The Future of Search - Outrank Your Competitors in 2025 | Steve Wiideman | MMP #014

The Future of Search - Outrank Your Competitors in 2024 | Steve Wiideman | MMP #014 Speaker 1: You could probably get 40 to 50 percent of the real estate of a search result page if you stop being myopic on just Google web search alone. So there's a lot more that you can gain from it, not just from an advertising standpoint and getting people to click, but from a marketing standpoint and building awareness for your brand by being the one that dominates the search result. Unknown Speaker: You're watching Marketing Misfits with Norm Farrar and Kevin King. Speaker 2: Mr. Farrar, what is happening again? Another week, another dollar, another podcast. Speaker 3: You're like every single server that comes up to me in a restaurant. Just as I'm putting down my coffee or sipping or eating, I get a question. Speaker 2: Anything else I can get for you, Mr. Farrar? Speaker 3: Yeah, right. Yeah. Speaker 2: You know, in restaurants, they always say, you know, you know, to get a better tip. I saw this somewhere, like if all these waitresses and people that are out there struggling, if you actually handwrite on the receipt, you know, you bring the bill. If you put a little handwritten note, like just say thanks or appreciate your business or something like that, that helps raise the tip by like 20 percent. But if you put a smiley face or you put some sort of a little emoji, hand-drawn a little emoji on there, it can actually double the tip. Do you know that? If you ever pay attention to these waitresses or waiters that do that, you're like, that's good marketing. You're being smart. I used to do that with pizzas. I've had two jobs in my life. I've worked at McDonald's and I delivered pizzas when I was in my teens. And one of the things that I always did, Along those same lines is if I went to the door with these pizzas and a kid came to the door, you know, the parents were watching TV and the kid, they say, here's the 20, go get the pizzas from the pizza man. I wouldn't actually take the money from the kid because the kids don't know to tip. So I would say, I'm sorry, it's your parent's home. I need, I gotta give, I can't give the money. It's company policy or I'd say something. And then they, the parents would begrudgingly get up. And then if the bill was, I don't know, $13.50 for the pizzas. You don't give them a five and a dollar and 50 cents back. You give them six ones because it's the psychology. If I got six in my hand here, I'll give you two of them versus if you give them a five and a one, then you're just going to get the one. So, you know, that's that's just a little a little marketing thing. There's lots of those little things that we could we could talk even with the servers. Speaker 3: You know, when you when somebody comes over and we're talking about just I like the details, right? And I've noticed this with you that we'll be out. We'll have our right here. I can drink it again. Coke zero. And, you know, we might have a second drink, your refill. And we both don't drink with straws. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 3: And you'll notice and you've heard you've said this to me a bunch of times. This one's on the ball. This person is on the ball. I noticed that she didn't bring me a straw. Speaker 2: Yeah, if they bring a straw again on the read, if you gave the straw back on the first one and say, I don't use it, or that they notice it's on the table unopened, and they bring you your refill of your soda, and they bring a straw again, that's someone that's not paying attention. That's someone that doesn't care. They're not actually paying attention to what they're doing. As a result, they get less of a tip from me. Speaker 3: You know, going back, I just want to go one step back. You were talking about notes. You put a little happy face on, you put a little enjoy. We do that with our soap. So we have, and we do these usually in China, we'll get them handmade, very generic, with a happy face, and we'll send it out with a sticky note. It says, you know, the name of brand, we send it out, and people just have a simple one or two words and some happy face or like a little dot dot smile. And that's exactly why. If you take a look at some of the reviews that we have, a high majority talk about the personal feel that they get from those little sticky notes that cost about half a penny to produce. Speaker 2: You know something else that gives me a very happy face is when I get free traffic coming from organic traffic and I don't have to pay for. You know, there's something out there called SEO, I think, search engine optimization that, you know, you're old enough to remember this. Some of the people listening to this are just, you know, they probably weren't even born or weren't even a wink in their mom's eye at that time. But back in the day, back in the 90s, there was no such thing as SEO. And you could just go on to, I remember, you remember Lycos and AltaVista and Excite and all these browsers. I remember 95, 96, all I had to do, meta tags, you know, all I had to do was put some keyword in the meta tag and I would instantly rank on page one for these things. And then they kind of caught on to that a little bit. And then it was like down at the bottom of the page, just put all these words at the bottom of the page, all the keywords, and then just make them white type so nobody could see them. It would be down there, but the search engines would still pick it up. You remember all that gaming that we could do? It was so easy. Speaker 3: All that gaming. Speaker 2: So easy to rank on anything, and it was crazy. Speaker 3: There was this little thing called Panda that came out. