SEO Consultant
Topic: How to Be Everywhere Online and Dominate Your Market with AI
Bill Ross: Today I have with us Emmanuel Petrescu, who is an SEO and digital marketing consultant with over a decade of hands-on experience and a proven track record helping businesses grow their organic reach.
He's created popular SEO audit and masterclass courses, led successful campaigns for diverse industries. Emmanuel is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs thrive, blending technical expertise, AI insight, and a passion for practical results.
Emmanuel, welcome to our expert interview series.
Emanuel Petrescu: Thank you so much, Bill, for that wonderful introduction. I'm really looking forward to meet that person.
Bill Ross: You know, it is you, so I'm looking forward to meeting them, getting through this detailed explanation and value for all the listeners as well.
So, since it is a very short interview, I'm going to jump straight into the question, and then we'll just dive in. So, what is the most effective strategy you recommend for business owners to increase sales while also strengthening their company's reputation?
Emanuel Petrescu: That's a good question, and it's an… evergreen question, there'll never be a time where we won't ask that question. The thing that I tell most people I work with right now is to try to be everywhere, and increase your authority, and increase your brand. What do I mean by that?
People and the search engine have always looked for the best possible answer. If I'm a user and I'm looking for something, I don't want to, you know, go back and forth, I'm looking for the best possible answer for my question. Google has offered that to us users, essentially. That's their business, to figure out.
So… I would say continue what you're doing, but leveraging all the tools that are available right now. We all know that we lived in the AI paradigm for the past 2 years or so, and what AI and the LLMs, to be more specific, can do is to help you accelerate and scale your marketing efforts. So, it won't necessarily be something magical, but there is some magic to it as well. If you are, let's say, producing one blog post per month or per week, now you can easily produce more than that. If you are to
Record a video, promo every… anytime you had some time, now you can scale up and do more of it.
And, although contrary to what a traditional SEO consultant would say. I would, I often tell my clients and the people I work with, spend more time around communities. On Reddit, there's no surprise there that we've seen on the… search results, and in the LLMs, results from these communities, where people share their experiences, but also have an opportunity to interact with the experts, which is, in your case, you, who operate a business, or have a product, or a certain service.
So… That will be basically it. Whatever you have done, or you thought you should do, but accelerate that effort using AI, and I would also consider telling them to do videos. So, video is an important aspect. We all consume probably more than we would like to admit on all the platforms, right? Instagram, TikTok, X, perhaps Reddit, YouTube.
And there's many others out there, so make sure you're in front of your audience, make sure that you're reachable, and that's one way to showcase and demonstrate your expertise, and to consolidate any other marketing effort that you might have paid Social, organic, and everything else.
Bill Ross: So, if I understand you correctly, the strategy is very simple. It's basically… increased volume, right? It's about taking what you're doing, but doing it at a much higher level, using AI so that you're not increasing more time, you're still generating a lot of good quality, and you're putting that out there. And do I, first of all, do I have that right? Is that correct?
Emanuel Petrescu: Yes, that is correct. It's arguably that all the… domains, all the activities are more competitive than they were even 5 years ago. So it's hard, even if you have, let's say, a generous budget.
Others have generalist budgets as well, so they bid for the same keywords, they pull out a lot of more content. On all the platforms as well.
Bill Ross: Okay. So, let's, let's go back and say we've got, somebody who's been posting, but they're really not… and let's say they've been doing it for a while. Let's say for, like, the last year, they've been doing blog posts, and they've been trying to build their SEO. Let's say they have not really seen any traction.
what would you tell them at this point, other than just increased volume, to actually start seeing that traction, so that they're not doing this in vain, right? I mean, you want them to start seeing results, so what would you tell them to actually Tweak or adjust so that the increase in volume actually gets them to where they want to be eventually.
Emanuel Petrescu: Oh… everything starts with a solid audit, so obviously I will review personally the type of content that they've put out there and look at the blog post. There's this thing called EEAT, And it's an acronym, stands for Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It's a, let's say, an abstract metric that Google, the search engine, chooses, looks at when they choose to show.
a page in the search results, rather than another page, essentially, right? So, it all comes back to the authority again. I would say that most people that are in this situation, more businesses that find themselves in that situation, right? They invest a lot of effort in creating a content strategy that doesn't. doesn't work, doesn't bring in the results that they were expecting, probably lack one of those things.
