Manick Bahn and Search Atlas Transcript

Royce Hall

This is Royce Hall, your host of the Coffee Dreamin podcast, your online network for sales leaders, operations leaders, marketing leaders connected to the Salesforce ecosystem. Thank you for listening, and be sure to like, subscribe, and share. Hey, this is Royce Hall, your host of Coffee Dreamin', and I'm joined today by Manick Bahn.

Manick, it is great to have you. Manick is with Search Atlas. So again, great to have you today.

Manick Bahn

Great to be here, Royce.

Royce Hall

So Manick, I was looking at your LinkedIn the other day. You clearly have a long history and passion around SEO.

Tell me what got you into that and why that's such a big passion for you.

Manick Bahn

Yeah, so that's true. Very passionate about SEO and just search in general.

And the reason for this is my first startup that I started working on, this is over 10 years ago, it was in the live entertainment ticketing space. So we were competing with StubHub, Seageek, Ticketmaster, all the big names in that industry. And the funny thing is, those companies you might think of as the largest companies in the ticketing space, but the truth is, Google is the largest ticketing company.

Because more people go to Google to find and buy tickets to events than anywhere else. And they monetize the industry through Google Ads, YouTube Ads, they make a lot of money. And I think that a huge percentage of the value in that industry is actually taken by Google through the ads.

So what that means is that Google is so important as a ticketing engine, that if you want to build a ticketing company, you have to win on Google. And if you're not there on Google, good luck. You can build a mobile app.

And yeah, we did that. And we were able to get market share on mobile, which was great. But many people still buy tickets at their desktop computer.

And so in order to build that company and succeed, we had to learn about search. And so that's how I cut my teeth. Yeah.

Royce Hall

Well, that's awesome. Well, let me ask you a little bit, dig in on that a little bit more. So obviously, like I still Google everything, but I'm also like the older generation now, like my kids aren't doing that.

My kids are going to chat GPT, right? And getting their information there. Does chat GPT, can't say it, does chat GPT change that equation for you? Hmm. Yeah, it is shifting the equation for sure.

Manick Bahn

And it's not just chat, it's also Bing. Because Bing's market share has grown quite tremendously. They're gaining on Google.

Google is still by far like king, but they've grown a lot. And so now today, it's more important than ever to have a Bing strategy, which is weird. Very few search engine marketers think about Bing, but today it's actually way more important now than ever to be aware of what our rankings are in Bing and to try to improve them.

In addition, chat, we actually did a survey in our community. And I was wondering, how many people have actually bought something because chat GPT gave them like recommended something or they were doing research? How many people bought something based on something they read in chat? And it was interesting. I've definitely done that.

I pay for the pro version, we're all in. And I use it to research for Search Atlas. Like when we have to buy an expensive piece of software or our social media team is trying to solve a problem, we'll do some research using chat GPT.

And a lot of times, the brands that it comes back with, we'll examine those and research them. It's much easier for us to do that type of research on chat with O1 Pro than it is to do that by hand. I've definitely paid 10,000, 20,000, way more than that even based on recommendations that I got through chat GPT.

But I was curious if anyone else, maybe I'm just the anomaly. What I found out was in our group, I think it was 52% of people have also made a buying decision based on what they read in chat GPT. So it's happening.

To answer your question, absolutely. And actually, that is a big part of what I spend my time on is research. I'm like the head of our research team.

And we're studying the correlation factors on Google versus Bing versus LLMs. And we're also analyzing with software, LLM visibility. Think of it like keyword rank tracking for chat GPT and Claude.

And we're doing that research to figure out how do you get found by the LLM and how do they decide what the answer is? Fascinating stuff. There's a lot that we learn and there's still more to find out. Yeah, I think that is fascinating.

Royce Hall

I'm in the consulting world. I'm a Salesforce consultant. And I know that I've had people come to me when they fill out our interest form.

I'm like, how did you find us? And I'm seeing like chat GPT recommended me. I'm like, that's a very large, often very large buying decision that is being relied on through chat GPT. And of course, people are still betting that.

