[00:00 - 00:09] (Intro Title Card: "From Signal to Dollars: Don't Confuse Information with Strategy: Mastering SEO in the Age of AI" by LQ Digital)

Monica Niblack: Hey everyone, great to talk to you again. I'm Monica Niblack, president of LQ Digital, and I'm joined by Lisa Ainza, our senior director of organic search here at LQ. Today we're going to talk a bit about something we're personally hearing a lot about, and I'm sure you are too if you're on LinkedIn any amount of time. We're hearing about how AI can create an awesome SEO plan in seconds, in minutes you could have a whole SEO plan. You don't need an agency. But the real question that we keep asking ourselves is who should use these automated SEO or AEO strategies, and will they actually help you get to your goals?

Right, so to kick us off today, Lisa, we're hearing more and more marketing leaders say that they're using AI to create their organic strategies. Do you think this is a good idea?

Lisa Ainza: Well, it's twofold here. So first, I think that AI is a fantastic research assistant, right? It's an extremely useful tool. But it is just that, it's a tool. And so, you know, AI is not accountable for business outcomes, right? It doesn't understand internal resource allocation, or budget limitations, or development constraints and priorities, all of these things that it cannot factor into creating an SEO strategy. So, I mean, I think the short of it is I kind of feel like if you're developing a strategy with AI, it's uh you can't have the context that you need, and strategy without context is just advice, right? It's not really a strategy that's going to move the needle for you. So...

Monica Niblack: Kind of speaking of that context, another thing that I sometimes feel like I'm hearing a bit is are we are businesses at risk of being the same when they use it, right? You need the context, but don't you need kind of something unique also?

Lisa Ainza: Mhm, you do, and if you were going to give it that something unique, I think you'd have to feed a novel's worth of information into it to get that. So, the other thing too is like, I think that um if you're asking it for strategies, I think that we've seen that AI repeats itself, so your competitors are probably getting the same recommendations, because they are so high level, the same tactics, all those generic things. That means you and your competitors are going after those same strategies, you know, all of those the same content ideas, the same keywords or topics. So, how are you going to differentiate? It's not going to really get you there.

Monica Niblack: Okay, so just to make sure I'm hearing you right, because obviously if I was a listener, I'll go ahead and say it, I would say, "Well, aren't you guys a little biased? You're an agency. Like, isn't the whole point, right?" Yes, I can see why you might say that, I would be thinking that too, but I think what you're saying is hell yeah, we'll use it when there's a good place to use it, but you need to be careful about giving it like the entire keys to the kingdom to it, because you want to make sure it's benefiting you, not kind of making you the same as all your competitors, is that correct?

Lisa Ainza: Yep, yep, absolutely.

Monica Niblack: So kind of on that note, if it can make a good strategy in seconds... why are people paying for us? And and obviously, you just said you don't think it can make a good strategy in seconds, but you did say it can do a lot, so so what is changing, right? If it's a tool, if we have more tools than we've ever had before, if we have better tools than we've had before, what evolves? Why why why should someone still pay for us? Justify why an agency still matters.

Lisa Ainza: Yeah, absolutely, and I think some of the biggest reasons are that prioritization that we just mentioned, the decision-making, and the experience, and especially the human judgment that comes in in those strategies. What for your particular ecosystem, for your particular challenges—and everybody's goals are not the same, everybody's conversions are not the same—so what are you trying to do? So getting that long experience and that judgment, that's what you're paying for. That's what's going to move the needle, and that's what's going to allow you to diversify over a long period of time. An AI tool simply can't do that. So I think some executives and business owners might just get caught up in the speed of things might be the solving, rather than what actually is going to make a difference to their growth long term, which brings me to a question for you, as, you know, being in the executive suite, what do you think is the mindset that's driving the push to use AI instead of actual professionals for the different channels, especially for organic?

