Web Presence Intelligence: What It Is and Why Rankings Only Tell Part of the Story
- Jessica Bush
- 2 days ago
- 32 min read
Season 1, Episode 02 | Conversations with Vibe & Logic | April 6, 2026
Your buyers form opinions about your brand on Reddit threads, YouTube channels, AI overviews, and publisher articles long before visiting your website. In this episode, Stephan Bajaio and Trevor Stolber introduce the Web Presence Intelligence framework. They explain what it maps, why traditional SEO tools miss most of it, and what understanding your full visibility picture looks like. If you manage a marketing program and still measure visibility through rankings alone, this episode is worth your time.
Watch the Episode
What We Cover
00:02 What VibeLogic actually does, in plain language
01:26 Why visibility is fragmented and measurement has gotten harder
02:44 The search surfaces that actually matter: forums, Reddit, YouTube, publishers, and more
04:21 What you actually get from a WPI report
09:05 How to decide where to plant your flags
11:06 How WPI turns findings into a prioritized action list
13:29 Can AI or an in-house team just do this themselves?
17:56 Where WPI came from, and why AEO and GEO aren't actually new
22:54 Nobody lies to the search bar: using intent data beyond your own site
24:15 Why the future of marketing is audience-first, not channel-first
30:17 Content gaps, influencer identification, and content blind spots
33:24 Is WPI replacing SEO?
35:51 The treadmill story: a real WPI finding that led to a March of Dimes partnership
Full Transcript
[00:00:00]
[00:00:02] SEO Meets WPI
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[00:00:02] Jessica Bush: SEO has been around for 30 years. Web Presence Intelligence is what happens when 30 years of SEO meets a world that looks completely different. That's what we're getting into today. I'm Jessica Bush, Head of Operations at VibeLogic. With me today are Stephan Bajaio and Trevor Stolberg, Co-Founders of VibeLogic. Let's get into it. we've been using the term Web Presence Intelligence for a while now, but I wanna start from scratch. If someone stops you at a conference and asks what VibeLogic does, what do you actually say?
[00:00:35] Stephan Bajaio: The first thing I'd say is we understand what audiences are looking for, where they look for answers, and then how brands can be sure to engage them in the places, shapes and forms where they look for answers. There are a lot of search surfaces, especially with LLMs and other things that are happening in our world today. We try to identify what demand is occurring on those search surfaces and what's being brought up as supply so we can help you be part of that supply, right? You can't always be the answer, but you can definitely know what those answers are made up of and where opinions are formulated. Helping people understand where to take multi-channel action against those problems or essentially those conversations is a key to what we do.
[00:01:21] Jessica Bush: Trevor, before we get into more details about WPI in general,
[00:01:26] Visibility Is Fragmented
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[00:01:26] Jessica Bush: what's the thing that most people get wrong about how visible they think they are online?
[00:01:32] Trevor Stolber: Yeah, I think, Stephan's, description there was great. I think the challenge is it's still looked at SEO very generally in the traditional box, right?
[00:01:40] And you know, so it means measuring visibility is harder. And you know, it's, it's not like, yes, now you're in this answer overview position five, your CTR is going to be five and your conversion is gonna be this. It's just changed very much from that.
[00:01:57] So I think it is not just a measurement challenge. I think people don't even really know which place. So what and where. It's not the traditional surface of search engine. So measurement has become fragmented and like where people are found becomes fragmented. So the reason that we develop WPI is so that we could reach all of those places and be visible where decisions are formed.
[00:02:21] Stephan Bajaio: Trevor Stolber, are you saying there's more vibe in search than there's ever been before? That's a lot more vibe. It's, it's not logical, but there's a lot more vibe. Sorry, I just want to get that on the record out there as the vibe guy here. I had to make sure to get one in when I can.
[00:02:36] Trevor Stolber: Nice. Yep. It's, it's definitely become a lot less, logic and a lot more vibe. So let's, let's talk about vibe a little bit more.
[00:02:44] Search Surfaces Explained
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[00:02:44] Jessica Bush: when you talk about presence across all services, can you break that down? Like what surfaces are we actually talking about?
[00:02:50] Stephan Bajaio: Search
[00:02:51] is a, is an ability to offer destinations, right?
[00:02:55] Those destinations can vary in their type. And what they ultimately are. I think the same thing holds true for LLMs, right? If you're actually using an LLM or a search engine to get somewhere, which most of the time it's not just to get an answer per se, but it's to actually go to a destination that can get you a more specific answer.
[00:03:16] When those are the cases, what comes back becomes super important. So understanding, hey, you know, what elements like. Forums, Quora, Reddit, those are responses, right? And people's opinions will get formed on those. So when those become part of your search results, or part of what the LLM answers with, that's important to know.
[00:03:39] When YouTube videos comes back from LLMs, they're constantly cited in the LLMs, right? And then also. In the search results, people consume those, they formulate opinion based on those, what are those saying? Like, are they positive, negative? Do they even bring you up? Are you part of the conversation? Are you not even talked about?
