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AI, SEO & GEO in Higher Education | Ray Martinez of Archer Education | The Brainiac Blueprint

  • Acy Rodriguez
  • Feb 3
  • 33 min read

Today on The Brainiac Blueprint Podcast, we sit down with Ray Martinez, VP of SEO at Archer Education, to break down how AI is reshaping SEO, GEO, and enrollment marketing in higher education. Ray shares his perspective on AI in search - including why he believes “AI is a mirror” for your brand online.


We dive into content freshness, LLMS.txt, AI Overviews, technical foundations, off-site strategy, and how AI-driven search is changing what it means to “rank” in 2025. Ray also shares how his team thinks about enrollment-first SEO, student voice, and using paid + organic data together to drive real outcomes for universities.


If you work in higher ed, SEO, or AI-powered marketing, this episode is packed with practical insights you can apply right away.


Full transcript below.


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⏱ In this episode, we discuss: 

00:00 | Intro

01:32 | Ray’s background in SEO & higher education

03:28 | How enrollment-focused SEO differs from traditional SEO

06:26 | How AI is changing crawling, entities & content structure

07:19 | LLMS.txt tests and what AI crawlers actually look for

13:58 | What “content freshness” really means in 2025

18:40 | When AI overviews get facts wrong (and why)

20:31 | Off-site SEO, relevancy & discovery signals

24:29 | Rankings vs. reality: AI Overviews, paid ads & zero-click search

29:20 | Ray’s playbook for new university partners

31:41 | Student voice, alumni stories & skills-based content

34:24 | Overrated and underrated SEO tactics today

37:54 | What’s coming next for Google, LLMs & multimodal search

40:15 | Using paid data to improve organic strategy

44:40 | Predictions for higher education & AI-driven programs

47:45 | Rapid fire questions


🔗 Ray Martinez


🔗Archer Education 


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Episode Full Transcript:


Kyle: All right, welcome back everybody to another episode of the Brainiac Blueprint, where we discuss the intersection of AI and how it impacts business and the world around us with our esteemed guests. I'm Kyle Lambert, founder of Left Brain AI and Action Hero Marketing. Today's episode, we're going to discuss AI and SEO and its impact on higher education and really just diving into all the changes with SEO and GEO and all the good stuff, making sure we're getting some good traffic in. So with that being said, today's Brainiac is Ray Martinez. Welcome to the show, Ray.


Ray: Hey, thank you for having me, Kyle. Great to be here.


Kyle: Yeah, man, it's good to see you. Obviously, we know, we'll tell everybody, you and I used to work together back in the day. It's been a couple of years now, but back in the Archer education days, I was leading some paid stuff. You were leading the SEO team. It's good that we can kind of stay connected and share some insights here.


Ray: It's been a while since our in-office San Diego days.


Kyle: That's right. That's right. Unfortunately, I was at the tail end of it, too. I never got to really fully experience it because of COVID. But got a couple of happy hours in. 


Ray: I mean, once you get a couple of happy hours in, that was the peak experience right there. 


Kyle: That was exactly the important stuff.

Well, cool, Ray. So you're the VP of SEO at Archer Education. I know you do a lot of speaking engagements. You're on podcasts. You're very connected in the industry. So if you don't mind, just tell everybody a little bit about yourself, your background, all the different cool stuff you're working on.


Ray: Awesome. So like you said, I'm VP of SEO at Archer Education. Really, I started my SEO journey back in 2010. I was working for a little nightclub in New York City. They wanted to rank their site locally and that was my first intro. Started working at agencies when I first moved to San Diego in late 2014 or early 2015. I was working for a small agency called Bright House. I worked with small businesses across a lot of different industries and sectors with really small budgets and had to learn SEO from the ground up, really focusing on the core aspects of SEO. So technical SEO, content strategy, and then off-page or link building.


From there, I kind of pivoted into a role in-house at California Western School of Law, where I was a digital strategist. I operated across all channels and managed their website. And that was my journey into higher ed. And ever since then, that was like 2016. I've been working in the higher ed space for about nine years now, primarily doing enrollment marketing. My type of SEO, we're not really focused as much on traffic and rankings, but we're more so focused on driving enrollment and measuring enrollment and lowering the overall cost per acquisition for schools.


Kyle: Awesome. Great stuff. It's interesting to see. I've done a lot of healthcare, but I feel like higher education fits into this what I call highly regulated industry. It's looked a lot from the higher ups and you have to adhere to certain regulations and some of that. So throw some extra complications in there. And of course, for you guys, there's a whole long process. It's not just the lead, it's an application, it's acceptance, it's paying. There's so much to it. So I know that you guys need to be focusing on, like you said, enrollment, butts in seats versus just a lead. Very complicated.


