Lead Generation and SEO Strategies for Business Growth - Teacher: Scott Gabdullin

Every business needs new clients to survive. And having quality leads for your business is the beginning of having long term clients. But How do you generate leads? And what do you do if you need help generating leads? Today in our lesson, we're going to look at lead generation and search engine optimization.

Why small businesses should focus on getting leads. Why bigger businesses should focus on getting their SEO right and why all businesses should be focused on making higher quality content. If they want to rank higher in Google searches. Here we go.

Hello and welcome to the Useful Content Podcast, 

and today we have a new teacher in the useful content classroom. 

Scott Galin. Hey 

Scott. 

great to be here. Thank you for having me. Definitely looking forward to the conversation.

So the deal is, this podcast is fairly new, this form of it. And I actually discovered you on the Facebook podcast collaboration group, and I put out a call and, uh, you didn't immediately respond, but 

somehow like a week later you'd end up. What did you see to make you want to inquire about the podcast?

I think the fact that your podcast are very much focused on teaching something that resonates a lot with me, uh, throughout my journey in digital marketing. I've done a lot of education to, and whether it's working with clients or whether actually teaching as part of various different colleges and kind of, uh, educational startups here in Toronto, um, I really became passionate about sharing.

My knowledge, my experience with digital marketing, SS E O S C M, uh, and even entrepreneurship in general. And so seeing podcasts that align with that, uh, passion of mine, definitely something that I always try to, uh, reach out to and see if there is a, if there is an opportunity to have a conversation and, uh, share as much knowledge as I can with the audience that you and other podcasters have. 

Yeah. And that's, that's great. I know you have a lot of knowledge to share in that area. S E o Ss e M, lead generation, and things of that sort. Because I've checked you out and you do speak a good game. I know you have stuff to back it up based 

on your history. So tell us a little bit about your journey to getting where you are and how you create useful content for your clients. 

I. actually originally started in computer engineering, Uh, graduated with a degree in it and, then went to work for a m d graphic cards company. quickly realized that it wasn't really something I wanted to do. and, uh, started to do quite a bit of web design, web development. on the side. And that just got me involved in digital marketing, as well as web development. And so, eventually I quit my career in computer engineering. Went into digital marketing, started working for large enterprise, agencies. So dealing with clients like K P M G, TD Bank, Toyota, uh, and basically doing a lot of ss e o on enterprise level.

So very much focused on technical ss e o focused on content marketing. That was really what we were, uh, we were really working on it for those clients and then eventually started to, to learn more about small businesses, doing a little bit of . Freelancing for small businesses and realized that, hey, why not to launch my own agency.

And so now I run my own agency as well as a number of traditional businesses of my own, that also we are, we also utilize all of the digital marketing knowledge that I have, as part of the journey. Uh, Been teaching a lot for teaching for five years now, and, uh, you know, teaching ss e o and ss a m to students of various backgrounds.

So some students own their own businesses, some students are changing careers just like I did once in once, uh, back in the past. And then some students who are just trying to upgrade in terms of skillset and maybe get a . Raise or get a, uh, get a promotion and, uh, really, really kind of learning a lot about what different motivations are for different people who are getting involved with digital marketing, with S E o Ss c m, just trying to upgrade their skillset.

so what's, uh, what's your favorite thing about being a teacher? 

Being a teacher, I would say that when you . If you have practical experience in doing things, actually knowing how to execute on s essay O, how to execute on digital learning, how to do YouTube. Um, when you teach, you can, and you teach something that's actually practical, not just macro level, but actually practical, real world application of that knowledge.

It can make a big difference for your students. So I had a student, for example, who came to our class. He took a class for two weeks, learning SS e o. Two weeks later, he comes back, he owns a therapy business here in Toronto. He's like, I made a few changes that you told me to make, and now I'm hiring an extra assistant, because we can't handle the volume of business that's coming through, right?

So this is a real world application of the knowledge that we're teaching them. And then it has a real world impact on their lifestyle, on their business, and it actually changes their life. Uh, and that's something that I love seeing. I really love seeing students who . Learn and then apply the knowledge and uh, and actually see the results of it.

Uh, because it can make a real difference. And I just love doing, I love teaching people. If I can see the impact that it's making, that's, that's why, that's why I keep gravitating back to it. 

Yeah. 

I love that. I love the, the idea of being able to take something that, you know, 

give it to someone else and see them do something with it. 

