How B2B SEO and AI Search Drive Better Leads With Thorn Compton
Learn how B2B SEO and AI search help build authority, attract qualified buyers, and turn website traffic into stronger sales leads.
Learn how B2B SEO and AI search help build authority, attract qualified buyers, and turn website traffic into stronger sales leads.
Search Engine Optimization Strategist at Amplifyed
Thorn Compton is a Search Engine Optimization Strategist at Amplifyed, an SEO and GEO agency that helps cybersecurity companies win visibility in Google and AI search. A former journalist, he brings an interview-driven mindset to content strategy, using subject matter expertise, buyer intent, and clear roadmaps to connect search performance with qualified leads. Thorn focuses on building authority, trust, and conversion-ready websites that support the full B2B buying journey.
Search today is no longer just about ranking for keywords; it is about becoming the trusted answer buyers find when they are ready to make a decision. For B2B companies, especially in technical industries, content has to do more than attract traffic — it has to build credibility, answer real questions, and support the sales process. So how can businesses create search strategies that generate visibility, authority, and qualified leads?
The answer starts with treating SEO as a business growth strategy, not just a content checklist. Thorn Compton, an SEO and GEO strategist with a journalism background, explains how expert-led content, buyer intent, and strong communication can help companies show up in both Google and AI search. Thorn emphasizes the importance of interviewing subject matter experts, mapping keywords to the buyer journey, and aligning marketing with sales conversations so content attracts the right audience. From backlinks and E-E-A-T to conversion rate optimization and AI-ready answers, stronger search strategies can turn a website into a more effective sales asset.
In this episode of Cyber Funnel, host Chad Franzen of Rise25 talks with Thorn Compton, Search Engine Optimization Strategist at Amplifyed, about why B2B SEO and AI search must work together to drive leads. Thorn shares how to build authority with expert content, why intent matters more than traffic, and how CRO turns clicks into conversions. He also touches on backlinks, content roadmaps, and future-proofing websites for AI search.
This episode is brought to you by Amplifyed.
Amplifyed is a specialized SEO agency, and we partner with in-house marketing teams to boost search visibility, drive qualified traffic, and turn organic search into real pipeline growth.
From technical SEO to content strategy, Amplifyed handles the heavy lifting so your team can stay focused on building and selling. If you want to show up when your buyers are searching, Amplifyed helps you get there.
To learn more, visit us at amplifyed.io.
Powered by Rise25 Podcast Production Company
00:02
Intro
Welcome to the Cyber Funnel podcast, brought to you by amplify. Where we feature the top minds in cyber security.
00:14
Thorn Compton
Welcome to the Cyber Funnel podcast, where you can hear from the top minds in cybersecurity. I'm your host, Thorn Compton. But today we're flipping the script and I'm actually going to be the interviewee, not the interviewer. I have the pleasure to welcome Chad from Rise25 into the Cyber Funnel. Chad, how are you today?
00:29
Chad Franzen
Hey, great. Thank you so much for having me. Great to be here.
00:32
Thorn Compton
Absolutely. Great to have you on. Before we get into it today, I want to let you know that today's episode is brought to you by Amplifyed the SEO and GEO agency for cybersecurity companies. Amplifyed serves cybersecurity marketing teams by driving more leads from Google and AI search. We handle all the heavy lifting and know the exact levers to pull to get you more Sqls.
Learn more at amplifyed.io. That's Amplifyed.io. As I mentioned, I have Chad Franzen here from Rise25, who's done thousands of interviews with successful entrepreneurs and CEOs. And we're flipping the script. He's going to be talking to me today.
Chad, welcome to the show.
01:14
Chad Franzen
Hey, thanks so much. Great to talk to you, thorn. I'm looking forward to kind of getting to know you a little bit more and learning more about Amplifyed. I know you, you had you had been in journalism for quite a while. Then you kind of transitioned into SEO.
How did that come about?
01:31
Thorn Compton
Yeah, it's really funny. You know, I'm used to being the interviewer, like not even just in the podcast sense. You know, I'm typically I'm the one getting information out of here. So it's a little weird to be on the other, to have the other hat on. Yeah, I, I transitioned from journalism into SEO back in about 2021, about five years ago.
