Higher-ed GEO and AEO: how AI picks sources (with Ray Martinez)

Intro and Welcome

Hello, and welcome to The SEO Party. I'm Timmy. We have Naveed producing, and joining us today is Ray Martinez. Welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me, guys. How are you today?

I'm doing pretty well. A little under the weather, but fine enough.

We all met up in Brighton, and when we wrapped up, it suddenly hit me. I started getting flu-like symptoms.

I think it waited until it was like, "Okay, we're done," and then the floodgates opened. Also the weather change. Up here we're about to have our first 50-degree day since April, so not great on the East Coast.

Oh man. We've had a storm system coming through, so it's been pretty gloomy outside, but cool, and I'll take that. We're usually hot and humid.

Ray, thank you so much for joining. I've known you for a long time now, so it's nice to have you on our podcast.

We've known each other for quite a while, and thank you for having me. I've seen you guys go through evolutions of content and really focus on providing the industry with important, relevant information over time, so I'm grateful to be part of this.

Thank you. My take has always been to bring on compelling guests so that listeners get something meaningful out of it. There are so many problems in the industry, from mental health, to how you handle clients, to tackling this new AI craze that's going on, and rightly so. Timmy, over to you.

Meet Ray Martinez

Before we dive into anything specific, let's talk about Ray. For our listeners: who is Ray, and what does Ray do?

I'm Ray Martinez, VP of SEO. I've been with Archer Education for just under seven years. In my role, my primary focus is driving enrollments for universities and .edu sites across the web, through organic means, so traditional SEO work. I've been doing SEO since 2010 or 2011. I started in local SEO, working on a website for a nightclub on the Lower East Side. That was my first exposure to SEO.

I've been agency-side for about 11 years, since 2015. I worked at a small shop in San Diego, with people who have since gone on to other agencies, so I have lots of connections across the Southern California agencies as well as some national ones. For the past decade or so, my primary focus has been higher education: how do we take the leap from focusing on organic traffic to driving a more responsible cost per acquisition for university partners, and focusing on butts in seats? Making sure our university partners actually enroll the right number of students so programs are profitable, and that the reduced cost of spend is passed on to prospective students through lower tuition. That's me in a nutshell: SEO for a long time, specifically in higher ed. My mantra is that I want to make sure everyone has access to education.

Higher-ed SEO then vs. now + OPMs

Ray, could you talk about SEO in the education space? I'm assuming they were late adopters. How was it done before, and how have things changed? I've certainly noticed a shift.

SEO in higher ed was like any other business. If you look back at those HubSpot studies from about a decade ago, they said only around 30% of businesses invested in SEO. In higher ed, I think it was about half that. A lot of university websites are run by centralized marketing or tech teams, so there was a lot of focus on the curriculum and the degrees themselves, but not much focus on how prospective students were finding that content. There was a very large gap there.

Throughout higher ed's history, we've had organizations called OPMs, online program management companies. Back in the day there were Pearson Online Learning Services, Wiley Education, 2U, Noodle, and other larger OPMs. They realized there was a large gap between universities being able to launch online programs and being able to market them efficiently and at scale. So they stepped in to help universities through revenue share, sharing the profits from programs. In recent years that model has fallen out of vogue, and more players are coming into the space, competing and understanding the importance of driving website traffic. In the last five years or so, there's been a real uptick in universities going straight to agencies for that additional online help, so they're thinking about the impact of organic.

Benchmarks: paid vs organic enrollments

From an industry benchmark standpoint, paid lead-to-enrollment conversion rates are around 4 to 8%. For organic, that number usually sits around 15%. So organic has a much higher enrollment rate, and I think universities have wised up to that and started investing in organic because of it.

Define Success & the student journey

That's so interesting. I was reading your article on Wix, where you talk about six practical steps brands can take to craft a narrative from numbers. There was also a case study showing a measurable lift in impressions, clicks and user acquisition. I'd be interested to hear a summarized view for our viewers of how they can approach storytelling with data and stats.

