Unscripted SEO Podcast Interview: Navigating Multi-Channel Marketing in the Age of LLMs

Host: Jeremy Rivera (SEO Arcade)
Guests: Claude Zdanow (CEO, ONAR) and Chris Becker (President, ONAR)

Listen to more conversations like this on the Unscripted SEO Podcast

Jeremy Rivera:
Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your Unscripted SEO Podcast host. I'm here with two fine guests today, Claude Zdanow and Chris Becker. Let's do a tag team introduction for both of you, focusing on what you guys have done that builds trust that you are the expert in your field.

Claude Zdanow:
Wow. What a question to start this off with. Well, I'll go first. My name is Claude Zdanow. I'm the CEO of ONAR. We are a publicly traded marketing technology and agency network. What that simply means is we own and operate technology-enabled marketing agencies that help middle market and growth stage brands advertise digitally on the internet across performance media, SEO, email, and a range of other services.

And I guess what have I done to have credibility in this space? I guess I've been in the industry for almost two decades. I've run two different agency groups like this where we've done multiple acquisitions of marketing companies. Under ONAR, as of date, we've now done four acquisitions since the inception of the business. And yeah, we have a team all over the world and are building a fun and interesting business. And I'll hand it over to our president, Mr. Chris Becker.

Chris Becker:
Hey guys, I'm the president of ONAR, and on the president's side for my role and responsibilities, it really sits on the internal-facing side of the business. So I oversee and manage all P&Ls that we own, the technologies and the agencies.

One thing that my background lends itself to that I look at is we have a real focus on what value do we actually provide? What is the meaningful thing to companies? When companies come to us, any time a business engages with a piece of technology or an agency, especially an agency, they're looking to make more money than they were charged for, just point blank.

And if you look at the agencies that we have been managing for the last five years with ONAR and then previously with Claude at the holding company that he was with prior, our retention rate is incredible. We have a very low churn rate. So when I look and say, what are the things that we've done to build trust? I think there's no metric that points to that more than having lower than a 5% churn rate annually for five consecutive years at a performance marketing agency.

With that, I'll say that we've worked with incredible clients. We have some really cool backgrounds and we've done some cool things, but that may be the actual metric that points to trust for me that means the most.

The Right Marketing Mix for Small Businesses

Jeremy Rivera:
That makes sense and this opens the field to quite a bit because not only are we talking about digital marketing agencies, but multiple digital marketing agencies. I would imagine that the mix or approach of those agencies would need to be somewhat different from each other.

So let's talk a little bit about cross-channel or multi-channel. What is the right mix for small businesses to consider in their marketing strategy online, as well as—and then the flip side of that is—for SEOs, how do we need to adjust what we've done to better integrate across those multiple disciplines or channels to function better and come out with better outcomes?

Claude Zdanow:
Well, let me speak to the first part of that question, and then I think I'll hand it over to Chris to talk a little bit more about the SEO side of things.

I think to be clear around operating multiple agencies and making acquisitions, we're primarily as of today focused on two verticals. The smallest one being healthcare, working with more of a B2B and some B2C marketing.

But the largest part of our business and where we've made all the acquisitions to date is actually not going horizontal, but actually going deeper into performance digital marketing, specifically for e-commerce brands and anyone looking to drive leads, sell products, sell services on the internet. Specifically in walled gardens. So think of Google, Meta, TikTok, retail media, et cetera.

And so when we talk about making acquisitions, we're typically not necessarily buying other agencies that compete with one another or they're going to offer other services. We're buying agencies to build out a more robust level of offering that we currently—or there isn't the same thing we are currently doing—and in some cases add some additional services. But those services are complementary to what we're already doing. So it's putting one and one together to equal three or four, right? 

We're buying—we have an existing platform, an agency for example that was previously called Storia. We bought an agency called Juice and then we put the two of them together and they're now called Juice. Juice is our overarching performance marketing brand. And we did that because we want that one platform, one center of excellence that can speak to the clients that know us and want to be part of that. And there's pluses from both businesses.

And so each time we look at an acquisition or buying another business, it's really around two things. One, how does it make us better at what we do? Maybe it's more data, more industries we've worked in as it relates to e-commerce, for example, and sometimes that could be additional services. And so that's really the focus when we talk about multiple agencies.

So think of us as a holding company where we have two existing services or agency verticals that we're buying businesses into. That's not to say that we won't grow out of that in the future and maybe have more verticals, but that's our two core verticals.

And I'll leave one caveat to that, which is that we do also have on the side a bit of a venture studio or technology incubator called ONAR Labs, where we have made some acquisitions around pieces of technology, marketing technology specifically, that we think all our agencies can benefit from. And so we've done some acquisitions there to say, hey, is this cool or interesting technology that we can use so that our agencies can be better at what they're doing because we now have that within our wheelhouse?