And it was a really natural progression. I actually, I went from content, I went into the content creation side of things. So I was, you know, kind of creating blogs and that kind of stuff. But just the way my brain works, I can't just make a blog. I have to know why are we making the blog and the strategy behind it?
And hey, look at that, I fell into SEO. There's a lot of really there's a lot of similarities between the two. It's a lot of, you know, kind of finding the right things, finding how people think about topics and, you know, trying to get in front of the way people are thinking about topics, whether or not that's, that's on the journalism side and actually like trying to provide news or trying to help people rank in front of it. So there's a, there's a lot of different ways that the two kind of mix.
02:27
Chad Franzen
What did that transition kind of teach you about how companies should communicate online?
02:32
Thorn Compton
Yeah. Communication, man. That's the, that's the bugaboo. That's that's the, that is one of the huge things that makes the world go round. And yet it feels like we're all trying to figure it out.
What I found out when I learned from journalism, going into like the SEO side of things is you can't over communicate. There's no such thing as overcommunication. The more actual talking, the more actual talking points you can get between some or between people while you're doing projects like that, the better off your product is going to be. And by that I mean get everybody involved. A lot of people like to silo sometimes their content creation.
When it comes to SEO, it's really important to bring in everybody, bring in the whole group, bring in your sales team, bring in, you know, the people that are going to be creating the products, the people that are actually going to be writing code and that kind of stuff. Because the more you can actually represent the whole team, the better off the product's going to be and the better off Google is going to let in. AI are going to like what you're putting out there.
03:31
Chad Franzen
Do you still have to maintain kind of a journalist mindset when you approach content and search strategy? Or do you I, I know you have to be a good communicator, but you also have to get the info. Sometimes you have to be kind of a fighter or like a bulldog or something.
03:43
Thorn Compton
I don't know how to not have a journalist's mindset. And that's just, you know, anybody that's ever worked in something for a long time, that's just kind of how they are. You're 100% right, though. Like the best way as I was just bringing it up there, if you're just writing content and you're just writing it and you haven't talked to anybody, like the best way to do that is to interview someone, talk to an expert about it, get their thoughts about what's going on, and then be able to create the content through that. Authority is such an important thing right now in both AI and Google search.
The higher the authority you can have on something, the better. And some of those authority metrics are really measured from how are you talking about content? How are you talking about the things that you're talking about? And how are you actually displaying that, getting that out to users?
04:32
Chad Franzen
How does the work you do at Amplifyed connect business development with actual results for clients?
04:37
Thorn Compton
Yeah, it's, that's the, that's, that's the, that's the key right there is, you know, a lot of people kind of get into SEO and they'll start to get organic traffic, but they don't ever see leads created. And that is the opposite of what we at Amplifyed try to do. We kind of look at things from the reverse funnel situation. Hey, Cyber Funnel, it's like that's where that comes from. But we want to focus on leads first.
So what we do from an SEO strategy standpoint is we want to talk to the business development side. We want to talk to them about, we want to talk to your sales team. What are they communicating to people that are actually buying the product or actually buying the service that you have? Because that lets us better inform the content that's actually being created so that you're not just bringing in thought leadership stuff. So you're not just bringing in people that are like trying to figure out what is penetration testing.
They are straight up looking for, I need penetration testing services on my on my site and they want to find you. So how are you actually doing that? And by including the business development team, kind of bridging that gap between marketing and business development, you can really start to cook with gas.
05:45
Chad Franzen
What do you think? B2B buyers need a different kind of SEO approach than consumers.
05:50
Thorn Compton
Well, think about your business versus think about how you how you actually are going to search for things. Users are going to be a lot more like just individual users trying to purchase the thing they can, they can be both way more research focused, but also way more like snap decision. So you want to be a little bit of both on that end and kind of the same thing for B2B. But the way a business is always going to be looking at is like, what's the benefit to the business of bringing me in versus an individual? You might not necessarily think, oh, what's the benefit of this?
