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00:00:01
SEO is Changing
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In this episode, Rustam Irani sits down with SEO expert Julian Hooks to unpack the growing confusion around declining traffic, AI’s impact on search, and what higher-ed marketers should actually focus on right now. Together, they cut through the hype around AEO, GEO, and LLMs, revealing that while the discovery landscape is shifting, the fundamentals of SEO—and great marketing—are still the foundation. The conversation explores how user behavior is evolving, why attribution is getting harder, and how marketers can adapt without abandoning what already works.
Resources Mentioned
- RGI AEO Dashboard - https://aeo.rgiconsulting.net/
Timestamps
- 00:00 – The Problem: Traffic and conversions are declining despite doing “everything right” in SEO
- 01:00 – Meet Julian Hooks: 20 years in SEO and deep experience in higher ed marketing
- 04:00 – Is SEO Dead?: Why AI isn’t replacing SEO but reshaping how discovery works
- 08:00 – AEO vs GEO vs SEO: Breaking down the terminology and what actually matters
- 10:30 – The Attribution Problem: Why AI-driven traffic is hard to measure (but still impactful)
- 13:00 – New Signals to Watch: Direct traffic, branded search, and behavioral shifts
- 15:30 – AEO Measurement Framework: Visibility, share of voice, citation rate, and sentiment
- 22:00 – How to Prioritize Efforts: 80–85% fundamentals vs 15–20% AI-specific adjustments
- 25:00 – Content Strategy Shift: Don’t abandon long-form—just surface answers faster
- 28:00 – Why Traffic Is Down: LLMs are capturing top-of-funnel informational queries
- 31:00 – Higher Intent Users: Fewer visitors, but stronger conversion and engagement
- 32:00 – Final Advice: Think holistically, focus on fundamentals, and build a great product/experience
Recommended
Transcript
SEO Challenges and Decline in Traffic
00:00:01
Rustam Irani
All right, well, you're doing everything right. Your content is being published, you're optimizing pages, you're doing all of the core SEO work that you've been doing for many, many years, but something's still not right.
00:00:16
Rustam Irani
Site traffic's down, conversions might be down, and really, lot of the clarity that you had one day may not be there. We're seeing that happen across the board.
00:00:26
Rustam Irani
It's more and more in all the conversations we have with some of our schools that we work with, as well as others that we're talking to in the industry.
Podcast Introduction: Julian Hooks on SEO Evolution
00:00:35
Rustam Irani
And today we're going to break down a lot of what's hype and what's not in the SEO, AI, AEO, GEO world. And we have today Julian Hooks, who's an industry leader, been in an SEO game for a long time. I've known Julian for probably 15 years or so, and excited to have this conversation.
00:01:00
Rustam Irani
Welcome back to University, podcast for higher ed marketers and leaders who want to change the game and themselves. I'm Rostam Irani, former higher CMO, as well as a recovering engineer and passionate digital
Julian's Journey: From Web Building to Higher Ed
00:01:15
Rustam Irani
marketer. So love to jump in. Julian, welcome to the show.
00:01:19
Rustam Irani
you don't mind doing a little bit of background on you, your experience, kind of your years in SEO, which I know are quite plentiful. So yeah, welcome to the show.
00:01:29
Julian Hooks
Hi, thanks for having me, definitely. And for the audience here, my name again is Julian Hooks. I've been doing, well, SEO has been the only job I've had after, actually since before college, actually.
00:01:45
Julian Hooks
So I started 2007.
00:01:45
Rustam Irani
Thank you.
00:01:49
Julian Hooks
I graduated high school in 2006, started SEO in 2007, just building my own first websites and trying to get traffic to them. And that kind of led me down a path and I've been doing it ever since. So that would be coming up next year. That should be 20 years of being in the trenches, doing driving organic search.
00:02:11
Julian Hooks
And I got into higher ed marketing 2012.
00:02:16
Rustam Irani
Thank
00:02:18
Julian Hooks
Shortly after moving to Florida and and that that was really eye opening, but I've always had a foot in higher ed marketing pretty much ever since then I've had at least, you know, some connection to some universities and schools and their marketing programs.
