Brad Eather (00:03.186)
Hello and welcome to the Selling's Creative Podcast, a podcast exploring creativity's role in sales. I'm your host, Brad Eather, a digital communication sales consultant applying communications, media and insights to help ordinary businesses sell on social. Today, I'm joined by an old friend from my days at Sydney University.
Bruno (00:13.966)
you
Brad Eather (00:26.436)
A very smart man who not only graduated and then went back to Sydney Uni to lecture, but has also successfully applied his digital communications education to the world of SEO. and I know what many of you will be thinking. What the hell does SEO have to do with sales? Well, the way that buyers make purchasing decisions is changing every day. And if there's a man that can answer that question, it's without a doubt.
Bruno (00:38.626)
Mm-hmm.
Brad Eather (00:55.73)
going to be Bruno Rodriguez.
Bruno (00:59.266)
Very good, thank you Brad. And go.
Brad Eather (01:00.254)
So yeah, thanks for joining me on the Sellings Creative Podcast, mate.
Bruno (01:07.278)
Appreciate it, appreciate the opportunity. Thanks for having me. Yeah, so you and I met back at uni and I think that when we first met we were both students and I think that the second time that we met at uni I was teaching one of the classes that you were attending maybe?
Brad Eather (01:16.979)
Yeah.
Brad Eather (01:23.878)
Yeah, because I started out full-time and then finished off part-time. So by the time I came back and it took me two years to get through the part-time aspect, you were already lecturing at that point.
Bruno (01:38.306)
Yeah, it was fun and I think that...
I came to Australia for a year and a I was going to do 18 months of just a masters, get my title in a non-Spanish English speaking university and go back. And then they offered me the opportunity to teach there and my career kind of took off after that time. And it's been 10 years now. coming back to Spain in April, so I think that my Australian dream had an expiration date, but it was
was great and it was a great experience that I still cherish.
Brad Eather (02:17.297)
That's awesome. So I sort of I want to go back to what I want to go back to the beginning and sort of compare and contrast our experiences. So how do you think so to put this into perspective at the time, the digital communications and culture degree that we both did was
Bruno (02:25.751)
Okay.
Bruno (02:37.422)
Mm-hmm.
Bruno (02:42.35)
Mm-hmm
Brad Eather (02:44.795)
The only Sydney University was the only one that was offering such a such a degree, I believe in the world. Yeah. So I want to I want to ask you, how did you think about the internet before you started that compared to how you think about it now? Like what were those initial? What did you think you were getting into when we when you started that?
Bruno (02:49.098)
Mm-hmm. I think so, yeah.
Bruno (03:11.512)
That is such an interesting question. think that...
I worked in digital marketing before starting that course. from that perspective, I already had this level of knowledge about what are the different marketing channels in digital? What are the main platforms? are the percentage of users? What different demographics use each of them? So I knew that, but then this unit had this level of anthropologic almost perspective to the way that people use the internet and asked questions that were completely uninterested with.
with marketing or how to sell things and it was more what do we win as people, what do we lose as people when we use these tools. think that the main thing that changed was we were exposed to all the research around the way that social media affects our brains and during the time that I was coursing my studies at University of Sydney I disappeared from social media so I stopped using
Brad Eather (04:15.261)
Mm-hmm.
Bruno (04:16.464)
This was what 10 years ago so back then Facebook Instagram any of those and to this day I don't use them I still have my accounts and
recently realized that a lot of LLMs like Chat GPT and Claude and others are taking updated information from these accounts. I will have to do something about it. And for Instagram, every time that I go on a trip, I download the app, upload the pictures for the trip and uninstall it. But I'm more aware of the dangers of overuse of social media, overexposition to screens, having our brains. And that's the main learning that I took from there.
Brad Eather (04:55.325)
Yeah, because what I, what I... The degree was, I believe, underneath the humanities umbrella. So...
Bruno (05:05.038)
Well, it's a media communications course, yeah. I think that that was the school.
Brad Eather (05:09.263)
Yeah. And I don't know, from, from my own experience, some of the things that I was exposed to actually made me feel quite, it didn't make me want to use the internet because it seemed like such a scary place. And for a long time, I probably knew too much.
and was too unwilling to use the internet. But, and it was, it was only much later down the track that I decided, you know what, this information that I have in my head, I can directly apply it because I understand it. I'm not, I'm not a marketing guru or anything like that. But like you said, that whole, the psychology piece between how a, how
humans interact with the digital platform interact with technology is so powerful. And, and, and I mean, I'm beginning, I've pretty much begun my process of trying to leverage these tools. and, and in the process of developing a organizational structure around how businesses can use social media as a tool, just interested to.
Bruno (06:10.286)
Mm-hmm.
Bruno (06:31.79)
You're doing great. You're being super successful in LinkedIn. I'm a big fan of yours.
Brad Eather (06:38.237)
Thank you, mate. Yeah, but I was wondering if you had the same experience in terms of having an adversity to the internet.
Bruno (06:46.734)
To one extent. I have this interesting story with my sister. My sister is 20... 24. So there's a 13-H...
