SEO’s Next Era: Manick Bhan on AI, Content Strategy, and Building a Brand That Lasts

John Jantsch (00:01.144)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is Jon Jantsch. My guest today is Manick Bhan. He is the founder, CTO of Search Atlas, a cutting edge SEO and content marketing platform designed to help marketers, agencies and businesses drive measurable growth. With a background in engineering and entrepreneurship, Manick previously founded RankPay and has become a respected thought leader in the SEO community. So Manick, welcome to the show.

Manick @ Search Atlas (00:30.847)

Thank you, John. Great to be here.

John Jantsch (00:32.686)

So let’s talk a little bit about creating a search Atlas. How old is search Atlas now? Five years ish? Is that?

Manick @ Search Atlas (00:39.551)

I think the first line of code I wrote about seven years ago. Yeah.

John Jantsch (00:44.066)

Seven years ago, okay. So a lot’s changed in that approach or in SEO necessarily. how did you approach or maybe even a better question, why did you think a tool needed to be built for SEO purposes? What was kind of your founding thinking of this?

Manick @ Search Atlas (01:03.187)

Yeah. Good question. with my first, my first tech company, we were in the live entertainment ticketing space. And if you don’t rank on Google, you don’t exist in that industry. You know, it’s like the largest ticketing company is actually Google. It’s not ticket master or stop hub. It’s Google because you go to Google to then find those tickets. So if you’re not on Google there, your business doesn’t exist. So figuring out what the equation was, was something that I started trying to crack the code on, over a decade ago. And.

John Jantsch (01:13.428)

Yeah, right. Yeah.

Manick @ Search Atlas (01:33.437)

What I learned very quickly in the process of trying to scale and grow that business is that other tools out there, conventional, what I call traditional or trad SEO tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush, these are analytics tools. They give us reports, they give us like data, but if we don’t move on that data, nothing moves, right? We’re just watching through the looking glass. And so I felt what we needed really as an industry was tools that would actually help us accelerate

John Jantsch (01:43.789)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (01:52.034)

Yeah, yeah.

Manick @ Search Atlas (02:02.259)

change, like the changes to our sites, the changes to the internet that help us rank better. And that’s where Search Atlas came from.

John Jantsch (02:09.592)

So people aren’t familiar with search as necessarily, you know, it basically lives on a platform, but it connects with your website. And so it actually is able to make changes on your website from that platform. That sort of took some wizardry, didn’t it?

Manick @ Search Atlas (02:25.087)

It did. It started as something on back of the envelope, trying to figure out how we would do this and make it fast in real time. But we’re happy that it worked. Initially, we weren’t even sure if Google would be able to see the changes that we were making. So there was a lot of risk in the early days, but I believed that we would figure it out. And we did. And now I can be, I think I’m happy to say, so over 20,000 sites powered by the tech, by the software.

John Jantsch (02:26.094)

You

Manick @ Search Atlas (02:54.269)

over 5,000 agencies on the platform. And it’s a case study machine. Like it just produces case studies constantly. And that’s been great.

John Jantsch (03:03.918)

Yeah. So you’ve probably seen these headlines of late. You know, it’s become very trendy to start a blog post or something with SEO is dead. let’s talk a little bit. So how do you see the landscape changing right now? I mean, there’s no question it is evolving and changing, but certainly not dead. How do you see it? How do you see it today?

Manick @ Search Atlas (03:15.229)

Yeah, I wonder why that is.

Manick @ Search Atlas (03:29.363)

Yeah, I think the problem is that some people’s brains are dead and they see those headlines and that’s what they click on. But the truth is, search is like a basic human function. We have information demands and needs that we need to get met. And there will always be a search engine to meet us in that. The form of what that takes and how it operates and whether the modality is through text or through audio or other formats, that’s going to evolve and become more interesting.

But at a fundamental basis, we’re essentially providing a fragment of information, looking for knowledge. And that discovery process is just evolved. The landscape is now more fragmented than it used to be. The total size of search is actually bigger. And it’s still Google’s game, but the types and ways that we’re searching are changing. And the kinds of people that search on different search platforms is also

John Jantsch (04:15.587)

Yeah.

Manick @ Search Atlas (04:27.743)

becoming pretty interesting. What we’re seeing in our data.

John Jantsch (04:29.826)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s almost like there’s almost like search personality, right? Almost.

Manick @ Search Atlas (04:36.743)

Yeah, I mean, on the end, on the other end of the computer, there’s an avatar, there’s an ICP. And the ICP of the chat GPT user is someone who’s willing to pay at least 20 bucks a month. Remember that, like we’re paying for the subscription. Anyone can search on Google without even a dollar. It’s a free platform. And so immediately there’s a higher commercial possibility from the user of chat. That’s why I guess when we look at our data, we’re seeing

John Jantsch (04:38.062)

Yeah, yeah.