Monica Niblack: Well, first I was just laughing at your speed comment, because I can think of like three scenarios you and I have personally seen recently where unfortunately, we're having to walk people backwards because I love the enthusiasm and speed teams are trying to run at, but they actually end up doing things that kind of hurt their SEO best practices instead of accelerating it, and I think that's a perfect example. When you do it wrong, you don't help yourself. But I mean look, I think we're all, to your point, to your question, what's driving the growth temptation, I think there's a few kind of key things that are driving it. One, like, we are all being told to do more with less, right? I hear it from my clients on a daily basis. I was just talking to kind of an old friend who was whose whole company just reorged and he's suddenly taking on twice as much as he has and they've like layers have been removed and it just reminded me of the story I've heard time and time again right now. You look at the Wall Street Journal, you look at the economic sentiment, I was reading an article the other day about just how kind of negative the general sentiment is despite the positive indicators that we've been hearing about a lot. And in some ways, I think AI is a tool that fits with the feeling we're all having right now, right? If we're all being pushed, we're like, "Okay, well here is maybe the magic wand in some ways," right? Like, it's not, I think we all know that, but you're in a situation where you're being told to do more with less, you're in a situation where your businesses are under pressure, you're in a situation where kind of buyers are a little bit more hesitant than they have been to sign up for bigger things, well what are you going to do? Like, that's a hard business problem. Well, suddenly you have this tool that can add speed, that can add efficiency, that can, and that you're hearing others are, right? How many tech companies have we heard do layoffs year-to-date because AI's helping them? And so of course, you kind of have to like, as an executive, you're under all this pressure, here's an answer, right? So it doesn't surprise me at all that people are going in this route. And let's be clear, I'm seeing it in our own business, there are places where it can drive a lot more efficient use, right? But I think the question that I know I'm having with all of our teams, and you've heard it from me a lot, is what are the places where it can drive better outcomes, and what are the places where it can just save you time to go get even better outcomes? And I think that's kind of the balance, right? We want to use it let it run on its own with the right context when it can just drive better outcomes, but most of the time, and I think this ties to what you're saying, we can use it to get farther down the field, and that's something I'm hearing a lot is a year ago even, a lot of teams hadn't figured out how to use it, but fast forward to today, and I think a lot more teams are understanding how to leverage it. So now we're all getting to the point where we have the same toolsets, and you once again need to figure out how to use that toolset to get above everyone else.

Lisa Ainza: Yeah, I think that's a key distinction, yeah.

Monica Niblack: And that's really where my big focus at LQ, like, we rolled out, I think your team just got onto it very recently, right? Our updated version of our agentic platform, LQ Brain, and I feel like in every conversation I have with our product and data team around it, my focus is how can we be outstanding, right? How can we use this to differentiate our clients? How can we use it to help them disrupt and take share? Because if we're using it to just get the same results we would have gotten a year ago faster, they're not going to win in today's market, right? You have to use it to really make sure you're thinking harder, you're thinking deeper, and you're going above and beyond, and it's pretty fun to watch what AI can do when it does that, but it's about getting better results.

Lisa Ainza: Yeah, absolutely. If it isn't, then you're like, "What are we doing?"

Monica Niblack: Right, yeah, because I because I've definitely seen I've seen some of the earlier stuff, right? It was like...

Lisa Ainza: Right, just like night and day, right, yeah.

Monica Niblack: Right, flop.

Lisa Ainza: Right, automated...

Monica Niblack: Right, I mean I even had a few posts early on where I was like, "Oh, it can be my editor." I can still remember my professors in college, "You need someone to edit your papers." "Okay, well AI can." "Okay, wait a minute, it's trying to make everything just be the same." That's not what we want to do. I don't need the same average copy going out. We're not going to get effective results that way.

Lisa Ainza: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Monica Niblack: I kind of on that note, I think there's a big question about do you change your strategies because of AI, right? There's the overarching like how do you change your team structure and whatnot, and obviously it can help a lot there. I I've seen some really awesome things it can do. But I think there's a more fundamental one of I just feel like every day I see some infographic of "Here's what AEO is" or "Here's the difference between SEO and AEO," and then I see some team forward it to me, and I early on, I remember I started to I would always forward it to your teams, and you guys would be like, "What is this?" And I'm like, "Well, it's an interesting thing that I saw like our affiliate team or our or our media team like forward," and you're like, "This is going around from 25 different sources, and it's actually not saying anything." And so I think that kind of question starts to become every agency I know seems to be talking at AEO, but like do you think people are changing their strategies, because I'm starting to hear some blowback of sure, people are talking about AEO, but what are they doing?

Lisa Ainza: Absolutely, you know, and it's there definitely is blowback in the industry that's surfacing because the SEOs that have been in this game for a long time and care that we're still focusing on what's actually going to work for the client long-term strategies and get them towards their goals, they are picking up on the SEOs and the agencies that are just sort of reviving the snake oil, which is unfortunate, you know. We've SEOs worked really hard to try and shake that off from the the wild west really early days of SEO, and so now we're kind of back into it.

Monica Niblack: In link farm days?