I love that piece, by the way, because I think it's unique to my story and my path. When I first started in SEO, analytics was my weakest area. There were so many things to measure, and I didn't know how to go about measuring them. What I've learned is to understand each individual KPI and define it for yourself and your team, and then have really clear conversations with your partner.

From a data story standpoint, I always ask: do you know what progress looks like? Do you know what success looks like? My first recommendation to any marketer in this space is to define success. We often think we know what success is, but it's such a subjective word. We might say success is bringing in a certain number of leads, while our partner says that doesn't really matter: how many butts in seats did those leads bring, how many applications were submitted, and how many turned into enrollments? So define success, understand it, reverse engineer it, and work back to your key performance indicators and what each one means in a broader sense. Then connect each data point back to what I call the student journey. My team is really focused on the student journey: the points where prospective students find our programs, and connecting KPIs back to that.

Personally, I also look at what's going on with my internal stakeholders. A lot of the time, SEOs like to operate in a silo. We think in terms of impressions, clicks, users and rankings, those superficial metrics, but there can be other things going on.

Attribution pitfalls (sports spikes, lead dumps)

One example I used was a D1 university that made a national championship run. On Saturdays they'd see huge spikes in clicks, and it would be easy for the organic team to say, "Look at the organic traffic we drove." The reality was that the university had banners pointing to its online site during nationally televised games. People were being prompted to search for the brand because they saw it on national television, on ESPN, so it drove a lot of branded search.

I've also seen partners where organic suddenly jumps from 200 or 300 leads a month to a thousand, and we think we're crushing it. The reality is that the partner had a lead dump: a partner or community program that enrolls students annually, and they manually upload a large lead list to their CRM. Having that kind of insight, and being able to talk to your internal stakeholders, puts together a much more realistic story of what's going on. It's about having those real-world conversations with your partner so you're not operating in a silo or out of context.

In higher ed, for example, we have a long sales cycle, and we have an admissions team working with prospective students to close them. So we talk to our admissions team to understand student objections and build content around them, having those deeper, detailed conversations so we're giving prospective students the information they're actually looking for. That's part of the story: what is the data telling us, where are the gaps, and are we collecting enough data, not only from our analytics platforms but from our internal and external stakeholders as well?

Visual reporting that clicks (charts, heatmaps)

That's interesting. In the article, I loved the part where you broke down visualizations. It makes such a huge difference, and I was doing it before I read your article. Could you talk about why it matters? I liked how you said it makes reporting more accessible.

What I wanted to convey is that you should be able to look at a report and know what we're trying to say. We often have so many metrics that reports get convoluted quickly and obscure what's actually happening. A lot of that comes down to whether we're using the right charts, tables and other illustrations to make the point. A pie chart showing percentages without context doesn't really do much. With the right compelling visualization, like a bar chart, and especially now with AI and ChatGPT, we can make really compelling visuals, even animated bar chart races from Python scripts, so we're creating more meaningful measurement that gives insights.

One thing I've been doing a lot recently is using Python to create heat maps. I've been taking our paid keywords and our organic keywords, mapping them together, and asking: what's the relevance between the two, and where are the gaps? That shows my teams where we're hot and where we're cold, and those visualizations have helped us drive strategy forward. It's about assessing the situation, going back to the overarching story, and asking which visualization will best illustrate it.

I wanted to break down the different elements you can add to a page, because a lot of people use them without thinking about what they really mean. What's the difference between a stacked chart and a plain bar chart, especially when you're comparing segments? One tool I've used for a long time does a really good job with its keyword charts, using stacked bar charts to show ranking progress over time from positions 1 to 100. That visual is compelling. It shows progress over time, and our partners get it instantly.

