Aleyda Solís on Building a Brand Reputation LLMs Trust

Welcome back to let's chunk you on to the drill. Five questions, 15 seconds each, short drop of a pure marketing insights suitable for anyone's LLM strategy. For the record again, this is not an endorsement of an actual LLM strategy called chunking. It's just the name of a show. Just the name of a show. Blowing chunks with me today about PR, digital PR is the queen of all the SEOs. She is the founder of Oriante SEO FOMO newsletter. She speaks everywhere and she does a ton for the SEO industry. You already know her. It's Aleyda Solis. >> [music] >> Thank you. Thank you very much for having me, Morty. I'm delighted to be here and very eager to chunk. First of first of marketers going to market, you're part of a brand new SaaS platform. Indeed. I joined Dave Perris into Finchley. Finchley is a tool that if you're in digital PR, really need to test that pretty much scans the news cycle to highlight the relevant news

opportunities for your brands in order for you to react. And we also have a new feature that allows you to plan ahead within a year to see any news opportunities or topics or events that you might want to leverage for your digital PR campaigns as well. So, yes, like in an era in which mentions have so much weight and importance, like yes, this I feel that this was a very natural way to evolve what I what I do, indeed. It's It's awesome. I've looked at it. It's super cool and you should all check it out, which is why we again we're talking about digital PR and what the the heck it actually is. So, let's start off with a with a quick question of what the heck even is digital PR now? Digital PR now? Honestly, like the I have been speaking to a lot of PRs lately to gather opportunities, functionalities, to validate ideas and and features of Finchley. Whenever I say digital PR, PRs that have actually started with PR, that are pure PR, let's say. They always say, "This is PR is This is PR, only PR." And

remove the digital, right? However, it's true. It's true that marketers who were might have been very likely previously in SEO or also content marketing or even link building and evolved to be PRs or to do PR online, they they are the ones who call it digital PR indeed. But it's a way to get pretty much your brand stories out there and to get coverage for them, to get mentions, to get visibility in a way that is actually very aligned with your unique selling positions, with the the values and of your brand and what your brand actually does. So, relevance is is very very important and the authoritativeness of the placement is also very very important. That is amazing cuz it used to be like digital PR was like link building. Because of LLMs and the importance of being visible, and like you mentioned, being visible in the right way, digital PR now means almost something completely um different, which brings to my next question. Which is more important for LLM visibility, your on-site content or off-site content? Oh, both.

Oh my god, it depends Depends on where you are in the maturity uh level, right? If you are I mean, if your content is blocked, if your content is is not rendered, if if if your content is not well structured, it's not relevant at all, it doesn't have authority or or or signals, it's not written by an expert, it's not unique, it's it's not citable. That is the base of everything. So, if you don't have that, it doesn't it doesn't matter that you have a lot of mentions, a lot of citations, third party citations, because you need to refer to something that you own pretty much in order to to make it work, in in order to tie and to connect with your actual customers. And that happens on your website. However, of course, if you have the fundamentals covers already covered, so yes, it's third party citations in places that actually matter, that are actually aligned to what you do and that refer to you and that mentions you in a way that is consistent across the web that is also aligned to what you do indeed. So, like it's like what we usually used to talk

about in SEO is like the base like technical content and then links and now technical content now mentions indeed. >> Right. Yeah, and it's amazing first off like that we're we're still like debating is it this or is it that? It's everything and the whole thing is a fake if you're mentioned LLM's are going to find your website at a certain point to check you out and see where do you actually buy? I mean, I'm assuming you're not an Amazon or something. A lot of times on the actual website. So, I don't know like I'm asking the question tongue and cheek which one is more important? The answer is both. Yes. But I want to ask you like a question number three is how do you measure success in digital PR? What does that look like? So, yes it's coverage. Coverage not only the volume of the coverage but the importance of the coverage as well as how many citations it gives you, how much traffic and and this is like I love that you're asking this because this also very tied of the complexity that we have now with AI visibility as well. It's not necessarily a performance only channel but it's a branding only channel, right? So, we cannot only measure it like how many mentions and

