In this episode, I join Anatolii for a candid conversation about the real game of modern SEO. We explore how AI and large language models are transforming search, why it’s crucial to master the fundamentals, and what strategies can help you stay ahead in digital marketing. Whether you’re a fellow marketer, business owner, or SEO enthusiast, I share practical tips and fresh insights to help you succeed in today’s fast-changing landscape.
Watch the episode and read the transcript below.
[00:00:00] Anatolii: Hello, good people. Welcome to our show. Hello, bad people. Welcome to our show. We love everyone. I don’t care. You are bad. Good, medium, between, I don’t care. I just wanna bring value. I just wanna lead you in the right direction and show what to do today because many things are growing fast. I’m so excited to discuss a lot more with Emanuel
[00:01:26] Anatolii: How are you?
[00:01:27] Emanuel: Hey, Anatolii. Hello to our listeners and the one who, the ones who are watching us, I am. Excellent. How about you?
[00:01:34] Anatolii: Oh, I’m doing great. Emanuel you are here six times. You know already. Yeah. Six times. You joined the club six times speaking on my podcast. It’s a big pleasure to get you every time and to learn more about you.
[00:01:50] Anatolii: To learn more your insights, because I care about value. I can’t bring people back who can’t bring value who, agree to share value or don’t know what value means. That is why I am asking you again and again to speak more about SEO and many things are growing fast. You know that AI search change completely the game.
[00:02:10] Anatolii: I don’t know what kind of optimization we have today. Some people hate geo generative region optimization. Someone can tell no, it’s a future even when SEMRush was acquired by Adobe for $1.9 billion, I think it shows a good sign that O is alive. If some companies are ready to pay almost $2 billion for SEO tools, it means something is there.
[00:02:39] Anatolii: It’s still growing. It’s still, we have we, we can. Get results, but we need to adapt. We need to adjust our strategy, what we have because it’s not about ranking 10 blue links. It’s more about to get mentions, references in AI mode. AI overview, and ChatGPT GPT, Perplexity is very important. Before we start.
[00:03:00] Anatolii: Just tell for my new listeners who didn’t know about you because old listeners who listen my podcast know exactly what you can share with us. But for new listeners, tell more about you about Canada, why you live in Canada, and one kind of SEO you can print to the customer tables.
[00:03:16] Emanuel: Thank you. Yeah. For those who have seen us: again, this guy.
[00:03:21] Emanuel: Yeah. But no, it’s a pleasure and thank you for your kind words. I try to bring value all time with all, everything that I do, because at the end of the day, that’s what I’m providing a service. My name is Emmanuel. I’m an SUN digital Marketing Consultant. I’ve been doing exclusively this work for around 10 years, close to now since I’ve been moving, since I moved to Canada.
[00:03:43] Emanuel: I’m originally from Romania, East Europe, so 10 years I’ve been living in Toronto, serving the North American market. I’ve worked, with the big agencies, with small agencies, with niche agencies, with general agencies, and in-house digital marketing manager as well. And I’ve took different positions, which gave me the opportunity to see things from different perspective and what I’ve been telling the clients, my clients, and the people I work with and our listeners for probably 10, 15 years: at the end of the day, we’re helping businesses make more money. People need the services and the products that the businesses we help offer, and they go to find those somewhere might be the search engine, might be ChatGPT chat bot might be voice, might be asking around somebody, a friend or so forth.
[00:04:35] Emanuel: My job is to make sure that when they’re looking for that, the clients and the businesses I work with stay at the top of those queries, regardless of which platform they, they might be in agnostic, right? So it might be Google, it might be Chat GPT more recently, perplexity and so forth. That’s what I do, and from that perspective, things haven’t changed and I don’t think they will.
[00:05:02] Emanuel: They’ve been like that for thousands of years and yeah, probably will be.
[00:05:07] Anatolii: I like this approach. I think it’s a very effective approach and modern approach because I remember for many years websites where chasing traffic volume. I don’t care about this metrics anymore. Of course, it’s important to have some traffic.
[00:05:20] Anatolii: Of course, it’s important to get the right traffic, not big traffic and I think when you craft your strategy in order to get more sales. That is important because it doesn’t matter what happens today. Charge GPT Google they will keep developing. They will change the system that we know probably virtual reality will come.
[00:05:42] Anatolii: So we need to adapt whatever happens and how to adapt. I think it’s the best way to crop the strategy from getting more sales. Businesses can’t grow with getting more traffic. Businesses can grow if they get sales, and everything should be crafted from bottom funnel, especially today when people don’t need to click links because Chat GPT or AI mode, Google can reply fully to the question. It’s not the same with 10 blue links, because when users search on Google when they see a title description, it’s not enough. It’s just short piece of content. And people need to click to open to get the full content.
[00:06:26] Anatolii: But with AI mode, it’s a different experience. AI mode just reiterate all this information provided to the users and they don’t need to click. So they got almost everything what they need. So that is why I think but if you grab the strategy from bottom funnel you can get results. Even today I read knew news about chat GPT.