And then Chris, I'll pass it off to you to talk about the SEO side of things.

SEO Disruption and the Rise of LLMs

Chris Becker:
Yeah, thanks. So just to close, I'll put a bullet on what Claude was saying. When we make acquisitions from one business to another, the platform ONAR is that through line. And so they're actually not too dissimilar in concepts outside of what they seek to achieve for clients.

Now on the performance side, specifically on the SEO side, cross-channel, we're seeing major disruption, frankly. And what I call major disruption is more about rate of change, not necessarily yet that change in high volume has been disrupted, but the rate of change is clearly headed towards LLM usage.

There are ways, or at least hacky ways, of tracking how much attention your brand is getting with a particular LLM. And I'm happy to talk about how to do that. And the fruit of doing that kind of allows you to see what channels you really need to be giving attention to, where maybe your weaknesses are.

But certainly, you can't deny that Reddit is playing a big role in this. Granted, it's been downgraded here in the recent period of time. Reddit stock dropped because a report or print came out suggesting that Reddit's usage and prompt outputs have been decreasing over time. That was at least what I read or at least understood what I read to be.

And so, I'll say that regardless of what that print said, I still don't believe that you can shy away from Reddit or tools similar in that same vein—Quora, whatnot—and your personal blog on your website or your personal website, the product description pages. These are areas where that contextualization you're going to try to align with what you have off-site with what you do have on-site.

Historically, we had this concept of a pillar cluster strategy that was from your website built out and you get into these peak key terms that you're trying to rank for. I think now you really have to look at the internet as a web of data which feeds into that more pillar cluster model.

And instead of just keyword optimization and just interlinking, you really have to think about contextualization now broadly and across all platforms. And that may involve seeding as a strategy. That may involve different types of affiliate engagements than we have seen in the past.

And that also may involve pandering to the big guys out there, the Walmarts and the 10,000-pound gorillas that are getting these early relationships with ChatGPT or Perplexity. Those early relationships are backdoors to those algorithms. And sometimes you just have to play the game there, though we like to see what treats the SMBs the best.

The End of the Google-Only Era

Jeremy Rivera:
I was speaking with my friend Michael McDougald of Right Thing Agency and we were kind of saying the golden age of SEO as Google-only was from 2010 to 2020. That's when, if you could figure out backlinks and get your content strategy, you don't have to worry about Microsoft anymore. Yahoo was gone. And the only game in town was Google, but that time is over. It's so gone.

And not just because of GPT, but if you look at moves within Amazon, Amazon has its own search sub-ecosystem. If you are thinking about commoditization, like getting your product out there, it's as much as getting into these new different sub-ecosystems—and not just Google Merchant Center, but you've got to have as strong an Amazon optimization game or Amazon mitigation game to compete against it. Either choose to play or play against it.

What's your advice for SMBs that are running in e-commerce considering what is a good way to consider your marketing mix now that Google is still a key player, is still super important, but now I think considering the secondary or knock-on impacts of what you do in Google have other places where they can have more benefit. So it's like, I don't want to say that Google is devalued because what you can do or what should have been the best SEO process in the beginning of making killer content and distributing, getting it in more places, has more value. But how do you structure your marketing team to handle that? How do you address that problem for small businesses?

Reframing Data Measurement for the New Era

Chris Becker:
This is a topic—I'm thankful that you asked the question. This is a topic I think that is in every boardroom, in every small business leadership circle, in every CMO's mind right now. There's no ignoring the elephant in the room that things are changing like you said. It's no more. And Google is no longer your only pillar that you have on the search side.

The answer to your question, I think, starts with a concept, and then it lends to tactics. I think the concept is on the data side. You have simply got to look at your data differently now. There's so many zero-click movements. There's so many—we used to look at clicks to website and think, well, this was an informational click and this was a commercial click and so on. And now you only get commercial clicks, point blank. They're coming to your website with high buyer intent.

We're seeing a lot of people who are seeing their SEO down, but the revenue is slightly up from organic. And so you're seeing these dynamic shifts, and to anyone who's an SEO expert, this is not news, but to any of the people who are looking at marketing media mix, it is something from a conceptual perspective that you really have to consider.

And so I say that you need to really lend your data stack to measuring behavior of your audience and getting very intimate with the cohorts or your avatars, whatever marketing speak we need to use there, to know exactly who it is that you're marketing to.