Um, 

very practical application, very applied knowledge type of system, and I'm happy that you are. someone who thinks that way too. 'cause that's exactly how I think and that's why the, 

this podcast is where it is. Alright, so, okay, so that's good. That's a good introduction to who you are and, um, why we are here today talking about ss e o and, lead generation for businesses. So let's jump deeper into the ss e o part of it and the lead generation for businesses of, of varying sizes and part of what you believe.

Is that depending on the size of the business, you need to focus on different types of, of marketing. do you believe 

that you need to focus on 

different types of marketing depending on the size of the business? 

Yeah, great question. most of the time what happens is that businesses that are really small, the owner of the business is in the business itself. There're 

the ones who are basically providing the service and the fulfillment.

So as a result, there is not as much time left for all the other activities, like, you know, building your own website, checking how marketing is going, learning about marketing, because when you are a business owner and an entrepreneur, you're wearing a lot of hats on any given day. There's just no time to go and invest a ton of time into learning how to do organic social.

And on top of that, SS e o on top of that SS c M. And if you do want to hire an agency to do it for you, you still have to keep on top of them and figuring out whether they're doing a good job for you or not. And unfortunately, in marketing, I feel like there are a lot of agencies that take advantage of small businesses.

And what happens is that they . They do mediocre job and pretty much learn on client's dime by providing, you know, average or below average results. So what we realized that was the best approach for small businesses is actually to buy leads. Instead of focusing on marketing and on building a website or building any kind of brand when you're still too small and instead, buy instead buys the leads, takes a lead, get on a call with that lead close, that lead, make money.

Reinvested into more leads. And when you get to a point where you make enough income to cover your own bills and you have maybe some money left to hire extra help, you hire that help and then you start to expand, then you start to focus on your brand. Then you start to focus on building websites, hiring agencies to do marketing for you, investing long-term into your brand building online.

I think that's a much healthier, much better option, much better path to take, uh, than to do it all. And . Try to do it all right from the beginning. a lot of the guys that we work with, we send them leads and they're, they don't have time for anything else. Uh, they're getting 50 leads in a matter of couple of weeks, and, uh, they're just

Busy answering the calls. And at the end of the year, he is like, Scott, you took us from $0, uh, a year, a year and a half ago to $220,000 this year. Right. So, and now they, they're basically expanding. They're adding teams, they're adding equipment, and uh, they're now asking a question, Hey, what can we do to.

Actually start to focus on our own brand because, hey, you never know Scott. You might disappear one day and leads will dry up. And then what do I do with all these guys? So it's, it makes more sense for me to start to build a foundation for my business online. And that's a rational question to ask. know, as a, as someone who is a business owner, I totally understand when business owners want to do that themselves.

Uh, so we, we always start the conversation and be like, Hey, yep, leads are great. Start focusing on your own business, start building brand. That being said, maybe you still continue with the lease just because you need the cashflow, but start to investing some of that money into doing s e o for your own website.

Uh, start to do organic social, start to do good web design, building good landing pages, storytelling, copywriting, stuff like that. Alright, so that's my mindset. Now, obviously there are exceptions to the rule. Uh, that's just the, the use cases that I've been exposed to where it really, really works well for small businesses.

To just focus on leads. Um, we personally do not like doing ss e o for small businesses you know, if you're doing s e o it takes time. It takes six months, might take 12 months depending on how new your website is.

And they need business right now, right They need to make money right now. So that's why we just productized the service. And essentially said, Hey, we're not doing s e o for you for small business. We're doing leads. You're getting on a call with someone. If you're good at closing, you'll close the lead, you'll make money.

That's, that's what we focus on. And uh, that's been my philosophy for the last few years and it works really well. Uh, 

So, okay. I am a business owner. I have never bought leads before. I don't know,

how does that work? I don't even know that this thing exists. 

Could you explain to me what is involved in buying leads and, how would you tell someone, well, this is the way to go as a small business owner, when they 

haven't, they have no concept of what, especially, 

suppose they don't even have a concept of what a quote unquote lead is, 

or how do you explain that to someone? 

Yeah. Uh, great question. So for us, well the, basically the explanation is fairly simple. Um, what we do is we get people to call you or to request your services. That's essentially a lead, right? So on through, through our campaigns, there are two types of lead. You get the ones who are dialing the number and going straight to your phone.