13 year age difference between her and I. And we're having this conversation about social media. And I was not preaching, but kind of sharing my opinion and so on on the dangers of social media and so on. And she said, well, for you, what I said before is, am actually very active on LinkedIn. And she said, well, you're kind of a LinkedIn influencer. It's a shame that you focused on the social network that
is the least profitable social network, something like that. And I said, what do mean? Like, yeah, because you are an influencer on Instagram, you get three meals, and maybe you can get famous, and you get money. But then you cannot do that on LinkedIn. was like,
How do you think that I get the opportunities that I get? How do you think that I got where I got? It's through my personal brand. It's through my network. And way of cultivating your network is that opportunity. For me, it's the most. I will say that.
that is the most interesting social network in terms of developing your career, developing your own financial situation and financial freedom. So it was a very interesting piece on how she perceived social media and how I perceived social media.
Brad Eather (08:16.797)
Mmm.
Brad Eather (08:21.469)
Well, I think there's probably a delineation, like an influencer is almost a job role, right? Like within the context of social media, an influencer is a job role on LinkedIn. It's secondary. You're a professional. You have some sort of service or good to offer and
you're promoting it to a degree. sort of see it slightly differently in terms of, don't necessarily see the role of individuals as marketing as such, but
Bruno (08:59.598)
Mm-hmm.
Brad Eather (09:01.091)
it definitely supports marketing objectives. think, I think maybe the division of marketing and sales as we've come onto the internet, as salespeople have come onto the internet, maybe the scope of sales is changing a little bit and, and marketing is more about
the SEO side of things and the strategic aspects around all the delivery and leveraging the insights that maybe sales is getting to a broader audience. Sales is more focused in their networking and more socializing. Their role is more socializing ideas.
the insights that sales get from socializing those ideas, it's marketing's role to leverage. That's how I'm seeing it.
Bruno (09:52.75)
Correct. Correct. think that has so many things. The internet has...
has made the differentiation between the two maybe a bit more clear. And the limitation is not so clear as before. You were talking about SEO before. Maybe this is a good segue to explain what is SEO and to explain what do I do. So SEO means search engine optimization. And when you go into Google and search,
I don't know, I need a new barbeque. And Google is going to give you a set of answers. Generally, there's going to be some ads at the top, and most people will be able to differentiate. And you pay for those ads. It's a pay per click. And it's a bid system where you tell Google, I want to pay this much for this click. And basically, you are giving Google money for each. But then there's the rest. And that captures of all the clicks that Google gets, it captures about 90%.
So that is 9 out of 10 clicks and that is organic and that is just Google trying to give you the best possible results and SEO is trying to make your website try that best result so you get more traffic, you get more leads, you get more clients, more sales, right? And if you are a salesperson of a company the role of the
of the SEO team, the role of SEO people at that company or an external partner is to give you the freedom of not having to pay for every click, not having to pay for every lead, creating that funnel of people that are coming, that are converting, that are interested in the product that you can just call and are more likely to convert. And does that make sense?
Brad Eather (11:40.38)
Yeah, I think from my understanding, correct me if I'm wrong, please, but within that organic piece, we're obviously talking about search engines. But Effective SEO is essentially giving you the opportunity to be visible online in that medium, which is a search engine in this case.
Bruno (11:45.72)
Mm-hmm.
Bruno (11:51.064)
Mm-hmm.
Bruno (12:02.126)
And you can do that either pain or you can do that through SEO which is kind of the organic bit. that is my specialization. So what I try to do is how can we make you the most relevant result for this and generate as many sales or as many leads as possible. And a lot of people think that it's kind of black magic. You come into the conversation and you get a lot of people like, okay, I have this website. I want you to do your SEO.
to the page and a lot of the time is not that big of a mystery what Google wants is to know that you know what you're talking about that you're providing new information that you are the most trustful agent or actor in that field so it's a bit technical and but it's not that complicated and I definitely love it I have a passion for it and I think that
Everyone should have a minimum understanding of how search engines work and how to benefit from them.
Brad Eather (13:07.559)
So you say it's not that complicated. it certainly sounds very complicated. maybe like what, what are the practical things that you do to actually teach Google? Like what are the practical things that you, the inputs that you put in from an SEO perspective on your website to actually influence
Bruno (13:22.616)
Hmm.
Brad Eather (13:34.493)
the search engine results. Just on a very basic level.
Bruno (13:37.049)
Yeah.
Okay, one of the things that we can do in which kind of sales and SEO can collaborate together is now thanks to ChatGPT, LLMs and so on, it's easier than ever to kind of distill what are the needs of clients or support tickets or so on. So one thing that I like to do, especially with software as service with kind of B2B companies is say, you give me the logs of all the conversation chats calls from your sales teams?
And then once I get this gigantic file, I start interrogating Chat GPT or Claude or another LLM in terms of can you distill these into the key learnings. I start looking at them as well. And what are the main pain points? What are the main insights? What are the main things that a product or a service is doing for people? And then from there, I get ideas for content, right? There's another level, which as I see us, we have tools that tell us.
