Scientific SEO, Ranking Secrets, and Breaking Algorithms - with Kyle Roof

Well, Ruf, good to see you here, mate. Thanks for having me, good to see you too. Happy holidays, happy new year, it's not too far away. Yeah, happy new year, happy Christmas.

And for anyone who's not aware of what you do, for example, how would you describe yourself? I think I'm an SEO, I still hold that title. I think a lot of people are, SEOs like to label, right? And we like to rebrand ourselves, but I think I am an SEO and I had an agency, which I've sold, and then a teaching platform.

Congratulations. And then a software called Page Optimizer Pro. It's quite simply, you put in the page you want to rank and we tell you the words that Google wants to see. Do you know what's interesting is like, how many people sell their agencies and never look back?

You know, I'm not sure how many people actually sell their agencies, to be perfectly honest with you, but I think there is a lot of not looking back that happens. Do you miss those days or would you say that's one of the most stressful businesses you've run? You know, the problem is I like it and I'm good at it. I think I'm good at agency SEO, but yeah, the headaches that come with it are significant, but it's still a viable business and it's still not even just viable, I think it's very profitable business and something you can do.

And I mean, we started with just my business partner and I and one VA, and Andy, he's Australian, but he was living in Berlin at the time and I was just outside San Francisco and our VA was in Rome. So we definitely had three corporate offices in multiple continents because Andy used his Australian address. We used, I think Rome or Berlin, I can't remember. And then me and San Francisco, so we had offices in Berlin and San Francisco and Melbourne, we're international.

Those were the times. Those were the times. Global domination. Where do you think we're at in 20, you know, it's 2026, probably when most people will be listening to this.

Where are we at with SEO? Because it's changed so much since ChatGPT came out, right? I think ChatGPT just offered one more KPI, more than anything and then tools that you can maybe do things a little bit faster, but basically all the techniques like to get into like LLM searching are just SEO techniques. The core algorithm hasn't changed.

There are different, you know, locations you can get your information in like with the AI overviews, but that's really just featured 2.0 in my mind. So really not much has changed, really just there's been more opportunity, but you can see change as a negative, I guess, in that sense, like, hey, there are these new things and a lot of people do see it as a negative, but anytime I see that, I just see, those are just more KPIs. That's more stuff to figure out. That's more ways to get visibility and make money.

I see it like not so much the way that SEO has done has changed because we still use the technology and the tools that we used years ago, really, for doing SEO, but it's more like the market and who does SEO and who delivers SEO. It's totally changed, I think, in my eyes. You know, like we saw the purge of people getting wiped out in 2023, a lot of agencies shut down as well. Great purge.

Yeah, that was end of 2023 with HCU and then the March core in 2024, but that really destroyed affiliates. When affiliates did buy a disproportionate amount of products and services, for sure, and losing that segment was not a good thing for people that are SEO service providers or people that have SEO tools. But since then, you know, we're two years removed now from that more, and I think I see those affiliate people coming back in a slightly different form. But you know who was never touched by any of that was local business, actual business, e-com.

Those kind of people never were touched, and their businesses have continued to grow. And a lot of them, you know, especially like a lot of local business, like some mom and pops, you know, with maybe a slight economic downturn don't quite have the marketing budgets that they may have had before, but they still have the marketing needs. And being able to provide to them has been hugely beneficial to myself and my team over the last year. Yeah, that makes sense.

Makes sense. What sort of tools are you using for SEO? You gotta use Page Optimizer Pro. Now you need an on-page tool because you still need the counts.

And actually it's become more important. I've shown this a bunch where LLMs don't know how to write, turns out. That's the best part of the whole thing. It's such a scam where a large language model doesn't understand English language.

That's a fantastic- What way? They don't- Explain this one. They don't add in contextual terms. They don't understand how to put in the terms that give words context and meaning.

And this is a huge factor that Google and other search engines need. A big component of how they process things is through these contextual terms. And the LLMs are woefully low on them. And I think they will continue because it's not really- They're not trying to do SEO.

That isn't what their purpose is at all. We're trying to take this tool and kind of wedge it into what we want to do. But it's not designed out of the box for SEO purposes. And it takes a lot of work.

And this is why people get hit by using AI. They've got a site with 500 pages on it and then they get the bright idea of throwing 500 AI pages on there. And those pages are all woefully under-optimized. And it's not that Google hates the AI, it's Google hates their content.

You know, that essentially it's not good content in Google's eyes. And then they devalue that content and we look like, hey, you know, this site has 50% of its pages are garbage. Then they start to devalue the whole site and then sites get hit. I've seen a bunch of these sites in June.

That update really seemed to go after a lot of sites that were using AI content. And every time I run those sites through my tool, and I'm sure other tools are showing the same thing, their contextual terms just are so inadequate. And so as a result, people rely on these things thinking that they can do SEO with them and they cannot. It's a tool to create content faster, but you still need to be the expert and understand what that content should look like.

You know, what is it that Google is actually looking for? And surprise, surprise, Google hasn't changed their algorithm. They're still looking for those same things they were looking for before and they don't see them. Then they devalue the content and then the site gets hit.

You think that Google cares about AI content at this point? They don't have to. That's the best part. They don't have to run anything extra to determine if it's AI-generated or not.

I don't think they care at all. What they're looking for is something that's adding to the conversation, something that should be in the conversation. And when they can evaluate the content and see that it doesn't have the terms they're looking for, then they know that that's garbage. So how can SEOs leverage AI in the right way?