Ray: Yeah, 100%. When we think about the movements or the student journey in SEO, that post-lead experience is where a lot of SEOs say, "Hey, drove the lead. My job is done." But the reality is, an organization like Archer, we have internal admissions teams. We also work with our university partner admissions teams to make sure that we're really driving quality because we know that if we just deliver a lead and that lead doesn't convert, that means there's a seat unfilled.


For us, we're constantly focusing on ways that we can offer more touch points within the student journey so that they feel knowledge and empowered. And the reality is the impact of our work - when we're able to drive enrollments at scale in an efficient budget, that ends up reducing tuition costs for a lot of universities. Universities actually lower their prices, students pay less, and we're also having a more educated workforce. So yeah, it's really cool. We get to go to that conversion funnel and really just dial in and do some work in a different way.


Kyle: Incredible. Lots of stuff to dive in there. But before we do, I'm going to have you finish that prompt that we talked about. So if you could, what does Ray think AI is?


Ray: I think AI is a mirror. It is a reflection of everything your brand is across the web. It's a summation of it. And it points that reflection back at you and it can be full of depth or it can be really shallow.


Kyle: I like that. Very interesting. I think we're going to dive into that in a lot of different ways. AI has disrupted all industries at this point, whether we're talking about higher education, whether we're talking about marketing. I'm curious in the last year, call it two years, whatever it is, have you had to completely redesign your offering or how you manage these clients or how you plan and things like that. I'm curious if there's been any just huge shifts or is it like Google has these EAT and everything like that and if we adhere to that and we provide a good experience then we're gonna be showing up on these AI responses also.


Ray: It's funny because I think for us at Archer, we were so future-proofed. When I stepped into this role seven years ago, I was working with marketers that really understood the art of storytelling and the art of faculty expertise. For us, we have a full academic thought leadership team. That's our digital PR offering. And they're able to work with faculty members, get them highlighted. I have a full content team doing really in-depth quality content with a real editorial process. So we haven't really changed much at the foundational level.


I think for us, where we've gone is let's look at the technology and look at the way that AI crawls. Now, let's also look at a deeper entity gap analysis. We're using the mathematics behind LLMs to really be a little bit more precise in terms of the type of content we measure too. What we're producing, it's no longer like, "Okay, let's just build out this huge tree. Let's actually prune this tree down." It goes from the approach of, "Let's build a forest," to "Let's create a beautiful bonsai tree."


Kyle: I like that. You mentioned crawls and crawlability and everything. I feel like I've seen you post something about this on LinkedIn. And a lot of people have had different ideas and their own perspectives. From your knowledge, how effective, if at all, is the LLM text tag? Does that need to be on the site?


Ray: I actually have a write-up coming out with Wix on this. I will say right now it's cumbersome. If you're not using a WordPress CMS where you can plug and play a Yoast or some sort of plugin that does it for you can be really good. It's not something I recommend as of yet, but it is still getting lots of traction. Like Kyle's referring to, at Archer, we have our own internal sites and we tested LLMS.txt across seven sites. What we were able to see from crawls and bot pings was we actually captured ChatGPT 5's pre-training. Our file was getting pinged every 15 seconds by OpenAI Search Bot, which was just looking for fresh content. What ended up happened is we had visits from GPT Bot, visits from Claude Bot.


But at Archer we did our file a little differently which actually incentivized the bot to crawl much more frequently. We added last mod date directly onto our file which is not like a requirement of LLMS.txt. And the reason we did that is because we knew that what LLMs are looking for is constant freshness. Krishna Madhavan from Bing, he's a VP of product, I saw him in San Diego he had a talk and the key takeaway is content freshness is always prioritized over legacy content. With that, that's how it was our mindset before he even said that. We were thinking about how can we get our fresh content to these LLMs and what we saw was constant bot pings and we saw a rise and then after the model released we saw it plummet back down.


But interesting enough even through that, another player has been consistently crawling at Google. They've made so many public statements. I've actually gotten into back and forth with John Mueller, I've had Gary Illyes refute any sort of learnings or observations I've had around LLMS.txt.


But I see Googlebot still crawling and revisiting. Googlebot's behavior is like the crawl requests will drop. Actually, we've seen those crawl requests increase. So I do think this standard will evolve in time. When you look at Claude, when you look at OpenAI, you look at Perplexity, they all have their own version of LLMS.txt. And they have LLMS.full.txt, which is another version of the file. So I think it will end up being a regular standard. Just another hint. I don't think it's a magic bullet, but I think it's something that helps inform bots on prioritization of content. And when we think about it as a tool, the LLMs really struggle with parsing content.


What makes Google so special is they're able to parse unstructured data post-BERT. They were able to really understand, they didn't need context and infer. They could use that content, reassemble that content. But LLMs can't do that. They can't render JavaScript in a much more simpler crawler that actually takes a screenshot and turns that screenshot into Markdown. So if we can provide a file in Markdown, we're already doing a lot of that work for them.