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 3: It shook up everything. Speaker 2: Yep, yep. That was before Google, and then Google came out. I remember Google's first, it was 98, 99 maybe, somewhere around in there. I remember when someone told me, hey, you got to check out this little thing on Google, this little, and I was, back then the search engines were pretty robust. You know, Yahoo wasn't even a search engine. Yahoo was a directory. And it's like a yellow pages or something. It wasn't even a search engine. It later became a search engine. But search engines were, the pages are full and you go to this one page and it's a totally empty page. There's this little box that says Google up at the top. And like, what are you supposed to do? And then who knew that that would become, that would dictate the world basically that we live in today is Google controls the world's information. And if you're not on Google and you're not maximizing what you're doing, whether it's be on Amazon, whether there's SEO that you can do on your listing on Amazon, that will affect your rank on Google, you know, outside of just the SEO on Amazon that a lot of people don't even pay attention to. And then just the SEO going to your landing pages or to your website or whatever, optimizing that is a game. And I think I read somewhere recently, it's like a $91 billion industry, something like that. It's something crazy like that. And that industry is There's some people, I think our guest today is one of the top experts in this. You'll introduce him here in a second, but I'm curious to know what his thoughts are because there's some people that are yelling wolf or crying that say that the sky is falling because AI is going to change everything and all these SEO tactics and backlinks and all this stuff that people have been doing to rank. It's like you just said the panda thing, there's going to be some big switch and Google's kind of messing with it right now where people are afraid that we're going to overnight lose everything. The publishing industry right now is freaked out. I don't know if you've seen the articles out there, the newspaper publishers and all these people that depend on all this organic traffic are like, we're not going to get it anymore because AI is going to determine what's best, not us determining that we want to scam you into thinking we're the best. Who do we have on today, Norm? You know our guest pretty well. Speaker 3: All right. Well, today we have, he's been probably one of the more popular people. Sorry, Kev. One of the more popular people on the podcast. He's probably been on four or five times. His name is Steve Wiideman. Speaker 2: On your other podcast, that is. Speaker 3: Lunch with Norm. Yeah, with Lunch with Norm. And it's just been awesome. He's an awesome guy. So humble and just easy to talk to. I'm just going to bring him on and I'll let him introduce himself. But just so happy to have him on. And he is a marketing misfit. Speaker 1: That's for sure. Hey, Norm. Hey, Kevin. Speaker 2: How you doing, Steve? Speaker 1: Fantastic. You're giving me flashbacks with all the history of search. I remember, was it Brian Pinkerton who came out with the web crawler? It was the full text search engine that you could go to. Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, yeah. I remember that. Speaker 1: All you needed was just some words in your title and on your page and you could be number one. Speaker 2: I don't know if you remember the days there's BOMIS, B-O-M-I-S dot com. There's all these ring sites. I don't know that one. So if you couldn't rank or you didn't want to do the search engine game, there's ring sites. So you would type in, I don't know, dog bowl or something. You could land on this one site. And instead of having to go back to the search engine and try to find that's not the dog I want, down at the bottom would be like previous and next. And you would just hit next or previous, and it would take you to another site of dog bowls or another site of something. And they were called ring sites. It was a major traffic-getting thing back in the 90s. And we went on this site, and these guys crushed it for us. I mean, they were our number one. There wasn't an affiliate program back then, but they were driving traffic to, we had a daily newsletter back then. They were driving traffic to it and sent a lot of traffic. And then I remember one day, There's two partners and one of the partners calls me up and