[00:06:48] Anatolii: They released new feature. It’s a shopping experience. And you know what I like on OpenAI? They charge for subscription. They are going to use paid ads and they’re going to get direct sales because on this press release, what I found tell you need to use today shopping experience because in the future you don’t need to leave GPT to buy products.
[00:07:12] Anatolii: So basically how it works you can ask, for example you wanna buy, let’s imagine the best gift for your nephew four years old who loves soccer for example, you can ask on ChatGPT. GPT will provide the list and explain which gifts will be better for the kids. And you can choose and buy directly on GPT without leaving the tool.
[00:07:37] Anatolii: It’s not today. Today you still, click and get websites. But in the future, I think we need to be listed on GPT. Like we need to create content. The GPT will reference and if customers will buy directly on GPT, doesn’t matter. You bring sales. It’s our goal to bring sales.
[00:07:58] Anatolii: What do you think about the future?
[00:08:00] Emanuel: I was laughing because I didn’t knew, didn’t read the press release yet, but makes sense. I was laughing because that’s. What Meta tried Yeah. To do. Unsuccessfully, I would say. And although I do meta advertising, I put in a lot of money. We spend and advertisers spend a lot of money, right?
[00:08:19] Emanuel: It’s one of the most valuable companies on the planet, yet still not, it’s not that meta experienced the metaverse that their owners tried to wish wished for. Maybe in Chat GPT, there’s gonna be a new. Maybe it’s gonna be different. We don’t know. But what we know is that things are changing and there’s more, not less things that we need to do, that we need to be aware of.
[00:08:48] Emanuel: I was telling my clients not so long ago we need to take care of the, we need to make the search engines understand our content, and I always said this, what I mean by search engine, Google, who cares about anyone else, right? Fast forward two years, three years now we start to care about other sources that can potentially bring traffic.
[00:09:16] Emanuel: Now to your point, this won’t happen today and won’t happen tomorrow. Google is still the dominant force in the search space. It’s unlikely that, I don’t think there’s any business at the moment that gets at least even a quarter of their traffic from any LLMs whatsoever, but we see an increase overall.
[00:09:40] Emanuel: Last time I was a guest that your show was not that long ago, I believe in September. So two, three months. And things have changed so significantly since, right? Yes. We have a new version of Chad GPT 5.1, which I’m not sure if I’m in a love hate relationship at the moment, right? Whenever I try to ask him to do the things I need him to do from a consultant perspective, but from a user that will probably experience this AI mode on whichever platform, probably most likely we’re going there. I wouldn’t put all my money on chat GPT and their overall experience with the shopping. But it’s unfair to say yes or no, or yeah, I don’t have the crystal ball.
[00:10:28] Anatolii: I think of course the same we have on TikTok, we have on Instagram when people can buy directly on these platforms without living platforms.
[00:10:36] Anatolii: But it’s not convenient. A hundred percent. So basically when you can buy on social media without living the platform, because lending pages can provide more experience if you craft the right landing page, you can learn some trust triggers. Probably chat will have some limitations. Of course, some people can buy from chat, a hundred percent.
[00:10:56] Anatolii: They can take some part of the market. It’s normal. So at that point, marketers can adapt and, to help businesses to get these references on Chat GPT, if people can buy directly on Chat GPT or second thing, we need to craft landing pages that customers need more because some people can buy directly on TikTok or Chat GPT.
[00:11:24] Anatolii: Someone prefer to get. Landing page to get more insights, to learn more about the business. So it’s part of the evolution. I’m okay with both versions. So I think we still have the room and I know Mark Zuckerberg tried to remove all marketers between Facebook and business owners who
[00:11:47] Emanuel: He’s still trying.
[00:11:48] Emanuel: Don’t worry, he still.
[00:11:50] Anatolii: Of course. Yeah. But if I compare Llama from Facebook with Chat GPT, Grok Gemini Perplexity, I think Lama is the worst from my experience. I can’t use this tool. I tried many times, but I can’t good can’t get good results with that. Do you have good experience with Llama?
[00:12:11] Emanuel: I have a good experience in a sense that I can create an image on WhatsApp. If I send a message and I can instead of searching for a meme, I can create my own meme with that. Or if I want an avatar for a group that I’m creating with just initials, that’s pretty well. I think we also need to consider the environment where this is happening.
[00:12:35] Emanuel: I think our last topic was Jack of all trades. What I mean by that is we need as, even as SEOs to look at the entire universe that’s surrounding the experience. What do I mean by that? Since our last call, what happened was also Atlas, which is Open AI’s own browser. I have it open here. I’m using it like more and moore.
[00:12:57] Emanuel: I’m trying to use Chat GPT exclusively in Atlas to see what kind of experience I can have from a user’s perspective and from a consultant’s perspective that uses Chat GPT in his work. It’s not a terrible experience so far. Now what’s next? Probably a device, right? Why wouldn’t Chat GPT or OpenAI create their own device?
[00:13:20] Emanuel: Create, create their own Chromebook, their own version of Chromebook, or a phone or a smartphone, where it comes with the Chat GPT ecosystem as well. Why not acquire a social media platform? Unlikely, I don’t think. Maybe AI will be Open AI can be forced. To, or TikTok can be forced to be bought, maybe North America, but it’s, I wouldn’t be surprised if we’ll see something like that.
