Why the Best SEO Tool in Freight Marketing Is Free

LLM search is only about 1% of the total search market. Google still controls roughly 88%. So why do so many marketer's content strategy sound like it was written by someone in a panic about AI overviews? 

This week we're resurfacing a conversation with Grace Sharkey of Orderful to reset what SEO actually looks like for logistics in 2026, with a new intro reacting to Google's recent guidance on what does and does not matter.

Included in this conversation is a fresh take on what Google just clarified, including what they're saying about llms.txt files, FAQ pages, and schema. Then we roll into the conversation where Grace asks the questions and Blythe walks through Google Search Console, long-tail keywords, the FAQ-page rebuild, and why your recorded sales calls are the most underused content gold mine in your stack.

In this episode:

• Why Google Search Console beats Ahrefs and SEMrush for figuring out what to fix first
• How to sort your queries for the fastest click-through-rate wins
• The long-tail paragraph queries LLMs are actually answering
• Why the FAQ page is the easiest piece of SEO work you can ship this quarter
• What Google just said about llms.txt files (spoiler: you do not need one)
• How to turn recorded sales and onboarding calls into a content engine
• Why YouTube case studies beat gated PDF whitepapers for shippers
• The "how did you hear about us" form field every high-intent page should have

Watch this episode on YouTube

Links and resources:

• Grace Sharkey on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grace-sharkey-31940765/
• Orderful: https://www.orderful.com
• Google Search Console: https://search.google.com/search-console
• Adam Robinson's Air Cover newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/air-cover-7450924377958912000/ 
• SEO expert Gaetanao DiNardi: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7368964829673390084/

