Irecently joined Anatolii Ulitovskyi’s podcast for the 7th time; and this one might be the most relevant conversation we’ve had yet. Our conversation covered some of the most pressing shifts in SEO and digital marketing heading into 2026, including:
- How artificial intelligence is fundamentally reshaping content creation and workflow efficiency
- Why many practitioners are transitioning away from WordPress in favor of lightweight, plain HTML solutions
- The security risks associated with vibe coding and AI-assisted development
- How AI-powered chatbots are converting leads that traditional forms and phone calls consistently miss
- Which SEO tools continue to deliver value and which are becoming redundant
- Why traffic volume is a declining indicator of success and what metrics deserve your attention instead
This episode is particularly relevant for digital marketers, agency owners, and business leaders looking to remain competitive in an AI-driven landscape. Watch it and read the transcript below.
[00:00:00] Anatolii: AI is changing our world. Many things are coming fast. We need to adapt. We need to adjust everything that we have, all our workflow and to create something different that will provide results. I’m so excited to discuss a lot more with Emanuel How are you?
[00:00:18] Emanuel: Anatolii Hi, how are you? I’m excellent.
[00:00:21] Anatolii: Oh, it’s a big pleasure to get on my show.
Emanuel Petrescu.
[00:00:25] Emanuel: How many times? It’s…
[00:00:26] Anatolii: Oh it’s seven times seven times club. So you speak a lot. You can bring a lot of valuable insights to my audience. I’m so excited to learn more because you, like me, you always learn something new about AI. You think how to improve what we have. And we chatted a little bit before the podcast about WordPress, about many things.
So I’m so excited to discuss. Tell more about yourself, about your business background, about Canada, Romania, and everything that can help our listeners to learn more about you.
[00:00:58] Emanuel: Yeah. Thank you so much. Yeah. So I was born in Romania. My name is Emanuel Petrescu. For the last 10 years I’ve been living in Canada, in Toronto, and I’ve been dedicated in digital marketing for more than I would like to admit because it’ll reveal my real age, but I’ve been focusing exclusively on digital marketing with a huge focus on SEO, so on the organic side, because I kind love and enjoy the SEO game, right? Try to win that. But, I currently own an agency 1307 Digital. We’re a Google partner agency as well. We do pay ads, we do organic, we do custom digital marketing solutions for the businesses.
I also have a project called How About Some Marketing?, a place for marketers to get better at their marketing as well. We educate people, webinars, podcasts, courses and so on moving forward. So that’s what I’ve been doing for the past 10 years or so. I enjoy it more or less. I’m really excited about the paradigm that we live in right now, which is the AI paradigm.
How AI is changing the game forever, essentially. And how we can leverage that and ensure that we’re still become, still be relevant at least for the next one or two or three years. Last time I said five years now, I came down to three years. So that’s where I see ourselves, people like ourselves being relevant in digital marketing.
[00:02:23] Anatolii: Yeah I wanna discuss with you about something that I change this year and just wanna learn from you what you change, because AI is coming. We need to adapt. And for example, I remember in 20 24, 20 25, my place to solve problems was Upwork. So if I need writers, if I need developers, designers, I just spend my time on Upwork.
In 2026, I didn’t even log into this platform. I am not sure if I have this password because I started to implement AI agents. And I will admit we change a lot of things with them. For example we changed the entire team developer. Team for our projects, we rebranded our brand, ummiss.com.
For now, we because we moved very slowly to create these tools for now, we are moving much faster without having this team. Developers, because of AI, AI can help a lot to develop great tools to implement everything. What we have. I have a few AI agents that can do everything, for example, from website audit to technical analysis and everything. What I can do, I just fit AI with data from Google search console, SERanking and other tools. And this AI can do this job much faster and better than meme. I just analyze the results and I will admit I don’t spend a lot of time to change. Anything there, or to prompt the second and third time because AI can learn my mind and can provide real great results.
Emanuel, can you tell about your changes? What you changed the last time, especially in 2026?
[00:04:12] Emanuel: Yeah. Before that. Let me ask you a question. Do you have any agent that kinda does the coffee for you so you don’t need to like, go in and do all the stuff, or even order just, you
[00:04:23] Anatolii: know I hope I can get this robot, but only I cook coffee myself.
Sometimes wife can, my wife can help you with that. Yes, but I, hope in the future I will have it.
[00:04:35] Emanuel: Although I kinda need to admit that there is the pleasure when you, when you prepare your coffee yourself. Back to your question, what things have I changed? Almost everything, I would say almost everything.
And I’ve embraced and adopted AI a few already, years ago two years ago. And understand that this is the future and that AI since AI, I haven’t done anything different, to be honest. I’ve been doing what I’ve already been doing, only more and only at scale. I was right. I was dealing with content.
Okay. I was writing one blog post a day, let’s say, or one a week. Right now I can do 10, a hundred, a week easily. And the decency of the content is becoming more and more acceptable, essentially is becoming better because it understands, as you said, how we wanna write it, the style and all those things.
