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Getting found in search is one thing. Getting recommended by AI is an entirely different game. Digital Marketing authority, Andy Crestodina, explains why succeeding in AI search requires fewer checklists and more empathy, and why understanding what your buyers really want may be your biggest competitive advantage.
What Marketers Get Wrong About AI Search
A Google search averages four words. An AI prompt runs closer to thirty. That gap of roughly twenty-six words is where most SEO strategies fall apart, and it’s exactly where Andy Crestodina, co-founder and CMO of Orbit Media, thinks marketers need to start paying attention.
Those extra words aren’t filler. They’re the buyer explaining their real situation: what they’ve already tried, what they’re afraid of, who else needs to sign off on the decision. Andy calls this the test of empathy, and most SEO playbooks were never built to pass it.
The Cheese and the Mousetrap
Andy calls SEO the cheese and conversion optimization the mousetrap. Keywords and content get you noticed. Evidence, objection handling, and clear user flows get you chosen.
Generative engine optimization, or GEO, sits right at the intersection of the two. It isn’t a brand new discipline that requires throwing out everything you already know about search. It’s SEO plus a much deeper understanding of why someone takes action once they land on your page, which happens to be the exact information an AI system weighs when deciding whether to recommend you.
The Checklist Trap
Most SEOs love a good checklist: add an FAQ section, add schema, get some PR. Andy’s argument is that checklists are containers, not content, and containers don’t win recommendations on their own.
Ask any team that just added an FAQ page how they know those are the real questions buyers ask, and you’ll often get a shrug. Andy’s answer: pull your sales call transcripts. Read them in bulk. The genuine frequently asked questions are already sitting in your CRM. They just require more effort to extract than copying a competitor’s FAQ format.
The same logic applies to blogging. Blogging has always been good for SEO, but not because it’s a blog. It’s good because it produces content, and content used to be the scarcest resource on the internet. Conflating the container with the value inside it is how marketing teams end up checking boxes instead of solving problems.
Schema Is Lipstick, Not a Face
Schema markup gets the same treatment. Tagging thin content with schema doesn’t make it strong, it just makes the thinness easier for a bot to correctly identify. Andy’s workaround is to use schema.org’s list of properties as a gap analysis tool. Pull up the schema options for “service,” then check how many of those a given page is missing before you add a single tag. Depth first, decoration second.
Where AI Learns About You
On the off-site side, Andy has analyzed Cloudflare data across dozens of accounts and found that AI systems visit homepages roughly fifteen times more often than other pages on a site. That alone is worth an audit of what your homepage says about who you help and how.
He’s also found a cheaper way to figure out which third party sources matter for your category than guessing: ask the AI directly. Write ten variations of the prompt a buyer in your category might realistically type, run each one in a fresh chat with no memory carried over, and ask for the sources that informed the answer. Feed everything back into an LLM and ask it to summarize which sources show up most often. That tells you exactly where to invest your PR and citation efforts, and for most small and mid-sized B2B brands, that place usually isn’t Reddit. It might be, if you’re selling something people genuinely discuss in forums (family SUVs, gaming gear), but for a lot of B2B categories, chasing a Reddit strategy is solving a problem you don’t have. As Andy puts it, prescription before diagnosis is malpractice.
Freshness Depends On What You’re Selling
On content freshness, Andy and I landed in the same place. If someone’s asking about gas prices, sure, freshness matters. If someone’s researching wastewater treatment infrastructure for a mid-sized municipal plant, it doesn’t. Evergreen leadership content that stays useful for years shouldn’t get timestamped into irrelevance just because your CMS defaults to showing a publish date. Some things can last in the fridge (almost) forever. Others need to be trashed in a couple of days.
Where To Start
If you only take one action item from this conversation, take this one: start at the bottom of the funnel and work backward. Fix your calls to action. Rebuild your contact forms. Rewrite your sales pages so they answer real objections with real evidence, describe the before and after of working with you, and cut the vague, low commitment language.
That work pays off twice. It makes you money regardless of how much traffic you’re getting, and it forces you to think through the exact criteria an AI system weighs when deciding who to recommend. Keywords come after that, not before it.