More logistics marketing and sales content over on Everything is Logistics

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Transcript

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 0:42

Hey everyone, it is Blythe Milligan here. With Everything Is Logistics presented by SPI Logistics, the best freight agent program in North America. And I got a quick one for you today, or I guess a quicker one. It's, uh, if you're listening to this, it's Memorial Day week, and so for a lot of folks, you're kind of, you're leaning back a little bit, you're kind of relaxing, you're thinking about what am I going to do this summer, am I going to, how am I going to enjoy myself? And if you clicked play on this episode, you're probably one of the psychotic people, just like me, who's thinking about how can I update my SEO strategy, and if that's you, then you've come to the right episode, because I want to do a quicker intro in order to surface a conversation that I had last fall with Grace Sharkey. If you've listened to the show before, you're well aware of who she is. She is the marketing manager over at Orderful, an EDI company, and last fall we went through during one of our live shows together. We went through an SEO, organic SEO exercise, just this week at the time of recording. This is before Memorial Day weekend. Google just dropped a major SEO update on what they qualify as, how your site should qualify, and think about organic SEO, and Google, for the record, rarely does that. They rarely do these news updates, and sort of dispelling myths, and they dispelled a lot of myths in the AI, SEO, AEO, GEO world. God, I hate all of those acronyms, but I'm.. I wanted to surface this conversation, because number one, I didn't do a very good job of distributing it out to the audience, and number two, there's still a lot of valuable information. Overwhelming majority of that episode is still very much accurate, and I kind of want to give myself a little pat on the back for, you know, call, and you know, balls and strikes here, but there were a couple myths that I was doing last fall, or even last month, until Google released these updates, and so I wanted to resurface this conversation, put it at the end of this quick little intro, because there's a lot of - it's not really fear-mongering, but it's a lot of debate that's going on in the organic search world, you know, it stems back to how our user behavior is changing because of large language models like Claude and ChatGPT and Gemini with the AI overviews inside of Google Search, and so there's a lot of internal debate. There's a lot of phrases being created, and now we're starting to get some concrete answers. We're starting to get some real data, AI search from an LLM perspective, so all those, you know, big acronyms that I just named, plus Claude, all of those are now starting to, I guess, come to light that all of those searches combined are really only sitting at 1% of the overall market share for search, and so there's a lot of controversy and debate and opinions going around about how to optimize for LLMs, because that's really where a lot of conversations are being started before the buying process, or that research process, and the informational discovery process is being shifted from a Google one over to a large language model one, but that shift is still only 1% of the overall search market share, and so there's a lot of interesting rumors or myths that were being put to bed, one of which that I mentioned in this conversation that we will will play here shortly, but I had to write it down because the no LLMs text files I mentioned at this show that you should have a markdown file on your website, you know, specifically for LLMs. Google has come out and said that's not needed, we already understand your website enough, we're able to crawl your site, then we're able to understand enough that we don't need to access that file, that's still kind of being debated. They also said that you don't need FAQs on every single page of your site. I think a lot of us knew that, but there's some spammy tactics, you know, being deployed. Also, schema is not as important as it maybe should be. I personally think that schema is still very valuable. Schema is a way to technically program your site so that robots can understand it, and so I won't be removing schema anytime soon, but I do take Google's guidance to heart, because they still, speaking of market share, they still control around 88 89% of the market share for the search market, organic search market, and then probably paid as, as well. I would assume that that's up there, maybe even more than organic search, but I wanted to bring all of that to light, because this conversation is really helpful if you're trying to figure out what the hell to do with your site, with your content, with your market. Marketing with your messaging, there's so many things that are being pulled in so many different areas from an attention standpoint. Just the mental load on ourselves feels sometimes overwhelming with how much demand all of these platforms are, I guess, demanding of your attention, and how you spread it so thin, how you search, I mean, even think about how you search. Now you're putting in long paragraphs of search data into a large language model, you're using shorter phrases and keywords on not just Google, but over on any social media channel, you're using that same way that you search on Google on these social media channels, and so our attention is getting divided in a bunch of different ways, and then what do you do when you find something that you like? You, you screenshot it and you send it to a friend, and then that friend hears about you or hears about your company, and then they Google you, and then they arrive on your site, and you have no way of tracking any of that from a business owner perspective, from a business owner lens, a marketing lens, and so it's just we're entering into a new era, and I, the SEO expert that I follow, that I love, and I pulled his name up because I always butcher it pronouncing it, so I'm so sorry, but Gontano Denardi, that he is an SEO expert over on, he has a Substack, he's also on LinkedIn, I think he's on X as well, but I don't think he's as active on there, but he has been an SEO expert that I've followed for years, and he's calling out a lot of these, dispelling a lot of these different myths, but he talked about how dark search is the new dark social and with how much our attention is being pulled in all of these different channels and all of these different mediums. Dark search, where you take, where you use a few keywords, and you find out something, and you're getting, you send a screenshot to a friend, and the friend comes on. All of those different buying processes or research processes happen all the time, all day, every day, and we have no way to measure it. And so, what does a marketer do? Right, a marketer who has to report a certain amount of numbers, or, you know, a CRO that has to report a certain amount of numbers to an executive team, they have to have some data to report on, and so it creates a challenging atmosphere when you add on additional. This was already a problem before ChatGPT and before Claude and Gemini, and so now it's just an extra layer onto the mix, and it feels, it feels like a lot. It feels like a lot, but luckily there are people out there like Gun Tano, and then also, of course, Adam Robinson. If you're part of any logistics marketing groups or on LinkedIn at all, you should know who Adam Robinson is. He's been in the SEO game for a very long time. He has a newsletter called Air Cover, which is fantastic, and he is developing - paraphrasing here, so forgive me, Adam, but it's an index of where he is using from what I understand the same prompt across a bunch of different LLMs for several different high level companies, seeing who ranks, seeing who doesn't rank, and is reporting the data on those numbers, and so it's really, really insightful, because even though AI search is only around 1% of the overall market, and there's, there's no real way to track a lot of this stuff just yet, and some of these LLMs are highly personalized, you know, so you have to keep that in mind of if you do a search inside of Chat GPT and your chat history is turned on, it's going to give you different results on if your husband were to, or your wife were to sit down in that same session, different account, but ask the same exact question, and it will give her a different answer because of her chat history or his chat history. So, vice versa, visa versa, whatever. There's lots of ways that people are trying to figure this out, and I think it's fascinating. It's like a, almost like a new wild wild west put on top of an established marketing channel, like everybody kind of knew, like how to rank for organic SEO, technical SEO, things like that. If you don't, there's still ways to, these tools are making it so much easier to figure that out, but these folks on these different channels are trying to have a higher, a very high level of expertise, and so if you want to learn quickly, I would definitely give those to a major shout out to learn from, because they've helped me for years, and so hopefully you know a lot of folks out there, they will give you some help as well. So, I think my covered all of the, you know, the new people to follow the intro, and then also with, or not the intro, but actually setting up the conversation to have with Grace, where we go much more in depth on the SEO discussion. So, I'm going to get into that, and a little bit more about the how. Did you hear about us forms? I've been harping on this for years, that probably now, and if you're unfamiliar, this is the mindset of all of your high intent converting forms on your site. Should have a field on the site. Ask, how did you hear about us? No drop down, no check boxes, just a free text required field, it should be on all of your book a demo, book a call, high intent purchase forms, all of those. You should be collecting this data, because that is going to be the only way that you're going to be able to measure your social media efforts, your search efforts. If you need help with getting something like that set up on any of your sites, or yeah, I guess any of your sites, any of your platforms, contact me. Sorry, I'm recovering from a sickness, and so, but I wanted to all that to say, I wanted to get this information out to you guys, resurface it, give you the updates on where we kind of stand from an organic SEO perspective, and who you should be following as far as like, who's trying to figure this stuff out in real time, so both an industry expert and someone outside the industry. I'll put them in the show notes in case it's helpful, but that's it for this one. Stay tuned for the conversation with Grace Sharkey, where we go much more in depth on the thought process behind organic search in the logistics industry. Give it a listen, so Grace Sharkey Blythe Milligan back. Everything is logistics podcast, presented by SPI Logistics. And we are going to get into some SEO tips for busy freight and logistics marketers, because much like we talked about in our other segment around data and trying to pull everything in and make sense of that data, and where the value is. That's exactly what's happening in the world of SEO, and trying to figure out what the hell do I do as far as content marketing is concerned. How do I market my company better? How do I placate the SEO gods, but then also, you know, kind of tap dance for the large language models that are out there, even though we don't have a clear defined set of rules for these LLMs, like Chat GPT and Claude, and not Claude, well, yeah, Claude, I know it's good for coders, I just haven't used it in a while for any other time, I'm locked into Chat GPT now, so that is the my my LLM of choice, but perplexity, you know, all of these Gemini. I don't want to, I'm not going to go through and name all of these, but you want to make your company visible in these different large language models. You also still want to placate the old SEO rules, because the majority of the internet is still searching under the old SEO rules. I know it kind of feels like it's all new in the world of AI, but want to kind of give like a high level overview of SEO, because you, in your new role over at Orderful, you are in charge of getting some PR for Orderful, which is good for SEO, it's great for backlinks, and so we've kind of discussed in previous episodes about helping you with your role, and so, as someone who builds websites from a technical perspective, and then also on the front end, as far as content and SEO is concerned, I want to know right now what I guess your understanding of SEO is, in what kind of strategies maybe you're deploying right now, or are you deploying anything right now?