Kyle: Got it. Very, very interesting. So we're getting pretty technical here. This is some interesting stuff. I like it. I think there's probably some tidbits in here that not everybody has thought of or is aware of. What tools are you using right now to monitor that type of stuff and see when you're getting crawled, how often, are there errors, whatever it may be?


Ray: So I'm pretty spoiled here at Archer. We have an internal dev team on the SEO team now. So our engineers actually built this plugin. It's all custom.


Kyle: Oh, sweet. That's awesome.


Ray: So we have a custom file that's all automated. And then it's pulling into a backend where we're actually pulling bot pings from our log file. That's why it's cumbersome because if you're an independent and you don't have - like, yes, Yoast can throw a file up for you, but you also need to do a bit of scripting on your server to actually monitor the LLMS text file bot pings. And that's pretty - you got to be pretty tech savvy with that.


Kyle: Sure. So for the people out there that maybe don't have a dev team or aren't tech savvy, do you have a "hey, at least check this out" type of thing? Is there kind of a step one that might point them in the right direction?


Ray: Yeah, I think it's really like using something like a Yoast there. I'm pretty sure there are other plugins out there. I haven't taken a look as deeply just because also in higher ed, a lot of our partner sites are not in a CMS like a WordPress. They are in proprietary CMSs or closed source CMSs because of whatever state law or restriction. But I recommend looking at low hanging fruit plugins, looking at options there and seeing.


And then also having conversations with your dev team. Having those conversations, everybody needs to work a little bit more closely and be a little bit more connected. Working across the channel team like paid and SEO working together or working with your tech team to really make sure what you can do and put together a business case and say, "Hey, this is what I want to do and this is why," and bring it to your dev team and see what they can cook up for you.


Kyle: Very cool. Yeah, I'm gonna have to start looking into that kind of stuff. I want to jump back to a point that you made earlier. I think we all realize the power of content, right? If you don't have good content, you're not going to show up on any of these channels whatsoever. You specifically talked about the importance of freshness.


I think that can mean a lot to a lot of different people. So how do you approach freshness? Is it freshness in terms of you should constantly be putting it out weekly, monthly, have a regular cadence? Or is it as simple as making sure that you have the most up to date - like if things didn't change within the last year, then you don't have to worry about it type of thing. So how do you think about freshness and making sure that you're not going too stale and kind of measuring that stuff?


Ray: I think about it from a last modification day. When was the content last modified? How frequently? When we think about Google, they measure what's called QDF which is query deserves freshness so they can understand how much content you've actually updated on a page. LLMs are not as sophisticated. They will become more sophisticated but they're just looking for that last Monday.


They're looking for little touches. But I do think in higher ed, we have our program pages and our program pages and our deadlines change by term. So how often are we updating those? If we have career outcomes, do they have the freshest salary information and the freshest hiring information? Thinking about those different types of things to ways that we can add content or even modify or edit content to make sure that we're providing the freshest perspective.


The reason why is LLMs are always going to prioritize fresh content because the moment they start ingesting stale content or their own content, AI content, it's like they're swallowing their own tail and they're going to spin out inaccurate information with lots of fascination. And for us to earn that citation, we want to make sure that, "Hey, here's the freshest," because these systems are using things like retrieval augmented generation to pull in fresh information or they're doing things like live search.


Because they're going to say we have our pre-training data, so the data that we trained on which is in our model, but we need to also verify across this, that this is the most accurate and up to date information so we can give a proper response. So that's where that content freshness piece comes in. I was reading a post yesterday and I will apologize to the SEO because I forgot which SEO posted this, but he was talking about NerdWallet and he's like, "Can you beat NerdWallet?" And NerdWallet has an average content refresh time of about 115 days.


Kyle: Okay.


Ray: Meaning every 115 days, they refresh that content to prioritize new information.


Kyle: So almost every three or four months, yeah, four months, they're updating it.


Ray: Yep, I would say update it quarterly. Light touches, have your content team go in there and look for any sort of new sourcing, any sort of way that you can provide new data or insight. Because I don't think it's just about - for us, it's like for just the whole larger landscape, it's no longer like how much data you can provide and how much you can quickly publish. It's about how unique the data is and how up to date that unique data is.


Kyle: Got it. Very interesting. So you guys working in higher education kind of have naturally built-in time segments if you think about it from a semester standpoint. So are you guys like every semester being like, "Hey, is this accurate? Like what needs to be updated?" Is that how you approach it?


Ray: Yes, we're looking at any - a lot of our strategy was already built this way for us. We're looking at segmented pieces of time so that we're driving strategy for each sort of changing priority over a term or semester. And so we've matched that. We're looking at content in a way that we have to be quick and we have to be agile and we have to constantly look to provide that fresh and up-to-date information. One of the posts that got lost when I was doing my LLMS.txt post was, I'm also an adjunct professor at University of Florida Online.