Like, is it a case of adapting to the new technology? Is it a case of training the AI? Yeah, I mean, you can, yeah, you have to be able to prompt it to use the terms, but you also need to know what those terms are. And I think maybe the people that were intuitively doing SEO and then their intuition into AI probably hasn't been as successful as they were hoping it would be, where you definitely need to be a lot more math-based on this and a lot more conscious of what the output should actually look like or what it actually looks like to a search engine.

And I'm like, man, this test looks pretty and it reads pretty well, but that's great. But if a search engine can't parse it and understand what it's talking about, then you might as well have done nothing. That makes sense. And what do you think are the skills that SEOs should be developing right now?

Well, I mean, I don't see too much difference. You know, we were talking about this before the call, to get an LLM search engine, it's just SEO. You know, it's like tweaks. You still need to know what you're doing.

You still need to know what HTML is. You still need to know how to interlink. Man, interlinking has been so huge for me in 2025. And I don't know, I'm very fortunate I get to consult with people.

And one of the first things I'm looking at, I'm like, well, how are you deciding how you're gonna do your interlinking here? You know, like, what's the strategy going for? Are you doing this kind of a strategy or that kind of a strategy? What are you doing?

And by and large, the strategy that most people employ is willy-nilly. Like they are just, there's no purpose to the content. They couldn't tell you why they created the content. They don't know why that's there.

And then they couldn't tell you why they're linking to anything. And so it's like, just because you can create a lot of content, which can be very valuable to a site. It's like, well, we can create all this content, so why don't we create all this content? And then they've missed out on foundational things as to what's the purpose of this content on the site.

You should be able to identify a singular reason for a piece of content to go up. And then how are you supporting that content? What other pieces of content are you gonna create to support that? And then usually you've lost most people at that point.

And then you begin to tell like, just how are these things linked together? Though they're like, well, I don't know. I just started doing links. What else am I supposed to do?

I'm like, okay. All right, so yeah, it often comes down to that foundational stuff, man. It's the basic stuff you need to know. And then you can build on top of that.

Then you can use tools that can maybe automate things for you or speed them up. But that's all that they do is speed things up. I think I used this joke the last time I was on with you is if you're bad at SEO, AI is just gonna help you do a bad SEO faster. Yeah, that's the bottom line.

That's all it does for you. It only enhances what you already have. And if you're not good at SEO, AI is really gonna make it stand out quickly for you. So yeah, it accelerates how badly you do it.

It amplifies. Like, it makes it glaringly obvious how bad you are. I feel like it's always the fundamentals that people skip and it's because all the other stuff is more shiny and interesting. It's so pretty and cool.

Yeah, it's like before people even think about building backlinks, trying to figure out semantic SEO. You know, semantic SEO. And by the way, I love the semantic SEO, guys. We have a lot in common on how we think about SEO.

Yeah, of course. But man, there are other things to think about before you get into the weeds there. Get a topical understanding of what they're doing. You know, topical maps are great.

Topical clustering is great. I do a lot with that myself. But get that foundational stuff. Take it as a foundation.

Build on it from there before you get really into the weeds on it. What do you think the biggest lie is sold in SEO marketing? Anyone can do it. That's my fault.

On the one hand, you think like, well, I guess they could. But on the other hand, I definitely don't want them to. I don't need all the extra competition. But, you know, just like with any skill, have you ever like heard people say something like, you know, anybody can wait tables and then you have a pretty horrible experience with somebody that clearly has no idea how to wait tables?

It's the same thing. All the different professions, different jobs require different skills. And, you know, just like with that, not everybody's suited for this magical, wonderful ride that we call SEO. I think the interesting thing about that is like, you know, if you look at marketing, just in general, if we zoom out a little bit, it's like you have to break the limiting beliefs that people have if you're going to get them to watch your content and actually use it and get value from it.

But at the same time, sometimes that gets misinterpreted or sometimes we, as marketers, push it too far. Well, I think to that point, we get lost in our own shiny objects on like, hey, we got to push the limit. We got to disrupt this or that. But sure, you disrupt within a framework of something that actually works.

You know, you can vary the accoutrement, but the, you know, the things on the outside, but the things that the meat of it still has to have some foundational purpose. And a lot of that stuff, it goes back decades and decades of marketing and marketing psychology and marketing knowledge. And then SEO is kind of one facet of that and how you can then take that information and that knowledge and apply it in a way that can be effective marketing. Yeah, that makes sense.

Do you think SEO is becoming easier or harder? So I started SEO in 2012. I don't know what you did, but I distinctly remember in 2012, I was at a conference and somebody was like, man, do you remember SEO in 2010? It was just so easy.

And then in 2014, I remember somebody saying like, man, do you remember SEO in 2012? It was just so easy. Then in 2016, do you remember SEO in 2014? Man, we had it so easy back then.

And I think it's just SEO. It is how it goes. You know, you have to be aware of what you're doing. You have to have a plan.

Most people don't even have a three month plan. I don't know how you're going to think that SEO is easy in any decade, you know, at any time period, if you don't really have a plan and you're just flying by the seat of your pants and waking up one day and deciding to try something new. So no, I think it's the same. I think it's just being aware of what's going on.

But this has been the same complaint that I've heard every year that now it's so hard. And, but before it was so easy, you know, they'll tell you like, you know, in 2020, you could just throw up anything and it would just rank. But I heard people in 2020 saying out there that was gone. And those were the good old days of 2018.

So I think it's all the same. I think I heard a good definition, which is nostalgia is just memory minus pain. I think that's pretty true. You don't remember the bad, do you?

