1526: AI & SEO Mastery: Boost Visibility and B2B Growth with Melih Oztalay

Robert Plank 0:01 Mainly. Ostole is here, and he is the kind of leader who has been in digital marketing long before most people even knew what SEO stood for. He's the CEO of smart finds marketing. They are a full service digital agency based in Birmingham, Michigan, and mainly blends 35 plus years of marketing, and it experience with a future focused mindset that helps clients stay one step ahead of change, helping out with his four A's philosophy, anticipate, accept, adapt and adopt in this era of disruption. AI, it's scary, but it's also exciting at the same time. So Mr. Mayley, how are you today? Robert, it's great to be on your show. That was one hell of an introduction. Yeah, you have to come.

Robert Plank 0:53 You Me, plus the audience. So why go halfway? But you tell me, what is good to be excited about? What did I miss in that introduction. Well, I

Melih Oztalay 1:02 don't know if you missed much. I think you know, as you can imagine, being in business for 38 years, you gain a lot of knowledge. You gained a lot of experience, more so experience, to say the least, with you know, after making mistakes, after mistakes. But if I had to take a look at that 38 year period, you know the we ended up, there were two hardships that I think are important to mention. One was the financial crisis. So we're at, we're just outside of the the city center of Detroit, in the suburbs, and Detroit was ground zero for the financial crisis in 2009 and 2010 were just horrific years for anybody in Detroit. It was just crazy. And the other part of you know, these, all these experiences that you gain over all these years was the pandemic, which, again, both of those events we had, we're not planned for right? And interestingly enough, when one was done, in other words, at q4 2010 things gotta go back up on our feet 10 years later. No, no kidding, 10 years later, you have the pandemic pop up in cause more grief. Now, granted, we were much better prepared for a pandemic, for or for that matter, any crisis than we were in the first crisis. But, yeah, that was, that was quite the interesting, you know, being a marketing agency, being a full service marketing agency, doing, you know, a lot of digital since 2004 prior to that we had three different groups. We had our traditional media, we had our ISP team, and we had our digital marketing, website development space team, and then that eventually evolved into 100% digital marketing, but yeah, for a marketing agency, those were some very interesting times. But here we are, 38 years later, and I a lot of it has to do with the fact that I, you know, you have to be able to pivot on a dime. You know, especially during the pandemic. I don't know if you remember this, there was a lot of conversation about pivoting, right? Pivoting was, like this big word in that during the pandemic and so but I don't buy the fact that it was just for the pandemic. We've had a pivot. I've had to pivot over the 38 years over and over again. You're constantly pivoting. Everything changes around you, and that kind of led to the four A's that you mentioned earlier in my introduction, which, you know, I think a lot of businesses need to kind of get over it, keep emotion out of the way, and focus on logic, being relevant in the marketplace and being competitive in the marketplace, let alone Getting ahead of your competitors. And so it really comes down to just pushing forward. Don't stop don't think that. Oh, what just happened? I just lost 30% of my investment. So what? It's the cost of doing business. Press forward. It's not like you're gonna hold back, and if you do, you're gonna you're gonna die, so you gotta move forward.

Robert Plank 4:25 Yeah, there's acting despite the fear. And you think about what can be regenerated or recovered, what's disposable versus what is lost forever. And I can only imagine some of the storms you've weathered, some of the things you've been seeing, and I think about some of these ideas all the time, like, about how, how much to stick with what works, versus giving it up before others, versus going to the newest thing. Because there's, like, kind of a weird there's extremes, aren't there? You think, Well, if I'm just, like, dropping all these companies, or if I, if I could be growing this and I drop it, and. To make something new, like, how much am I an entrepreneurial ADHD, or how much am I a dinosaur if I'm clinging to something that's kind of going on forever? So you have these four A's to help us navigate that. And can you kind of tell us what that's all about?