And when I was writing out my calendar and looking for the last day of class, I asked Google, an AI overview gave me wrong information. I changed it to AI mode. That gave me wrong information. I went to Gemini. It gave me wrong information. I went to GPT. That gave me another date which was incorrect. And all of this because the UF site didn't have a PDF, didn't have it in a table or chart, and was using JavaScript rendering to provide the date.


Kyle: Interesting.


Ray: Right? And so now when you think about me, who's a capable search marketer, who can find the right sort of information, that's not as impactful. But when you think about one of my current students who is under a deadline, who is operating in a state of anxiety, yeah, that's what gives me the greatest pause and the greatest concern, especially for not just myself as a professor, but for all of my university partners, too, to make sure that their students feel supported and there's no friction along their journey. 


Kyle: Especially something as simple as a date, right? You should be able to get dates right. So that's a big issue. Big, big red flag right there.

Interesting stuff. So when I think about SEO and I'm kind of thinking about the plan and then how we're going to attack things, I oversimplify it and talk about technical, on-site and off-site. So we've kind of talked about technical and content already. So I'm curious how off-site has changed for you. I know like George and the PR team do a lot of good links and all that kind of stuff, but what has changed for you guys and are there specific sources or specific pieces of content, again, off the website that you are finding has the greatest impact either on Google or these LLMs?


Ray: I think for us, our approach is always focused on relevancy. Relevancy of content of where the link is placed. Relevancy of anchor text around that. Are we offering the right sort of context? And for me and my teams, we have one simple rule. It's like, can we drive traffic from where we're getting a link placed? Does it make sense for us to actually have a link there? And if the answer is no, then that's not a link that we prioritize. We're really looking to drive that context signal.


There's another leak recently, Google Goldmine leak, which talked about the importance of anchor text. Anchor text, and then when we think about LLMs, there's been a couple papers by Microsoft which show that an LLM crawler, they are absolutely focused on the anchor text around a link because they need to infer context around the document. They're going to parse this content. They're going to vectorize it. They're going to measure relationships between vectors, and they're going to assemble an answer. But for them to even consider your document, they have to get that initial context.


Kyle: Interesting. Interesting. There's a lot of guidance that you need to be putting into place, telling Google to look at this or telling the LLMs to look at this. And like you said, you added the modified date to the tags and all that kind of stuff. It's almost, again, making it as simple as possible for them to find what they're looking for.


Ray: It's exactly that. And I think a lot of people focus so much on link juice and building authority. They forgot about the other underlying foundation. Google algorithm was built off of a crawler jumping link to link. So what we're also trying to do is link building also affects the crawl side, right? The crawl request side. We're giving Googlebot more avenues into our site. We're trying to invite Googlebot because we want Googlebot to parse our content. We want Googlebot to better place us in the index.


So we're serving our content to the right prospective student. So for us, that discovery piece is huge. I think you can submit a sitemap via Search Console, but the number of crawls, the frequency of crawls is going to be really low. And because there's not that many avenues for discovery, I think a lot of small businesses too, that's why directory submission - getting into local business directories matters because that provides context and avenue for Google to find and discover your site.


Kyle: Interesting.


Ray: They used to build all these really spammy niche links. I don't know if you were around for that Kyle.


Kyle: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. 


Ray: Huge lists. Like you'd have like sports directory.org and it'd be like a list of all the - and it ended up having every single niche on there and it wasn't just for sports. I'm not talking about those directories, but I think a lot of real sort of business directories and tools like a Yext for a small business. Push yourself out on Yext and get yourself into some small - make sure your name, address, phone number is consistent across there so you're sending that local signal but you're also creating avenues for Google to find your business.


Kyle: Very interesting. Whether we're talking about SEO or paid, Google wants to make sure that you're providing a good experience for its users so that they continue to come back to Google and using it. So to your point, giving them all of these signals is just saying like, "Hey, look, we're doing the right thing. Users are happy. Keep showing us."


Ray: Yeah.


Kyle: So I'm curious on what you think in today's world about ranking overall. I've been in digital marketing since 2010. When we first started, it was 10 blue links on Google. And the only thing that mattered was that you're showing up on page one. And obviously things have changed. It's become way more sophisticated 15 years later. And you're not getting as many clicks. And some people talk about their click through rate dropping and all this kind of stuff. So how do you think about rankings today? Or how do you have that conversation with your clients today to say like, "Yeah, we might not have moved the needle in terms of ranking that much but look I just got you 5,000 more clicks." What's that conversation like?


Ray: I think for us it's become a conversation of citation and ability. Are we being cited by an AI overview? Are we being cited by AI mode and are those citations driving clicks? AI overviews are stacked over everything now. And then when we think about the synergy with our paid media teams, the latest Google algorithm update rolled out these very large paid ads with lots of site links that are almost indistinguishable from an organic listing.