Yeah, you don't remember the pain. You don't remember the hard work. You don't remember all the problems that you had, all the frustrations. Imagine like if you're a second child or lower, it's a good thing that your mother forgot like how painful and terrible that experience was.

Cause pregnancy, from the outside looking in, pregnancy does not look terribly fun. And then you have that little birth part at the end and then you get this little demon. That's the best part. If your partner's pregnant and was like, especially your first child, like, oh, it's so beautiful and wonderful.

And then the moment your child was born, they're like, welcome to hell. But somehow parents forget all of that, especially the mothers forget all that. And then now they've got like, you know, two or three siblings. Yeah, that's a really good way of looking at it.

I think it's the same, same with business, right? It's like the good old days of you grind it out and starting from nothing were, it seemed like the golden age, but actually back then you didn't know, okay, is this going to work out? Are you actually going to figure this out? Do you even know what you're doing?

Yeah, I mean, the foolishness you have to have to be an entrepreneur is insane. And then like, you know, but everyone's a hero of their own story and everyone's story is linear, right? So you always have to be a hero of your own story. So you always think of like, we were here and now we're here, but you really forget about these swings in between or some of those sleepless nights or times when things just weren't going well, or people are mad at you and you don't know how to fix it.

But that all seems to blur into the success story because you made it out at the end, right? Yeah, a hundred percent. Coming back to SEO, do you use any other, you know, slightly different techniques to say rank inside AI? So for example, you know, a lot of people are using listicles.

For sure. Yeah, that kind of stuff will definitely work. You know, I really rely a lot on search console data. I think it's one of the cleaner, all data is bad data and some is worse than others.

But overall, I think it's as consistent as you can get. And you really just want to find a tool and benchmark. Like you could be down with SERP robot. That's totally fine.

Just stay with that though. Don't like change, you know, things as you've got benchmarks, you understand how things move in that and just stay with that. Stick with one tool and how you're evaluating things. But I have seen some people show how to get like AI overview information, like on clicks and keywords through scripts and Google analytics.

So I've started to look at that a little bit more to see if there's good information that can be gleaned there on like what people are actually searching that caused the AI reviews to appear. And maybe questions we can answer and stuff like that, that might be a little beyond what you would get from a standard tool. But a lot of it is just using the data out of analytics and search console and filtering it the way that I wanna see it. How does that work?

Like when you're tracking it from analytics for example. I got a guy for that, but definitely, I know it's possible to use the, there's a, you can see the link that they append when you click through on the overviews and then you can set up things to check that within GA to find those URLs that they've appended. And then you can see what the search terms were. Now, how to actually implement that, that's not my job.

That's not my job at all, but I'll look at the data. Yeah, that makes sense. Makes sense. How do you see people in terms of search behaviors?

Do you think that's gonna change at all? You know, or people are just gonna be using Google or what's your take on that? No, the one thing that Google is claiming is, I guess their revenue is up, right? And they're saying the search is up.

And they, what they point to is that in the AI overviews, people see answers and then they refine their search based on those answers and that they also then get more acquainted with brands. And so brands will get more direct traffic and then also more search happens because people are searching better. I think it's the argument that they're making on search. Google still has such a hammer lock on the overall percentage of search.

And I think people are learning that chat GTP is not the best search engine because it's not really a search engine. And I think people do like, not counterpoints, but confirmation. And I think it's disturbing to see one answer and then just, you rely on that one time and it goes horribly wrong, you're not gonna do that again. Whereas within a multi-search result kind of field that gives you an opportunity to compare, and see like if this information is actually trustworthy and worthwhile and accurate.

So I don't see things changing too much in the near future. I imagine Google is probably gonna try to play with other things. It looks like overviews might be here to stay though. I was kind of hoping they might peel that back a little bit or tweak it slightly, but they might look to monetize it more.

Maybe there's gonna be some opportunities there, but otherwise 2026, I don't think it's gonna be much different than 2025 in terms of search. I do think my bold prediction is LLMs are gonna have to change. They're gonna hit their limitations and they're not gonna be able to do the things that people want them to do going forward. It's gonna require different models.

Some different models are gonna be out there that's going to arrive and I think disrupt the AI LLM movement and that might provide different things. But as it goes right now, I don't know how far away that might be, but I don't think it's gonna come anytime soon because people do seem to be investing a lot into the LLMs and the powers that be when they invest billions. They do like to see a return on those billions and so I don't think they're gonna be very pleased about some other technology coming up and potentially hurting that investment. So I think it would be all right.

I think it was similar and I'll see where things go from there. I mean, everything that I've seen apart from the LLMs as well, just doesn't really work. Like for example, you've got like these AI agent browsers, you've got things like ChatGPT Atlas, you've got Chrome extensions that can use the browser for you, but they're just kind of... Not quite there, right?

You wouldn't use them more than once. They're fun to play with. Do you know how many extensions my dad has installed right now? Zero.

Like, to get him to... He wouldn't even know how to do it. He wouldn't even know where to go to find an extension. And so for him to say, like, all you need to do, buddy, is get this one extension, and then you sync it with this, and then you do it with that, you've lost him.

He has no desire to do that sort of thing, whereas we're nerds and we're happy to do that, because we feel like we're gaming something, or it's fun and interesting, and we're going to get some edge on something. But, you know, the average consumer doesn't care about that at all. I don't think they would ever adopt that as a go-to policy. It's a thing, isn't it?

It's like, you know, everyone has... Even if the technology is amazing, it's like, can you change their behavior? You know, for example, everyone needs to learn something, usually for their career or whatever. And maybe, you know, you've got things like ChatGPT or Notebook of Lamb or Gemini, some of the most powerful tools in the world for free that can help you do that, but 99% of people are not going to use it for that.