00:02:36
Rustam Irani
Awesome. Well, it's funny when I think back at... Julian and I have had a long history. And what's amazing about this, and I'm a big believer in this, is you want to kind of cheer people on as they grow and as they
00:02:48
Julian Hooks
Thank you.
Reflecting on Collaboration and Career Growth
00:02:52
Rustam Irani
succeed.
00:02:52
Rustam Irani
And Julian and I actually worked together. Julian was our head of SEO at a school I was working at. And Julian came to me one day said, Hey, we're some like, I appreciate everything. And it's been fun. But I'm just crushing it with some of the stuff that I've done some of the sites you built and so on. And you're like, I just have an opportunity to focus on this. And I just I remember that so vividly join because like, I was so proud of you. I was so happy for you. Obviously not for us at that time. But I
00:03:27
Rustam Irani
You know, that's what happens and on it. And that's what it's about. It's about the individual. It's about the success of the individual. And, and what's amazing is the full circle of how we're working again together, right?
00:03:40
Julian Hooks
Yeah.
00:03:40
Rustam Irani
That works, right? Good people. kind of stay in touch and cheer each other on and eventually kind of come back around. And I'm so glad we're working together again.
00:03:50
Rustam Irani
All right. Well, here's the deal, Julian.
Is AI Killing SEO?
00:03:54
Rustam Irani
You work on the SEO side with number of our clients and you see what's going on. You've seen of across the board, there's a lot of talk about SEO being dead because of AI. all the LOMs are stealing all the traffic, right?
00:04:11
Rustam Irani
So what's your honest take on that? Because I believe some of it's noise, but what's your take?
00:04:34
Julian Hooks
I would lean towards Google over a chat GPT or even Claw. They're kind of carving out their niches right now.
00:04:40
Rustam Irani
just going to be really, really,
00:04:44
Julian Hooks
There's so much, and there's a reason that so many SEOs are the default AEO, GEO people. And it's because there's such an overlap with this new channel.
00:04:57
Julian Hooks
Because if you think about it, the LLMs, they have to get this information for them to operate somehow. And they're using the internet.
00:05:08
Julian Hooks
And how do you surface information on the internet? They're all using search engines of some sort to crawl, retrieve information, especially real-time information. It's one thing to have a data set because you've been crawling the web for however long, however many years you've been crawling, but that information gets old really quick.
00:05:30
Julian Hooks
So you're constantly having to refresh your training models or the data that they're trained on. And so that's why couple years ago, maybe one year ago, you'll see a lot of, especially ChatGPT, it defaults to doing a web search for the majority of questions or prompts that people put And regardless whether they're using Google or Bing or some other search engine to do those web searches, they are still going out on the web and doing a search.
00:05:59
Julian Hooks
And that's where the SEO overlap comes in because they're doing searches basically on the user's behalf. So it might not be student on Google searching for, you know, what's the best program or university for me.
00:06:14
Rustam Irani
you.
00:06:14
Julian Hooks
It's them asking chat or one of the other LLMs. And then that bot goes out and does the search on the student's behalf, you know, pulls in, compiles the data, does the analysis, and then spits back the answer.
00:06:28
Julian Hooks
So there's really a large overlap on SEO. And then marketing and branding in general, there's also still overlap.
AEO and GEO: New Terms, Same SEO Core
00:06:37
Julian Hooks
You'll see really, really high correlations between strong branding and strong visibility in the LLMs, as well as strong SEO and strong visibility in the LLMs. So still important, very much so.
00:06:54
Rustam Irani
Yeah, and I appreciate that. And I think one of the things also, right, the terms that are out there, AEO, answer engine optimization, or it's GEO, right? There's so many different terms.
00:07:09
Rustam Irani
Like how are any of those different? Are they different? Or is it just kind of different way to say answer, like LLM optimization? Is there any differences there?
00:07:19
Julian Hooks
I personally don't think so. think people are trying to create definitions that'll serve different buckets. So in the local SEO space, I see them using GEO much more often than anything else.
00:07:27
Rustam Irani
Yeah.
00:07:33
Rustam Irani
Okay. Okay.