You have that stacked on top of an AI overview and then all the way at the bottom, almost three scroll depths down is the number one organic listing. Who's making that click? So ranking number one doesn't just matter anymore. You have to focus on zero click search. We have to provide answers and we have to also make sure our brand appears there, appears in the conversation. The one thing we have seen though is of course rising conversion rates. Our conversion rates are going to rise because we're seeing less traffic but we're seeing qualified traffic come via Google AI overviews.


Now I will say on the LLM side, I saw a paper that showed conversion was actually lowered. And I think LLMs themselves aren't direct conversion drivers. What they are are just another step in your attribution model now.


Kyle: Interesting. So let's unpack the AIO, the overview a little bit more. Let's dive a little bit deeper here. Because I think everybody has seen it. Everybody knows the impact of it. What is your go-to tool for showing that to your client? And how are you marrying that to keywords? Because Google is still keyword-based, right? So how are you saying that we want to have this keyword strategy and then show that we're seeing this many appearances on AIO? How are you marrying all of that together from a strategic standpoint and showing them, "Look, we are actually showing up more on AIO"?


Ray: Yeah, for us, we're using things like SEMrush has their AI tool. Ahrefs has an AI tool.


Kyle: I've been using SEMrush the most.


Ray: Yeah, we use both of those. I do think that they have their challenges because really what they are is they're using their own sort of persona-based instances of an LLM to measure those. So it's not perfect. And then there are all sorts of other tools out there like LLM refs. Then there's also like Profound. Profound has a huge - their tool is really, really cool with really cool visualizations. But I think for us, we're looking at like, "Here's a citation." We're pulling what we're being cited in, what links were there.


And we're looking at all those things together with our partners. And then there's also a correlation here. The more consistently we drop content that matters and we're updating and adding content to our site with avenues around our programs, the more consistently we get cited. For us it's really about not just us doing our blog content, it's also how active our partner brand is. We can only do what we can do, but how active is our university partner? How many partnerships are they making? What are they seeing on their end as well? And all those things together will sort of drive this and I think for us it's just treating it and showing these results as a collaborative approach between brand, SEO, and all organic strategies, not just organic search.


Kyle: 100%. Yeah. People overlook the brand part of it a lot, which is obviously a big mistake. So I'm curious. There's obviously a lot here and you have to have a good plan and a step-by-step process and all that kind of stuff. So new university signs on, comes to you, says like, "Hey, let's start getting some enrollment for program X." What's the first three to five things you're doing? You're getting under the hood, you're checking the data. What's that look like? What are you jumping into?


Ray: Always at the foundation, we start with the technical aspect. Can Google or an LLM crawl, render, and index herself? Can they access our content? Can they understand our content? Are there any limitations around there? And then thinking about it from a knowledge graph standpoint, are we doing the right things and do we have the right types of content to fill out the knowledge graph around our program? Are we actively focused on content that drives a conversational path forward? Do we have the answers for our prospective students that they need to have to make an informed decision and evaluate our programs? So those are the first couple of things.


And then for us, it's continued - it's the traditional aspects of, "Let's build the right sorts of content. Let's make sure that our faculty members are getting featured across our assets and really focus on the expertise piece. Let's go back to EAT. Let's focus on using EAT as a way to drive quality and to inform our content strategy as well as all of our assets on site so that we're best positioning this brand."


Kyle: Makes perfect sense. So what about your content? You obviously talked about faculty. There's the straightforward stuff of this is the program, this is how long it takes, this is how much it's going to cost you, is it online or offline. So there's some obvious content points there. But what else are you guys thinking about? I think some people out there might not necessarily realize there is a lot of angles that you could take from a content perspective for higher education for a program. So is there anything that you'd like to play around and build out or is there anything that's been like a shock to you? Like, "Wow, I can't believe this worked" or didn't work from a content perspective.


Ray: Yeah. I think one thing that we've actively been focusing on is student voice. I think that's the most underrepresented and it's been always been something hard for institutions to do. It's like, let's focus on the experience part. The student experience matters so much. And capturing that and also living across channels matters. Let's have a conversation where our prospective students and current students live. And I think that sort of content, as well as skills, tangible skills based content are always interesting.


For us, we have lots of avenues, as you said, to really just expand outward and say - because the reality is like if you're getting an MBA, you want to know about the alumni and the job connections from your MBA. If you're getting a family nurse practitioner program, you want to know about the actual, the core skills you're going to learn and the specialties you'll learn within being an FMP. And so for us, it's tailoring a real content offering around each of the programs, each program's unique and distinct value proposition.


Kyle: It basically sounds like a souped up testimonial, right? Get someone to come in and say, "Hey, I went here. I learned all this stuff. Look how successful I've been." And then other people can be like, "Yeah, that could be me too."