So it's not like the bot answers and the bot buys. It's still a human centric experience, but it's coming through a new channel now.

Manick Bahn

Yeah, that's so cool that you have that in your form.

That's really smart. What some people don't realize, they'll just use their Google analytics to tell them where their traffic or conversions are coming from. It's really important, really important to ask users when they convert, where did you come from? Especially if you're spending a lot of money in marketing or you're curious to really understand because chat GPT, right? A lot of people will read something in chat GPT and then they will go and Google the brand, right? They will find it that way.

They don't click the link inside chat because chat doesn't usually provide links inside its answers. So then how does that get attributed? It gets attributed as an organic search for your brand because they typed in your brand into Google. So if you're looking at your analytics tool, it's going to lie to you.

So it's awesome you have that question there in your form. And now you know, like LLM visibility matters for your business. Yeah.

Royce Hall

Well, Manick, obviously that's like something that we're all dealing with and something that we're all learning, right? Is how does LLM change the equation for our marketing programs for how people come to us? I wonder if you could share with me, like in your history in SEO and marketing, what are a couple of things that have been kind of aha moments for you? What are some things that you've learned that maybe you wish you knew earlier that can help some of our listeners who are kind of earlier in their own marketing and SEO careers?

Manick Bahn

Sure. So I've been primarily a search marketer for a decade. And I say search because I've done the most research there, but we also spend a significant amount of our budget and our clients' budgets on meta ads as well.

The two most important marketing channels you ask me are search and all the search platforms. That would be Google, Bing, LLMs. I would even put YouTube in that equation because it feels to me more of like a search platform can be than a social platform.

And then on the other side of the table, you got the social platforms like meta and TikTok and et cetera. And it's hard to master everything. It's hard to be the best at every channel.

I decided to specialize in search. And what I learned about search is something really interesting. In the early days of Google, it was about trying to trick them, trying to manipulate them, trying to find some hack that just beat the search engine and defeated them.

And in the early days, you could do this because the signals that they were evaluating and their robustness of the algorithm, it just wasn't there. In today's day, their algorithm is superb. You can't defeat it and trick it, let's say.

However, there is a framework. There's a way to understand and think like a search engine. And that's what I call holistic SEO.

So if you're listening to this and you care about how your brand or your company's business ranks on Google in search and you're trying to figure out how to get better rankings, you need to understand what that means. Holistic SEO is the essence of the algorithm. It's not just one factor or one signal.

It's an amalgam of four pillars of search, which are authority, content, technicals, and UX signals. If you can give Google all four of those together in the right way, you will be able to rank on page one, position one. And the hardest part of the exercise is figuring out what is your gap? What is your authority gap? What is your content gap? What is your technical gap? What is your UX signal gap? And bridging that gap.

And so from knowing that, you need to figure out which gap is the most important to focus on because resources are finite. We don't have an infinite amount of budget that we can spend on backlinks or new content or our writers to optimize our existing blogs and landing pages. So it's really important to have a holistic methodology.

And when I began in this industry, I didn't see it that way. I didn't understand that lens. Now that I have that framework, and we practice that, and we've actually created the holistic SEO framework at my agency.

Now we have a quantitative framework where we can literally take any brand, any brand, anything, and get it to page one of Google provided the right strategy is executed. And you need resources. You can't just do it with 10 bucks in your pocket.

It's work. But it works. It 100% works.

And we have now, I can say this with a little bit of humility, but also excitement that we've got over 1000 case studies across every single industry. So I was just amazed talking to my team, and I found this out yesterday in our quarterly, that we have over 1000 case studies. So that wasn't easy.

It took us 10 years of research and study and experimentation and clients to work with and build with and use their capital and budgets to learn the secrets we learned. But I think we've done it. And yeah, so it's exciting.