Grace Sharkey: 14:55

So, I will say this: Kate, who runs our SEO at Orderful, is a goddess. So, if I didn't have Kate here, this would be a different discussion. Um, you know what's interesting, though, is like, for example, so recently we've been keeping track of like our keywords that and how those have moved. I think is big, and a big part of that venture is that we're like redoing a lot of our blogs on our site, for example, like we have a couple of these like blogs out there that are listing like different EDI providers, right? So, when people are searching, like, who's the best person, kind of those like tricks, you know? Like, I think Google search tricks, that's as an outsider, that's what I call what it, what a trick. So, we've seen a lot of healthy results there. I think what's interesting, though, too, is of course a little bit of this SEO, and you know, I saw an article today, it's calling a Geo. I knew she'd hate that, the SEO and Geo of things, right? And how are we showing up for each? So, for instance, like now we're working on our Wikipedia page, because Chat GPT does pull more of that too, and we haven't. Let's be honest, it doesn't really matter too much more of the Google Analytics side of things until now. So, focusing kind of on these weird areas that we're seeing Chat GPT pull, so when people are asking what's the best provider for EDI. Or something along those lines were behaving in a way that they're behaving. Another big area we found is like updating our YouTube videos, so they're kind of asking the questions that people could potentially be asking there too. And so I think that's what's interesting is like understanding like how people are searching for things now. What's how that's being pulled, but of course you know how that's leading to at the end of the day pipeline, I think is the big thing. And you know, here's a question, and we'll start with Blythe, that I've prepared for you as well. Look at this, so because this is kind of important to the role that I have as well, so we're talking a little about how a lot of my work is a little bit more bottom of funnel compared to think a little bit even more of Kate and does is a little bit more top of funnel in regards from your point of view to SEO KPIs outside of just traffic, what should a company be focusing on, so that they are seeing lead quality improve, or at least a pipeline influence from it as well?

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 17:40

Question, you might not know the answer to it, but do you know if you're using Google Search Console?

Grace Sharkey: 17:45

Yes.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 17:46

Okay, so inside of Google Search Console, Google Search Console is my, personally, my favorite tool, and I use the word tool use loosely, because there's there's hrefs, there's semrush, there's, you know, all of these different keyword monitoring tools, you know, these tools that will look at the volume of a keyword and suggest a keyword that has low competition but high volume, and the problem with those tools is that they're relying on guesswork, whereas Google Search Console is relying on Google, and Google doesn't share that data with anyone except for their own products, and so if you have what's called Google Search Console, typically it's a short little piece of code that your web developer can add into your site, so it tells Google your domain history, your domain value, and your domain value is the URL that you input, so ortiful.com In this case, so if you go into Google Search Console, the best reports that you can see, you can look at your pages and you can look at your queries. I love to look at my queries, and then to see, because your query is not sometimes it could be a short phrase, sometimes it could be one word, sometimes it can be your brand name, but what you really want to see, especially in today's world, are long tail keywords, long tail keywords are, you know, at least five words, three to five words, that these long tail keywords are, you know, what is the best, or you know, best EDI integrator for 2025 that could be a common phrase that folks might be using, and then what happens is, in your Google Search Console, you can see how many impressions you're getting, so what that means is you're looking at the console and you're saying, okay, I have maybe you know 15,000 impressions for this word. Well, right next to it, they're going to list what the click through rate is, and that means how many people saw you in a search result and then decided to click. If you sort those two columns by the least or the most amount of impressions that you're getting, but the least amount of click-through rates. Then you can also click on the pages, and you can see which pages are registering for that query that people are ignoring. So, when they scroll through Google, what they're looking at is they're looking at what's called an SEO meta title, an SEO description, and sometimes an image, sometimes a video. It just depends on the phrase that you're looking for, and if you have that properly optimized on your website, on a blog post, on a landing page. So you have to have that clearly defined, but it just, it kind of shows the point of you have about a half a second on someone's Google search results in order to make that impression that somebody should click on that link, and so that to me is low hanging fruit for anybody who's out there. You can go to Google Search Console, as long as your domain is verified. You want to make sure that verification is added into your domain. It just tells Google that you own the site and that you have the authority to manage it. So, they will give you this data of all of these queries, and you can see which ones that you're performing already good at. And, as far as impression wise, but if you just make slight tweaks to the title page and the description, it could increase your click through rate for a phrase that you're already ranking, already getting impressions for. I don't say ranking, because you don't necessarily know yet how you're ranking for that word, but then you can also infer, so whatever the phrase is, maybe it's like EDI integration. In trouble or EDI integration error, something like that, where that is something you're getting a lot of impressions for, and then look at the page that is being sent for that, so that what that is telling you, what that console is, or telling you is that Google thinks that this page is relevant to this query, but for whatever reason, if it's a low click through rate, the audience is not thinking that you can solve their problem with that, with the way that the title and the description are set up. Does that make sense?