[00:03:57] We can't live in a vertical world anymore.
[00:03:59] We need to be living horizontally across what a consumer or a user sees, and they're gonna see a lot of stuff and have a lot of options at their disposal. So using the data to understand where they're more likely to go so that you can be a part of those conversations where decisions are formed. Is super important and it's very different than it has been in the
[00:04:21] past.
[00:04:21] What You Actually Get
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[00:04:21] Jessica Bush: Trevor, help me out. When someone,
[00:04:27] signs up to get a WPI report, what do they typically think they're getting versus what we actually give them?
[00:04:36] Trevor Stolber: so yeah, it's, it's, part of the challenge is you don't necessarily know what you're gonna find until you look right. So what does the data tell you? so when we tell people, here's what you'll get with WPI, we show them examples and case studies and you know, just show them an overview of the process and like the likely outputs that you're going to get.
[00:04:55] But one of the really interesting things is, it makes sense, right? So I was gonna go back to what Stephan was saying, and you know, the typical user journey has fragment. It's not just in one channel, one event, one journey, right? That's just not how it works. And that's typically how people try and measure it and how people look at visibility.
[00:05:13] So that's like part of the problem is this sort of traditional, thinking, and it's very linear and very logical. Like Stephan said, it's very vertical.that's how people think about it. But, and I forget the exact acronym, but Google's 7 11, 4, you know, the number of places, touch points and mediums that you have to see in and be exposed to before you make a decision.
[00:05:32] Really hard to measure. But the key thing that WPI does that I don't think any other approaches really do very well is contextualize it for a specific audience. Right? So we're really drilling down into the audience and where they're influenced, and we can show you where those places are and find the opportunities.
[00:05:47] So the real benefit of WPI is finding the opportunities to intersect really well with your audience. So for me, that's where the value is and it's, different for everyone. It's not the same A, B, C. Here's our SOP that we do, and this is the box you fit in. It is logically different for everybody.
[00:06:04] Jessica Bush: so is this something that's just a one-time report? Is it something that, I mean, when I think of SEO in the traditional sense, I think of like, we're continually running reports, we're continually checking to see if there's other areas where we need to improve.
[00:06:20] Like it sounds like this isn't just your typical audit slash report. It is very. Like pointed very specific around a topic, a persona like, is this something that you can rerun? On a regular basis, like talk about that.
[00:06:38] Trevor Stolber: It's, it's not a one and done. but it's also not a weekly thing either, right? There's a cadence quarterly or monthly as a typical cadence, and usually we're working with people to prioritize what we find and helping 'em execute on the opportunities they're discovered.
[00:06:52] So, yeah, it's, it's not a one and done, I mean, you. The, the, your competitors aren't standard still. The web isn't static. There are new, new things published, new places you need to be mentioned. somebody might have written a great article about you a week after we've run a WPI report and it's not there, it's not been uncovered yet.
[00:07:09] and it's actually, that's one of the interesting findings like. One of the fairly common findings is there's an influencer out there that's written something about you that you didn't know, and you haven't shared it on socials and you haven't connected with them, and you haven't sponsored their YouTube channel or whatever it, whatever it comes to be.
[00:07:25] The web's not static and the report's not a one and done. there's a fairly logical cadence to when people should run these, and it depends to some extent on the sort of nature of the marketing team, what resources and bandwidth has and what, investment is made.
[00:07:37] But yeah, there's a logical cadence.
[00:07:40] Stephan Bajaio: I think it's also important to mention. WPI can be used for a lot of different reasons, right? So, one of the reasons obviously can just be, I want to get in front of my audience for this particular topic and or intent signal when it comes to a group of people.
[00:07:56] And so it's really understanding for a group of terms and, and a group of prompts and so forth. What are the likelihoods these things are gonna show up and then taking them into account from a marketing perspective. But let's assume you're moving into a new space. Someplace your business is thinking about going but hasn't gone yet.
[00:08:15] Understanding the lay of the land beforehand to decide who would be the competitors, who could be potential partners, where would you want to advertise? Who would you want to influence? Where should you be having conversations? All of that is pre-planning, and so that can also be done
[00:08:32] It's just recording of, and synthesis in a way that you can understand an action against. So your choice of taking those actions is completely at your disposal. It's more about having a roadmap or kind of even a top, a graphical map of where you're gonna wanna plant your flags to get. the trust and authority that's already happening, right?
[00:08:55] So if vertical feet are your modem of measurement, then you know you're gonna wanna plant flags on the surfaces that are the tallest and most visible.
[00:09:05] Where to Plant Your Flags
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[00:09:05] Jessica Bush: How do I know which flags to plant?
[00:09:08] Stephan Bajaio: Oh, well that I, you see, that's the interesting part is that you let the, you let the, the topography dictate.
