 a month for something that’s going to be here in two years—you know, that’s paying for branding, not advertising.
It’s going to build you up, and you won’t have to pay for that in the future. It’s a compound effect.
Darren:
It’s a compound effect, yeah. Because that’s something I talk about a lot when clients ask me—business owners ask me—you know, where should I put my money? Should I put it into SEO, or should I put it into Google Ads or Facebook Ads?
They get instant results, and it’s all about the compound effect. Google Ads—you switch them off—that’s it. They’re gone. Whereas SEO will compound over time. Content will compound over time. And you can get traffic, you can get leads, you can get enquiries, you can get sales from a piece of content you did fifteen years ago.
Peter:
And depending on how competitive your industry is, Darren, you need to be careful. There are serious competitors. You know, the number one players in a market space are going to send bots and VA agencies to spend your ad budget.
So I worked in enterprise SaaS. We were selling large contracts of electronic healthcare records—$25,000 to $150,000 a year contracts. And all of our ad spend was being taken up by some agency. And we could never figure out who it was.
And we just quit doing ads. And we put all of our time into SEO—all of it. And we grew. You know, we rebranded from zero visitors to 44,000 visitors in a year and a half. When we exited the company, we sold the company through private equity.
But thank God I didn’t spend a year and a half focusing on ads.
Darren:
It’s frightening that that’s still possible—that you can run ads, and somebody can basically just burn through your ad budget.
Peter:
Well, I mean—our competitor was doing $500 million a year in revenue. They probably paid some agency in a third-world country $10,000 a month and said, “Just eat up all of our competitors’ ad budget.”
Darren:
Just had someone clicking away using VPNs.
Peter:
Right. They would even fill out our forms with emails and stuff to make it look more realistic.
Darren:
So Google could be full of shit.
Peter:
Yes.
Darren:
So top tip for people listening to this—don’t bother with Google Ads.
Peter:
Yeah, or don’t piss off the number one player in the market space.
Darren:
Yeah, but you’re going to want to do that, aren’t you? If you’re going to want to grow your business, you’re going to have to do that. It’s unavoidable.
Peter:
It’s unavoidable. Because—you know—they might buy you.
Darren:
Well, the other affordable option is have a great podcast like you, Darren. And that will help you growth hack as well.
Peter:
Wow, yeah.
Darren:
Yeah, I didn’t want to mention it, but thank you for the plug.
Peter:
Your competitors aren’t downloading your Spotify episodes to inflate your metrics.
Darren:
And they can’t make you waste money.
Peter:
They can’t do that.
Darren:
No. No. But if they want to do that—they can—well, please go ahead.
Peter:
They can’t make us any uglier than we already are.
Darren:
I’m married. She—I mean, like, I’m ready. I’m good.
Peter:
Oh, I don’t know. With AI you can do—I turned myself into a muppet the other day, and I got absolutely butchered by it. I don’t know what went wrong. It was horrific.
Darren:
VidIQ—VidIQ’s thumbnail autogenerator made me bald yesterday. Nasty. The only thing I really have in life is glasses and good hair.
Peter:
You’ve got more hair than Chewbacca. How could it have made you bald?
40:00 – 50:00
Darren:
Ridiculous. So, content marketing. When you were building up this business, other than getting the employee-generated content right at the start, what was your strategy for content marketing?
Peter:
Once again, I have to say it was embarrassingly organic. Not organic in the way of SEO—organic in the way that we just kind of started working on it.
We would try to figure out what the top of funnel content people were searching for. The way that we did it is we went to TripAdvisor forums, and we looked at what are the questions people are asking that had the most amount of engagement. And then we just tried to write a much better blog, embed a video into it, have better H1s and H2s and, you know—back then it was tags and number of keywords and so forth.
Today, my strategy is much more exhaustive and thorough. We call it—when we’re starting with a new client—we come up with buckets. So what are the buckets that our competitors… what are the adjacent… what are some of the things people are searching for that actually aren’t related to our product but would be helpful type of thing.
And then we just chip away at it. Every single quarter we come up with what are the ten to thirty keywords that we want to be in the top ten for, and we plug away. But we don’t outsource anything.