Grace Sharkey: 22:04

Yes, and I believe that's like what I was talking about, Kate's update. I think that's the journey that she's currently on.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 22:11

Okay, perfect. So that's low hanging keyword or low hanging fruit for anybody that's out there that is wondering. Okay, where do I even start? Yeah, start there. Get,

Grace Sharkey: 22:21

and we've seen like really great improvements from just like the very little read - I don't want to say rebranding, but almost like repurposing of like the blogs, and I think those links, right, that are coming through and making sure that that they are clicking through more often, or whatever, showing up right, whatever content of ours is showing up in that post is relating better, so that click through is happening,

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 22:47

and then you could, you could have multiple pages that are showing up for that particular phrase, and so what you kind of want to do is just make a like attack first kind of priority list, and that's what Google Search Console helps you to do, is to make that attack first mentality, and so from Kate's perspective, she's probably going through and making some tweaks on her end from your point of view, that could signal to you. Okay, well, let me look for the queries that make the most sense for the bottom of the funnel for the people who are looking for answers to that question. I'll send you the recording color. Yes, I'm recording this. Yes.

Grace Sharkey: 23:33

Oh my god, you guys are learning with me here with

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 23:37

so what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to look at because this is the way that SEO is evolving in it, and I'll take it into LLMs in just a second, where the volume, so say if you went to H refs, it might tell you that that string of keyword that those phrases gets no search volume, and it will, it'll essentially tell you this is not worth your time to solve. That could not be further from the truth. First of all, they don't have access to the first party data, they only have their own, you know, first party data to sort of judge by, which I do think that some of those tools have their, have their place, especially maybe finding some opportunities. I personally, especially for marketing teams that are strapped for time, and your their entire agencies that are tasked with handling SEO, because it's a lot more than just let me tweak this blog post in order to match this query, but that long tail query, if you match it to what your buyer or what the position of your buyer is, are they problem aware, are they solution aware, do they even know that they have a problem? If they typically they know that they have a problem if they're searching for that phrase, and so what you want to do is you want to then make content in the future around those particular topics, as long as it's relevant to your audience. Where, uh, previously in my past life, you know, early days of the internet, you know, I was making, I was looking at these tools, and I was looking at, oh my god, like this phrase has a ridiculous amount of volume and low competition. I'll make a blog article, and I get tons of traffic to my site, like it's a win, but it's not the right kind of win, like I think. For I use this example before, like digital dispatch ranks, I think one, two, or in the top three. For how do I fill out a log book? Digital dispatch has nothing to do with log books.

Grace Sharkey: 25:31

Yeah,

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 25:32

we are a website development and management company.

Grace Sharkey: 25:35

I see what you mean, like don't try to don't just take that results and like make a bunch of content for someone who's not your ideal customer.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 25:42

Yes, and that historically is it is why a lot of SEO, SEOs, that's what we call ourselves. Yeah, a lot of the SEOs out there are falling victim to, or have fallen victim to, this because they're chasing the arbitrary, like vanity metrics, they're not chasing the keyword phrases that are going to actually bring in pipeline, that are going to bring in leads and book meetings, or things like that,

Grace Sharkey: 26:07

qualified, and then it's just bogging your sales reps, hate you, so

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 26:11

exactly, and so you're set, you're at marketing, you're that's exactly right, you're you're sending off shitty leads to the sales team, they're going to try their best, maybe at first to call some of those leads and to reach out to them, but if it's they're reaching out about log books and you're a web development company, it makes sense, I. Um, so the way that this is transitioning into the LLM world, because Google has spent the past 20 years of defining how you rank for specific keywords, and they give out guidance for web developers and designers and content marketers of this is how you structure your website, this is how you structure your content in order to rank better for specific keywords, where a lot of people messed up is that they were chasing these keyword phrases that had nothing to do with their business, or it was just very low value traffic, and it sent, you know, just unqualified pipeline. Now, where it gets a little bit more challenging in the world, or LLMs, is that they don't have that clear defined. Make sure you put your website, you know, in this technical structure. Make sure you're getting link backs. They haven't released any of that. So, the best assumption that SEOs can go off of right now is the long established rules of what Google has done. Now, there's obviously competition in this regard, because this is LLMs are a brand new way to search for information on the internet, and Google has been catching up pretty well as far as their own data, their own LLMs, and how they're handling search engine rankings, and who should be given traffic and who shouldn't be. It's a big problem, and Google hasn't exactly solved it yet. Then you enter in AI content, and they don't know what's being created by real people, what's being created by real companies. So, there's all of these different additional technical side of things, which I'm not going to bore you all about, that play a role as well. But now, with LLMs, it's getting more into a very long tail phrase, I am experiencing data issues with my invoicing from XYZ Trucking Company. They don't want to pay. That is a full paragraph. Yeah, that is what is making companies either show up or not show up in LLMs, and so there's there's an argument to be made that not only should you be focusing on the long tail keywords that you have, you know, sort of low hanging fruit in your Google Search Console, but how can you predict what that paragraph text is around that query, and so that's really important too, and so the ways that you know some of the SEOs that I thought, because I have bookmarked in order to prep for this, in order to prep for my own like SEO plans for Cargo Rex, like I've pulled in like 20 different searches of all of these different SEO experts that I follow, and like in-depth knowledge, and the commonality among those things is finding the long tail detailed paragraphs of what your audience is asking and make sure that it's bottom of the funnel. Who cares if it doesn't get any quote unquote search volume, because what the LLMs are looking for is slightly different than what Google is looking for, and so if you can tailor that around, built out,