People are searching for these things. So what I try to do is match the two. What are the needs that we solve that people are searching? And that's one very easy way for me to provide value to SEO and to sales teams in organizations. And it can be the other way around. Sales people can tell me, look.
every person that calls asks me this question. And this question is not currently on the website or is not appearing on Google. So I can work with sales teams a little bit, just creating that content, making sure that that content exists. And a lot of the time, that solves the problem.
Brad Eather (15:10.717)
Cause I understand it. the
looking internally, finding information, creating content. Very, very similar to what I'm doing in the social selling. We're explaining complex problems by providing a range of different sources that people can access in many different ways. So if you're creating a piece of content,
Bruno (15:18.498)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Bruno (15:24.472)
Yeah.
Bruno (15:33.774)
Mm-hmm.
Bruno (15:41.646)
Mm-hmm.
Brad Eather (15:44.55)
In order to get it to show up in Google, are we targeting the headline? Are we targeting the body of the content? What are those little aspects within that that actually mean Google's gonna find it?
Bruno (15:59.956)
Here's where we are getting to some level of technicality and I don't want to get too deep into the woods. But the first thing is making sure that content answers the question better than other people. it will be a good thing to look at what's out there in terms of first making sure that there's people searching for it. SEO is not for everyone.
If for example you have a completely new idea something that no one has thought before and let's say the Apple approach right? Don't give people what they want and or what they are asking for and give them what they need right because you have this intuition if you're doing that and SEO wouldn't be a good channel to launch the iPod for example because there's no demand already like people are not searching for it and that's something that you should push on social
Brad Eather (16:19.452)
Mm-hmm.
Brad Eather (16:34.557)
Mm-hmm.
Brad Eather (16:47.271)
Mm-hmm.
Bruno (16:49.328)
media you should push on advertising on other channels. SEO is for things where people already have a need. So there's a need for sales training, there's a need for barbeque as we talking before, there's a need for software for lawyers, right? So first of all is make sure that there's a demand for that. And there are tools you can maybe use, Ubersuggest, can use Moz, can use SEMrush. There are a series of tools that you can experiment with.
Most of them have a free trial if you want to use them. But the second thing is make sure that your content is better than the content that is out there. That means that just going to Google, doing a search, and seeing what's out there is useful.
Not every brand will be able to compete for everything. Let's say that tomorrow you want to launch what is one of the most competitive markets. Anything that is AI related, anything that is cloud technology, anything like that, you are going to compete against.
The websites that you are going to search is AWS. It's going to be Microsoft. It's going to say Google. When you see that kind of thing, it's like, maybe this is not the thing that I need to start working on. And then you need to start targeting more specific questions, maybe related with your specific brand.
What questions do people have about my brand that Google can answer? Or maybe things that are very very niche that only you and a couple of people are trying to answer or are trying to do. Does that make sense?
Brad Eather (18:21.415)
Yeah, yeah does. So you're getting very, very, very niche when we're talking about that. And I suppose that's probably a question that many businesses are, many businesses might be struggling with because they hear SEO and they go, okay, we need it.
Bruno (18:27.406)
granular. Yes, correct.
Brad Eather (18:44.881)
But in order to actually leverage it properly, you need to have a very, very clear understanding of your customer and what exactly they're looking for, Yeah.
Bruno (18:56.12)
Correct. For most people investing in for most SMBs, investing in SEO is something that probably should be part of the founder or the one marketing person or one of the directors because for the budget that most SMBs have, if it's going to be $1,000, $2,000 per month, I would say that it's better that you do it than hiring.
and the services of an external person because unless it's a freelancer or someone that you know meets rates and so on because it's not that complex you know your business better than anyone else and at the end of the day SEO is not something that you add on top of your site a lot of people have that understanding of just add SEO to the stuff that I already have and there's no secret sauce that you are adding to your content is
Are you answering your client's need? Can you compete? Are people searching for your product? And if so, just go as niche as possible. Try to make sure that your content is as unique as possible.
Brad Eather (20:04.829)
So I suppose this is kind of where we, where we come together in a point in terms of the content piece, leveraging social media, leveraging SEO for content. So I suppose the way that I think people should be thinking about it is that social media is a distribution channel and websites.
Bruno (20:29.262)
Mm-hmm.
Brad Eather (20:32.995)
is a different distribution channel and SEO, the content that you're putting on your website would fall into that SEO category. Is that fair?
Bruno (20:43.992)
To an extent, yes, but content is so much reach than just SEO. What if every person that you onboard, let's say that you have a course, or let's say that you have an onboarding process for your client, you can have a lot of content on your website that is just to make that experience better.
Brad Eather (20:51.143)
Mm-hmm.
Brad Eather (21:11.591)
Mm-hmm.
Bruno (21:11.66)
that is not oriented to getting traffic for SEO, and maybe even, you know, an internal content that you build. So content is broader than that. will, when you say distribution channels, yeah, we talk in marketing about.
marketing channels. SEO will be one channel, paid search will be another channel, you have display, have social, paid social. So yes, all those channels can bring traffic to your website or your LinkedIn profile, whatever you want to do, or you can grow organically in those channels. And SEO is one of them, yes.
Brad Eather (21:47.538)
Yeah, because well, I suppose what I'm trying to get at is that as soon as you start getting into content, you realize that every different piece of content has a different purpose, a different function.