Manick @ Search Atlas (05:05.278)

5.5 times higher conversion rate from people that go to our site from chat GPT than from Google, which was insane. And then even for some of our product pages, we see, you know, 1.5 to 4X higher conversion rate. So it’s undeniable that the conversion likelihood is way higher from chat than it is from Google. And that’s what we’re seeing.

John Jantsch (05:27.384)

Yeah, and I think it makes a ton of sense because at least today, the snapshot in the moment, I think that the consumer’s belief is, chat, GPT or AI or something has gone out there and done all the research for me. And so these three results that it gave me, you that’s all I need to look at. And I think that’s really why you’re seeing that. Don’t you think that’s why that intent and that conversion is so high?

Manick @ Search Atlas (05:49.843)

Yeah, for sure. And the other thing that happens faster on LLMs is that you’re able to do your research in a more comprehensive way. So there’s other prompts they’re asking. They’re asking refinements and they’re digging in deeper. They’re going and they’re asking more questions. And then when they get to the final end of their journey, usually they’re in a pretty close position, I think, to make the transaction happen and they’re ready.

John Jantsch (06:16.022)

Yeah. Yeah. was a lot of those questions they used to ask a salesperson have now been answered. Yeah. Yeah.

Manick @ Search Atlas (06:21.693)

Yeah, exactly. Way less objections and they’re way more familiar with what they’re buying. And from an information processing perspective, John, like that’s the other amazing thing about it is it’s way easier for us to interact with ChatGPT because we know the structure. It’s text and it’s structured in a way and it’s easy to synthesize that.

John Jantsch (06:37.858)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (06:44.238)

Yeah, yeah, it’s a conversation. Feels like a conversation, right? So, how, where do you, what do you see the biggest opportunities and maybe the biggest risks today for marketers with AI becoming, you know, so integrated into search strategies?

Manick @ Search Atlas (07:00.447)

Yeah, that’s an interesting one. I think one of the biggest risks is

Manick @ Search Atlas (07:09.297)

One of the biggest risks is how the platforms themselves are changing. And if you’re like, as an example, if you’re a pure play organic search marketer that was good at creating content and you were creating a lot of informational content, that strategy is becoming more and more obsolete because the truth is Google and all the LMS, they already know what color an Apple is and they know that the sky’s blue. Like we don’t have to like create content to show that to them.

John Jantsch (07:29.027)

Yeah.

Manick @ Search Atlas (07:38.143)

We have to create something new and different. And so some people that haven’t evolved their marketing approach in organic SEO, that methodology is already obsolete and they need to retrain. So I think that’s a risk is obsolescence. If you’re watching podcasts like this and reading up and actually applying the knowledge, well, you’re using an obsolete blueprint that’s living in, hopefully not Windows 95, but an out-of-date era.

John Jantsch (07:44.408)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (08:07.064)

Yeah, yeah,

Manick @ Search Atlas (08:07.439)

So that’s a risk. Yeah. And the platforms themselves are changing a lot. like what used to work two years ago on Facebook, for example, like I remember buying mobile app installs from, for my first tech company for less than a dollar by scraping the Facebook user IDs and running custom audiences. They closed that loophole. So just how the platforms work, their opportunities, that also changes. And it’s changing faster with AI now than it was before.

John Jantsch (08:36.142)

So you described a lot of that how-to content. The theory was very top of the funnel, get people to my website, that kind of thing. The common advice that I’m hearing a lot and a lot of folks are giving right now is that our content strategy needs to be more around winning high intent searches, which I think people would say we’ve always wanted to do, right? But that person that’s out there searching for best person to do X is a

is a better searcher, but how do we optimize our content for that type of probably more competitive search?

Manick @ Search Atlas (09:12.595)

Yeah. So it’s, so it starts with really understanding your, like the central topic or the primary keyword of your business and being really laser clear about that. So for example, for search Atlas, some people would say it’s SEO. No, it’s actually not SEO. It’s if it’s SEO, then it’s SEO automation and not just SEO automation, SEO automation software. Right. Or maybe it’s marketing automation software.

John Jantsch (09:19.128)

Yep.

John Jantsch (09:34.551)

Mm-hmm.

Manick @ Search Atlas (09:41.279)

problem becomes first off when people begin the process from the wrong starting point and they don’t really understand what is what’s called like their primary keyword or their central searching town. So that’s the first thing. what I, we do, because we also have an agency and we take on a lot of projects from people that have worked with other agencies that did the content process wrong. And they didn’t understand what it was that this business was actually selling and they created as an example.