Grace Sharkey: 29:36

because people are probably for I would assume what's happening when you say like the paragraph aspect is instead of someone saying who's the best in my situation, who's the best EDI provider, they're saying who's the best EDI provider for supply chain companies who have less than$100 million in revenue and looking to scale in the next five years to $200 million

Unknown: 30:01

and then

Grace Sharkey: 30:01

more detail.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 30:03

Yeah, and then to be honest, it's if you work internal at a company that could be a little more challenging, because you're used to the jargon, you're used to these market conditions, so that's where customer calls, like recording your calls, meeting notes, things like that's where those can play a pivotal role in this, because then you can find out the jargon that your customers are using, and then match it up with those long tail keywords, because what the LLMs are doing is that they're, they're adding more nuance, they're adding more detail, but the LLMs have to have something to go off of. So, what do you do as a marketer? Well, you want to make sure that you have an FAQ page that is very detailed, an FAQ, and you gotta, you gotta have your questions that are, you know, in a certain format from a technical perspective, like I go into some very light

Grace Sharkey: 31:02

physically watching this right now. What you're watching me experience is she brought this up before we started recording, and I'm not gonna lie, kind of went in one ear and out the other, but now it's clicking, so continue.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 31:15

Okay, so FAQ pages are going to be really important. There's also a debate around creating a separate markdown file just for LLMs, and now a markdown file is basically a data repository. Theory of all of your websites content, but that's what Google wants to see, that's what the robots are crawling and checking. Now, on the flip side, if you make one specifically for LLMs and you include a bunch of information about your company FAQs that are being asked, and you just.. it's a plain text file that allows the LLMs to have one resource document that they can scan, and so there is a lot of, I don't want to say debate, but tips around add a markdown language doc to your website that includes an FAQ section, information about your company, customers you help, and add that nuance to that document, and then that way you can also format, you know, an FAQ landing page, because you don't want visitors, you know, finding that in an LLM, and then go clicking on the source page, you want them clicking on, like, the nice page that's built around, you know, easy readability, you know, you got proper like h1 h2 formatting on, you know, the question title, and then you have a full description, or maybe even better, you have a YouTube explainer video that goes into that as well, because YouTube is the second sergeant, second largest search engine on the planet, and there are many people who would much rather go to a YouTube video and watch that versus reading pages and pages of FAQs, so if I were you, I would figure out what those FAQ questions are. I would pull in all of the meeting notes from the sales team, I would pull them in from current customers, especially if they're recording onboarding conversations, because those are the questions that people want answered to before they ever pick up the phone and book a meeting with you, so having that prioritization, I would start with Google Search Console. I would start with editing, or auditing, not auditing, but pulling in all of the customer onboarding conversations, and then that, to me, are the two biggest gold mines for how you can make like a Venn diagram of your first kind of initial attack plan for placating not only the Google gods, because Google still controls, you know, I think it's 88% of the search market that has dropped a little because of the LLM adoption, but we're so new to LLM adoption that it's, I think, especially for the logistics audience and for a lot of folks making these buying decisions, they're not using Chat GPT and Perplexity and Claude yet. So, for a large portion of that internet, they're always going to stay on Google, that's what they're familiar with. They're not changing, and they're sometimes they don't want to even entertain the idea of using AI, which is a whole other, you know, bucket of worms. So I would target those two areas, and then I would make the FAQ pages. I would make some markdown language from a technical perspective, and then I would also make sure that your website is discoverable, and you're discoverable not only in meaning you have a site map that Google is regularly crawling, but you also want to add Bing in there too, because guess what, Bing and Open AI, they've had a relationship for years. If you want to be included in Bing's version of Chat GPT, then you want to make sure that your site map is also added to Bing, so that they know to crawl your site for these different markdown languages for these different FAQs. These are easy winners ahead of time. So that is, I would, I would, I said a lot. I don't know if, like, it's resonating. Hopefully

Grace Sharkey: 35:08

it is. I'm just taking notes, and I actually, everyone should stop watching the video right now.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 35:15