Yeah, definitely not. There has to be a real reason, a real compelling reason. Why should I change my behavior? I've been doing it this way for X number of years, and it's worked fine.

Not even fine, I like it. It's worked very well for me. What better thing is this going to bring to the table? If it's not bringing anything to the table, then they're not going to do it.

What's the most expensive SEO mistake you've personally made? I mean, we've invested in some features that I think approximately four people have used. Where I think, oh man, this is going to be a game changer, and everyone's going to want to use it. And you put like $30,000 into it, and then you realize, I think there were four people consistently using this.

In the year 2047, we might recoup our money on that one, you know, in terms of overall usage. So maybe those are some of my bigger, at least dollar value mistakes for sure. The interesting thing is in it with software, it's like, for example, I was at the school games recently, and Sam Ovens was there, you know, the guy who designed school and everything else. And he was talking about how he tries to make everything perfect, which means he literally can't create many features at all.

And so like, because it's so simple, it works so well. Sure. And I think that's something he's probably learned the hard way. Yeah, I can see that.

We do, I mean, you know, they always talk about like, listen to your consumers and, you know, create features that way. But people are idiots. Often they don't even know what they want. And often some of their ideas are terrible.

I've had some people like, and some ideas we've gotten from our users have been fantastic. Don't get me wrong. I know that makes sense. Sometimes they've got these ideas on how things should work, and it's like, man, I don't think there's a market fit here.

Other times, you know, we've created features that nobody else has had, and they've gone off really well. You know, we're like, we were ahead of the market and created a feature that people didn't realize they needed, and then when they saw it, they used it a lot. So I don't know. It's a hard one when you're building out features.

It's also the idea of put out something imperfect and then tweak it, especially on feedback from users. That's a way to do it, a Kaizen-type approach where you're constantly iterating, or this approach where you create two things or three things and just make them as perfect as possible. There's valid ways to handle them. It probably depends on the market you're in specifically and what your users are expecting, and maybe price point as well.

A lot of people as well, like they've switched fully to just using Claude or using ChatGPT to create content directly instead of these AI SEO tools. I've certainly seen, you know, for example, do you remember Jarvis or Jasper? Yeah, I remember how they were going to take over the world, and then like one month later after they got that round of crazy amount of investment, it was basically off the face of the earth. I don't know anyone that uses it.

Like literally no one. Man, did they take it over though? Was that 2023? Yeah.

Yeah, they were, this is it, it's over. The only thing they did do is they killed the Filipino content farms. That went away. That was effective.

So those businesses went away instantly, but I'm not sure that had much of an impact beyond that. I mean, there were some big agencies that shut down, right, who would only focus on content. Like the one-sentence-a-word kind of people, two-sentence-a-word, that all went away overnight. Yeah, that's it.

I mean, we actually, this year, our agency, we were still providing human content for some clients who want it. Now we've pretty much cut back. Like we don't use our supplier at all pretty much, maybe for like a few projects a month. And so like his earnings have gone from like probably 90% down this year from us, whereas we were his best client, and that's mainly due to AI.

For sure. Niche content still works, you know, like where you have to have specialized information on what you're writing about. Even like YNYL stuff, I would not trust to any kind of AI on, you know, here, take these supplements. It's good for you.

That's a straight path to a lawsuit, I think. I do see a lot of people using AI content as kind of like the first draft, you know, that that goes to, so rather than having like a team of writers, you have a handful of content editors, and then they're editing the stuff that's coming out of AI for tone and brand and accuracy and stuff like that. One thing that's worked really well for us is like we take the YouTube transcripts and then we plug those into Claude and create blog posts out of them. And then that tends to do really well algorithmically inside the platform, but then also rank inside Google as well.

And the information is going to be good because it's coming off of an interview, right? So it's somebody that presumably knows what they're talking about. Yeah, it's firsthand as well. It's like firsthand data.

So I think that's the main point. You know, it's not generic. I like that a lot. That's really smart.

And that kind of goes to also one thing that AI does really well for you is to take one piece of content that you've done and get it across multiple platforms quite quickly, where if you've got, say, you know, an interview like this, that can then turn into a blog post, that can turn into reels, that can turn into TikToks and shorts and stuff like that. Chop up the videos into parts, turn it into, you know, a video series that people need to give an email address for us. All of that can be done, I think, relatively quickly with AI, and it's not too bad. Yeah, yeah, 100%.

That's actually something we do. It's like, you know, we put out 100 pieces of content a day. And it just comes from like, you know, one video. There you go.

That's a lot of content going up. Are you getting traction on other platforms like, say, TikTok? Yeah, TikTok we're pretty bad at. I mean, I have a personal TikTok that does pretty well, but I think...

What do you talk about? The normal TikTok we don't do. Like your very personal one? Oh, it's just like...

Are you into some weird hobby? It would be my personal assistant. I try not to look at it because I don't want to cringe too much. It's like Julian discusses cheese or something.

But it would be like my pet. So we'll do... My personal assistant, she'll just say, OK, do this or, you know, dance like this, listen to this music from ESAN, and then we'll record that. And then I think we do get a lot of traction on other platforms.

Like, for example, personal TikTok, I think we get like 500,000 views a month. That's amazing. On my... Yeah, on Instagram, we get 1.6 million on my personal.

That's insane. Which is pretty good. That's absolutely insane. Yeah, Twitter.

Oh, dance. Twitter is like 6 million. Mate, whatever it takes, right? Like, you got to do what you got to do.