[00:09:16] So for example, if a lot of commerce comes back in a space, well then I'm gonna have to judge whether or not those companies are my competitors potential partners. Like what do I do if they're all people also selling the same stuff as me? That's probably not. The best neighborhood. I'm obviously going to wanna show up for it, but I don't know that there's a lot of actions from a marketing perspective I could take against that.
[00:09:41] There are some partnership opportunities we find, and that's kind of cool when we do. but understanding that might be that the keywords and, and the, and the phrases you're looking after are so down the funnel and so intent specific on purchase, that might be earlier on, that might be later on in the, in the, in the transaction.
[00:09:58] Versus if you look earlier on and you see, well, who's formulating those decisions? Right? Who are they before they know exactly what they want, what are they looking for and how are they looking for it? And what are the terms they're using and who's answering those questions and who's formulating those opinions?
[00:10:14] That's where you can jump in and say, oh, okay. Well, I see there's a bunch of social stuff that we can jump in on. So let's go there. Assuming, let's say Reddit or fall under your social team, there's a bunch of, of, potential advertising display opportunities. 'cause I see a bunch of publishers showing up.
[00:10:34] I could buy up all the retargeting there. there's a whole host of different results that can come back and once you know what comes back, kind of like what Trevor was saying before. Once you see what the landscape is made of, then you decide where to put your flags. Right.
[00:10:47] Jessica Bush: Well, I, I could see where, I mean, I've worked with a lot of marketing leaders in my day and a lot of them get really overwhelmed with lots of options.
[00:10:58] Do you help prioritize? Do you say, here's why this is the first thing you should do, and, and go do it.
[00:11:05] Trevor Stolber: Prioritization is key, right?
[00:11:06] Turning Insights Into Action
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[00:11:06] Trevor Stolber: So first comes understanding, then comes prioritization, then comes execution. And, and the landscape analogy is really, appropriate, right? It is a topography of visibility surface. And you know, one of the things that are two things that often come out of A WPI, is. Identifying. So the first thing is YouTube channels, right?
[00:11:28] Or the video might actually only have a few organic visits, right? And might not be a very big thing in terms of organic, but then you go look at the channel. They have hundreds of thousands of subscribers with hundreds of thousands of views, and they're highly relevant to the industry.
[00:11:45] You play in the specific segment as well. It's not just like, yeah, this is related to marketing, right? It's a very specific, aligned, intent and so. Even though regular organic visits are low, the visibility that's relevant that we find is huge and that would normally be discarded, right? So that's why we would prioritize something like that.
[00:12:07] Now, if it had only a few organic visits and it only had like a hundred subscribers, that would not be prioritized very high. 'cause the, the opportunity's not very big. And the same with what sort of, Typically referred to as like nano influencers. We might identify these people that write on and have authority on a topic that you care a lot about.
[00:12:26] That's very, very relevant, but it's this really sub niche specific thing that's highly aligned to you. Those people will nearly always be ignored in any influencer search. The data shows they drive huge influence in this very specific topic. So we uncover those folks as well. So you can go and connect with them, engage with their socials, get them to sponsorship deals, get 'em to write for you.
[00:12:47] And again, it's just prioritized by the opportunity. So. the list of opportunities is a prioritized list that can go and be actioned or right away. It's not just a, here's all of the things we found that might maybe be interesting to you. It's, and then, you know, I mentioned before as well, like on the frequency and cadence, somewhat aligned to the makeup of the team that we're working with.
[00:13:07] Like if they have a content army, well guess what? We're gonna give 'em a lot of content that they need to produce. If there's a huge social opportunity, we're gonna make sure that they have the right makeup for that. And if there's lots of technical fixes needed, either they have the team that can implement it or our team can help with that.
[00:13:21] But it's, it, it is very tailored, right? It's, it's, again, it's not this A, B, C, you must fit into this box. It, it's tailored to the specific needs.
[00:13:29] AI Hype Vs Human Insight
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[00:13:29] Jessica Bush: So I'm gonna throw a curve ball at you. Are you ready for it? Let's go. Okay. so let's just say you approach, a company with WPI and they say, oh, we'll just have AI do this, or we'll just hire a team to do all the things that you say you're gonna do in this.
[00:13:50] Trevor Stolber: That is a curve ball and it, and it is one that many people are doing right now. You see this all over socials. I actually really, like, I just saw something today where someone showed the, the ramp up of, of, organic traffic. 'cause they did everything with AI and then showed the crash, which isn't often shared.
[00:14:06] So, you know, AI definitely has its place. it can do some useful things, but basing your whole strategy and approach on AI is, is not wise. it's a, it's akin to a lot of the links span happened in the sort of early days of, of SEO where, you know, you, you would be doing good general solid work and out.
[00:14:30] Would come these people that could give you hundreds of thousands of links at very low cost and it would have a, an near immediate effect or, you know, a relatively quick effect. And that was hard to compete with at the time. But everybody that went down that path was sorry about a year later. And I, I see a lot of similarities with ai.