We bring in in-house writers for each one of our clients that are kind of subject matter experts in that. If necessary, we’ll write it under our client’s voice. So like, if Darren’s the CEO in a healthcare space, then we’re writing content under him. He doesn’t have time to write, but you are the expert, so we’re posting on your LinkedIn and on your blog that way.
Pretty basic. I feel like that’s kind of what every SEO person’s been doing for the last ten years, wouldn’t you?
Darren:
It’s pretty accurate. Yeah, what you described is a pretty solid content marketing strategy, I feel.
What about—
I was going to say, those people that think about, “Oh, should I be writing blogs for my website? Should I be writing content? Oh, I’m going to do—I’m going to do one a week. That’s enough.”
What’s the actual level of content that a business such as yours should be doing?
And anyone listening to this probably should be sitting down at this point, I feel.
Peter:
Well, my agency has kind of three things going on, right? So I’m a fractional CMO for companies who can’t afford a full-time CMO but they need the strategy. And then I have a traditional marketing agency behind me with retainers, 15 teammates, employees. And then I sell documentaries.
My content strategy is pretty aggressive because I have a team to do it. So we’re publishing probably three blogs per week on my website. Every single thing that comes out on a podcast or any press, we’re then doing a rewrite and repurposing that and putting it on our page. And then we’re pushing that out into social media tools that will distribute across the web.
Our favourite tool is Quuu Promote. And I can see that that’s effective because I see the people sharing it on LinkedIn and sharing it on Twitter.
I would say the only thing that is nuanced to what I just shared with you—about three to four blogs per week—that we’ve done in the last year is we are now checking our keywords to see who is ranking ahead of us on Reddit or LinkedIn. And we’re taking a percentage of our content that was going onto our blog and we’re now writing them as articles under my name on LinkedIn.
And then we’re spending probably three hours a week going over to Reddit to answer people’s questions and be as helpful as possible. And when relevant, we can share a link—either to our blog or to LinkedIn or to a YouTube video.
Darren:
So you’ve mentioned Reddit quite a lot here. It’s cropping up in a lot of SEO strategies and a lot of talks on SEO. How important is Reddit from an SEO perspective?
Peter:
I think it’s probably the most important thing right now that you need to get a hold of and need to learn.
To give you—from a B2C point of view, right—I went on spring break vacation two or three weeks ago with my wife and my son and then another family. When all of us got in the van that day, we talked about where we were going to travel. We were going to travel about a twelve-hour road trip to a place we’d never been to on the beach.
Every single adult in the car except for my wife had done all their research on Reddit. We determined what beach we were going to go to, what restaurants we were going to go to, what excursions our kids would—would be kid-friendly excursions, where we could rent a boat.
That’s insane. I’m 44 years old, Darren. A year ago, I didn’t use Reddit for anything other than like—should I buy this backpack versus that backpack? And they were like photography backpacks—like geeked out, niche-specific stuff.
And today, I’m using it almost like I use ChatGPT.
Darren:
That’s impressive. Yeah. Well, I’m shocked that it—it’s become so ingrained into a family’s research on where to go on holiday. Because you just wouldn’t think of using it like that unless it’s something that’s part of your daily routine.
Peter:
I wonder what—I mean for me, it’s not because I put it—I looked in Reddit. It’s because Google showed it to me. And the kind of younger, smarter, kind of thorough investigators in my life—so my friends—I’m 44—my friends who are 30 to 40, they’ve just been talking about Reddit for the last two years, and I haven’t been using it.
So now that Google is showing it to me in the top five, I’m like, “Oh, my smart friends use it. I’ll just click on this link for the first time in my life.” And then I spend a little bit of time reading it. I can see the upvotes. I’m like, “Oh, this must be trustworthy. It has, you know, 17 thumbs up.”
Darren:
And the fact that Google is promoting it shows how much value and importance it’s got from an SEO perspective. Otherwise, Google just wouldn’t give it any real estate at all.
Peter:
I think, you know, if you’re not a Reddit user, I’ll explain something to you in kind of layman’s terms to explain how impactful it is. It’s the same reason that you look at reviews on Amazon. It’s the same reason when you go to TripAdvisor or anything like that, you look at who’s ranking at the top.