I don't judge. You do what you need to do. I can do feet pics. You want me to be a dancing monkey?

No problem at all. Done. Get the bananas. That's your other personal channel, like you go through like fruit markets.

Julian discusses fruit. There was one with... Yeah, exactly. Julian discusses fruit.

No problem. So good. I would be so happy if you just had some, like, random hobby, and that's what your personal one is. Like, well, I am really good at SEO and all that.

What I really want to talk about is horticulture. What I'm obsessed about is reviewing durian. Reviewing durian. Oh, that would be so good.

Or like you're into Warhammer or something, and it's like you painting your figurines. That would be great. I could do a live stream like that. Hey, guys, today we're doing something totally different.

And we told you that every once in a while I get the idea in my head, especially when I'm a little frustrated, where I'm just going to walk out on stage, and instead of doing my prezzo, I'm going to juggle for about three minutes, catch the ball. Not say a word. Bow. I'm like, walk off stage.

I would watch that. I think it would crush. Especially the bow. I'm actually really good at juggling, too.

I've got moves. I've got moves. I've got moves in everything. Three balls.

Three balls, though. I can't do four. That's pretty impressive still. I think that's better than 99% of people.

Have you ever thought about joining the circus? It's crossed my mind. Things aren't going well in the business. I'm like, man, I wish a traveling crew was on its way through right now.

I could probably join them and find my fortune. That'd be great. Just jump in. Twitter as well, we get about six million a month.

That is a lot. this is working extremely well right now, which is a Facebook organic. It's wild. We get a hundred thousand views a day.

What is Facebook organic? Like people searching in Facebook to find niches and information? Yeah. So for example, um, like it would actually promote, if your content is relevant to promote your content, people look on it and it's like wide open.

So for example, if I do a video on a live stream on YouTube, I'll get a few reactions, but most of the reactions come from Facebook, like even like on a replay of it or as a live thing on it as a live. And then, yeah, we post the videos on replay as well. And that was, uh, you still do a lot with email outreach as well. Are you finding that to be, I've had a lot of people ask me recently if they thought that email was still a viable medium.

I think so. I think we get sales out of it, but what do you think on that? I'm interviewing you. I'm interviewing you now.

Let's find out what you have to. Yeah. So I mean, like for actual outreach to other people to get clients, we don't really do that. Like we just do that for link building and that's it.

And then for inbound, inbound marketing is insane. It is by far the best. Um, I've seen your emails for pop as well. So I assume you're killing it on emails.

Yeah. We're liking it. We're liking the results on it. We're, we're going to tweak it a little bit because we did want to use it more for lead generation and that's been so-so.

It's not bad. It's been so-so. But that's like cold email outreach has been, eh, not bad. The, um, but when it's warm or it's to your list, that's also, that's just the way that's, that's huge.

If, if I was you, I mean like, uh, you probably already thought about how you would do it, but if I was in your position, first thing I would do, I would set up a free school community about SEO. Okay. And I would just every single video tutorial, every single post, just link back to your tool, your crush. Cause like, for example, our, our community on school, they are profit boarding, uh, we grew it from like zero this year to, to $90,000 a month.

And it was, it was, most of it was from the free school to the pay group. Um, just creating a community. Yeah. And on that, on the school platform as I just kind of started and went from there.

Yeah, exactly. At first it was like, I don't really want to do this. It feels like a distraction. And now it's like, let's do this as much as we can.

Like, this is, this is a one person business with no agency stress. What kind of ticket items are you selling? Like how, how expensive is it? Is the sale?

Very cheap. So it's kind of like a Netflix for AI. Um, so the, the, you know, for B2B it's like $49 a month subscription. And then we also have a option to buy annual and it's like $399.

And there's, the thing is, it's kind of like, it's really interesting to school because you've got their attention. They're part of a community. They feel part of a tribe. So like, it's a very close connection, but it's very scalable.

You know, we have 1,900 members in there. Um, and then the final thing I would say on that, it's like a ghost or somebody in a bathroom walk behind you. Just FYI, that's, that's my mom. I should close the door.

Really? One sec. One sec. Hey, it caught my eye.

The first time I was like, did I, and I felt, yeah, definitely. It could be a ghost. It could be, I mean, places in the UK are pretty old. They're pretty haunted.

Uh, that's it. This house itself is over a hundred years old. Sure. Especially if you're in a ton of Thai people, they'd be like, there's 100% ghosts in there.

Oh yeah. Yeah. They wouldn't like that. I think they don't like Santee Tam, right?

Santee Tam is full of, uh, old places and ghosts and all that sort of thing. I didn't know that was the spot. Well, Nimmin is such a new location that I don't think it had time for ghosts, but Santee Tam has actually been built up for a while, I believe. Yeah.

Yeah. That's it. That's it. Um, so yeah, coming back to school.

You had one final, final point to make and I just didn't want anything embarrassing. The ultimate cliffhanger for YouTube watch time. Uh, so yeah, the, the final thing I was going to say on that was like, I'm not even good at getting LTV, you know? So for example, like there's probably so many upsells I can add, you know, lifetime offers inside there, et cetera.

High ticket offers. It's like, we're barely scratching the surface of what we can do. That's awesome. So that's pretty exciting.

I guess the platform is pretty easy to use and all that too. This is turning into a school pitch real quick. Yeah. Yeah.

Sorry for trying to convert it. I'm in, I'm in right now. I should be an affiliate. You should.

Um, yeah. Oh, just on a final note, what question do you wish people would ask you, but never do? I'm going to talk about my, my passion for fruit. Nobody wants to talk about it.