00:07:35
Julian Hooks
And then when you think kind of just national in general, anything that's not like the local space, I'm seeing answer engine optimization more prevalently. So I feel like they're trying to carve out some more strict definitions in terms of generative engine and then answer engine.
00:07:57
Julian Hooks
But at the end of the day, it's like that AI search channel. I think it's just that one new channel. And I personally just say AEO, but
00:08:07
Rustam Irani
Okay.
00:08:08
Julian Hooks
It doesn't matter for me, and I don't think it really makes a huge difference.
00:08:08
Rustam Irani
Yeah. Yeah. And.
00:08:14
Rustam Irani
So I guess the other question is, how impactful is this right now? Do you think? How much effort should school or university be putting towards optimizing for AEO or GEO and so on?
00:08:30
Rustam Irani
And what's awesome, and this is kind of a little bit of a kind of layup since we've worked together to build an AEO dashboard, right? That shows you exactly kind of what's happening in the platform. But yeah, I mean, how much effort or time should people be spending outside of the core SEO, which is still critically important?
The Rising Importance of AEO
00:08:54
Julian Hooks
Yeah, I think it's very important and it's going to become more important. But it's also difficult to put, let's say, number on it because this new channel, the attribution is just almost not there at all.
00:09:07
Rustam Irani
Yeah.
00:09:10
Julian Hooks
But it is one of those things where like, you know you're doing the right thing, but you might not be able to prove it just yet. But you have a lot of signals.
00:09:21
Julian Hooks
And, you know, that's in business, it just comes down to, you know, like doing great business or having a great product. And it's like, what is the attribution just having a great product or having great customer service? Like there's so many things that will never know exactly how many people student or customer told about their amazing experience.
00:09:43
Julian Hooks
Like you might get a review out of them. You might not get a review out of them. But they might have told 50 people how amazing your school is, your product or service, what it's done for their career, X, Y, and Z.
00:09:49
Rustam Irani
Thank you.
00:09:54
Julian Hooks
And you'll never be able to attribute that to other people who signed up. So it's similar in that vein where like, we know if we do the right things, it comes back in ROI.
00:10:07
Julian Hooks
But the attribution just isn't there right now. So there's a couple kind of clues that you can see.
Shifting Search Behaviors Due to AI
00:10:15
Julian Hooks
we do have the little bit of attribution. So you can look in your analytics and see the traffic, the referral traffic coming from the various LLMs.
00:10:23
Julian Hooks
But we know the click-through rate out of these LLMs is really, really, really small.
00:10:27
Rustam Irani
Yeah.
00:10:30
Julian Hooks
And so we know there's so much more happening there. Like you might be getting 100, 1,000 visits from anllm but there's likely maybe a hundred more times, hundred X more times that you were mentioned or talked about, or someone saw your brand name or you were cited.
00:10:46
Julian Hooks
But we just don't have that kind of volume numbers right now. And I'm hopefully once the paid search or the paid ads and campaigns are open broadly and widely to everyone within the LLMs, they'll have to start supplying some type of metrics Because you can't just spend and have nothing to track for it. So I'm hopeful that that's coming in the future.
00:11:09
Julian Hooks
But right now we have the referral traffic from the LLMs. Other things that we look at, and we kind of pair this with the SEO, because you might be seeing organic traffic numbers come down.
00:11:21
Julian Hooks
And more now than ever, even as an SEO, I have to look at all channels. Because people didn't just disappear. The people just, they're not all of sudden not searching anymore. They're just, their behavior's changed. They're searching somewhere else.
00:11:39
Julian Hooks
And so it's our job to figure out like where the users are now doing their searching or what's their user behavior now. So what we're looking at, direct traffic across the board on lots of schools and other sites that I've seen and have access to, direct traffic is going up for a lot of people.
00:11:58
Julian Hooks
And that's kind of the catch all bucket for when, you know, GA doesn't exactly know where they came from.
00:12:00
Rustam Irani
Yeah, that challenge. The challenge we're seeing exactly Julian is that it keeps growing, right?
00:12:06
Julian Hooks
Yeah.