how much traffic or direct traffic does it refer? Is it tied or correlated with a growth in AI visibility or rankings? Well, it compounds as well, right? So, what will be important for us to understand is that if it is connected with the way that we want to be perceived from our end, if it allows our brand to be accessed and viewed by the audience that we really care about and that are really our customers rather than raw generic metrics at the end of the day. Which is such a change for like the performance world because I'm talking to someone on the brand side like everyone's looking for volume, volume, volume. When it's on brand, it's really about alignment and quality and narrative and it's a whole new world for us, I feel like. It's it's different way to assess thing, and and not necessarily the way that we have been taught to explain things and to show value, right? And it's it's so much work on I do I really think that we will we are being pushed to learn a lot. But thankfully, we are not the first having to do that. Like there's a whole area in

marketing that is pre-used to navigate and and use this sort of metrics as well. And so well as well. I've been joking about this forever. If you've been running TV ads since the 1970s, this is not new. This is an old problem. How do you measure the impact of that ad? There's no exact metric and then you don't have you don't know exactly who's watching and then when they're watching and what they're feeling. It's not new. 100% >> Okay, so what I really like the the snarky question that I really wanted to get to is what kind of snake oil or bad advice do you hear about LLMs and digital PR that our audience should be careful of? My God, so We need to give us short answers. Like I don't know where you want to start on that one. Okay, still today I am seeing a lot of people thinking that an easy way, a very low-hanging fruit, a very low escape to having to really tackle and and and develop a real campaign, a meaningful campaign that requires a little bit of understanding of the brand alignment, resources, and yeah, actual understanding and involvement, and actual average to journalists. And it's

pretty hard to compete in order to get coverage. So, rather than having to do that, this is just pretty much it's just pretty much faking it with self-serving, sort of top best of type of list that don't necessarily make sense. I think that this is what unfortunately a few thing can compensate real good reputation, right? Like your self-serving reputations, your top best of list, whatever you do, and then distributing it across many websites that many times have zero real value or relevance to your actual customers and audience and industry, but brute forcing that will make, especially now that we're in an AI very AI driven sort of like AR. They will try to influence like that the visibility of your brand of certain personalities as well to be perceived in a certain way like that. >> There's so much on digital PR side like that. It's all like automated automated automated automated automated. Whereas yeah, you want to automate you want to use AI as much as possible to make

things as easy as possible. You can't artificially or completely agentically build a perception and a reputation and do PR or do digital PR completely agentically. That seems bonkers to me. Well, in fact, this is something that again talking a lot with digital PRs. I it has come my way and I become aware of a big issue in the industry is like automation. All of these platforms that promise to automate outreach for example or the pitches, the the whole campaigns that and at the end of the day is about lack of uniqueness, lack of a real angle, understanding of the actual brand and then all of the spam that it generates as well. >> Yeah, and they they hit a fan at a certain point and there's a there's a limit to what you can accomplish with that sort of like kind of brand building. And which brings my last question before our bonus question. What percentage of companies do you think are actually doing the hard work? What hard work? What of all of that hard work? >> work of like building positioning, the legwork of running actual digital PR in a real way that drives quality mentions that are not just not just trying to drive performance in a new way. I wish I

could say most, but unfortunately I think that this level of sophistication, right? And even inside big companies and and I do consult for a few of some of the top companies in the world for SEO and now also AI search and it's not that they are not doing PR, they are doing PR. The same with community management and builder, right? But now it has come the time that even if they are doing it in a very sophisticated way and they have have departments running it globally etc. And per country and per industry that that they see the real need of alignment. Many times it's not that they don't do it or they do it, but they are they are very split in silos. They work in silos. And SEO is still seen, even if these high-level companies have a lot of resources have running they have been running SEO programs since, I don't know, 20 years ago, it's still seen as a very performance-oriented and and and technical type of area in marketing. So, and they talk potentially talk a lot right now with PPC, yes, and product