I don't know. I get asked so many questions, man. I think I've been, I think I've been asked. I don't think there's anything.

Uh, I don't know. I think I've been asked. For anyone watching, like you are, I would say probably the best public speaker I've seen in SEO. Thank you.

I do like to talk about that, by the way, if you want to talk about speechcraft, I really, I really like to talk about that. I'm a big fan of speechcraft. I'm a big fan of speechcraft. I'm a big fan of speechcraft.

I'm a big fan of speechcraft. If you want to talk about speechcraft, I really, I, cause I study speechcraft, like, you know, and I, and I study people that do talks and I study how to put a talk together and, and how long things should be and when you need to have different breaks and emotional shifts and stuff like that and, and what resonates and what doesn't. So I really enjoy talking about putting a talk together. I'm if anybody needs help putting a talk together, I'd be more than happy to, to, to chat with you and I'll give you 10 minutes or 15 minutes to go through your notes.

How much time do you dedicate to coming up with those speeches? I do one of my big ones, like a check my SEO one that usually takes about two months to write. I write though. And you know, cause you have to, I kind of different parts that come together and there's no linear way to do it, but you know, you kind of have some things that you want to talk about.

You, there's a point you want to make and then you want to make it interesting, or at least I do. And so then you have to have your interesting points that go along with it. But usually I, I do like to start at the end in terms of like, how do I want people to feel walking out of here? Do I want them to feel encouraged?

Do I want them to feel challenged? Do I want them to feel optimistic? Those kinds of things. And so that'll often then help me work my way back through on a talk in terms of the pacing and what I want to bring up and what I want to talk about.

Um, so you kind of want to think how should the audience feel when they walk out of this? Because the, the most important thing to remember is as soon as they walk out the door from the auditorium, they will never remember a word you said that's, that's gone. And especially like as soon as like in the car on the way to the airport, it's gone, gone. Uh, but they will remember how they felt.

They will remember that. And so the most important thing to focus on then is how do you want them to feel? Because that's it. That's all that they will remember.

Um, I've had people come up to me and I saw you speak six years ago. It was so amazing. I can't remember a word you said, but I just remember feeling so excited. You know, when I walked out and I was like, well, that's awesome.

I appreciate that. Cause that's what I was going for. And, uh, so you need to think about that most. Cause that's the only thing anybody's going to remember is how they felt in your talk, you know, and, and, and, and work from there.

It's so fascinating because like, I think from a speaker's perspective, sometimes you fall into the trap of like, I just want to give people as much value as I can. They don't remember the nuggets, but really the value comes from like the belief shifts, isn't it? It comes from how they feel and change. They're going to get plenty of nuggets and your, and your talk should have nuggets.

You should have things that are interesting or in terms of, or valuable in terms of like maybe practical application, but they're not going to do it. I can apply one thing and, uh, cause they're not going to get there and they're going to hear a bunch of other good ideas and hopefully they latch onto one thing that they've heard or two things, and then they can implement from the conference. That's usually what keeps them coming back, uh, to conferences, but they will really remember how they felt listening to you talk. And I really try to be respectful of people's time.

You know, I know it takes a lot of energy and resources, uh, and money to get to conferences and it's a privilege to be on stage talking to people. And so I want to be as respectful as I can to give them an experience. The last thing too, like when people will often get into a lot of value, uh, often those talks really should have been a blog post, you know, they could have just, they could have just read it. And it's like people come to a conference for an actual experience.

And so you have to be conscious of the idea that they came here to have a physical experience and an actual response. And so you want to make sure that you provide that physical experience. And I'd also say, if you're not funny, don't try to be funny. If you, you know, if you're, if you're not good at telling stories, don't try to tell a story.

But if you are good at those things, then those should be, those should be added in. But there's always something about you and your personality that can make your talk unique. And then you can weave your nuggets in and out of that and talk about things you like, you know, as you see me speak, I like to talk about kind of science stories from history, you know, historical science, um, philosophy, stuff like that. I really enjoy it.

And that's because I read it, you know, I read it regularly and I enjoy this. And so when I tell those stories, those are stories that I really like and I can relate to them. And I think I can do it, do my content in a way that makes it very relatable. And it makes, in my mind, it makes it interesting and you can feel good at the end of the day.

But if that's not your thing, telling historical science stories about, you know, Edmund Haley, who's my favorite scientist of all time, um, I care about Edmund and I'm, I want to preserve his legacy. And so I'm happy to tell a story about him. But if that's not your jam, don't do that. Like it's, you know, but there's probably there's something that is your jam, you know, like your time at the fruit markets.

You know, you can talk about all the, you can weave that away. I could, I could, I could do so well with something like that, like a, like a rando hobby. That could be your whole thing and people would love it. It's just, it was inspiring me that because I was thinking about, you know, I do live streams every day on YouTube and I prepare the content and, and I'm always tweaking this, you know, the, the Claude project that I use to generate the notes and everything else like that.

And you get better and you get better You add another layer of pain, you know, to the process and you add in improvements across it. But one thing I was thinking was, well, actually I could take what's unique about me, what I'm interested in, and then plug that into the project and that would be 10 times better. And it doesn't have to be, you know, again, it doesn't have to be huge. It doesn't have to be life-changing.

It doesn't have to be anything, but there's probably something that you're interested in that you could weave in, you know, and people are going to feel that you're interested in it. It's going to make your content more relatable. It's going to make you more relatable. People buy from people.