So if you're a business owner, they're gonna call straight to you. Uh, you're gonna answer the call, and they're gonna be just pretty much saying, Hey, I'm looking for. For long care services, I'm looking for an accountant, corporate accountant. I'm looking for tree removal, right? And then from there you take it, you get their information address and whatnot, and you invoice them and get the job done.

The other type of a lead we get is usually a lead, comes through a lead form. So they just submit the information. Guys, uh, folks like me, who are introverts, uh, we don't really like to get on a call with with folks And you know, and talk about prices and quotes. So we might submit a, a form instead telling them, Hey, here's My address. Uh, here's what I'm looking for in terms of services. Give me, gimme the price, right? I want to know how much you're, how much you're gonna be charging me. So, um, business owners love that. So when they work with us, they, they love to, uh, to get those types of leads because they, those people are actually interested, interested in the ServiceNow.

They're not gonna be somebody who is gonna be beating around the bush and waiting until next year to get something done. So a lot of our lead, a lot of our businesses that work with us, primarily in home services, so I have to caveat it primarily in home services. Uh, they get to close the lead within about 24 hours.

As soon as someone calls, they get on a call. And if you have good sales skills, you can actually close people on a, on a, call. Uh, there is no problem getting those, those businesses, uh, closed and, and, and pretty much From there, you just charge the client and get the job done. That's essentially what happens.

So for anybody who's never tried leads, um, it's, it's, it is just you, you basically, what happens is that we're not touching your website. We're not doing anything with your brand. Also, leads are coming through our own campaigns. We might put up a website of our own. We might put up a landing page, and then the, the leads will be generated.

Via, you know, Facebook advertising, Google advertising, SS e o, whatever it might be, the channel that's not for you to worry about. The only thing that you have to worry about and kind of give us feedback on is how was the quality? Did the lead close? Did they actually look for what your offer? If not, we pivot, we fixed whatever needs to be fixed and we try to get you the best quality leads we can. 

Okay, so I understand now. So you run campaigns separate from, and 

these are like, these are generic 

campaigns, right? These are not campaigns specific to the company. So these are generic campaigns that that's safe for tree removal, 

for lawn and care for those type of things. Um, let's just suppose you have some creative that 

says. Dead lawn? 

Would you like to 

revive it? click here or 

sign on form. And So you run those on uh, let's say Facebook or Instagram or wherever it is. People

sign up, they click the go to landing page, they enter the information, you get the lead, and then you send it to the, the business. That's how it works 

Exactly. Yeah, that's exactly the process. The, the reason why it really works very well is because we cut out the, the part that takes the longest time. It's basically dealing with clients' websites, right? Because their websites, small businesses, don't really have websites that are built to convert, right? So now you have to go in and you have to change the fonts and the buttons, and you put a form here and there, and then the client is like, well, I don't know if I like it. And then it takes six months just to get off the ground. us, we don't concern ourselves with anything like that. We know what works.

We built, like you said, we built something generic. We put it up. All clients care about is that the phone rings. If it rings, do they care if it came from a generic landing page? No. So they, they'll answer the call. Somebody's looking for a loan care service. They offer loan care service. That's it. Uh, that's, that's the transaction right there. 

Right. I, this is great. Uh, 'cause I never thought I knew it existed, but I never thought about Oh yeah, you don't have to 

necessarily, cause people always talk about 

building a brand and, you know, putting a company out there. So people are very .Caught up in my business. Face needs to be out there. It needs to be my 

logo, my colors.

People need to know me. But you're very rightfully said at the beginning, you don't care 

how you get the business. You just want the 

business. Right? And so they hire someone like you, who is a lead generator, 

you, you do They don't have to 

touch that. They don't have to 

see it. They don't have to know how the magic works.

All they know is 

that

their phone is ringing and they're getting this information that they can now try And close

to make sure that their business continues to survive. Yeah. 

That's exactly it. And I think you, you touched on a very good point. A lot of small businesses are being told, go build a brand. Right. Go work on your brand and do social and do this and do that. And there's just not enough time in the day. Like you said, they just need some money to survive, at least at the beginning.

Right? That's why we say like to certain revenue threshold, you just need to focus on getting your phone ringing. That's all that matters, right? The there is no brand really at the beginning. You, you are still figuring out . your own offering. You're still figuring out .If you are even good at this business, can you get people to, you know, to buy your service?

