The New SEO Playbook for Business Growth written by Jarret Redding read more at Duct Tape Marketing
The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch
In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I do a solo deep dive into the fast-changing world of SEO and what it means for small businesses, marketing consultants, and agencies alike.
Is search engine optimization (SEO) still worth it? What do zero-click searches and AI content mean for your online strategy? If you’ve seen a dip in organic traffic or keyword rankings lately, it’s time to stop panicking and start rethinking your approach. I unpack a new, modern SEO framework designed to boost search visibility, attract high intent traffic, and drive real business results.
Whether you’re focused on local SEO, creating strategic content, or looking to optimize Google Business Profile, this episode gives you an actionable blueprint to level up your SEO for small businesses.
Key Takeaways:
- SEO Isn’t Dead—It’s Just Evolved
Dwindling clicks and changing algorithms mean we need a new playbook—one focused on search presence, not just keyword rankings. - Zero-Click Searches Are the New Normal
With Google answering questions right on the SERP, it’s time to pivot from traffic obsession to meaningful brand authority and engagement. - Think Visibility Over Rankings
Use tools like Google Search Console to measure click-through rates, branded search growth, and query diversity—not just top 10 positions. - AI Content is Your Friend (If Used Right)
From ideation to FAQs, leveraging AI for SEO content helps scale your efforts—just don’t lose your brand’s voice and strategy. - Content Clusters Beat One-Off Posts
Learn how to build content clusters for SEO that support the buyer’s journey and amplify your content optimization efforts. - Double Down on Local
Optimize Google Business Profile like it’s your homepage. Publish content, post updates, and answer local FAQs to improve local SEO. - Focus on Intent-Based SEO
Create strategic content that maps to real customer intent, not just search volume. Use the marketing hourglass to guide content across each stage of the journey. - Backlinks Should Build Brands
Forget shady directories. Use podcast backlinks, PR, and industry partnerships to grow brand authority and earn trust. - Say Goodbye to Vanity Metrics
It’s not about traffic anymore—it’s about SEO reporting that drives results like leads, engagement, and conversions.
Chapters:
- [00:09] Introduction
- [01:52] Search Presence and Visibility
- [04:10] Embracing AI for Content
- [05:59] Local Search Isn’t Going Anywhere
- [08:29] Prioritize Intent Based SEO
- [11:06] Link Building
- [13:58] Long Tail Queries
John Jantsch (00:01.272)
Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and no guests today. I'm going to do a solo show. I'm going to talk about a topic that I'm seeing a lot of angst around. A lot of people asking questions. You've got people saying it is dead. You've got people saying, no, it's not dead. It's just changing. I'm talking about search engine optimization today. SEO. SEO has been a marketer's friend.
I mean, you think about that somebody who wants to buy something goes out types into Google, lands on your website, right? a lot of people are seeing that Google's changing the way that they're returning search. You got this thing called zero click, which basically means that Google's giving them all the answers on the Google homepage and no reason to click away to your website to find the answer. you're getting AI overviews, that truly outline.
Lots of options for the answer. And so what people are seeing is a dramatic drop in organic search to their websites. But here's the thing I've noticed. A lot of that traffic wasn't very useful anyway. It was people looking for answers to things, how to do things. They weren't looking to buy something from us. They just wanted to find the content and hey, marketers were more than happy to produce the content. So don't panic.
they, the, the drop in traffic, if you've seen it, doesn't mean that SEO is dead. it does definitely mean that there needs to be a new playbook. kind of the, the, I'm going to go over, I think five or six, kind of approaches that I think, I can't remember how many years, five, no, six, six approaches that I think we need to be thinking about taking, right now. So, and I'm going to kind of do old SEO versus new SEO, just to kind of frame each of these approaches. So.
The first one is we need to get away from this idea of keyword rankings. That was like the big thing. That was the holy grail of SEO was, you on page one for X amount of searches? What we need to think in terms about now is search presence and visibility, right? So the old way was track a fixed list of 10 to 20 keywords, try to get just obsess over getting page one rankings. And a lot of people did that by writing thin
John Jantsch (02:24.974)
kind of over-optimized content that was the only goal was to rank. So the new model is to think in terms of total impressions, not just the top 10 spots, because today's search is not a three-word, four-word search. It's a long phrase, you know, what we used to call long tail searches. And so...
Having a lot of that high intent long-term search is still okay, even if you are not ranking for page one for that thing you really want to rank for. Google Search Console, I'm going to mention it a bunch of times, is a tool that you should get to know. You should get really friendly with because it's got a lot of the answers to what we need to be doing today. Measuring click-through rate, which is something that is a metric inside of the Google Search Console.
to look at branded search growth and what is called query diversity, meaning you're ranking for lots of things. Like one page might actually not rank highly for a high intent search, but it might actually rank for 30 or 40. I've seen some 100 different types of searches that are the kinds of things people are putting in. They're not putting them in in any volume, but they still add up to a lot of traffic to a specific page. And when you start then saying,
that traffic coming to this page is getting X click through rate because people are actually looking for my brand. That's a much, much better way to think in terms of, of search presence and visibility. So let me give you a tactic example. Use Google search goals. Use Google search console to identify hundreds of low impression, long tail queries, like I've been talking about, and then build content clusters.
