Speaker 1 00:00:05 Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt in required, where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100% inbound in your industry over the next 6 to 8 months, with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years, and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to up my influence. Com and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments. Also, don't forget the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for great guests. Go to up my influence. Com and click on podcast. I'd love to have you. With us right now it's Nick Musica. Nick, you are the founder and CEO of Optics in. You are found on the web at optics in.com. Nick, it's great to have you.

Speaker 1 00:01:19 Thank you for joining us.

Speaker 2 00:01:21 Thank you so much Josh. Super happy to be here this morning.

Speaker 1 00:01:23 Yeah based in San Diego. Tell me about the work you do, who you serve and who you've been able to help.

Speaker 2 00:01:30 Yeah, yeah. So the work is anchored into SEO. And so what that means for folks who may not be as familiar as others is, largely web search, which which means we work on people's websites quite a bit. And the idea here is to raise the visibility in Google. So when someone searches for a query, a topic related to your business that you have a chance to show up for, that someone clicks through, they fill out a form, they buy the thing, whatever it may be. But we're largely working with small businesses. we'll say about 50 people in terms of company size, sometimes bigger. We do have some bigger clients, but largely it's 50 and below. And the the range of, types of clients is it's it's cannabis, it's shipping, it's senior living.

Speaker 2 00:02:22 It is. We have a range of clients that we work with. So not necessarily specific to to a domain, but specific to SEO across verticals.

Speaker 1 00:02:34 Yeah. Well, Nic, in that this is the work that you do in the world that you live in. For those of us who are just, you know, we're just out here running our companies, you know, maybe we've had a mind for best practices of SEO. Maybe we have some simple things. Maybe we're working with an agency, maybe we're not. Maybe we just have a VA. let's. I would love it. From your perspective, what is the state of the Union when it comes to SEO today? There's a lot of movement in Google. there's a lot of, I'd say concern. I've heard over the value of SEO when more consumers are doing their research. Not on Google search engine. looking for a blog article to answer their question, but they're using tools like ChatGPT and and other AI tools. So help me make sense of where we are right now.

Speaker 2 00:03:25 Yeah, for sure, for sure. Yeah. So, SEO has been dying since roughly the day it was born. If you take a look at SEO is Dying, you're going to find a bunch of articles out there that say SEO is dying. You can also pop in paid searches. Dying or email is dying, right? Every marketing channel has been dying since it's existed. And right according to the internet. Right? According which right? Which means no, nothing is dying. It's just shifting and changing. Right. And so when we take a look at our, our marketing and this includes SEO. Take a look at the marketing mix. And we're looking to see what is relevant in terms of the marketing mix. Where are our people? It's the Jesse James. I think he was the guy who robbed the banks. Right? Right. So why why are we going to the bank? Jesse? Why do you rob the bank? Because that's where the money is. So why are we doing SEO? Because people are on Google.

Speaker 2 00:04:13 They're doing the searches. So we're less or less of them on on Google searching because ChatGPT maybe because TikTok may be, but is that where your people are? Is the question. And so there's still a bunch of folks using Google, using Bing, using all the search engines to find the goods and services that people sell. So, the state of the Union is so that's the broad picture. The state of the Union is, we'll say the headline is AI. And here's how it shows up for a couple different things. One is about two years ago, a lot of folks start to write their content solely using AI. I have an idea. I use this AI content generator and now I have a 50 page, 500 page, 5000 page article, whatever you actually asked it to write. And then you do that a hundred times and you produce it on your website and, and then you cross your fingers and you think SEO is going to grow. That didn't work for a lot of folks because Google sniffs it out.

Speaker 2 00:05:14 And maybe you get some up into the right on day one where day one could be six months, nine months. But sooner or later Google looks at it and says, this is not quality content, and then it drops like a rock. We've seen that multiple, multiple times. So that's the state of the Union from the business owners operating perspective. And the goal was never good content. Whenever you talk to someone, they say fast and cheap. Good was not not a factor in that conversation. So if you're going to produce content solely using AI as the device to generate the content, and I'm not talking about a tool to help you build the content, but the but as pretty much the proxy writer. Typically, that doesn't work out well for SEO to use it as a tool. Fantastic. Do it all day long. Idea generation. Give me an outline. help me rephrase a line or two, maybe for some programmatic SEO. These are places where you can use AI as as an owner operator.