So the best way to do it The best way to validate whether you've got the required skills to run a small business, is to get on a call with leads, ,right? And it doesn't matter how those leads you get, you acquire those leads as long as they're looking for your service. That's all you need. You are get, you're quickly getting on a call, you're validating your own, uh, your own sales skills, your own pitch, and your your own pricing. and that's the best thing You can do. Uh, instead of, you know, . Sitting there and kind of, figuring out, do I like the color of this logo? Do I like the, you know, the color of this button, the size of this font? None of that matters at the beginning. All that matters is getting on a call with, with a potential customer. 

Yeah. 

Yeah. And uh, I dunno where I got it from, but I know the saying of you don't have a business unless you get a sale. 

For 

a business 

of a certain size far as you see was the most effective way to convert.

Is it that some people prefer the direct 

phone call or some people prefer to get the. Things in a form and and sent to them, or is it from business 

to

business is different, or is it like, what's the internal systems of the business? Like 

what are the best channels 

and the best way for any business owner to choose 

how to. Generate

leads. 

Yeah, I, I think there are two questions there. So, which I think channel works best, and then what, um, once someone is on a website, once you acquire them, Uh, what type of a, lead, I guess mechanism works best in terms of phone 

call or a form So, t answer 

is the first one. Um, I would say if you are gonna be a small business who wants to invest your own time and your own money into your own, you know, running, generating your own leads, I would say Google Ads is the best option, right?

So everybody who goes on Google already has a problem, so they're looking for a service. It's, it's very much bottom of the funnel type of a channel. Um, so most of the time when you get those leads, they're really easy to close as long as you're just . You're not horrible on the phone, , which, which happens. I, I've seen a lot of small business who couldn't deal with leads because they just couldn't close and we couldn't help some. So the, you know, their relationship cannot progress from there. So Google Ads is the best option. Now, if you are gonna be doing Facebook advertising or if you're gonna be doing Instagram advertising, or any other social media platform out there, something you will have to, keep in mind is that you will have to, nurture.

The lead to actually become ready for you to close. The reason why is because when someone goes on Google and they look for long care services, that's because they need long care services. When someone goes on Facebook or Instagram, they're there. because they're looking at the photos of influencers or their friends and family.

Nobody's looking for anything that you are offering and you're interrupting their experience with your ad. So if they got curious, it's not because they had a problem at this given moment. It's because maybe something . Came to their mind as I might need it at some point In the future. So there needs to be, it's kind of, you think of it as extra steps on the, on, uh, you know, on the, in the funnel for you to actually nurture someone coming off of the Facebook versus someone who is, uh, coming off of, Google is fairly close to the actual transaction itself. so that's one thing that's always, you have to always keep in mind. And we do generate leads in, uh, you know, in all of the different platforms. we love Google, If Google doesn't work, we go elsewhere. If Google works, we do it on Google. If client wants more leads on top of what Google can offer, because Google is finite, there's only so much you can generate from it, then you go and you layer on top social media, uh, paid advertising and social media.

Now, once somebody actually lands on your website, on your landing page, right, um, . At the beginning, every business owner tells me that they want more phone calls. So they're like, I want more calls. I love phone calls. I can get on a call with a person and I can close 'em. So get me phone, more phone calls. and what I tell them is that we'll give you phone calls, but we'll also give you forms. Somebody submits a form. Trust me, you will love it. Now, the reason why they love it at the end of the day, they will always ask for more lead forms rather than phone calls. But the reason why they love it, is because someone submits a form.

They will give you all the information upfront. They will tell you the address, they will tell you the phone number, the name. They will tell you what they're looking for. So before you even get on a call, you already got some homework done. So now you're talking to the person knowing that, hey, they want a cut for their lawn.

The lawn is, I don't know, this and this size, based on my Google Maps research I've done based on the address they provided. So now when I get on a call, I can pitch them, you know, $400 for the season. I. Right, instead of getting on a call and when they tell you exact information, you kind of have to think through it, you have to process it, and then there's pressure of time and you're trying to close them at the same time and you're like, am I doing a good job with it?

right? So a lot of businesses come in, we want calls and, and then after a while they're like, I love forms. Can you give me more forms? Right? So we can't control which . Option people will choose. That's why we give both options to the actual potential customer but usually it ends up being, you know, 50 50, 70 30 in favor of a call.

Uh, but forms just work fabulously. We love forms ourself. I run a number of own, my own traditional businesses and forms are just great. We can follow up within 15, you know, 30 minutes and We already have a pitch ready. So it it that that's the way that we, that we position it from the channel that we generate leads from to the actual website and the type of elite that that businesses get. 