You're probably going to fulfill a relatively quick need, sometimes actually focusing on the ROI, actually focusing on if I were to bring this in, if I were to bring this service in, how is this going to benefit my business and everyone underneath me? You really have to keep that in mind when you're creating content specifically on the B2B side.
06:46
Chad Franzen
So when I think of SEO, I often think like, okay, I just need to get my, my stuff seen or whatever. But I think you've, I've heard you say it's about more than that. And it's also about credibility and trust. Can you kind of explain that?
06:59
Thorn Compton
So you'll hear this a lot in SEO spaces. It's the it's the acronym EEA or EEEAT. And what that is is expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness. Those might all seem like synonyms, but they are very different things. Your expertise and your experience are displayed in different ways.
Your experience is pretty much always shown by like, how long has your website been there? It's one of the few things we can't really mimic. If you've had a website that's been on the, on the same URL for 30 years, you are already kind of fighting from a, from a, from a, an advantage point there versus like, if you're making a brand new site, you're just your experience, your expert, your experience level is going to be just generally lower. now. How you can make up for that is through the other three.
The other three expertise is really, again, that's kind of that like, how are you talking about what you're talking about? Are you using correct terminology? Whenever you're talking about things, are you talking directly to users, our users actually interacting with the content that you have on the site? All of that really kind of blends into that expertise side of things. Then you have authority and trustworthiness.
Authority is kind of the big one when it comes to both AI search and, and Google search. And that is built through a couple of different ways. It's really like a, a look at who you are and who you associate with. So that's where backlinks come into play a lot. And it's, it's actually seeing the, the profile of who is linking back to you.
They trust. Are those also trustworthy websites? Are they websites that are actually talking about what you talk about? If are you a cybersecurity thing and you have like a cooking blog that's sending back to you that can be negative or are you a cybersecurity and you have Microsoft linking back to you back to positive? So like building that authority level is really important.
So it's way more about, you know, your site health as a whole and less about just like, hey, I'm going to write this content that I think is going to be good and let's hope it shows up in front of people.
09:10
Chad Franzen
So you say backlinks, I'm sure myself included, a lot of people are just like, I don't even know what that even I don't even understand how that works or what that even means. Can you give us a, like a, like a Reader's Digest version.
09:22
Thorn Compton
5000 foot view? Absolutely. So you have a website and you are writing a blog about something and you have a source you want to link back to, to be like, you know, go, go back to high school. You always want to source yourself to make yourself seem more authoritative When you create that link and you have linked back to that source, you have now created a backlink that is a little bridge between your website and the other website, what Google does, what bots do. And when we talk about bots, we mean crawlers that Google and AI have that run through your site.
What they do is they run through the content on your site, and when they come up on that hyperlink, they follow it and they follow through. If, if it's, we can get into the nitty gritty of that a little bit later, there's do follow and don't follow. But for the most part, what you want is you want a bot to be able to follow that link over to the other authoritative thing, and they evaluate what piece has been linked. And then they kind of give, they share some of your authority between the two. So like if you're linking to somebody that is lower authority than you, you've, you've shared some of your credibility with them.
Kind of the same thing on the other end, if a higher credibility site has linked back to you, they've now shared some of their credibility with you overall, making you look better. So the best. So when we talk about backlinks, that's what we're talking about is other sites linking to you or you linking to other sites. There's also internal linking where you're actually creating like an internal map of the, of your website, kind of in through linking. So your bots can kind of go back and forth.
But that's a little bit of a different subject as well.
11:01
Chad Franzen
So if I'm starting to get into SEO and I realize, oh my, the, the clicks, my clicks are amazing. They've just skyrocketed, but nothing really has come out of the clicks. What, how do you kind of help companies think about attracting the right kind of traffic rather than just, you know, more of it?
11:19
Thorn Compton
So there's two issues that could possibly be popping up there. First, is your intent, as you just said, it's not so much when you think about it from like top down view, say you want to sell dog bones. Well, if you just type in dog bones in Google. It's going to be 100,000 people that are searching that, and it's going to be a really difficult thing to be able to break through. You're going to be competing with Petco.
