Garry Grant – CEO of SEO Inc. | The Future of SEO: How AI and Quantum Computing Will Revolutionize Search

Frank Cottle [00:01:15]: Hey Garry, welcome to the Future Work podcast. It’s great to have you on and I have to tell our audience a little bit, but I’ve known you for 20 plus years, 25 years, and you are one of the secret sauce agents inside of the alliance structure overall. So I’m sharing a little bit of that with, with our audience. We’ve worked with you on and off with great success throughout the decades, and I know you’ve worked with a variety of people in the flexible workspace sector as well. Some of the largest players, in fact. So welcome to the Future Work podcast. I’m excited for you to share everything. Nothing is sacred here of your knowledge. And tell us first, a little basic. What is SEO and what does it really mean to the users, to a person with a website that wants to be seen?

Garry Grant [ 00:02:17]: Sure. Well, Frank, thank you very much for having me here. I know we’re in different states now, but a little history. We would go out to lunch all the time and tell stories and you invited me to London to speak and I was always super excited to do those speaking engagements. Okay, so let’s get down to businesses and what basically SEO is. I could sum it up very simply. SEO is the ability to get somebody ranked highly on Google, because if you’re not ranked on Google whatsoever, you’re not going to get or generate revenue. That’s, in its simplistic form, 90 plus.

Frank Cottle [00:03:08 ]:Percent of the search engine marketplace. Now. It’s staggering.

Garry Grant [ 00:03:13]: It is staggering. Google is the Goliath so to speak. They all have different little personalities, if you, so to speak. Google is for everybody. It started out as a research center and then it’s just expanded and they’ve monetized it. So Google is everybody. There’s a different demographic. If you look at Bing, the reason being is most people get a computer and Bing is the default search engine and the browser is edge. The demographic is quite interesting because it’s an older element with a lot more revenue. So if you have a company that services maybe elderly people, I’m not talking old, I’m talking fifties on up. That’s a great way to get yourself in front of that audience.

Frank Cottle [00:04:11 ]: Interesting. Okay, yeah. Well, how do you think that Google and the search engines, we’re talking about the future of work here. So for the entrepreneur, for the small to medium sized enterprise that’s really dealing with their own website as a vehicle to gain business, how do you think the search engines and Google in particular are going to change over the next five years?

Garry Grant [ 00:04:38 ]: You know, that’s a great question. Hold on. I should put on the Creskin hat from Johnny Carson if people are old enough. So the search engines are evolving at a exponential pace. So when I started, you would just put keywords in and for years that was the accepted norm. However, the biggest change in the past two years is the use and implementation of AI. Where I see this going, it’s going to be very interesting. Here’s my prediction. I go to Google once a year and hear them talk about where they want to take the company, whether it’s quantum computing or AI or brain mapping. Okay. All three of those are going to be involved. What Google wants to know and what they already know, they just don’t know how to put the big data together with quantum computing. They want to know what you need before you think you need it. So whatever your conversations are online, whatever social media networks, whatever research you’re doing in your browser, for example, my refrigerator is on the blink. I think I’m going to need a new refrigerator. The next two years, magically, you’re going to see those ads appear and they’ll follow you through your journey.

Frank Cottle [00:06:14 ]: So I think following me once I purchased a darn refrigerator, they will still.

Garry Grant [ 00:06:21]: They haven’t figured that out. I’m not going to say it’s perfect. So Google has this thing called, it used to be called rank brain and it was an AI to rank websites. Google is rolling out one. It’s the longest one I’ve ever seen in 25 years. It’s lasted a month and a half, and it’s very volatile. So if people see their rankings at the top, they drop down, they come back up. That’s what’s going on. So the future in the next five years, AI is going to be more complex, hopefully show you better relevant information on the web. Right now. I don’t think it’s the best, but they’re evolving in the next ten years. This may sound like science fiction and the terminator. They’re already, Elon Musk already put a chip in somebody’s brain for somebody who was neuralink. Yeah, Neuralink. The people at Google, specifically Ray Kurzweil, you could look him up. He is the Albert Einstein Einstein of our time, as well as Elon Musk. He has already said, and this was two years ago, he mapped the brain. So if you map the brain, thought process, front, cortex, lobe, whatever, you can use that with some kind of implant to better operate things. Downside is Google will be able to connect to that and know your thoughts, dreams, whatever, which is frightening. The big advantage is you’ll have this insert and be able to access any kind of technology that’s ever been on the Internet.