Melih Oztalay 5:16 Yeah, so the first two A's are the are the most important of the hardest side of the four days. And I, I developed these, believe me, over time, dealing with customers who get emotional about changes in the marketplace, about algorithm changes, about technology changes, about new websites popping up left and right. And you know, as you can imagine, what they're getting emotional about is budget. It's either I've lost where I invested or it's I need to increase budget. And that's where they get hung up, and it over the years, especially since Google's hummingbird algorithm in 2013 is kind of the starting point of how I built out these four A's. So let's start with the first day. It's about anticipating change. Now it sounds simple, yeah, I know change is going to come, right? But that's not it, anticipating changes, putting a budget aside to reinvest when the changes occur when you find that your current marketing strategy isn't working, because there's something change in the marketplace, right? It's a shift in your your target audience. It's a shift in in the in like right now LinkedIn is going through another shift in this algorithm. Lot of people don't see a downturn in the amount of views they're going to get on their posts. You know, these are all things that eventually, whether we like it or not, require an extra budget or an extra investment, right? And I don't, you know, I if you broad stroke it, you're going to say, Listen, take your existing marketing budget and advertising budget. Lump them together. Take 15% keep setting it aside. You know, that's what you need. Something is bound to change. Something is going to impact you. So anticipating change tends to be a hard one, because it's about money. It's about I need to throw something aside, and I need to let it sit there and not touch it. Okay? So that tends to be a hard thing in some cases. The second one is equally hard and that was more emotional. It's about accepting change. In other words, change comes, and just like I mentioned here a few minutes ago, it's a cost of doing business that change happens okay, and you just stop fretting and fussing and fuming about it. That's not going to get you anywhere. All you're doing is being emotional and you're being reactive. That's there's no value in that. Rather, I'm suggesting be logical and understand that you're going to have to put up a few bucks more. You're going to have to change your process, your strategy, your plan, something's going to change, right? And you're going to do that. You're going to go through the storm. You're not going to go around it and take shortcuts. That's not going to work either. And why are you going to do this? And the why is this? You're going to want to be relevant to the continue to be relevant to the marketplace. You want to be competitive in the marketplace. And like I was mentioning earlier, you want to get ahead of your competition. If you pull back and say, I don't want to play this game, which I, believe me, I've, I've heard that before from from clients, okay, I'm not gonna play the Google game. I'm gonna get off the Google train. And I'm like, Well, that's all fine and dandy, but six months later, when you try, when you find out that you don't have a choice but to get back on the train, it's gonna cost you 10x to catch up, right? And so what I'm saying is, stop being emotional. Stop being reactive. Just accept the fact that this is going to happen, be logical about it, and figure out how to stay with your competition or get ahead of them, because if you pull back, I guarantee your competition is moving ahead of you. So the second A is the acceptance. Now the LEX two are actually pretty easy. One of them is adapting to the changes, and that can take anywhere from 24 hours, or maybe I should be realistic about this. That can take anywhere from a week to 30 days. Right? Why you have to identify your processes, your strategy, your plan, where, what, when you're going to make changes? How are you going to revise what you're doing? Which usually happens at least six months after you put in whatever plan you did, and that's your adapting portion. The last one, which is also easy at that point, is adopting, in other words, implementing every, all, everything, to work through these changes and go right through it and keep running. And like I said, Being emotional is not. I option being reactive is not helpful to you as a business. It's about pushing through. That's really what it's about. So that's where the four A's came from, and they help, and honestly, they help keep put things into perspective, especially when I'm talking to clients about being competitive in the marketplace about exceeding your your your competition, right? Stop being reactive. That's what it's all about. And honestly, I could say that in the last whatever, let's say five to 10 years, as I kind of built out these four A's and helping clients navigate and put change into perspective, I would say it's helped. It's helped the client more than anything else. I mean, granted, I'm putting my psychologist hat on at that point, but trying to help them navigate this,

Robert Plank 10:52 and I can see how it just helps to tame the chaos, so to speak. And you're mentioning about being emotional and reactive, and it just seems like a lot of if you go that route, it seems like a lot of nonsense and dead ends, and you say, getting frustrated and quitting, then your competitors get ahead, and you get back on, then you're way far behind. And it seems like there is, there's so much noise out there to be overcome, right on LinkedIn, on Google, on YouTube. And I know that you're, you're big on talking about this change that's happening with the algorithms, from ranking to relevance, where it's it's really important to to socialize, like we're doing here, right? We're on podcasts. You have other people talking about you and your ideas, but you tell me, like, what is happening with SEO and AI and just getting noticed, getting heard?