You're going to be competing with all the things. Now. Are you selling organic dog bones? Are you selling organic vegan dog bones that don't have any meat in it? I don't know why a dog would want that, but hey, it might be what you're into.
The more the actual intent of the search you can nail down, the more you can kind of niche that down, the better off you're going to have actually getting in front of the users you want to get in front of versus like the other opposite would be like writing a blog about what is a dog bone. While that might get you a lot of users, you're very rarely going to get in a real user that's going to try to convert through that versus organic dog bone providers near me in Kansas City, that is someone who is a commercial intent trying to find something to buy. So if you're having a lot of clicks, but you're not getting a lot of conversions, one of the issues you might be having is you have an issue with an intent. So you're just not being put in front of you're being put in front of a more educational informational style user than you are the like someone actually looking to buy the other option. The other issue is, and this gets a little bit away from SEO, but we like to talk about it as well.
And that's CRO or conversion rate optimization, even something so small as what color are the buttons on your site? Or where are the placement of the buttons on your site can be the difference between getting actual conversions coming through and having nobody come through. So we kind of take that as a holistic approach and look at everything on the site and including some design elements to make sure that not only are we bringing in traffic, but we're bringing in traffic that's actually going to turn into what everybody wants, and that's money for your business.
13:28
Chad Franzen
Man, what a pain. Do do most ecommerce owners realize all that stuff when they talk, when they talk to you.
13:34
Thorn Compton
It is it's a little bit of people know that they need to have certain things. We've kind of been trained as a whole. You know, when you go to a website, you need to have a call to action in the top right corner. The all the the other issue with that is though we know that's there as a human. And when humans know something's there, we kind of ignore it.
So that CTA in that top right corner is really important. What color is it? Is it the opposite color of anything else? Are you have do you have an orange website? Make that thing purple.
Make that thing green to where it's like that draws your eye to it and be where else are you putting your CTAs? If the only CTA, the only call to action, you have the button that's going to have somebody, you know, request a demo or, or buy your product, if that's the only one you have there in the top right, you're probably failing because you need to put it in front of people's eyes as they're moving. Have it, you know, dead center on your home page whenever you first come in, have it as a scrolling element. Whenever someone's going through the blog, that's like, hey, book a demo with us. Little things like that, again, can make such a big difference without ever even touching a meta or creating schema.
You know.
14:42
Chad Franzen
How important is it for a company to build content around the full buying journey?
14:48
Thorn Compton
That is, that is the, the really the secret sauce right now is while we think bottom of funnel down or a top funnel up, you have to consider that top of funnel, that authority building is so important really specifically when it comes to AI. AI is answering questions, millions of questions a day in the way AI finds those answers is through content on the web. It's they they search it in a couple different ways, but still, one of the, one of the number one ways that AI finds what they want is through Google search. So that's why the two are still, still married. They're still one and the same.
But the difference between Google search and AI is AI is actually looking for an answer. Google is looking for the place to give you the answer. AI is looking to just give you the answer, so you need to actually have the answers to a lot of this informational stuff, to the stuff that someone at the beginning of a buyer journey is looking up. The important part of that is also what are they searching, getting in the minds of that buyer jersey journey at the beginning? What are they putting in that would have AI recommend my site and then like moving down that funnel?
Okay, cool. Now you've got the informational side. You want to lead them down into the next part of it, which is the like, oh, hey, let's talk about a demo. Let's talk about a little bit more niche on that. And then you go to the bottom of the funnel of the, this is our, this is our service page.
This is where we want you to come in here. Click the button. We're going to we're going to schedule a demo.
16:21
Chad Franzen
How important is it to have maybe like a strong a B2B SEO roadmap before even creating a single new page. And then what does that process look like?
16:32
Thorn Compton
Do you Chad? We're both old. Do you remember back in the day before we had like maps on our phone and we had to, like, print out a map?
16:40
Chad Franzen
Yeah, I can. I remember having to bring the Atlas with me.