[00:13:48] Emanuel: A major social platforms, which have a lot of users think Reddit again, Reddit has a partnership with Google. We’ve seen because of spamming getting less and less of those Reddit results and even charge GPTI saw a survey from two, three weeks ago saying that they quote Reddit less. But is it unlikely that at one point soon to see a merger or something like all the Reddit users can access Chat GPT through some of that platform that automatically expands the potential reach of that platform and the value in itself?
[00:14:26] Emanuel: It’s. Probably won’t. It’s not unlikely and it’s more possible, I’m just speculating here, but from the signals that I’ve seen and also you mentioned Adobe acquiring same Russia last week, it also sends a signal of where things are going, right? So they’re not just purchasing the tool, they acquiring the user base as well because they see some kind of value in that.
[00:14:53] Emanuel: I think that would be probably a next logical step, in my opinion, to like control more of the environment, more of where do people perform? All these things.
[00:15:05] Anatolii: Yeah, Anyway, it’s not boring we always have some news. Things are going fast and I think when Adobe spend $2 billion for SEMRush, it means.
[00:15:18] Anatolii: This data is valuable. So I see we still need this data. So AI search didn’t kill SEO and by, by the way, s Rashi is adapting fast as well. So they provided many new features. AI brand mentions AI, AI review. So SRA is good with that to adapt fast. So that is why Adobe is spent almost $2 billion for that.
[00:15:42] Emanuel: I believe other tools have been more effective in adopting and adapting to the new paradigm. But again, SEMrush is a publicly listed company, so they have a different process. They can’t as easily turn on and off a new feature.
[00:15:56] Anatolii: Yeah. Nice, Em, let’s talk about traditional metrics. So I’m interested about traditional metrics because we still have foundation checklist, how to make website audit, how to find errors, and how to choose critical errors because many websites are use, usually provide a lot of data, a lot of insights, and what I can see when people without experience who open this website or did they don’t understand anything, what to do what, to take, which errors critical, which are not. And for example, let’s talk about page speed insights. I spoke with a few business owners who told me, I want a green zone. I need a hundred percent. If I get a hundred percent, Google will rank my content. I replied, no, Google feels not. Google ranks the best content. And it it’s great to have Green Zone. It’s great to have a hundred percent, but can you sacrifice the quality of your content even for I spent some time to learn about wise.com because I was surprised about this company. They, didn’t lose traffic in AI search, in AI overview and still growing. And they have crazy traffic over 30 million traffic. And they use programming SEO to get all this traffic. And when I analyze page speed in size on their pages, it’s like medium around 50. It’s not green, it’s not red, but it’s yellow.
[00:17:32] Anatolii: Why? Because they have a lot of features. They have a lot of images, they have a lot of blocks, and you can optimize 200%. But they can provide the best user experience. When users open, they get all this information. Let’s talk about technical optimization. What do you think about today, how it’s important
[00:17:52] Emanuel: That ties into a blog slash LinkedIn post?
[00:17:56] Emanuel: I’m writing for December.
[00:17:58] Emanuel: Tapping into the idea of, not what SEO is and things that we don’t need to do right now because the AI has taken over, I think SEO and the foundations are more important than ever. I think given back to the basic knowledge of how the web works, H-T-M-L-C-S-S, JavaScript, I believe that the SEO should have knowledge and be able to troubleshoot some technical stuff.
[00:18:28] Emanuel: Not necessarily be a developer, but being able to spot a script or something that’s broken or something that’s preventing getting something accessed. That’s mandatory in my opinion. To address the page speed, we need to remember first of all that you know, Google and now all the others crawl our websites at a cost and at a huge cost.
[00:18:47] Emanuel: So there’s one thing for them to crawl a and figure out the, content that’s smaller than content that’s bigger. Now, I’m not saying there’s no particular reason why you should have a 12 megabytes image on a page, maybe if you’re a photographer, but probably not even then. So these ones are important to take care of, but.
[00:19:10] Emanuel: We need to remember overall the experience that we want to create and the quality is at the top. So I wouldn’t recommend necessarily at all taking from the quality. Just because, I was telling actually somebody we need to have a green light back when Google scared us that our website will will disappear from search if we don’t have all the pagespeed insights, all in the greens, right? Even Google analytics, right? Loads takes time to load. So what we remove some of the scripts that are element to our important to our campaigns just because of that. So we tend to overall exaggerate, but obviously to answer your question shorter, we need to at first of all know the basics.
[00:19:59] Emanuel: What’s important, how the web operates and align with the best practices. Obviously aim for the best, but don’t compromise on the quality and overall the experience, just because you want to have 20 200% more than your competitor, than someone at the top when they say the page speed is important.
[00:20:21] Emanuel: Yes. For brands like Walmart, like Amazon, like all those things when they do at a template level, we might have a regular SEO consultant might do a thousand, 10,000, maybe let’s say up to a hundred thousand products. But think of Amazon, Walmarts, and all these guys have millions. If not, God knows how many, so when they usually say these things, they refer to these, big players, but obviously the most common knowledge needs to be there. And if you get your basics right, understanding H-T-M-L-C-S-S and JavaScript you will have a, probably a good understanding of any errors you might encounter in your work as an SEO consultant.