I’ve been doing, let’s say social media posts. I’ve been doing one a day. Now I can do easily 10, a hundred a day. I’ve been building websites. It was taking me this much time, let’s say a week or something for a WordPress website. Updates, servers and all those things. Now I can easily build one with a couple of prompts.
You don’t necessarily need to be a software developer to be able to build something different something decent within a matter of let’s say a couple of hours. Now it’s important to know and have some knowledge because vibe coding, which is like the thing right now, is killing me and I have a personal vendetta against those things because there’s a there is a security threat essentially, but that’s a topic for another conversation. So you ask me what have I done differently? I wouldn’t say I’m doing necessarily different, I’m just doing more of what I’ve been. And I’m using more AI than I’ve used even a couple of months ago.
Last time when we met, I wasn’t using, let’s say Claude that much now to no one’s surprise, Claude is the primary LLM that I go to when I’m started doing anything essentially either research, content creation technical analysis or looking into whatever I need there is, that I need to do.
I didn’t mention graphic design. It’s amazing, right? What these tools can build right now. Google Stitch has made a significant update for the past last week or so. That, and I can easily do the high, the important high level stuff, the branding, the colors, define all the stuff that I would previously would have used, probably one or two people to help me work with in creating all those stuff.
I’ve been doing the same things that I’ve been doing in digital marketing only more and at scale, and perhaps cheaper because I don’t need to hire this many people. I don’t need to buy this many tools. I don’t need to spend that much time, learning the entire ecosystem, I can simply focus on what I need to know and it’s not uncommon to ask Chad GPT to look at the code that Claude provide, or ask Gemini to generate a video that will further be that the script was generated by Claude and so forth.
So that’s where I’m at today.
[00:08:06] Anatolii: We chat a little bit about WordPress for me. WordPress for me, it’s not like for we have plus 20% of websites online. But for me you mentioned about Claude and Claude can replace WordPress. Yeah, because everything that you can do with cloth, you can just, you don’t need to be, become a developer.
You don’t need to know the quote. You just need to. To give the right prompts for clo and it can build much better websites with clo even for non-technical people, for example I’m using Claude. I just give comments and CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman says that our developers are going to die in six, 12 months.
The same I got from founder of Perplexity. The same say founder of Anthropics big companies that very built by developers. Are going to replace them with ai. Even today on Anthropic, they don’t use developers anymore. They just built everything in big companies with AI because AI can do major with this code.
And for me we decided to switch all our CMS from WordPress that I use for over decade to clean HTML to any other system like Hugo React Next, and it works great. You don’t need to have special skills for that. Emanuel, can you tell more how you use cloud? Because I love this model. I like Codex.
I mix all of them. So tell about your methods of using them.
[00:09:45] Emanuel: I felt frustrated the other day when my wife built the most beautiful website for her business, a side project, and. She’s not in the business of building websites. She’s not a website builder. However, with Claude and with a couple of prompts in, with a couple of examples, in probably 10 or 15 minutes, she was able to pull up a excellent homepage.
Like design and also content, right? With all the proper sections, with the hero, with calls to action and all those things. Beautiful imagery and about page, amazing about page, probably some of the training that I did with the model helped a lot on having all that information over there. So I feel very frustrated.
Okay, amazing.
One thing I would like to caution before I talk more: WordPress has been serving us digital marketers for the past 20 years or so, I just realized right now that I’ve been using WordPress heavily since 2006, 2007, and believe it or not, it’s been 20 years already since. But as you said.
I am transitioning as well to plain HTML because realistically most businesses don’t need the fancy stuff or all the bloat that comes with WordPress and I don’t want to trash WordPress because it’s has served as great. It gave us the possibility to build some websites that other platforms wouldn’t have.
Allowed us, or it would have cost us a lot of money, right? We have a database we can do essentially whatever you want, all those things. But I was getting tired of the notification. I was getting tired of all the plugin updates. I was getting tired of all the security threats that having a WordPress site can, can mean essentially. So that’s why I choose to transfer to something more simple because I said realistically, most businesses don’t need something fancy. They need something efficient, something fast, something decent looking, and, it’s more important to be highly optimized, right? To be fast, to have the right proper content over there so that when people search for the products or services that business offer, either Google or Chad GPT or Perplexity will show up faster than that.
So that’s where I am at today, as you said, as well. And I forgot exactly what the question was, your initial question, but, I do want to caution on one thing for me, for you, for digital marketers. You said we don’t need developers, but we have the knowledge and know more than let’s say a junior developer.
So between you and I we’re more experienced than at least one one year developer, a developer with a one year experience because we’ve been in the trenches and we’ve built website, we dealt with malware, we dealt with all kinds of situations throughout the years, Google algorithm changes and all those things, whereas, no, not most people are like that.
I mentioned earlier about vibe coding and to define what Wipe coding is essentially. This thing about everyone can build a website using a tool, either Lovable or Netlify or some other tools that were out there.
I caution here with this because many are a security threat essentially. It’s not just one example I’ve seen where people have built apps, have built websites where people have, put in their personal information, some even credit cards and all those things, and they’ve been compromised. So I would caution whenever you think that you’ll be using a tool to make a business. Developers are gone? Not entirely, 60 to 70%, probably within the next, I wouldn’t say necessarily 12 months, but two years for sure.