None of this requires abandoning SEO or learning an entirely new skill set. It requires treating the twenty-six extra words in a buyer’s prompt with the same seriousness you already give the first four. Pull a handful of real sales call transcripts this week and rewrite what you find there. Then, and only then, go add your schema tags.
Andy publishes a new article at orbitmedia.com every two weeks, and has for ten years running. Orbit Media also put together a free prompt library starter kit if you want a running start on the research side of this.
Transcript From Andy Crestodina’s Episode
Rich: My next guest is the co-founder and CMO of Orbit Media, a 55-person digital agency that helps B2B companies turn their websites into machines for lead generation. Over the past 25 years, he’s helped over 1,000 businesses improve their digital marketing. He’s written over 650 articles on content strategy, SEO, GA4, AI, and visitor psychology.
But that doesn’t even begin to describe the impact that he has had on the marketing community. This is my part, by the way. From his annual blogger survey to his in-depth articles on how marketers should be doing SEO, analytics, and now AI, he’s the guy who always makes me think, “Damn, that’s clever,” and, “I wish I had thought of that first.” And in those rare cases where I’ve created similar educational content, he’s forced me to say, “Ugh, he said it better.”
I’m glad to welcome back my good friend, Andy Crestodina, to talk to us about what marketers are getting wrong about AI and GEO. Andy, welcome back to the podcast.
Andy: Thanks for having me back, Rich.
I don’t know if you remember, but back in the old days, I met you or I knew of you through your podcasting long before you and I ever met. So this format brought us together before you knew that it did.
Rich: That’s awesome. And I think I remember you coming up to me at a very early Social Media Marketing World and introducing yourself when I was the room monitor or something like that. And you were just so awesome and kind, and I had no idea that that moment I was making a lifelong friend, so that was pretty awesome.
Andy: Many years ago.
Rich: All right. So before we get started on GEO, I just want to say, on the intake sheet that everybody fills out when they come on the show, when I asked about what truths in your industry – our industry – are complete balderdash, you stated, “People use AI wrong, and essays are wrong about digital search.” Let’s start with the people are using AI wrong. How are they using it wrong?
Andy: People use AI like it’s a magical typewriter. Look, it wrote that so fast. It wrote that so well. But I think that there’s huge risk in using AI to write, not for any kind of copyright issue, Google penalty issues. I think that the stuff that if you write a short, simple prompt and AI generates something for you and you’re considering publishing that, keep in mind anybody could write the same prompt you wrote and publish and have that same content generated for them with that same tiny effort. And I think anything that’s purely written by AI with short, simple prompts probably shouldn’t be published at all.
I think it’s extremely useful. My favorite use case for it is to use it to better understand your buyer, build a persona, talk to it, what is missing from this piece. And then gap analysis. How could this page be stronger? What’s missing from this content strategy? Or which questions on this URL did I leave unanswered? Human brains are very bad at gap analysis. AI is amazing at gap analysis, especially when it’s driven by a persona, that is a wonderful use case for technology, and I think most marketers are sleeping on it.
Rich: All right. Good to know, and I completely agree. And as always, you said it better than I did.
So right now in the marketing world, there’s so many opinions of SEO and GEO out there right now, and a lot of them are basically saying that GEO is just free SEO in a trench coat. So what’s your take? Is GEO just a dolled-up version of SEO so SEOs can sell more, or is it its own practice?
Andy: This takes a little bit of nuance to explain because AI searches. If you give AI a sufficiently interesting or in-depth prompt, or the prompt touches on things like healthcare, finance or legal, whatever, AI, let’s say ChatGPT, you can watch it say “thinking,” and then “searching.” So really there is not a complete separation between AI search and traditional Google search. So that’s really .
And when AI goes and searches on behalf of your future buyer, it’s using keywords, and it’s looking at rankings, and it’s clicking on pages. Then it summarizes that content and reads 50 of them, and comes back and reports back to that user after synthesizing all the stuff it found.
But traditional SEO methods is still 100% a thing, no question about it. It’s just that Google, or Gemini or ChatGPT or Perplexity or whatever, is just doing a bit of processing on your initial prompt, writing a dozen fanout queries, they’re technically called, that’s from a Google patent, and then someone ranks it, clicks it, reads, and then synthesizes. So it’s like a layer on top of the internet. So these are not wildly separate channels, but SEOs, I don’t think necessarily have all the answers to this because SEOs often have a big blind spot.