[00:21:04] Anatolii: Nice. Nice. I wanna ask about, I think it’s like a new aspect in email marketing that we can connect to a as well. And I can call it aI personalization. Let me explain why. So basically, a few days ago I got four emails from Neil Patel Digital. So Neil Patel didn’t write these messages, but his agency wrote to me four messages in one hour.
[00:21:33] Anatolii: I think they made some mistakes in scheduling because all these messages were ei written. How I found this, because it’s not called email outreach, but it’s not human written outreach. So if I can rank this emails, I can put them like seven from time. Because cold email can be like five four and to get results today with cold email outreach, I know some great experts who can get real good results, but they send plus hundred thousand emails, millions emails. Now I got them every single day in my spam inbox.
[00:22:09] Anatolii: I put all of them there. But anyway like it’s different experience. Personalized by AI and I decided to try something similar. So instead of because. To craft great email message, you need to spend time to learn about recipient. At least five minutes, at least minimum. But sometimes you need an hour to learn about interest, about hobbies, about many things.
[00:22:37] Anatolii: With AI, you don’t need it. So AI can learn the recipient and personalize this message. To combine with ML outage, basically in the beginning, you can praise some skills in the first paragraph cell to say, oh, you are good, I like your product, I like your achievements. Anything like, that’s all basically, you can learn from news, you can learn from social media and AI can do this job.
[00:23:02] Anatolii: Then you can smoothly transfer to your product to sell it to anything like that. I think it’s like new experience. I didn’t test this link building because I think link building is not my strong side. I pay attention to PR mostly, but I started, I, by the way, I will share my experience because today I ask my team to send plus 10,000 emails to sell one product in accounting niche.
[00:23:33] Anatolii: And I paid around $50 for 10,000 emails. So basically AI loan, 10,000 recipients, and I paid $30 for a Claude API, so not 4.5. So recipients and personalized 10,000 emails. I will share results in future videos in my content, but for now, I don’t know. What do you think about this new thing that you have today?
[00:24:03] Emanuel: It’s not something new, right? We are doing personalization and automatization since whenever it’s, it was available. What we can do right now is go probably two, three steps further through that. So we started off simply by personalizing, like having the first name there, because these tools allow us to do, if we have the possibility to craft a direct message, and even sometimes the success of an email campaign matters even when the time is right, the deliverability time is right. So there’s many studies, say for certain type of industries delivered on Tuesday. Others on Fridays, Monday morning Wednesdays it’s a bad day for most industries or stuff like that. I don’t remember them by heart. I always Google them.
[00:24:49] Emanuel: So the more you can personalize these things, the better results you should have. Now, AI, what it does is giving us the possibility to do it at scale. It’s unlikely to, for you and your team, to go in and personalize 50,000 email messages. That will be insane. I don’t think I’ve sent that many in my life.
[00:25:10] Emanuel: I think that’s, the future. That’s kinda like where the, all the big companies do. I’m coming back to Meta advertising as well, which what they do is when you do advertising, you provide a couple of copy for your ads. Primary text and descriptions and all those things, and you provide a couple of them.
[00:25:28] Emanuel: And based on their data, their AI algorithm matches based on the data that they have about the users that they showing the ad. They match the best possible combination between your headlines, your description, your call to action, and the image or video that you have provided in the best format for the device that they’re watching for.
[00:25:49] Emanuel: So it’s similar to email, that’s just an extension and probably there’s a lot of calibration that many companies, including the example that you just showed us needs to do. I personally, at the moment wouldn’t trust something like that. Having an AI mass email and mass personalized and e-blast to my audience, at least to my audience, right?
[00:26:12] Emanuel: But okay. What, are you showing us?
[00:26:15] Anatolii: I don’t know if you can see, but I share on my screen for someone who can listen this podcast, I can put the link in the description below. So basically you can learn all these messages. From Neil Patel Digital. And basically on these messages they are asking they propose some experts who can speak on this podcast. So new portal shared in four different messages some experts, by the way, not bad experts to speak on this podcast. Honestly, I didn’t reply to this messages because I’m waiting for follow-ups. I wanna know what kind of follow-ups, what kind of distance they have, like a few days. Four days, seven days. I just wanna know what kind of…
[00:27:02] Emanuel: Reverse engineer they drip campaign. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:27:05] Anatolii: And professional like I didn’t put to spa inbox. I didn’t unfollow. I didn’t do anything. I’m waiting for follow ups because I wanna know what kind of follow up, Neil Patel can provide now with these messages.
[00:27:19] Anatolii: But I’ll share with you the link. You can check out all these messages. But yeah, I think for me, I estimated seven to 10. So not bad. Not bad. Really not bad. And for me, it’s better to get this message than, cold email outreach because cold email, like five from 10. Like just fully sell message.
[00:27:43] Anatolii: But this one, yeah, it’s like a little bit personalized, but far from human being. I didn’t get the feeling.