Lisa Ainza: Yeah, just oh gosh, yeah, don't don't even think about the the keyword stuffing, the link farming, all just the just the the craziness that went on um when Google was in its early days. But I think that, you know, unfortunately, AI has revived some of that, and it you'll see it when there's just this constant like buzzwords being added into sales decks or or AEO web pages um or agencies just immediately rename SEO to AEO or GEO, whatever they're calling it, AI SEO. Um, but they haven't really developed a framework around it or included it within an existing organic framework, right? So um which is a really important part and something that I know at LQ, right, we've been really thoughtful about not um sort of jumping into the what I call the FOMO tactics, right? Which everyone piles onto for AI, right? Fear of missing out. The listicals, the spamming of FAQs, those kinds of things, we've been very circumspect in what are we actually going to include that's not going to damage the existing work that's been done by our clients for traditional SEO, um traditional search, right? Because that's we've seen the data that comes out quarter after quarter, it still holds like 95% or above share with Google.

Monica Niblack: Yeah, it was kind of a radical strategy we had last year, and by radical I mean I definitely got some pressure with why are we taking so long to get to market, but we decided to kind of build that visioning platform first, right? LQ Vision, and really get a deep understanding of the data of what's working, what's not, and then build all of our playbooks around it. And I mean, it's working. Our organic department has doubled in the past just few months, but it was definitely um a different approach, right? We didn't want to jump on the bandwagon, we wanted to really have a data-backed strategy to drive results. What I guess what does give me a little bit of hope and optimism, and I'd be curious if you feel this way, is I did think it was really interesting that Google recently came out with updates that kind of what fundamentally is driving it, and it seems like, you know, I know you pay a lot deeper attention, I'll admit I I'm more of a headlines person on a lot of these, but kind of what stuck out to me with some of it was it's really the fundamentals, right? It's kind of boring, but you have Google starting to go on record of the things that matter are the true fundamentals, and I don't know, to me that kind of seemed like a an interesting moment in this whole evolution.

Lisa Ainza: Mhm, right, yeah, definitely not abandoning what's worked for decades, um and I think that was really smart because more and more we learn how much popular platforms like ChatGPT depend upon those Google results because they're in their infancy, right, as we've talked about before, and so they don't have all the signals sorted out, that's why they're so easy to spam, and so yeah, not abandoning those basics, not abandoning, and I wouldn't I wouldn't go beyond like even the basics, not abandoning the core of what makes search work and so effective.

Monica Niblack: Yeah, and I guess, I mean, the way I've been thinking about it is it's not an either/or, it's an evolution, right? So I do want I do want to make sure I'm going on record saying we're not here saying all this stuff is hype and AEO doesn't matter and it's exact same thing as organic, that's absolutely not true, right? That's not at all what we're saying. I think what we're saying is in this world, kind of like everything else you have, there's more and more noise, and finding the things that will truly drive results for your business is important because if you're not careful, you can end up in this kind of stream of bad advice and bad content and bad recommendations, and what we hate seeing, and I know you've seen this quite a bit on some clients we're taking over, is people who are really truly trying to drive results for their business, like they're really focused on it, but unfortunately, just the advice they're getting is not right. But if you're kind of not technical and not spending as much time truly understanding what's happening as we are because we are an agency, we have the ability and the need to go focus on it that you do not have if you're kind of one person on a team responsible for it, like you can really get steered the wrong way, and I think that's what really has me...

Lisa Ainza: Definitely, yeah, and that makes me so sad when I see that, that people have like blown up their progress and blown up effective strategies, that that that we definitely that's not that's not our goal, that that does not work, we don't want to...

Monica Niblack: Yeah, I was looking at someone who was kind of a prospect the other day and it was really unfortunate because it looked like they had been having this kind of steady progress, and then they had put all this effort in, and you just saw them fall, and I'm like, "No, like now we have to go recover that." Um, but kind of on that point, there is there is hype, and there is real true things that you need to evolve, so help us cut through the noise a little bit, what do you think are some examples of hype that people should just ignore and kind of what are one or two things that you think are really true evolutions that people should focus on?

Lisa Ainza: Yeah, absolutely, so I mean hype, I would say, um chasing every new AI platform and tool. Everybody's got them. That's, you know, kind of what we were talking a little bit earlier is make sure that if you're buying into a tool that it's giving you the information that you actually need. Real prompts, real tracking, as much as you can get that, because there's all limitations just because we don't have access to the data from the platforms, right? That's slowly starting to leak out, so if you're being promised that it can dazzle and can do a lot more than that, that needs to be a red flag. So the other thing is just rewriting websites for AI. Um, we mentioned earlier about FAQ spamming, there's listicals that people were jumping on board with that are now definitely causing uh problems, Google's cracking down on those, so these are the kinds of things where if you hear about a lot of tactic-based type moves, those are things that you really need to think about do they those actually fit in with a broader more holistic organic strategy? Um, if they don't, then that's something you probably need to question, if they do, you're probably on the right track. But if you're being promised pie in the sky, that's just like we ignore SEOs that go, "I can get you number one for these terms in six weeks," that has always existed, you need to steer clear of those people, it's the same with people who are touting the the AI progress.