says, hey, Jim's going to be leaving the company. Just let you know we're going to make some switches. We're going to change some things around. I'll be running it now. I said, oh, what's Jim going to do? He's like, oh, he's starting doing some encyclopedia thing or something. I'm like, oh, OK, cool. We'll just keep working together. Exactly. It turned out to be the Jimmy Wells who started Wikipedia. I used to deal with this guy before he was anybody, not knowing who he was. He probably doesn't remember me from Adam, but that's how far back I go. And the founders of MySpace messaged me at one point about something and I blew the email off and I found it like four years later, like, why didn't I act on this one? MySpace at one point was hot and I could have acted on it. So, yeah, it's funny to see how this has evolved. Speaker 1: I love that history. I do some teaching at Cal State Fullerton in UC San Diego. And it's always fun to see the expressions on the students' faces when you tell them that Google's original name was Backrub. And I always tell the joke that, you know, because Google didn't exist when I was in high school, you know, back in the early 90s. You know, it was what, 98 when they finally launched. But The joke is that, you know, if we had Google when I was in high school, it'd be the only place that I could actually get lucky, right? Because it was the two buttons that were on the site where searching get lucky. Speaker 3: I remember that. Speaker 1: It was kind of weird in high school. So that was, you know, kind of a fun youth story. Speaker 2: For those of you who don't understand, Google used to have a little button there. They don't have it anymore, do they? I think it's probably too woke or something right now. But they used to have a little button when they first started that you could do a search and type in your keyword. Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm feeling lucky. It's still there. Speaker 2: Or they had another button that would say, I'm feeling lucky. And you didn't know what you're going to get. It'd be some random thing. So that's what Steve's referring to. Speaker 1: Yeah. But it's still there. Speaker 2: Oh, is it still there? Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 1: But most people just type and hit enter. They don't even think that there's buttons there anymore. Speaker 2: Oh, that's true. I don't even use Google. It's hardly ever that I go to google.com. I'm usually using it through the search engine. One of those that's taken advantage of the 20 billion they're paying Apple to put it in the search bar on the top of Safari. Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. And it's so interesting when we think about just kind of search in general and people don't really know or understand the difference between a search engine and the search site. You had mentioned Yahoo being a You know, a directory and eventually having its own search engine. And a lot of folks don't realize that when they're searching some of these different websites that they're actually searching through one or powered by a search engine like Google or something else. So a lot of as you're learning about the world of search, you know, you're learning that a lot of where you're searching is still powered by the search engines that you may end up actually going to later anyway, like the google.com and bing.com and so forth. But it's exciting to see what's changed just over the last year and all the, not just the AI, but just everything that's happening in the world of search. You're hearing rumors of Apple maybe partnering with ChatGPT and some other folks, maybe coming up with their own search engine that they've been, you know, kind of threatening us with for a while and being a competitor. You hear that chat services like Perplexity are likely competitors of Google now, even though we don't really think of them that way. We think of them as AI, yet those folks that are using tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT and Gemini and Cloud, you know, are doing exactly what they would normally do in Google. They're searching for answers. Speaker 2: Doesn't Apple have a stake in Perplexity? Speaker 1: I don't know. Unknown Speaker: I think they did actually. Speaker 3: I think they actually did. Speaker 1: I've heard a lot of hype lately about different partnerships and mergers. Speaker 2: I think they did invest in it. They have some sort of ownership. Yeah, I love Perplexity. Have you played with Perplexity, Norm? Speaker 3: Yeah, I have. And in fact, this is really bizarre, but Perplexity is growing based on Google. It's being trained on your searches. And every search that you do, it's just going out there. And where's it going? It's going to Google to learn. Speaker 2: Well, it's also using several LLMs. It's using Claude and Chet GPT across them. But yeah, I like it a lot because it's a totally different way of searching. And so I think that's something we'll probably get to is the way people search may change. And can we actually teach people to search in a different way versus from phrases or