But I still believe that there’s a need for experienced software developers. Especially within the security space as well to supervise and create the watch the system. And of course for us, for digital marketers, as I mentioned in one of the previous episodes, being the Jack of all trades will be to your advantage here because I suspect that if you are not able to flip between social, between copywriting, between link building, between technical analysis of a website, know a thing or to about, all the other stuff, then you’ll become obsolete and become irrelevant, because even if I build a tool chat, an agent that will do all those things, let’s say for the business owners you still need somebody to guide that tool and help be in the middle within the business because the business owner doesn’t know SEO okay?
A tool. The difference right now is that let’s say a SEMRush report was telling him Your page is slow. You need to do all these things. Okay? Now, with an agent, he can actually prompt that agent and go in and implement all those things, but, will those changes break some other parts of his website or his business.
And as we all know when you fix something here, it breaks something over there, right? From our experience. So there’s still a need for somebody to overview this, and that’s what I believe the future for digital marketers like us is. And somebody said that small agencies four to five people can now compete with agencies that had like hundreds of thousands of people.
[00:15:28] Anatolii: You mentioned about compromising data with AI and, I had this experience. Basically my brother had, he created a tool and fit AI with API, and then when he checked his balance all payment was gone because yeah AI compromised this key, but, I didn’t test it.
I don’t know exactly, but I think AI fixed this like Claude and Chat GPT, they fixed. When you share with GPT, your key your passport any other access tokens, AI will not share. I’m not sure about that. I don’t recommend anyone to check out. I still use, Terminal or Vercel to hide this data.
But equivalent to, something that I learned online GPT, stop, sharing all this tokens, keys, passwords credit cards. Yeah I’m not going to test it because I have my process, but if someone wants to test it, just, yeah, be careful about that. Okay. Emanuel let’s discuss about, you mentioned that you can create a lot of content at scale.
Probably, for example, without AI, you can write one post for now. You can write a hundred posts. Especially I like Claude with that because in quote, I don’t need to even just write text. I can design that including infographics and including screenshots and including submission. So we use designers, content managers who can submit this post.
For now, I just ask. Claude and my AI agent can go directly to WordPress, any other CMS and just post directly in nice looking design. So I use EA agents for that. But and I spoke with a few SEO agencies that stopped using Ahrefs and SEMRush big tools because they just use AI to get data and I shared this before that I’m not using them as well.
But if you this post became viral on LinkedIn. I got a lot of hate, someone who still believe that you need to use these tools as much as possible to get this data because all AI data is inaccurate. I tested many times ai all tools SEMRush, Ahrefs have different volume, have different data.
It’s not the same. And for me, AI can provide not bad data as well. Like estimation still estimation. And for now, yeah, I stop using these tools, pay tools because AI can learn and provide all this data and it works with me great. So Emanuel, can you tell which tools you still use, which tools you stop using and which tools you can recommend to our audience?
[00:18:31] Emanuel: It’s always about personal preferences, right? So for example, we are to a customer of a tool. We’ve been using it for so long that it’s hard to change and that’s probably where I am. I am not going that far yet on stop using tools. There’s still value and it’s unlikely that it, in the next couple of months I won’t be using them because I need the benchmark and I need a third party that I can reference.
To give some context, SEMrush Ahrefs, they have their own databases that they pull and they have created throughout the year. Some were purchased, some were built because they have access to websites, right? Whenever we choose to sync our Google search console with Ahrefs, obviously they get. Some of the information that we provide as well.
And from that, they can build their own databases, their models, and all those things. There’s a difference. That’s why you will see a difference from when you look at a keyword in Google’s keyword planner, which theoretically should be the most accurate tool for volume and for trends, right?
From Google. Yet again, it’s not always that’s why you see some big discrepancies between a keyword planner, SEMRush and Ahrefs, because they’re pulling from different databases. And when I see that, say that I’m referring it globally, right? So we can look at keywords in Germany, in Europe, in US, and all those things, all those places.
There’s still value in looking at that. But as everyone else, I still, I’ve been using less and less these tools and I’m switching for, other options, which are a little bit more affordable for keyword research. I’m being using Keywords Everywhere, which is a desktop plugin has, there’s a suite of tools with SEO Minion as well, which is amazing tool.
When you do go deep into people also ask questions for keyword research and stuff scraping the Google search result will be Keywords Everywhere, the Chrome plugin with the premium feature. Of course, I’m a big fan of SEO Power Suite, the suite of tools that includes the rank tracker and the website auditor, and the SPY Glass, which is the link building component as well.
So we can have everything like in one place. And what I love about this tool is that it runs locally, but you can actually monitor significantly a lot more than with Ahrefs or SEMrush. For example, if you wanna monitor, let’s say a thousand keywords or 10,000 keywords, you can easily do that.