groupings of blog posts around those and then you can measure growth and not just not just rank and position. All right number two. Don't worry if some of this starts to get technical we do it all for you. So if I'll give you an option we've created something we call the search visibility system which is our new approach to SEO. So I want to let you know we know how to do it in case you want us to do it for you. How's that? But everything I'm talking about you
John Jantsch (04:43.982)
can figure out and do yourself. So number two, we're going to have to embrace AI for content. I think that's just a given. There are some things that it does far better than humans, but we have to do it carefully because your brand, your stories, your case studies, your voice, your tone, all of that is you. That's the human part of it. But there's a great deal of the research of the ideation that can be done and should be done, quite frankly, using these tools.
You know, tools like chat, GPT, you know, Jasper, you know, is another one for content as well. You're going to put on the strategy, the trust building, you're going to, you're going to do the UX still. You're going to how it looks is going to be up to you. The readability is going to be up to you, but the ideation creating outlines. tell you one thing that is awesome at doing is FAQs. So any content that you produce, anything that you read, you can actually produce the FAQs.
You can answer the FAQs in your voice, in your tone, actually with your brand. Put your brand into those and you start when people start saying, what's the best brand for X? You'll start to see some traction around that.
So instead of writing 50 blog posts, one detailed guide on a real, you know, client interview, then use AI, spin that into FAQs, videos, Google business page content. Don't worry. You know, if you have to write strategic content and then you do that with it, it's going to pay so many more dividends than just writing those 50 blog posts.
All right, if you are a local business, meaning most of your business comes in a town, in a community, this is definitely for you.
John Jantsch (06:36.546)
That search isn't going away. That search, if somebody is in a town and Google knows they're in a town searching for a certain type of product or service, a very high intent, let's say you're a remodeling contractor, somebody says best remodeling contractor, they don't even have to put the name of their town in there, Google knows it, right? So doubling down on local and reputation SEO is going to be extremely, extremely important moving forward. Maybe it'll go away in two years, but right now.
is going to be extremely important for local businesses. So treat your Google business profile, not as a listing, but really more like a publishing platform all by itself. It gives you tremendous opportunity to publish your reviews, obviously they go there, but also a blog post or just little snippets of things, know, little abstracts of your blog posts, images can be put there. So think about it as more like a
a publishing platform. that ought to be, you ought to pay as much attention to that, if not more sometimes than your own website, quite frankly. Build content that answers local questions. Look at what people do. When you search for one of these terms for your local community, look underneath there at what people also ask, questions that people also ask. So again, going back to the remodeling contractor, what's the best
countertop, you know, for kitchens today or something somebody might ask. Well, they're also going to be under that six or seven other questions that people ask. Your FAQ should be addressing all of those. can put them in your Google business page. They don't care what you publish there. Optimize, you know, location pages, structured data, citations, all the things that that help you show up when people say near me, you've probably done that kind of search, right? Mexican restaurant near me. That that all happens.
You know, some of its proximity, obviously, if it is near you, that's going to show up. But, you know, for other categories, I mean, there are thousands of restaurants, right? But for other categories, maybe it's an estate attorney or something. Well, there aren't thousands of those in a community. So you can do a lot over and above proximity by really focusing on that.
John Jantsch (08:54.624)
If you are working with an agency, they better be thinking, asking you about review acquisition, about responding to Q and A's, about publishing weekly updates and posts on your Google business profiles. I mean, that's, if you're doing it yourself, that needs to be your kind of weekly checklist. All right. Number four, prioritizing intent based SEO over volume based SEO. Okay. What do I mean by that?
intent base is clearly a search somebody puts in when they're looking to buy. mean, that is different than a search when somebody's trying to say, you know, what's the safest car I could buy? That's just kind of those things, you know, lots of volume for them, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they're looking for, you know, your particular product or service. So, you know, the bottom line is, regardless of what any SEO company tells you, mean, traffic doesn't matter.
Unless it leads to trust, engagement and conversion. That's what you need to worry about. So high intent traffic is certainly competitive, but you know that if you spend your time and effort there, it's more likely to turn into conversion. So what we do when we work with folks is we want to map all kinds of content to the customer journey. for us, we use something called the marketing hourglass. You've probably heard me talk about it as seven stages, no like trust.
Try by, repeat, and refer. And the thing about those stages is those are behaviors that people go through when they're trying to find a business and engage with a business and then actually do business with that business. And so what we know is that their objectives at each of those stages, their questions at each of those stages, the challenges or what they're trying to accomplish at each of those stages, it changes. And so should your content.
Make sure that you are not just producing content that gets people to find you, but once they find you, it builds trust. It actually allows them to try maybe what it might be like to work with you or to understand your business, to understand your culture at your organization, all the things that they're going to lead to them kind of checking those boxes and getting their questions answered at each of those stages. So.