And so they want to buy from somebody that they like and they're interested in and that seem human and transparent and honest. And those kinds of things all add into that kind of stuff. Yeah, that's the other thing I was going to say, was like, when you're presenting as well, I know you're talking about the way people feel, but one thing I've started doing recently, and this works like beautifully, especially if you want to sell, you probably do this already, is breaking people's beliefs. So like the old way, or like you probably think this, but you're wrong because of this.

Yeah. Do you integrate like that into your content as well? Yeah, so if you're trying to challenge them, I don't know that a 30 minute talk is going to rock anybody's belief system to the core, but in, you know, a month worth of content of yours, probably. You know what I mean?

When you have- That's it, I just keep pissing them down. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just keep grinding them down. But seriously though, like, because then they're going to, they will come to your way of thinking.

I don't know if one talk is enough to do that, maybe, but I would think then the content format that you're in, that's exactly correct. You know, let me give you a seven day challenge to make you rethink how you do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then in those seven days, you got them. But in a, you know, 30 to 45 minute talk, maybe not.

Maybe not the right place to challenge directly because you don't want to piss off the audience and like kind of leave them hanging on a challenge. But in like a span of like, they know that it's got a definitive start and finish and you're going to try to change their thoughts on something I think that could be pretty effective. Yeah, that's pretty awesome actually. I should do like a seven day challenge on my YouTube channel or something like that.

And change your, you know, you thought that you couldn't do a YouTube channel in seven days while I'm here to change it. The other thing too is you give them a premise that they really didn't have anyway. You know, like, you're giving them a belief that they actually didn't have in the first place. Like, yeah, that does sound like too short of a time.

And then you can, oh, Mr. Whiskers. Arthur, he's called Arthur this little man. Good looking guy.

Good looking guy. Yeah, give them an idea that they didn't know they had and then break that because that's very breakable. You know, it's a position that they didn't hold for that long but maybe they're holding it for a second and then you can convert them. Yeah, I would do it that way.

Yeah, I was looking into it and I was like, okay, there's something called procedural knowledge and there's something called declarative knowledge. So it's like, for example, you know, when people, when I watch your presentations, one of the things that I get the most value from is like the stories that you tell about history, about scientists, for example. So interesting. And then there's also procedural knowledge, which is like, here's how you do X, Y, Z.

But the problem with that is like, especially if you want to sell from that, people are like, oh, no, I'm good. I've got the action points right here. I'm gonna do that first and then maybe I'll buy later. No, that's exactly right.

Again, people buy from people. They're gonna turn to people that they like and they trust when they need something. And they're gonna remember like, oh, that guy, I liked what he was talking about or that gal, she really made some great points here. And her topic was on this.

And then they're gonna go search you out after that. You know, that's, I think, the better way to do it so that you are knowledgeable. You demonstrate that you know what you're doing but you do it in a fun and interesting way so that when they need your service or they might need your service, then they're gonna be encouraged to go and find you or at least find a little bit more about you. Yeah, that makes sense, makes sense.

What other skills have you, I mean, obviously you're great at SEO. You're great at public speaking. Are there any other skill sets that have really helped you or you've really mastered like this that have helped you along the way? Public speaking does take up a lot of time.

That's not, and it's not a static thing. I do think it's a learned skill. I'm an introvert, by the way. I don't, I'm not an extroverted person by any stretch.

I would much prefer to stay home but I am really good at talking to people and I don't mind doing it and I think I'm good at it. And so like that networking kind of skill, I think a lot of it translates to them to be able to speak but you, I think it's a learned skill. I do think that you can figure something out. The line from that song, it's like, a hundred bad days makes a hundred great stories and a hundred great stories makes me interesting to parties.

It's extremely, you know, that's all it is, is go experience life, write down some stories, tell them at parties, tell them in your talks and you become a lot more interesting. So that's certainly a skill that I think, I work on that and how I'm going to present. I mean, all of this is performative. I mean, it's just, I mean, it's who I am but it's all part of the act.

And, you know, when you see me on stage, you know, that's just an amped up version of myself, really, you know, because when you're on stage, you're performing. And, you know, when I'm on this, I'm performing, this is performative Kyle, but, you know, it's just a little bit more ramped up version of myself on things that I think I'm good at and that I've practiced and can do. So yeah, I don't know, interpersonal skills I've been working on a lot. Maybe I don't know if I've mastered it but I think I do all right with it.

What about for 2026? What's in store for you? Man, you know, I do feel like my prompt game is weak. I'm not going to lie to you.

I think my prompt game could be better. The main thing that I use ChatGP for is write this stupid email for me. Like there are times when I got to like write an email and I got to put in some data and I just don't want to do it and I procrastinate for forever. And I'm like, wait a minute.

And I can just like, I just like vomit it all out to ChatGPT and it organized it really well. That saves me a ton of time, but I think I can do better. I need a better prompt game. So I'm going to, maybe, does Julian Goldie have a course that I can take on how to prompt?

I have the AR Profitable Community. So it's got like, yeah, it's got a lot of good like prompts and systems inside there. There's nothing, I wouldn't say there's anything specific on like exactly here's how to prompt, but there's like a full AI automation masterclass in terms of like, here's how we use all these systems to automate YouTube and Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and everything else. So I think that's the best thing is like, how can you take all this stuff, all these possibilities and turn it into something that actually grows your business?

Like that's the most important part. Kind of the learn by doing on something that's actually useful and effective. Yeah, that's it, that's it. I mean, it's the same.