[00:14:46] So I think it is, use it where it's appropriate, don't use it for strategy and just use it to augment the team and assist the team. But I, I don't lean in heavily on ai, in my opinion. And what about the part of the question? for like, could, could a team theoretically do what we do? I'll take a swing at it.
[00:15:06] Stephan Bajaio: the reason why I say good luck is because first you've gotta make sure your data set's accurate. Once you make sure your data set's accurate, you've gotta make sure that what comes back from the LLMs isn't. Frankly bullshit because half the time they do actually provide you some erroneous stuff.
[00:15:25] The problem is they don't go from like most relevant to least relevant in terms of what they provide you. So, qa your stuff. I mean, if you want to go ahead and do that, by all means, I'd say give it a shot. But you're gonna, this isn't something that was conjured up overnight. It's taken us a really long time to get to, our ability to do this and.
[00:15:45] The idea is we're using proprietary technology yet to the end point of the data sets we bring together, and I think that's clutch, right? You can't just reproduce. This simply with ai. and again, even if you did, I'd say you'd have to, you'd have to QA it 10 ways to Sunday and you'd be wasting more time trying to get to the output than actually going and taking the actions.
[00:16:10] Yeah. I'd much rather you to use AI to help you with some of the actions you're gonna need to take based on what this information comes back with, because you are gonna have to take some actions, right? This isn't, the data alone doesn't give you. it doesn't give you the, the keys to the kingdom.
[00:16:28] What it does, it gives you the directions. Mm-hmm. Then you go as a brand and as marketers and you do what you do best. You market, you place your flags and you know what your brand is best and no one's gonna be better at you than that. And how you approach things, your tone, your, your desire, your value propositions, that's where you go and put all that good marketing stuff out into the world.
[00:16:49] We're just helping you understand where to do that. In context of an audience that already needs you, right? They're expressing need. They're expressing desire. They're expressing a a, a, A want for understanding and or information, and they're going to get it right. When was the last time you searched Google and you got no results?
[00:17:07] So the reality is someone's gonna answer. You can't always be that answer.
[00:17:13] SEO would lead you to think I always have to be the answer. Web Presence Intelligence leads you to say. I don't always have to be the answer, but I can be where the answer's given, and that's a different story, and it also builds trust and authority over time.
[00:17:29] That's how you build it. If you keep saying you're great, that's one thing. If other people are confirming your greatness. Now you might have something.
[00:17:37] Trevor Stolber: Yeah. That's harder to fake Right. And you've gotta, you've gotta be visible there. And this is gonna be very vibe and not very Logic of me. Right. I love the data side of it, but like what really differentiates it is human insight.
[00:17:47] We surface the data, but the human insights the ah, this is relevant, this would be useful. That's where the value is.
[00:17:54] Stephan Bajaio: Yeah.
[00:17:56] AEO, GEO, WPI -- Same Playbook
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[00:17:56] Stephan Bajaio:
[00:17:56] Jessica Bush: okay, so let's go back. Let's talk about why WPI exists to begin with Stephan. I wanna understand the origin. So was there a specific moment you realized SEO as a framework just wasn't telling the full story anymore? Like was there that like spark moment?
[00:18:13] Stephan Bajaio: This is gonna date me. So this goes back to like 2012.
[00:18:17] I have decks in 2012 talking about this, and it was honestly, it, it, the concept of WPI or what I used to call search presence intelligence, but search was limiting in that most people just considered SEO and now we have LLMs and other things to, to essentially use. it was really born out of the idea that SEOs.
[00:18:41] Had a lot of data at their disposal of what was actually out there in the space, but they were having trouble even getting someone's attention to write a blog post or fix a title tag. Right? It was, it was pretty ridiculous. Right? And so I, I, I said to myself, well, the only way to elevate the SEO is to try and give them what they already have in a different package, which is evangelism, right?
[00:19:07] Y'all have this data at your fingertips, the rest of your company could kind of use it in a ton of different ways. They don't even know what exists, and you're the keeper of it. So let's try and elevate.
[00:19:17] I fought those windmills trying to, convince companies to let the SEO be more of a center of excellence. Some took. My word for it and built out teams to do it. Others didn't. I'd say more of them didn't than did. the ones that did are better situated now to be able to actually succeed. And, I think this is very much an idea of a center of excellence.
[00:19:41] I think the funnel is not a funnel, it's an hourglass. We need to be focusing on our audiences more than ever. They're going to be wading through the nonsense of AI, like for a really long time until the systems can kind of get that nonsense out of here.
[00:19:58] And also until this wave of like, Hey, faster isn't necessarily better, it's slop. And our consumer has to go through that LOP to get to where they want to get to. At some point, they're gonna get tired. So you have to be the human respite for them. And how do you do that? Right? So I think a lot of people are gonna have to, rethink their approach and we, this idea that was birthed, you know, a decade plus ago, might have been a little too early for its time.