No, don't stop. I'll share the transcript with you, and then you can. Okay, so there are a couple of the notes that I

Grace Sharkey: 35:23

was very helpful. That was excellent. No, that was very helpful. I love that, and I like, honestly, I can use it, but I bet you, a lot of sales teams haven't even thought of that aspect, and I mean, I don't know about you, but pretty much any conversation I have, business-related, any conversation I have at this point, I'm recording, so it's like, and I would assume most sales teams are doing that in some form, so instead of just like using that to monitor how good your sales reps are, why aren't you using that to also improve your search? You know

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 35:58

that's a great point you brought, because I was just listening to a podcast the other day that mentioned that they store all of their customer conversation recorded conversations in a certain database, and then they'll have one of their like admin assistants go in and find, you know, something about that customer, like what their favorite sports team is, or their favorite, like a vodka brand, or something like that, and they will use the customer conversations in order to send a personalized gift to that customer, and I thought that was such a brilliant use. Is of using your meeting notes and making a deeper connection with your customers and your potential leads by using these recorded conversations. Now, of course, you can't, you want to be a little careful, you don't want to, you know, mention specific companies, but you can profile them into different, you know, ICP buckets, and then that way, that's a, it's a better resource for you to have, where you have, you know, different customer segments that you can classify each of these different meeting notes into. The onboarding calls are, I all in every, like, freight tech interview that I do for this show, I always ask about onboarding, because I know that's what people, they want to know what the experience is going to be like before they ever book a meeting with you, and so if you can give that information, as much of that information upfront as possible, without ruining, you know, any kind of competitive advantage or, you know, disclosing any like sensitive customer data, that is a huge win. I briefly mentioned on the technology side of things, or like on the, I guess, the SEO tech side of things, that that is very important too. Like, you want to make sure you also have an interlinking strategy. You want to bucket your customers into certain ICPs, but you also want to bucket your topics into into different content buckets as well that match up to those ICPs, and so these are different, like sort of like 102103 levels, like once you get the technical aspect right with your website, then you don't necessarily have to worry about that in the future, so get it right from the jump, make sure that these search engines are crawling your site, and then start with Google Search Console, and then work with your meeting notes, and then that is a perfect place to get started, and then you can start to, you know, expand from there. The cat has an opinion,

Grace Sharkey: 38:27

she's like, yes,

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 38:28

she wants to hear more about SEO and LLM.

Grace Sharkey: 38:32

That's awesome. No, I love that. I think that's super helpful, and I would assume, like, it sounds like it's not only just helping the LLMs, but also just the SEO side of it as well.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 38:47

That's the thing, is like, you, Google has a set of defined rules and strategies, and so my theory is, is that a lot of these LLNs are not going to reinvent the wheel, like Google has spent 20 years perfecting who should show up and why, and you could argue, you know, around the merits of some of there's lots of arguing about what they should do and what they shouldn't do, but what they have right now is probably going to be followed by these other companies, and so you might also. I had a client recently that they don't want any of their content scraped by LLMs, they don't want anything, they want to actually block them, and so it was Cloudinary, which is a hosting like DDoS platform, we host some of our, our sites with their, with their platform, but they allow you to now block the LLM bots from scraping your site and using it as an informational resource. I don't recommend that.

Grace Sharkey: 39:44

Yeah,

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 39:45

but there are, like, with Cargo Rex, for example, I'm not letting it all, I'm letting a little bit, but I'm not letting it all. I'm not going to have

Unknown: 39:53

like

Grace Sharkey: 39:53

strategic advantages, like giving that you want people to come to the site for the information, right? Yeah,

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 39:59

exactly. So, I don't want to give it all out, because why would they want to do business with me? I want to prove value in the LLM first, and so we have some different ways that I'm going to be experimenting with that, but everything that I just told you, like that, is exactly my plan for cargo wrecks, and so it's making these blog post guides, you know, getting real world testimonials, not just, oh, I need an article about associations and logistics. Well, guess what, like, if you, I did those research reports, and at best you're going to find maybe 10 solutions or 10 associations, not all of them were relevant to what I was looking for, but you know that you want to be able to use these LLMs to your advantage within reason, but just know that they're working off a very limited data set because they don't even, they haven't even let, like, webmasters know what that, what they're looking for to begin with, so we have to rely on what Google has told us for years, what the results kind of are hinting at, and then what some, you know, early adopters, early experimenters are finding success with, and that's creating those FAQ pages, and that's creating the markdown page for specifically for LLMs, so both of those things were deploying on Cargo Rex. So I'll report back if they're, you know, successful or not. But gosh, I cannot believe I'm blanking on her name right now, but she works over at Avro. Bold TMS, I love her too.

Grace Sharkey: 41:33

Oh, it's kind

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 41:36

of.. sorry, I can't believe I'm blanking on her name.

Grace Sharkey: 41:41

What company I think you have? Is

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 41:43

it not Avril?

Grace Sharkey: 41:45

Yeah, that's Aviar,

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 41:46

Alice, no, Elvis.