[00:27:50] Emanuel: I feel like we’re looking back at meta. So a similar experience that Meta Facebook had was a meta back then before the Cambridge Analytica / 2016 experience, when the meta chat bots were actually a thing.
[00:28:10] Emanuel: And we know there there’ve been a couple of great tools that were allowing you to spam essentially, right? Mass spam, not just necessarily mass email. Your followers or on a page or your friends or circles that you had on Facebook or something like that. I remember clearly it was a I forgot the name sold an a Google Ads tool and then created this chat bot on Meta Tool as well.
[00:28:39] Emanuel: So I think that’s something similar to that experience. At the end of the day, AI. Allows us to scale, to do more of our work. To do more of our work. Yeah. So that’s my, those are my thoughts right now. That requires time, that requires somebody to manage all these things. So probably somebody like Neil Patel has the capacity to do such a thing.
[00:29:08] Emanuel: It’s most likely very, successful. So I expect more and more. Now, if I were to get these, I’m already annoyed from two or three messages a year. I get from, let’s say a company that I bought from, let’s say some, shoes or some clothing, right? North Face, they had the data breach a couple of this year or last year also, for example.
[00:29:35] Emanuel: And sometimes they get, they send text messages. I get annoyed myself as a user, but probably that’s the future and we’ll see. I personally would be a little bit more prudent when I would test something like this. Currently again maybe things change so fast. Maybe in six months I’m gonna say, you know what?
[00:29:58] Emanuel: In the previous podcast I said everything I said was wrong and all those things. That’s always a possibility.
[00:30:05] Anatolii: I’m not sure that anyone can be wrong. We can make some decisions according to environment skills that we have. And I made a lot of mistakes. Terrible mistakes. Yeah, I keep doing them because, I don’t know what they can use. It’s like part of the process. I mean like you can learn some generic information, but when you test, when you try, it can be different experience and sometimes you need to improve it to craft it. Not sometimes always. Why? Sometimes it’s always, you need to improve what you can learn online.
[00:30:41] Emanuel: Who, what, where, right?
[00:30:42] Emanuel: So some things work extremely well in North America, whereas for example, in the US, WhatsApp is not. As popular. Contrary to the fact that in Europe everyone uses WhatsApp and sometimes they don’t even text regular text messages or call regularly. They only use WhatsApp in the us for example, is not that popular, right?
[00:31:04] Emanuel: So these, the platform, the environment to whom you are sending matters even more. And AI LLMs right now can help you determine these things so that you don’t waste time and budget. At the end of the day, they all come at a cost, right?
[00:31:22] Anatolii: Nice. Nice. Yeah. Let’s talk about meta tags. I have some different opinions about meta tags.
[00:31:33] Anatolii: Title is still important, very important by the way. All my tool on unmiss.com, so crafted from title basically we had experience when we got great results. We double traffic from a hundred K to 200 K in one month because we rewrote all meta tags. So we rewrote all meta tags in order to give a strong reason to click to this content that was very low supplements, great results, awesome results.
[00:32:01] Anatolii: I signed after that good contract with this company because all competitors were like billion dollar companies, multi-billion dollar companies. But we signed this contract and we found the way, how to market these products, how to bring results. We even grew results to 700,000 people. That was long story.
[00:32:21] Anatolii: So we cooperated for a long time. But after that I decided to create this tool. I decided to create that can measure meta tags because you can sign, find something similar on SEMRush, Ahrefs and many other tools. They, don’t care about this matter, just show short, long. But what I found, journalists usually pay a lot of attention to headings. Journalists, it’s like you can write great article on New York Times, but if your heading is boring, not interesting, people will not click and nobody knows if it’s quality or not. Paid marketers. They pay a lot of attention to title because if people don’t click their pay ads, Google will charge more.
[00:33:05] Anatolii: Facebook can charge more. So they have simple system. They estimate the quality of your ads. And if people don’t click, that means, okay, we, I can show other paid ads or pay more to bring me this money back. But in Asia, I don’t see similar experience. Many SEOs just keep ignored.
[00:33:28] Anatolii: Sometimes it works. For example I check out a few websites in online niche online games, niches. So basically they usually write simple, very simple meta tags and not all online games. That was card games for adults. Cell tour, anything like that. So basically. They have just very simple title, description, like play online Solitaire, nothing else, nothing special.
[00:33:56] Anatolii: And I analyze a bunch of websites and I found It works for this target audience. People don’t need some curiosity, encouragement to click to this content. For example, when I analyze wise.com, I found they Put a lot of keywords. A lot of keywords because when you promote market pages with calculators, for example, USD to Euro or USD to rupe like you need to write, in different ways. USD to Europe or American dollars to Indian Rupe. So they put like a lot of keywords in one title and it works great for this target agent, so they don’t need to give a strong reason. But in weight loss niche, we found it’s important, like to give a strong reason, like you can lose 10 kilograms in two weeks.
[00:34:45] Anatolii: You can lose like 25 pounds for 10 days. I don’t know if it’s possible or not, but marketers can use this message. What do you think about meta tags today? How it’s important in AI search?
