SEO's Identity Crisis Is Self-Inflicted
- Stephan Bajaio
- Jul 15
- 34 min read
Stephan Bajaio on The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast with Jeremy Rivera | March 2026
In this episode, Stephan Bajaio talks with Jeremy Rivera about why SEO’s identity crisis is something the industry created itself, why it’s better to speak the language of executives than just focus on technical details, and why the best keyword research often comes from outside the usual tools. If you work in search, report to someone who doesn’t really get it, or have ever been asked to 'SEO' a site just before launch, you’ll want to listen to this episode.
About the Show
This conversation originally aired on The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, hosted by Jeremy Rivera.
Connect with Jeremy Rivera on LinkedIn.
Watch the Episode
Key Moments
00:00 Meet Stephan Bajaio
01:43 SEO Is Dead Again
03:35 Redefining SEO Value
14:38 AI Era Content Trust
23:43 Fix Misconceptions Fast
24:50 Real Keyword Research
27:27 LLMs Into Useful Assets
33:58 Building A Visibility Agency
Full Transcript
[00:00:00] Jeremy Riveri: Hello, I'm Jeremy Riveri, your unscripted SEO podcast host. I'm here with Stephan of VibeLogic. He's going to introduce himself and tell us why we should trust him as an SEO expert. Oh, that's a big promise. Okay. Well, I, I'll start with it depends. actually, I thought about starting a podcast called, it depends 'cause that would be kind of awesome.
[00:00:23] Stephan Bajaio: But, I'm Stephan Bajaio. I am, the CEO and co-founder of a small agency called VibeLogic. my background stems about, Let's see. I helped put some of the first, e-commerce sites on the internet during the.com boom bust. We'll talk about that 'cause I'm getting a feeling that we're in that, that same bubble right now.
[00:00:44] Stephan Bajaio: So I would later go into publishing and from there, find my way. Into the link sling in business of SEO at the beginning, a little company called Link Experts that would later turn into a larger company I'd helped become one of the [00:01:00] original co-founders of called Conductor. some of you may know it, very large enterprise SEO platform.
[00:01:06] Stephan Bajaio: I helped build that business out for about 14 years. after we were bought by WeWork, we bought ourselves back from WeWork. And then I decided I want to see how the other half lived. So I did the stint as a CMO, 'cause I'd been telling the CMOs how to do stuff for a while at the big companies and now it was time to like actually do it.
[00:01:25] Stephan Bajaio: And then, finally started VibeLogic, this, this, this passion project that's become an agency that, is growing steadily. And, I'm excited about what's to come with AI and where we're at and all that good stuff. So if you trust me at your own risk, how's that?
[00:01:42] Stephan Bajaio: It sounds good. talking about dejavu all over again, there are multiple things where I keep, you know, 'cause I started in 2007, and so what is old is new. And what is new is old. and it's infu. [00:02:00] I, I think, what is it, we're on the seventh iteration of SEO is dead at this point. Oh, seventh. I think we're on the 17th, to be honest.
[00:02:06] Stephan Bajaio: Like. It's, I, I, I, I actually, I did a, an article for Halloween about it, where I just kept showing the zombies of all the different times people have cited, SEO dying, because it's just, it's, it's, it's a joke. And it's also just very telling and sad that we keep having this over and over.
[00:02:28] Stephan Bajaio: But, but, but in all fairness, in all fairness, if you're an SEO out there and how clean are we supposed to keep this? you can, I don't care. Okay. Well, it's your fucking fault guys. It's my fault too. Okay. I'd been doing this for two decades and part of my job at one point was to be the chief evangelist, conductor.
[00:02:47] Stephan Bajaio: And believe it or not, that wasn't just evangelizing conductor. That was evangelizing search. And the reality is that we've done a piss poor job of defining ourselves within organizations. We've let others define us for us. We've [00:03:00] let others help. We still are in an argument right now about what we are, A-E-O-G-E-O.
[00:03:05] Stephan Bajaio: A IO like that's our fault. That's no one else's fault. We're letting the, we're letting the, the others narrate what we do. And it's ridiculous. And SEOs, as an industry who I love and have grown up with and feel like are honestly some of the smartest people in the room at the companies they're at, are acting like idiots when it comes to our actual industry.
[00:03:30] Jeremy Riveri: Because like, we need to claim what it is, not let others tell us what it is. So stepping on your soapbox, tell me what it is then. What would you say as an SEO you do here? I mean, it's simple. It's Stephan's employment opportunities, right?
[00:03:49] Stephan Bajaio: No, no, it's all kidding aside, the optimization part is what we do. Okay? We take data, take content, and we look at [00:04:00] opportunities to make whatever ingests that content and judge that content, understand it better. That's what we do at the core nexus of what we do now. We can complicate it with algorithms, we can complicate it With LLMs, we can complicate it.
[00:04:16] Stephan Bajaio: As with voice search and different kinds of mediums. We can add universal search on top of it.
[00:04:22] Stephan Bajaio: We've been through all of that, It's part of what being an SEO is optimization is we have to optimize ourselves. Unfortunately, like we are the keepers of this great data that lives within these organizations. Whether you're doing it as a third party consultant to help others as an agency or you're in-house, your job is to look at the wisdom of this organization, the audience that needs that wisdom, and finding ways to connect those two search engines, just the medium by which it's done.