Unlikely to do that with SEMrush. You can, but you need to pay like thousands of dollars per month, which is unrealistic. So that’s why. Screaming Frog, I still use it. It’s still valuable to see everything at the glance, and obviously you have the agents that can do that for you, but I still love to do some of the work myself because I’m passionate about SEO.
So to summarize, I would say for, SEO Keywords Everywhere, SEO Powersuite, Ahrefs. Of course, I still use Ahrefs and I still find it more accurate than any other co competitors on competitor on the market. Right now it’s, in my opinion, it’s still the most accurate one. Screaming Frog. And a lot of AI and having AI helped me interpret all this data, especially at scale in mass.
When you analyze thousands of URLs, it was taking a lot of time and it was very, a lot of manual work. You had some scripts here in Excel to filter some stuff, but you can’t compare right now with just a couple of prompts where, AI can help. And again, I need to caution here because it’s important data, privacy, security.
Be mindful of what you are sharing with your favorite LLM being charge ChatGPT or Claude, because don’t think they don’t know, bet on them using the data that you provide to better train their their models and serve you better? No, they’re using it and that’s a fact. You can use it to analyze some data.
Don’t share information you don’t need, probably client’s names or emails when you upload some data in GPT, which unfortunately many people still do that to analyze their data. So caution and use your brain, that’s number one aI tool: Brain.
[00:22:57] Anatolii: Yeah. Number one, a hundred percent your head. So your mind can make big surprise if you just use it.
And for example I can’t say that I’m big learner because I’m big practitioner for me, I implement. Practice test everything. Plus 99% of my time when someone can share with me video watch this video. Like it, it takes 10 minutes to watch this video. I don’t do it.
Yeah, I usually I have no time for that. I just open Codex. I just open Claude Antigravity. Test all these things all the time all day I can put down my computer because all these models can use everything that they have, all my power. But yeah I like practice more. I like test things and it works great for me.
Emanuel, let’s talk about, our tool. So we developed this SEM Chat is the tool that can replace the entire customer support. We’ve built this tool for one client. Basically it’s interesting because you showed me first this tool you showed similar tool and analog.
Yes. And in this tool I analyze. I need similar solution for my client because it’s a big company and they rent luxury yachts in Greece in Europe. They have a lot of great luxury yachts. And they told me their audience is very, speak different languages.
And they got huge bounce rate because that was thought for them to reply to all questions to serve customers immediately. And many customers are impatient just open. If they can’t get help, they just bounce. And that was a big frustration for them because these customers came to them from competitors who can charge plus 50% from big aggregators.
Get your guide TripAdvisor. And they told me, look at we spend some time on marketing people, open our website, bounce and go to aggregators and pay them. And with 30% markup,
Like payment fee for to this platform. When you shared with me this tool by the way, you didn’t share it, I just opened your website, analyze your website, and found this chat.
I got it. Wow. It’s interesting. I wanna use it. But then we spent some time to discuss with my team how to use it, right? And we decided no we can develop this tool themselves. And we did it. We developed this tool and we implemented for this website. And that was a big game changer for this website because for now this tool can speak 95 languages.
They don’t lose customers who open website because this chat can reply immediately to any request. You can speak with this chat. So you can call it, you can chat a lot. So it’s a big game changer for this project. And we decided to create this SaaS project as well. Emanuel, tell more about creating the right experience for traffic because what I can see by now for example, you can spend a lot of resources to get organic reach even to pay for some traffic. But when they open your site and leave because they can’t get the entire support or the experience with design it’s not user friendly, anything like that.
So can you tell how you solve such problems, how you analyze specific projects and can decide, okay, I need to improve landing page, I need to improve content, I need to set up chat like this, or any tips about that?
[00:26:58] Emanuel: Have you ever had a client that ask you to either remove their contact page or the contact form or the telephone number on the website?
I had and not just one. It’s the nature of the business to interact with all kind of businesses that may or may not have different needs. There’s this thing called the standard and templates. So that’s what I use. There’s a standard that should, is applicable across the web and even Google in their raters guideline determine those standards, right?
So a website should have a contact, a way to contact the website. And it’s common knowledge. It’s common, sincere. Again, many people, some people don’t actually think about this in the first place and they kind make it really hard to contact them in the first place, whereas it should be something more prominent.
AI kind like works on the same parameters as with the best practices. Gaining online, looking, having templates. Obviously being in the business for so long, I like in building so many websites or working with so many website, it comes second nature to me. But I have a template and all make sure that all the check boxes are listed there.
So customer experience, the user experience overall is, extremely important. I often refer to SEO not at search engine optimization, but the search experience optimization. And when you change the name, you can like then incorporate not just Google, but Gemini, ChatGPT, and all the other LLMs.
Because at the end of the day, the way that I see my work is this, it is said that people don’t need a drilling machine; they just need a hole in their wall or something like that. When they search for something like that, my job is to make sure that my client, the one that provides that service or that product, shows up at the top of the results, wherever those might be.
Could be Google, could be ChatGPT, could be Yahoo!, Altavista, or any other platform that exists, have existed or will exist in the future. So that’s part of my job. That’s one thing.
From a user’s perspective, because myself before anything else, I’m a user. I use some tools and I have interactions with all kinds of websites.