00:12:09
Julian Hooks
Yeah. Direct is growing. Keeping an eye on your branded traffic as well, because that's likely tied to that direct traffic. And so what's happening is if someone's searching or using an LLM and they're, they're getting an answer and that answer is your brand.
00:12:25
Julian Hooks
then the next thing they do is, you know, if they're not going to click that tiny little link, or there's there is no link, then they head to the search engine. And then they, you know, they type in your brand.
00:12:32
Rustam Irani
Yeah.
00:12:34
Julian Hooks
Or they just, you know, maybe they they type in your URL, if it's super short or something like that.
00:12:36
Rustam Irani
Yeah.
00:12:40
Julian Hooks
So that direct and that brand traffic should be growing. And that's likely tied to some AI behavior and AI search behavior. If you're not, you know, if you haven't done some
00:12:51
Rustam Irani
Yeah.
00:12:53
Julian Hooks
giant brand campaign at the same time, if you haven't done anything that should be massively increasing your branded search, then it's likely that AI channel is heavily influencing that.
00:13:05
Julian Hooks
And so those are a couple clues where you can start tracking and looking at these things for kind of that direct attribution.
00:13:14
Rustam Irani
Yeah. And to that point, I think one thing we also are seeing across a number of, again, our conversations we're having out there and the schools we work with is some of the traffic is down to the sites, but the folks that are coming through and engaging, let's say they're engaging with live chat or they're filling out a lead form, Their actual application or interview rates or their enrollment rates, we're seeing a bit of a lift, actually, from the folks that are coming through. And I think one thing that's interesting that I think there's a lot of data that we can still look into, and this goes back to understanding a little bit of what's happening in these searches in the LLMs, is... are they getting the information through that versus having to speak with somebody or versus having to dig into the website? So there could be areas where they're getting information right off the top, for example, cost. If they want to know the price of a program, they may be able to kind of just research that pretty quickly. Perplexity is amazing at giving research, right, as well as any of these LLMs. So I think that's an interesting thing that we're seeing across the board. I know you're seeing that as well. And to that point, I think one area, maybe you can speak to this because I have just been...
00:14:33
Rustam Irani
you know pretty impressed with what you've been doing, with what you've been building, Julian.
Julian's AEO Dashboard: Metrics for Brand Visibility
00:14:37
Rustam Irani
In the dashboard, you've really pulled together real overview and look at what is key and what is important. And there's four key factors that you have developed out into this dashboard, which is visibility rate, share of voice, citation rate, and overall sentiment.
00:14:55
Rustam Irani
And maybe you can kind of speak to like a little bit of that, like when you were building that out, what your thought process was and like how you see that kind of shaping what people are looking at now.
00:15:07
Julian Hooks
Yeah, definitely.
00:15:08
Rustam Irani
Yeah.
00:15:09
Julian Hooks
So I always knew that the very first step in getting a handle on this new channel was some type of measurement.
00:15:20
Julian Hooks
Because you got to go from somewhere, you have to start somewhere. And I had no clue like what's going on in this black box that are these LLMs. And so there's been a lot of, you know, SaaS companies that have popped up and they start doing these trackings. And I've tested the majority of them and some I'm still customers with some of them.
00:15:40
Julian Hooks
and they're, you know, they're, they're iterating on things, but again, with the use of LLM, you know, the vibe coding, like lot of these things, if you're, if you're a small shop, or you just don't have the budget, cause some of these softwares are extremely expensive. i'm seeing the pricing come down now. Cause I think some of the, they, they realize that people are just going to figure out other ways to do this themselves.
00:16:03
Julian Hooks
But yet you want to know, and here's kind of the process we went through since we don't have prompt volumes, but we can still rely on traditional search keyword volume as far as the topics go.
00:16:05
Rustam Irani
Thank you.
00:16:17
Julian Hooks
So we know, you know, people are still searching for, you know, business administration programs or what's the best school, you know, in my state or my city, or, you know, what's the what salary can I expect with this type of job, X, Y, Z? So we know those searches are still being done. And so we have that kind of top level data in terms of search volume.
00:16:39
Julian Hooks
And so what we do is we take those key terms and we kind of turn them into conversational prompts.