Because earlier we were talking about the contextualization of all of your content—it needs to speak very specifically to someone. We're not just marketing to athletes, we're marketing to amateur runners who enjoy 5Ks and may take on a marathon every year. As an example, we've really got to get down to the nitty-gritty of who we are marketing this key product to or this set of product category to, and make sure that we're building an entire measurement framework for their behavior, because we're going to see them engaging on platforms, we're going to see them engaging on website, and we're going to see them converting and then re-converting down the funnel.

And I think that historically, we used to look at all of these clicks to the website and give credence to that. And now we need to look at how much—what's my share of wallet on the LLM space?

Within ChatGPT, relative to my competitors, what percentage of queries do I populate within the answer relative to my competitors? And how often does this LLM recommend my product or my service over my competitors?

So conceptually, I think it really does start with a reframing of how we look at the data and then we can start taking action on that data.

Moving Content Down the Funnel

Jeremy Rivera:
I definitely agree. I mean, it's on a granular level down to the industry. I was talking with my friend Timothy Jackson of Mercy's Sake about his precast walls client and we were looking at—they've got these wall constructions and I wanted to point out to them that we needed to get down to the comparative level of that type of wall versus another type of wall that they don't do. And to also provide the answers of that head-to-head question of like, how am I differentiated from this other product?

Because if you don't do it, if you don't do it on your site and you don't distribute that elsewhere, then when these LLMs are building that knowledge graph about that product, you're not going to be included.

So I see it though as different from the massive content shotgun, top-level content, mass production system we had in the 2010s to 2020 of like, let's write everything. Let's have an article about how to fix leaks. Let's have an article about how to fix faucets, and it was all top-of-funnel stuff. Now we have LLMs that can mostly do that. But I think the answer is that we need to move down the funnel. Would you agree, Claude, that it's about moving our content marketing strategy further down the funnel in terms of the content spread we're making?

Claude Zdanow:
Yeah, look, I absolutely agree. I think it's about relevancy. Based on the query, based on showing up in a place that matters. I think there used to be a lot of things that you would do just to get eyeballs, right? And then hoping those eyeballs would convert.

And just being—hey, I want to be a—I don't know, I run a plumbing company and I want to be a thought leader in plumbing and post articles about thought leadership of plumbing because you want to rank for certain things—using an extreme example. But then to hopefully convert that end user.

Whereas now it's not necessarily the best solution. It's like I want the best—I don't know—shoes for running at 100-degree temperatures in Arizona. It's like how do you solve for that query? How do you have content that speaks to that around your product and ties that all the way back?

So yeah, I think you're totally spot-on. We're just in this hyper-catered world now where the expectation, I think by nature of these LLMs, is instant gratification, instant result that speaks to exactly what your question is. And so how do you link those two together? It's very different than where we once were.

The Authenticity Challenge: Reddit and Beyond

Jeremy Rivera:
Chris, how do you address the uncanny valley of that push and pull—and this happens a lot on Reddit, but in particular—you want to market to people on Reddit, but if you try too hard or try in the wrong way, they will eat you alive and downvote your content and upload actively memes to mock and/or destroy. I know there's wreckage of dozens of companies that have tried super hard to show up on Reddit and crashed and burned.

What have been some of the—and it's not just Reddit—there is kind of an audience participation, a certain level of acceptance of the AstroTurf on different platforms. So I think Instagram and TikTok might accept more of an AstroTurf reality. But how do you deal with that side of it when you're proposing that people in their digital marketing mix start to look outside of just what they can publish comfortably on their own site, but start to look at secondary platforms to multiply their message with influencers or themselves directly with their brands?

Chris Becker:
Yeah, the question of how do you do authenticity at scale? That's a tough one. It's a tough one. There's no way of discussing it without getting into some gray areas, without getting into some trial and error. And then in those gray areas, you can really get egg on your face like you were talking about. People get taken down on these platforms if you show up as inauthentic, trying to lean too far on that authenticity at scale—you lean too far on the ladder and you focus too much on scale.

There, of course, you can reach out to curators and try to get curated content on behalf of your company and you can work with those curators in some manner. It honestly is challenging to do that. You can invite customers to leave reviews, your conversion rates will be low there. But I think what you really can—and what I'm going to do is maybe speak to strategies that people can use. I'm not necessarily speaking to strategies that we use just to be clear. But what you can do out there—and this is getting into a bit of a gray box—is if you have audience members who are creating authentic elements on Reddit or other platforms as well, not just Reddit. We mentioned Quora as another, but they're creating authentic answers or authentic reviews of your product.

You can do micro tasks and get those upvoted at a high frequency in a way that doesn't flag the system. You don't get crazy, but just give them some help, if you will, to create that. I know I'm only saying that because I know a lot of brands do that. And we've ran into it, but we've also seen people overdo it.