[00:35:01] Emanuel: I have a couple of ideas I’m trying to figure out which want to start with. If you are to look for a, to play some game online, Solitaire, probably you’ll only need play solitaire online. You don’t need PhD thesis. If you are to look something for weight loss, you may or may not have an idea of what’s going on, and you might also need some education.
[00:35:23] Emanuel: I’m pregnant, can I take these supplements or should I take others? I have this allergy, I have this reaction. So it’s a difference between lose weight with our products, let’s say diabe lose weight with our diabetes friendly, I know safe diabetes, weight loss products. I’m just giving an extreme example, right?
[00:35:48] Emanuel: Yeah. So if I see that, and God forbid, but if I see, if I have this situ, I’m in this situation and I see that, I’m more likely to click on that because they mention the that differentiator that’s maybe life ending. For me, this is kinda like an extreme example, but I just want to prove a point. Back to the comment that I made about the page experience and page speed as well as the meta description, the titles and all those things.
[00:36:19] Emanuel: These tools, SEMRush didn’t do necessarily a good job also in not. They did a good job in scaring many people, right? Because you get a big red flag alert: your meta description is longer than 160 characters, right? And red and you see it with alert and you see it you associate it with something like that. Many business owners and clients also got a sense of that, or at least they got different audits from other people that try to sell SEO services and say, oh, you got so many errors on your site because your page speed is critical. Be because you’re missing all meta description because your title is longer, and all those things. So that’s one part.
[00:37:07] Emanuel: That’s why the expertise needs to be there and you can’t simply and blindly just go in and do some stuff. Now we know that headings not so much meta description, but the content itself are signals to the crawlers to Google, to chat GPTs to different LLMs, right? So I believe there, the SEO work in this paradigm is more important and we should pay more attention than ever.
[00:37:35] Emanuel: When you are saying about rewriting the title tags for a company that’s probably a few years back. Now everything is more competitive. There’s more websites that can figure that one out. And they have like good, or at least okay titles. Okay, meta description. Okay headings some sort of optimization on the page, but there’s still many that don’t get the basics altogether.
[00:38:02] Emanuel: I believe in paying attention to these things. I was just reading a couple of weeks back a study from Joy Hawkings from Sterling Sky saying that she rewrote with all caps, all the titles, the SEO titles for local businesses. And they, she saw a slight, increase in the Google business profiles.
[00:38:25] Emanuel: Okay. Just by rewriting with all caps. Okay, so all caps, it’s very cheesy, but just we know there’s a difference, when you say best SEO extension, then SEO extensions. When you want, I’m just giving you example for you best, your intention extension. Best best plumber near me. Best this and best that, just by that so we know because it appeals to the people and we tend to automatically go to what we associate as being of value.
[00:39:00] Emanuel: So if you see best, if we see as an example, right? Something that’s fit for me. And that comes, that covers the basics. It’s unlikely that you’ll get good results without covering the basics, right? Have a good site, right with no major errors and not having your basic OnPage like a SEO title, meta description, and the correct subheadings on the page.
[00:39:22] Emanuel: It’s unlikely Google charge GPT or whatever. I don’t think there’s a, you’ll get, you’ll be successful if you don’t take care of this. And what I used to do back in my days, I was, when I had more flexibility, was I try to change stuff around. Always. A new year is always an opportunity to review your most trafficked pages, at least top 10, top a hundred, top 50 pages.
[00:39:48] Emanuel: See if there’s an opportunity to rewrite some of the titles. Many people right now, back Black Friday or end of the year, so they go in and update the years right for 20 24, 20 25, 20 26.
[00:40:00] Emanuel: That’s an opportunity also to see what worked on other pages, what other people have put out there. You listen to a podcast, you re-read a survey or a study, so you can might as well take a couple of minutes and try to tweak those things, see what the results are.
[00:40:16] Emanuel: That’s part of the SEO work. So long answer, I, I think that’s what you are expecting, a longer answer, but they’re as important as they have ever been in, in my opinion.
[00:40:28] Anatolii: I think yeah I, learned the study from Joy and she wrote even I learned a few other studies. For example, when I check out Amazon, I can see Amazon can break the rules so they can write 200 characters in title.
[00:40:44] Anatolii: 500 characters in description and Amazon doesn’t care that Google can cut some data.
[00:40:51] Emanuel: But Google never said that there’s a character limit, as far as I remember. As far as I know. That’s something that YOAST the SEO plugin promoted, right? Keep it under, and it makes sense because you don’t have one to have 500 characters write a PhD thesis in your title tag, all those things.
[00:41:06] Emanuel: But there’s not necessarily a specific limit. And right now in the AI paradigm, whenever people might search for, in the future, that might have changed. And there’s a school of thought, and I agree to some extension that you can have great results with completely ignoring the meta description field.
[00:41:27] Emanuel: Which can be true, but it’s a good practice. Once you start ignoring one stuff, then you tend to ignore the other stuff as well. And we’ve seen at one point Google was showing the meta description in the search results, and at one point they started tweaking it. Then afterwards they started not showing it at all and show some different type of results, more dynamic.