[00:04:52] Stephan Bajaio: I've been doing this a really long time. Like I, I, I have a lot of pain in me and it comes from the lonely [00:05:00] island that is every SEO feeling like they're on their own. Palm one palm tree with two coconut little islands that when they see another SAEO, they go, we're saved. But in reality, they're still on a little island by themselves and that doesn't get any better.
[00:05:14] Jeremy Riveri: By the way, when you go to big enterprise companies, the number of SEOs that exist there are myopic compared to what they're actually trying to accomplish.
[00:05:22] Stephan Bajaio: So the game's been rigged from the beginning in regards to the value prop of what this was supposed to be doing. Yes.
[00:05:28] the worst thing that ever happened was that the channel.
[00:05:32] Held this amazing data set that was trapped and treated as a channel instead of as an information set that we should be using as marketers, which is where I kind of have been preaching and pounding my fists against the table for years, even before LLMs came into the picture and have been saying like, Hey, we know more about what a user's going to see, what ranks supply [00:06:00] and how they're gonna look for it.
[00:06:01] Demand. We know that stuff. We, we are aware of it. We, we have the data. We have an internal search to look at it. We have external search signals. We can look at what the SERPs look like. We have all this data. Unfortunately, we've been treating it like a hammer with a nail. And our response is, I need to rank for that.
[00:06:21] I need to rank for that. And that has put us in a position where if you don't rank for that, you failed. But that's not true. That's not the way the LLM interprets stuff. That's not the way search engines even interpret stuff anymore. They look at whether you're being cited and referenced and so forth.
[00:06:36] Stephan Bajaio: And the problem is the SEO is the most lowly positioned in a company, unfortunately, because they usually don't create the content and they don't do the dev. So if either one of those people charged with those things aren't on board, let alone the executive that sets the brand messaging or whatever direction you're going in, if those people aren't on board with your message.[00:07:00]
[00:07:00] Jeremy Riveri: Your direction, you're screwed. Doesn't matter how smart you are, you could be God's gift to SEO and literally have, Larry Page call you on your cell phone, whisper three little nothings in your ear, and tell you the secrets to the algorithm as if they existed, and you would still fail a hundred percent of the time in that situation if those people don't go along with you.
[00:07:20] Stephan Bajaio: There's no other job like that, that I know of. So it doesn't actually matter how smart you are, it matters how capable. Your organization is to actually accomplish the smarts you have. I agree. I've worked in a lot of enterprise scenarios. so much red tape and a lot of SEOs have failed, you know, and, and I got stuck in a trap a couple of times, you know, in-house with, Raven Tools and tap clicks and tap clicks organization.
[00:07:54] Stephan Bajaio: Resources go somewhere else. So I've, I've been in that trap and I think that's the actually the most [00:08:00] challenging part of an enterprise level SEO experience is, navigating how to get buy-in from, Different teams that are siloed, bringing them together and finding that, giving them the, the talk through of, hey, you can get more out of your email wins if we partner it by creating these resources on the sites.
[00:08:22] Stephan Bajaio: Which by the way, oh, hey, CMOI. Partner this channel and bring this traffic in. We should tie that in with paid ads and we should bring in, you know, our social media team and we can tie in the collateral that they're creating. They're getting 15 videos. All of those conversations don't happen when you're like.
[00:08:41] Stephan Bajaio: I am SEO, I use SEMrush. I look at Keyword and Jeremy, can you optimize our site? We're going, it'll be launching in two weeks and you'll get to see it two weeks after that. Yeah. And then we can do SEO on it. Yeah. Well, we'll, SEO that for you. Absolutely. It's a, it's a verb. [00:09:00] And we do it after the fact. Of course.
[00:09:01] Stephan Bajaio: Right. Like that's so I know that feeling. I know exactly what you're talking about. And it like. It nerves me to no end. Because here's the thing, right? If we go back in time, what basically happens is search engines come aboard and people start recognizing the opportunity and they look around their orgs and they look for the person who knows how to code, and they're like, it's HTML, right?
[00:09:32] Stephan Bajaio: So let's get that person to do the SEL. A lot of times that's where that started, right? Yes. Now speaking tech and speaking exec are two different languages, literally two different languages, and unfortunately a lot of us who only spoke tech, and I will say I do not speak tech as fluently as I do exec, right.
[00:09:53] Stephan Bajaio: And, you know, like you'll find certain traits among it, like SEOs, right? You'll find, I found there's like two. [00:10:00] Clusters of them, right? Yeah. They're the tinkerers who like love playing with cars, like actual cars and mechanic style SEOs.
[00:10:07] Stephan Bajaio: I've seen them 'cause they like that sort of side of the house. And then you'll see the games like board game, you know, star Wars, all of that fantasy. Yup. SEOs two. And that's not to say you have to fit in these two buckets in order to exist in our industry, but I'm just saying there are some common traits, right?
[00:10:25] Stephan Bajaio: We are not necessarily the best suited to go in front of the executives and convince people that care about and note you. I already talked about supply and demand. Why did I use that language? Because those are, that's the linguistics of business, not the linguistics of canonical. I often say you want to see someone roll their eyes.
[00:10:47] Stephan Bajaio: Say canonical in a meeting, it's gonna raise more wristwatches than eyebrows. Like you are talking about technical stuff and they're not, they don't care about that, right? Yeah. They really don't. They don't even care about the channel. That's the [00:11:00] funny part. When I got to be A CMO, you would've thought, oh, SEO was my channel.