16:43
Thorn Compton
Love MapQuest. I loved all the MapQuest in the Princeton, that kind of stuff. And then you ever try to get back in the day again before we all were able to just do this on our phone? Try to you're like, I know generally where I'm going. And then 20 minutes later, you have to stop at a gas station and figure out where it is.
16:57
Chad Franzen
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
16:58
Thorn Compton
Same thing with SEO. If you are trying to take off on a journey without knowing your end destination, you're not going to get to your end destination. So actually planning out a strategy rather than just. All right. Cool.
We're going to make blogs. What are those blogs going to be about? Are those blogs going to be talking to each other? Are we going to be able to create internal linking between each of these blogs and then each of those blogs also internally linking back to the service pages? If you don't have that mapped out at the beginning, a plan for that at the beginning, it's just not going to happen.
And so you'll try to go back a year later and you'll try to haphazardly throw some backlinks and that kind of stuff. When you set it up from the beginning, it can just execute it. It just makes the whole thing so much smoother. And you don't have to stop 30 minutes away from your destination when you've passed it and asked for a gas station to attend it, to tell you how to get there.
17:52
Chad Franzen
So for each client, I'm sure there's, there's metrics that matter. How do you kind of decide which ones are most important for a given client.
18:02
Thorn Compton
That's going to come back to the communication side. Every client is different. For the most part, I the thing that we care the most about are ROI, actual leads coming through. Now to get there, you have to start from the bottom. You have to start by improving your rankings and by improving your rankings where you're ranking on or your visibility in AI by improving your rankings in your AI.
That's kind of the first metric that we want to take a look at. You will then start to get in new traffic as you start to get in new traffic. That traffic should then start to lead to conversions. It's kind of a, you know, you have to have the egg first and then the chicken happens and then you can start laying more eggs. I guess that's why when it comes to chicken or egg, we start at the egg.
Now ultimately we want to get to the ROI side. But what is ROI for everyone else? Some people might not be satisfied on, hey, we want to improve our authority. We want to improve the informational content that we have. So let's do that.
Let's, let's get more traffic around the informational content that we're putting out versus some people are like, we don't care about informational content now, but the answer is really somewhere in the middle. You kind of have to care about both. But effectively communicating with each client and finding out what we call their money metric is do you guys want more sales on this specific product? Do you want more demos booked? Do you just want more views to this blog?
Actually getting that communication from each client can help us better serve exactly what you guys want to achieve.
19:38
Chad Franzen
What does it mean to future proof your content, and how is kind of AI? The process of searching through stuff, through AI affect the way that you talk to clients about that?
19:50
Thorn Compton
Future proofing is our fun little way of saying, if you're just considering SEO right now, you are think you are two years behind. Things have changed. Just look at it. Just look at what a Google front page looks like compared to what it looked like two years ago. There.
Not only is there all the AI stuff, when you really look at it, there are a lot of what we call SERPs search engine results pages. So like, you know, the first page that's only going to have 5 or 6 organic searches. They used to be ten. It used to be pretty solidly. You're always going to get ten.
And so you think top ten rankings are really important. Right now it's top five rankings that are important. That's a massive change, which means you really have to be aggressive but smart on what you are targeting. Now how is AI changed all of that? We talked about it before that AI wants to serve the user an actual answer.
They want to kind of AI wants to plagiarize you is the best way. I used to say it, I'm a journalist. And so that's the way I look at it. But because of that, you want to make yourself plagiarize able, which means you need to actually know what people are looking up in AI, answer questions people are actually putting into AI. There's a lot of different ways you can do that kind of reverse engineering, like actually talking with chat bots and kind of getting back feedback of what, what people are talking about with that.
But by physically answering questions, people are putting in AI that lets AI take your answer and give it to them. Which better increases your general visibility.
21:26
Chad Franzen
So I'm a business owner and I'm hearing you talk, and I know all this stuff is important. I understand about 60% of it, but I know that I need to get into it and I need somebody to help me. What should I look for when choosing some, you know, an SEO partner?