[00:20:28] And I think now it's kind of hitting this apex in that AI actually needs all of the referral stuff, all of the things that are creating these opinions, these citations, these considerations. AI is actually using those as signals. So if you know what those signals are, you're not only performing better or being referenced more in the LLMs, but you're also part of the conversation.
[00:20:54] So those are all good things. Like, you can't go wrong by doing that stuff. It's just no one's ever been charged with doing it. So it doesn't happen, dare I say, organically. Do you see ga AI as filling a gap that has been there? Like is, is there something that AI's doing that's kind.
[00:21:15] I think it forced a bunch of people to recognize things that SEOs already knew. We knew it through links, right? Like Trevor can get into this, but like we knew links. A signal of how other sites were referring to you and referencing you and stuff like that.
[00:21:34] And that was all about how trying to increase your rankings, right? But in reality, that stuff was really good for your brand, right? It was building you up. It was citations and references, and the more authoritative places talked about you, the better. Well, that was always good for search engines. Right?
[00:21:51] Now that everyone's focused on AI and LLMs, go figure the same thing holds true. Now they're waking up to it and they've just slapped a bunch of new acronyms on it as if it's a new thing. It's not a new thing. That's the secret. It's been, and this,
[00:22:05] Trevor Stolber: this is very timely and you know, you had the vision way before.
[00:22:10] I think you always said the problem with search data is it got stuck in the channel. And that's one of the things that I loved. All of all of these things that you should be doing that are good practice things like I have yet to really see an A EO or a GEO list of things that are important that weren't good things to be doing anyway.
[00:22:25] And the search data was telling you where people are influenced and you should be doing all those things. You should be visible there. And others have talked about, you know, brand mentions as being new links.
[00:22:35] And that's become very ev evident in this sort of LLM AI age. If you are not mentioned, why not? You should be. So, you should be putting yourself in all of the places where you're ultimately gonna be served up to provide influence. So, kind of digging into that a little bit, a little bit further, Trevor,
[00:22:54] Search Intent Beyond Sites
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[00:22:54] Trevor Stolber:
[00:22:54] Jessica Bush: what are you seeing in the data that you're pulling on WPI that traditional SEO tools wouldn't or couldn't capture?
[00:23:05] Trevor Stolber: Yeah, so it, it is a little more opaque than that. So, you know, we talk about search engine as an engine of intentions, right?
[00:23:13] Nobody lies to the search bar. I love that phrase. It's really appropriate, right? So people use the search engine to tell you what they're looking for. We can get that data. We have that data, we understand it. What's really interesting is, and as Stephan alluded to. The answers to those don't have to be on your webpage.
[00:23:29] So the search data is telling us the, where is important related to those things, right? So we know what comes back and where it is, we know where you need to be visible.
[00:23:40] One is you could use organic search data. Just to tell you where display opportunities were, right? you don't even have to have a web. You could no index your entire website, right? And just have a display landing page and you could find an audience, a very specific audience, and that's kind of the point.
[00:23:56] You could use this search data. Find the specific places to put your display ads that were very intersecting with the audience that you care about with a tailored landing page and tailored messaging to that audience. So that's just one example.
[00:24:07] So it's using the data to find where to be visible. And I think it's important to mention
[00:24:15] Audience First Marketing
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[00:24:15] Stephan Bajaio: this is the future of marketing. So the future of marketing, at least as I see it, is not channel based. I don't believe as AI takes on a lot of the ops aspect of marketing, right? Some of the creative stuff, some of the other things that are out there, and makes things faster.
[00:24:34] I don't believe that we're gonna have people who just specialize and constantly only live in one particular channel. I think what you're gonna have is people devoted to an audience across multi-channel and who are. Channel agnostic, but hyper specific to audience knowledge. Right. I think gone are the days of the marker not having interviewed the client, not having understood the true needs behind it.
[00:25:07] Right. I don't think the alliteration persona of, you know, I don't know. Someone throw me an alliteration here. Patty, the patty, the purchaser patty, the purchaser is no longer your, is no longer a viable persona, okay? Like you're gonna have to go deeper.
[00:25:25] You're gonna have to go into the psyche of the individual. You're gonna also have to understand the things that are going to come across their paths and influence them. That's what this does. Recognize what gets in front of that audience and where you should go take actions.
[00:25:39] Focus on the places where we know you can take an execution against the problem. So if you got a display person and you have display and you have the capability of doing that right now. Cool. Let's look at all the display opportunities that are coming back, what they're telling us, how they're performing, what they might need to be focused on.
[00:25:57] And if you were to put up some really unique, specific ads that just target those pages, what would they be? How would you work these words? Queries intent into the messaging so that it's not just another ad, it actually grabs attention. Right. Trevor's point about the supply and demand is super important.