needs and wants instead of keywords driven type of stuff? Speaker 3: Why don't we talk about that? Why don't we start with that? Speaker 2: Sure, sure. So I mean, it's like perplexity, like what Norm was just saying, you know, if I can go into Google, I was just creating an article for my newsletter the other day and I can't remember the exact things that I typed, but I told it something like, it was about languages, it was about keywords and how Spanish words are different in Colombia, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Argentina. And even in English, how the Canadian word for bathroom is different than the US bathroom word, than the British bathroom word, all English. And I was saying how you need to actually make sure these keywords are in your listing on Amazon if you're trying to really hit all these audiences. And so I went to Perplexity. Instead of me doing the research and going into Google and trying to find a blog or something like that, I went to Perplexity and I said, give me some examples. Act as whatever. I gave it the prompt and told it, think it through carefully. So that makes it actually make out the little steps and shows you how it's thinking. And give me an examples. of this in these four languages, create a chart, and also find me five other charts on the internet that someone has talked about this, and blah, blah, blah, and it sat there and did its thinking and walked me through the steps. I could see it spinning on the screen and doing its thing, and then boom, here's the results. I can't do that in Google. I like to be searching individually things over and over, going down rabbit holes, trying to find the right thing. I might be able to do an image search and find a graph or something, but the way it did it was brilliant. But that's a whole different mentality of way of searching than the average person searching. Speaker 1: I can imagine in five years from now, if we went into the future and pulled somebody from five years from now and asked them to use JetTPT or Gemini right now, they'd punch in a question and then spit out an answer and they'd look at you confused like, it's not going to ask me for more context, it's just going to just guess what I'm thinking or what I need, right? It's like, wow, that's kind of bold and audacious, right? I think they'd be borderline upset, you know, or perplexity will ask you, you know, additional add-on questions like, hey, I'd like to You know, go for a walk down the street. Oh great, which direction? Right? You know, so it's definitely trying to be more of an actual assistant than, you know, just a language model or generative AI. Speaker 2: Well, one of the things I tell people like on Amazon right now, Amazon's doing, I don't know how closely you follow what's happening with AI and search on Amazon, but that's the backbone for people like me that sell, and Norm, that sell third party products on Amazon. You game the system. So we're going in there and we're using tools that will find who our competition, what keywords and phrases they're missing out on and get those into our title or basically SEO our listing on Amazon so that we optimize for those versus they have it and you can gain a major advantage and millions of dollars potentially in sales by doing that. But that's with all the AI stuff that Amazon's doing now with Ruthless and Cosmo and a whole bunch of, and they're testing this and rolling it out slowly. Instead of me, if I always give the example, if I'm going to the beach, I'm taking a trip from Austin where I'm at to Florida with my family in July. Right now to go to Amazon, I got to know what I need. I got to go in there and I got to type. I need an umbrella. I need a beach towel. I need, oh, my son is fat. I need a wide chair, wider chair, beach chair for him. I need, you know, some sunblock. My wife gets sunburned easy. I need 75 SPF if there's such a thing, whatever the maximum is. I have to type, basically do each of those separately versus with this AI tools on search. I can just go in, And Amazon already knows a lot of data on me, and so I can say I'm taking a trip in July to the panhandle of Florida with my family. What do I need to get? And it's going to know that I already have a wide beach chair. It's already going to know I have a blanket. It's like, oh, you're missing these things. What time of year are you going? I'm going July 14th to the 18th. Oh, the weather is going to be this. It's going to be raining or something on one of those days projected. You're going to need these things. It's going to tell me everything I need. So from a search engine SEO point of view, that becomes a whole new challenge. Versus optimizing for a keyword phrase that matches ask the public or something like that or it matches an exact phrase. I gotta be selling to an avatar or to the AI in a different way. So how do you see from perplexity to this whole thing changing when it comes to search and the way Forget the customer side really. It's like because we're like here to make money. I mean, we're misfits. We want to make some money off of this stuff. What do we