00:16:39
Rustam Irani
So
00:16:45
Julian Hooks
And so that's where we start with the tracking. Like we know what's important to the school. We know what's important to the students. And so we just, we create those conversational prompts there.
00:16:57
Julian Hooks
And then we start tracking those to see as the responses come how often is our school mentioned? And then we do go a little bit deeper because there is, and I'll get into that because that's kind of the next step, but it's just how often is your brand being mentioned?
00:17:15
Julian Hooks
Are they linking to you? So is there a chance that someone can click through to your university or website?
Understanding Sentiment in AI Mentions
00:17:25
Julian Hooks
share a voice so you know how often in comparison to your competitors so are they are they sharing 10 schools at a time which is a lot for you know a prospective student to have to process just be like okay well you didn't really narrow it down for me yeah in terms of results it's like if someone asks you know what's the best you know school near me and they get 10 results like oh thanks i could have done that myself i still have to dive into 10 different results Or are they giving a top three or a top two?
00:17:40
Rustam Irani
In the result. Yeah.
00:17:57
Julian Hooks
And so with the share of voice, you also get that number in terms of, you know, what's the percentage of you versus the competitors? So that helps like kind of give context to that visibility score. Because the visibility could be very high, but they could also be mentioning 10 schools every single time.
00:18:17
Julian Hooks
So yeah, you're showing up, but your share of voice is now only 10%.
00:18:22
Rustam Irani
Yeah.
00:18:22
Julian Hooks
So visibility high, share a voice low, it's like, all right, we're showing up, but so is everybody else.
00:18:28
Rustam Irani
Mm.
00:18:29
Julian Hooks
You know, so that also helps us give context to the visibility number. Then we have a citation, which is at least a chance for them to just click right through to your website. And then there's the sentiment, because we know it's just because you're being mentioned, you know, doesn't mean they're saying nice things about you.
00:18:46
Julian Hooks
so you know the prompts aren't always like, what's the best. So it could be like, what's the best and worst? What's the pros and cons? Similarly, things like that. And so sometimes the response will say, this school is great for this, but according to these reviews and these Reddit posts and this affiliate website, they don't do very well in these areas.
00:19:09
Julian Hooks
And so you want to know that when you're showing up, what's the sentiment behind that as well? Is it positive? Is it neutral? Or is it negative in which we need to maybe activate and figure out where they're getting this information from and seeing if we can go out there and resolve that?
00:19:26
Rustam Irani
Yeah, and I love that. You have built that out. You know, you hooked and utilize many, many tools. And, you know, I can tell you, that's one thing I've loved about kind of working with you over the years is you're always kind of looking to learn and improve and then also figure it out and start to build.
00:19:47
Rustam Irani
And I've, I've, done my share of Vibe Coding as well, which has been pretty exciting recently. And maybe I'll talk about that. It created a really cool heat mapping app that shows you kind of whatever data sets you're looking at.
00:20:01
Rustam Irani
But we won't go into that today. But I think the other thing here, Julian, is there there are I guess people that are still a little confused about the traffic that's coming through and the real true impact of LLM searches,
00:20:26
Rustam Irani
Do you think that's kind of over-hyped right now with the actual impact versus core SEOs and SEO fundamentals and still building relevant content that speaks to EAT and doing and making sure your schema is probably making sure your site loads fast, making sure all those fundamentals are in place? Have you ever thought of a number? Are we like 90% is still core fundamental, 10% maybe? Or is it? Have you seen it kind of increase? Where do you think that number is? I'm just curious. I don't think we've ever talked about that, but I'd be curious.
00:21:02
Julian Hooks
I think it's still very high, you know, 85, 80 on the core fundamentals.
00:21:07
Rustam Irani
Okay.
00:21:11
Julian Hooks
And then because a lot of those things, when you get into the technical details of how the LLM works and how they're crawling your site, like speed is always going to be a factor.
00:21:22
Julian Hooks
Like if the LLM is trying to retrieve information for a user,
00:21:22
Rustam Irani
Yeah.