That's what I'm trying to do, because a lot of this is very in the weeds, especially in higher ed. We're dealing with subject matter experts who are experts in their fields but don't really understand marketing. If I have to explain the exact power of NavBoost and go that far into the weeds of the technology, I'm not hitting the right notes or showing the right impact. Does that make sense?

It does. That's awesome.

Vectorizing keywords

Ray, what's your take on vectorizing keywords? And can you explain what it is?

It's funny, because if you'd asked me a year and a half or two years ago, I'd have said, "What the hell is that?" Vectorizing keywords is essentially taking an individual word and turning it into a mathematical representation. Once I understood the process (crawling, turning content into vectors using a script hooked up to, say, the ChatGPT API), we could look at each word in relation to all the other words on a page, also as mathematical representations. That lets us create similarity scores and see the differences.

Back in the day, there were tools that measured things like co-occurrence. These measure semantic relevance: how related words are from an actual mathematical standpoint. There are different models for it, like cosine similarity and Jaccard similarity. What they really do is give us insight into whether we're telling the right story on the page and hitting the right notes, so we're no longer guessing as much. It's a powerful way to take stock of our content and understand how LLMs are ingesting it and how they view the relationships between the words on our pages and what our prospective students or users are actually looking for.

It's also a helpful tool for SEOs to prioritize. We often have large content strategies driven by industry knowledge, but a lot of it is intuition-based. Now we have a much more data-driven approach, with a map showing how close these concepts are, and because you see one vector, you might also consider another. It helps us flesh out a much more detailed, comprehensive content strategy that covers a larger set of topics in much greater depth.

Organic + paid: close the gaps

I've also read that the best way to achieve success in digital is to combine the power of organic search and paid advertising, because it's really effective at identifying the gaps and overlaps between the two. That's really interesting.

GEO vs SEO: layer, not replacement

Let's talk about GEO. There's a narrative building right now that GEO is SEO's mirror image, just a rebranded version of SEO. People on social media are saying the strategic gaps between the two aren't really different. I think Lily Ray posted that even though LLMs are better at answering queries directly, they still rely on search engines to get their data, so unless you're indexed in Google or Bing, you can't get cited in AI answers. To what extent do you agree with that, and with the idea that GEO and SEO are the same?

I'm going to give a hot take here. Lily Ray is also talking about answer engine optimization, and I think a lot of people are posturing and trying to put their mark on search with acronyms. I look at GEO as a layer on top of traditional SEO, not a completely different thing. It's built on the foundations of traditional SEO, but we have new technology and crawlers that operate in a similar way, and we also have new standards we can adopt. A lot of people rely on traditional Google search, but take schema markup as an example.

Schema beyond rich results (.edu use cases)

A lot of people think about schema only in terms of Google's Rich Results Test, which accepts only certain types, and many types have been deprecated. The reality is that Schema.org has thousands of types of markup. In higher ed, a while ago, we were using schema types that were deprecated or not validated by the Rich Results Test, and they still changed our output in the SERP. We used a type of markup that created a table in the search results, and a lot of large publishers and aggregator sites in the .edu space used it to highlight different programs in a table directly on the SERP.

Moving that forward to now, there are all sorts of schema types that fall outside the purview of Google Search, where we can provide all kinds of information. From a .edu perspective, a lot of programs don't put tuition or cost per credit directly on the program page, and that's by design. Sometimes it introduces friction in a prospective student's buying process. But we also don't want it hallucinated by an LLM. That's a new, unique problem that isn't specific to traditional SEO.

When AI answers get it wrong

On my LinkedIn, I posted an example of this. I also teach at the University of Florida, and on my first day of class I was finishing the calendar for my students and needed the last day of class. I asked Google's AI Overviews and got an incorrect answer. I switched to AI Mode and got another incorrect answer. I switched to Gemini and got a third incorrect answer. Then I tried ChatGPT, and that was incorrect too.