[00:41:49] Emanuel: So essentially, we don’t know if they decide to come back and just simply show the meta description. No, maybe all this AIs, they’re gonna figure out, you know what, 10 years ago the search was better and we want to simple search results with the meta description shown in the SERP. Then might as well do it. Do it now.
[00:42:09] Anatolii: Yeah. So basically what I can say for the audiences who can listen to this podcast each case is different. Each case is different. If Amazon can break the rules, you can also try to break these rules. But I think Amazon can explain better to search engines with long meta tags that about the user intent.
[00:42:37] Anatolii: Probably I can suggest like that because Google can cut this data. What is the reason to write longer if Google can cut? Because it explains about user intent. Google can learn much better about the intent. So I think about that. Emanuel I have my final question. Very important question for my audience.
[00:42:59] Anatolii: Let’s bring more value to them about the future. I’m terrible forcaster. I’m terrible. I felt with American president with Bitcoin price now many things. I remember when one of my friends came to me like 10 years ago and asked, can you buy thousand Bitcoins. It costs no much.
[00:43:24] Anatolii: It’ll be future of the money. I replied, no, why do I need to buy this? I don’t know. What is it? I even don’t understand. What is it? He, ask, okay, buy just a hundred Bitcoins if you don’t want thousand. No. It can grow far significantly. I denied. I denied all those requests, and I can say that forecast is not my strong side, but I usually am, from my experience try to become on the second stage. Second stage, that means I, I don’t know what happens. Everything, what happens for me, it’s surprise. But I’m trying to move fast. I’m trying to adapt to learn new things to change something in my strategies. I never break anything. I, think it’s stupid.
[00:44:09] Anatolii: Like to change everything, but you need to adapt and think how you can adapt to your workflow, to your results. So from your experience. What kind of future you can forecast in five, 10 years? We probably, we can get like virtual reality. I don’t know anything like that. So your prediction about the future.
[00:44:35] Emanuel: Yeah. So my crystal ball is in service right now. Side note, although it has gained significant, value, there’s still not a bad time to buy Bitcoin. I don’t tell. I wouldn’t recommend, and this is no financial advice or anything like that you don’t need to buy one Bitcoin. And I believe there’s room for growth even if it’s grown so much exponentially in 10 years.
[00:45:01] Emanuel: It has changed lives.
[00:45:03] Emanuel: For the SEO and digital market in industry. And for life in general, there’s this thing called, and I think I mentioned in one of your podcasts: Soshin mentality. It comes from Japanese Zen, Japanese, Zen. It’s the beginner’s mindset. So whenever you approach a task or a project with the beginner’s mindset, you might see you’ll more likely to deliver and do a good result and not oversee something that might be easily missed, right? We, within thousands of SEO audits, if I look at the next audit being like: oh man, another SEO audit, the last thing I wanna do right now, then I might be able to miss some things. Even something basically like the format working or the telephone number listed is no or wrong telephone number altogether, right?
[00:45:50] Emanuel: Sometimes you have this, you do everything right, everything is good, you rank and all those things, but there’s a small stuff, small thing, basic stuff that’s not taken care of.
[00:45:59] Emanuel: I would say to approach everything with the beginner’s mindset. Okay, what is it? What is this about? How can I do that? What’s out there?
[00:46:07] Emanuel: That’s one thing. The second, get your fundamentals right, and I’m insisting on this even myself. I go, I’m not a developer yet. I have. Instructed many experts on how to make a custom integration, for example, right? You need, you have CMS that needs to integrate with A CRM. You have a HubSpot with a, I don’t know, a Shopify or some, something like that.
[00:46:33] Emanuel: Some basic elements that. Are required, right? Or meta to work with some other tools. Even though you have connectors like Zapier and eight N8 or make.com. With all those things, you still need to understand the fundamentals and the basics in order to be able to provide that.
[00:46:51] Emanuel: And unfortunately not even some of the experts out there don’t get these things right and they create a terrible experience altogether. Painful. And what should take, let’s say a couple of hours of work ends up taking months and cost an arm and a leg, essentially.
[00:47:09] Emanuel: So getting the fundamentals right is important for us, sEOs, I believe, HTML, CSS and Java Script. So this is, important and have an open mind.
[00:47:20] Emanuel: Be tapped into all the resources that you can follow on Anatolii because even yesterday, I. Although I was busy, I stopped for a couple minutes to listen to one of his live podcasts as well. So make sure wherever you’re watching follow us. And subscribe, because he always brings value more. He’s mentioning that I bring value.
[00:47:42] Emanuel: No, Anatoli brings value because Anatoli, does this, almost do it on a daily basis, and I believe sometimes even twice a day, right? So all of your guests have amazing, information to share. So follow Anatolii to be on top of things and leave some room for, experiments. Always experiment. We know from the nature any system that’s not exploring doesn’t give a percentage of their capacity to R&D research and development, right? Even bees, right? If they don’t send to explore new grounds to explore different potential sources, those colonies tend to disappear in time. So we need to experiment.
[00:48:25] Emanuel: That’s my, that’s what I’ve been doing. 20%, up to 20%. Even if it’s ads, right? You’re spending, let’s say, a thousand dollars a month on or on a service in one location, right? Even 20% of that, or even 10%, you can try to put it towards something else, right? Or even the content, the type of content that you can create.