And I’m going to be direct about this, Rich. I think it needs to be said, the prompts that your future buyer enters into the AI are much longer than a typical query. Let’s say the average query is four words long, and some research shows the average prompt is 30 words long. What are in those extra 26 words? Very likely this person’s telling the AI about their problem in their life, who they are, what problem they’re trying to solve, what outcomes they’re hoping for, what they’re afraid of, reasons, things they’ve tried before and didn’t work.
Those extra 26 words are very likely the things that are really just perfectly aligned with the sales, with sales language, and SEOs are not famous for knowing what wins a sales call. SEOs know how systems work. SEOs know how the crawl works. SEOs knows special powers of URLs to rank and get indexed and used, can affect AI training data.
There’s lots of technical things that SEOs understand. But an SEO is a single channel traffic-driving marketer. They focus on search, and their goal is ranking and traffic. SEOs are not necessarily great at conversion optimization or the answers to real sales questions.
You can kind of see this in the recommendations they make where SEOs sometimes say, “Add an FAQ.” It’s like checklist marketing. Add an FAQ. Slap an FAQ at the bottom of this page and you did your job. But ask any SEO how they know what the frequently asked questions are. the questions that the visitor asks during sales, very likely some of those extra 26 words that appear in a prompt are not necessarily things that SEOs are intimately familiar with.
They require empathy. They require research. They require talking to sales reps and reviewing lots of sales call transcripts, or exporting sales call transcripts in bulk, and then analyzing them. Those are the FAQs. So I think that SEOs are over-indexing on the old school playbooks and just adding new checklists to their schema FAQs. You know, like Reddit. They’re just going with these prescriptive answers when I think it’s deeper.
Rich: Right. And I want to get into all those things that people are saying right now that are important to GEO, but I just want to kind of clarify or make sure I understand.
Those magical 26 words that we’re talking about, the ones we never used to see, but we still can’t see, but they’re there now, they exist. They also feel like they lean into what you were talking about before, about understanding the ICP and the intention.
We’ve talked about search intent for years now, but this feels like all of a sudden 3D chess, which it’s much deeper and more nuanced. Would you say that that’s a correct way of looking at some of the things you’re saying today?
Andy: Absolutely. Algorithm marketing, aka SEO, is very black and white compared to human psychology, which is a test of empathy, which is extremely nuanced.
So yeah, I mean, if you want to win in AI search, you should probably know what the decision criteria are before somebody hires the brand. Yeah. You get it.
Rich: Yeah. So it almost sounds like GEO is SEO plus empathy. It’s understanding the intent of what that user is asking for may give you a leg up in this.
Andy: Yeah. And said differently, GEO is the intersection between SEO and conversion optimization. SEO is cheese, conversion optimization is the mousetrap. SEO is about keywords and content. Conversion optimization is about evidence, objection handling, answering real sales questions, clear user flows, low commitment verbs. All these… it’s a hundred little things that determines what happens after the visitor lands and see pixels load on the screen.
So yeah, if you expect to be good at GEO, you probably should train yourself to be a full funnel marketer that knows why people do and don’t take action on your page. Because the same reasons why people would take action on a webpage are the exact things that align with how people prompt and what AI’s going to recommend.
In other words, SEOs are focused on AI visibility, but the full funnel marketer is focused on winning the AI recommendation. Why would AI recommend my brand? Why would AI not recommend my brand? Who does AI recommend when people ask for something with these four criteria in it?
That is the game. To be recommended, you need to understand why it would or wouldn’t recommend you, and that’s totally based on the decision criteria of your buyer, which is based on empathy and research. And none of that is from an SEO playbook.
Rich: So let’s see if we can make this practical for the SEOs out there that are suddenly feeling seen right now.
They’re getting digital search wrong, that’s what you’re putting out there. What are some of the things that they’re either saying or doing right now that are making you shake your head? You mentioned FAQs as an example.