Ray: Exactly. And I think people are a living extension of your brand. There's ambassadors out there. I think beyond ambassadors, I think they are the encapsulation of everything that you've made them in higher ed. So it's a little deeper. Because they are representing their alma mater in the workplace. And I think part of that has to be that you really shining light on those stories. I tell my students this, when you're a student at UF, a big part of this is also you're building your network. That's what a lot of folks miss out on education. They just think that they're learning a skill. And it's like, no, you're also building a network of people that you can share ideas with, you can grow businesses with, you can get referrals from later on in life. And that network matters.


Kyle: That hits so hard. And I think that's one thing that I did pretty poorly when I went for my master's is I didn't necessarily network as well as I should have. Luckily, my career has been an agency, so I've been able to get a lot of connections that way. But you're right. It's an opportunity to really build out your network, build out your skill set, kind of jumpstart everything for you. It's interesting stuff. I want to jump into kind of your own thoughts here about just specific tactics. Do you have something that you're hearing people talk about that you think is just overrated in today's world? And conversely, is there something that people aren't talking about enough and is underrated that they should be focusing on?


Ray: You know, I hear people talk about fan out a lot.


Kyle: What was it?


Ray: Fan out. The fan out approach to content. Google has a patent, the fan out patent. They talk about, "We need to build out fan out questions and find every..." And I'm like, well, a content strategy that's comprehensive and really trying to answer the student pathway and have a conversation or engage with a customer should have been that already. I think a lot of people on the GEO side are focused on gimmicks and realizing that a lot of this applied to a larger semantic SEO approach. But I also think that there are new things, things that we take for granted, like going back to the basics of, "Can our content get written? Can it actually be rendered by an LLM?" A lot of folks are not focusing on that enough. I've seen sites where something, a misused semantic HTML tag caused the stop in LLMs reading a page.


Kyle: Interesting. That's a big no-no.


Ray: Yeah. And it's something that you wouldn't have even thought of because it's just like, okay, it didn't affect ranking for Google because Google understood, could parse it, but for LLMs, they would stop reading the content. And I think going back to the basics of SEO and even JSON markup, which there's a lot of mixed review on whether JSON-LD matters. So you'll have someone like Mark Williams-Cook who says, "Wait, it gets tokenized, it doesn't matter."


And I've seen folks from the SALT agency, which is a pretty large technical SEO agency, say, "Wait a minute, actually it does matter, and here's why." And so I think what matters versus what doesn't matter is really up for debate, but I think for all of our sakes, we should be focusing on the foundations of the technology it's built on. Revisiting our path forward in SEO because revisiting the past will help you move forward.


Kyle: I think it's that age old saying of, you know, it's simple, but not easy, right? It's simple to kind of understand, but it's not exactly easy to fully implement and build out and be successful with. But again, it comes back to just being human, getting the right information there, answering their questions, being authoritative, all that good stuff. And there is some of the technical stuff, but overall, yeah, just think about if you were trying to enroll or make this decision.


Ray: Yeah, it's know your audience. Really know your audience in depth and make content that speaks to them. Absolutely.


Kyle: So I want to move forward on - we're coming to the end of 2025 here. Things are rapidly changing. So, and I know you're talking to some of these different people that are connected in the industry. Have you heard anything that you kind of are expecting to come in the pipeline? Maybe it's 2026 in terms of changes with Google or changes with these LLMs or things that we should be thinking about to help prepare?


Ray: Honestly, who knows at this point, right? 


Kyle: I agree. 


Ray: The one thing I will say is let's expect the unexpected and let's expect lots of change, especially as Google is trying to maximize profit and shareholder return. Expect there to be volatility on search engine results pages for them to measure this. Expect there to be constant shifts in sources. Like one week Reddit is the most cited site and then you see that fall by the wayside. I think the one consistent thing I can say is be consistent across a variety of channels and a variety of strategies.


The one thing we will know, we do know is the future of agentic search is much - is what we call multimodal. It's different types of content. And so thinking about your content strategy, how many pieces of content should one topic represent? And think about it from that approach. That would be my biggest advice is, are we telling that story in multiple ways and making those connections across channel and across platform and not just being beholden to one platform? Build your audience in multiple places and engage them in different ways.


Kyle: That makes total sense. I think you made some interesting points there. One being Google is always going to be focused on maximizing revenue, right? Everything they do is going to be testing and figuring out what leads to more dollars for them. You also mentioned having multiple channels. And I think that me, I'm a paid guy. As someone who runs ads, we are blessed with - we get empowered with a lot of data because, again, they want more people to be having success with these channels and investing more dollars and growing. So you guys have some data, obviously, to help out with SEO. But how are you marrying a paid strategy or using any of the data points to try to inform some of these tactics or changes you might be making?