Bruno (22:00.27)
Mm-hmm.
Brad Eather (22:00.65)
so whether that's a piece of sales content that's directly targeted at, you know, bringing people in, maybe it's a piece of educational content, which would be like directly related to SEOs so that you can, they're, they're searching things. find an answer. or you could have something like a training course where people are paying for essentially what is the service, right? Cause I'm, what I'm trying to unpack is just like.
Bruno (22:10.776)
Mm-hmm.
Bruno (22:18.446)
Mm-hmm.
Brad Eather (22:30.703)
Once you start developing and adopting the practice of creating content.
If you're not doing it, it feels like a minefield. If you are doing it, the more and more you start. Yeah, it starts. It starts all making sense and what fits where.
Bruno (22:44.534)
Yeah, it's natural.
Brad Eather (22:54.809)
One last thing on content, cause if we're to go even deeper, have the ability to make different types of content. And what I'm talking about is whether that's written content, video content, or maybe, you know, to some sort of image or visual. When it comes to SEO, because let's put this in perspective. Maybe I've got a website.
Bruno (22:59.502)
Uh-huh.
Brad Eather (23:23.909)
and I'm, that's all I've got at the moment. A quick way in my opinion would be to go to YouTube. So how does YouTube's function or creating content, educational content in the form of SEO? How could a small business leverage that channel to develop search results that maybe then that then they can push to their website.
Bruno (23:28.312)
Mm-hmm.
Bruno (23:46.914)
Yeah, no, that is an excellent question. I think that it's been decades since Google started doing unified vertical search. So they not only provide you links to different websites, but they integrate images and they integrate video. And video is a type of result that is becoming more and more. It's becoming more and more common when you search something.
Also another thing is YouTube is the second most used search engine in the world, right? more people search on YouTube than on TikTok or than on Bing or or Amazon, right? So If you want to truly leverage YouTube again, you can create videos for a lot of things and the last thing that MrBeast has in mind is SEO but
And I think that one way is if you're identifying problems and those problems are better solved through video. And one way to identify this is do the search. You get a ton of results. Hey, I'm seeing a lot of videos.
For example, if you ask about how to fix a bike or or stuff like that You are going to get a lot of video content. Maybe this content belongs in video form What I will do is try to record that content Learn from what's out there and maybe try to the gaps if they are missing something try to provide your unique perspective as well and google like something a Lot especially lately which is called net information gain, which means
whatever new information that you are adding to the web or to that topic is going to be seen as something really, really positive for that. if the only thing that you, let's say that you are a writer and you search, what is this topic, you find the top 10 pages about it and you just synthesize them, it's not going to perform that well because you are not adding anything new, but you have a unique perspective, unique point of view. If you know the subject matter, the subject, if you are a subject matter expert and know the topic better than anyone.
Bruno (25:51.982)
You are the new things and Google is going to love that. So record the video, create the post, add the video to the post, upload the video to YouTube and so on. And that's going to create this kind of engine where the sum of the parts is better than the different parts added.
Brad Eather (26:13.191)
Yeah. You said add unique perspectives and this is another crossover that I see between what we're doing is that
Bruno (26:23.352)
Mm-hmm.
Brad Eather (26:25.359)
If we were going to take that definition of the changing nature of sales that I was talking about where now we are at, we have salespeople developing digital communication skillsets, they're making video within an organization. You might have different skillsets and different unique perspectives, different expertise in different areas. The power of
Bruno (26:31.298)
Mm-hmm.
Brad Eather (26:51.975)
for a small, let's stick to small business, but the power of starting to develop that content library that we're talking about and those unique perspectives coming from multiple different sources within the business, culminating to drive business development for a business.
Bruno (26:56.675)
Mm-hmm.
Brad Eather (27:18.757)
And I think that that's an incredibly powerful way to leverage it. I don't think there's many companies that are actually leveraging it in that way. But I'd love to hear your thoughts on...
on mate on maybe in practice how that would how that would work in a structure that yeah, that might work from an SEO perspective.
Bruno (27:44.012)
I mean, at the end of the day, there's this... People have a specific level of content literacy as well. Like, some people can get in front of a camera and record a video, some people can just edit their holiday pictures or their holiday videos into something beautiful with creative music, and some people don't know how to that yet, right? Put their thoughts into words, stuff like that. I think that...
As a business, your people are your biggest asset and it's really, really important that you leverage them the best that you can and empower them to do as much for the business as possible. That includes content creation. Not only because that's going to create blog posts and videos and stuff for your company that are going to create a sales funnel that works in social, that works in video, that works in SEO.
media as well and promote it in a big way but also because you are going to help these people build their own brands and have more I would say trustworthy and people with with an additional expertise in your company that is something that Google values very much is not only what is written but who is writing it so let's say that you have a company on again AI and
Brad Eather (29:00.909)
huh.
Bruno (29:06.646)
you have someone writing the most beautiful content about AI but Google doesn't know who that person is. Google is going to trust that content less than...
