Find your audience of one to cut through the noise

Dixon says: “Clearly, AI is going to take over in 2024 – in many, many ways. For all its dangers and its pitfalls, you won’t be able to avoid it in the SEO world, whether you like it or not.

However, I do think it gives the enlightened company founders a real chance to shine. If you know why your business truly exists, and who it truly serves, then I think you can cut through a lot of the AI noise.

Write like you’ve got an audience of one. The idea is that you don’t talk to everybody with your content. If you’re talking to the founder of a small SaaS business: I’m talking to you. My audience of one for this tip is people who have their own websites and want to do their own SEO. Those are the people I want to speak to. I don’t want to speak to the rest of the world. When I give that tip, I’m talking to you, Mrs. Founder-Of-A-Website-With-A-Real-Business-Purpose.”

Is cutting through the noise and talking to a specific individual something that AI has a challenge with at the moment?

“I’m talking about your business wrapping itself around a central concept that will allow AI to always come back to you. ‘All roads lead to Rome’ is a concept that’s been around for 2,000 years. Originally, all roads did lead to Rome. Rome portrayed itself as the centre of the known universe and the empire expanded from there. I think that that’s the same for anything that you do.

If you’re a plasterer, you’re not just a plasterer – you’re a plasterer in a particular area. If you’re a consultant, you’re not just a consultant – you’re a consultant in a specific subject matter. If you’re a retailer of electronic products, you’ve got a specific genre of products that you’re selling. What you need to do is become synonymous with that concept. It’s the same with any marketing principle. You either need to be number one or two or be in a position to become number one or two in your niche in the near future, or you need to get out of the game.

Now, that has transferred over into pretty much any concept. First, you’ve got to define what it is that you do. You’ve got to be so specific that, if you were to ask anyone in the world to define the best person to go to for this, then they’d come to you. Then, in theory, all the AI in the world, reading all of the pages in the world, would end up with you as the best answer to that question.

I’m not saying that’s gonna happen all the time. What I’m saying is, if you don’t have that mentality going into the game, then you won’t get much out of an AI-driven world.”

When you’ve found your niche, how do you define if it’s possible to become number one or number two within that niche?

“One way to do it, with or without SEO, is to have a look on Google and see who the players in that niche are. Using a tool like G2 (formerly G2 Crowd) is also a good way of doing it for a SaaS business.

Really, though, it’s working out the raw ingredients of your business which, to be honest, starts with you as a business. It doesn’t really start with market research. There’s no point in a plasterer trying to become the best electronics expert in the world. They’re a plasterer. You’ve got to start with that.

Then, it’s about what makes you different. It used to be called the USP, but now I think we need to refine that idea a little further. Your USP has to fit into a well-definable concept. Let’s take Banksy as an example. His USP is that he is an artist who does graffiti art and is well known for his graffiti art. If I were doing SEO for Banksy today, I would work around the concept of graffiti art as my marketing USP, rather than art in general.

If you want to become the world’s greatest website on graffiti art, then it would help to know great graffiti artists. You would want to talk about particular pieces of graffiti artwork that are famous around the world. Go and have a look at them, photograph them, talk about them, and try and find the people who painted them. Then, you’re building your business around graffiti art. You would not then become a fine art salesperson because you’re not going to transfer your skills from graffiti art to fine art very well. If you’re creating an artist’s website, you need it to become more than just a generic artist’s website.”

If you clearly define your USP for your business, but also for AI, could AI then write content on your behalf?

“There are two philosophies that SEOs are thinking about. My philosophy is that you can’t stop AI from reading your content. Another philosophy is to block AI from interpreting your content altogether because they’re stealing content. I agree; they are stealing your content – which is exactly what I felt when I started doing SEO, even before Google arrived.

People crawling your website, indexing that content, and then providing it back as their own seemed to me to be stealing. We’ve moved on from that, and we made a big business out of SEO, and that became okay. Then PPC came along, and we got angry about the fact that we had to pay to send people to our own content, but we adapted and metamorphosised.

There are two streams of thought right now. One is to protect yourself from the AI so that the AI doesn’t steal your ideas and repurpose them. From an SEO perspective, a better approach is to make sure you are the answer to the question. Make sure that everything about your business answers one question incredibly well so that, when people want to do business, they’re going to end up with you.

You can clean a carpet, or you can hoover a carpet. You want to be the ‘Hoover’. You want to be the verb. That’s the objective: to make sure that your content is so good that it not only becomes part of AI conversations, but you end up as the answer even when your content isn’t directly cited because you are the best answer to the question. It’s not an easy thing to achieve, but it is the same principle as defining your own USP and being the best in your niche, which are common marketing principles that have existed for a long time.