[00:11:04] Stephan Bajaio: No, it wasn't. I didn't care where the leads came from. I needed the leads. Someone's breathing down my neck, and I could give a crap which channel's driving it. I just want to see results, right? Mm-hmm. There is a different mindset there. And Jeremy, to your point, the, and this is a bigger conversation that needs to be had, especially now in the ai, dare I say landscape,
[00:11:30] Stephan Bajaio: I, I look at it and say maybe the marketing departments are built wrong. Maybe the marketing of the future by channel is the incorrect way of doing it. That channel specificity in the way that we're doing it is actually incorrect.
[00:11:45] Stephan Bajaio: You can have specialties, but perhaps we should not be all K Ping because the KPIs that people do in the silos that are a marketing department, when you get to a midsize, let alone enterprise company, are conflicting [00:12:00] by nature. Yeah. And because of that. You won't necessarily like, let's use a very simple example.
[00:12:08] Stephan Bajaio: One of the two Achilles heels that exists in an SEO's world is content. If the content writer is being gauged or KPId on volume, you have to do five blog posts a month, except I come back and tell you page. 6, 7, 8, and nine need optimizations, at least a paragraph or whatever.
[00:12:32] Stephan Bajaio: More to them, have I actually helped you hit your KPI? No, because this is not gonna create net new content, and that's not counted in your KPI. So what I've done is actually distract you from your KPI, which ultimately gets you the pat on the back or the bonus, or the, you're doing a great job, or at least you're keeping up with what we're asking of you, right?
[00:12:53] Jeremy Riveri: Those two things are at odds. it depends on what kind of CMO it is. By the way, you've got brand, brand, brand heavy, [00:13:00] which is like messaging, and then you've got some that are really geeky that like the numbers and like to get into all the depth of stuff.
[00:13:06] Jeremy Riveri: Again, I'm making generalizations, but those people. Aren't necessarily gonna come in and, and arbitrate the problems or conflicts of these things for you, right? So as a, as an SEO, you're kind of trapped, right? And you really should be a center of excellence. In reality. That's what you are. You're keeper of data and direction, but you're treated as a channel.
[00:13:32] Stephan Bajaio: So I've always said the key, if you are dealing in multiple silos, the key is not to add. 6, 7, 8, 9 to the to-do list. It's to find out what the to-do list of the person who's already doing the work. What is their number one, number two, number three, number four on their list. And can you make it better?
[00:13:54] Stephan Bajaio: Hey, here's three things you might want to add to it that's gonna make it perform better, and when it does perform better, [00:14:00] I'm going to show you that performance so you can take the credit with your boss on it. Now we're working direction as opposed to before we were conflicted. Yes. Yeah. That is doing the value.
[00:14:12] Stephan Bajaio: And it's also why people are allowed to say our entire industry's dead just 'cause AI showed up, let alone voice search, let alone Google Plus, let alone all the things that came previously that were supposedly SEO killers, right? Like if you want to play, play, but like. Show up and, and, and do the stuff you have to, and being an SEO is harder than just telling people what to fix.
[00:14:38] Stephan Bajaio: I'm curious what, what's your take on this quote from Chris? Chris Wheaton, a Space bar collective? He said, talented SEOs. Look forward to Google algorithm updates. Agree or disagree.
[00:14:53] Stephan Bajaio: That's a really interesting quote.
[00:14:59] Stephan Bajaio: I think [00:15:00] it depends on the type of SEO you are. I think my co-founder, Trevor, who's the logic in Vibe. Logic, right? I'm more of the vibe. I'm less of a technical SEO. I'll be the first one to tell you that I don't get excited at an algo update because I'm not going to pick it apart. He's gonna pick it apart because it's a floating math equation in the sky, and he likes doing that and that gives him dopamine, right?
[00:15:21] Stephan Bajaio: When I look at it, I say, okay, that's one more aspect of how things are or aren't working. I look forward to it when I know we're doing the right stuff. I would not be looking forward to it if I knew a client of mine was writing all AI content right now. Right? I would know that that was a very bad day that I would have to say, I told you so.
[00:15:41] Jeremy Riveri: and they chose to go in that direction 'cause I never would've wanted them to do it in the first place. Right. And I definitely am not the type, as you can tell, to shy away from shooting straight and tell you what I think. So Sure. For me that might actually turn out great. Yeah. Awesome.
[00:15:56] Stephan Bajaio: Look, I was right. Not that I really want that to be the case 'cause I don't want you to [00:16:00] drop, but maybe some of the spammer, listicles, you know, that are out there, just got out of the way. And less nonsense is in the, is in a SERP and it's getting cleaner. I hope so, but for me, that's not where I focus. I focus on go deeper and wider.
[00:16:17] Stephan Bajaio: Go deeper into the content. Am I really answering it correctly? Have you really done a good job? I usually wear a t-shirt that says if you're not helping people, you're just selling stuff. And I actually believe that as a mantra for marketing, like I actually think you can give away a lot of stuff to someone and you'll earn their business.
[00:16:36] Stephan Bajaio: Like you'll earn their trust. you'll do that with the engines, you'll do that with the LLMs, and you'll do that with your audience, but you need to earn it first. You need to not give some top level. You know, I think someone, there's a great example I use, someone's bullet point is someone else's entire universe.
[00:16:53] Stephan Bajaio: So I was looking at, at a company who dealt in, in healthcare and they [00:17:00] were talking about change of life events. And divorce is a change of life event where you're allowed to change your insurance. Awesome. That was a bullet point. Do you know what kind of a copy brief I wrote on divorce? There are so many questions that people have when they get divorced.