I'm an experienced searcher who can find the correct information because I'm also a faculty member and know exactly where to look. But think about a current student on a deadline, anxious and scrambling to get something done. How does this affect them, and why did it happen? Part of it is the way UF lists its dates: they're not accessible as static HTML on a page, which creates all sorts of confusion. These are real-world examples where traditional search didn't get the job done. It let us down, and the LLMs, which draw on traditional search, got the wrong answer too. So we need ways to influence these outputs more.

LLMS.txt & GPTBot: what's actually crawling

My team and I tested an llms.txt file with a simple question in mind: is anyone actually going to crawl and use this? It's a standard no one has really adopted; nobody has openly said they'll look at it and crawl it. We just thought: what if we try?

What we found is that OpenAI crawls a lot. When I released my article back in July, we could see pre-training activity for GPT-5, with OpenAI pinging that file every 15 seconds. Then they deployed GPTBot, which we know they don't deploy at as high a rate as their search bot. The reason is that they're not Google. They can't operate at that scale, so they have to create their own crawl budget efficiencies and think about the resources they're deploying.

I was scoffed at, but at a recent SEO conference, a speaker from JetOctopus gave a talk on AI agents, what they crawl and why, and it showed exactly that: GPTBot was deployed at a much lower rate. Part of that comes down to LLM companies not having the depth of resources Google has.

Google vs LLM crawlers: scale & patents

Google is huge. Google has twiddlers and all sorts of modifiers. It can understand sites and unstructured data, and it does all of that really well. So of course Google won't need llms.txt. But what about these other systems? Google has a 20-plus-year head start in crawling and parsing information on the web. When I think back to someone like Bill Slawski, this is exactly what he was talking about with a lot of those patents. How many patents does Google own that give it a huge competitive advantage, even over Bing, which has been around a long time?

So we need to be a lot more explicit with our outputs for these new systems. The last number I saw was that only around 3% of searchers use something like ChatGPT for search. It's relatively low, a small shift in market share, but more people are adopting it. If it's part of our users' buying journey or action journey, we need to be there and think about the most efficient ways to shape the outputs. A lot of what the rest of SEO has done is argue over semantics.

I agree. Whether it's search everywhere optimization or answer engine optimization, I don't care what it's called.

Is GEO real? Names & adoption

I call it GEO because my CEO calls it GEO. Deans and provosts are calling it GEO, and New York Magazine is calling it GEO. The more we try to deny it, the more citations we create around the term, which solidifies and cements it as an actual thing.

Those are all really good points. If it really wasn't a thing, maybe we should stop talking about it altogether. But let's keep the conversation going.

Practical GEO: IR basics, originality & vectors

How would you advise our listeners to approach GEO and LLMs?

The biggest thing is to bring it back to the basics of information retrieval. Understand how the technology works. If you understand the underlying technology, things won't be a mystery. We keep hearing buzzwords like query fan-out and chunked content. I think the answer is a continuous content strategy that we measure in new ways, like vectorizing our content and understanding the relationships there, but also ideating and leaning into people and the actual questions our users are looking to answer. That's how we'll win.

When we're thorough, and when we think about content from an original perspective rather than regurgitating the same old content, we'll win, because we're providing the additional context needed to be cited. If you ask ChatGPT whether llms.txt is being crawled, Archer Education is a source and my article is a source. The reason is that we provided unique, original data. It was ingested relatively quickly, and I have the bot pings. I published the article on July 23rd, and on July 24th we got a visit from GPTBot. By the rollout of GPT-5, about a week later, we were in the model; it had been trained on our content. That wasn't the search bot performing a live search and relying on an index. It was model training on our content, and our bot pings show it. It's observed behavior, not a grandiose claim.

Another piece, and I've spoken to other SEOs who are doing this, is to observe these bots and their behavior, because each LLM operates slightly differently. I've noticed Perplexity, for example, isn't hitting llms.txt. It hits your robots.txt and then ignores it. They'll gather content at any cost, because content is the lifeblood that makes their model unique and able to give their users the right answer.