Monica Niblack: So if it seems too good to be true, it probably is, unfortunately. Gosh, I wish I had a magic wand, but—and second, if it supports some a bigger strategy it's probably worth doing, but if you can't really see how a piece like a certain thing would do anything except maybe game something short-term...

Lisa Ainza: Partnerships.

Monica Niblack: ...then it's probably then you have are at risk if you take it on.

Lisa Ainza: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Mhm.

Monica Niblack: Interesting.

Lisa Ainza: And for you, I wanted to ask, that brings to mind, I mean, for business owners, for executives, you know, some have really aggressive goals that they have to go after now with this renewed interest, I mean, what do you think being an agency head, what do you think um, you know, what are some things that they can do that help identify legitimate agencies from the snake oil agencies out there?

Monica Niblack: Data, right? And I think we're already starting to hear this in the sophisticated buyers, and it's good because I think a year ago people were only saying, "Hey, I need to tell my board I'm doing something," right? But now the sophisticated buyers, the ones who understand kind of they need to cut through the noise, they want to understand the proof and the reasons, and like I said, that's how we've always operated, right? Why? What is the data-backed strategy? And I think the people who can kind of point to, "Here's what we did and here's why it worked, and therefore here's the data we're seeing in your site and why we're proposing this strategy," like those people can actually have a conversation. But if you can't get anyone to kind of answer the second or third "why," I think that's kind of a signal, so spend a little bit extra time just having that conversation, and if it seems like they can't adapt to your business or your goals or give you a data point as to how it ties to your business, to me that's a red flag.

Lisa Ainza: Yep, absolutely. Getting deeper, asking harder questions...

Monica Niblack: I say all this and I'm like, and those are the buyers that take a lot of time, but no, it's fun, right, like...

Lisa Ainza: It's not going to close next week.

Monica Niblack: How much free advice do I have to give? No, I'm joking. But no, that's why we really like, you know, at LQ like we've talked about this a lot, how much we streamline the process, but I always push back to a point because I'm like, we all collectively need to understand what we're signing up for...

Lisa Ainza: Mhm.

Monica Niblack: ...or we're not having success, and the same way that a buyer needs to understand that the agency does too if they're truly building a strategy that's for you. Because otherwise you're like, we fully believe in that, and I think all the good agencies I know do, because you want to make sure you're selling something you can deliver.

Lisa Ainza: 100%.

Monica Niblack: And you know, okay, we're talking a lot about all the different sides of it, but I want to go back to something that we were talking about earlier, because I do want to ensure like we're not we don't we're not suggesting you can't leverage AI, we're not suggesting it's not changing things, we're just suggesting there's places where it's really useful, and there's places where it's not, so maybe we should go a little bit deeper on that, like what should you be doing differently because of AI, what is one thing that you believe absolutely is evolving?

Lisa Ainza: Right, yeah, so one thing that is legitimate, one thing that will make a difference. So one thing that I feel very strongly, one it also should also, for starters, it should benefit your traditional search organic strategy, um when you think about these. But one thing that companies should absolutely focus on is building stronger brand narratives. So this has always been beneficial for search engines and for SEO, but for AI, um and AEO/GEO, it is something that has more of an emphasis now, and this is mainly because these tools aren't programmed, they're not designed to say, "You know what? I'm not sure, there's not really any information out there on that." It will make it up on its own. So it also will glean information from competitors. We've definitely heard unfortunate stories of malicious information being placed out there, the AI picks it up and then sort of latches onto it and that becomes part of the brand's narrative, the competitor's narrative. So controlling this as much as you can is becoming very very important um when whether, you know, fending off you know malicious actors or making sure that you provide the AI tool with as much uh brand information as possible, and what this means in practice means cleaning up your review profiles, cleaning up third-party general profiles and third-party sites, um this includes for local like your Google Business Profiles and your Yelp profiles, this means uh revisiting affiliate, are you doing that work? Do you need that work to help you get third-party placement and include more details about your site? This also includes or your brand, this also includes um fleshing out your brand information on your site directly, so not just having that singular "About Us" page, but having more, having several "About" pages that talk about your history, your timeline, your specifics, your team, things like that.