I’m not sure where you are right now, probably somewhere in Europe, but you often need to interact with let’s say your cell phone company or a government agency to go in and submit something or the cable and you have experience with the chat bot, AI or human interaction.
I cannot tell you how many hours I’ve wasted just for the same thing, like providing my name to 10 people because they escalated different departments providing the same problem thousands of times.
Just overall that pure hard experience overall. So from learning from what, as a user, I dislike whenever I interact with the business or website I implemented in mine as well. That’s why, and I have the data to show that if you have a chat bot on your site, that’s prominent for some, so some businesses, so theoretically all the business can have one, but some businesses can benefit more than others. We’re talking about traditional, let’s say roofers, plumber, hvac and dentists and all those things because some people actually, I’ve noticed that they don’t fill out a form and they don’t call.
They actually chat with the chat bot. If you don’t have it, those people otherwise wouldn’t have reached out to you.
That’s the nature of things, so that’s beneficial. So whenever, that possibility came into existence. We implement for small businesses as well without paying an arm and a leg because chat bot solutions have been around for a while, but they cost a lot of money and only a few businesses could afford.
Then I’ve implemented for some of the, businesses I work with as well, and I have the data to prove it right? People are reaching out, people are interacting with the chat bot. People are calling because some of these chat bots allow you to do calls as well. You have the voice AI right now.
That’s many people don’t even realize that they, it’s not a human behind it, right? It’s not uncommon to see, I saw it on my chat bot. Hey, I talked to Alex from your team. My name is also Emanuel Alexandru, so I named my chat bot Alex. And that person didn’t realize that Alex was my, actually my chat bot, so many people didn’t know. So now the technology allows us to make this happen at a fraction of the cost with a little to no maintenance overall, which is again, something extraordinary. And again me and you have been in business for a while and we see these things naturally they progress naturally.
We need to remember that not everyone is necessarily like us. And a business owner will still need somebody like us to help them implement. Case in point, exactly the example that you shared. Okay. Your clients with the yachts have told you that they have these issues, but unlikely they would have thought of the solution of a chatbot.
Unlikely they would have gone so far on creating, developing such a chatbot. They can easily flip between the languages, right? Because it doesn’t even, you start a conversation in English and then you move it to Ukrainian, and then you move it to Romanian, then you move it to German. It’s not like they would transfer you to the German department or the French department.
Yeah, it’s happening in the same kinda like chat conversation because it comes natural to the chat bot, right? If he speaks in English or French or Spanish. It’s the same thing for him. He can easily flip just like that. So the technology now allows us, even guys like me and you, smaller teams to actually build the tools that weren’t accessible for us just even two, three years ago.
Unlike, we would have thought, oh, let me build my own, chatbot two years ago, how much you wouldn’t have taught. Or if you have taught and you did run the numbers you would have cost you at least two developers. Good developers that cost at least $50 per hour in up and just by at least a hundred, 200 hours.
So there you go. You would start just from that and it’s always adds more. So that’s where we are at right now and that’s why I emphasize a lot on explaining, because many people actually don’t realize the paradigm that we live.
[00:33:52] Anatolii: Yeah,
[00:33:52] Emanuel: it’s for me, I’m, I am embracing it and I look at the positive sign. It can go sideways, but if it goes sideways, then there’s not much you and I can do anyway.
But I suspect it won’t go sideways. It’s gonna be a transition period, which will not be fun at all. People have invested a lot of time, they spend a lot of money on getting trained on something that your AI can do in less than 30 seconds,
[00:34:20] Anatolii: I wanna ask about your login metrics. For a long time I checked of course traffic.
It’s very important. We analyze many metrics, but for now I think, I spoke with a few big agency owners. And they told me they even don’t track traffic. They don’t know what kind of traffic they have, but they know that like 40, 60% of all sales are coming from SEO. Like today people don’t need to open your website.
But yeah, agents can open your website and buy some stuff for their customers. So basically things are changing and we need to pay attention to, of course, conversion rate sales the most important, but I analyze that volume is still the most popular metric. Traffic probably second.
But can you tell like an expert in SEO, what is your live metric in 2026 where you pay more attention and recommend to anybody else?
[00:35:32] Emanuel: That’s a good question. I’m gonna put my agency owner hat on and say the following. We still have deliverables, right? So whenever we onboard a client, we set some expectations and traffic, keyword positioning, volume, overall increase, increasing everything, all the metrics is important and it’s deliverable and it’s included in all the reports.
Unlikely that they will go away. And it’s a thing important to look at. Is it critical to campaign success? Probably not. You need to define at the beginning what success looks like for a business. That’s the most important part. And many people don’t actually go through this exercise.
Personally, what I’m looking at is contact, so form submissions and calls, that’s the most important ones. And chat bot interactions if we have any. So that’s included because at the end of the day asset, the way I see it, I help businesses make more money. That’s the end game. That’s the game I’m playing and that’s how I do it.