Brand activity & academic thought leadership

You have a workshop coming up about this too, right?

Yes, and in that workshop we're talking about the power of brand activity. There's a technical side to GEO, where we look at bot pings, but there are also things we should be doing, and shout out to Rand Fishkin, who's been talking about this for a long time: the digital PR side. We call it academic thought leadership. It's how we work with universities to highlight the work they're doing and the expertise they have in their fields. Brands that are active, are recognized entities and consistently get brand mentions are the brands that will be cited.

How to get picked by LLMs (mentions, engagement)

There are so many perspectives on AI optimization, and the discourse can be contradictory, like whether schema works or how to get LLMs to rank you. Given those differences, and based on what you've observed, what tactics actually make LLMs pick your website? I've yet to hear a convincing argument. Everybody's talking about it, but even in our experiments we come across so many variables, and it's not consistent. It's consistent for certain things, but it ends up looking random if you try to replicate it. So what makes an LLM pick your website over Timmy's?

From a .edu context, it's the brand activity piece. I see a huge gap between smaller institutions that aren't very active and smaller institutions that are: getting mentions, working with their communities, building partnerships for their prospective students, and doing a lot of marketing beyond just SEO. Those brands are winning. And the top-tier D1 or R1 institutions (an R1 is a research institution) that get lots of citations and brand mentions because of their research or their sports teams are winning too. They're taking the lion's share. To me, that speaks to being active and being known in your community. It's almost like we've gone back to the billboard approach, where passive impressions drive marketing activity.

Going back to llms.txt and the piece I wrote: half of the SEO community yelled at me. So thank you for yelling at me, because my hypothesis is that between having the file there showing freshness, me talking about it on social media, and getting yelled at and generating lots of activity, all of that activity is a signal for the bot. It says, "Wait a minute, something's going on here." If we can be active across our channels, and communicate across channels so we're amplifying each other's work rather than operating in silos, that will go much further in this new search landscape.

Social signals used to be just a suggestion. We know Google looks at click data on pages, at the popularity of a post, and at things like pogo-sticking, even though it said bounce rate doesn't affect anything. We know they're looking at popularity and importance. So the more engagement you can drive with a post, the better, and to me that speaks to compelling, original, unique content. It all goes back to content. Do you have the right content, or is it derivative of other content? I think derivative content will fall by the wayside. If you're not offering unique value in your content, it simply won't be cited, unless you have a ton of external citations around it and you're known as a thought leader. But then again, that goes back to a historic brand presence.

EDU moderation: suppression vs. penalties; subdomain spam

I saw your podcast with Jeremy Rivera, Unscripted, and thought it was brilliant. I had so much to take away and meant to text you about it. There was a lot covered, but one thing I found interesting was the .edu manipulation and Google's response. You said Google is hesitant to penalize educational institutions, so I'm assuming you think Google will never give a manual action to a .edu domain. Could you elaborate?

That's where we have some fun. I think it's simple: Google is trying to avoid regulation. That may change in this landscape; right now regulation isn't in vogue or a focus at the federal level. But Google doesn't want to kick the hornet's nest. What it will do is suppress your traffic by up to 90%. As I talked about in that interview, I've seen sites with a noindex on their homepage where Google was still serving the homepage from a supplemental index. I've literally seen that while doing an initial audit of a site, and I thought, wow. I think it shows Google understands this is a known entity that people are actually looking for. It goes beyond just another site doing business. These are degree programs people are actually looking for, with a reputation around them. I also think Google doesn't want a user to leave and look for it elsewhere, so it supplements the index and serves a page. But I think the biggest deterrent is regulators. Why put yourself in their sights when you don't have to?

That's interesting, and it's clear as day. Just a couple of weeks ago there was another round of .edu spam hacks.

Apparently there was a DNS-related hack where you could take over a delegated subdomain. When you look at queries like CBD gummies, for example, you'll see a bunch of .edu sites ranking. I think it speaks to the power of an authoritative domain that Google is hesitant to penalize. And the helpful content update, and site reputation abuse in particular, wiped out a lot of sites, but not all of those.