Beautiful. Beautiful. 

Excellent. That's, that's good information. 

So we, we kind of just flowed straight into how businesses would generate, Leads, which is the first part of the two things that we want to come and talk about today.

So we kind of covered all 

that already in exactly what you said, which was excellent. And I I think you gave some excellent information as to how the system works for small business owners. But now let's move on to some of the SS e 

o stuff that you do for enterprise businesses and you say 

that you really focus on s e O for bigger businesses.

Why do you think that's the best way to go about generating leads for bigger businesses?

Yeah, so the thing about bigger businesses, obviously, that they're much more mature, right? So they're at a point where they do have budgets to allow larger campaigns and to be most importantly, patient about the the marketing efforts, right? So small business is. at a point where they, they, they need to make money in order to survive, uh, medium-sized to large enterprise businesses already

Surviving. As a matter of fact, they're thriving. So now most of the time what they're doing is they're layering s e o on top of whatever they're doing in marketing, trying to get more incremental leads, right? So as a result, when we work with large enterprise, with enterprise, uh, clients, we like the fact that they understand that something will take three months, six months, 12 months, right?

Depending on how competitive the keywords are that they're trying to rank for So as a result, we don't have to Justify our efforts every single week to them. We don't have to deal with questions every single day. Where is my rankings? What are my rankings? right That's really the hardest part of being in the agency business is actually client communication.

clients who are less patient, they will be messaging you all the time Clients who are much more mature in terms of their business stage, they tend to, you know, ask you once a week, once a month, where we at How is the progress, how the revenue numbers or lead numbers are progressing? If it's up, great. If it's down, they expect an explanation, but it's never panic or anything like, that.

Unless you're not doing a good job and it's been 12 months and there is no progress, obviously you're in trouble. right? So that's why we really like to work with, um, with larger companies. When it comes to actual service s C O Service, it's because, it takes time. So your business has to be at a point where it can afford to, invest, not just money, but time as well into the process.

And ss e o is not an easy thing to, to do just primarily because, um, . You, you don't control Google, right? so what we do is we work with best practices and depending on your risk tolerance, some results we can get quickly. Uh, they do with certain level of risk, which we usually don't do for enterprise clients.

I. Or if we do it based on best practices, pure, you know, kind of, you know, content marketing, Uh, marketing campaigns and whatnot, then that will just take some time. And, uh, yeah, we've noticed that it's way easier to work with larger clients as a result, uh, when we're doing service versus small businesses. Productized service is the best option. 

Yeah, so, uh, when we were doing our websites back in the days, 

'cause I know you are 

somebody who built websites, and so you would've optimized websites, you'd have done all the meta tagging and all the different things. Uh, we actually were able to get our 

website to rank for a 

kind of a short tail.

Search term. We rank on it first page for a number of years, and that's something that 

I did for my s e o, but that all was all 

the way

back in 2011. What is different about SS e o in this time? 

Well, I wasn't doing s e o in 2011. Uh, so, yeah. Uh, my, I would say that based on what I know in terms of just this, this, you know, going 10 years and whatnot back, um, SS E so the s e o got more saturated, so there's a lot more competition. Definitely. Right. So a lot more businesses are now obviously understanding the value of organic search and driving organic traffic to their businesses. so there is way more competition. The algorithm has become more complex. Uh, so there is a lot more factors that Google takes into account. Uh, there is a lot more emphasis on . Content. There's a lot more emphasis on backlinks and a lot less, I would say, on just keywords or finding keyword on a page, which is what I would assume would be the case in back in 2011.

The early days of Google is when you put the right keywords into the page, that was pretty much giving you an advantage to actually rank higher, right? As well as you could build a lot of low quality links back to your site, and that would give you a boost and get you to rank better as well. Now a lot of those links

Uh, or those link strategies that used to work back in the day would probably not cut through The chase this time around, but if you do still do link building, just a little bit better quality links, that is still working. the industry has become more competitive.

There is a lot more businesses that are trying to get to go after the keywords that you probably would be interested to go after. And there's also the more complex algorithm as well. So, Way more factors to consider. Google keeps saying that quality matters, depending on which Ss e o you ask, you can't get away with low quality.