00:21:26
Julian Hooks
it can't wait a minute for your site to load to get the information. It's just going to time that out and pull something out or just omit it. So like when you think about those things, like if you think of the LLM bot like as a user, because it's coming to your website to retrieve information, like it's still, once it's fast, easy to find, structured, so it's easy to understand,
00:21:52
Julian Hooks
So all those things still play a very big part in that visibility. The 20 to 15 to 20% things that might be different or tweaked or changed just comes down how the bots are synthesizing information and how it might be a little bit different than a user.
00:22:12
Julian Hooks
So for example, we know now you know that many of the LLMs
00:22:17
Rustam Irani
Mm.
00:22:19
Julian Hooks
there's a limit, like payload limit on how much of the page they're going to load. Because again, they need to do things quick because they not only do they have to load your page, they're loading 10 to 20 other website pages, then they also have to go through that information and then give the answer to the user. So they're working on a quick timeline.
00:22:40
Julian Hooks
And so you know, the big long articles, they are great. They're good for humans, but sometimes maybe you need to rethink or reshape them. And, you know, you're always, you don't want to forget the little guy, the humans, everyone else, just to try and you know, satisfy the LLM bot, especially when you don't even know like what the volume or traffic or impact is there right now.
00:23:04
Julian Hooks
So it's like, you don't want throw away the playbook and like only care about, oh, this is good for LLMs. And at the detriment of your search or your organic. So like right now, one of the hot things is like short, snippy content that just gives the answer right away is good for LLMs.
00:23:22
Julian Hooks
And so what are you just gonna delete all your articles, your expert guides and things like that and just serve up a paragraph instead and lose all your search traffic so you can try and get some visibility in the LLM?
00:23:35
Julian Hooks
Well, that's obviously not the way to go.
00:23:37
Rustam Irani
Yeah.
00:23:37
Julian Hooks
So that 15 to 20% is thinking thoughtfully of, okay, how do we create an experience that's great for search, traditional SEO, our user base, our students first and foremost,
Balancing Content for Humans and LLMs
00:23:50
Julian Hooks
and then also how do we serve any LLM bots or crawlers that are coming to the website as well?
00:23:51
Rustam Irani
Thank you.
00:23:56
Julian Hooks
And so people are testing, having like a markdown page or file versus just the HTML file. They're testing things. And what I've found to work and what I like is just maybe edit your copy. So above the fold, that most important answer is right there.
00:24:16
Julian Hooks
So traditionally, people are like, oh, we need time on site. Let's bury the lead. Let's put it at the bottom or in the middle, like that real meaty answer that they came for. Just go ahead and put that on top.
00:24:25
Rustam Irani
Yeah.
00:24:27
Julian Hooks
You know, if that's all they need and they get the answer and then they leave, it's okay. You don't have to force them to scroll to the bottom to kind of get the information they're wanting. And that serves two purposes. Now you still have all your content for people who are really interested and they're going to read through the whole thing.
00:24:45
Julian Hooks
For people that just want to skim the TLDR, they get what they want at the top and then they can make their decision to either leave or continue on. And then for the LLMs right there at the top half of that content, they also get what they're looking for too.
00:25:00
Julian Hooks
So they come, they get the information they need, take it, and then they're gone. So that kind of serves everyone. And so that's what I've been seeing is working kind of really well. And in that same vein, you know, with the information, was kind of already commoditized with the internet, but at least people, you know, you had to go to the website and, you know,
00:25:21
Julian Hooks
People could sell ads on those eyeballs and there was a real marketplace there and a good amount of value or perceived value because at least you have that traffic number. You could say these people came to the website, they saw our brand, they had an opportunity to engage with us.
00:25:37
Julian Hooks
And that opportunity is valuable whether they took it or not. And so now with a lot of that top of funnel content, they don't have to go to the website to get the answer.
00:25:49
Julian Hooks
And so that's one of the big things about the traffic drop. A lot of it is top of funnel. If they're not already thinking like two to three steps ahead, like once I find this out, then I got to take action on something.
00:25:54
Rustam Irani
yeah
00:26:04
Julian Hooks
If it's just information only, that's the traffic that a lot of us are losing right now. They get the salary information from the box. And this started on Google with the rich snippets before.