I’m not ignoring a lot of the problems with AI that are going to be coming forward. That’s a conversation for another day. Today, we’re talking about SEO, and you’ve got to work with what you’ve got. Now, we’ve got ChatGPT, we’ve got OpenAI, we’ve got BARD and LLAMA, and all these different things coming down the road. We’ve got to understand them as the neural networks that they are.

Another way to look at neural networks is that, of course, they are mimicking the human brain. You can also expand that idea to say that the human species has always been a neural network. We have all communicated with each other since the dawn of time, in various different languages. The Chinese language didn’t converse so well with the English language in the past, but now it does because we’ve found more ways of communicating and connecting the dots.

It was always possible that you could talk about your idea in a pub, and it could get stolen. It could be pinched by somebody else, and they could go and build the next great thing that you thought of. That could always happen. it’s just going to happen a lot quicker now. That doesn’t mean you should stop talking about your ideas in the pub.”

Do you need to do anything differently to optimize for becoming the answer in ChatGPT as opposed to the direct answer in the SERP?

“Google is now depreciating its answers in the SERPs, as we’re talking today, but I think that they’re depreciating the direct answers in the SERPs to make space for a ChatGPT box. I’m sure that, by the time this book goes out, that will be live. I think the depreciation of a direct answer in Google SERPs is to allow for the Google equivalent of OpenAI to provide a summary of the answer. That’s important. If you haven’t answered the question, then you won’t be the endpoint of that answer.

The trick, of course, is getting the customer to then buy from you, which means there has to be some kind of business model that you’re applying to follow the money. ChatGPT and generative search are not there to try and grab the sale, per se. That’s still up for grabs. As SEOs, we still have the obligation to try and get the customer to the point where they’re going to buy your stuff instead of the other guy/girl’s stuff.”

How do you define your ideal audience of one, either from the perspective of your own business or the perspective of an AI?

“Through the InLinks tool, we first look at the website itself and break it down to the underlying entities that it’s about. We then throw all of those back into Google Suggest, which uses Google’s AI systems to generate the kinds of questions and search terms that people are looking at, based on that existing website.

Break your website down into its constituent entities, throw all those entities into Google Suggest, and then collate all of those answers and filter out the ones that are semantically distant from your business model. Then, you’re going to get a big picture of the concepts that are semantically close to what you already have. In many ways, you can only work with what you’ve got. I’m not asking you to reinvent the wheel, as an SEO.

Let’s say your website has 50 - 100 pages on it. If they’re good pages, you’ve got a core set of ideas that you can then build on. To become a more authoritative answer to the exact audience that you’ve already defined, you can then talk about the things that are semantically very close to what you already are, instead of suddenly jumping from graffiti art to fine art.”

Is defining what your business represents, who it’s for, and what content you should be sharing a fairly individual process?

“Looking at the core of your own website and then expanding on that is a great methodology for creating a fingerprint that’s unique to yourself. There’s no point in getting entirely third-party data to define who you should be. It’s much better for you to develop from what it is that you already are.

InLinks is based around a knowledge graph and a natural language processing tool. That makes us different from other SEO tools because we’re not based around keyword research, technical SEO, etc. We need to create content that is building on that core because that will naturally give us a different fingerprint from any other SEO tool. That’s our approach. Majestic’s approach was similar. It was able to crawl the Internet very effectively, but it didn’t index the entire content of the Internet. It didn’t want to become a Google or a competitor to a beast of that kind. What it could do was invert that information and have the world’s largest link index (for a long time) and incredibly impressive backlink information, and focus on that. That propelled Majestic into its niche.

I think that we can all do it. We don’t have to be huge businesses to do it, but we can’t just wake up one day and create the same thing that everyone else has done. If we want to survive in the world of SEO, we need to have a unique element.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2024?

“I would stop using a generic keyword research database. For example, ‘house’ as a key research term.

‘House’ means a house in bingo, it means a house as in a property, and it means many other things as well. Even when you’re talking about the term ‘house’ as in property, do you want to buy a house, sell a house, or decorate a house? These are very different things. If you just look at the search volume for ‘house’ or ‘SEO’ or any other generic head term that has large volumes, then you don’t focus on the users that you are actually interested in.

There has been the tendency, for at least 25 years of SEO, to say, ‘I’d love to rank for [insert big term here], so I’ll get a long-tail one here and then try and build up.’ That’s fine. You definitely need to concentrate on that long-tail keyword and make that long-tail big. You need to get that fine definition of who you are, and then enlarge the market that is buying that product, or make more people aware of the product, and work that way round.

First, concentrate on USP, then expand that USP to a market size that you can make money with.”

Dixon Jones is a Majestic Ambassador and CEO of InLinks, and you can find him over at InLinks.com.