[00:26:17] We understand the demand, and we've known that for a really long time. On the SEO side, the problem is we've treated demand as. Supply being our website, and the reality is more people are gonna make decisions off our website than on. We see the end result of a lot of branding and a lot of other things that happen before they get there.
[00:26:40] You look at analytics, it tells you this. This is why attribution's so hard, right? They don't have to show up and hit a checkout button and go, I wish it was that. The rest of us, we, we, we don't have like that luxury, right? So people cross paths with our, our products and they often do that towards the end of their understanding.
[00:26:59] They do more homework now than they ever have. So what are they learning when they do that homework? What are they being told about? Are you in those conversations? It's important to know that. Yeah. You just made me think of a question. So when you hand one of these reports to a client, I assume there's some thought given to the team that they have.
[00:27:21] Jessica Bush: So you mentioned display, like if there's a finding in your report that is pretty high priority, you think it's probably the top thing they should go do, but they don't necessarily have someone that can go do that thing.
[00:27:35] Like how do you handle a situation like that?
[00:27:38] Trevor Stolber: Yeah, I, I think, it's, it's conversation, right?
[00:27:41] If it's like the, you, you know, if there's a glaring display opportunity, but they don't really have a good paid team and they don't have the ability to execute on it, I think that's something that we strongly recommend, right? We'd be looking to see whether they can bring anyone in to do that, whether there's a partner they can work with, whether we have people in our network that can help with that, or whether it's just something that we can directly help them execute on.
[00:28:01] But yeah, we've seen a couple recently, Really, really big opportunities. In fact, even one single page opportunity, that was highly valuable, right? I don't see us just ignoring that because they don't have the right makeup, you know? But like also it's be being practical, right?
[00:28:18] It's if we're just handing people a list of problems, it's not very helpful. Right. But you know, where there's a big opportunity, we want to help to make sure it can be executed on. We still wanna work with the team on what they can execute on and, and where we can help execute directly. But yeah, where, where there's really big priorities and you know, it, it should be, it should be glaringly obvious as well, right?
[00:28:40] If there's this huge display opportunity, it's like, we should go do something about that. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:28:45] Stephan Bajaio: We're not trying to add more to the to-do list, right? We're trying to, if we bring an opportunity, we're bringing a solution, right?
[00:28:53] And so, if you already have channel marketers or you have people who are doing channel marketing, our hope is to try and align that with what we find, right? So if it's earlier in the, in the funnel. The odds are you're gonna find a lot more informational stuff. So we'll focus more there because we know you have the capability to do that.
[00:29:14] So we take that into account when we think about, how demand is being expressed and what that supply might look like. We can't always figure that out before we see the result. But we're pretty good at having a sense of, Hey, this is gonna be super transactional. That's probably not gonna be where you wanna focus.
[00:29:33] Earlier in the cycle, and kind of gauging that back against what we're seeing in the LLMs, what we're seeing in the search engines, and helping you guide what you really need. Also, if there are gaps in your content, that's also a great place to play, right? You might not have the luxury to go write a bunch of articles to fill that gap right now, so that doesn't mean you shouldn't be in a conversation, especially not if that gap is something that really matters to your business while you're waiting.
[00:30:02] Create the content, rank the content, have the content consumed. You should still be advertising, influencing, doing all the good stuff for those gaps, and we can help identify those and then you can go and take action against them.
[00:30:17] Content Gaps And Influencers
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[00:30:17]
[00:30:17] Jessica Bush: so you bring up good point about content, and I would assume that the report would also pinpoint like.
[00:30:28] A specific maybe content strategy around like the topic that you're writing about, the type of people you're writing for. Does that come out of the report or is that separate? Is that different?
[00:30:39] Trevor Stolber: Yeah, no, that's, that's definitely part of it. And you know, we mentioned that, we'll find where you've already been mentioned in articles that you should be connecting with the people.
[00:30:47] That's part of it. Those are opportunities. an outcome is, it's, it's the I three portion of it, right? Intelligent influencer identification, what would typically be called nano influencers. We'll find the people that have influence on the topic, and those are good writer candidates If you don't have the internal bandwidth to do it.
[00:31:04] And let's face it, like most teams don't, right? Content usually takes a backseat and it's like, as well. Like this is another area where AI is, you know, the economics of producing content and not using AI are hard to argue against, but. You see the flip side of it when someone's been completely de-indexed from a search engine, 'cause they mass scaled AI content, the, the value prop is not as good as it looked to start with.
[00:31:27] So not a fan of that, but yeah, identifying these people that have real authority. and then, you know, when we, we look at things in terms of topics and personas and it, we, we, we have also find through the WPI process where you have content blind spots here, here's this persona and audience that's really interested in this.
[00:31:46] But you are not really serving it. So that's, where we identify, Hey, there's a content blind spot here. You need to produce content on that topic. Nice.