Frank Cottle [00:08:18]: Okay, let’s stop there for a second. 1st, I’ve known and followed Ray Kurzweil since the mid eighties when he was in Berkeley. So this is one of the most brilliant. And look him up, anybody in the audience. This is one of the most interesting people on the planet, and you can’t say enough about him as a thought leader. What you can say enough is he doesn’t get nearly enough publicity. Well ranked, so to speak. Yeah, he needs a little SEO work. But when you talk about AI, we all thought it’s a huge, massive topic and we all know that. But I’ve got a small website, or I’ve got a big website for that matter. But I’ve got a website and I want Google to see me better. I want Google to say, oh, if you’re looking for anything to do with what Frank does, boom, he pops up so that people can get to my website so I can share what I do. How do I train Google’s AI to see my website above others? Because the whole purpose of SEO is to be number one on the front page. I mean, that’s our goal here. I want to be ranked above everybody else. I want to be seen as the most important website for the topics that I’m playing with. So how do I train Google’s AI? Is it content? Is it speed? What does Google react to that? I can do to my own website and how do I monitor how I’m doing it?

Garry Grant [ 00:10:08 ]: Sure. You know what, Frank? Those are the best questions you could ask somebody who does this for a living. Right. It’s gotten very complex. I call it the million dollar question. Because if people knew how to do it, I’d be out of business, so to speak.

Frank Cottle [00:10:25]: Well, I want that. My goal is to put you out of business.

Garry Grant [ 00:10:29]: But I will tell you factual data. I’m not one of those magicians or smoking mirrors. Snake oil sales guy. I see 98% of the SEO companies are just that.

Frank Cottle [00:10:44]: Can’t say that. Can’t say that.

Garry Grant [ 00:10:48 ]: I’m going to do it because I have all their proposals and what they’re talking. It’s unbelievable. So this million dollar question is two things. How do you get there? And then I see a lot of websites. I just had one yesterday and I’ll talk about it. The other thing is, Frank, you could spend all your time build this unbelievably great website that has good content, so to speak. It looks amazing. You’re blown away. All your friends are blown away and you spend a million dollars on it. Part one, part two, if it’s not visible in Google’s worth zero. Zero that. And the example is if you have your business on Main street, such and such town, you’re going to get foot traffic, right? It’s inevitable that you’ll do that. If you have your business store located in Alaska in the middle of the tundra, nobody’s going to walk by and see you or in the middle of a cornfield in Iowa. Google will get you that visibility. So how do you get there? And you mentioned a few things. Is a content, is it speed?

Frank Cottle [00:12:02]: How do I train that AI you’re talking about? Because AI has to be trained.

Garry Grant [ 00:12:07 ]: It does have to be trained. So I’m going to give you a top five or six things that’ll help. Based on my call yesterday, I had a great website. It is a designer and construction and the thing was beautiful. Aesthetically, he has no rankings, not even the top 100. And he’s been trying, and I looked at the code of the website, it had stuff in there. However, the platform is. Oh, geez, what’s the name that, squarespace or something, or wix. Those two platforms, platform. Yeah. You’ll never get ranked. I don’t care what you do. You could pay Google $5 million, you’re just not going to rank.

Frank Cottle [00:12:56]: Right.

Garry Grant [ 00:12:57 ]: So let’s talk about what really matters these days. Number one and two or tied, is page speed. And that is extremely difficult to do unless you’re a programmer. But even programmers I haven’t met one that knows the intricacies of it. I’ve been doing it for three years. I have a down pat. I have perfect scores. The second piece is this.

Frank Cottle [00:13:24]: Let’s talk for a second why page speed is important. And I’ll answer that question real simple. Google’s cost of servicing a search is based on the time it takes their servers to accomplish that particular search. So if Garry’s website is one millisecond and my website takes 1 second to load, then my website costs Google ten times as much server power timewise to load as Garry’s. And Google being the greedy, selfish bastards they are, doesn’t want to spend the money on my website even though it might be better for the search. Instead, they’ll put Garry’s faster website up first. And that’s the logic behind page speed. It’s not just for the oh, who can have the fastest site. It’s why Google favors page speed that’s important.

Garry Grant [ 00:14:29 ]: 100% correct, Frank. I’ll add my ten cent comment on this. Google tried this four years ago, do you remember? They would want you to create amp pages, accelerated mobile. Okay? That was to accomplish what they’re doing now. However, the European Union sued them and won and said it was unfair business practices. All the newspapers, the big ones, would benefit from that and everybody else didn’t. So I was in the hangouts with Google engineers and they were very frustrated and like they always do, as I hope Google doesn’t hear me, the evil company, so to speak. They said we’re going to put the onus on website owners or anybody with a website. That’s how that started. But when I heard that I started working at it without knowing any of the parameters or even test sites to get the site faster. So that and content are the biggies right now. Links used to be the end all. If you listen to Google, they’re going to tell you that page speed doesn’t matter. It’s all about content. They’re going to tell you that links don’t matter. They’re, they’re going to tell you that the code you know can be okay, that doesn’t matter. It’s all about the user experience and what you’re showing people. Okay, so Google is the masters of misinformation. That’s a big political topic, but they disseminate information that is misleading. That is not going to get you ranking organically. But the question is why?