Grace Sharkey: 41:48

Yes,

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 41:49

yes, Elvis. God damn,

Grace Sharkey: 41:51

God, what is her name? She's gonna be so mad at

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 41:53

us. I'm sorry, and I love her. So we were gonna find out right now. Hold on,

Grace Sharkey: 42:01

I always spell Elvis wrong too. I always put the y in the eyes, but yeah, it's gonna drive me nuts, because we love her. We do love you. And why are you popping up for me?

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 42:11

I spelled it wrong, I guess. Maybe I'm on LinkedIn, and I'm seeing like other TMS providers. Hold on, she's all over

Grace Sharkey: 42:18

right here. I can see her face.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 42:21

Yeah, I see her face, because she's gorgeous, and she's Ava.

Unknown: 42:29

Sorry,

Grace Sharkey: 42:30

I swear,

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 42:32

but she just posted a video the other day on LinkedIn about how, you know, she's been experimenting with Chat GPT five and how she's using FAQ pages on, you know, the the Elvis, you know, landing pages there, and so you know we're all, I think that's the beauty of this space right now is that there's a tremendous amount of opportunity if you can have these LLM bots scrape your site and source you in the right way that it leads qualified traffic to you. It's going to take some figuring out, and I think that you know that that's what Ava is proving, that's what other, you know, marketers in this space, and just, you know, industry-wide are trying to figure out, we're all trying to kind of figure this out together. There is no real structure into how to win yet, but I think that's part of the fun, is like trying to figure out where to, you know, place your flag, and maybe it's not one flag, maybe it's a bunch of different flags, and so if I had any sort of, like, lasting advice, is just make sure from a technical perspective that your site is discoverable in both Google and Bing, because then you know that the LLMs can also access your site. Add an FAQ page to your website, that's pretty simple, pretty easy. Add, for God's sakes, like team photos, who works for your company, to your about us page, that gives a little extra, you know, sort of trust, creating like a trust moment on your site, because frankly, no one's going to book a meeting with you if you have no team member photos on your site, or any kind of just hints that you're a legitimate company, fraud is rampant, I don't have to tell anybody else that, but if you can nail those two things, then it makes going into Google Search Console, pulling meeting notes, and making those FAQ pages a lot easier. So, I think that's that was a lot.

Grace Sharkey: 44:26

I hope everyone on watch it learned something. I definitely did, for sure. I guess if I could ask, do I have time to ask? Oh,

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 44:35

please go.

Grace Sharkey: 44:36

So we're doing, we're starting to deploy some more of our content syndication strategies. For example, what are.. I don't even want to say, what are some of your like best tips for content syndication, and I almost want to flip that question. Where do you see people maybe execute content syndication poorly?

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 45:02

What do you mean by content syndication

Grace Sharkey: 45:05

in terms of like doing webinars with different sites or doing white paper, gated white papers, I sponsored articles, things of that nature. Where do you see people maybe not getting the pipeline that they would hope from that, from just mistakes that they've made?

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 45:25

Well, I would. So, I was at the TMS, and we might have talked about this in the last episode, but at the recent TMSA conference, we had a shippers panel, and every single part, it was four people on the panel, but every single one of them said that they liked getting case studies, and I would have never guessed that, as a marketer, I

Grace Sharkey: 45:44

would have done that a little bit, because I think I brought up the fact that, like, I always see our engagement pop up with case studies, especially if it's like brands that people know,

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 45:54

and typically a case study, so that that buyer journey is you know, probably, you know, create the content with a customer. It's really tough to get customers on record for some of these things, and so when they, they do get the customer on record, typically they'll post it out to LinkedIn, they'll make a LinkedIn ad, somebody sees it on their feed, they click on it, they go to the page, they enter their email address, they download the ebook. The problem is, is that for a lot of ebooks, not a lot of them are read, and so even though you've done the hard work of like creating it and getting awareness around it and getting the folks. To come and download it, that it's.. it's one of those things where people, once they download it, they know that they have it, and they're.. it's just a.. oh, I can go back and read that later. They're not actually, you know, digesting it to the point where they're going to read it in full and then call and book a meeting with you. Yeah, so from that lens, I would say they're still worth it. You should still create them, but you should have a greater distribution strategy around that white paper. I would actually first get the customer on a video interview, I would ask them a lot of those different questions, send the questions in advance, so they can kind of think about, you know, for some of these customers it might have been a while since they went through the onboarding phase, and you know, questions that they asked and things like that. So, if you could do this on new customers, this is that, that this is what I would do, is I, as soon as their onboarding is finished, I would schedule an interview with them, and then I hopefully you can get it recorded, and they have permission in order for you to share it out, but I would put that video out, I would make a written white paper slash case study from that video, because then you have the video of them talking about it, you have the transcript of them talking about it on your YouTube channel, which will help from an SEO perspective as well, and then it helps the creepers, the creepers who are not going to fill out, you know, their email address. They're going to make a fake email in order to get that white paper, because they don't want nobody calling them or reaching out to them and bombarding them, like people are having wisened up to this flow. But if you just put the information out there, and then you make white paper case studies based on that interview, I would use that as, like, a combination package, because then your sales team can take that YouTube interview and send it out to their leads, or they can send it out to, you know, specific questions, especially if you have that interview tailored around different questions. You could isolate those clips for all of those different questions, and your sales team can have a content library to send to their leads if they're on the fence, or if they have a question about onboarding. Well, guess what? I have the seven minute video where this customer was talking about their onboarding experience, or these specific questions, and so then you have almost like an entire library that the sales team can use, you're getting more qualified leads because they're digesting your content, they're reading it, and then they book a meeting, and then they're more qualified to close because of that initial strategy. So, hopefully all of that makes sense.