[00:17:22] Stephan Bajaio: Can I keep my spouse on my insurance? How long am I allowed to keep my spouse? Do I have to tell the insurance company about it? What if we're just separated? What if I don't want my spouse on my insurance? All of this stuff is actually helpful, right? That's the stuff that matters, not the bullet point that says this is a life event, right?
[00:17:44] Stephan Bajaio: So while this company was gonna leave it at that level, done with it, is that really helpful? Should that really rank? Does that really solve the problem? Or is the knowledge of this company really in depth and should be shown? [00:18:00] To actually help people. Does that mean every person's gonna switch to that healthcare company because they gave them the answer?
[00:18:05] Stephan Bajaio: No. But does it mean that brand will be associated with having made that answer somewhere in someone's head along the way and may find its way back at some point? Yeah, we gotta worry about that. Not whether or not like the latest algo just, you know, just bumped me this way and that way. Like, that's not, that's not the future in my mind of where this all goes.
[00:18:27] Stephan Bajaio: Because if. ERPs change. If voice search is a thing, if AI were to take over in other ways, right? They still have to interpret. So what are you giving them to interpret? That's the key, right? That is the, that's the crux that they can't, they can't do it without the data. So if you go back to the source and you deal in the data.
[00:18:52] Stephan Bajaio: And instead of putting a moat like you put it on the other side of the moat and you expose some of it in the ways that you can, [00:19:00] now I think you're doing something awesome. Now, I think you have the opportunity to do some, some real good in the world and ultimately solve people's problems and, and earn the trust that these people end up getting in their, in their businesses.
[00:19:15] Stephan Bajaio: So one of my quotes that I often use in interviews comes from Matt Brooks of S Esoteric. He says, chat, GPT is your most popular, but least trained customer support representative. So tying those two concepts together of, Hey, as SEOs, we need to think about how we can help our end customer of the business.
[00:19:38] Stephan Bajaio: Yes. What is the process then of helping our, human by talking to a bot? And in some cases, in, in a long time we have been talking to the bot already, and now we have a bot, human sandwich where human talking to bot goes, scrapes Google, and then [00:20:00] you're on the other side. Oh, the snake is eating its tail.
[00:20:02] Stephan Bajaio: Jeremy the snake is 1000% eating. There's no question about that. Right? So. Here's three things I think that happened. The real idea of authorship shows up. I think Google Plus had it right and then they had it wrong.
[00:20:16] Stephan Bajaio: They were right in their authorship. That whole concept of an author profile. I think that exists somewhere on the backend in Google. Like they know what you've produced.
[00:20:28] Stephan Bajaio: and the reality is, right, there's something about that which is. You are gonna have to show up As a human, we're gonna have to know and put a human's name behind something.
[00:20:38] Jeremy Riveri: No longer are you allowed to do this anonymous nonsense where you're like, oh, I posted it, therefore it is, and my brand carries its value. Bullshit. Like you, I want a human. To say I wrote this, or if not, supposedly now we're supposed to cite, I don't know if you noticed that recently in the schema when it's written by ai, which I thought was quite funny, that new [00:21:00] feature.
[00:21:00] Stephan Bajaio: Okay guys. I don't believe it. Anyone who's gonna play it, they'll give them some credit for doing it and then they'll take it away like they always do. So back to what I was saying. I think real idea of authorship is a huge thing and I think that's coming. I think you need to go back and get your profiles, your about us, your, those things need to exist.
[00:21:19] Stephan Bajaio: They need to interlink, they need to show entities of who you are. It's knowledge graph. It's important and it's gonna matter more in the future.
[00:21:27] Stephan Bajaio: Do you recall it was the A chat GPT as the right. So understanding and the depth at which you understand your consumer is fundamental. I think this concept of a funnel is stupid. Like we, we shot ourselves in the foot.
[00:21:44] Stephan Bajaio: Marketers did not just SEOs. It is not a fun, it's an hourglass and everything always ends up at the bottom. Unless you're in the business of selling something once to someone, which I question WeatherTech, by the way. One, how the hell do they have enough money to [00:22:00] keep running Super Bowl ads based on like laser measured like mats for cars?
[00:22:06] Stephan Bajaio: And how many times do you buy mats for cars? Especially if they last, right? Like I, I, I don't understand it. They created it.
[00:22:15] Stephan Bajaio: But nonetheless, my point simply is you're usually not in the business. And I came from SaaS, right, which is subscription. So yes, you're not in the business of selling something to someone once, therefore the experience they have post purchase actually matters. That's gonna perpetuate its way back into referral.
[00:22:35] Stephan Bajaio: Whether or not I tell my friend, Jeremy, you should consider this, you should look at that. That's a great product. All that stuff happens post, right? Yeah. So if I don't have the support, if I don't have the knowledge of that, somehow, by the way, SEO got stuck at some companies, not all. I know that like Samsung and Apple are great at this, they do focus on the post.
[00:22:57] Jeremy Riveri: They recognize that people are gonna look [00:23:00] up, what's that blue thing? How come that happens? Why does that? And they know that there's disinformation out there that's gonna show up in answer boxes and give the wrong answers. And that's really negative to their brand. So they've made that investment to focus on that sort of stuff.
[00:23:15] Stephan Bajaio: And then when you start asking questions. In addition, which by the way, find their way into the LLMs when people put in prompts that aren't clean little queries the way we've liked to have them and measurable MSV bullshit, but little measurable MSV, right?