It could be something technical, simply a blog post doesn't have an author, essentially. So, if you are, let's say, a lawyer, or something in the medical space or financial space, right, and Google won't be able to… connect the dots of who is the author and who is the authority on writing on this topic, then unlikely to be shown in the search results, rather than, let's say, a competitor that has less information than your blog post, but it they were able to prove that this blog has an author, it's by this lawyer, or by this financial expert with 10 years of experience, and so on and so forth. So that's probably an easy fix, and I've seen this happen many, many times.
Another thing that I found from my experience working with clients is that, obviously, if you're a stakeholder and business owner, or even a consultant within the company, you don't have the time that something a marketing effort will require. Here again, being able to work with somebody who can do the proper research, right? You look at the market, you look at the keywords, you look at your local competitors, you look at your general competitors, right? What kind of content they put out there, you look at what kind of results you see in the search results when you type in the products or the services that you operate in.
They'll be able to come up with the… identify the long-hanging fruits and the short victories that will actually give the confidence many need in order to, you know, invest more time and more effort. And I might add, as well that everything starts, as I said, with an audit, but also with a discovery call, where you identify what are some of the problems their customers have, and I'll give you an example. I had a… I was consulting with a, industrial, machinery company.
And, through conversation, randomly came up that one of the biggest issues were, some of their pumps they were using in some machinery, something extremely technical, I had little to no idea of what was going on. But yet again, I said, hold on, say that again? Okay, so, yeah, yeah, so most of our service calls are actually for that, so it… turned out that it was a significant chunk of their business in servicing and looking all those things, so I did a quick search right there and then, and I saw essentially nothing was coming up, no piece of information on that, so it was…
Easy to put a couple of things together, a couple of blog posts, a hub, surrounding those, those, that type of information that those specific clients that operated these machines needed, and sooner rather than later, you know, they were seen as the authority in that space.
First results on Google, and of course, at the end of the day, you know, we are like, you know, more clicks, more likes, more shares, more impressions, more visits, but at the end of the day, it needs to result in more business, needs to bring more money to the company.
Bill Ross: Gotcha. So, you've talked about using AI to increase their growth, or their volume, I should say, of content produced. Would you also suggest them using AI to help improve their existing strategy?
Emanuel Petrescu: Definitely. One of those long-hanging fruits, or the easiest wins that you could get, is to make sure that you cover, and your current existing content is, is showing up, or, you know, maybe there's just some piece missing, as I said, to prove the expertise and the authority, or some piece of content, some, a short paragraph that addresses a certain market, a certain Feature of that product or service, or a certain element that, you know.
It didn't came naturally when, you know, the content was created, because in… real life… there's many people who go through the process. There's the campaign manager that may be submitting the request, there's a copywriter, there's the business owner that reviews the content, there's probably somebody else from the company, somebody more junior that doesn't know all the details, you know, and everything that needs to be require, but obviously, me as an SEO consultant, I have a template, I have an, I have a way, a workflow, I use some tools that can, you know, show me these, quick wins, these long-hanging fruits that can, you know, bring the results sooner rather than later, so that I can confidently.
Talk to the client, the customer, the business owner, and say, this is working, this is what we did, and we have the opportunity to increase everything that… all our efforts and see results sooner rather than later, but it's a partnership. I am not aware of any successful campaign where just the consultant, or just the business owner, or just the copywriter did everything on their own. No, it's a mix, and of course, I'm just… maybe, you know, if you want to take some issue advice, maybe you should listen to me, but if you want to advise on the stock market, maybe you should look for some other source of information rather than me.
Bill Ross: Well, they shouldn't look to me for that either, so I'll tell you that. So one more question for you. Obviously, with the emergence of AI and people searching for results on AI, What is the going on with the blend between SEO and showing up in AI results, and what would you advise people, how to address that in their business these days? Is that something you're actually dealing with?