How they make more money? Ensuring they’re at the top of the search results when people look for what they are offering products or services. Now, many people I said don’t actually go into, through this exercise and set up everything right, set up the tracking, the analytics. I can’t tell you how many times you look at a new website and 10 Google Analytics accounts with 10 Google tag managers thrown everybody.
Same SM department put their own and then social, put their own and organic, put their own and all those things. And sometimes, not sometimes, but all the time, there is a conflict and they can mix the data. So it’s important to look at the right data. You asked me what I’m looking at so obviously form submissions phone number calls and all the other stuff, making sure that at the beginning I don’t take any projects unless I have complete control on how to analyze the data, right?
So Google Tech Manager, Google Analytics, and Clarity. Are the minimum Microsoft Clarity are the minimum that I’ve I’m installing on a website to make sure everything works. Define a couple of KPIs that are important for the client, are important for me as well to measure success. Right now, they switch through from KPIs, key performance indicators to all OKRs.
So most big companies look, here’s objective key results, I think it’s the acronym. It’s something more abstract. So instead of KPI being something like 10,000 new users, new visitors in six months, something like increased traffic by 60%. So that’s like the paradigm that we live in. Looking at that, looking at something very specific.
For example, each business is unique and I like to spend the time on, understanding the business and what success looks like for them. It’s not uncommon to see, let’s say a traffic decrease. But the number of leads stay consistent or even go upwards a little bit, right? Depending, sometime you get a lot of traffic from a popular blog post that will never convert, but you have it there, so it’s not necessarily doing you damage for your business at all.
A little bit of extra traffic, nobody will complain. That they get some extra traffic, although it doesn’t convert as well. Those are the things I try to understand then what success looks like for a business and start structuring the digital marketing effort based on that. And when I say digital marketing, I’m just not saying just SEO; is important and I push for a strong organic, effort from the beginning because it pays off, inevitably it pays off. But as it can take some time. It can take some, a lot of resources. Obviously I’m exaggerating sometimes when I can say, yes, I can write a hundred blog posts a day. Yes, I can do it, but. I just, I won’t simply just put them out there like that.
No, I need to read them. I need to understand them. I need to check them. Are they plagiarized? I still, it still needs the human factors. Some internal linking, some restructuring of the sentences, right? For example, if you write for AI for LLMs, you need to better get featured in LLM results.
You, there’s some tweaks that you can do when you structure your sentence and how you present some stuff. So still need to do that. You asked me earlier what tools I’m using and I mentioned a few, but I left out actually one tool. I’m not using it daily, but I’m using it at least at the beginning of any new campaign and every, I wouldn’t say necessarily every month, but every quarter I’m looking at it and it’s called Gum Shoe ai.
It’s a tool that tracks your AI citations. How this tool works is, and I recommend to everyone, is essentially creates, develops the personas, your ICP ideal customer profile, that again, many businesses don’t have it and don’t even go through this exercise. Whereas for me, it’s one of the first thing that I ask, who is your target audience?
Do you even have a name for them? And I like to name them. Jack? He’s a 30-year-old, business owner that does this or does that, his main problems are this, and that. You don’t need to go into details such as the shoe size and what kind of hats or what kind of sunscreen he wears, but some general characteristics are important.
And then based on those personas, that tool develops some scenarios, right? What is most likely that they will prompt into ChatGPT and they have all these models. They work through their API and basically runs a hundred, 200 something scenarios, prompts at the at a glance. And based on that report, you can see where you’re at, what are your competitors, what they’re doing.
And it’s not something new, right? We’ve been doing this for years and years, right? With SEMRush,, we plug in our competitors, we look at their backlink profile, we look at their keyword positioning, we look at their content, what kind of blog they have, how can you do this? How can you do that? But coming back to your initial question, what success looks like, identify it at the beginning, look at the technical ones, and you, it’s usually form submissions.
I don’t do much of, SaaS which means like product downloads or I dunno, something else, trials, and all those things, although they can actually mean success for, let’s say your sim, SEM chat tool.
[00:42:25] Anatolii: Yeah.
[00:42:25] Emanuel: It says over whether SM Dutch chat. So define what success looks like.
Define one KPI, at least one or two. We usually form submissions and contacts for best service businesses, or app downloads or installs or trials for something like SAAS. And then work with the templates, with the best practices and the knowledge that you have accumulated throughout the years to ensure it’s aligned.
And sooner rather than later you’ll see some success. Because again, it’s digital marketing, not just SEO. It’s not uncommon that I would recommend to put some paid ads money towards a business, maybe a landing page to make sure you get the right traffic sooner rather than later.
[00:43:10] Anatolii: Yeah. Nice. Emanuel and I have my final question, a very important question for my audience…
[00:43:17] Emanuel: already?
[00:43:18] Anatolii: Yeah, already. So yeah, I have a bunch of questions, a lot the questions we can discuss, but I know from personal experience, it’s tough to learn a lot of valuable insights from one attempt. So we can repeat this episode again and many times when before AI, avatars can replace us.
But for now, we still have this real, we’re doing
[00:43:42] Emanuel: coffee in the meantime avatars talk. We’re brewing coffee.