got to start be thinking about to do? Speaker 1: I think one way to look at it is about just consumer behaviors. How are consumers interacting and changing how they're interacting with the web? Like you'd mentioned, the Short keywords we used to search in Google are being replaced by conversational queries that have 7 to 15 words, which you won't see in your Google Search Console, but you might see it in Bing Webmaster Tools, because as I understand it, I think Dwayne Forrester, before he left there, made sure that we were able to see longer queries and better understand the intent of what those searches were, as opposed to, here's some search terms, and then you can figure it out from there. I also think that The principles of search are sort of unbreakable. They never really change. You mentioned earlier about links and content and so forth. And I don't feel like those are going to go anywhere. Even with zero-click searches, the fundamentals of how search works is through crawling the web. So making sure your website and your content, wherever it might be, is crawlable and accessible and indexable. Making sure that those things are prioritized enables you to make sure that you've set the foundation to start building your visibility. And if you ask any of these generative AI platforms how they're indexing and ranking some of their content, especially Gemini, formerly BART, and who knows what it's going to be next, It'll tell you. I'm a search engine. I'm going to crawl the internet. I'm going to find content. I'm going to score it, rank it and display it in my search results. And the principles there, of course, are making sure that you've got great, helpful, useful content, making sure that your content is visible, not just on your website, but in how other people are talking about it. Sharing it, linking to it. Page rank isn't going anywhere as we see it at the moment. It's still, you know, 1998 Stanford documents that Larry Page from Google put together in a way to sort of judge content beyond just the context, but looking at how other websites are linking to and mentioning it. And the most important thing, in my opinion, in my tests that I've ran, is your actual search appearance. You can optimize your content better than any competitor and you can get more links to your content Then any competitor and still not outrank them because. You've been too explicit in your title and description that appear in the search results, the blue link, black text. We saw this even with one of our clients, reverted some of the work that they had done on their title and meta description, and it simply had the word delivery in the title, where a competitor said, breakfast delivery, save 50%. So which one is the user going to select in the search results? The more descriptive, helpful one with a call to action and a unique selling proposition, or the one that just says the word delivery? What kind of delivery? Food delivery? Breakfast delivery? Right? So having that search appearance and I think Google's recent court cases that they had released a lot of really interesting information from the people at Google themselves admitting to the use of user data. So thinking about those three things and how we're thinking about being discoverable in search, we always ask ourselves, is our content the most helpful? I'll get into a little bit about how we think about that and how we get into actually using that to optimize. Is our content the most visible? Are other websites sharing it and linking to it? Is it there so that search engines can use it as a means to vote for our content? And in our search appearance, are we the most clickable? And do users actually stay on our URL as the final destination they choose in the search result versus going back and choosing a competing listing? So we think about those user behaviors, the visibility of our content and our brand in correlation to that. A conjunction to that, and of course, at the end of the day, making sure that we do actually have the best content out there. So I think that's, as long as we're thinking about those fundamentals, AI and AI overviews and generative AI really should continue to display us as the most talked about, the most helpful, and hopefully the most interesting to what our customers, our consumers and our Prospects would be looking for. And it is a lot of fun to play around with and test. So if you are kind of getting into how do I show up in AI overviews, you know, there's some really fun things you can do. The first is reverse engineering. When you do see, you know, an AI overview that a competitor is getting, Take a look at the page itself that's being linked to. Look at how they're marking up their content. Look at how they're syndicating some of the summary information that you might have found in the overview by just popping it into Google, maybe putting some quotes around it. To see how often other folks are curating and sharing that content. And then look at, again, how helpful it might be. Then run some tests and say, here's three different answers to a question. Which one do you find the most