It's everything in a way that can appear to be true. If you have virtually no presence on Reddit and your first post gets massive upvotes, it probably seems pretty silly and people are going to look at it because we're human and we know exactly what is real and what isn't.

So you can get into some strategy there of jockeying the system, no different than any system out there that gets jockeyed. I know that happens a lot on the social media platforms—kind of micro tasks of people engaging quickly to a post in a positive manner. You provide in the micro task a large volume of curated responses that heck AI can now curate in mass volume. And you hand those out and people select one of 50 responses and they simply copy and paste it in the post response.

You see that happening on Reddit, you see that happening elsewhere. I don't know that I necessarily condone it, but I also don't know that I necessarily don't in the moment of you have a great, authentic piece of content out there, and now we're just trying to play an algorithmic game to get this syndicated at a greater value.

And so there is a piece of that that you're trying to jockey and you're trying not to. The most important piece is create a great product and a great service that people want to talk about and then invite them to talk about it.

So we get into these items and you want to use them cautiously. If you do choose to use them, you have to ask yourself if they're within your value set. And those are tools and mechanisms out there that people are pulling levers. But the most important thing is have a really valuable product and focus in on your value proposition against your pricing structure so that people have a real reason to go and talk.

Black Hat, White Hat, and the Ethics of SEO

Jeremy Rivera:
That makes sense. It kind of echoes back. I went to PubCon, which is an SEO convention in Las Vegas, mostly known for the drinking, thus the PubCon. And we go to this bar, I think it was like a German-themed bar, and I sit at the bar, and this SEO guy sits next to me, and he starts talking about his SEO strategies, and I start to realize that it's the equivalent of a Jedi sitting next to a Sith Dark Lord because he starts telling me about how Google is actually the bad guy.

They're gatekeeping and actually as a Black Hat SEO, he's doing Google a favor by pushing the edges, by finding the exploits in the algorithm to bring it to their attention. 

If they can't be bothered to fix the algorithm enough for their users then it's okay. 

That doesn't matter because it's just terms and conditions. They're not laws that you have to absolutely obey.

And if your clients are risk-averse, then buy some secondary domains, it's really okay. You're—as a Black Hat SEO, you're benefiting the SEO ecosystem by making millions of dollars pushing pills, porn, and casinos because Google's never going to improve its algorithm for everybody else unless we push those buttons and make them improve their systems.

So obviously that's a pretty... So I'm sitting there like, okay, well, yeah, that's…. okay. That's a very Palpatine argument to make about white hat, black hat.

Chris Becker:
Yeah, that gets far on the Machiavellian side of that scale.

Claude Zdanow:
[Laughs] I love the Jedi analogy.

Jeremy Rivera:
It's very on the Machiavellian side, but it does kind of echo across what you said of like, is it—if your job is to promote your client and get their products to be sold, then does it matter if you paid a bot to click an upvote button 50 times? Or five times or 500 times. So sometimes, maybe it's a question of scale of it versus—it is that question of authenticity when it comes to digital marketing and these choices. I personally handle it on a matrix of risk that I'm presenting to the client. And what's the potential downside of following through on that? In some cases where you're doing kind of gray hat-ish local SEO stuff, then that has high risk, high reward because your local profile gets burned, your company can't show up in those searches.

Chris Becker:
I also think you said a really important piece there of the bot side of things. Anti-bot, to be honest with you, across all strategy. So I think it's pretty important that if you are going to take a micro-task approach and you're going to try to do it in moderation, that you're using people who can get past proof of human because we're certainly headed in that direction if we're not already there.

I think if you truly use a bot to hit upvote 50 times, you're playing with fire. You really are. The digital footprint on the back end of those platforms that can then be attached to your brand can really light you up. It can really get into losing an account, like you said, which can really hang with you.

And so sure, you can create the subdomains. If you're going to play with that type of fire, your subdomains are even at risk in that category and maybe that doesn't hit your domain that hard, but sooner or later they're going to create an AI that branches those subdomains to your domain.

Jeremy Rivera:
I think it comes down to the business and ethics altogether too. I'm sure there are a range, a number of things that you can do ethically or unethically to market or get advantage in business.

Claude Zdanow:
Yeah, I mean, the one thing that came to mind too is like, look, at the end of the day, some of the things that a brand can do and cannot do besides how far to the dark side or the light side they're approaching is also a factor of the amount of money they have to spend and how competitive the market set is.

And so it's like, that's the other aspect of it, which I think is important to remember. It's like, there are brands out there that essentially have endless amounts of money to do these things. And there are other ones that have to be scrappier and more creative in terms of how do they penetrate a market where you're facing an army of ad spend and people working on these other brands that you're competing with.