It's interesting. I recommend listeners check out that podcast, and we'll leave a link to it, because there was a lot in there.

Do links still work? The 2025 reality

I'm going to shift the conversation to our favorite subject: link building. We hear the questions, and you probably do too. What's your take on its efficacy today? Is it still relevant? Does it still work? And what's the right approach?

I liken link building to citations in a research paper. Good citations from other research papers make your research stronger, because they show people are actually engaging with it. Contextually, anchor text matters too. Absolutely. For link discovery, it provides a context signal around the document a crawler is going to access. I think link building is just as relevant as it has always been, but the requirements for what makes a valuable link have shifted.

What makes a valuable link today (+ referral value)

I think Google has gotten a lot pickier with links. If you compare Search Console numbers with a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush, you'll see a large discrepancy. It's not that Google hasn't found those links; it's discounting the ones it can, and that's getting more and more stringent. But if there are places where we can drive relevant referral traffic back to our site and we earn that link, that will always matter. If we find content relevant to, in my case, a program or the outcome of a program, that matters. We still see links get indexed and pass value, and we see our organic rankings and visibility increase with link building. It's correlative, but the correlation continues.

It does. A lot of people don't understand that what differentiated Google from Yahoo and the others back in the day was that its entire algorithm was based on links. That was the biggest thing. People learned to manipulate it, and it's become much more advanced, but there's absolute value in it. We see it in our own work and with countless customers. If you draw the ethical and strategic line at earning a meritorious link, it has so much value. Thank you for supporting that. There's always a negative connotation attached to link building, but done right, the sky's the limit.

For context, when I started agency-side, I was doing the really terrible kind of link building. I don't know if you remember the old niche directory lists. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about the best way to provide off-site context around your document. Google is still looking for that: "Here's this anchor text; let's see what it's talking about." If we spam a bunch of low-quality domains with exact-match anchor text, of course it won't matter. But if we're thoughtful about our targets, build relationships with sites and acquire links ethically, of course it matters. Why wouldn't it? We're driving referral traffic, and that's hard to ignore.

A lot of people will posture and say, "I didn't build a single link." What they don't mention is that their brand has a million links pointing back to it, with lots of context and references to their work. That context was already absorbed through a foundational backlink profile. It didn't become magic overnight. You built it over time. That's actual equity in your brand, and your new content keeps benefiting from it.

Forgotten benefit: links → crawl budget & discovery

If there are more places to discover my site from a backlink standpoint, I'm going to influence the crawl rate. We've forgotten that foundational piece. When we first started building links, it was to get our site crawled more frequently. Yes, we were passing PageRank, but we were also influencing the number of crawls on our site. We were trying to move crawl budget from five crawls a day to a hundred, to a thousand, so Google would keep crawling and positioning our content as it moved through its storage systems into the top ten blue links. That's the foundational, historical value of link building, and I think it still holds today.

One high-impact move for small colleges

Nice. Ray, a bit of a hypothetical. Say you're advising a small local college whose marketing department is small but mighty, and they can only do one SEO task this year. What's the single most effective thing they could do for a meaningful impact?

I'm going to cheat a little. I'd focus on the on-page first: is my content right, and do I have the right internal links for discoverability, with the right internal anchors? But if I had budget for one external task, it would be link building. As a small team, I already control the content on my site. The question is whether I have the right amplification. So for me, it would be either external link building or digital PR.

Music & creativity in SEO

Nice. Ray, when you're not being awesome at SEO, what else do you like to be awesome at, or strive to be awesome at?

I make music, actually. I make beats and that kind of thing. But my main focus right now is self-improvement every day. Today I'm doing a Hispanic Heritage Month run in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I like to do all sorts of community activities. I'm Puerto Rican, raised on the island, and I've really been focusing on being in community.