If the same content is written by someone that Google knows that they've published a few things in Google Scholar about AI, they've been publishing in five or seven publications about AI, they may have things out there, like they may have a LinkedIn profile that is heavily focused on AI. So when you're doing all that work, Google has a higher opinion than you. And it's smart enough to say, okay, if this content has been created by this person, I need to take a second look at it and position it more highly. they are...
Brad Eather (29:40.893)
Mmm.
Bruno (29:44.334)
And obviously this is just from an SEO perspective. You just want to have people that are well valued in the industry, that have good networks, that add value, and training them on how to create content, educating them on, and even spending resources on making sure that they are trained. That's good investment, I think.
Brad Eather (29:47.634)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Brad Eather (30:04.295)
Yeah. I honestly could go on. like, I could ask you questions all day about this, but I think, what I want to do is, is shift to the elephant in the room, which is AI and how, how things are changing. You made a post the other day relating to personal branding and AI search results.
Bruno (30:15.886)
Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
Bruno (30:29.55)
Mm-hmm
Brad Eather (30:32.507)
That was a really interesting take on, what I think is that illuminating how AI might be used as a personal branding tool might illuminate how the industry is shifting from your perspective. What did you mean by that? What are you seeing from, yeah.
Bruno (30:35.714)
Thank you.
Bruno (30:50.046)
Mm-hmm.
Bruno (30:56.024)
Well, this was inspired by a friend of mine that I visited in Melbourne. And he has a creative studio in our creative agency, web design agency in Melbourne. They are called Your Creative. And I was asking him about LLMs, is his experience. And he said, a couple of weeks ago, someone found us through Chach-BT.
And when I asked them, how was the search, how was the query, what she said was, I'm looking for creative agencies in Melbourne with women in leadership roles that also are socially active with kind of, I think that it was aboriginal work and so on. So Chai GPT answered this very specific question of this is the agency for you because this agency is doing all of these things.
breaks the way that we work, right? From an SEO perspective, that is completely different to the way that we work. And because that adds a level of detail and complexity to those queries that make it very difficult to add them, to group them. But I think that it's really, really interesting because then you need to understand better how Google, sorry, how Chat GPT or how Gemini or how Claude see you.
And what are the differences between them? And it was very funny, you are a person that spends a lot of time on LinkedIn and you talk about this. And I'm a person that is very invested on LinkedIn and I talk about this as well. ChatGPT search, which is when ChatGPT decides that it needs to access and search the web to reply to use ChatGPT at all. It was using...
Brad Eather (32:23.847)
Yeah.
Brad Eather (32:47.559)
No.
Bruno (32:50.766)
Personal blogs, was using industry blogs, was using other things that I believe that were actually more relevant, conference websites, and it was putting this information about them, but it wasn't using LinkedIn. Maybe it uses it in the future. Whereas Google or ChatGPT4o were using it much more. So it was really, really interesting to see how LLMs were influenced to the point where, you know,
Podcasts like these were mentioned a lot in chat GPT web. So
So what I saw is that a lot of the internal relationships and mentorships and people trying to elevate each other through conversations like this one, through podcasts, through interviews, that was one of the main ways in which Chachibitsearch decided to find that information. It was really, really wholesome to me to find that.
Brad Eather (33:49.243)
Yeah, right.
Your, the fact that you're so active on LinkedIn and the fact that those insights about you didn't show up in that search suggests to you that it's not accessing that information.
Bruno (34:09.516)
Yeah, well, it might. Well, it gives you the sources for that information, right? So I was just, funnily enough, it's not quoting or referencing LinkedIn as a source ever.
Brad Eather (34:14.801)
Rock.
Bruno (34:23.886)
So that was the analysis that I did where, well, Chachipetit4o referenced LinkedIn as source most of the time. So it was funny to see those differences between models. And to your point before, in terms of content, video content, image content, post content, that tells me...
that you cannot put or you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket. for example, chatgbtsearch referenced YouTube a lot. having a podcast or a channel where you can upload videos about yourself, interviewing other people and so on, spot on, great idea, something that definitely is going to work on the LLMH. Things like participating in conferences and collaborating with other people to appear on their websites, maybe with a shared
Brad Eather (34:51.357)
Mm.
Bruno (35:16.356)
study, maybe with an interview, maybe with a compilation of opinions on a topic. All of that are going to be great ways, not only of existing ways to rank in Google, but new ways to inform and influence LLMs.
Brad Eather (35:33.558)
things are moving quick. Things are moving quick. what, what, and I see, I see online that there's quite a lot of discussion within your industry about what that actually means. What, what do you think from, from a behavioral point of view, what do you think we are trending towards in terms of our search habits?
Bruno (35:35.501)
Yeah.
Bruno (35:49.71)
Mm-hmm
Bruno (36:03.528)
That is a very interesting question. And the answer is no one really knows. OK, we are all trying to read the tea leaves. to be honest, what we are seeing is a generational shift. We are seeing that for a lot of younger people searching on Google, it's like Facebook for us. It's your uncle, not you. It's something for an older generation.
Brad Eather (36:29.095)
Yeah.
Bruno (36:32.654)
So a lot of people are using LLMs, they're using social media more as a search engine. Younger people, for example, are more likely to use TikTok instead of Google Maps to find a local place to eat. It's very limited. Yeah, I'm not on TikTok, right? And I don't have...