It basically means that there's a path forward for any business that doesn't want to just pull out a card and hand it to Google and hand it to Amazon and hand it to Meta and say, here's my budget, bring my card, give me customers, right? This is an alternative direction, where we can earn that traffic and earn it for the long haul, right? Not just pay by the click. And when we stop paying, we stop getting, we build, and then we get to capitalize on this long term investment for the next 10 years, 20 years beyond. Well, I love that.

Royce Hall

You know, in my own searching, like when I Google search something, this is probably bad of me. But I just, I just skip over the top few that are paid because I'm like, okay, you're paid to be here. And it gets back to that authority, right? Of like, you know, I trust the one that has earned that top spot that isn't paid.

Like it's easy to just, you know, whip out the wallet, and, you know, boom, you're the winner. But, you know, I want the one that's like actually truly leading the market. So that, that's amazing that, you know, you can help anybody get to that page one, slot one position.

That's incredible.

Manick Bahn

Yeah, it is. And I don't want to say it so cavalierly, like, that it's easy.

There are some keywords like mesothelioma, or, like Salesforce related keywords, you know, like that a lot of people want, and they greatly desire like CRM. So to win on those, not easy. But there's a lot of like medium to long tail or bottom of funnel keywords or mid funnel keywords that have the same semantic characteristics, similar buyer persona, probably even greater buyer intent, instead of a broad intent, which which you see at the top of the funnel, much greater buyer intent that are actually easier to conquest and win on.

And the cool thing is, is that Google has a very democratic aspect to one part of its algorithm, which is your content quality. And I think this is a really beautiful thing about their search engine in particular is that if you have really x excellent content about a topic, and you're the you're the authority in that niche, if you have more correct facts, and all the concept map around whatever it is that your business is about, and that your product or service that you're selling, and you explore all those concepts, and all of what are called entities, and you have all that information on your website, you're proving to Google that you're the authority in that niche, and they reward you for it. And so for us, for example, we wrote we ranked page one for SEO tools, right, which is incredible.

It's a great keyword. Despite the fact that our competitors like SEMrush and Ahrefs, they started 10 years before we did. And they had a chance to build up their site, their content, their authority, way before we got even started.

And despite that, we're we're still competitive and beating them in many cases, for keywords, because we've just shown Google that we're more of an authority than they are around that the contextual domain that is SEO software. And I can do that you can do that anyone listening in can also do that. So don't look at your competitors and say, Ah, these guys like they're at the top of the mountain, and I'm at the bottom.

And I, I look up at them, and I see them ranking and I and there's no way I'm ever going to get there. There is a way you just have to level up. And you can do it too.

Royce Hall

So so you're going to help me when somebody Google Salesforce, I'm going to come up above Salesforce, right?

Manick Bahn

There, I can help you find some keywords that we can prospect for sure. Well, and that's, I'm sales like I don't have a background in marketing or SEO, but I've seen, you know, SEO campaigns, even paid campaigns fall flat. I think it's because of that very reason is like, what is the correct keyword? And you know, what are the ones that are meaningful that signal buyer intent? And, you know, I've looked into a little before, like I've gone to like the Semrush and everything.

I'm like, okay, there's words here. I don't, I don't know the heads or tails, which one is the best. So I definitely need that need that support.

And you and not just you, Royce, like, I think that's like one of the biggest problems in in this space is all of the tools out there that people are using for search are, are so the reporting tools. They give you this face full of data, keyword data, backlink data, all this information, but no action. There's no like, Royce, here's what you need to do here.

Like, here's your blueprint. Here's your playbook, just follow this step, these steps, and you'll get to where you need to go. There is no such thing like that.

That's why we built search out is because we we realized for me doing this from our agency doing that we realized that there's no bumpers on the bowling alley, right to help you get that strike in search. It does not exist. The first problem is knowledge.

If you don't have the knowledge, you're going to be twiddling on the wrong things. So the first problem is knowledge. And that's that stinks because for marketing teams that are busy at a big corporation, you don't have time to like, educate yourself for a quarter and then get started in in Q3 or Q4.

Like your team needs results today. So the first problem is the education gap. We realized we could close that by creating an automated framework that can be followed.