Ray: Yeah, I think for us - and I've just done this exercise with my internal paid team. I've had the paid team here at Archer like, "Hey, export this keyword list and let me get your impressions and clicks." And then I've compared it to a Google Search Console output of impressions and clicks and where's the gaps? Okay. Where's the gaps on the paid side for them to optimize? Where's the gaps for my SEO team to add content and really focus on areas that we're not seeing the right sort of traction? I think that sort of marriage of appearing where the other is, and it needs to happen more frequently. We need to be there to really maximize click-through because click-through is dwindling.


Kyle: So then are you using that data to say, okay, paid is getting a lot of good traffic and a lot of conversions and enrollment. So let's focus on these keywords. Or are you saying that paid has this covered. So maybe we try to get these other stuff or is it like kind of a marriage of two?


Ray: It's a marriage of the two and it's really dependent on - yeah that push-pull relationship to really - if we're pushing pull let's really focus on all right they're really doing really good at pushing traffic there but how sustainable is that from a cost standpoint how can we sort of up and pull in sort of that that conversion aspect over time so that they can actually then spread budget out or we haven't seen traction or we're missing a keyword set on the organic side because we focused hyper focused on a program set. And our paid team is seeing wins across this. We want to optimize for that as well so that we could just blow it out the water together.


Kyle: I was going to ask if you go deeper than keywords by any chance. I've heard instances across the industry, sometimes people will use ad copy to maybe inform title tags or we see performance better on the weekends. Maybe there's something there to help us with our content strategy and our audience first approach. I'm curious if you go deeper than keywords at all.


Ray: I don't really. And the reason why is my process with the keyword data is we're taking large sets of keywords and we're vectorizing them and actually comparing vectors. And we're doing things like cosine similarities, Jaccard similarity. So complex math.


Kyle: Like I said, you got some stats going or something here.


Ray: Yeah. Like we're doing some stats, right? We're diving in and doing some complex math and we're trying to understand relationships.


Kyle: Interesting. Interesting. Are you using AI to help you out with that kind of stuff? Or are you a mathematician?


Ray: No. No, I've done my own cook there. I am not a mathematician, man. We are over here scripting and running scripts ourselves. But no, we use lots of really cool tools. I've done stuff like little one-off stuff like that with like plot code and built out artifacts that my team can use and other teams can use across this. Because we're still figuring it out together and playing with it. But I think there's a real math that drives LLMs and the way that they reassemble content. And for us to think like that and think as these systems think allows us to have better hints into what's going to play.


Kyle: Interesting. All right. So final question here in terms of just this main portion. We talked a lot about SEO and AI. Do you have any predictions for higher education just as a whole in terms of what changes might be coming next year or in the next few years or anything like that?


Ray: Yeah, I think for higher ed, what is going to end up happening is we're going to have a much more streamlined program list. And what I mean by that is it's going to really be future proofed in terms of the career outcomes. I think a lot of universities were already moving towards that before. But I think it's going to matter now. And we'll see. I think it'll harm some schools where you'll have such limited offerings. And yeah, but I think also it'll help students find the right place that they need to be.


It'll help them be much more evaluative in their process. Fair enough. There's value there. There was predictions of an enrollment cliff before this. And before AI or anything, there was talks of enrollments are going to drop off a cliff. But I think we're actually combating that. They are reaching more people and showing them value of education. In times of economic hardship, what ends up happening for higher ed is boom times because people up their skills. And so for over the next couple of years, I expect us to see some growth in student enrollment.


Kyle: Do you think programs will change to be - like you mentioned nursing, for example, do you think by any chance it'll shift to say, "Here's the normal stuff that we've been talking about. And then also here's how to use AI as a nurse to be better for, provide better patient experience or reduce burnout."


Ray: I think there will be pieces there to use some of these tools. Like I have my own students use these tools.


Kyle: I feel like that's what education should be, right? The tools are there. So it's not just making you memorize stuff. It's how do you use what's available to you?


Ray: I think also it helps you evaluate, right? If you pump sources in there and you're saying, "Hey, you know," I tell my students, like, I don't - if you write a paper with AI, I'm going to know it's written by AI because it's going to be shitty. It's going to be filled with grammatical errors. And I'm going to call you out on it. But if you look at your research and you're like, "Hey, give me key points of this," so you could sum up a paper that you've pulled from like a LexisNexis and get the gist of it so that you can then further drill into it with your research. I think that's a great use of the tool.


Kyle: Couldn't agree more. I mean, that's it's ChatGPT has become my starting point for a lot of different stuff just to ideate and think of different perspectives.


Ray: 100%. And what studies have shown is people go back - they'll use things like a ChatGPT and then they'll go to Google and they'll bring exactly more informed search in there. And so they're engaging with more content than ever.