management, yes, less so with community management and PR. And now with AI search, that is fundamental, right? So, I believe that the challenges are based on the size and the levels of sophistication of the company. For startups and small companies, unfortunately, if if this is not a well-funded startup and just small company or a small startup, unfortunately, PR might not necessarily be the first thing because of resources and effort. And then for bigger companies in which you will assume that it's a solved problem. Yeah, they have a different problem. Amazing, right? >> split. They don't talk to each other. They do it still in a very traditional way. So, alignment is needed and optimization and better support is is needed in order to maximize the impact. Different challenges indeed. And the good part is that we're here to help, of course, to close that gap. And hopefully that will mean better results in general, not only for AI search and only for PR, but for all the areas at the end of the day. I I'm totally with them. If you're this coming out a few in a few weeks in actual recording of this, like

pull the curtain behind the scenes, but keep an eye out on the SEO ranking channel it's about breaking those silos because we're going to be talking a lot a lot about that and it is a real problem. Okay, so my bonus question, on a scale of 1 to 10, and I ask this every guest, how important, with one being least 10 being most, how important is a lms.txt file? I can never get that out right. >> Really, Morty, minus a million. It's a million. [laughter] I I don't know why we have >> gave you that too. It couldn't get any lower. Minus a million is definitely lower. That's awesome. Go on Barry, check your robots.txt. The file that actually actually my crawlers should be able to check or talk with your devops and get access to your CDN dashboard or to hosting coordinator to understand all the accesses of AI bots and what you are blocking and what you are not and so on to better understand that their their behavior with your content indeed. But but in general unfortunately it's not because just because Google has mentioned that they don't use that file

potentially they don't need to use it because at the end of the day they are the most sophisticated search engine out there, right? The calling system and all that they they they don't need that at the end of the day. But but also I I I believe into that that is sort of like a patch in any case at any point a mechanism that was actually adopted by platforms as but I don't think that anybody will necessarily endorse that or adopt that at large because it doesn't necessarily solve the real problem at scale any longer run but it's just a work around so why just don't improve your calling systems in a different way, right? So yeah, there's that. And on that note, Alida, where can people find you and what newsletters should they subscribe to? Well, thank you very much for asking me Morty. Well, they can find me in of course my website alidadati.com. I'm very active also in LinkedIn lately and and of course SEO FOMO is my weekly newsletter with the latest SEO and AI search news, jobs, events, tools, whatever. I also have speaking of digital PR, I have a new

newsletter since a few months ago that is called trending campaigns at trendingcampaigns.com. The main indeed and I pretty much every week we highlight the best campaigns, the best digital campaigns of the week for inspiration and we'll explain why we believe they are very deserving top campaigns on one hand, and then top three news opportunities of those topics that could potentially provide really good sources of topics for trending campaigns, for cool campaigns that certain brands can develop. And we explain why and provide also angles and examples as well. So, if you are in digital PR or who want to learn more in order to enhance and to expand your SEO, let's say, visibility and visibility and the ways that we understand what we do as well. It's like we should learn more about this, and not only about this, but also about community management, social media. I I believe that we're in this search everywhere optimization era. So, it's it's important to have an understanding a little bit of all of the different platforms as well. We're very much about that because we have a social media platform called Planable, and we

very much believe in the layers of the ecosystem of correlating what's happening in search, having an AS, what's what's what's happening in social, and traffic, and on your site, it's all one picture together. And that means thank you for spewing hot chunks with me today. Don't forget to follow Aleyda on all of her platforms and all of her newsletters. And don't forget to look out for new episodes of Let's Chunk each Tuesday on the SE Ranking social media platforms like LinkedIn and on our YouTube channel where you can see past episodes and you can subscribe to get notifications of new episodes of Let's Chunk. So again, like and subscribe on the SE Ranking YouTube channel. Goodbye for now and until we chunk again. >> [music]