[00:23:33] Stephan Bajaio: They don't come so clean in prompts. So now all of a sudden, all this other content stuff's gonna find its way into LLMs, and you're gonna have an executive going like, Hey, Jeremy. How come these guys are talking about our pricing or how come these guys are saying that we have a bad review? Or how come it's because all we cared about was getting in front of them in order to make 'em buy something.
[00:23:54] Stephan Bajaio: You need to be going back to your chat log, seeing what people are asking, understanding the most asked [00:24:00] questions, the most plaguing problems. Maybe it's a problem we already solved, by the way, and it's a misconception in the industry.
[00:24:07] Jeremy Riveri: Like there used to be a time where Conductor couldn't do global rankings. It was a million million years ago. But then I'd have like someone who'd had a sales call with us a year ago, still think that. Yeah, we solved that problem like six months before. So their preconceived notion or whatever, the moment in which they interacted with your brand was, is where you left them.
[00:24:28] Stephan Bajaio: If nothing else is gonna confirm or deny that to them for the future, then like they're left with whatever they were thought left with. And so you are not doing, you're doing a disservice if all you're doing is being a demand gen engine rather than a, than a, a, a, a brand continuity like. guardian of the brand.
[00:24:50] Stephan Bajaio: I think it goes back to some new best practices that I've developed, which is actually, I don't know, speaking to your client, do an interview, [00:25:00] oh my goodness, I, you know, scheduled, interview with, you know, the precast concrete wall guy, and, talk to the guy that actually installs and ask, Hey, when you're bringing it to the site, what are the questions that they're, they need answered?
[00:25:13] Stephan Bajaio: Oh, do we have space for this? Oh, we need a clear pad. Oh, we need, these measurements to be measured three times. 'cause it's concrete. It's not going to change dimension. If it's the wrong measurement for the first time, then it's going to be delivered at that measurement. Ain't going to change it.
[00:25:28] Stephan Bajaio: Jeremy. Preach. Preach. Preach talk to, like I, you interviewed, you know, it's, it comes from an extension of finally doing these podcasts, but I realize, you know what, this, this conversation right here, this is the best goddamn keyword research that you could ask for. Get two experts riffing on a subject.
[00:25:50] Jeremy Riveri: They'll bring up the most cogent pain points. They will address the elephants in the room. Yes, that's what you turn your marketing on. If you wanna find out what's happening in home improvement. [00:26:00] Talk to a home improvement guy, like get them on the phone. Don't start SEO with your SEM rush tool.
[00:26:08] Stephan Bajaio: I don't care how good your tools are. They are tools and they should support some sort of process to deliver X, y, or Z. But that's not, you are not an ah ref's, exe executor. You're an SEO. You're optimizing, use your tools, but it's just, I don't, I know there was somewhere where we got lost in the weeds.
[00:26:31] Stephan Bajaio: I think it was just so easy to get. you know, traffic from Google between 2010 and 2020, where that's all you could do. That's, you could, you could survive by just, you know, Optim quote unquote optimizing keywords on blog posts. Like, and, and you could just stay in a HS you look up your data, come up with the headlines, never speaking, I, I had done this, said they just, I will cop to him.
[00:26:57] Stephan Bajaio: I, I worked at an agency and [00:27:00] I never actually spoke to anybody within that company, ever, but produced dozens of articles in collaboration with our content, content team, who also never spoke with the customer. Right? That's the other piece. All interaction was done through a customer support representative who I also never talked to.
[00:27:18] Stephan Bajaio: We see his notes, and we did our thing in a silo and separate, and we wonder why we're disconnected from our clients. Okay, so let's take exactly what you put there and let's put this into actionable practice right now. I'm gonna turn this into an actionable practice.
[00:27:36] Stephan Bajaio: First and foremost, guys, LLMs, you're using them wrong. You've seen them as a channel ranking. That's because you've been trained to believe that ranks, first of all, there is no rank in an LLM, okay? We don't even know whether or not relevancy is highest to lowest. They make [00:28:00] up results. Like it's not, this is not the droids you're looking for.
[00:28:04] Stephan Bajaio: What you need to be thinking about in my mind. Is how easy it is with the tools we have today to transcribe. So to your point, if I have, you already called it the installer's a great person, but am I gonna do a great job interviewing? No. The first thing I should probably do is go to an LLM and ask what are the most frequent questions I should ask an installer of concrete into my home?
[00:28:28] Stephan Bajaio: Okay, so now I have a good basis off which to start my questions. Next thing I might go to, a SAMR or an HRF to see if there's any additional questions I can find that are frequently asked. Okay? It might not be for the installer, it might be for the salesperson, whatever. Okay. I've got a good set of questions now.
[00:28:45] Stephan Bajaio: Now I go with whatever your, choose your, favorite, whether it's teams, Google, Google Meet, whatever. Right? Switch on whatever your note taker is, fireflies, whoever you're using. Otter. You name it. [00:29:00] And what used to be, oh my God, I gotta pay a transcription service and blah, blah. Look how fast that turned into something we now snap our fingers with.
[00:29:08] Stephan Bajaio: Okay. So like we're like. We don't even realize an entire industry of transcription, by the way. It just got like wiped out. Yeah. By version of these little features, right? So there's a lot of really cool shit you should be doing. But what do we do with that data? So now we take that data and we think through a few different things, right?
[00:29:27] Stephan Bajaio: What are the pain points of installation? What are the considerations? What are some things you're gonna want to do in order to actually. Get this thing to happen. Well, because you know that if someone comes in to install concrete and it's not ready and it's not capable, there's friction, right? Yeah. And you could actually maybe even measure that friction.