Melih Oztalay 11:43 Yeah, so a couple of things, and I'm going to refer back to Google's 2013 hummingbird algorithm, because it was very impactful. Number one is that's when SEO no longer became a task and SEO became an ongoing marketing process. In other words, it had no end point. You're constantly doing something, whatever something is, and there's a lot that goes into the SEO umbrella. It's not just, Hey, I'm going to put the title and meta description and keywords. We're way beyond that, right? So we think of SEO being something that never ends, and it continues to this day now with two with the hummingbird algorithm, albeit we didn't really call it that at the time. What eventually happened was we talked about answer engine optimization AEO. An AEO is the concept being that your web pages are answering questions that your target audience would ask. So you need to work your way backwards and figure out, how are you, you know, what are the questions that might come up, and therefore your pages are optimized, or a page, or five or 10 pages are optimized around that those answers. Okay. Now, FAQs, I know are shortcuts, but there's other ways of doing AEO now, here we are three you know, in the last three years, we're now into generative engine optimization Geo, and that's all about preparing your website for not search engines, but in addition to search engines, the AI bots that are out there now and so now where search engines are about scouring the web and bringing it all back into a database, AI bots are doing it on the fly for that reason, because they're not pulling anything in and trying to store it and figuring out algorithms and what's you know, what's proper and what's not. They're doing it on the fly, and your web pages have to have the necessary technical code to help answer the question, you know, get them to understand what that page is about, and figure out if you're being going to be referenced in somebody's search within AI. Now let me put it put some perspective on this number one SEO, AEO and GEO, you're doing all three of those simultaneously. There is no version that you just do one and the other two just fall off. Okay, there's the that's not happening. You're doing all three. Now, that's the important part to understand the other thing. And as we were mentioning, you're we're moving away from rankings. It's not about whether or not you're ranked on Google search results or Bing or Yahoo or wherever. We're now moving towards being referenced. So moving from ranking to being referenced is the motion that we're going through, the process, the change that we're going through. Don't worry about whether or not you're ranked on Google. The bottom line is Google search volumes have been going down. And I'm not don't get me wrong. I'm not saying it went down by 50% But we're seeing a downward trend, okay? And AI searches are going up now. In order for you as a company to be in an AI search, you need to have your web pages accommodate the AI bots. All right, let me take it one step further, and let's do it. Let's do it. Help the viewership with an exercise. Go to any GPT you want. I don't care Claude or chat GPT or Gemini or copilot. Take your pick and ask a very simple question. Please recommend to me five to 10 companies that do x right? So depending on what your company does, what services you offer, what products make X that product. So for the sake of this example, let's say it's ball bearings. Okay, please recommend five or 10 companies that do ball that manufacture ball banks. It's going to come back with five or 10 companies, and I will tell you nine times out of 10, or 10 times out of 10, especially in today's world, that you as that company are not going to show up. Your next question after those results is going to be, why did you not recommend my company? Oh, now you're going to get a laundry list of to do's. And guess what? You're going to work your way down that to do list, because that's what you need to do to make sure the AI bots understand who you are and make sure that they reference you in somebody else's search. When somebody is searching for like in this example, we just did ball bearings, right? You want to make sure that you're one of those results, and so take that to do list and just work your way down right. So that's one that's one bit for the audience, which I think is helpful, but I'm going to take it one step further. And I think there's a very simple, I don't say simple, but there's a quick way that you can at least get one of your to do's done, go to your homepage, grab the URL, go to your favorite GPT and ask it to give you the schema, code, schema, slash JSON script for that page. It's going to spit out a script for you copy, paste it into your homepage. You just fulfilled one of your to do's because and listen, schema has been around since 2007 is something new, but the AI bots want something completely different. Or, I should say, different is not the right word. They want additional details. They want it formatted differently. And so for that reason, you're going to take the JSON script from there and you're going to pop it into place. Now some people take it a step further. Google has a JSON script checker that you can just make sure the syntax and all the details are accurate. And if you go to schema.org they also have a schema checker. You can double check over there and make sure everything's the way it's supposed to be. And like I said, this is one very important part of your to do list that you will have from the gpts. And so that's the world we live in, whether relative to SEO, AEO, Geo, schema codes and JSON scripts and how you can use your GPT to figure out how to be competitive and get referenced,

Robert Plank 18:29 that is magical. And I feel like even today, the general public doesn't know that you can do this, that literally any problem or question you have about your business, you can ask your favorite LLM, and then it'll give you, like, a surface level answer. And then you can say, Okay, well, like, What are the five following questions for me? Or, like, if I'm not, if I'm not getting the result I want, like, I'm not listed in the LLM search for, you know, plumbers in Detroit, Michigan, what should I do? And you can just kind of go back and forth with the feedback loop, and it wants to help you, and you want to help it. And you can break down the strategy. And if you're stuck on some step with the implementation, you can say, How do I do this? What tool do I use? Can you check it? What tool do I use to check it? It's all there. It's just asking the right questions. And it's like even I have to remind myself that, like any time management, weight loss, dieting problem, anything like this, you can just say, like, Hey, here's what I want, here's what I'm not getting, here's my goal. Break it down for me. Give me the steps, give me the daily tasks, tell me who to talk to. It's all there. It's just we have to break it down. And it's just like, it, it hurts my brain and blows my mind about this amazing tool that we're just we're just trying to keep up right, to use this and follow through and and get some results from it. And so it's been such a enlightening, magical conversation. And like, everyone listening needs to just, like, go back and listen to like, minute for a minute, like, 14 to 16 just now. And like, get that little bit because that's exactly that price of admission. But since we still want you to just give people a taste and tease of what you're all about and these final minutes of our conversation, what do you think is the missing question here? What should I be asking you? I just don't know what to ask you.