21:42
Thorn Compton
The first thing right now that you should look for is, does that person also do AI GEO? And is that an extra extra step? I'm not going to get into other people's businesses, but I'll tell you that we at at, at amplify, don't look at it. Don't look at them as separate things. We don't charge you like a separate contract for GEO because if you are not lifting both of those tides at one at once, you are stunting your growth.
They should be done. Connectedly. And so like if you're talking with someone that's just talking old school SEO. They never even mention AI. They're not worried about that.
They are behind the ball. Now, they might be able to help you with some Google rankings, but they're not going to be able to overall help you. The second thing I'd say is look at their reporting. It's really important to keep reporting in mind to keep the SEO accountable. Accountability is such an important thing, especially when talking about SEO, which is kind of a nebulous subject.
It's what are we doing to bring in to bring in leads? What are we doing to bring in new traffic? Where are our rankings? You should at least be getting monthly updates on all of those things, on what's going on with the rankings, what's going on with the content? How many leads are you bringing in?
How does this compare to past or to the past and that kind of stuff, and then letting you know, what are you working on? Some people will just be like, yeah, I'm just cooking. I'm just going to do some SEO. No, you should have exact like laid out. What is the SEO working on, and how is that going to be helping us with one of the different factors that that will help with SEO and AI ranking.
23:22
Chad Franzen
And I know that working with a expert strategist is important for Amplifyed 100%.
23:29
Thorn Compton
Yeah. All of the people at Amplifyed are expert strategists. We, we don't believe in just like pairing you with an account manager that's just going to be, you know, just project managing everybody that you're going to be managing is also going to be going to be creating, creating and executing the actual strategy. We, it just makes more sense to us to have the person doing the doing the communication, be the actual person and not, you know, just a side person that you have to talk to.
23:57
Chad Franzen
Does that have any effect on? Does the fact that they're experts have any effect on like the access that a client might have to that person?
24:04
Thorn Compton
Absolutely. Yeah. We are we, we like to say we pride ourselves on being experts, but also like great to talk with and easy to communicate with by by immediately getting with your expert, you're not having to filter through 3 or 4 different people. You are sending directly to the person that can make a change or make any kind of, you know, do any kind of research and that kind of stuff. It makes communication super easy and, you know, doesn't have to jump through a bunch of hoops.
24:31
Chad Franzen
So we talked about the content, the SEO roadmap, what makes a documented content strategy so important for SEO success?
24:40
Thorn Compton
So again, by laying out exactly, by knowing your journey before, before going on or knowing your destination, before going on the journey, you can make that journey more efficient. So what you should have is essentially laid out, okay, this is exactly what's going to be mapped to what page. So that way you know that, all right, this specific keyword is going to be going to this specific page. And you don't have to create more content just going for that keyword. Now there's going to be secondary tertiary keywords that or related things that you can have and you can create as backlinks and that kind of stuff, which you also then create through that actual documented, mapped out thing.
It also lets you know, like what has actually been made, what changes have actually been made to the site. If you don't have any documentation on of changes that have been made into the site, you don't know, you know, when something was changed, you don't know if that's a change that needs to be maybe reversed or needs to go back and be looked at. It just overall accountability is much better when you have something physically written down and are executing something that from a map, you know.
25:47
Chad Franzen
So keywords are another thing to kind of like backlinks, like sounds sounds important. I can't even understand what, how you come up with it. Like how do you approach keyword research and maybe how do you do that without losing sight of the, the audience needs.
26:03
Thorn Compton
Audience, audience needs is always what's going to. Well, so it's audience needs and business needs are the two most important parts of a keyword. Because there might be keywords, there might be key phrases. And for those that don't understand, when we say keywords or key phrases, we're talking about physical things that people are putting into Google. A lot of the ways, especially with AI, that this is also being referred to now as grounding queries, people don't use AI in the same way that they used that they used Google.
People don't just put in like, you know, cybersecurity company near me in, in, in AI, what they put is they put their exact needs or they like are saying, hey, I'm dealing with this issue. I'm dealing with a problem with, I'm having a, I need a disaster recovery for my active directory. What exactly or, you know, recommend me some people to do this. The grounding query there is active directory disaster recovery. So you need to have that specific query, that specific Phrase mapped somewhere on your site to be able to actually move the needle forward on that.