[00:43:47] Anatolii: Yeah. Okay. My final question about your prediction. So basically things are going fast. Many things are changing. And for now, for example, in Google, if you search any keyword, you can get this AI overview.
But in mobile, if you click on this AI overview, it doesn’t open the top 10 results. It opens Gemini. So even today Google can replace, top 10 results with Gemini with this AI overview if you wanna get more data, you can ask each other directly again. And it’s not a big reason for Google to share links.
And many people get almost, all insights in AI review or AI mode, anything like that? Many people start to use ChatGPT, or Perplexity. I use a lot of them, and I can admit that they use a lot more than Google. I don’t know how 90% of traffic still on Google. If all smart people won’t more than.
Yeah, so your prediction about the future and how you are going to adapt to the future, because, for example, if equivalent to some from OpenAI equivalent to founder of Anthropic Perplexity and all of them predicted developers will die soon. So basically all occupation can disappear. Can you tell.
Your prediction about SEO it’ll die soon. It’ll replace soon. And how you are going to adapt to that.
[00:45:21] Emanuel: So my crystal, I left my crystal ball at the mechanic because, he’s facing it, he’s repairing it. So I don’t have it with me right now for the prediction, but based on what I remember last time.
There’s a saying, don’t believe everything that you read on the internet. Abraham Lincoln said it. Obviously, all these guys, they’re trying to push their agenda and they’re trying to predict the make the future happen by working towards happening the future that they would want. It’s clear that AI the LLMs are here to stay.
They won’t go anywhere, and they’re replacing more and more. You say software developers? I would say I won’t stick to software developers. I would stick to, I would go even further along I won’t mention right now, but in the medical field, the applications are more important than the software, some of the software development itself.
So Will, my prediction is that we’ll see AI replacing not just developers, but other professionals as well. Obviously I wouldn’t necessarily at the moment accept any advice, medical advice from Chat GPT. Nor would I, God forbid, go to court just based with my arguments brought up by per Perplexity.
But nevertheless, I would definitely love if a doctor would use them with his knowledge and a lawyer would use his, the AI with his knowledge as well, right? To be able to go through, do the research in a couple of prompts. Another thing that I suspect will happen is more people will understand, and by more, more than they are today.
Not the majority, but more people will understand the paradigm that we live in and will shift towards becoming even better or gaining more information about everything essentially. So I suspect that kind of like courses and even to an extent universities and colleges, will, at least for the near future be a thing of interest for many people because they either will shift, they’ll need to learn and develop new skills or enhance their current ones.
So essentially these would be my two general, predictions for the near, near future, if you can call them predictions. Again, you and I are something else and you cannot think for the general, in general about, for everyone else compared to you and I and people like us that have been in the trenches and know the things.
You mentioned that Google, the experience on mobile is slightly different and it shows different than desktop and so forth. One thing we need to remember is that Google ChatGPT Perplexity are businesses and businesses need to make money. Ads are coming to town. I think I saw an ad in charge PDI think I’m not sure exactly.
I saw a notification about something that I didn’t know, and before I click it, it disappeared. But I believe that once ads will be in place in the LLM experience, it’ll change the game a little bit more. So I don’t know where it’ll, towards what, it’ll change it, but I know for sure that it’ll change it.
And to address Google’s, your Google example, the AI overview. Looks terribly similar to the experience we had 10, 15 years ago with the Google’s 10 blue links. Something simple, right? So that’s what differentiated Google from, let’s say Yahoo!, the, or Alta Vista used to go there and you’ve had all that information.
Could be a little bit more overwhelming. On Google, you went and you saw nothing but a simple search box. You simply type in whatever you had to do, and the results were more than decent, and that’s why people adopted it because they had that good experience. What I used to tell my clients, is that Google’s only looking for the best to offer the best possible experience to their customers.
Who are Google’s customers? The people who type in the queries. Okay, I need the coffee, I need the plumber, I need SEMRush, SEO, a chat bot for my website. I go in on Google and I type in. Google’s businesses’ make sure that. The best results sit at the top because if you, we as users wouldn’t have been happy with the results facing seen on Google, we would have looked at them somewhere else.
So that’s basically what Google is aiming for and that’s what Chat GPT and all the others are aiming for, to provide the best experience for the user so that they would return and they can make money out of it. At the end of the day, they’re all B2B companies. So those are the short to medium term predictions.
I, I told you last time, five years.
[00:50:44] Anatolii: Okay. We’ll,
[00:50:44] Emanuel: three years now. Now I reduce it to three years. I cannot see over three years.
[00:50:49] Anatolii: Okay, we’ll see it. You know what, I like that it’s though to predict anything. And now that is why we love this game. So because it’s not boring and I’m on the second stage, I usually am.
Adapt to whatever happens.
[00:51:04] Emanuel: Yeah.
[00:51:04] Anatolii: If what can surprise me and then, okay, I’m going to Claude. If Google Perplexity can provide something different, okay, I’m in. So for me, it’s important to adapt to whatever happens because all my predictions failed many times.
[00:51:20] Emanuel: Most.