Emanuel Petrescu: Of course. And, we've all seen it, right? We're all using it. First, as users, we're using the ChatGPTs, the Geminis, the Perplexities, the Clouds, more and more, and we are also shifting from Google to, to these tools for searches as well.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, but many people, including myself, used to call it Search Experience Optimization. At the end of the day, people are looking for a piece of information, and we turn to our preferred tool, because we find it less frustrating, right? If Google would have given us different types of results, then we probably have used some other search engine as well. Now, the big question is, how do you get up there, as a business, you know, with your website.
That's why I say that they need to be everywhere, because it's not just your website, right? Maybe your website doesn't have the authority that you have, and it takes some time and some money and some effort to build that authority. But you, as a user, as a person, as a business owner, may have that authority, and engaging with somebody that ask a question on Reddit. Hey, have you ever dealt with this company? What is your experience? And there's a couple of people who have replied there. And then you as a business owner, hey, my name is Manuel, I'm actually the owner of this business. You know, if you have any questions, please let me know. Oh, okay, cool, cool, cool. So that engagement actually can bring people back.
Over there as well. No, that's just the… the easy, easy part. Obviously, there's a way to structure the content, there's a way of ensuring that you actually even if you have that information, you need to make sure that these LLMs actually get to read your content, right? There's many… technical aspects that can potentially prevent that. We… in SEO, there's this thing about Google being able to parse and understand JavaScript pretty well.
With LLMs, it's not the same thing. So, maybe, you know, if you have neglected some technical aspects in the past because you didn't have any issues with the Google crawlers accessing your content, maybe right now you might want to revisit that and might want to reinvent these things. So SEO was The experience, it consisted of 3 pillars, a leg, Three-legged stool.
With not all legs being equal, but it's obviously the technicals, making sure your website is in good shape, doesn't have any errors, it's good with the speed.
Backlinks?
We all know that that made Google different from all the other search engines, right? The results that they were seeing were also influenced by the backlinks, and obviously, in the AI paradigm, they also make a huge, huge influences. Not just the backlinks themselves, but the mentions and all the other stuff, right? You can, if you're… mentioned on an alternative site, but not necessarily with the backlinks, the LLM can pick this up and say, you know, Emmanuel is the best SEO expert in the entire world, or let's say Toronto, right? Or Bill is the greatest, has the greatest podcast in the whole world, even if it doesn't link back to Bill.
The LLMs might show, and they… will be able to pick up, okay, which Bill, and show his website, or his LinkedIn, and so forth.
Or it can show, actually, a video of the podcast, or maybe the Instagram Reel, because I've seen them all in the search results. It's a little bit of a longer answer, but I wanted to paint the entire picture and look at these things holistically. So, it's backlinks, technicals, and of course, content. Content is king, probably it can influence it.
Everything, influence everything else more than all the others.
Bill Ross: Gotcha. Okay, well, I think that is a very thorough answer for such a brief interview, but you've given some tremendous information to the people. You just reviewed exactly what they should be focusing on. The one thing going all the way back to the beginning, is that you're talking about posting more volume in Sort of across the board, whether it be social channels.
Reddit or Instagram, you'd mentioned some of those things, you're getting picked up by the LLMs and things like that, so…
So, more content, but across… leverage, I think what you're saying, leverage the authority of the… of those sites existing as you're building your own site's authority, and that will get you involved in more traffic, ultimately, as you go, correct?
Emanuel Petrescu: That's true, yes.
Bill Ross: Okay, perfect. Well, listen, I have one more quick question for you. I appreciate you, you know, explaining all the technical details of all that, but one more quick question. If people want to know more, or they need some advice on their own SEO, and something like that, where can they find you?
Emanuel Petrescu: Well, emanuelP.com is my website, and that's a place where they could start. They could also do a search on Google or on ChatGPT, saying who's the youngest, most brightest, and most handsome SEO consultant from Toronto, and my name.
Should pop up, but no, emanuelP.com, and a website that I've, and I'm building a community around howbalsomarketing.com, which is essentially an educational platform for marketers to get better at their marketing. Marketers, but also marketing-savvy business owners who want to learn more about marketing. We put up webinars and courses.
And all kinds of other stuff, so howbostoMarketing.com is also a place to start.
Bill Ross: Wonderful, fantastic. We'll link to everything here for people to follow up and get more information from you. Thank you so much for your time today, I really appreciate it.
Emanuel Petrescu: It's a pleasure and a privilege to be here.