Recruiting EQ E97: The Urgent Need to Humanize Your Brand w/Wes Towers of Uplift 360

yeah well it varies a lot from business to business and and um industry to industry so for us the trades construction you know industrial brands it's about building trust and authority in the spaces they work particularly for those larger So we've got some clients who win most of their jobs through tender, through tendering process, government contracts and so on.

So for them, it's not really about optimizing for Google and attracting people who are searching for them.

That's not the way in which they gather leads and so on.

So it's about building the authority and trust.

So when they submit a proposal, then people will do their research because it's a massive investment oftentimes.

they're going to look at their website and every other social signal that they can say to ensure they're making a good, good decision.

That's an extreme example, but a lot of people are just trying to attract enough interest in the marketplace as well as the opposite end of the spectrum.

So they're really trying to optimize to get Google's attention and Google's still the leading source of traffic for most of our clients' websites, although it's, it's changing.

It's still the leading source.

So search engines, but also, showing up in large language models these days as well.

So the website is not there just to, it's there primarily for the human reader and user, but it's also a way to train AI about your company because they're gleaning information from far and wide online.

And the website is the one space you have.

absolute control of and you can dig a lot deeper than you might in social platforms, for example.

Yeah, I've heard, and I don't really know a lot about this, but I've heard that if, let's say, you did a whole bunch of stuff in your website like 10 years ago or even five, six years ago, that was traditional SEO optimized so that Google would find it, that now that's not exactly obsolete, but it's not ideal that you want to sort of take into account LLM searches, which are not keyword driven, but rather It's logical inference driven from like mini sentences and phrases.

Have you found that that's changed a lot of what you're proposing that people put in their website as a result?

Yeah, it's changed and for the better.

I certainly think because you had to try and not cheat your way to the top, but think about keywords in a really, it feels like an archaic way now.

So people would search for the service or the product and the location typically.

Plumber Melbourne, for example.

But now we understand, they understand the context of language.

And so therefore you might search for a full sentence and backward and forward with a large language model, you know, ChatGPT.

So yeah, it's changing for the better because it's understanding context and nuance.

And I think, you know, there was always different ways people would try and cheat their way to the top in the old methods.

what would happen, there would be a new hack or a cheat and people would apply that.

And then Google would realize, hey, people are cheating and changing the rules and sometimes penalize sites or blacklist them.