Frank Cottle [00:16:14]: Yeah, they want your ad money.

Garry Grant [ 00:16:16 ]: That’s right.

Frank Cottle [00:16:17 ]: I want your ad. We all know they want you to pay them instead of them boosting you to the top. So you’re really fighting their own monetary, their own economic model by optimizing. But you still have to do it. We used to have a saying, I don’t know whether you remember this or not, Garry. Going back into the late nineties, early two thousands that, you know, website maintenance or website optimization is like bathing. If you don’t do it every three days, at least you’re going to start to stink. And that’s true of your website optimization is not a, oh, I did it. It’s. I constantly have to do it, adjust. It’s like healthcare or getting in shape physically or something like that. The moment you start working out, you get flabby. At least I. So this is the whole deal around SEO, or optimization in general of your website and why we’re bringing it up. But when we look at your reference links and your reference content. Links can be within content, but your content itself, you have to optimize each piece of content individually as well. You can’t just throw or write or create because you want it all to be original. You can’t just throw something on your website. You’ve got to throw it on with purpose and then architect the content in order to have an aligned outcome with your overall SEO plan. Is that correct?

Garry Grant [ 00:17:57 ]: That is correct. And there’s.

Frank Cottle [00:18:00]: Maybe I should have your job.

Garry Grant [ 00:18:03]: No, you don’t want it because I’m going to give you a little sample of what Dalton was doing yesterday and it kind of popped my eyes.

Frank Cottle [00:18:14 ]: Dalton is your son and partner?

Garry Grant [ 00:18:16]: Yeah, Dalton’s the president. And full disclosure, he’s my son. He’s been working, working at the company like 17 years, ever since he was six, I think maybe 15. I used to teach him SEO and it was great. He started from the bottom, like, cleaning things, and worked his way up. Unlike the way new people are out. Hey, pay me and I’ll show you what I could do. So I’m under that old philosophy.

Frank Cottle [00:18:44 ]: So the Dalton has both more knowledge than you do at this point and better tattoos. So he does.

Garry Grant [ 00:18:51 ]: Yeah. You saw that tat, right?

Frank Cottle [00:18:53]: I’ve known him. I’ve known him a long time. But let’s not go into that. It’s the optimization issue. What can. As we look towards this future of work, this ever changing future, it’s like crossing an ocean. The winds change, the currents change, you have obstacles. The ship gets in your way. All these things going on how does the small to medium enterprise keep up with this? And don’t say hiring you. How do they keep up with this and know what to do or how well they’re performing? Because Google Analytics used to be one of the benchmarks we used, and now it’s somewhat worthless. It’s not that great. Google even makes it difficult to find out how you’re doing on your own website at this point. I know it’s a. I just asked 15 questions, but how does somebody do that?

Garry Grant [ 00:19:54 ]: It’s. Well, it’s not easy, and they make it that way purposefully. Just what we talked about, the Google Ads. So what I could suggest, if without saying, hey, hire somebody is in a business, any business, if you have a storefront and a brick and mortar, if you just let it sit there, the paint’s falling off it, or a restaurant, paint’s falling off it, it gets dirty, you’re not updating it, you’re not staying with the latest trends. It’s the same thing with the website. But how do you find out, you know, what’s going to be effective and what’s not? If you’re doing it yourself, you could research the topics again. There’s a lot of misinformation out there. It’s going to be trial and error. But as you know your business and know your consumers, you would have to get up early in the morning and just take an extra step per day, an hour, put an hour aside to do research, try it on the website and see if that affects the rankings. It’s going to be trial and error. We’ve, we’ve gone through that, been there and done that. And to circle back about that content, Frank, just throwing up an article or really quality content is not necessarily you’re going to be found or have Google’s algorithm like that. We created a tool about three and a half years ago that looks at content for us to create one page now could take a week. Take a week to create one page of quality content that will rank. Is it worth it? Without a doubt. Without a question, it is.

Frank Cottle [00:21:51 ]: Well, where can somebody go to say, how do I determine whether the content I’m creating is quality or not? What are the rules for quality content? Is that defined anywhere?