And it’s the same thing with Product Hunt, right? Product Hunt launches new tools all day long that we can use on our Google Chrome or whatever. And whatever’s at the top—you know—those are the first two or three tools you and I are going to test.
Well, Reddit is that. Right? It’s telling you what other people like.
And SEO—unfortunately there’ve been a lot of bad players out there, and people don’t trust high-ranking websites the same way that they used to. So those of us who do good SEO—like you and me, I would suppose—we have to adjust our strategy and start to think about Reddit and LinkedIn and now make sure we’re putting everything on YouTube as well.
50:00 – 58:00
Darren:
Yeah, I’ll come on to YouTube in a bit. Obviously, you being a filmmaker as well, that’s going to be doubly important to come on to. But you mentioned ChatGPT.
A lot of people, when they think about content for their website, they think, “It’s easy. I’m going to go to ChatGPT. I’m going to say ‘knock out ten blogs for me’, and there you go, there’s my content for the next month.”
What’s your view on AI and how it can be effectively used for content?
Peter:
What you just described there sounds like a recipe for disaster to me. I feel like Google is going to just punish me at the next update. And I’m not only—
I’m not going to rank for anything. If I do rank for anything, at some point I’m going to be penalised, and it’s going to be hard to change Google’s impression of me and what I’m doing as a good player in the SEO space.
Now, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use AI. I use AI every single day. For every new idea—I start there. I usually start with audio, and I will have a conversation like, “Hey, you know, I’m working with Darren. He’s in the podcasting space, and he wants to rank for selling his podcasting services or whatever—his production company.”
Then I start there and be like, “What are the people—what’s going to be top of funnel, what’s going to be middle of funnel, what’s going to be bottom of funnel?”
Then I’ll say, “How should my strategy, from an SEO point of view, be different for YouTube versus website?” And that’s—I will start there with ideas.
Then I’ll go over to a tool and go see what’s being written and how I can actually improve it. And I’m not going to improve it through AI. I’m going to go watch a YouTube video that has, you know, 100,000 views but only 20,000 subscribers—like, why did this person pick up on the traffic?
And I’ll do the exact same thing with blogs. What is something that might be ranking, that might be getting lots of traffic, but isn’t well written, and how can I improve it?
And there—I go back and I have a real human write that. They might come up with the outline, but there’s a real human putting in paragraphs. It’s coming up with opinions that matter—that’s valuable.
Darren:
How do you approach it?
Peter:
Something very similar, to be honest. I personally don’t use it that much for research. I do everything off my own personal opinion and experience, because I make it very story-based.
When we’re working for clients, we might do it for initial research—for brainstorming, for coming up with concepts or clusters. But in terms of writing—absolutely not. Never use it for that in any capacity whatsoever.
You cannot trust what it says. Everything is written in a very—what—passive, non-specific tone. You can identify AI content very easily. There are tools to identify it.
We use a lot of freelance writers who are human writers. And since AI has come in, the people that apply to be writers with us has gone up by hundreds and hundreds of percent, because they all think they can do it now very easily and very quickly.
So we have to very, very carefully check every submission that we get to make sure that we are not having somebody trying to essentially just pump the briefing into ChatGPT, output it, and send it to us.
We even had one a couple of months ago—this is very rare—where the submission they sent to us actually had at the bottom the ChatGPT response:
“Sure, here’s a sample for a profile for somebody who may be North American and lives in Kansas.”
Peter:
Oh, that’s cringe.
Darren:
I know, right?
Peter:
But that’s what’s happening. It is very, very good, it is very, very clever, but it is also very, very dangerous because it makes it seem so easy for people to create content that they think they can get away with it.
And there was one thing you mentioned in there that I think we should pick up on. You said if you use ChatGPT, Google will punish your website, and it will be a very long time before Google will trust your website again.
This goes back to what you said about Google Search Console and where you made your site Chile-specific as opposed to North American. It took a while for that to be fixed.
If you do use AI like this, and you do cause these problems, and you do get punished—it’s not an overnight fix, is it? It’s not something you can just flick a switch and suddenly you’re going to be okay again.