[00:51:22] Anatolii: Yeah. Because I can’t develop such things like Google ChatGPT but I can use these technologies, I can use these technologies and for me Claude Google are trying to create a lot of tools as well to extend their database to get more customers and only one way how to compete with them to create user friendly design. By using these technologies, because you have API, you can use API and create something better and niche down to specific queries because Claude and ChatGPT can create the interface for everything.
That is why for we can get better results. Okay. Yeah, go
[00:52:04] Emanuel: ahead. You run Facebook ads, right? And at one point, I’m not sure if it’s still available, it wasn’t that popular, the page experience where essentially inside the ads they would create like a website experience so when people click the ad, they would be taken to a website that was still on Facebook’s ecosystem and you I forgot what it was called. It was page experience, I believe. And it wasn’t that popular, but essentially you had more control because on Facebook you cannot have a lot of control of what you can, the users can do on their platform. This one gave you a little bit more control.
You can add a header, some images, pan then out left and right and some stuff like that. I forgot how, been using it. I’ve experimented with it, but with no success. I do suspect that perhaps in some instances that will be an experience altogether. What do I mean by that? On ChatGPT, people will go to ChatGPT and look at it.
So essentially it’ll if they would recommend a plumber. They will show a stripped down version of your plumbing’s website, adapted for the Chat GPT – Open AIs’ platform, like an amp accelerate the mobile pages version that was the thing. Also some people would have sworn by AMP replacing websites altogether and where exactly is AMP right now?
Nowhere. Essentially we just spend a couple thousand dollars and a lot of time implementing that for the businesses that we work. So I suspect that, from a user experience, a similar version to the Facebook’s ads page experience would be happening as well. And to an extent, it kinda like it does, right?
That’s why it’s important to have the correct implementation, right? It’s called semantic HTML having the name, the heading H one, having H twos, like H twos and all those things. And believe it or not, as many businesses actually don’t, take, do the effort to go on backend and put all these things over there.
So I suspect that will be one of the things that will happen within the near future as well. Instead of showing your actual website, it’ll show a strip version of your website with all the important elements that ChatGPT or Gemini would think it’s necessary for that specific users. Now, if you don’t have your SEO.
Correctly in place. Your website all your headings, all your tags, all the backend is all over the place lots of bloated code. Then you know you, your site won’t be showing up correctly and. Sooner rather than later. All these tools will choose to show something else that it’s better rendered and can understand more correctly.
And to Kevin’s point, we saw a comment here on, on the screen at one point, yes, so Google’s users are one thing. Google is a B2B company. I cannot emphasize this enough. So Google’s business, how they make their money, and they make a lot of money out of it, is by selling they’re stuff to other businesses like you and me, right?
Selling their use users data, essentially, right? To guys like me and you, and obviously bigger business as well, right? Because if Google is in the business of making money, when somebody types in, how can I install a chat bot on my site? Your website should show up. You can either show up organically, but more prominently will show up the paid advertising and you need to pay Google the money.
Yeah.
[00:55:50] Anatolii: Yeah,
[00:55:50] Emanuel: that’s the game.
[00:55:51] Anatolii: Yeah. Emanuel it’s a big pleasure to get you on my show. Welcome back to bring all the knowledge bombs again. So to be, tell the best way how to keep from you, how to reach out to you, how to follow you.
[00:56:05] Emanuel: Emanuelp.com is the website, howaboutsomemarketing.com is the other project that I’m doing and I’m focusing more.
I’m gonna have you at one point soon, a guest that I would like my audience to know about your your tool that you’ve built as well. So maybe I’m doing this live invitation right now within the next couple of months. emanuelp.com. howaboutsomemarketing,com If you Google my name or go to LinkedIn, you should be able to find ways of contacting me.
Let’s have a chat. I’m open to conversation. I’m open to learning as well. If you have a business, I’m more than welcome to have a conversation as well because, at the end of the day we’re in this game to nice help each other.
[00:56:51] Anatolii: Nice guys, you can find the links in the description below. So tag you on LinkedIn post so you can find on my LinkedIn account.
So I recommend to, to follow Emanuel Petrescu.
[00:57:03] Emanuel: And one more recommendation, if I may. Follow right now. If you’re watching us, follow Anatolii’s YouTube channel, on LinkedIn because I promise you’ll find something useful for your business or for your career. If you’re an SEO digital marketer and want to learn and get better at what you’re doing, I promise you’ll find here something useful.
It’s not just me who’s coming on his show, actually. He has many, yes, sometimes even two a day I’ve seen every now and then. So whenever I don’t have time to watch all of them, but whenever I feel like I need a break, I need to watch something else, and I need to, let me see what the industry, what others are doing I go to Anatolii’s channel and look, choose any of his latest episodes. So if you wanna do something for your business or for your career, follow Anatolii right now. Okay.
[00:57:51] Anatolii: Thank you. Thank you. Okay guys, if you wanna reach out to Emanuel please don’t send spam messages. Don’t sell your link building. Just honest real feedback and let him know that you found him on this podcast.
Okay guys. Love you. See you.
[00:58:06] Emanuel: Thank you.