Andy: Yeah. Yeah. I think that they’re not doing deep enough research to know what the actual frequently asked questions are.
SEOs should spend a lot of time thinking deeply about sales and the visitor’s decision criteria for making a decision. SEOs should understand who else is on the buying committee and what information those other people need. Because let’s say you provide marketing services, like flyte, and the future prospect is saying, “Hey, I need a company to help me with social strategy and fit it into our broader marketing context, and my CFO is very skeptical about social media. Suggest to me four agencies in Portland, Maine that can help me with social strategy, but also help me pitch it internally.”
You ever heard SEOs talk about a buying committee and who else is involved in the decision process and what their decision criteria are? Probably not. It doesn’t show up on any… SEMrush doesn’t recommend that. There’s no reports for that. It’s like a black box. It’s too nuanced. It’s too weird, it doesn’t show up.
But, that might very well be the prompt of your future buyer, right? And to win that in that context, your page maybe should talk about the other people involved in this process, or acknowledge how this buyer feels during the buyer journey, or go beyond EEAT.
I’m exhausted by this. EEAT? That’s just like, I did it, I checked the box. Did the evidence that you presented defeat the objections in the visitor’s mind after the page loaded? That’s what evidence is for. It’s not to check a box, EEAT. It’s to support marketing claims that are critically important to a visitor while they’re making a decision of whether or not to become a lead, take action, convert.
But yeah, I think you used the word ‘nuance’, Rich, and I think that nails it. It’s the test of empathy just got harder, less data, weirder, cooler, more fun, But I think the full funnel marketer wins and can beat an SEO and AI search.
Rich: One of the things I see on most of these checklists is the importance of schema. What’s your take on schema when it comes to GEO?
Andy: And I’m going to push a few buttons here because it’s going to sound like I’m arguing against schema. I’m actually not, but follow me follow my thinking here.
Schema are tiny tags that appear around content to declare to the bot what kind of entity that is basically, right? Like this is a person, this a company, this is a location. Great, makes sense. Let’s keep the internet organized. And I want to tag things to help organize the internet. That’s lovely. The problem is that if you take a page of thin content and add schema to it, you didn’t really improve the Internet. So you didn’t really help. If there’s not much to tag there, what’s the point?
I think that AI is quite intelligent, and it can do an amazing job of extracting meaning from a detailed page with no schema much better than it can try to extract meaning from weak, thin, vague copywriting beautifully tagged with schema. In other words, the content is more important than the tags. I don’t care about schema unless the page has the, all the detailed information.
So if you flip that, there’s a clever method here, and I have a fun prompt for this. Schema is extremely useful as a set of things that a page could include. Go to schema.org and look at service. There’s like 60 schema there of things, tags that could be added around it that relate to services. My prompt audits pages using schema.org as a creative lens to list all the things that the page didn’t include, and it uses schema standards to find content gaps.
I think if you did that, you’re more likely to make an extremely detailed, comprehensive, informative page that answers sales questions and helps the language models know what you do. And then if you do that, sure, go ahead and add your schema tags, because why not? But the value of the depth of the content, I think, is far more important than whether or not things have little tags around them.
Rich: All right, so no point putting lipstick on a pig. And in this case, lipstick is schema and the pig is thin content. Understood. All right.
Let’s talk a little bit about PR and third-party citations. In SEO, this is your off-page optimization. A lot of people are talking about how important it is for AI as well. What’s your take on that?
Andy: I think it does really rhyme with traditional SEO. Because there’s on-page and off-site SEO, and the content on the pages plus whatever the other sources on the internet. AI learns from pages, and especially home pages, weirdly. I did this research and found that AI visits home pages 15 times more than other pages, according to Cloudflare data I have on dozens of accounts.
But AI also learns from the rest of the internet. And I’ve gone on many rants about this. The proper way to determine which off-site sources are most important in your vertical or for your buyer, that requires research. And the research is best done just literally talking to the AI and saying, you know, “What corners of your probability matrix,” or whatever, like, “What sources do you use to inform responses when buyers prompt for X?” Very basic.