Once you have a good list of those grounding queries of those keywords, it's important to then map them each to one page because that's kind of, that's kind of the, the rub is every page can rank for multiple things, but you get one primary thing. So pairing primary, primary content, primary keywords to the, the things that they need to be. If it's a, it's an informational, then that primary keyword needs to probably be a blog or a use case page. If it's a, if it's a conversion, if it's a, it's a buyer intent keyword or grounded query that needs to probably go to a service page, something that will lead to somebody continuing on the buyer journey. I believe that answered your question.
I kind of went on a little bit of a tangent there.
28:01
Chad Franzen
So, so given that given especially the way you described a search in AI compared to Google. If your content contributes to you being found, you probably want your content to be helpful, like, like answer questions. What does that kind of look like in a B2B context?
28:16
Thorn Compton
So, and you'll hear this. CEOs love to talk about the, the, the Google updates, the Google algorithm updates. First, the nice thing about Google algorithm updates are they ultimately are reinforcing what Google has always cared about. And that goes back to that EAT thing. What's your authority?
What's your what's your expertise on that expertise side? Google loves to bring up this thing called helpful content. It is more about actually serving the user than it is about trying to sell the user. They Google cares about their users. Some people might not agree with that, but they do.
Google really does want to give the user the best thing. what Google thinks is the best thing, and what the user thinks is the best thing sometimes aren't necessarily the same, but that is how Google's algorithms working. So if you have content on there that is helpful. That is actually good information. That is not it doesn't have to be not written by AI.
We're in 2026. People are using AI to create content. The important part, and this is kind of where my journalism background comes into play, is having the human element on that. You can't just have AI create a content, a piece of content, and put it on your site. You have to have AI draft a brief or AI, draft the actual content, and then have the human that actually knows what it's talking about go through there, because AI will hallucinate, AI will just kind of say whatever.
And AI is also really good at knowing that AI wrote something by making adjustments, by making actual human adjustments to the content, you can create helpful content that Google thinks is this is something that a user will be served by reading.
30:00
Chad Franzen
So you shouldn't think of your blog page as like an extended catalog page.
30:04
Thorn Compton
You can, and it depends on what you are, but your blog page needs to be a little bit of a mix of both. Have it as a little bit of a catalog page. Have a little bit of high level informational content there. If you are on YouTube as well and have certain things like that. Create a blog post that's about a YouTube thing that you have.
Marry those together. And that's another way to start cooking with SEO gas. But that's also another way to be helpful because Google looks at that and goes, sweet. You've now given me the information in text. You've now given me the information in a video.
You've now given me a photo that's relevant on that, that has, that has text on the back end of the photo that explains what it is and talks about. It just overall improves your authority, which is going to skyrocket you on everywhere you want to show up.
30:53
Chad Franzen
How do you decide which content format best matches search intent?
30:58
Thorn Compton
So that's a that's a great question. Weirdly, a lot of the times you can really decide that is by looking at the, the Serp, the search engine result page, and taking an average of the amount of words, the actual word count on each of those search engine results pages, search engine results pages is essentially like our North Star for a lot of these because or, or looking it up in AI because that tells you like that, that gives you the actual what is showing up. So if you search a term and you notice, hey, of the eight things that are showing up organically on here, six of them are blogs or use case pages. You have your answer. You need to create a blog or a use case page, or the opposite way you think it's going to be a use or a blog or use case page you're looking at is like, man, I've got five homepages of the six things that are showing up here.
Well, then that tells you it needs to be something that's pretty highly authoritative, like a homepage That is actually ranking for that. You don't want to swim upstream, go with the current, go with the flow. You can always try to fit a square peg into a round hole and try to make a use case page rank where a where a service page is and vice versa. And sometimes it works. The amount of effort and what's the word I want to look.
Yeah. Effort and material you have to put to it their backlinks, constant page refreshes and that kind of stuff toward that versus like trying to actually just match the intent that Google has already decided. It's just, it's night and day on what the actual result you're going to get.