00:26:17
Julian Hooks
And entire industries have to have done this with Google Flights, calculators. There used to be calculator websites, got a ton of traffic. Now there's a calculator on Google.
00:26:26
Rustam Irani
Yeah.
00:26:27
Julian Hooks
Same thing with flight searches. Expedia and others, they sued Google for this same thing. Google's like, oh, we'll give you all the flight information right here. We're also affiliate with all the airline partners. So use Google Flights. So that killed industries when they're just taking all the information and serving it up right there.
00:26:44
Julian Hooks
And so now this is that on steroids. First, it was the rich snippets. They were just pulling out at least a sentence or a paragraph. Now they're pulling out entire answers, taking all the content, just giving everyone everything they need without ever leaving that ecosystem, whether it's the LLMs or whether it's Google.
00:27:04
Julian Hooks
Google's now merging more of their AI mode into the traditional search. So it's more and more AI. less leaving the Google ecosystem. And that is really, really driving down these traffic numbers.
00:27:18
Rustam Irani
Yeah.
00:27:19
Julian Hooks
But like I said, lot of that is informational. People still need to book the flights. They're still ending up. If you have to take that next real world action, then you still have to do something. So those people are still there. And that's why you're saying,
00:27:34
Julian Hooks
The people that do go through, we're seeing increased conversion rates and increased engagement because those users that are at the bottom of the funnel that are ready to take an action, they still have to take that action.
00:27:39
Rustam Irani
Yeah.
00:27:45
Julian Hooks
So they're still there, but a lot of that top of the funnel traffic is gone. And while we do say it's less important because they're further away from taking that action or becoming a student or a customer, it's still important in terms of eyeballs.
00:28:01
Julian Hooks
You want as many people to see and go to your site and have it in the back of their mind as possible.
00:28:06
Rustam Irani
brand exposure I mean it's brand awareness
00:28:07
Julian Hooks
Yeah. So that, yeah, that brand exposure and awareness is going. And I think that is, you know, it takes a while for that to hit the bottom line, but it is, it is a thing. And that's why the visibility portion on the LLMs is like, well, we need people to see us, see our name and know we exist.
00:28:29
Julian Hooks
And Before they can do anything, they have to know we exist. So that's why the visibility is still very, very important. And if you're not going to get that visibility kind of on the organic search side, that's why you have to start making sure that you're visible in as many places as your target audience is going to be giving their attention to.
Adopting a Holistic Marketing Approach
00:28:50
Rustam Irani
Yeah, no, I appreciate that. I think, and again, you brought it full circle to kind of the conversations we're having right now with a lot of marketing leaders and schools is,
00:29:02
Rustam Irani
The people that are coming through, the intent is quite a bit higher. They've done some of the homework and they're coming through and we're seeing the impact of that. But don't ignore the folks that are coming to your website from a remarketing or retargeting perspective. There's so many other opportunities there.
00:29:19
Rustam Irani
this as usual, this time usually flies by, especially when I speak to somebody who is just so extremely knowledgeable kind of in a subject. And I appreciate, you know, Julian, kind of your background, what you've been doing over the years, you've built sites, you've done so much, it's just been awesome to continue to work with you.
00:29:41
Rustam Irani
You know, I guess, just to kind of wrap it up, like if you were to say, like, you've seen and you've kind of seen where some of our schools are, where some of the focus is and what they're looking at. And if you were to kind of say, hey, you know, you were talking to a current marketing leader or CMO, you know, what would you say is kind of a key thing for them to kind of look out for right now or just stay on top of? You know, think, you know, even one or two things, if you had some advice just from what you're seeing, from what we're seeing, like,
00:30:13
Rustam Irani
Here are a couple things just to keep in mind.
00:30:15
Julian Hooks
Yeah, I think what I've been, because a lot of times we really zoom into the specific channels and how is this one thing working, whether it's paid campaign or whether it's organic.
00:30:16
Rustam Irani
Yeah.
00:30:19
Rustam Irani
Yeah.