The next level analysis is to generate synthetic prompts, like, “Who are the best digital agencies for lead generation in Portland, Maine? I want flyte to be recommended.” Okay, I’m going to write 10 of those different prompts and run them all through Gemini in fresh tabs. Like, I don’t want any memory involved here. I’m just going to run them all separately. And at the end of each of those prompts, I’m going to add a little extra text that says, “List all the sources that informed your response.” Now, I have in all those responses, a giant list of places where AI learned and AI informed itself about who the best agencies are in Portland.
Great. Copy those all out of there, give them back to your LLM of choice. I’m using Claude a lot lately. And ask it to make a report saying, “Which offsite sources are most important for informing recommendations in my vertical?” It will do that. And then you’ll know if Reddit is a thing for you. And it might be, but we do B2B, manufacturing, banking, tech companies, I’ve never seen Reddit in there.
Rich: Yeah. Two thoughts on what you just said. One is, I’ve done the same thing obviously with flyte, because I’m curious about how we show up in AI. And when I started asking, “What are your sources?” I uncovered some sources that I had never even heard of before, embarrassingly so. But then I knew, okay, well, I know then I need to show up here. Like, we have zero presence on that site. This is obviously a site that AI trusts at this moment in time, so then I need to invest some time, energy, or money in that site.
And the other thing is, I love what you do, which is just coming from a place of curiosity and just asking the questions of AI. Because I was putting together a presentation and I was trying to show how you get cited or recommended by AI, and I just chose skilled nursing facilities as one. And I asked a question, and I got five… I think I was showing how it changes every time you ask, right? Because it’s probabilistic in its answers.
So I asked this, I get two different answers, and I said, “What were your criteria for suggesting these?” And it broke it down, and it wasn’t generic that would work across all industries. It was specific questions like, “I thought about the continuum of care in a retirement community, but do you want to stay in place and move into the Alzheimer’s unit if needed?” Like, that’s not going to be true with any other industry. So I think it’s really critical to do your own research, to be curious, to ask these kind of questions of AI. And unlike the search engines, the AI will just tell you.
Andy: It’s amazing. Google never did that for us. “Hey, AI, why didn’t you recommend this?” Or, “Who would you recommend for that?” Or, “I’m this buyer, here’s my prompt, these are my decision criteria and how I’m going to make a choice here.”
It gives you, okay, now put that at second prompt. Now put that in a table listing the partners or skilled nursing facilities that you would recommend based on that buyer and why. And it will draw for you a chart and tell you exactly what it has in its base training and where else it looked to get that information.
And now, that’s almost a plan. You’re very close to having a plan now, that little bit of research, which is free, which is fast. But best practices aren’t really sufficient in a hyper-personalized channel. It would be weird. AI would be terrible if it used Reddit to inform responses for every category. That would be so strange. For the people that are all saying, “Oh, what’s our Reddit strategy?” I’m not sure that they’ve stepped back and actually found evidence that Reddit is, in fact, an important source when AI is recommending brands in that vertical.
So far for me in all my research, it just doesn’t usually come up. In fact, I never see Reddit informing these buyer prompts. But then again, I’m not in gaming. You know, there’s probably tons of categories where Reddit’s really important.
Rich: Absolutely. And I think, to your point, because I was going to ask you about Reddit, but we kind of dived into it already.
So for me, I hear the same thing. You really need to have a Reddit strategy when it comes to AI. Most of our clients are small to medium-sized businesses that are going to have almost no conversations going on about their brand. If you’re Coca-Cola, or Apple, or even General Motors, sure, there are people talking about you and your products there, but rarely are they talking about the products. Or maybe it’s one conversation once. I just don’t see that as being relevant for most small to medium-sized businesses, at least from a GEO or AI standpoint.
Andy: Yeah. I mean, it might be. I mean, if you ask the internet, “I’m looking for a family vehicle that’s a hybrid electric with third-row seating because I’ve got kids and they have soccer practice, and I need some storage and sometimes I’m in a carpool.” And there might be 1,000 people talking about that on Reddit, and that might be a category where you could use Reddit to inform your content strategy. I think, what’s the saying? Prescription before diagnosis is malpractice.
Rich: Absolutely.
Andy: SEO best practices are not, I don’t think those are safe, easy wins the way they were six years ago.