[00:31:54] Stephan Bajaio: Yeah, I think it's also important to mention that we, we take competitor context into account. So we're gonna look at what the competition as defined by you, is potentially, I mean, we'll do a shared list of some stuff.
[00:32:08] Where they might have more visibility than you or where none of them have visibility. So there might be an untapped, we might be literally finding like virgin ground that you should be going after. Now there might be a reason for that. There might not be.
[00:32:21] That's where we lean on your expertise is the, you know, subject matter experts. But ultimately, you know, we can unearth a whole bunch of interesting opportunities when it comes to content and where to take action. And then to Trevor's point. We can actually help you increase essentially the eat. So if you know what that is, that's expertise, experience, authorit and trustworthiness.
[00:32:43] Ultimately, when you take those into account, that's really Google's way of saying, Hey, you are really who you say you are when it comes to this topic. Having a human behind that. Has a lot of cache in their mind and it's gonna have a lot more cache in the future.
[00:32:59] The more AI slop finds its way to the internet. So unless someone's willing to put a name and a face to content, it's gonna be a lot harder to trust it. And, the reality is that we're able to help people identify who already has that trust and who they can lean on to kind of, drift off that trust as well.
[00:33:19] Jessica Bush: I'm gonna ask the potentially. Controversial question
[00:33:24] Is WPI The New SEO
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[00:33:24] Jessica Bush: So is WPI replacing SEO?
[00:33:28] Trevor Stolber: it's an evolution of SEO. it's basically SEO for the modern search age in my opinion.
[00:33:34] Stephan Bajaio: Okay, let me back up. The O and SEO is the most important Letter. Search engine is not that important. Optimization is what you're really doing. If you're an SEO today and tomorrow, even with WPI is not optimizing, the way in which people will see your brand. That is WPI, optimizing how your brand will find its way into conversations The data off, which LLMs search engines or anything else ingests your data and then has to produce it back in some way, shape, or form. That's the job of an an, an SEO today and tomorrow, right? It's optimizing your data set and even more so I'd say in the future. It's optimizing the wisdom of your organization.
[00:34:28] To produce valuable content and meaningful experiences to get in front of your customers in an effective and useful way. That to me is what an SEO's job is now and in the future. Uses that intelligence and what the presence is along the way.
[00:34:44] I'm using the actual terms in the name to use that to make a more efficient and better experience that includes your brand. Those are the two differences between those two actions. one's a keeper. One's, one is gonna have less control, but more capabilities to execute. The other one's gonna have to do a lot more wrangling of cats internally, which is the SEO to figure out how we can all get on the same page and like produce the stuff we need for our customer.
[00:35:19] Jessica Bush: Um, Stephan, I want you to answer the question I asked Trevor earlier, It was around what does WPI uncover that traditional SEO audits. Maybe Miss I think what I really wanna hear from you is like, what excites you about WPI and the outcomes of it, the outputs of it.
[00:35:39] Maybe even an example of something that you've seen in, when we run before that you're just like, wow. No one would've ever seen this if they had been running just a regular SEO auditor or check.
[00:35:51] The Treadmill Story
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[00:35:51] Stephan Bajaio: So here's a great example of using WPI in a really meaningful way. We're looking at a, under desks treadmill company.
[00:36:00] Walking treadmills. They're not even under desk. It's just the walking treadmills some of you have at home 'cause you work at home like I do and you need to get some exercise or else we'll just be fat s slobs in our chairs, which I have become, sorry guys. I'm working on it on my treadmill. Not enough.
[00:36:16] so you've got a treadmill company and you start saying, well, who are the audiences that could use this? Oh, well, you know, Pregnant women. One, it's an evergreen market. There will always hopefully be pregnant women. in the meantime, you know, what do they want?
[00:36:29] Well, they wanna be able to exercise to some degree and not necessarily run. So, low impact makes sense. We position our product. The treadmill, walking treadmill for pregnant women. So start looking up terms that have to do with, is it safe to walk while pregnant, walking while pregnant, all sorts of stuff.
[00:36:48] As you go and look at that and you say, okay, that's not necessarily where our product's thought about, but we want our product to be thought about there. We start to discover who shows up, and as we start to discover who shows up, guess what? March a dime shows up and I'm like. Whoa. Well that's interesting.
[00:37:05] March of Dimes is out there and there are a potential, partner. So why don't we create this partnership between these two folks that are trying to create a good experience for pregnant women?
[00:37:16] Well, we could sponsor their walks, right? They could put us on a page that we think gets about on estimate organically, about 10,000 or more visits a month. That's a lot of traffic of women looking up terms that have to do with healthy pregnancies and walking while pregnant.
[00:37:32] Build a partnership. That is an incredibly unique and different way of looking at this thing that I didn't realize until we got into the data and, and said, wow, you know what? It is an evolving market for you. It's something you haven't taken an action on before. This can give you a, a litany of places you should go and execute.