[00:29:49] Stephan Bajaio: So that might be some interesting things when you're trying to figure out the ROI of this, you might wanna say, Hey, have you guys ever seen how many times you had to go back to a site to redo? Because it [00:30:00] wasn't ready the first time. If that's a metric they've calculated somewhere, you need to get your hands on that.
[00:30:05] Stephan Bajaio: Now, what are we gonna do with this data? Well, we're gonna look at whether or not we can create a calculator out of it. Some things that are on and off. If they go yes, then that's okay. If they go, no, that's a problem, and we're gonna maybe do a calculator with certain things that you're supposed to check off, check on.
[00:30:21] Stephan Bajaio: Maybe it's a checklist. It's digital. And guess what? If you don't know how to do a lick of code. Throw it to Claude and then QA the hell out of it. Okay. Like now I've got a piece of con, this is where AI is helping you, right? Yeah. It's not having to get five devs, time and effort to come and help you. No vibe.
[00:30:41] Stephan Bajaio: Code the shit out of that and go and try and get something that actually helps. Now, is that gonna be on the website? Maybe? Is that gonna rank, eh? Probably not. Is that gonna be a useful asset that you've now created that could actually go. Actually sit on the site that [00:31:00] someone can send from the customer service team before the installer comes in and says, make sure you follow these steps.
[00:31:06] Stephan Bajaio: Once that happens, we'll get an email that says, you've done this, you're good to go. Right? Yeah. And now it's almost like the unwritten written contract. They went through the process, they did the stuff, they checked the stuff off. So now if they say they did it, but they didn't do it, you kind of can lay the blame where it belongs.
[00:31:25] Stephan Bajaio: The really cool part there is you don't just leave it there. You put the question bubbles that are gonna come along with some of these things, and that leads to the content you just created. Now, you can have content on the website. Now you can have answers and questions, right? FAQs and so forth. That came directly from your interview.
[00:31:45] Stephan Bajaio: Right that have been edited down to be those pieces that now live somewhere on the site that can be exposed to the engines that are your way to answer that, prove that you know what you're talking about and help your customer so they can find it [00:32:00] either in their process or when they're searching on the web.
[00:32:04] Stephan Bajaio: Yeah, that is the flawed logic that existed in SEO, is that we believed the search engine was supposed to be the only source, and if it doesn't come through the search engine, it has no value.
[00:32:15] Stephan Bajaio: But the search engine was just a way for us to understand supply and demand. The better we got at that, I could create something that gets absolutely zero organic visits and still be one of the most valuable pieces of content. If it ends up being your number one newsletter piece, or it's a blog post that is.
[00:32:33] Stephan Bajaio: Like I was told what to write about because I looked through the data, whether that was in SEMrush, a H ah H ref, or I did my sourcing like Jeremy was telling you. I found the pain points, I understood them and I built the content.
[00:32:49] Stephan Bajaio: When that happens, that's valuable content, not because of the channel that drives it, but because it's valuable content. 'cause this does the job it's supposed to. After that, how it gets to, [00:33:00] I'm gonna be honest with you, I don't care. I really don't be your number one email piece. I don't care. As long as it, as long as it helps and you can tie some ROI to that, like the fact that anyone is just reporting on organic traffic only to a piece of content they've created.
[00:33:17] Stephan Bajaio: And don't show the direct to it. Don't show the referral to it, don't show the other channels to, it is insane. It didn't exist until I told you to build it. Now you built it. But all credit for a fraction of that because it has to fall cleanly within my channel otherwise, oh my God. Right?
[00:33:34] Stephan Bajaio: That's again, guys, you remember what I said at the beginning of this conversation. We shot ourselves in the foot. We acted stupidly. We haven't set ourselves up for success.
[00:33:48] Stephan Bajaio: Yes. I told you there were a lot more rungs on the soapbox. I think you, you tied that up magnificently. That's where I was going to, going to go next. so just tell me a little [00:34:00] bit more about what you're doing now. you have an adventure with, with conductor, and, and you came back to your own agency that's.
[00:34:09] Stephan Bajaio: Curious, why is that a passion project for you now? And, what does that look like on a, on a tactical basis? Like what do you like, are you working in a specific niche that you're in love with? Is it, just the challenge of, you know, speaking to that third throughput value? and, you know, agency life has its particular challenges.
[00:34:32] Stephan Bajaio: It's different from optimizing, in-house and different from optimizing as a, a solopreneur freelancer consultant position. So what is it about that, agency life that you are, attracted to? Right? Sure. That's a great question. It's got a lot of pieces, so I'll try and break it down. I had the luxury and the privilege, a conductor of building out our professional services team.
[00:34:54] Stephan Bajaio: I started with two kids, straight outta school who didn't know keyword research. but since the product [00:35:00] required keywords and it was crap in, crap out, like you needed to know what keywords to put in. That actually turned into a team, believe it or not, of seven people who full-time were doing keyword research.
[00:35:10] Stephan Bajaio: Like we got that down to a science. It was kind of awesome. Like we built separate tools just to help that team that would help people do that. Right. And as I built out this team, it ended up being 65 global SEOs that we're working on.
[00:35:24] Stephan Bajaio: So I got to live that on someone else's dime, to be honest. One thing that was my passion back then, which was again, much of what I've said today, which is the SEO was probably one of the smartest people in the room, but unfortunately was not in the right rooms.