Rich: I also feel that SEOs may feel cornered by clients who have read just enough and be like, “Well, are you adding FAQs? Have you done schema? What’s our Reddit policy?” And then so we have to check those boxes if we want to satisfy the clients, rather than having an informed discussion with them about like, “I know why you feel that’s important.”
Like we were talking about FAQs a week ago when we were prepping for the show, and we were talking about the fact it’s not that they necessarily need FAQs, it’s that they like the question-and-answer format. But that doesn’t mean FAQs are important as much as addressing the pain points of your ICPs.
And it goes back to talking about blogging is great for SEO. Well, yes, because you’re creating content. But it’s not because you’re creating content on a blog. It was just easier to publish then, and that’s when Google was looking for as much content as possible.
So sometimes people think it’s one thing, but it’s actually that deeper thing. And meanwhile, you’re just only paying attention to that box you just checked.
Andy: You just really put that beautifully, and those examples are the same really. It’s like the best practice of the prescription thing or what the blog post the executive saw and then pushes down to a marketer, they were asking for a container. We need an FAQ section. We need a blog. Those are containers.
What the internet needs is great answers to buyer questions. I don’t care if it’s in an FAQ box with little, expandable areas. Or does it really make a difference if the answer is in a directory called /blog? Like, this is not the point. The brand that publishes the most helpful, useful content that addresses real humans’ actual concerns, and pains, and fears, and hopes, that brand has the best chance of being matched with the ideal buyer.
Even if traffic will, and it will, traffic goes down. Your marketing will become so much more efficient in this era at connecting you with ICP visitors and prospects because of this hyper-personalized channel, and your ability to inform it and win recommendations. You’re not looking for millions of visitors, you’re trying to find the right visitor.
So go ahead and publish stuff that helps people disqualify themselves or stops AI from recommending you to everybody. You don’t need that. What you’re trying to do is to help the web make a good match between the value you offer in the world and the person that gets the most from that value. And to do that, yeah, these pages should more or less emulate a sales call.
Rich: The bottom line is, if I want coffee, I don’t care if it comes in a cup, or a mug, or a pitcher, I just need that caffeine. So worry less if it’s an FAQ or just a question-and-answer area, or you’re just answering the typical questions you get during a sales call. It’s about putting that high quality, high octane content in front of people.
Andy: One more time. Quick digression. Similar, I teach AI at conferences all the time now, and partway through it’s like, “This method, this thinking, this philosophy, this approach,” and then people suddenly ask, “Should I use Claude or OpenAI?” It’s like teaching driver’s ed and a student saying, “Should I drive a Mazda?” I don’t care. Just thought I’d throw that in there.
Rich: Yeah. Well, it’s like the old podcasting questions, “What mic should I use?” One that actually picks up your voice. That’s the end of that conversation.
Andy: That’s right. This one’s working fine.
Rich: That one’s excellent, yes. One other topic that often comes up is the freshness or topical authority. Is this important when it comes to GEO and AI search?
Andy: Well, in a way, obviously not, because ChatGPT, the P stands for pre-training, and that stuff’s all out of date. It’s like new models come out, there’s months between new models launch, so to get into pre-training it’s not fresh or current, which is why AI needs to search when the user’s asking for anything that’s current.
But freshness of content, I think it would depend entirely upon the prompter query. You know, if you’re asking about gas prices, yes. If you’re asking about how much space do I need for a wastewater centrifuge in a medium-sized municipal treatment plant? No, you do not need….
Again, I hate the answer ‘it depends’ but I also really hate one-size-fits-all answers. But content freshness, no, I haven’t heard that one in a while. I haven’t seen evidence of it. I think that some content’s timely and needs to be published frequently, but many topics are yet still evergreen, and freshness wouldn’t matter. What do you think, Rich?
Rich: No. I hate to say this, I agree with you. I don’t hate to say that I agree with you, it usually means I’m right. But in terms of that, I felt the same thing back in the web when everybody was putting dates on things, and I’m like, “I only care about the date if it’s news, weather, or sports.” Outside of that, if it’s a leadership topic and I see something from five years ago, my first thought is, is there anything fresher?