Garry Grant [ 00:22:05 ]: Not really. There’s AI programs like Chat GPT. It’s not going to tell you if the quality is good or not. Dalton, you may have. You want to add your two cent in there? I’ll give you my opinion. You could take all your content, copy it into Chat GPT, and then there’s certain parameters or things you have to tell GPT to do, and if you don’t specifically do that, you’re not going to get content that ranks. Will Chat GPT? Is that the holy answer? No. Is there a holy answer?

Frank Cottle [00:22:45 ]: You know, well, I’ll use all work as an example. Take articles that we, every article that we publish is optimized and we have last year over a billion impressions just in social media and millions and millions of readers now. So we take every article that we write and we optimize it for keywords. Of course we optimize it using one or multiple AI filters such as you’re talking about, because that’s really what you’re doing. You’re running it through a filter to adjust it relative to multiple search patterns to see how it ranks. And this doesn’t take that long. If we spend it doesn’t take us a week, but we’re probably not doing it as thoroughly as you do. But we do an article and let’s say that takes 2 hours an article, maybe three 2 hours to do an article. It takes us about another hour to optimize it to our degree of satisfaction, which is probably an 80 20 rule or a 70 30 rule on the efficiency basis. But we have a lot of content to get out, so we can’t spend a week doing an article. This is something that is pretty easy to do once you figure it out. And you can use several. There are several other systems specifically for content that you can just look up on the web and find them. And as you say, experiment with a couple of them, I think that’s a worthwhile suggestion for people because content is great, but only if both your reader and the search engines see it. And the search engines have to see your content before your readers will see your content. And you want new readers, not just your old readers. If your website isn’t growing, then, you know, if you look at your stats and you say, oh, I have a thousand visitors a month, oh, that’s great. Every month, right? A thousand visitors, yeah. Cool. Boring. To 1000, 1502 thousand, 2500. You know, it has to grow your audience, which is one of the purposes of the content, I think. At least. I think that’s what it is.

Garry Grant [ 00:25:14 ]: Yeah.

Frank Cottle [00:25:15]: How does that relate to paid search, though? I mean, shouldn’t people have a blend? SEO is not the magic silver bullet. It’s just one of the bullets you carry. But it’s not the only thing you can do. You can’t succeed just with SEO. I think at least you’ve got to have a paid search component in what you’re doing. Maybe you disagree with that, Garry.

Garry Grant [ 00:25:46 ]: I don’t. Organic search is going to bring you over 84% of your traffic. Believe it or not. You’d think paid search does at the top, but people know those are advertisements. Me, I never click on any paid search. Yeah, I do the research myself. If I can’t find it, maybe I’ll try one other one or two of the paid searchers. But it’s like hand in glove. Frank, if you have that budget working, both of those is the best way reason why you own up more real estate on Google’s first page. So that’ll get more traffic, it’ll be better branding, it’ll give a expertise that, wow, these guys are all over, I gotta order from them. If, you know, if you got good rankings, so to speak. Yeah, but it does, Frank. When you were talking about your articles, you guys know what you’re doing and that’s great. And because you spent some time and to do a good article for the typical user, you’re right, it takes that kind of timeframe. I’ll put in context kind of how I was talking about it. It could take a week. It’s because the niche that we’re in, they’re all SEO companies. So who’s we have to outdo? The best of the best, which are some of those on the first page. So it’s a lot more difficult for us. But for a normal person, here’s two tips that, and you already mentioned it, you have to write for the users and you have to write for search engines. And the trick is I’m going to put out content, four or five things every day. That’s not the purpose. The purpose is to have your content viewed. If you just do activities, to do activities, it’s a waste of your time as a business owner and you don’t want to do that.

Frank Cottle [00:27:43 ]:
No, I think that goes into the user experience issue too. So much content that we see. Hit all the time. Oh, I’m a blog writer, I’ll write content, I’ll do this, I’ll do that. And it’s just Pablum, it’s fluff, it’s worthless content, there’s no depth to it. And I don’t like to say Google’s smart enough to figure that out because I don’t want to give them that credit. But they are.

Garry Grant [ 00:28:11]: Yeah, they are.

Frank Cottle [00:28:13]: If you have the same fluff on your website about a topic that everybody else has, then you don’t count. You’re just a grain of sand on the beach. And that’s about it. You have to stand out. You want to rock that somebody stubs their toe on. You don’t want to be just another grain of sand. You want to notice you. That’s critically important. I think, overall, certainly is. As we look at search and we look at content, how does one optimize content, in your view? Is it relative to subject matter? I know we run an algorithm that says, what are trending topics today? What are the topics today? And we align ourselves with that. We say, oh, these are the ten topics that are trending today. Which one of them appeals or has something to do with our audience? What quick research can we do to identify more important data that would relate to that topic? That’s the an article will write. We write about five or six of those timely or newsworthy articles a day, but we run searches to see what people are looking for. How does a website owner do something like that?