Brad Eather (36:50.833)
bright. Wow.
Yeah.
Bruno (36:57.602)
that need but that is a behavior that is becoming more more common. You want a restaurant around you and for me, go to Google Maps, search a restaurant around me, look the start review, look that maybe filtered by price, filtered by type of cuisine and I will go to the Thai place next door because it's affordable, it's well reviewed and they had, I don't know, pad thai.
But for lot of people, especially younger people, there's a more visual culture. And also there's an element of experiences need to be more shareable.
for their audiences, right? So you not only want to go to a restaurant to have a delicious meal, you want to go to a restaurant that will offer you an experience that you can share with the world. Now, whether this psychologically is positive or not, I'm not going to enter into that. Whether these audiences are real or healthy, I'm not going to enter into that. But you have this perceived audience.
Brad Eather (37:53.649)
Yeah.
Bruno (38:03.818)
So you want to search for a restaurant and you will see a beautiful video of someone entering a restaurant, putting the camera in this specific way, doing this with the noodles, and you will go there because that is the way that you consume information now and because that gives you a chance to maybe record something that you can share on TikTok or Instagram.
Brad Eather (38:11.805)
Mm.
Brad Eather (38:25.853)
Yeah.
Bruno (38:27.286)
Again, I'm not going to try to dissect that psychologically because I don't think that is a healthy behavior, but it is the behavior.
Brad Eather (38:35.698)
Yeah.
So that in a way, cause this is...
Some of this stuff's so complex, but in a way, like, you know, we've got our real world and we've got the online and in a way that, that the online world is changing the dining experience because people expect that, that they expect to be able to make that piece of content. They, they expect to be able to share it. They want that experience and that's directly influencing something as simple as a restaurant.
Bruno (39:13.998)
Yeah, correct. And I guess that if you talk to a restaurant owner, they will tell you, yes, we need things that are something that you can add to your Instagram account that looks beautiful, and that is influencing how we spend money in the decoration of the restaurant, and how the chef is deciding the menu and making decisions about that. And what trends exist, right? Is it the...
Brad Eather (39:15.079)
yet.
Bruno (39:41.23)
It's the Dubai chocolate now that became a trend a couple of months ago. And you can say like something that was created in Dubai like a month ago. Now it's in restaurants all over the world. went to, think that, you know, I was in Bali recently and they had it there. It's like, how this thing created in Dubai six weeks ago.
Brad Eather (40:04.985)
Mmm. Is nap.
Bruno (40:06.322)
made their way to Indonesia to a chef in Indonesia like in two weeks, right? And that was very, very funny to see how, you know, trends are no longer something that you do in a video trying to jump on a trend. It's something that everyone is kind of interconnected now.
Brad Eather (40:10.63)
Yeah.
Brad Eather (40:19.441)
Mmm.
Brad Eather (40:27.005)
Yeah, it's, it's, it's, uh, it's a brave new world. I'll tell you what. Cause the, there's so many complexities to this, I think a lot of people view the internet as, as the internet's the internet. That's one place. But I think I'm trying to try to make this sort of blatantly clear.
But if we were taking those demographic information, like, all right, young people are searching for things on TikTok related to restaurants over Google Maps, right? You really start to see a dice the the
you really start to see the different generations, the different people, like we're in an interesting time at some point in the future, everybody's going to have grown up in the internet. But right now we have people with different levels of understanding, different, they've gone through different education systems. It's a bit of a smorgasbord. And I think like people often ask me like, why would I, why would I, I see B2B businesses going for Instagram. And I'm like, why would you go to Instagram?
Bruno (41:21.4)
Mm-hmm.
Brad Eather (41:40.626)
when your audience on LinkedIn is in a beta B mindset, you know, and I'm, and I'm talking about, I know why you would go on Instagram, but I don't think it's the first point of call if you're not already familiar with media and advertising, right? But I think what I'm trying to say is the internet is the internet, but within it, there's spaces.
Bruno (41:52.974)
Yeah.
Brad Eather (42:08.623)
and people, different types of people hang out in those spaces. I refer to that as communities, like, know, initially, if you're to segment your audience and go, okay, this is the type of people you need to first go, where do those types of people hang out on the internet? I think that's maybe the first question you should really ask yourself.
Bruno (42:09.036)
Yeah, absolutely.
Bruno (42:34.35)
100 % know your audience know where they're hang out and Just following them. This is there There's this guy called Rand Fishkin right and he is a very important guy in the field of SEO He insists he's not an SEO anymore and that's true and he built a tool called Spark Toro
that is focused on audience, identifying where your audience is. So I want to talk about these topics, like these are the social networks that your audience is in, these are the accounts that they tend to follow, these are the topics that they are interested, these are the types of things that they search. And he insists a lot that marketing is changing in this way that...
The promise of digital marketing was always you are going to be able to measure everything and that was never true. The internet and life in general is too complex to be able to measure everything. But we have this fake promise and this attempt at measuring everything. We are going to this level of complexity because of different things. There's limitations to what we can measure with cookies and even if we are doing a...
Brad Eather (43:29.853)
Yeah, that's a great point.