So I actually think evergreen content should be undated so it doesn’t lose value. Because there are certain things that can stay in your fridge forever, and there are certain things that should get out of your fridge within a couple of days. So again, you’re right, it depends.
Andy: I like the fridge metaphor. I’ve got an old jar of giardiniera, like those crunchy pepper, pickled pepper stuff.
Rich: Okay.
Andy: Nothing wrong with that at all. It’s just been soaking in oil. Once a month I’ll make a sandwich and put that on there and perfectly fine, crunchy, spicy, delicious. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Rich: You’re still alive.
Andy: Evergreen.
Rich: Yeah, absolutely. So if somebody’s listening today and they’re like, “Okay, I heard a thousand great things, I’m not sure where I should start,” if you wanted to tell an SEO out there one thing that they could do, the first thing that they could do to start doing better with AI search, where would you point them?
Andy: Conversion copywriting. I think all marketing should be prioritized starting at the end of the buyer journey and working backwards, upwards through the funnel. And after you fix the calls to action or contact form, you’re going to work on your sales pages because that’s really very close to the end of the buyer journey.
A lift there will make you money regardless of how much traffic, without improving traffic. And it will put you in the mindset to win in AI search because it will force you to think deeply about all the stuff we mentioned.
I probably said it, like, four times. Did you support your claims with evidence? Did you answer real buyer questions? Did you handle the likely objections? Did you have a short, sharp summary of the value you offer in the world? Did you describe the before and after in their life? Give this transcript from this show to AI and have it write you a prompt that will do basic conversion optimization which is, I believe, AI search optimization.
And then once you’re done with that, sure, pepper in those keywords. Choose a primary target phrase. You know, work on your headers and title tags and cover all your semantically related topics. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve been an SEO for 25 years. But I feel it’s more important to be a full funnel marketer. So I think if you just add conversion optimization skills to an SEO, you’ve made a dangerous dual threat marketer perfectly positioned in this era, because they’ll understand both how systems work and buyer psychology
Rich: Andy, if people are realizing now that they should’ve been following you for years, where can we send them online so they can check more of your stuff out?
Andy: Orbitmedia.com is where I write an article once every two weeks. How many years? 10 years I’ve done that. And LinkedIn is my best social network, so if you hear this and want to connect with me there, just skip that blue follow button and click on the three dots as a menu and click connect, and just say, “Agents of Change,” and I will say, “Awesome, I’m a Rich fan, too.” And then if you want, we could chat or share, create prompts.
But I have a YouTube channel. It’s a bit dormant now. I’ve been quite busy, but basically just look me up. I’m easy to find, and connect with me anywhere.
Rich: Awesome. And I will say that if you are not subscribed to the Orbit newsletter, then you’re falling behind. It’s one of the few newsletters that I read every single time it comes out. I think it’s always something interesting, and I’m always trying out new stuff that Andy’s putting out there. So definitely make sure you do that. And I also believe you have a free AI prompt giveaway as well. Can you share the URL? Do you have it on the tip of your tongue?
Andy: Orbitmedia.com/blog. Amanda, our mutual friend and my marketing director, posted that. It’s our first ever gated content. I don’t even know what happens if you give it your email address. Probably you’re just going to be on our newsletter, but we don’t send sales emails. If people need us, they can find us.
But yeah, it’s got a prompt library starter kit, and it has a lot of the more highly developed and tested prompts that we’ve used and found to be performant over these last few years.
Rich: All right. And you can find it there, or we’ll have it in the show notes along with all the links that Andy shared with us.
Andy: Cool.
Rich: Andy, always a pleasure catching up with you. Thank you so much for coming by today.
Andy: Any time, Mr. Brooks. Thank you.
Show Notes:
Andy Crestodina is co-founder and CMO of Orbit Media, a digital agency helping B2B companies turn their websites into more effective lead-generation tools. A longtime educator and trusted voice in digital marketing, Andy writes and speaks extensively on content strategy, SEO, analytics, AI, and conversion. Connect with him on LinkedIn, and check out Orbit Media’s free AI Prompt Library Starter Kit.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, digital agency offering branding, web design, and digital marketing located in Portland, Maine. He is also the founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his nearly 30 years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.