Grace Sharkey: 49:07

No, I think I mean, and honestly, for small teams too, that makes sense, because you're not only gathering, you're not only fulfilling maybe that gated asset, but you're collecting a large amount of, I mean, YouTube Shorts, and I mean, and to talk about what we talked about right beforehand, I mean, in my head I'm thinking, well, you take all the onboarding questions, you do a, you record a podcast with some a customer who is open to talk about onboarding experience, you touch on those questions that pop up more most frequently, and then not only do you now have content for blogs or whatever to kind of bring in that the SEO strategy, but at the same time now you have all the videos that you can post out, it's like you've created content that's helping in so many different ways.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 49:55

Yeah, I mean it's really like if you start with the video interviews, or even, you know, pulling in some of your, your customer onboarding calls, or even lead calls, because that can, that's a whole other can of worms that you could target from a customer perspective too. Is is answering those questions, because people use your website as sort of like the last line of do I want to invest time into talking to these people, and so what you can use your website as, as the sales closer that works 24/7 for you, so then that way you're answering as many questions as possible, so that they know when they book a meeting they're not going to waste their time, and if you position it that way with these different resources, I would be surprised if you didn't see an overall lift of people who are dealing with those common issues, and then focus on your distribution, get it out on email, share it out on social, share it several times on social, it doesn't matter if it's the same clip, and you're going to post it once a week for the next six months. People, nobody remembers your content like you remember your content, and the fact is, is that if you're posting a clip out on social media, chances are, no, especially if it's organic, and you don't put any like paid ads behind it, hardly anybody's going to see it, and a fraction of the people are going to interact with it, and then you know we've talked earlier, you know, about like views and what counts as a view, and you know who knows how many people saw that video and didn't actually listen to it, or maybe they saw the video and never unmuted it, but read the text in the post, so all of these different instance. Exist, and so you can create that you can create your own content supply chain based on those customer interviews that hopefully leads to more customers that are just like the ideal ICP that you're going after, and you're playing in the world of great content, so great original content that can't be replicated by LLMs, but they can use you as a source to people who are looking for those answers, so

Grace Sharkey: 51:55

totally,

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 51:57

that's a lot. I'm worn out.

Grace Sharkey: 52:00

I just got free advice. This is

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 52:05

like, I forgot what we're going to cover the rest of the show. Damn,

Grace Sharkey: 52:08

is less talking about how our personalized are going to be asking, like, how to do my job. I was like, I'm just gonna make.. I'm gonna buy your classes. Look at me. Let's

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 52:24

go. I don't have any, actually, SEO classes on the site. I have been, I've been readjusting how I approach SEO, because I feel uncomfortable selling that as a service if I don't know the answers, and I don't know that anybody knows the answers right now, and so I, but I am worried, I feel like I need to test it on my own brands first,

Grace Sharkey: 52:50

yeah,

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 52:50

and then come up with a solution that I can advise other other companies, so that that is just sort of everything that I know, and the experiments that I'm going to take based on the experts that I follow, and just some of the data I've seen, but hopefully you know this will be something that we can add on, you know, like a LLM technical package to websites for folks who need it. If you don't have a lot of content in your site, you don't need it. Just make sure that you're at an FAQ page, is probably the easiest thing that I would suggest, no matter if you have blog content or not, because the FAQ page will help a ton. But if you don't have blog content, you don't need to, and if you don't have the energy or the budget or the staff to do blog and video con, I would focus on video first. I would not focus on blog content, because blog content, it can just be replaceable, but with AI, and so you have to, you have to both protect yourself from getting cannibalized by these LLMs, but also position your company as, as a resource for the LLMs, which is a fine line to walk.

Grace Sharkey: 53:56

Yeah, interesting.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 53:58

Okay, well, that does it for this segment. I hope you know freight marketers out there, you know, found some value in this, maybe some company.

Grace Sharkey: 54:05

Sure, they did.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 54:06

God, I hope so, because I feel out of breath, and we still have the rest of the show. Oh, thanks for tuning in to another episode of Everything Is Logistics, where we talk all things supply chain for the thinkers in freight. If you liked this episode, there's plenty more where that came from. Be sure to follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast app, so you never miss a conversation. The show is also available in video format over on YouTube, just by searching everything is logistics, and if you're working in freight logistics or supply chain marketing, check out my company, Digital Dispatch. We help you build smarter websites and marketing systems that actually drive results, not just vanity metrics. Additionally, if you're trying to find the right freight tech tools or partners without getting buried in buzzwords. Head on over to Cargo rex.io where we're building the largest database of logistic services and solutions. All the links you need are in the show notes. I'll catch you in the next episode, and go Jags.