[00:35:39] Stephan Bajaio: And so what would happen is they would be at the tail end of decisions that they would come back into the meeting room and try and tell everyone, like, hold on. And like, but all the decisions have already been made for months. The, the train's been rolling and all of a sudden you show up being like, stop the presses.
[00:35:58] Stephan Bajaio: So I spent a lot of [00:36:00] time doing that and I said to myself, you know, Need to first I found an awesome partner like Trevor Olberg is, my business partner. we met during COVID. We actually physically didn't meet, but we met on a meetup through hook agency.
[00:36:13] Stephan Bajaio: Great guy Tim, Tim Brown, connected us on one of these like meetup drink up things and we just like. I hate to say we vibed, but we vibed and it's before I named the company VibeLogic, which is funny 'cause like I'm the vibe and Trevor's the logic.
[00:36:28] Stephan Bajaio: Trevor is a Doogie Hauser, if you know the reference. Graduated high school at 12, two point Chya. Mensa has like 17 pending patents to his name. Like absolute technical genius when it comes to search has been doing it for on the side for like 26 years. So before Google was a thing, right? he's awesome at that.
[00:36:52] Stephan Bajaio: Me, I'm all about the vibe, right? So I like thinking through what are the crazy ideas? What are the ways people should be thinking about [00:37:00] content, kind of like we just did. Now, how do we turn this into something more valuable? How do we shape it? And so forth. So with that in mind, and knowing where AI seems to be coming in, which by the way, I think is, like I said, distracting a lot of executives over to this world right now.
[00:37:19] Stephan Bajaio: I said, let's start building some product, but let's build an agency first to fund it. So we've been building out our agency and you know, we have everything from enterprise clients, you know, $3 billion company over here. That's not what we make. and, and, you know, small. Little therapy clinic over here like we ra, we run the gamut.
[00:37:41] Stephan Bajaio: Honestly, we're kind of starting to get our ICP down, I think, which is more B2B focused. I think we're probably stronger there. I think we're more in the growth space of like, let's say anywhere between, and this is a pretty broad space, but revenue between 10 million up to probably a hundred million dollars is [00:38:00] probably where we should sit.
[00:38:02] Stephan Bajaio: Really going and solving their problems of which SEO is part of it. But it's really a visibility issue. So the way that I'm looking at the problem is what we call web presence intelligence. I used to call it search presence intelligence, but I changed that because search presence intelligence was two search, and this is really web presence intelligence.
[00:38:22] Stephan Bajaio: So what do we do? We look at actually the supply side. We say, Hey, you know what? LLMs are gonna show these results to you and search results. Search engines are gonna show these results to you. Is your response to treat it as a ranking opportunity? Or is your response to recognize the multi-channel opportunity of influence of getting in front of that audience?
[00:38:47] Stephan Bajaio: So we start to think of multi-channel approaches around topics that make sense. To go after that. Audience's visibility, we say be where decisions are formed, [00:39:00] not made, formed, right? You form an opinion on Reddit, you form an opinion reading, an article. You form an opinion on a partner site, potentially.
[00:39:12] Stephan Bajaio: these are places where unfortunately, because we're so siloed in our approach of KPI and marketing. The display person isn't gonna recognize that opportunity, nor is the social person gonna op, recognize that opportunity, nor is, and we can keep going, right? In terms of the man gen groups and performance marketing, they don't see these opportunities that way because they're looking at it.
[00:39:37] Stephan Bajaio: We look at it the way the consumer moves, what is put in front of the consumer to influence the consumer. If we understand that better, then we as marketers optimize, we use what's at our disposal from a marketing perspective, and we apply that against the audience.
[00:39:56] Stephan Bajaio: We've created some products that allows us to see where those [00:40:00] opportunities are. I like to think of it very much like a roulette board. we try to help you decide where to place the bets according to the visibility you're trying to achieve. The highest probability of getting in front of this audience is, and then we help you figure out where to put those bets.
[00:40:17] Stephan Bajaio: That is one of the things we do on top of obviously. SEO and a lot of the time, by the way, when we walk into an engagement, one of the first things we do before we even tell them, oh yeah, here's a, you know, here's a a, a retainer for X, Y, and Z. We do a diagnosis where we let them diagnose themselves, and what's really cool about that diagnosis is.
[00:40:40] Stephan Bajaio: We come up with a few quick things that usually are dissonance, so the CMO believes this, whereas the head of product believes that, oh, well this is a conversation that's not naturally gonna happen in their company. So if I can help facilitate that, right. I'm, I'm showing them [00:41:00] the dissonance and then in the next meeting we give them a roadmap.
[00:41:03] Stephan Bajaio: And that roadmap is like, Hey, listen, if you want to go without us, go. This is prioritized. So what we would do if we were in your situation, based on what we heard from you. So it's a self-diagnosis that we told you, and it's very much like the doctor coming in and saying like, if you want the home remedy, like you can go home and do this.
[00:41:20] Stephan Bajaio: Or if you want to take on, you know, the, the ongoing treatment that's gonna take this and allow us to do that. And we might find other things over time that you're gonna need, That's the other option. So we're very much like not trying to force services on people. We're trying to let companies recognize the needs because then you're working with them, not against them.
[00:41:43] Stephan Bajaio: Too many companies you go into as a consultant or an agency, you are taking someone else's budget or there's politics involved or, or, or, and so it's adversarial by nature of where it starts If they come to their own conclusion of [00:42:00] why you're needed with their own answers, it opens you up to being able to solve for them rather than just search for them, so to speak.