[00:37:53] I just thought that was really interesting, a partnership, right? There's, there's partners to be had out there. There's people that have shared audiences with you. You don't necessarily know that until you look at the data, but if you've only been focused on your, you know, on yourself, which is what a lot of SEO was until now, or your competitor, you've been missing everything.
[00:38:14] But damn, the job descriptions, this is what people see. We gotta care about getting in front of them. Right. And that's what this Yeah.
[00:38:22] Trevor Stolber: And you know that that was actually, the example I was referencing with the YouTube channel because another thing that we discovered in this, this one was, there was a, a YouTube channel, host in city walks that people walk to on their walkin treadmills, right?
[00:38:37] And it had huge amount of visitors and subscribers, a huge visibility to an audience that you really care about. And they were unsponsored. There was no partnerships, no paid sponsorships, no deals. huge opportunity there.
[00:38:52] Jessica Bush: Yeah. so speaking of job descriptions and just like having an an SEO in-house, a team in-house is dedicated to that.
[00:39:00] Like if a company already has. A solid SEO program running, like, why do they need this? Like what, what's your conversation with a, a client or a prospect that says, oh, well we've already got that under control. Like, why would they need this?
[00:39:16] Trevor Stolber: Yeah, I was just gonna say, yeah, so I mean, we work with a lot of teams that have in-house SEOs and it augments them, right?
[00:39:22] It helps them with content strategy, tells them where we need to be influencing. And again, that that sort of in and of itself, that approach or that that perception is that here's my channel, vertical is my SEO guy, right? Here's the, this is our SEO program and we do X on this page, and we're track tracking the rankings of that page.
[00:39:42] There's a whole other layer, a whole other surface, the horizontal surface that we talked about. so it's very additive. It's not replacing, it's working with and helping.
[00:39:52] Stephan Bajaio: you don't deserve to rank for everything, but you do deserve to be included in things that are relevant to your business. So. Google has to identify maybe the top 10, let's just say, and reflect those back to a user when they put in a need or query.
[00:40:12] You aren't the answer against publishers and people that have tons of authority, I'd love to tell your blog is worth it, but it, it, it probably isn't going to go up against one of these really well written by a journalist who do this for a living articles, right. Powerhouse, trusted brand, news brand and so forth.
[00:40:32] So that's not to say, oh, well then I guess I won't do anything about it. It's to say. Well, there are conversations that are going to be held in the space. I can either take part in them or I can hope and wait until I rank for something and that's when I guess I get my consumer.
[00:40:47] You cannot just wait until you rank and get. The recipient,
[00:40:52] they are the individuals. Do far more research in advance. Now. Anyone who's got a brick and mortar will tell you, people come armed with data when they come into shop.
[00:41:01] Dollars matter more than they ever have. The economy's not great for everyone.
[00:41:05] People really wanna make sure they spend their money correctly, whether it's, you know, whether it's on, honestly, like there's never been so much choice, like we're all trying to figure out. Is it the best option for me? What could it be? How much is this super important? Maybe it's something super important in terms of cost where you're not gonna a car or something that you're not just gonna snap decision buy, or maybe it's something that's.
[00:41:31] Less costly and you're like me and you're neurotic and you feel like you're gonna make the wrong decision. So you go look through this, all the results. 'cause you don't wanna make a mistake. Right.
[00:41:39] Trevor Stolber: Well that's kind of the point, right? Because they've already had their decision formed by all of the places they've seen it influenced.
[00:41:46] Stephan Bajaio: Right? It's why Steve Jobs wore the same thing over and over again. Right? He recognized decision fatigue like. I don't want to have to make these decisions along the way. In some cases, AI will take over that portion of your life. I can guarantee it to you right now. AI will make life easier.
[00:42:02] It'll also make life harder, but it will make life easier in certain ways. Those are some of the ways I think that little decisions that you don't wanna pay attention to, that you can automate, it'll take care of, but the reality is that. Tons of options and tons of opportunity. People are turning to the lms, they're turning to the search engine.
[00:42:21] They're looking for advice. Sometimes they want more of it. Sometimes they want options. We have to be willing to be there for both. Right. Are they looking for advice or are they looking for optionality? If they're looking for optionality, we've gotta make sure we're one of the options,
[00:42:38] And if they're looking for advice, well, are we brought up, are we producing advice that's worthy of being used in whether it's an LLM or a a search engine? A IO. AI overviews, stuff like that, it all comes from content, right? So, you've gotta take that into recognition and then decide where you wanna be in the conversation.
[00:42:59] Jessica Bush: I love these conversations with Vibe and Logic, and I look forward to doing many more. So I'm gonna sum up what we talked about today. Basically, your buyers are forming decisions about your brand long before they ever talk to your sales team. The question is whether you know what they're seeing and where, and if you don't, that's where we start.
[00:43:21] So click the link in the description to book a discovery call and we'll see you on the next episode. Take care.
[00:43:28]
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