Bruno (43:50.405)
180 around that I think that at some point privacy will become something more relevant and We have LLMs that are a bit of a black box Google is not sharing as much information as before and Social media is becoming a bit of a black box when you invest on it so
So at the end of the day, we are going back to this time where it's just, what is your audience? What is your message? Is that aligned? Are you in the same places that your audience is? And as you said before, there will come a time where everyone has grown in the internet. But also the internet is this changing beast. The internet from 10 years ago, when again, we're talking about the start of uni, like we're talking about Facebook as an almost this new thing, right?
Brad Eather (44:25.853)
Mmm.
Brad Eather (44:31.517)
Mmm.
Brad Eather (44:36.699)
Yeah, yeah.
Bruno (44:36.942)
And because when did it launch 2004 probably expanded internationally during that decade. So by 2014, like maybe people have been using it for four years or so. it was at this peak probably. And, now 10 years later it's like, yeah, no, it's just bots. TikTok didn't exist. Instagram was a relatively new thing. And podcasts weren't like.
Brad Eather (44:52.305)
Well, TikTok didn't exist then.
Bruno (45:01.464)
I don't know what we're calling podcasts, audio blogs or something like that. We will still call people video bloggers or Vbloggers. So kind of.
Brad Eather (45:09.769)
Well, think, I think, I think since then, the internet has become a very dynamic marketplace. Whereas before Facebook was a marketplace, there was social media, but social media was Instagram, Facebook. Now they exist within their own marketplace and they are competing for attention. Hence why algorithms have changed. Hence why things are accelerating.
Bruno (45:40.142)
And I think that, you know, 10 years ago, even 20 years ago, the internet was this wild, west, but it was a beautiful place because maybe you have a couple of forums that you were part of. One was about, in my case, video games. Another one might be about travel. And there were like these 200 people or 2,000 people in each of those blogs, and you more or less knew the names and so on. And I don't know, it was...
It was very interesting and now it seems sometimes that we have four websites and we don't have anything else and it's more difficult to start something new, it's more difficult to do something creative and every platform wants to be the only place where you spend your time.
And yeah, we have these communities that you call or these subcultures within the internet that you talk about Roblox never played it and it's one of the biggest and most thriving communities right now. You talk about, you know, same for Minecraft or same for very, very specific subcultures that I don't belong to. And then you hear how big they are and you get surprised. Yeah.
Brad Eather (46:38.032)
Yeah.
Brad Eather (46:56.603)
Roblox is amazing. I'm aware of it, but I don't, I mean, even advertising in games now, like that's another world. It's another world. But I think like on the flip side, you said that there's four, there's four places that we go to find four sort of places on the internet, right? But I suppose the thing is like,
Bruno (46:58.85)
Good day.
Bruno (47:06.775)
Yeah.
Brad Eather (47:22.829)
As dynamic as human life is in terms of we just go through it. The internet is changing at the same rate. the internet, you post something, it's gone in half an hour, you know, and people may be intimidated to start creating because it is so dynamic. But what I think that's relevant here is that this, what you said about it being crowded.
Bruno (47:52.056)
Mm-hmm.
Brad Eather (47:52.728)
is that now's, no, anyone that you're seeing regularly online has, has got on there and started practicing and got better and reached there. The fact that the internet's so crowded means that you can literally post and the reality is no one's going to see it. So the reality is for the, as you beginning this journey,
Bruno (48:15.757)
Yeah.
Brad Eather (48:21.251)
no one sees it and you're almost if you treat it as a learning experience
Brad Eather (48:30.061)
And your only objective is to learn and continue doing it. People often think people often talk about like being nervous about what other people think and all that. Like the reality is you start, you're going to get a hundred impressions, 50 impressions the next day. And as over time as you learn and you build, that's when you get the views. The internet's so what I'm trying to say, what I'm trying to say, what I'm trying to say, what I'm trying to say.
The internet's so busy now that you do have, there is an element of privacy in there, I suppose, in one respect.
Bruno (49:10.519)
Yeah, I think that...
So you're talking to two things there, guess. One is the journey of someone who creates content and how that journey is going to be very unrewarding for long time. And it is. I started working on my personal brand second half of last year. And sometimes I spend 20 hours working on a piece of research that I'm very proud of. And I get 300 impressions and three clicks. And then one day I write some
Can I say bullshit? I read some bullshit. And then 500 people have interacted with it. was like, what is the learning here? It's like at the end of one after reading, what did we learn here? was like, sir, I don't know. So it's a bit similar. But I think that one thing, yes, it's crowded. The other thing, you need to understand what are the.
Brad Eather (49:44.657)
Yeah, because,
Brad Eather (49:54.333)
Mmm.
Bruno (50:09.706)
incentives for these platforms, right? And these platforms want to incentivize that you post as much as possible, that you engage as much as possible, that you provide them with as much free labor as possible, right? Because that's the way that they function. And...
Brad Eather (50:12.153)
Of course.
Brad Eather (50:21.149)
Mm-hmm.