[00:48:48] Emanuel: 20%. You can experiment, see, okay, I’m doing this long form. Maybe how would short form perform? I’m an SEO want to get business from the search engines. Let’s see, Google. We have seen for the past years that in Google we don’t just see the websites, we see YouTube results. Yeah, we see Reddit results, we see LinkedIn, pulse blog results as well.
[00:49:14] Emanuel: Not so many for the past couple of months, but they’re still there. In AI I’m trying to do all kinds of experiments and in Google, AI mode, and then I try to replicate it in Gemini and got to the same result. But in a different route. I got a listing from Tumblr. If you remember what Tumblr is, was a social platform that turned into something else altogether right now, but it’s still there.
[00:49:39] Emanuel: It still has some history, still has some authority. So if you’re able to kind consider all these things, this one have been brought to my attention unless, I was experimenting. So have an open mind approach everything with the Soshin mentality, with the beginner’s mindset. Get your fundamentals right and I’m pretty sure that there’s many talented SEOs out there, but there’s still room, to understand and to learn, the, coding part and give some room for experimentation.
[00:50:11] Emanuel: And stay on top of your game by following anatolii and no one else.
[00:50:17] Anatolii: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. So Emanuel I follow you. I recommend to anyone to follow you as well to Don. I know you started your podcast. So basically, yeah. Please send me the link you’ll share with my audience.
[00:50:28] Emanuel: Howaboutalsomarketing.com and you’ll be a guest at one point soon.
[00:50:31] Emanuel: Don’t worry. Oh, thank you. I do webinars, so I’m, podcast is in, in the works for 2026. I’m just putting this out there so that you can keep me accountable: hey, when did you start your podcast? But webinars where I bring experts, first of all, that I want to learn from.
[00:50:46] Emanuel: So I did this out of my, my own need.
[00:50:50] Emanuel: I want to bring somebody that can present something that my audience that consists of marketers, can learn something. And you have some things to share as well. So you’ll be a guest, a premier right now here at your show in 2026 and beyond.
[00:51:05] Anatolii: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Emanuel. Yeah. Big pleasure.
[00:51:08] Anatolii: So of course I will speak on your podcast to bring more value. For me I don’t care about. Useless stuff. I just wanna bring value and to be myself. I always play myself. I can’t play anybody else.
[00:51:20] Emanuel: That way, that’s why it’ll be hard to have an AI replica.
[00:51:24] Anatolii: Yeah, I don’t know. Probably we’ll see you in the future.
[00:51:28] Anatolii: Like when I invite you, like 50 times, you can tell my AI avatar will join instead of me, but don’t care. Value is the same, emotions the same. You’ll see, I dunno,
[00:51:41] Emanuel: Out of all the tasks that I would automate with that and I would with. Embrace it with two hands. Okay. But probably one of the, things last things that I will do myself is to be, to join these kinds of activities because before everything else, I enjoy it.
[00:51:58] Emanuel: And it’s a pleasure and a privilege to speak again.
[00:52:00] Anatolii: Yeah, for sure.
[00:52:02] Anatolii: By the way, according to data. 46% of people follow at least one AI influencer. So sometimes we don’t know that content was created by AI. For example, I can watch some videos on YouTube, faceless videos, and they’re great value. I, love it.
[00:52:19] Anatolii: So I listen a few podcasts, a hundred percent AI created, but I don’t think that AI created should confuse people. All this content were driving by human, so humans can set up AI to create some content that people wanna consume. So for me, I don’t care. It’s AI or human. For me, I care about value, but about connections, of course, I wanna connect with humans not before avatars today.
[00:52:50] Emanuel: Yeah definitely, But AI still hallucinates a lot and it can produce the content that’s not real. And unfortunately people take many, take this for granted as good and it will send you on the wrong track. Even something basic like getting an year wrong or many people automate and try to generate schema with business schema with Chad GPT and does a pretty good job.
[00:53:21] Emanuel: But I found that. They use sometimes old phone numbers or the wrong address, and these type of things translates to the other type of information as well. So I’m, a little bit more prudent coming from somebody who is AI all in, again I’m paying for Gemini Chat GPT Claude, Cap Cut.
[00:53:48] Emanuel: Yeah, probably two or three subscriptions of those subscriptions that I don’t use, that I don’t use as much. Yeah, as much, but I’m still paying for them. So yeah, it is what it is.
[00:54:00] Anatolii: Yeah. Nice. Thank you. Thank you a lot Emanuel it’s always a big pleasure to speak with you. I love this experience. It’s always fun.
[00:54:09] Anatolii: So welcome back anytime to share more valuable bonds. Guys. You can find the link to Emanuel’s LinkedIn account in the description below. I will share the link to his podcast. So please listen to him, learn from him because you can see our industry is growing fast. Many things are changing. When you get this information, fresh information, you can adapt faster because it’s not 10 or 10 years ago or five years ago when things change, but not like today.
[00:54:42] Anatolii: Like today, it’s dramatically different. So we need to adapt. Just learn from the best to become the best. Okay guys. Love you. See you. Bye.