That's like the essence of that Otto product we made. Otto stands for one click trusted, transparent optimization. So you click the button, the fixes deployed or the update or the content or the improvement, the backlink is deployed, trusted, it's based on science transparent. Well, you can see it, there's no stank oil or magic, you can see everything you're doing optimization, because it works.

So that was our was our approach. And so now auto we kind of think of it as like the bumpers in the bowling alley that help you get the strike, give you the strategy for your onsite and offsite components of search so that many, many, many more people who are less initiated in the science of SEO can actually be successful with SEO, even though they haven't gotten their PhD, let's say. Yeah.

Royce Hall

So then search at Atlas and Otto, those are the tools that you all have built to give us the framework, you know, implementing your four part framework to say, here's where you're failing. And here's how you you improve in those areas. Is that is that fair?

Manick Bahn

Exactly.

Yep. Okay. It's it's come from us doing this for clients for the last seven, seven, eight years, and understanding what techniques are successful.

And then figuring out like, you know, these are the workflows that our team used to use, we had SOPs written out, and then transposed into ClickUp as tasks, which would be completed sequentially by a team of SEO strategists. And our SEO strategists on our team, they make a lot of money, like they're very highly paid resources. And then there's a lot of execution people that follow those tasks and are supposed to complete them in the perfect way.

And of course, what you find out is like any team humans, we're not perfect, right? And that's okay. But the challenge is that when people don't adhere exactly to the SOP, things get missing on the site. And sometimes, you know, and this happens, people will put a new piece of content up on the site, and they'll put a no index tag.

So Google doesn't index the page, or they'll throw up a no index tag on a page that they used to have that ranked well, and then it gets dropped in the search engine. So there's a lot of mistakes that go on. And there's also a lot of suboptimal decision making that happens.

And we essentially were able to significantly optimize our operations and deliver way, way, way more, as far as fixes to the site faster, because it's done programmatically, not by hand. So instead of it taking six months to see results on a campaign, we'll see results in two weeks, three weeks, like we'll see, we'll see the change. So it's just been amazing.

Royce Hall

Yeah. That's incredible. Like, I know that, again, I've been part of those, those strategies before.

And exactly what you said, like, you know, I've been told straight up, like, okay, you know, you're gonna spend $10,000 $15,000. And you're not going to see anything for, you know, four or five, six months, you're like, that's, we're really going out on faith here. You know, quite a bit.

And, and for a small business, that's, that's a considerable amount of money, you know?

Manick Bahn

For sure. Yeah. That's, and I think that because of what you just described, it's brought a stigma to the industry where a lot of people have been burned.

A lot of people have been basically bought snake oil. And it's really sad. So, so yeah, I'm actually happy because I think that that's going to happen a lot less now.

More people will be successful and they won't need to rely on like shady consultants that actually just are great salespeople, but have no knowledge and can't get you results, which is unfortunately a lot of what's out there. So let me ask you one more question about Otto. So it's Otto AI.

Royce Hall

And I think what I've seen on your websites, what I've seen on the marketing is, it's talking about automatically optimizing your, your site for, you know, ranking on SEO. So that, that's not just a one time thing. That's something that is like constantly updating.

Like, how does that, how does that work?

Manick Bahn

Yeah. So, so one of the, one of the things that SEO managers are, have to do is they have to, well, first they have to create content and publish it to the website. Then they have to build backlinks and all these other things.

But let's just stick, stick to the content. They have to publish content to the site and they have to get it right. Like with all the right title tags and meta descriptions.

And then there's stuff that a lot of times people overlook, like image alt text, which is really unsexy, but also very sexy because if you do it right and you have really good semantic image alt text, it really helps the rankings. So, and I could go on. There's a lot of technical factors that are often overlooked when they publish their content.

So the first thing is like correcting all those fixes. Then the second thing is the site is actually every day the rankings are fluctuating and Google as you publish new content or even old content is ranking it for keywords that maybe you didn't anticipate the page would rank for. So there's a, there's a optimization process where once the pages in the site start ranking or get ranking for keywords, you have to go back and reoptimize the landing pages.