helpful? Include the one that shows up in the AI overview. Include a couple that you're thinking about using for your webpage. And then just keep surveying until you get 50% or more of, you know, the votes from, you know, doing some of those tests. And those tests eventually, by doing them enough, will culminate into enough experience and enough sort of gut instinct that you won't have to use them quite as much because you'll know and you'll have figured out the patterns of, you know, how the tests usually go. So I think... Speaker 2: Are these live tests or are these tests on some service or something? Speaker 1: No, these are just live tests that you do right now. I don't think there's a lot of platforms that have that yet. This is all still kind of new stuff. They only rolled it out and then rolled it back, you know, in the last couple of months. But yeah, it's a lot of fun. Speaker 3: You mentioned, we've talked about this before, but it was unbelievable what you did. You were just talking about changing around the URL, the meta title and the description. You told me a story, I think it was Sketchers or IHOP, where you were able to drive double the sales in a very short period of time just by restructuring that, just by rewording it. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Speaker 1: Sure, that was the Sketchers example where the original one, and you go back to archive.org and kind of watch it evolve over the years. Some of the categories, I know the products have changed over the years, so it might be hard to find a product that's the same now than what it was like 10 years ago. But it was an e-commerce site, of course, and it said, official Skechers website, dash, and then whatever the category was. That was their title across every single page. So of course, with the limited amount of space you have in the search result, all you would see is, Skechers official site, dash, and maybe a couple letters, and then dot, dot, dot. It was always getting truncated. And so we came up with some ideas of what we thought might help with click through rates, did some research, did a few sort of focus groups to see what we thought was most interesting. And what we found was people wanted price transparency and nobody was doing that. So we did at the category level, we would do shop for the specific category starting at and the lowest price of the products in that category. And then on the product detail pages, we would start with buy. Right? Because, you know, the behaviors are different. Shop is a category and buy is, you know, a purchase. Buy and then product name. And again, starting at the lowest price based on, you know, the different attributes. And it seemed like just putting the price in there by itself, you know, we just saw tremendous results. And even after this, I'll share a little bit of that click-through history with you on an email just so you can Play around with the data, but the file in my drive, it's always easy to find, CTR Awesomeness. And it was neat to see the click rates, the click-through rates of people who were seeing those updated titles and descriptions go through the roof, 300% on some of them and more. It was kind of a big moment where when we looked at it and we shared it, everyone here stood up and clapped and we're all like, this is a win. And we learned something really great, but it also benefited Not because their ranks suddenly went up, which eventually it did, but organic doesn't work like that. You don't just suddenly move up overnight. It takes some time for Google to collect enough data to know that that was not just an anomaly and that there's a long enough pattern of that behavior. So being in, say, the third position, if we were, and only getting, I don't know, maybe 20% of the clicks, it's possible after that happened. Maybe we were getting 30 or 40% of the clicks because we stood out more. So our position didn't change, our visibility didn't change, our share of voice for the keywords we wanted to rank for didn't change, but our traffic sure changed because more people were clicking on our listing now. So it was a double win, win for driving traffic and a win for long-term SEO as Google started to understand that that was becoming more of a helpful listing than it was previously. Speaker 2: Sounds like you need a hook in your title. Speaker 1: It's definitely fun to play with. And you can use chat GPT and Gemini to come up with ideas for titles and meta descriptions and include those prerequisites. Write me a title tag for search engines under 512 pixels, because they use pixels and not characters. That includes a strong call to action, a unique selling proposition and emphasizes this primary keyword. Those are your three Directives for your chat to come up with maybe 10 different ideas. And then circulate those ideas and then make sure it's on brand and it seems like something written by a human of whatever you end up coming up with and run a test. Run it out there across maybe 5% of your products pages or your product categories. See how it performs compared to a control group and then just keep doing