I don't know if you ever seen it, but like, for example, there's a lot of videos on YouTube about how to use NA10. But NA10 is like quite nasty to use for someone who's non-technical, who just wants to get stuff done and move quickly. And you don't want to be connecting the APIs and messing around with HTTPS. And so it's kind of like, okay, that's great, but let's talk about stuff you can actually do inside the business, right?

Let's talk about, okay, what stuff could you use to promote pop, for example? Yeah, I'd also like to get an agent that does like organizes my emails a little bit better than what I'm doing. That's going to be a time saver as well. If I could get 30 minutes back a day on just like my email organization, there must be an agent that's doing well.

I do have concerns that they're going to read all my emails and send all my data somewhere. Is that a concern that anybody still has, or is that just me being old? I think there's still a lot of concerns like that. Yeah, especially for example, private data.

That's why people like local models. Because when you use a local model, obviously it's siloed into offline. But it's funny you say that, because the one that I've seen that's the easiest to use right now is Google Workspace. Well, I mean, they've got all the data anyway, so.

Trying to stop them is just pride. You can basically just type in what you want, like manage my emails or organize them in this way, and then it will build out a workflow automated for you to do that. Way, way back in the day when computing banking, computer banking was just starting, somebody was like, well, let me get this straight. So now all the banks run computers now?

And I was like, yeah. And he's like, and all the computers are run by Microsoft? And I was like, yeah. I was like, why don't we just give Microsoft all the money now?

And the answer was pride. Like that's the same thing with Google. They've got all the data. Why don't we just give them all the money now?

And it's just math pride. Yeah. And they've got all the best AI tools. Like, I mean, you know, you look at, do you remember we used to talk about Google Bard and how bad it was?

Yeah. And now they've got like the best image generator. They've got the best video generator. They've got the best media generator.

Yeah. I would say, I think like, the light three nano banana for images. And then also for media, I would say notebook lemons is probably the best one. I don't want to get into that.

I'd like to like make fun, like meme type, nothing useful for business. Yeah. I just want to make stupid stuff. Send it, send it to my friends and get a giggle and move on with my day.

One of them. I mean, like just taking it for a practical example. Like, for example, both, let's say I'm doing a live stream. I need to whip up a high quality thumbnail in like 30 seconds.

So I can just take like the old thumbnail that performed extremely well with the highest CTR, put it through Nano Banana on Gemini and just say, tweak this. So it says minimax 2.2 instead of 2.1 and boom, thumbnail done. And you know, it's going to click, have a high CTR because it did before. I like that.

Yeah. A little stuff like that. I need, that's my, uh, that's my, uh, new year's resolution for 2025 or 2026, slightly better prompting and learn these little, these little hacks to make my life a little bit better. Yeah, that that's it.

It's the same for me. It's like everything that I do is through the filter of, okay, let's do this AI first. If it's something that repeats, it's got to be automated. Sure.

No, I'm with you. I'm, I feel like, I felt like I was like on top of it a year and a half ago, two years ago, and then I felt like I let it slip a little bit. I want to get back on top of my game. Are you, you can wake up one morning, new update is out and you're like, oh, I feel like I'm months behind again already.

So I'm going to try to find a wedge where maybe there'll be a little stable. And then, uh, I can learn all my stuff and at least get a good enough foundation where I can handle it myself from there. Yeah, that makes sense. I think some of the things that I don't see change so often are like image generation, video generation, and human, and, you know, humanized writing or, or sentient writing.

Like, I think those three things tend to stay very consistent. Okay. Right on. That's perfect.

That's all I need. Awesome. All right, cool. Well, what's the best way for people to contact you?

Thanks very much for being on. Well, thanks for having me. It's always a good time with you, man. Um, you know, uh, pageoptimizer.pro is where I'm, where I'm sitting, so I'm on there all the day.

If you have a question, you can probably go through the live chat support and we'll get to me eventually. By eventually, I mean soon. Cause I'm usually keeping an eye on that. Uh, we've got a free Academy too, which actually isn't bad too.

Academy.pageoptimizer.pro. If you like the sound of this voice, you can get several hours of free content. Right there. Who doesn't?

I need more Kyle in my life in 2026 to go check out, go check out our free course. We could have a AI, a voice agent with Kyle Roos voice on. You know, we're actually playing with that a little bit. We're actually playing with that a little bit.

We're actually playing with that a little bit. We're actually playing with that a little bit because you know, there's a stupid little videos are like, Oh, go over here and click the orange button. And then the orange button turns green. Right.

And then most people can't figure out that the green button was the orange button, even though it's in the exact same spot. It's a need to tweak the video. It sucks as a human to go and then make one little video for that one little thing. So we're playing with like a little AI Kyle that can, those can be changed on the fly.

I think for courses like the AI agent, especially is really important. Like for example, if I, I'll give you an example this week, I've released two courses about notebook, one of them was my humanized one that released yesterday. One of them was a collection of all my AI after videos in a course, the one with the AI after videos was one out of 10, like the best performing video we've released this week. The human one was the worst performing video we released.

Man, you know, I've been really wondering about the uncanny valley, uh, where people understand that it's not really you, will they be turned off by it? And maybe you're seeing the answer to that question is no. Yeah, I think you're right. I think you're right.

I think like, you know, when I look at the, even the click-through rate, the CTR, the watch time, all the engagement metrics are like right up there. That's insanity. It's crazy. It's crazy.

It's crazy. My ego was up here. Surely people want the real me. No, we prefer, we prefer Julian, please.

Can we see him again? Yeah. Can we just get rid of this human guy? I don't know who he is.

I love it. Thanks, man. Awesome, man. Oh, I appreciate it.

Take care.