For the queries that people are searching that you're maybe ranking for, but not ranking that well. So I'll give you an example. We recently published a page to our website and I, on something, let's just say it was about holistic SEO.

Um, we started ranking for other keywords like a holistic SEO course, holistic SEO framework, holistic SEO methodologies. And because we didn't put that terminology in our page, our rankings were lower for these other terms. So all we have to do is optimize the page for these other queries.

So we're bringing that intent and concept into the page, into the content. As soon as you do that, the rankings improve. So that's the, what I call the dynamic SEO part of this, where it's dynamic.

We collect your data from Google search console. We can see all the keywords that you're ranking for, new keywords, and then we can optimize. And now we can even do that with Bing.

We can also see what Bing is seeing and optimize the pages to also rank better on Bing. So it's cool. That's the magic.

And if you don't have technology to be the bridge, the way I see it is our software is really just the bridge between here's your website and here's AI. Cat GPT, Claude, Midgerny, Sora, all the cool AI models that are out there. There's no way to get the outputs of those GPTs onto your site, especially for all the different CMSs out there.

There's WordPress, there's Salesforce, there's HubSpot, there's, you know, Wix, Squarespace, and everything else. So the whole idea behind this JavaScript pixel that we get, that we install on the site is that it is the bridge. It allows us to take the LLMs, the AI, and push the AI's decision-making and improvements to your website without you having to lift a finger.

Royce Hall

That's awesome. That's got to be incredibly powerful for business owners and small business owners. Like as you're talking about the things that matter, you know, I've done some blogs and whatnot in my past.

And for me, it's such a labor to create the content. By the time that I'm done with that, I'm like, I don't care what the alt text is. I don't care what all this stuff is because like, I'm just thinking about like you put good content there, but how to find that is a completely different art.

So you're speaking my language like this seems incredible.

Manick Bahn

Yeah. And also, how do you organize the information you want to convey? There's an art to that as well.

How do we organize the information into the architecture that is, it's not just about giving Google what they want, because then maybe we don't give users what they want. It's a balance between the two. But there is this like subtle art and science of creating content for the search engine that can also resonate very well with users.

There's also creating content for users that doesn't resonate with search engines, but we really want to do both. And this is the part where I think we're not at a point today right now where you can click a button and it'll AI generate all of your blog posts to perfection and they don't need to be reviewed by humans. We're not quite there yet.

But I will say that the AI technology exists today, that theoretically, it should be possible to do this. Yet no one in the space has provided a solution for that. We're working on it, but we're not, we haven't released it just yet.

We're still optimizing it and testing it. But I do believe that we're at a point now where very soon we'll start to see AI creating superhuman quality content for the web, and it's going to change radically the course of content generation on the internet. There you go.

Royce Hall

You guys are leaders in true SEO optimization right there.

Manick Bahn

Heck yeah.

Royce Hall

Well, very good.

Manick, thank you for joining me today. Where can we find you on the web? If somebody wants to come and say, you know, search Atlas, that's the thing. Where do we find you?

Manick Bahn

I'm an easy guy to find.

We've got a YouTube channel. If you go to Google and type in search space Atlas, you'll find the brand. You'll also find our YouTube.

YouTube is where I teach and we do podcasts. If you want to learn and kind of learn about what we're teaching and be a part of our webinars, we do them every two weeks. We've got a Facebook group called SEO Theory where anyone can join for free and we basically teach and put out content.

It's also a great place to learn more about the platform. And then of course, you know, the technology itself, you can use it for free and test it out at searchatlas.com.

Royce Hall

Fantastic. Well, I know that I'm going to be looking into that.

You've really blown my mind today on education around SEO. So thank you so much for that. I'll definitely personally be looking into that and encourage my listeners to as well.

Thanks for joining me today.

Manick Bahn

I had a great time. Awesome.

Thanks, Royce. Thank you.