that. Once a quarter, run some more tests until you're hitting an unachievable goal. Like we want to get a A 40% click-through rate. And even if you never get there, but you keep growing, you get closer to it, you'll get to the fraction of a percent and then you'll know, hey, we're kind of plateauing in terms of the most clicks we can get with titles and metas. And then what do you get into? Then you get into more of the structured markup to have more richer results like the star ratings or product details and things that Google will display in addition to just title and description. So you've got a lot of cool things that you can play with to affect how you appear in a search result. And Norm, we've talked about this before. It's not just how we appear with our one listing. There's 10 listings on a page, sometimes more with all the different video tiles and image tiles and now the forums like Reddit and Quora. There's so much more real estate available to us beyond just our paid ad and our organic listing. Now by doing the right optimization for the media itself, We can have a paid ad, an organic listing, we can have an image appear, we can have a video appear, we could appear in the people also ask section by continuing to work on upper funnel and not being paranoid of AI overviews taking away all of our content, you know, as well as the forums and making sure that we're engaging with our consumers where they're interacting. So I think you could probably get 40 to 50% of the real estate of a search result page if you stop being myopic on just Google web search alone. So there's a lot more that you can gain from it, not just from an advertising standpoint and getting people to click, but from a marketing standpoint and building awareness for your brand by being the one that dominates the search result. So yeah, a lot of cool things you can play with there. Speaker 3: Yeah, and properly using Schema, you know, just seeing those review sites or recipes or whatever it is. I don't think a lot of people, we talked about this on the podcast, my podcast, and a lot of people never even heard of Schema. Schema Market, it's been around forever. Speaker 1: It sounds like a scheme, right? Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 1: Sounds like a scheme. So it is, it is sort of the standard now for, for Google, Google's rich results. A fun exercise you can do if you're still kind of, if you're listening and you're a little bit off on what the heck we're talking about, just do a quick Google search for the Google rich snippets gallery. And the first URL that you'll see appears on Google itself. And it'll give you a preview and an idea of what the different options are of how you're listing, can appear in the search results. Again, beyond just the blue link, black text. Eventually, they sort of standardized what type of format they want to use. There's several different types of coding that could have been used to tell the search engines the meaning of what a word is or how Or what the page content is about. And now they've gone to a certain format. JSON-LD, which is a JavaScript type, is sort of the primary way. And then we use schema.org to get the actual list of what's available. But you're not restricted to that. You can create your own knowledge graph if you really start playing around with it. Or use tools like WordLift. I think it's wordlift.io and you can actually create your own knowledge graph and build your own meanings of what words mean so that search engines, when they're crawling your pages, can better understand what it is and have more context around it for when people are searching differently. Like, oh, I found a site that made it very clear that the meaning of this word is this on their site. So there's no ambiguity. I'm going to show this site and see how it performs. And then your search appearance plays a role. People do click on you and say, yeah, this was really helpful. Enough of them, Google starts to infer, hey, this was probably really helpful. I'm gonna move them up a little bit more until I see a different pattern of user behaviors. So yeah, the schema does help give you some places to start, but you're not restricted to it. If you wanted to get really nerdy, again, you can get with WordLift or someone else and say, hey, I wanna create my own knowledge graph, not just be confined to what schema.org's giving me. Speaker 2: What about someone like Zapier? I think I read something, I think it's Zapier. They're indexed, their SEO is one of the most maximized out there. They're indexed for something like 250,000 phrases and words or something crazy like that. What do you think of that approach and people that are doing that are just trying to like cover everything? Speaker 1: I think it depends on your business. I mean, what are your business objectives? Is that what you want to do? Do you want to just cover everything? Or are there specific areas that you want to focus in? I think a lot of it's experimentation, a lot of it's brainstorming with key stakeholders and figuring out what's the most important and what we should