John Jantsch (11:12.066)
build a service page for what you do, but then also create a supporting blog post, a case study, an FAQ. Certainly make sure that you have CTAs on those, calls actions, book a call, whatever it is. All of it optimized for intent. All of it focused on that person that if they land there, there's a pretty good chance that they're looking to buy. And that's different than somebody that you're just trying to rank for some term that gets you traffic.
So it's a different mindset in the content that you focus on building. Again, we've gone through about a decade period of content for content sake to try to get eyeballs. And now what we're trying to do is understand the journey that people are on. Link building is number five. It certainly was an aspect, is an aspect still of SEO. Anybody who talks to you about SEO is gonna talk about backlinks or link building. But instead of thinking about link building,
I think we need to reframe that as brand authority building. know, the way people used to do it before was guest blog posts or shady directories that they'd be in or even cold outreach. I mean, I get it all the time. People writing saying here, link to me for whatever reason. So the whole focus was volume, right? Volume of backlinks. The truth of the matter is now,
Google doesn't even pay that much attention to backlinks, particularly the ones that it doesn't see as very authoritative. So you're have hundreds of backlinks and they may view 20 or 30 of them as being valuable at all. So putting effort into just getting random volume of backlinks is something that's been going away for years, but it's just absolutely silly now to do because it's a waste of time. In fact, it may even send some negative signals.
So the new strategy is all about earned media, podcast guesting, PR partnerships, strategic relationships with related industry players. That's the type of thing that is going to really be a valuable backlink. I post, I publish a podcast, right? Every guest that comes on my podcast, I link back to their show. give them, if they tell me some freebie they have, I'll probably link back to that.
John Jantsch (13:33.566)
It's branded because we mentioned their name. We mentioned the company name quite often in that. so that type of backlink is probably the most valuable backlink you can get. A bonus is that we give, I mean, the podcast gets some exposure. Maybe they actually get a client because they heard them on that. It is amazing content. You can take that content from being a guest on a blog or on a podcast and you can republish it. You can cut it up into a hundred social media snippets. So
It is, um, it is the number one, um, backlink that, that I think you should, uh, really be trying to acquire and just to cold out, uh, um, pitch here, I think so strongly of it that I actually own a podcast booking, uh, service. So if you want to get on some podcasts, podcast bookers.com would be an option for getting these types of backlinks that I talked about. And frankly, you can get.
four or five podcast backlinks for the, you know, what somebody would charge you to get probably a bunch of dubious backlinks. So no more guest blog posting, get your clients interviewed on niche podcasts, you'd be on a podcast, get cited in the local news. look for these links that carry brand equity. Don't worry about page rank or authority anymore. From that standpoint, it's all about brand. All right. And then the last one, and this is really,
for agencies, but if you have an agency that you work with, know, vanity reporting is something that I think drives a lot of businesses crazy. You know, rankings, traffic, bounce rate, keyword movement. You know, these were all the things that sounded good. In some cases they looked good because they were going the right direction. But what did they amount to for you? So today, long tail queries, your search impression growth.
is now more important. So collectively, what are all the impressions that you're getting? Your click-through rates by intent category, branded versus non-branded, but particularly branded click-through rates, you want to improve those. You want reporting on those because those really tell the story that you are actually getting the right kind of traffic. Obviously, leads, engagement, email opt-ins, form submissions, phone calls,
John Jantsch (15:56.118)
I that's what you want to see grow, right? mean, because that's a pretty darn good indication that there's not only high intent, but that you're going to actually get some conversion out of that. So if you're an agency, I challenge you to start showing clients their search visibility and trust indicators are growing and not just whether they rank for plumber in their city. So those are my...
six, was speaking to both businesses and agencies there because a lot of businesses hire agencies. So if any of this made sense, but you're thinking, great, how do I do this, John? Happy to help you. Love for you to ask us about our search visibility system, which no shocker here is built around strategy first. So there's no sense in creating any kind of
visibility or SEO play, you know, without actually building that on a solid foundation of what you're, you're who you're trying to attract, what you do that's different, your core brand promise, all those things have to be built around that. And then no matter what you have to have content. So we're going to help you build not only helpful content, but we're going to help you build these content clusters as we call them or hub pages. You've got to
If you're local business, you definitely need to focus on Google business and your local SEO optimization becoming more important than ever. We, I love Google search console and I think there are so many, it's the most underutilized tool. It's free. And it's the most underutilized tool. And there are so many nuggets and insights that you can gain from there. So we definitely mine that.
to really direct a lot of what we do and then really work on your reputation, authority building and give you reporting that's actually going to tell an accurate story. if you're listening to this and you want to know more, it's just John at ductapemarketing.com or just visit our website. You can book an appointment with.
John Jantsch (18:03.7)
somebody that can really kind of walk you through what strategy first looks like, how we're employing AI as part of all of this. And, and maybe, this idea of how to think differently about SEO. you're an agency, this is something that we teach and licensed to a lot of agencies as well. So hopefully that was useful for today. I'm going to actually be harping on this idea. In fact, I'm going to do a full show on Google search console, as well. So you might want to tune in for that. So.
Thanks for listening. Love those reviews. Love any feedback. It's just John at DucktapeMarketing.com and hopefully we'll see you one of these days out there on the road.
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