Speaker 2 00:06:09 When we take a look at the Serp, the search engine result page, when on Google or Bing, which is the result when you put a query and you hit submit, what comes back is, is that Serp? You start to see some patterns at the top AI generated. Right. Oh yeah. And right. And that's, that's, that's a new thing. And it came out very strongly and it's been rolled back a little bit. And what we don't have are the numbers from Google or other search engines of the usage of it. Well, because they're hedging their bets, as my guess, they're hedging their bets. They're trying to figure out how best to make people use it and actually be useful. But when you do a query about getting rid of kidney stones and the AI says, here are ten things you should do to get rid of kidney stones xyzzy. Also, drink your urine. Maybe I search results are not the best thing for the user right. And so there's, you know while they're there.

Speaker 2 00:07:11 what we're going for is relevant results. And so our job is to continue to play in the places where we have visibility, where we can give our clients relevant results. And search engines are certainly one of those places. Still, it hasn't gone away anywhere.

Speaker 1 00:07:27 Is there anything, Nick, that like, say that, someone's frustrated and maybe they've heard. Listen, if you get going with SEO activity, don't expect to see much of anything for about 6 to 12 months. Is that true, or are there things that we can do that might be able to move the needle a little bit faster?

Speaker 2 00:07:46 Yeah. So, maybe. So let's break that down a little bit. So with the advent of SEO or with the AI in SEO, here's what we've seen. We've seen, small publishers getting kicked in the pants. They basically basically being been replaced by Quora and Reddit. So small publishers, which you could nest affiliates into, they've largely gone missing from the Serp. A lot of them, certainly a smaller ones.

Speaker 2 00:08:12 You will still see bigger publishers like Forbes, but for Joe Blows expert blog on topic where Joe Blow should actually rank because he is the expert, a lot of those blogs have actually gone missing. What we're seeing, the opportunities for businesses are what we would write a wrong call, a legitimate business, someone who is selling a product or service, who may have a brick and mortar. Those are the folks who are still getting a lot, a lot of traffic through SEO, where we need to just keep in mind the right way we want to navigate the time frame of results is where are the pockets of opportunity. So here's here's an example. I was working with the client last week and they said we want to call our product IG. Thing doesn't even matter what the thing is. And we can imagine that people are going to start search for this project or this product using IG. What do you think? I said, well, if you have the money and the stomach to be a competitor, Instagram all day long because when you search for IG, Instagram shows up quite a bit.

Speaker 2 00:09:22 That's the acronym that people use for, for Instagram. so if you want to play the really, really, really long game of battling Instagram, that could be a good idea. That doesn't sound productive because it's not productive, right? So we need to choose our shots. And this is where strategy comes in. And then we get the execution. So why are we doing what we're doing. And then we execute on what we're doing. so where there's pockets we want to start to build momentum of that. SEO traffic and but those pockets have to back into meaningful, relevant traffic. We don't want to start ranking for best blue giraffe to do a thing right. It's not we could rank for it tomorrow. It's not relevant for us. So we want to take a look at the areas where there's relevancy and there's low competition. Start to get a foothold in there. And then once we have momentum, we build on that momentum and start to go for more competitive terms, which can take longer to to get traffic on for sure.

Speaker 1 00:10:17 Yeah. Do you mind maybe sharing a little bit about maybe a client that you worked with, what happened? like how did you begin and and what was the transformation that you co-created?

Speaker 2 00:10:31 Yeah, yeah. I mean, we have a process that fits well for a lot of folks who have never done SEO before. So if you just haven't stepped into it, we walk into, typically a six month engagement with with a three pronged approach, because we know some amount of all of these things need fine tuning. And so SEO is based on three items that three items make SEO tick. It's technical, aka how Google can crawl and index your website, and then it's what you have on your page. And then it's how people talk about your company, your website, and those are the backlinks. So we take a look at the technical health of your website. We take a look at your content. We take a look at your, your backlink profile, and then we start to see where we can get those quick wins, as you said, Josh, to start to move the needle in the right direction.