Peter:
It’s—you might not—it might not be as catastrophic as doing black hat SEO and getting caught, but I know a lot of brilliant SEO content writers who’ve had content sites hit in the last year or two, and they have no idea how to recover them. No idea how to recover them.
Darren:
Because Google doesn’t tell you, does it? It doesn’t tell you what the problem is.
Peter:
No. Have you ever tried to talk to Google’s customer service about SEO?
Darren:
Not about SEO. I have about Google Business Profile locations. And that is an exercise in frustration.
Peter:
Yeah, it’s not something that’s pleasurable.
Darren:
Over the years, you’ll have seen a lot of changes in Google. A lot of changes in SEO. What’s been the biggest change you’ve seen that has affected either you or one of your competitors or the industry on a whole?
Peter:
I think it’s back to the very first thing that you talked about—with snippets and how I’m reading Google at the top.
Right? Like, even myself, every single day I ask a question—“this versus this”—and I read Google’s. And if it’s enough for me to make a fast decision, or at least tell my team where—at least “go check out these two tools” or “go check out these three tools” or “think about this strategy”—then they run with it from there.
Now, that has had a negative impact on some of our clients who were spending most of their energy on top-of-funnel. And they were B2C-type clients. So travel industry—even some banks—types of things like that.
But if you are working on the domain authority on a more holistic manner, like thinking that my name is part of my brand—not just my company—thinking about people are going to be searching me in AI, and you’re approaching it from a journalist point of view—you’re on podcast, you’re on YouTube, you’re on LinkedIn—and all of these things, that could favour you.
Right? So like, yesterday, when I was in that coaching—in that mastermind class—I went in in incognito and played around with all the keywords similar to what I do: fractional CMO work, somebody who does branded documentaries—long story—and I was showing up across, you know, Perplexity, ChatGPT. And that’s because I think I’ve—and I say “I think” because I’m not certain—it’s because I think that I’ve approached it in a holistic manner, not spending all of my resources only on one channel, so that Google just pulls the carpet out from underneath me.
Darren:
No, I think that is very important. Google has long—for a long time—talked about the authority of the author, the authority of the person behind the content. And to have that wide reach across LinkedIn, across YouTube, across podcasting—wherever you can get your personal name out there—it shows that when you publish content in your name, Google knows that, ah yes, that’s this person, they have this credibility, we can trust them. So their content is of real value.
And you’ll get those increased rankings that you wouldn’t get otherwise. So when people ask, “Well why do you bother doing a podcast? Why do you bother publishing on LinkedIn?”—it’s those reasons. It’s the reasons that you can’t quite quantify.
Peter:
Darren, I’ve got an SEO question for you that—I feel like you might know better than me.
Do you know if Google gives more weight to certain visitors based around who they are?
I’ll tell you why. So, I’ve spent a decent amount of time bringing in my ideal customer profile to look at my website from a documentary point of view. And I can see they’re doing it, because I’m using those identification tools that tell me who their LinkedIn is.
So these are bigwigs. These are CEOs of large companies, broadcast companies, national media companies.
Is there a chance that if I’m only getting a hundred visitors—of more important authority—that that would have more impact on Google than a thousand of people who are never going to buy from me, and nor are they decision makers?
Darren:
I think the obvious answer is: it depends.
What I would say is, no one—I don’t think anybody—would actually know that for a fact. But because Google search is so personalised, and what you see when you search for something is going to be different to what somebody else sees when they search for something…
If Google knows that, say, particular people of a certain stature are looking at your content over others, it’s more likely that it would prefer your content to somebody similar when they are searching for it—as opposed to somebody completely unrelated.
In much the same way that Facebook’s algorithm would work, or TikTok’s algorithm would work—that it’s showing content because people like you like this. People like you have reacted to this.
Peter:
Mhm.
Darren:
I think that’s entirely possible.
So yes—you’re thinking, maybe you don’t need to go wide and get loads and loads of traffic. You want the targeted traffic for the people that are most relevant. I’d say you’re probably right.
Peter:
Yeah. You know, now that you kind of—I’m kind of teasing this out in live—on a live call with you—it makes me think back to your question of how have we changed, or what are we doing in a nuanced way from an SEO point of view?