Melih Oztalay 20:17 You don't know what to ask me. What should you ask me and that. And usually what I my thought on this is, what is, you know, what is your pain point? What's causing you, the headache in your business? And what I'm and usually the the answer is pretty simple, I don't have enough leads. I I can't close I have a lot, or I have a lot of leads, and I can't close enough of them, or I've got, I'm not able to close leads fast enough, okay, it's usually going to hover somewhere in that neighborhood, all right. And of course, all that you know, the underlying below that is, I'm not competitive enough. My competitors are ahead of me, or my website's not turning around and generating, you know, generating the response I'm looking for. That's usually where, you know, that little world that we play in, so to speak, and businesses come to us with the idea that I have a problem, help me fix it? Or, Can you help me? And that's usually the question that we, you know, that people would ask us, can you help me? And the, of course, the answer is always yes. It's like, my team is, you know, we have a creative team, we have a marketing team, we've got a tech team. I got writers. Everybody's in Detroit. It's a team of 25 that's been working together now for 14 years. Our Vice President has been working with me for 16 years. It's a very cohesive team, and very knowledgeable and very experienced team as well. And so to that extent, if you you know, you come to us and ask, Can you help me? The answer is always going to be yes, because I guarantee we know what we're doing.

Robert Plank 22:09 And so it seems like there is. It's really valuable to know what that pain point is, to know where you're stuck. And I imagine, and like a lot of your mindset here, revolves around this, right? Revolves around the problems, the questions, and then us as entrepreneurs, business owners, we're supposed to go and seek those problems and go and solve them. So it seems like when you think about going from mediocrity to success, there's not even knowing what the questions problems are. So figure that out. And then a lot of people, they figure out their problems, and they they like being stuck there. They're not seeking solutions. They're just like there to wallow and have the pity party. So then the step after that is say, Okay, I know what the problem is, and I want to solve it, and I know what success looks like after I solve it, and now it's just who will help me get there, whether that's a LLM agency like yours, themselves, the team, combination of all that stuff, and get there. It seems like it's a straightforward path to success when we lay it out that way, but it's, it's definitely worth it to kind of state it in those terms, right? That it's we need to get out of our own our own heads and our own bad thinking, and sometimes have this conversation with you and your agency to get these problems solved. And so we've been talking about these, all these concepts here, about like the the AI SEO and the Gio and all that sort of stuff. But what should someone's pain point be if they contact you, who is your ideal prospect? So to speak?

Melih Oztalay 23:40 First of all, let me add one thing to what everything you just said. I think it's important to understand that marketing is actually a problem solving discipline. Ooh, okay, I don't think, I think that concept gets missed. Everybody looks at marketing as a I you know, demand generation, right? And outbound activities and all these different things, or they look at advertising, or they miss all the marketing activities and go straight to advertising, right, without any foundation of the other things. And all of that really comes down to the fact that, yes, you can execute a strategy or a marketing process with activities and tasks, but the question is, are you able to measure everything? Take all the measurement points, analyze them, and interpret that. And ultimately, you're going to find is you have to solve a problem in order to move forward. And so I think the concept of marketing being a problem solving discipline is very important to understand with regard to us, we are a B to B marketing agency. We work with manufacturers, technology companies, transportation, warehouse, supply chain management. We work with professional services and. On, you know, we've worked with financial institutions in the past and and the like, and a lot of variations within those. And so for us, it's generally the B to B market.

Robert Plank 25:13 Okay, so B to B. And you, like you said, you worked in automotive, healthcare, retail, manufacturing. Is there a ideal size or required size for a company like this?

Melih Oztalay 25:25 Yeah, ideally, $10 million in gross revenue annually, a year is good. But to be profound with you, I would say, you know, we, our clients, probably start more like the 50 to 100 million, and go up in terms of, you know, their their size, never, I mean, obviously we work with startups too, but there tend to be well funded startups. There's a reality here that marketing is labor intensive, regardless of all the AI that's out there and all the llms out there, it doesn't change the fact that a human being is involved in a lot of the elements that need to be executed. The only good news I could say, is that we're able to get twice as much work done with the same budget, with the same amount of people. That's the good news, and that certainly helps to move the needle forward.