Speaker 2 00:11:19 Well, we don't want to do is say, oh my goodness, your nearest competitor has a million making up the numbers. To illustrate the point. They have a million backlinks. They have a million, articles that rank very, very well. We should do that on a on a site that is technically unhealthy. We don't want to make that recommendation, because every dollar that we spend on a link or on copy, we're going to get 40 to $0.60 in return by putting it on an unhealthy foundation. So we take a look at that foundation, make sure that foundation can actually support the efforts. And then and then we build the content on top. We build the links on top of that. So that's a typical path for the first six months. Once we get through the the first six months now we're saying, well, what has worked better than not were the new opportunities, because as you pointed out, CEO shifts and changes, which shows up in the Serp as an opportunity, is going to change because you're working on your website, competitors are working on their websites, and Google is making changes.

Speaker 2 00:12:19 So we're navigating that as we sort of tack our way to our destination now.

Speaker 1 00:12:25 so, Nick, for our friend that's listening, I suspect that you've got maybe some resources or, I don't know, for someone that's enjoyed our conversation, they're interested in learning more. do you have any. like content that you like recommending anything along those lines?

Speaker 2 00:12:46 Yeah, I mean, I would, I would recommend for a lot of folks that we talked to, they don't have some simple setup on their website. So Google Analytics, a lot of people have Google Analytics set up on their site. What a lot. What most folks do not have is Google Search Console, which is, a free program. It's brought to you by Google. You create an account, you go get a tag or some other method and you drop, either an HTML file or a tag on your page, and then you start to get data directly from Google about your SEO. Search console is all about SEO. If you ever seen Batman from the 60s, it's your bat phone direct to Google, right? You can't get a cleaner source of information, so we highly recommend folks plug, Search Console onto their website if you know what you're doing.

Speaker 2 00:13:36 Takes about all but ten minutes. That's a long time if you get distracted with a cup of coffee. and then you're going to start to see how much traffic you're getting from Google and what you're ranking for. And people are typically very, very surprised to see that they're not getting a whole bunch. And so that's a lot of times that's the wake up call to, well, how's my SEO doing? We'll go to the source that's going to get 85. That's the 85% of your SEO traffic, and see how it's actually doing. And typically it's a it's a surprise for folks. So start there. And at the same time it's an educational, endeavor. You can see what you're ranking for. You can see maybe some queries where you're ranking in position 20, and there's a chance to bring that to the to the first page, but you never even actually focus on a specific phrase that you're still ranking for it. So it could be a goldmine as well to to dig through the data there. Yeah.

Speaker 1 00:14:29 you have a blog, on your website as well. So if someone wants to spend some time and kind of look at some of what we're talking about here. Also, Nick, a pretty good follow on LinkedIn as well. So again, we've got all of that linked up in the show notes your website optics in.com. when somebody goes there and and wants to grab a conversation with you, what would you recommend they do?

Speaker 2 00:14:53 Yeah. We go to the contacts form, and fill out the form. mentioned Josh's name, so we know where you're coming from.

Speaker 1 00:15:03 Yeah, I mentioned my name.

Speaker 2 00:15:05 Mentioned your name. And so what we're going to do is we're going to set up a 30 minute discovery call. Yeah. So I talked about what what an engagement could look like. But here's the thing. we don't move ahead with everyone. It's got it's got to be productive for both of us. Right. So we're going to take a look at the website. we're going to hear the resources that you have or don't have.

Speaker 2 00:15:27 We're going to hear about your goals and objectives. And if we think it's a fit, we're going to make a suggestion. And if we don't think it's fit, we're going to we're going to also call that out.

Speaker 1 00:15:38 Excellent. Nick Musica again. Your website optics in.com Nick has been a great conversation. Thank you so much for joining us.

Speaker 2 00:15:46 Thank you so much, Josh.

Speaker 1 00:15:53 Thanks for listening to The Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit up my influence. Com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video that you can watch right now with no opt in or email required, where I'm going to share the exact steps necessary to be 100% inbound in your industry over the next 6 to 8 months, with no spam, no ads, and no sales.

Speaker 1 00:16:51 What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to up my influence comm and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments. Make sure to hit subscribe so that tomorrow morning. That's right, seven days a week you are going to be inspired and motivated to succeed. I promise to bring positivity and inspiration to you for around 15 minutes every single day. Thanks for listening and thank you for being a part of the Thoughtful Entrepreneur movement.