Garry Grant [ 00:29:40 ]: Great question. And you know what? I was thinking my brain was kind of cooking. I don’t know if you smelled it, but it was burning a little bit. I think as a follow up to this podcast, I’m going to create some articles that are easy to understand, that has some graphics of kind of what to look for, to find those topics, to find question and answers. And I’ll write a couple articles that we could put right up on the site.

Frank Cottle [00:30:12 ]: Okay. So you’re right. You’ll post some information nation that our readers can follow that will give them guidance on all this.

Garry Grant [ 00:30:20 ]: Yeah.

Frank Cottle [00:30:21 ]: Great. Thank you.

Garry Grant [ 00:30:22 ]: Okay. You know, because we could talk about this blue in the face, and I already know that somebody’s out there listening to me. We had four new clients come in the last two weeks. They don’t, and it’s kind of funny. The. The bigger their title, the less they know. And when. Yeah, when we talk about XYZ, they go, I don’t even know what you’re talking about. So I’m like, oh, my God. I go, you have to have trust in somebody, and what it’ll alleviate with your readers and the followers that you have with the website. And you have a lot now. You’re doing a great job. It’ll stop that misinformation, the false narratives.

Frank Cottle [00:31:06 ]: Well, you know, one of the bits of misinformation that I think is a simple rule to follow. Everybody looks at their own website, okay? And everybody says, oh, I wonder how I rank. And what do they do? They search their own. They do a search in their market or for their product or something like that. Google knows that it’s them. Google knows that they like their own website and Google shows them their own website at the top of the rankings. So the person who searches for their search terms or their. You know, I have a co working center, it’s in Los Angeles, California. So I do searches for co working centers in Los Angeles, California. I’m going to come up at the top because Google knows I like that site, so they’re going to present that to me first. When you’re doing your checking on your own site, get rid of Google’s misinformation and make sure you do your own, all of your searches through a VPN.

Garry Grant [ 00:32:14]: Yeah, that’s a good way to do.

Frank Cottle [00:32:16]: It, because that one thing itself will tell you what the average searcher sees as opposed to what you see. And that one bit of information, you might go, holy cow, I’m number 14 on page three versus I’m number one on page one. And that gives you a place to start that’s valid, which is, I think, where, if you will write some stuff for us, Garry, which I would be grateful for, be our guide here. I think that’s a place where people can start today even before presented with anything, is really. Yeah, look. Look at yourself the way others look at you. And that’s a. That’s a good, good example. When you look in a mirror, you don’t really see your true self. When you see a candid photo of yourself that somebody else snapped, you go, oh, my gosh. Yeah, that’s a whole different image. But that’s what other people see, and that’s what you’ve got to see when you’re looking at your website. Well, we could go on for days on this because the topic is massive. If you will give us some guidance and write some articles for our audience to follow up on, sort of a how to, if you will. That would be great. I’d really appreciate it and I think our audience would be grateful as well.

Garry Grant [ 00:33:41 ]: Awesome. I have no problem doing that. Dalton is pretty phenomenal at. He does all training with our clients, he does zoom training, and we take everything on a gradient, and that’s how I’m going to release them with you. So somebody who knows nothing, but I will always put snippets in there for intermediate and advanced business owners. But I have a feeling there is.

Frank Cottle [00:34:07 ]: A big mix in our own audience out there and mostly small to medium enterprise businesses, but it is a global group as well. So if you could think about that I’d appreciate it.

Garry Grant [ 00:34:23 ]: Hey, no problem. I’m really excited. You know what, Frank? I’m really excited to be here and to be hanging out with you and working together like we always do, and concocting brainstorming ideas. Your platform is excellent. I get your emails constantly and read through everything, and it’s been very insightful. Right. You could maybe read three articles, but if the light bulb goes off in one, you’re like, whoa, didn’t think of that one. It’s very beneficial.

Frank Cottle [00:34:54 ]: Well, appreciate it very much and we’ll look forward to your content.

Garry Grant [ 00:34:57 ]: Great. Hey, everybody, see you next time. Keep their eyes out for that content from Frank.

Frank Cottle [00:35:03]: Take care. Bye bye, Garry.

Garry Grant [ 00:35:05 ]: Bye bye.