That being said, if you're building a real brand, I think you might want to focus on building quality, uh, website quality content, whichever. Whatever that means to, to your end user. Whether it's AI generated content, it's still quality or human written content that you know that's still quality. That's up to you and your choice.

But yeah, things just got more saturated and more complicated with regards to, ss e o over time. 

Yeah. 

And I know Google has implemented the 

Google helpful content system, or which, um, rewards, well they say it rewards 

higher 

quality content as opposed to, uh, just

keywords and things like what word stuffing and things that people would've done in the past. some marketers 

be worried about that, and how do you go about 

navigating that

Google content system? 

Yeah. Um, there's been a number of different updates that we're focusing on content. Uh, one of them was actually in September this year, so helpful content update. Uh, just rolled out at the end. Finished rolling out at the end of September, so just a few days ago. And I. There's been a lot of car carnage, so a lot of websites went down. and if you, if, if your, your audience is following kind of Twitter, Twitter news and whatnot, people talking about ss e o, they'll notice that a lot of the, uh, what we call niche websites went down and Reddit and LinkedIn and quota actually went up. So there is a lot more of them that Google shows for various different keywords like war and Reddit.

Uh, and Google's explanation is that that's a content that people are looking for something that's real advice. Um, something that is In a way, I guess a quality advice because it comes from the users and their own experience. Uh, whereas whatever niche website owners were providing before was just kind of repetition of the same knowledge of the same information over and over again for the purpose of generating more income via affiliate marketing or display advertising.

Alright, so .It. I, I don't really have an opinion on that. . I try to not have an opinion on this particular update. Uh, so Google says that they're focusing on quality. That being said, if you look at the websites that's showing up, let's say quarter results and whatnot, they're horrible. Some of them are just AI answers.

Uh, like Chad, g p t answers pretty much in core format, . Uh, so that's not quality. Even though user posted, it doesn't make it quality. And then, but however, some websites that we've seen that went down . They were not quality either. Uh, they were not giving any original information, right?

Uh, So again, for me, if, if you are someone who is interested in long-term growth of your business and you're actually building a brand, then all this updates will happen, right?

At some point you're gonna go up in rankings and some point you're gonna go down in ranks. you have to always think long-term and just focus on your end user, in my opinion, and build content or original content that is actually of quality to your audience. So I think that really reflects really well on YouTube where

You can see when someone is faking it or someone is producing something for the sake of just generating more, you know, more videos And then, maybe manipulating the algorithm. Whereas when you and I are having conversations genuine, there's quality to it Your setup is quality, your audio is quality, right?

The same mindset is what we try to apply to websites is how can we create the best quality content? with videos in it, with's, podcasts in it, whatever images, and if user likes it, We are building a real brand. Um, We can get more traffic from other platforms like Facebook and Instagram if quality content is there. that being said, Google is obviously the biggest source. So again, um, you know, , I would say don't focus too much on algorithms. Too much on algorithm updates. Sometimes you will get hit even though you don't deserve it Sometimes you'll be rewarded for it. Uh, if you are just doing churn And burn, like A lot of SEOs, uh, we do have websites.

We just build it for the sake of making a quick income and we know that. it's gonna churn and burn in six months. By all means, That's not a problem. We'll use AI for it and whatnot, but there is a real expectation that eventually it's just gonna go down. Right. If You are someone who's a small business, which is I assume, which most of your audience are, Focus on brand, try to build a brand.

Once you have enough, uh, revenue coming into the business, we have maybe potentially leads then you have that income to spend on marketing and branding and doing proper job in terms of your own business.

Yeah, and I think what out of that, I guess one of the big questions comes up because it's quite in vogue right now, of how do we properly use AI in order to, augment, lemme put it that way. Augment 

our content without falling into the trap of producing commodity content within which then tanks our s e o.

So how, how, do you marry both of those things? So they may be a smart business owner who says, Scott, I, I really wanna do the ss e o stuff. I know that AI is big. How 

can we now use AI to drive 

our s 

e o? is that something that we can do? What would your response to, to a business owner like that be? 

A hundred percent I think. I don't think that AI in general is bad for s e o. Right, I think is that when you are trying to take a shortcut, it ends up being bad for s e o. So what do I mean by that? If you just ask Chad g p t to write an article for you, and you take it the way it is and you put it on your website, that's probably bad for your s e o.