And that’s impacted the SEO that I’ve done on my own website.
Now that I can identify who’s hitting which web page, even though they’re not giving me their information—
I’m selling a high-retainer service, where a lot of CEOs don’t want to give me their email. They want to research me for a while.
And I can see that the top-of-funnel content that I was going for beforehand—one in a hundred was my ICP. And the bottom-of-funnel content—it’s 100%. 100 out of 100 is ICP.
So I’ve almost quit doing top-of-funnel, because those tools have helped me identify who that anonymous visitor is.
It’s changed my strategy.
Darren:
That’s interesting—which will save you time.
Peter:
Yeah. And then—and then I connect with them on LinkedIn, because it’s given me their LinkedIn account. And I’m using my LinkedIn as my secondary website. It’s like my landing page, because LinkedIn is going to show them my profile for the next seven days. I post seven days a week, so LinkedIn is going to nurture them.
What I was using for email nurturing ten years ago, I’m using LinkedIn nurturing today.
Darren:
I love that as a strategy. And it’s occurred to me—I actually do something similar, but I’ve not documented it. I’m not consciously doing it. But I am doing something similar.
I have a particular lead magnet that people download for a network, an organisation, and I see who downloads this. And they’re all business owners. They’re all in business. Most of them are in the UK, or they’re in the United States, a couple in Australia, New Zealand.
I will then connect with them on LinkedIn when I see it, because I know who they are. I can identify them. And I’m posting regularly as well. It is working. I’ve had one-to-one meetings with people from New Zealand as a result of doing this.
It’s not something I have actually documented and systemised as a process. But now, after speaking to you—I’m going to.
Peter:
I love—yeah, I love it. And we actually have two people on the team that are doing SDR roles for both myself and my high-ticket clients. So I have a couple clients who, you know, are doing twenty to fifty thousand dollar types of services—roofing, commercial painting, baseball stadiums and things like that.
And so we aren’t waiting for the people to fill out a quote form. As soon as they hit our website, we’re identifying exactly who they are. We are connecting with them on LinkedIn with the CEO of our client. And then somebody on my team is playing an SDR role, and we’re calling that person within an hour.
We don’t say, “We’ve identified you on our website.” We offer them the monthly special or the monthly promo. Can we send them an email or book a call for them?
Darren:
And of course they’re more likely to be receptive to that, because that is actually what they are looking for at that time. They just haven’t said it.
Peter:
Right. And had I not done the SEO work, I wouldn’t have the traffic. Now I just have a new tool that identifies them. And when I identify them, I put in a LinkedIn process and SDR process, and it’s closing deals.
Darren:
It’s fantastic. Because yeah, a lot of people—they won’t fill in an enquiry form, will they? They don’t want to do that. They don’t want someone phoning them up.
Peter:
Yeah, or a crappy newsletter again, right?
Darren:
Oh god. The number of times I’ve spoken about that.
“Hey, subscribe to our newsletter.”
No.
Funny enough, that doesn’t work.
It is not 2002 anymore.
Okay. YouTube. How important is video content for a business, and what can people do who don’t like to have their face in front of the camera?
Peter:
Well, those are two big questions.
So for me—for me—YouTube has the biggest long-term impact for a high-ticket client.
Right? I can’t speak so much for B2C. I do have one B2C client who’s killing it on YouTube, but they’re doing it under their own guidance. I’m not overseeing it, so I can’t speak to that.
But for anyone in B2B—once you can figure out the algorithm, once you can figure out the frequency, the timeliness, the consistency, the thumbnails, the quality, the value—it will nurture people before they ever come to your website.
It, for me, is very, very critical.
So I do probably thirty videos a quarter for my own brand. I probably do five to fifteen videos for some of my bigger clients, where I’m the face for them. And then if my client has an executive who feels comfortable on camera, feels comfortable in front of a microphone—cut me out. Let’s make them. It’ll make it a lot easier.
It is—it’s just a fantastic way for people to build trust and authority.
Darren:
I love that. And what a way to end.
Thank you very much, Peter, for being on The Engaging Marketeer podcast. Thoroughly enjoyed this.
Peter:
Thank you, Darren. Appreciate it, sir.