[00:42:10] Stephan Bajaio: I love that concept of, Positioning yourself as a solution. After they answer the question of do I need a solution? And what, what is my problem? I think that's really also the big one, right? Like if I go in and, and let's say I went in and I told you, I'm gonna give you this many copy briefs a month.
[00:42:27] Stephan Bajaio: I've done this before. You're gonna get this many copy briefs a month. Here's the problem. Everything they do when it comes to creating content has to go through one writer, and that one writer is tied to about 700 other things and does not have the capability to do it. I can keep giving them copy brief after copy brief after copy brief to go execute.
[00:42:45] Stephan Bajaio: Have I actually helped them? By the end of the contract I've fulfilled Right, but did the needle move? No, 'cause I gave them the wrong stuff 'cause it didn't map back to their capability. So it's like you can do the right stuff in [00:43:00] providing your client the answers, but if you don't know their ability to execute, and that's more than just a, honestly, that's more than just a one conversation, you know, really good discovery call.
[00:43:11] Stephan Bajaio: Like you have to get in there and understand the pain points of their organization to understand where you can help the most. That's how you make a real partnership. Vendorship are a dime a dozen. Anybody can be a vendor. If you're like snake oil salesman guy who comes in guarantees, ranks, guarantees this, that and the other, sorry guys.
[00:43:28] Stephan Bajaio: You're not my SEO and you're not my guy. Like, or girl, that's not for me. I'm in the business of creating partnerships where people are gonna refer me, want more of, more people like us, want to know other people. If we can't take on their business, we can turn to people who can. We wanna be trusted advisors, right?
[00:43:46] Stephan Bajaio: The problem I have in a company is I have to hold myself back 'cause I want to help you with everything. Like I want to get in there and fractional CMO and you should be, by the way, if you're hiring for one of these positions, that's what you should be looking for. [00:44:00] If you're a good SEO, you want to do all of that.
[00:44:03] Stephan Bajaio: Like you are so passionate about what you do and the business you're helping that like, you just want to, like, you can't help yourself. It's what I call shower thoughts, right? Like. You're thinking about them in the shower should do this. Yeah.
[00:44:18] Stephan Bajaio: But like you're thinking about them, right? These are the things they don't, it's not plaguing you. It's passion. You, it's like getting into your head. 'cause you can't help it because there's a problem to be solved. And by the way, that trait, when I hire, that's what I look for. I can't anyone can teach you aspects of search.
[00:44:37] Stephan Bajaio: I can't teach you passion. If you have a passion, a true desire to help Jeremy, the fact that you thought about going and doing that with your client and asking those questions, even though it wasn't the modus app operandi you had done up until now is a testament to exactly that passion. Passion doesn't show up the same way.
[00:44:57] Stephan Bajaio: Notice Jeremy's not gonna mote the same way I emote, [00:45:00] but recognizing, recognizing when and how that passion comes out in the people you're around is really important to do. If you had just poo-pooed what he did, you'd be squashing his passion. So like the reality is you took active steps to get out there and figure out what the client really needed.
[00:45:21] Stephan Bajaio: You didn't do that 'cause you got paid more for it. You did it 'cause it was part of what you felt should be done. And that's usually driven by passion. So that is the number one. If, if someone says, what's the number one trait? That's what it is. 'cause algorithms are gonna change. LLMs are gonna come in, blow up your shit.
[00:45:40] Stephan Bajaio: But the reality is. That passion carries you through, and that's why I'm still here 20 years later, still messing around in search, right?
[00:45:48] Stephan Bajaio: An industry that's dead and dying and whatever, and yet I'm doubling down here, building an agency in it. When everyone's like, oh, what are you doing? What are you doing? No, it's not an SEO agency. It's a visibility [00:46:00] agency and it's all about search about LLMs and AI and any surface in which people are looking for solutions.
[00:46:09] Stephan Bajaio: I wanna help companies with. That's it. Love it. Tell people where you are visible, where they can have more of this conversation with. Absolutely. So, by all means hit me up on LinkedIn. It is my like drug of choice. Though it's been souring a little bit, that algo's acting a little bit strange these days.
[00:46:28] Stephan Bajaio: yeah, definitely check me out. Stephan Baja, S-T-E-P-H-A-N-B-A-J-A-I-O. That's on LinkedIn, VibeLogic, VIBE, LO LOGI c.com. hit. Dot com. You can always hit us up there. Check us out on LinkedIn. That tends to be where we're at.
[00:46:51] Stephan Bajaio: I love just honestly spitballing, so I'm, I can't say I have tons of time to do it, but if you have a problem and no one else can help. [00:47:00] Maybe you can call now. sorry. That reference is only good for certain people that are old enough to know it, but I'm always happy to help. it's kind of my thing.
[00:47:09] Stephan Bajaio: I get real dopamine off of doing it when I can. So, if you're running up against a business problem or a search problem or even a communications problem where you just don't know how to, how to get that across to the exec who doesn't get it, I've been the cool uncle. I know how to do that, so, you know, let me know.
[00:47:26] Stephan Bajaio: I'm more than happy to help. I'm no Ghostbuster, but I, I'll do the best I can so, know that this industry is worth more than we're giving it credit for and I'm still proud to be a part of it. and I'm happy to keep pushing and I hope we all do.
[00:47:42] Stephan Bajaio: 'cause there's a lot more good stuff on the other side of fear. We just need to get over it.
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