Bruno (50:24.918)
in order to incentivize that, what they will reward is consistent posting. So if you demonstrate the algorithm that you are willing to give it what it wants, which is just content that people engage with regularly, that people like, and you are willing to put your time and so on, the algorithm will do, you you scratch its back, it will scratch yours as scary as it sounds. So I think that you need to understand that a little bit as well.
Brad Eather (50:57.377)
I 100 % agree there. Like you can almost see it, know, and you see it at the bottom line. Your average views start trending upwards and your follower count might not.
Bruno (51:17.41)
And you see it with your, if you use native content, for example, what does LinkedIn want to keep people engaged within the platform as a world garden as much as possible?
Brad Eather (51:17.657)
as an example.
Bruno (51:31.31)
We all know that if you post something on your... if you add a link to your post, to your LinkedIn post, it will generate less... it will generate much fewer views. Why is that? Because LinkedIn doesn't want people to click on your link and go somewhere else. So that's why everyone says LinkedIn comments, right?
Brad Eather (51:51.965)
And that's...
Gosh man, the whole idea of like I quite often did advise people that create content within the platform ecosystem in because Even just from a psychological perspective if you're going down and you click on something Even though it might not seem like much but the act of actually leaving a website
leaving a platform to go to an external website has way more friction than simply clicking and then being popped up somewhere else in the same platform.
Bruno (52:24.792)
Mm-hmm.
Bruno (52:34.77)
And yeah, at the end of this, understanding what the platform wants, but also from your perspective, a lot of people are, yes, a website is the thing that you own, that you always want, and you should have one, right? Because if LinkedIn disappears tomorrow, you want to have that permanent presence on the internet. But on the other hand,
What you want is for people to have a good experience with you, to know what you do, what you're selling, and what is your strengths, who are you as a person. And that is going to happen on LinkedIn, on Instagram, that's going to happen on Facebook, on TikTok, whatever you want. So you don't need to bring people to your website. need that when they are going to make that decision to purchase one thing or another, they remember you.
Brad Eather (53:21.426)
Yeah.
Brad Eather (53:25.821)
I am going to finish it off here. I would love to keep talking, mate, and maybe we should do it again. just to finish off the question that I ask everybody at the end, based on your personal experiences, your professional experiences in the SEO world, what is your definition of creativity?
Bruno (53:33.134)
It's time.
Bruno (53:53.762)
For me, I was scared of this question because I've never had a good definition for that. think that in the context of AI, in the context of all the new tools that we are seeing, I think that for me, a lot of it comes to taste.
We have the tools to create beautiful paintings, beautiful text. We have the tools to create programs, websites, with just a prompt. But a lot of people create things that look like shit, that look like shit, create websites that are terrible, because they don't know how to differentiate good from bad. Maybe that is not exactly my definition of creativity, but I think that in a world full of AI.
That for me is one of the most important aspects of creativity, having taste. I believe that having the differentiate between something good and something bad, it's really, really, really important and a crucial part of creativity.
Brad Eather (54:53.041)
Yeah.
Brad Eather (54:59.367)
Yeah.
Brad Eather (55:07.797)
That... What you just triggered in my mind was the idea of a DJ.
Bruno (55:16.407)
Yeah.
Brad Eather (55:17.255)
So like a DJ's role is to go out and find all the music that's particular to his taste and bring it together and present it to an audience in a way that they like. And it's an industry, they get paid for it. But I think that that's a fair comparison, like that idea of taste in a world of AI. If you have the ability to have...
your own opinions that are actually your own, not others, critical thought, then leveraging AI to become the DJ and delivering that to the audience. I think that's a beautiful definition.
Bruno (55:44.782)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Bruno (55:56.14)
Yeah, because you bring something of yourself as well as a DJ, right? You are curating this, you are doing so in a way that you are bringing yourself into the mix. So that's beautiful.
Brad Eather (55:59.934)
Yeah.
Brad Eather (56:09.127)
Yeah, there was another conversation that I had with a guy called James Michael and similar kind of thing came up around collage and creativity and collage and taking little bits and pieces and adding it to your own worldview. So I like it. I like it a lot.
Bruno (56:29.122)
Yeah, thank you. I appreciate it.
Brad Eather (56:32.155)
No worries, Bruno. Where can... What's happening on your end and where can people find you?
Bruno (56:41.518)
So you can find me.
on LinkedIn, Bruno Rodriguez Armesto. It sounds very, very complex, but you will find me. I trust you. And I'm still working on my own website, so that will be launching in a few weeks, I guess. But yeah, I do SEO. I do SEO for enterprise companies. I work with companies like Amazon Web Services, ClassPass, Expedia, Skyscanner.
And if you need any kind of service, you have a company like this or you have a marketing role in a company like this, you are interested on hearing my opinions, just send me a message, I will be happy to talk.
Brad Eather (57:24.606)
I'm sure anybody listening to this will be interested in your opinions. Yeah, it's been a pleasure, It's been a pleasure. Everybody out there, thanks for listening to the Selling's Creative Podcast. And if you've enjoyed this episode, make sure you subscribe. And in the meantime, happy selling. Thanks, guys.
Bruno (57:29.102)
So thank you very much. Yeah, it's such a joy.
Bruno (57:43.95)
Happy selling. Cheers.