00:30:42
Julian Hooks
Because as the attribution gets fuzzier and it's harder to get a grasp on the user behavior and the information is more democratized, then it really becomes as a whole, how is the university doing?
00:30:57
Julian Hooks
We're talking direct, organic, offline channel.
00:30:59
Rustam Irani
Yeah.
00:31:01
Julian Hooks
Like what are we doing outside of the computer the internet? And wrapping that all together and looking at things as a whole I think it'll help relieve some stress and really help get a better picture on how these different channels are working together.
00:31:19
Julian Hooks
I found that that's been really helpful for me trying to make sense of a lot of these things, especially when I see organic traffic down. I'm just like, what the heck is going on?
00:31:27
Rustam Irani
Yeah.
00:31:28
Julian Hooks
I'm like, the impressions are still there.
00:31:29
Rustam Irani
Yeah.
00:31:30
Julian Hooks
People are still searching. It's just like, oh, but this is going up. And this went up more than organic went down.
00:31:35
Rustam Irani
Yeah.
00:31:37
Julian Hooks
So what's going on here? And so really just taking that step back and looking at things holistically. And then also realizing that we're marketers. And if you're in this, it seems like this has been happening forever. It's been, what, two and a half, three years since ChatGPT came out.
00:31:54
Julian Hooks
That's really not a long time. The adoption... we're early adopters. People watching this podcast are early adopters.
00:32:02
Julian Hooks
If you're using AI, you're an early adopter. The rest of the world still largely is not in here yet.
00:32:09
Rustam Irani
Yeah.
00:32:10
Julian Hooks
So also keep that in mind.
00:32:11
Rustam Irani
Or are you just using basic type stuff?
00:32:15
Rustam Irani
Yeah.
00:32:16
Julian Hooks
There's so many different things in the evolution come.
00:32:16
Rustam Irani
Right.
00:32:19
Rustam Irani
Yeah.
The Timeless Value of a Great Product
00:32:20
Julian Hooks
And so that's why I think in that and also... getting back to basics and focusing on some core things that permeate permeate through any type of marketing, anything you do you know, just focusing.
00:32:29
Rustam Irani
I'm...
00:32:37
Julian Hooks
And we say like, you know, it's really easy to sell a great product, like very similar things. And I don't think that's going to change in the LLM world. Whereas, you know, if you get the best in class faculty and, and, and, you know,
00:32:52
Julian Hooks
campus experience and students are happy and they're getting kind of the outcomes that they were promised or that they expected and things like that. Like there's no, that is going to work.
00:33:04
Julian Hooks
And so there's those things and then just showcasing that to the world in every way you can.
00:33:04
Rustam Irani
Yeah.
00:33:10
Julian Hooks
So, you know, maybe that is social. You know, it's social. TikTok is getting bigger. TikTok organic is getting bigger. TikTok has a local presence now.
00:33:21
Rustam Irani
Yeah.
00:33:21
Julian Hooks
So there's lots of different avenues, whether it's the Reddits of the world, there's just, you know, wherever your users are, like, you know, there should be some type of engagement there.
00:33:31
Julian Hooks
And if you're doing kind of the basics right, then all you really have to do is just share experiences. And then that makes marketing a lot easier because, you know, your students are basically doing it for you.
00:33:44
Rustam Irani
Yeah, I know, appreciate. Julian, I am grateful to be continuing to work together, have known you for so many years and continue to learn from you every day in our conversations and the work we do together.
Conclusion: SEO's Place in the Discovery Ecosystem
00:33:59
Rustam Irani
And the key takeaway here is SEO is not dead, it's not dying, it's still very much alive. It's just realistically being absorbed into broader discovery ecosystem.
00:34:12
Rustam Irani
That's kind of what I would say, right?
00:34:13
Julian Hooks
Yep.
00:34:14
Rustam Irani
There's a bigger discovery ecosystem out there. So just keep that in mind. When you're looking at all of this, and down funnel, down funnel, attribution, make sure you keep a good picture on what's happening. Well, Julian, I appreciate you coming on. Great chat. Great to speak with you.
00:34:33
Rustam Irani
And that's all for this class of ROI University where the biggest ROI is personal.