Robert Plank 26:12 Yeah, and that's an important point there that, and I have to remind myself that the AI is not sentient, right? It doesn't but it's just it kind of gets you on a faster path towards where you want to go. That sounds like me. I fit that profile, 10 million annually and up, or 15 million and up, or a well funded startup. How can someone contact you? What's the next step? Right?

Melih Oztalay 26:38 So I'll give you my standard response to that. Number one is, go to our website, smart finds, marketing.com there's lots of information about what we do, who we are, and we have case studies as well on the website for different types of activities. The other side of it is, look me up on LinkedIn. I guarantee I'm the only mainly, honestly on LinkedIn. Number one. Number two is I have a network of over 23,000 people, and it keeps growing. And so I generally suggest whether you connect with me or don't tag me on your posts. I usually that'll generate an email in my inbox that says, hey, somebody tagged you. And so I use as my to do. I will react. I will put a solid comment in there. I'll put some hashtags in there as well, and it'll help to expand your reach into a larger, larger audience. I'm happy to do that with anybody that wishes to tag

Robert Plank 27:33 me that is some good LinkedIn hygiene and habits. So take him up on his offer. Find him on LinkedIn. That's May Lee Osterley, and you spell it, M, E, L, I, H, O, z, t, a, l, a, y, and there's just such that importance of making friends and networking and building that social graph. Because if the AIs are looking at your LinkedIn profile, and if they see you have five followers, that's not good. If you have 10s of 1000s of followers, they say, hey, this person has a more solid reputation. If this person is making posts, if they're active, making content, appearing on podcasts, hey, that's all good stuff to get attention to you and your business, to get on that path to ranking better when someone is seeking you out. And as we've been saying, there's so much of a lack of a click from that search over to those web pages. Isn't there that you do Google search? And it tries to be helpful. It says, Hey, let's here's the AI and here's the answer right here. Here's like, four sub questions. It's like they're on purpose, making it difficult to click over into these sites so you can't ignore this anymore, and it'll be, it'll be something that you ignore at your payroll, if you, if you keep on thinking that this is something you get to later, so get a jump on it, especially because we've been speaking about those four A's, anticipate, accept, adapt and adopt, and those last Two are kind of come naturally, but anticipating and accepting that's where we're at right now, as far as trying to rank for some of these AI algorithms, so don't wait on this. Add mainly ostole on LinkedIn and interact with him. And if you're the agency or company that needs help to get this better visibility, He guides national brands through AI powered content strategy. He's helped an influencer grow their audience 11x in just over a year. So melee and his team focus on practical wins that build long term momentum. That company is smart. Finds marketing.com that's the website, or mainly ostole on LinkedIn. And before I let you go, Mr. Mayley, it's time for the scary part of the podcast where I try to stop you. I try to put you on the spot by asking about a fun or interesting quote or lesson. So what comes to mind as far as a fun or interesting quote or lesson? Um.

Melih Oztalay 30:00 I'm going to go with a lesson, and I'm going to suggest for people to read the book Crossing the Chasm. Crossing the Chasm was originally written back in the 80s, after IBM was coming out with new computers every year, and it discusses the concept of early adopters, mainstream doctors and late adopters, and I think it's very important to understand that concept in today's world, even more so than back in the 80s. Now, that book has been updated multiple times over the decades, and it is current, but it does, I still think it's falling short on where we are today to this extent, let's assume that it would you people were able to wait 12 months for something to prove itself and then accept it and move on and say, I'm going to do this. Right? We don't have that luxury anymore. You're down to about six months number one, and by the time something proves itself, you have You're already late to the party in today's world. So that's not even an option anymore. Late adopters have to move into becoming mainstream adopters and therefore process the changes faster. And I realize that's a hard thing for a lot of come for a lot of people and a lot of companies to do, but that's where we come into play.

Robert Plank 31:19 Yes, that's where you provide that help. And they say, Money loves speed, don't they? So that book is called Crossing the Chasm by Jeffrey A Moore, as you said, it's been updated. It's in the third edition. It is the Bible for bringing cutting edge products to larger markets. And they talk about that technology adoption, life cycle, innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. And if you want to change your thinking, change your actions, that's a great resource Crossing the Chasm by Jeffrey A Moore, and we mentioned smart finds marketing.com and mainly ostole on LinkedIn. And you have quite the homework assignment now, right? You need to talk to your llms and work on your your rankings and and your your schema and so many different things. But hey, we're all about solving those problems. So thanks for being here, Mr. Rainey and helping

Melih Oztalay 32:09 us show Robert, thank you very much for having me on your show.

Robert Plank 32:13 Happy to have you all right.