Kyle: Yeah. That's awesome. Kind of inspiring. All right, cool. So we're approaching the end here. So I want to jump into the rapid fire section here, Ray. So I got five quick questions for you. We'll jump through them quick. So this is one that I ask everybody just because I think it's interesting to see how people think about it. If you could right now, just have a genie pop up and give you a wish of one fully automated process that just gets implemented right now for you, what would that be?


Ray: It'd be Reddit and community engagement.


Kyle: Reddit and community engagement?


Ray: Yeah. I'd love to just one click that and build real community engagement very easily.


Kyle: Very interesting. Yeah. Reddit's getting bigger and bigger. It's more important in your marketing mix.


Ray: Oh, 100%. Yeah.


Kyle: Cool. What is a memorable win in your career?


Ray: Yeah, for me, I think one of my favorite wins, I would say, was like early on. I worked with LSU online and watching that site just explode from a traffic and enrollment standpoint. Those guys were great. They were really fun. It was nice. Yeah. So also like LSU. I get to see like lots of partners and you can get to get the stories back. And like, we've gotten stories back from like folks who said, "Hey, you know, I enrolled in this program and it changed my life." Like those are the biggest wins for me. Like I'm like, it makes the work I'm doing so much more important because it's affecting people's lives positively.


Kyle: Positively. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. What is some random social media content that is all over your feed that you just - it's kind of a guilty pleasure for you?


Ray: I will watch a lot of hip-hop videos. Actually, there's a comment about like telling stories about when people have met Jay-Z and I told my story for a time - that's a story for another time. But I got like blown up across Facebook and like actually Mike King from iPullRank said, "Hey, dude, how did you end up in my Facebook feed?" But no, like lots of hip hop content for sure. All day.


Kyle: OK, awesome. Awesome. Have you ever seen the movie The Matrix?


Ray: I have.


Kyle: OK, so if you could plug into The Matrix and kind of upload like one fun non work related skill or category of information, what would that be?


Ray: For me, it'd be like mastering a record, right? I make music. I like - so I make beats and the mastering aspect. So getting it ready for radio, getting it ready for actual like physical media is a science. It's like and I wish I just had all of that knowledge in once, one upload.


Kyle: Just a quick upload. Yeah, that'd be awesome. That's a good answer right there. Awesome. And then last one, I know through our conversations, you are a baseball guy. You like the Mets. I like the Phillies. We've had some rivalries there. Who is your favorite baseball player of all time?


Ray: I would have to say Rey Ordoñez from the 90s Mets. He was a magician with the glove, could not hit for a lick, but the guy was magic in the field, like made some amazing plays. And really, that's where like what solidified my Mets fandom was watching him play as a kid.


Kyle: Very cool. There's something to be said for just a shutdown defender.


Ray: 100%.


Kyle: Cool. All right, Ray. Well, we are at the open forum section. Is there anything that you're super passionate about that maybe we didn't discuss that you just, you know, you kind of want to share with everybody and some food for thought?


Ray: Just a fun, quick, shameless plug. I'll be speaking with Renee Girard from Whitepages at the AI Summit for Latinos in January. We're going to be talking AI search. Other than that, I mean, I do a lot of cool stuff, dude. Lots of music coming soon, too. So I'm actively working on an EP and expect that soon Q1 of 2026.


Kyle: Nice. Nice. Is it gonna be on like SoundCloud or Spotify where's it gonna be?


Ray: It'll be everywhere you stream music so like I have music on Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, all the different streaming services even ones internationally. I'm on iHeart all that stuff so 


Kyle: You could look just under your name or do you have like a like a DJ or stage name or something like that? 


Ray: My stage name is Raymond Angelo.


Kyle: Raymond Angelo. All right. I'll have to check it out. Maybe we'll take one of your songs and put it to the background of this recording.


Ray: Let's do it.


Kyle: Awesome. Well, Ray, I really appreciate you jumping on and sharing all of your insights. I knew this would be a great conversation. You're a smart dude. You're well connected and successful in the SEO world. So thank you so much. Everybody can check you out, Ray Martinez on LinkedIn. Do you have any other socials that you want to kind of throw out there or plug?


Ray: You can find me on Twitter at Ray Martinez SEO. You can find me on Instagram at Ray underscore MRTNZ. And then, yeah, just my LinkedIn is if you go to LinkedIn and my profiles, Ray Martinez SEO, you'll pull me up. Reach out. Feel free to follow and send some love.


Kyle: Sweet. Yeah. And Archer Education is where you're at. That's ArcherEDU.com. People can learn more about the whole squad there. So, Ray, thanks again, man, for joining me on the Brainiac Blueprint. I really appreciate it. If you don't mind, look at the camera and say, "Stay brilliant, Brainiacs."


Ray: Stay brilliant, Brainiacs.


Kyle: Awesome. Thanks, man. I really appreciate it.


Ray: Thank you, Kyle. Thanks for having me on.


Kyle: Yeah, man. Cheers.

 
 
 

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