John Jantsch (10:04.781)

Nice.

Manick @ Search Atlas (10:10.463)

for a cardiologist in LA, an article about did Donald Trump have a heart attack? Well, I get the concept of a heart attack and Donald, that’s somehow related to cardiology, but that has nothing to do with cardiology in Los Angeles or the service or the practice of it. And so when people take that path and they don’t do the right content strategy, they confuse Google about what the site is actually about. And that is the part that is devastating when they…

John Jantsch (10:24.451)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (10:35.629)

Yeah.

Manick @ Search Atlas (10:39.281)

increase the site’s focus score, which is a metric Google is quantifying, when they reduce its focus score, when they increase its radius, when the site gets topical radius goes large, it becomes unable to rank for a core topic. And that’s like the mathematics of how they do the demotion. That I think is the biggest problem with content strategies today.

John Jantsch (11:02.39)

Yeah. You see a lot of people that write these things that get a whole lot of eyeballs. And then when you really start drilling into it, it’s like, well, these aren’t, these aren’t people that would ever buy from us, you know? And, so it’s almost like you’re hurting yourself, you know? Yeah. Great. We’ve got lots of traffic, but you’re actually hurting yourself. So, so how should, how should marketers that’s broad and beyond SEO be, thinking about AI today and certainly as it plays into, to your tool search analysts as well.

Manick @ Search Atlas (11:11.732)

Right.

Manick @ Search Atlas (11:33.097)

Well, probably the common thing anyone’s going to say right now is like, learn more AI, like get more into the tools, practice it. And so I don’t want to just say that. I like to come up with kind of my own little unique flavor angle on it. And what I would say is, create gatherings of people either on your team or people that you respect in the community and do your own hackathons. There’s way more power.

John Jantsch (11:39.778)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (11:59.95)

Mmm.

Manick @ Search Atlas (12:01.971)

When a group of people collectively approach a problem together in like in the real world, by the way, not, I’m not talking about zoom. I’m talking about in the real world. we do hackathons with my team and I, I fly out all over the world to meet different clusters of our team. And we lead hackathons for like four days, five days. We all stay in the same place and we build and we build in at the end. We come out, but we come up with a couple of different things we’ve created together and the process though, we all.

become masters of some type of use case around AI in that process. And sometimes we’ll even bring in people that I know that are experts in a particular discipline. And so if you don’t know those sorts of people, go find them and make friends with them and learn as much as you can, not just from what’s online and on YouTube, but from real experts that you can become friends with.

John Jantsch (12:49.975)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (13:01.87)

So there’s a lot of common, know, the whole idea of quality versus quantity. And I see a lot of people looking at AI and saying, I can produce 10 times as much content, you know, in the same amount of time. And I think the flip side of that is I also think you can look at these tools and say, no, I can produce way better content in maybe the amount of time because I can go so much deeper. can have access to stats. I can have access to

know, reports to people have written and be able to pull quotes from other people. Is there a quantity versus quality kind of best practice or advice that you give people?

Manick @ Search Atlas (13:41.753)

So I’ll give a controversial take. I think that web pages as we know them will be dead in less than 10 years. And the reason for this is that right now, and historically, Google have needed us to build web pages and really even Facebook to build web pages to lead people on an informational journey that maybe also includes a conversion journey.

towards some sort of transaction or registration or some path like that. And they needed us to box up the information because they didn’t have it. When we live in an era where creating content, you can create high quality content and lots of it, where content, the value of it, whether it’s a webpage or a blog post is essentially zero and high quality content is abundant. That’s the future we’re racing towards. And so in a world like that,

essentially all the information that’s knowable gets compressed into a knowledge graph. And that knowledge graph is essentially containing all of the factuality, all the information consensus of all of the voices on the internet and the world. And then at that point, Google can just make their own web pages. They don’t need us to build it for them. They just know what our query is. They have their lens and perspective on an answer or multiple answers. And so they will reconstruct

John Jantsch (14:55.138)

Yeah.

Manick @ Search Atlas (15:04.627)

the webpage experience synthetically optimized for our exact question and the exact answer we’re looking for.

John Jantsch (15:10.06)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Dynamically created for that one person as well. Right. Which, which obviously we, you know, very hard for us to do as a website owner. Yeah. I guess the begs the question then like, what do we do to, compete with that?

Manick @ Search Atlas (15:15.859)

Yeah, on the fly.