And so I think, I agree with you. It's—I liked your comment earlier about risk and then thinking about the ethics, but I think also part of it plays into where are you investing your dollars for what result and what is okay with you and how you're going to do that to try to get the results you need? Because that plays into it as well.

Using AI Agents to Track LLM Performance

Jeremy Rivera:
Yeah, and it's also probably like a—one benefit you could say of Google not being the only playground is that there's literally—there are high verticals and niches and products and services where a new player coming onto the playground—they don't deserve to be on the first page. There are 10 really good strong competitors who have tons of market influence and they deserve to be on the first page. And you being the newbie, I'm sorry, but you don't. There are cases like that.

And so now that Google's not the only playground that leads to a more diversified choice, not to say don't have a website, not to say don't create content, but just consider how you leverage that or how you're approaching that. If you know you're not going to be necessarily the first page on Google for your head term, maybe it's find another play.

Chris Becker:
I must say that a strategy that we definitely deploy for our clients to get into where do you put your time and attention because you've got a lot of—with Google not being the only player in the game, you've got a lot to go for here. So I'll say this. The piece of this that we do that I think is really important for companies—it's not an agency, we do it, yeah, sure, but you can do it on your own—is simply create an agent that comes up and that you work really hard to give it all the information about a specific persona that you have and let them—let that agent rather—think of every query that would come out of that audience member to your specific LLM.

And in theory, if you give it enough time and enough duration, 10,000, 50,000 queries to come out, it should be able to over time create the largest list of queries. And then you match that with your query list historically on Google, and you can really get into an AI model creating all of the queries that you need.

Give another agent the task of prompting each LLM with those queries, and then give another agent a task of reviewing those answers and determining where they're referencing the answers they give. LLMs always reference where they get those answers. And you can take a look at what type of questions you're not ranking for. You can take a look at what reference points are pulling your competitors and not you.

Those are basic tactics. Now they're not so basic, but they're basic enough that marketers can really deploy and get a grip on what percentage of followership, if you will, or what percentage of LLM usage your brand is getting—share of wallet on that LLM. And it can really give you tactical items of where do you go, what type of content do you create, and on which platforms do you need that energy to come from so that you can get those references over your competitors, or at least you can get in there and duke it out with them.

Like you said, if you're not necessarily that top brand, focus in on one very specific area and maybe become that known for that one cohorted column or cluster, if you will, of queries.

The Power of IRL Marketing and "Knee to Knee" Engagement

Jeremy Rivera:
An area I'm curious if you've tapped into. I was talking to Matt Brooks of SEOteric about the weakness of many digital marketing strategies who ignore the real world and ignore the value of sponsoring a truck to come out and play a movie at a local park and having a sign for your company and having a bumper on the beginning of the trailer and exposing your brand that way, or supporting a fun run, or doing a trash park cleanup.

There are dozens of IRL things that you can do that they've got word of mouth. And if you're smart about it, they have digital word of mouth, because you got event aggregator sites up the wazoo. You have a literal SERP type that literally is looking for events that people will be exposed to your brand putting on the fall play, putting on that park cleanup, or the shoe drive. Have you had any playgrounds where you've been able to play with mixed media in terms of doing things in real life to impact digital marketing strategy?

Chris Becker:
Jeremy, you hit the nail on the head. This is—I think earlier we talked about tracking that behavior of your audience and then deploying marketing tactics against them. It's not just SEO. It is everywhere they are. Get niche, get rich. You've got to know those niche audiences that you have and go show up where they are.

I'm giving a talk on this in Paso Robles at the Wine Alliance there later this year. And it's going to be about meet people knee to knee—your brand needs to be meeting people knee to knee. And if you are doing that in great experiential ways, outstanding. You mentioned a couple of really great examples, but you really got to have a digital component to it. You really need to make sure that those digital components are leading back into a very clear and organized funnel, if you will—for a beat-up turn over time now—but a very clear funnel where people can go get a grip on what your product is and who it's for.

And they can get a grip on that contextualization funnel because I assure you that if they go into GPT, they may reference that location. And if you have a custom squeeze page or landing page built specific to that location—right? We're creating connectivity across all of these platforms. We're creating real unique juice, if you will, to point back to the brand.

But we really are. And getting in and meeting knee to knee at that brand level with a digital connectivity piece, that hook—and that speaks very specifically to that audience that we talked about earlier. That is truly the area where I think we're going to see marketing head toward.

Frankly, the metrics have to follow that. Your data, understanding the data, it's really going to have to follow this new attempt to get knee to knee with clients.