That's awesome. Where can we find your music?

You can find me on Spotify and Apple Music. My artist name is Rayman Angelo. I have about three songs released right now, with more coming soon. I'm working on a project I plan to release in the coming months.

Awesome. Are you getting feedback from Tyler? He's a professional musician.

I got Tyler's stamp of approval on one of them, so that's good. He's a prolific musician. It's funny, because most of my SEO team is pretty creative in their own artistic endeavors. That creative outlet is nice for all of us.

It is. I know other SEOs who share that thought process: intuitive, thinking outside the box. I'm surprised how many of them make music. I might run a poll to find out. In Brighton, we went to dinner with about eight people, and half of them were musicians. None of them knew each other; they were from different places, and they were all hardcore SEOs. I asked what they did, and they said, "Oh, I make music."

It's pretty wild. I'm over here watching Mike King go into the studio with Scott Storch, the guy who played the piano on "Still D.R.E." for Dr. Dre and did the beat for "Lean Back". And Lily Ray DJs all over New York.

I was going to bring up Lily Ray too. She's probably the best example. I think it makes sense, because to be a good SEO you need that creative side. There's a box, and you follow the instructions, but you need the creativity too. I think it plays a big part.

I think creatives make really good SEOs. I firmly believe that. Strategic thinking and creativity go hand in hand. Good strategists look for creative solutions to problems, so they feed into each other.

Precisely. I'm a little creative too. It allows you to actively look at things in different ways and see how you can change them, whether it's a piece of music, a painting or keywords.

100%. Going back to my team member Tyler: he's been in bands and done all sorts of music in Southern California. I've known him for seven years, and some of what we're seeing today, Tyler was talking about seven years ago, because he's such a deep thinker with such a creative mind. I think he saw a lot of these trends early, and that comes down to who he is as a person and his ability to think beyond the moment.

That's a differentiating factor, absolutely. I remember when we were making our YouTube videos, doing our table talks and getting creative here and there, and we said, "Let's do something different." We made a video about treating a website like a story, going back to things like the hero's journey. It ended up being one of our best, and it was a big change in how we approached content. We started having fun with it. We made a video answering a very simple question, but it had penguins with guns and explosions. We took everything we'd learned from making short films and put it to use. Now, every time we're at a conference, people come up and say, "Your content is amazing."

I remember you showing me the first videos you were doing, back in 2021 or so.

Yes. And sure, it gets views, likes and engagement, but it's the satisfaction you get when it's done: we made something awesome. That makes me really happy.

It's part of the process. It's like a site launch. Something that was continuous action, planning, thought, care and craft becomes a finished product in front of you that you made, and that's deep satisfaction. When I finish a song, I shamelessly listen to my own music, because I'm like, damn, I created that.

We do that too. Sometimes we pull up a video we made and say, "This is so awesome. I can't believe we did that." I get a kick out of watching myself shoot penguins. Not real ones. No penguins were harmed.

Wrap-up, plugs & workshop

That seems like a good place to wrap things up. Ray, thank you very much. Before we go, this is your chance for a shameless plug. What are you up to, and how can people find you?

You can find me on LinkedIn at Ray Martinez SEO. Also, I'm running a free GEO and academic thought leadership workshop at Archer for our .edu partners on October 14th at 2pm Eastern. It's on my LinkedIn, where you can hit the register button. I look forward to seeing you there.

We'll leave links to all of that in the description and on screen.

Wonderful. Ray, thank you so much.

Timmy, Naveed, thank you for having me. I really appreciate the chance to talk shop.

Absolutely. We need to do this again. Alex, who co-hosts our show, couldn't be here. He had so many questions and was bummed he couldn't make it. I didn't even cover half the questions I'd written out, so we could definitely do a part two.

100%. Set it up for the sequel.

Outro

Wonderful. Thank you all for listening and watching. Like, share, subscribe, all that good stuff, and we'll see you next time.