You're guaranteed to, to get hit at some point, sooner or later, however. When you are writing an article, even if it's an original piece, right? Even when scientists go and do research papers, it's research, right? There is a reason why we're saying research papers that they are gonna be sourcing information from somewhere else in order to come up with their own conclusions and write their own articles or their own papers. So I would recommend for any small business to use AI as a way to research the topic. To get an outline, to get new ideas, just because when you do your own research just on your own, as a, as a human being, there's probably gonna be limitation as to how much information you can really get through, right?

Whereas AI can quickly, um, you know, go through a ton of different sources and whatnot and provide that in a more or less, uh, digestible format back to you. so I would say, . Don't use it necessarily for writing the entire thing. Use it for, uh, influencing what you're gonna be writing and for researching the topic in greater depth. So for me, AI is a great research tool. It's great for using to, uh, you know, to, to, to learn more about the topic, but at the end of the day, it's you who should be writing it.

Yeah, yeah, I hear you. I hear you. Uh, and so what I, what I get from that is that 

effective ss e 

o has to be driven by, experience-based authentic, content and not necessarily, um, pulling. 'cause we know how it works. we know that when 

you ask for the prompt and 

let's say chat 

GPT or 

Bard or.

Whichever 

one you, decide to use is, it's just aggregation of all these, these different multiple thoughts under this particular topic, and then it puts something out for you which is not necessarily 

the most useful when And so it makes sense 

that you would use it for structure or you would use it for some other type of research, but primarily the content 

should come from, from your experiences, from you and 

and That's the type of thing think you should be focusing on if you want to .build content for SS e o. 

No, that's exactly on point. And you know, if you are building a true brand, I have to . I have to provide a disclaimer here. If you are building a true brand, right, you you really wanna build something long term. That's the approach. Uh, now, now some of my colleagues who are SEOs, they, they build websites purely on AI content and it ranks and it makes money for them.

Affiliate marketing, display advertising, right? There are ways to cut through but . When you go to that website, it's just generic copy. you're not really building any kind of long-term affinity between your brand and your customers. they're not gonna be searching for your brand. you know, a week from now being like, I found some really interesting information on that website. But most of the time it's just, it's a boring article. It's got a bunch of links. Somebody clicked on a link. You, you made money as an. C o or or niche website owner. If you are building a brand, you're trying to build an affinity. You're trying to basically build trust between yourself and the end user. And so when they see this original content, the videos, the quality of everything that you're producing, in turn, that should generate more, More loyalty on their end and they will probably come back to you. Right? So, yeah, for sure. I just have to kind of add a disclaimer that there is always a way to make money if you wanna do it, just shortcuts.

There are plenty of them. They work if you're building a business long term focus on quality. That's my opinion on it. And You know, with enterprise clients, we, we actually do content writing for them. Uh, we offer that as, as part of our service. and we never use AI for it, right? None of our articles are written with ai.

The reason why is because , . If one day Google decides that. it's no longer okay with ai, for whatever reason, we don't want to be held accountable for, uh, for large amounts of traffic just tanking on a client website that is enterprise client. Like we're talking about hundreds of thousands of visits, right?

So again, uh, it. you know, for us, we're still human first, human written article in terms of our own service. Uh, we offer that as a service and we see really good results with it. But AI is just used for research just to, to help us, you know, get more information, become makes the article a little bit better, but never to write the entire article itself. 

Yeah. I love, I love what you said, and that's a big thing for me, building these long-term relationships. Uh, and I guess you say you're building a brand, you're building these long-term relationships and, um, if you take too many shortcuts, the journey becomes longer 

in my opinion. Are of course, as you said, you'll get short-term wins.

And maybe that is the idea. Maybe the idea is, okay, let 

just do this real quick. Let me get some short term wins. And maybe that's the purpose of it, but it really is purpose driven. And if your purpose is to stay in the market, And to maximize customer lifetime value and to build a brand and those things that you should in fact, uh, focus on

authentic experience-based content in order to drive your Ss e o.

Yeah. 

Yeah, 100%. I'm in a lot of different masterminds with various different SEOs and something that always . It kind of becomes a conclusion of a lot of conversations is that As SEOs we're trying to pretty much fake the signals that a real brand would have. Right. So we're trying to take shortcuts to get to a point where we look like a real brand.

And in the back of my mind, why not you just build a brand ? Why not to put a real person on your website, put their bio, put their photo, tell the person who that you know, who the writer is, who's the author, is not just AI generated picture, right? Um, so yeah, that's what Google is looking for. They're trying to actually find your website to be more like a real business. And then that information will help them to try to you know, rank websites that actually deserve to rank better. Doesn't always work out that way, but if you're already taking shortcuts to look like a real brand, why not just build a real brand? 