Monica Niblack: So what I find so interesting about that is there are lots of tactics you just talked about obviously, tons of tactics, but as kind of the higher level thought that I keep going to is how are you really clear in who you are as a company and what you do? And like if you can do that and you can talk to your customers about that reason, then you'll win. Like that's what I think I'm hearing, and to me that I love that so much because that's like what we're all supposed to be doing at the heart of it, right? Like, but it gets really easy to get kind of bogged down in all these tactics and all of these things, but if you're clear, I mean, tell me if I'm saying what you're saying correctly, but what I heard is if you're truly clear on what you do for your customers and you tell that story in a very good way, like it will help you, and then the AI can tell that story too.

Lisa Ainza: Absolutely, and making sure that you're telling it in detail, which we're not used to doing on our pages.

Monica Niblack: What? But but I think we are used to storytelling, we're used to doing that in different mediums, and now it's just kind of like how do you do it in a medium that allows the robots and not just the people too, but if you're clear on that message, like that's going to help you, and that's going to build long-term value, right?

Lisa Ainza: Definitely, you want to shout it from the rooftops more than ever before, spread it everywhere.

Monica Niblack: So would you say kind of is that the Obviously there's going to be a lot of people with tactics and things that matter, but if you kind of were to have one takeaway for someone like myself who's not the practitioner, what would that takeaway be?

Lisa Ainza: Yeah, I mean the takeaway from this conversation that I really want decision makers to uh understand, especially with the use of AI, its role in building our strategies and things like that, is don't confuse access to information with strategy. It's a big difference, and that's where we get that differentiation of that AI is a tool. It can generate thousands of recommendations, it'll never run out, it'll just keep slicing and dicing every which way. The real challenge is knowing, well, which five or ten do I actually implement to move my business forward? And that's where we circle back around to that experience that humans bring and that human judgment.

Monica Niblack: Yes, ah, so I'm laughing because yes, sometimes they sound very sure of all of its recommendations, but maybe when you put on your experience brain, it's confidently wrong. Um, I've definitely had to go change a few prompts in an agent yesterday when I was like, "Stop it."

Lisa Ainza: For sure.

Monica Niblack: But yeah, no, I think that makes sense.

Lisa Ainza: So kind of along those lines, kind of coming to the end here, I wanted to ask a question. So being, you know, helping those business owners and those decision-makers, you know, better understand AI use and when AI should be brought in and how it should be used by those people that they have working on their site, what has LQ actively done to effectively incorporate AI for real benefit for its clients?

Monica Niblack: Well, I think I talked a little bit about LQ Brain, which is our agentic AI platform. It's been going on behind the scenes a lot for some time now, and it's starting to get rolled out to kind of more front-facing places for our clients, but it is it's a lot of things, frankly. So it's a comprehensive agentic AI platform, but I think where it's useful is kind of things like you're talking about, right? How do you get a ton of information distilled down to a few points? How do you use it to build more competitive advantage? How do you ensure that the strategies you're running are more data-driven? And I could spend, you know, hours talking about all the ways it does that, but to me, that's really what I'm getting at is how do we get ourselves more data and signals to be able to get, you know, be in that field from the highest point? So I think LQ Brain's been really helpful with that. And the other one, right, we didn't talk about it much, but we have the we have the vision platform, LQ Vision, which allows us to understand how AI is talking, and like I said, it's the foundation to all of our AEO and organic strategies because when we actually understand how you're showing up, when you're showing up, where you're showing up, that's how you build strategies. So I guess it goes back to the same boring thing we've been doing for a long time. We've I believe that having data and having data-driven decisions is how you get the best results, but now we're in a moment where we have way better tools. Man, I think back to the days where I literally was typing ads into Yahoo! If I had had half these tools, like could have been a completely different thing, right? So the tools are evolving, the tools are fantastic, the tools get us there a lot faster, but to me, it's really about the same kind of heart of how we make very smart, empowered, data-driven decisions to build strategies.

Lisa Ainza: Mhm.

Monica Niblack: But, you know, it's I got to say it's interesting now. It's more fun to get to use all these tools to go do it.

Lisa Ainza: It definitely is.

Monica Niblack: Stitching and a lot more of the fun parts.

Lisa Ainza: Mhm, for sure.

Monica Niblack: Cool. Well, Lisa, thank you much so much for taking the time um to discuss. Always enjoy getting to dive a little deeper into organic with you, as it's been really fascinating to watch how it's been evolving these past few years.

Lisa Ainza: Yeah, as well, thank you for chatting with me, I love it.

Monica Niblack: Awesome. And if anyone's ever curious about AI strategies and what to do for your own business, don't hesitate to reach out. Or get your free scorecard to see how you're doing in AI search today. Thanks.

[20:24 - 20:34] (Outro Title Card: "From Signal to Dollars", "LQ DIGITAL", www.lqdigital.com)