Manick @ Search Atlas (15:30.633)

Well, good question. Number one, build the biggest brand you can fast. Build that brand, get people to know that brand and love it. Build something that they want to come back to. Use your resources to create a true brand. Ultimately, all these search systems are essentially trying to identify the brands. Larry Page said famously that the internet is a cesspool and the brands are the signal and the cesspool. That’s literally what he said.

John Jantsch (15:33.294)

you

Manick @ Search Atlas (15:59.933)

And so what does a brand look like? Well, brand looks like people coming to your website, to your assets consistently to first a single purpose and for them to have like a high recall amongst your competitors. Get to that point. Even through traditional methodology, just get there because ultimately that’s the signal you can’t fake.

John Jantsch (16:25.612)

One of the things that I’m seeing a lot go on, you I’ve been doing this for a very, very long time. You know, the first kind of round of digital was like, once these other platforms started popping up, it was like, you know, go there, top of the funnel, get some exposure, but drive everybody back to your own property, your website, your email list, right? I’m seeing a lot more people that are investing in YouTube channels and in LinkedIn newsletters that are

of rented space, but that the entire conversion journey is actually happening in some of those rented places without necessarily sending people back to your home. So how do you feel about that kind of rented versus owned change that seems to be going on?

Manick @ Search Atlas (17:08.819)

I think we’ve always, yeah, I think we’ve always lived in a rent world. It’s always been rented and we just maybe didn’t want to believe it. because even ranking on Google, that’s also rented, right? We’re renting it. We could lose it if we, if we make a mistake. the exception to this would be Amazon, but even Amazon has parts of its business that are rented. and so I think it’s becoming comfortable with the fact that across all areas that, that we have visibility.

John Jantsch (17:18.99)

Yeah, sure.

Manick @ Search Atlas (17:36.627)

we will always be competing with our competitors there. So that means at the core of what we’re doing, we can’t just use crony marketing techniques to box out, you know, the bad guys and just keeping the good guys. Good guys have to become better. You guys have to like keep evolving the state of the art in our craft so that we stay competitive. And like, I mean, that sounds like the most obvious thing, right? Like we just can’t, you know, but I think that’s what it is. And if you build something,

John Jantsch (17:59.436)

Yeah. There’s no silver bullet in that, though. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Manick @ Search Atlas (18:05.767)

No, there’s not. And it’s different depending on what industry you’re in. ultimately, guess, you know, and I always hated like the Kevin Costner, if you build it, they will come like mentality that Google have. Like I’ve always hated it. But ultimately it is like in this perspective, it’s true that if you build something of value and people will come back to it and you know, only other thing I want to add to that is also, I think because of this, we’re going to see people move back toward community.

John Jantsch (18:15.512)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Manick @ Search Atlas (18:34.585)

real face-to-face spaces that are free of digital advertising and just people that now feel like they’re being misled by what they see online. feel like everything’s been gamed and can be gamed. There’s an increasing amount of people that are looking for recommendation from another person, not from the internet.

John Jantsch (18:34.69)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:57.048)

So last question, I always love to end on kind of a personal question. Looking back at kind of your entrepreneurial journey, any lesson that you wish you’d learned a little earlier as a founder?

Manick @ Search Atlas (19:09.663)

Don’t be afraid to fail and fail harder. I had my days of couch surfing and crashing in New York City in the early part of my startup journey when I had no money and I zero twice. And I think we need to celebrate that more and be comfortable and support people who are there. And I’ll say every single person I know that was in startups or building on their entrepreneurial journey a decade ago,

John Jantsch (19:11.31)

Yeah.

Manick @ Search Atlas (19:38.289)

every single one of them has landed someplace amazing. Like not just financially, but also just happy with like where they are in the world. And I feel like, you know, anyone who’s listening to this and is in that early part of their journey, absolutely like commit to it, keep going and like, don’t give up. you’ll get there, like it will happen.

John Jantsch (19:41.196)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:02.69)

Got to keep taking swings, right? So Manik, is there some place, I appreciate you dropping by today. Is there some place you’d invite people to connect with you, learn more about Search Atlas, everything you’re up to?

Manick @ Search Atlas (20:04.969)

Definitely.

Manick @ Search Atlas (20:14.451)

Yeah, easy person to find online. You can find me on Instagram at Monique Bonn, at Monique Bonn. I’ve also got a YouTube channel. If you look up search Atlas on YouTube, we do like weekly webinars and Google challenges and train people how to get better rankings on Google using Holistic SEO.

John Jantsch (20:34.06)

Well, again, I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Manick @ Search Atlas (20:39.527)

Awesome. Thanks, John. Appreciate it.

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