32:36
Chad Franzen
We talked a little bit about backlinks earlier. They're kind of like another one of those magic words. Do you do you feel like most companies underestimate their role?
32:46
Thorn Compton
You know, two years ago, I would have said absolutely. And I still think they do. Backlinks have changed. It used to be that the amount of backlinks that you had really mattered, and the amount of backlinks you have really matter still. But it's way more about what backlinks you have.
I care way more about. So really, really quick nitty gritty domain rating or domain authority is one of the main ways that somebody that, that Google looks at your site and that is a couple of different businesses have put to put that together. It's a rating of 0 to 100. On how authoritative your site is. A zero is a brand new site 100.
I think the only 100 is actually YouTube because think about it. Think about how many different places link back to YouTube and how many places that YouTube links there. The. So what your domain rating, where you lie on that scale is really important. And that is essentially what that is, is a look at your backlink profile.
Now, the thing is, you don't have to compete with YouTube. You have to compete with your competitors. So it's important to find what are your competitors, people that you are actually trying to beat out for sales? What's their domain rating and what kind of backlink profile do you have? Because that lets you know, like, all right, you're at a 26 domain rating.
They're at a 33. Let's you know that you're pretty close. You just need to actually reach out. You need to, you know, find some good authoritative backlinks or are you like on a local site? Because if you are trying to rank for, you know, like managed it in Chicago or managed managed it in Los Angeles or something like that, you can actually really kind of help that out by getting citations, getting listed in directories in the area, because those aren't super high authority.
But what those do is that really ties you to the local area. So it knows, all right, someone's looking for managed it and they're in the Los Angeles area. I need to send this person over to them.
34:41
Chad Franzen
Is there an approach to link building that you should take to be, you know, both effective and sustainable?
34:47
Thorn Compton
Be really nice. Yeah. It's The link building is one of the most important, but one of the most monotonous, one of the most difficult things that we do, because it is all about reaching out. And it's all about finding good partners and finding good websites and creating good content. If you create good content, people want to feature that content on your on their site, or they want to be associated with that kind of content.
So even if you don't have a super high authority, taking the time, creating good content, that's going to rank well and then reaching out to people and be like, hey, I've got this new blog that I have here. I'd love you to create a link for this. You know, do a little quid pro quo. We can do a link back. Full disclosure, sometimes you have to, you have to, you know, grease some palms with that though.
Google doesn't love that. So I don't don't go buying big backlinks. But again, just making relationships, building relationships. So being nice is really important when it comes to actually reaching out and getting good links.
35:50
Chad Franzen
Last question for you, Thorn. What kind of an impact would you hope that better search communication can have for the companies and community communities that you serve?
36:03
Thorn Compton
Your website should be your best salesperson. And by that I mean think of the person that is your top sales guy. That guy's bringing in people all over the place. And if he went a year without bringing in a single sale, you'd be worried. It's too many websites for that.
And your website is your constant salesperson. Your website doesn't work 9 to 5. Your website doesn't take weekends. It doesn't take vacations. Your website is your sales window.
It is. It is your storefront. It is one of the most important ways that somebody is going to decide to use you, especially when you look at the buyer journey. And in cybersecurity specifically, it can take six months for somebody to actually decide to come on to you. And it would sometimes take three, four touches onto your website before they even decide to get a demo.
But by having your website be that constant advocate for you, by having your website look the right way, convert the right way, bring in the right content, you are really setting yourself up for success. Even outside of, you know, other other factors. And it's one of the few things that you truly get to this is mine, and I'm going to have this say what I need it to do and do what it needed to, needs to be done.
37:24
Chad Franzen
Okay. Awesome. Hey, great stuff. Thorn, great to talk to you. Thanks so much for having me today.
37:29
Thorn Compton
Chad. This was wonderful. I appreciate you, sir.
37:33
Outro
Thank you for listening to the Cyber Funnel podcast. Tune in next time for more tips and insights, and be sure to click subscribe for future episode updates.