Yeah, I agree. I agree 100%. I agree with that. I think just build a real brand. I mean, um, especially if you plan to be around for a 

while, if .if . you don't, then it doesn't matter. But if you plan to be around for a while and you're building this big business, and if you're

enterprise level, I mean, one would only assume that you're in this for some for 

the long term or at least for the medium term, you have some kind of goal or plan.

And so that makes sense just to build it, build it, all the way out. 

Alright, so, okay. So that, this has been very, very good and, tell the people if you you have any last 

takeaways or anything that

you would like them to know about 

lead generation and s e o.

You can just share that with the people 

or any last big takeaways. 

I think that the biggest one is gonna be the philosophy we talked about, right? As a business. Just understand at what part of the journey you're at. are you, are you at a point where you can afford to invest into actual marketing services done for you or done by you? Whether you're investing into an agency Or you're investing into your own education to do it for your own business, or are you at a point where you're struggling and you just need to make

You know, income this, this week, this month. Then . Try to try to play around with leads as, as, a way to generate more business for yourself. Once you get to a certain point where you have a good ca good cash flow where you can start to outsource business to your employees or contractors, then start to invest into, into, into actually building a brand and.

You know, starting to do more flyers and logos and website and whatnot and stuff like that. If you're on an enterprise level, right? That's kind of a, going from small to medium-sized to, to enterprise or medium-sized, if you are at that stage, a lot of times you are investing into the brand.

You're investing, you are creating quality content to help you . Get that incremental traffic back to your site. We were doing, we just finished doing a pitch document for one of the businesses that we're pitching to, um, a $6 billion publicly traded company. And, uh, something that we, we did a quick calculation and we pretty much told them that, Hey, , If you do s C O, right, in the next two years, you could be looking at six to $12 million in additional revenue, right?

Just based on what we see in terms of the keywords that they would write to, would like to rank for, and you know the websites that they have. so again, what stages of business you are at, and then pick the right. You know, the right, uh, approach to marketing as a result of that, uh, you know, that realization.

So that would be my biggest advice. it's always great to build a brand. I took a while to get to a point where I'm intentionally now putting myself out there and sharing my knowledge. It's because. I had to one, learn things. Two, I had to practice them. I had to become comfortable with them.

And then, uh, you know, I, I, I, and now I'm applying all the lessons that other people are telling you in terms of brand building. I. back to my business. Right? But, and that's the same thing for every business out there. Where are you at? What part of the journey you are at? Be very, be very honest about it. Uh, just because that's probably the most important question you're gonna ask yourself if you're trying to grow as a business, uh, because that will pretty much give you the right tools to, to get from $0 to a hundred thousand to 200,000 to a million, and then beyond a million. 

Excellent. Excellent. Really, really good stuff, Scott. I I appreciate how you framed that and pulled everything together at the end so that people will know what stage that they're in. They recognize that and what kind of strategies they have to adopt. In order to generate leads and continue to, bring business in over a long period of time.

That's an excellent synopsis. So thank you again, Scott, for coming and joining us here on the Useful Content Podcast and talking to our students 

in the useful content classroom. 

I know after people have heard all of this from you, they want to know how can they find you online so you 

can just let the people know how they can find you. 

Yeah, you can find me, uh, on my 

website, scott gabdullin.com or 

you can find me on any social media platform, probably Twitter is a great place. And uh, from there you'll be able to find either my enterprise agency or our lead generation agency. And a number of other businesses that we're involved with. uh, we are traditional business owners ourselves on top of running an agency. So we understand, the hurdles that a lot of business owners go through as entrepreneurs. So I, I am passionate about helping and I, it is been a pleasure. Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to speak to your audience, share whatever knowledge I have, and, Uh, and definitely had a great time. 

So thanks all these students for coming 

to the lesson today. Useful 

content classroom. Dismissed.

And we clear. Ooh, that was good. That's 

good stuff,

man. How you feel 

Uh, feels good. Um, yeah. Uh, usually so, so , when you ask me like I have to re-ask the question, I was like, oh, we're not doing one take. All right. That's easier. 

Yeah, that was my fault. I, I should 

have, uh, yeah, I realized I meandered all over with that question. Lemme