prioritize. I think that's going to play a huge role in what you do technology-wise, but Tapier's been great and not just what they're doing with SEO and digital marketing, but they're also doing great with other types of advertising. I see them everywhere pushing all sorts of integrations that you wouldn't have even thought about. Like, hey, you know, you can create your own Anything report you want using Zapier, instead of using Looker Studio even, you could use Zapier and create kind of your own reporting and not have to use a Google service if you wanted to. Don't want BigQuery? Back up your own data, use Zapier, right? So there's all sorts of cool things that you can do and they've got some of the best tech. And obviously they play really well with their marketing teams, which I've found over the last two decades is probably the biggest limiting factor of any business is the tech team not playing well with the marketing team. You know, marketing could do so much more if tech would let them put more content out and have, you know, structured markup and other cool things. But tech's like, nope, we got policies and processes and we built this thing from the ground up. We're not going to rebuild it. Or the other way around is you've got tech that creates a phenomenal foundation to do really great marketing content, but you lack the marketing team with enough experience to be able to create that really helpful content. Instead, it's thin or copied from somewhere or worse, created with AI. So yeah, it's hard to find a group. I remember getting hired a couple of times specifically to come in and evangelize for SEO with the different groups. So tech's over here and, you know, your marketing and content teams are over here and you've got to do kind of a masterclass on SEO and try to get buy-in from both groups. And so many times you had to tell the tech folks, could you guys please close your laptops? You know, because they're just like, yeah, I don't, this is all marketing. I don't care about marketing. I'm here for tech. It's like, sorry guys, you got to listen to this because without marketing, there's no jobs. You're not going to make a revenue. And it's, you know, your goal is to work together. To grow the business and you're preventing this group from doing their job, which is a tough thing, especially when SEO is looked at as, you know, kind of a mystical cloud, right? It's like, it's really hard to quantify and create forecasts against, whereas with advertising, it's really easy to get an estimate from. Google ads or Bing ads of what's possible using their platforms. So yeah, that's the fun world of SEO, of how we've known it. And I think, like we talked about with AI overviews, not being just myopic on Google web search, but looking at ways that we can extend out of it. We're already starting to make a pretty inclusive list of where we want our clients to start spending a little bit more time. As it pertains to search in general, such as the What, 51, 52% of folks, I think, again, Dwayne Forrester was the one who shared this statistic, that are in Gen Alpha and Gen Z, and they don't trust Google, so they're using TikTok to search for things, or they're using ChatGPT, or they're using Instagram, and they're finding, in fact, you could do a search in TikTok for a business, and just look over and find the Places tab, and you'll see local listings in a Places tab in TikTok, in the app. So for local businesses, if you're not paying attention and looking at where you're currently ranked in TikTok and your audience is or is going to be, This next generation, you know, you got to extend out to it. So we're looking at social search. We're also thinking a little bit differently, like, you know, Kevin, you'd mentioned longer queries and how we're using chat services and assistance. And it's very similar when we think about search behavior, when we know we have an interest or affinity in a certain type of thing, and we're scrolling through TikTok or Facebook streams or Google Discover. And we start to see things we know we want and that we're interested in, but we didn't search for anything. We simply opened up a page or flipped to a Google Discover. feed, and we start to see all sorts of stuff that's interesting to us. And I think businesses are so focused on Google and keywords and content that they don't stop to think that most of our day when we're on our phones is spent scrolling feeds that are giving our potential customers content that they're interested in. And we're not taking the time to create a content calendar to address where they're looking for things, even if they're not punching in keywords. So again, 15-20% of our time in 2025 is going to be spent around social search and discoverability. platforms like Google Discover. And I think every business should be at least putting, you know, two to 5% of their time, at least looking at it right now. And then as we get closer to 2025, having somebody who owns that, and every month, you know, get with them, see what progress they're making, where their challenges are. And if need be, hire some consultants to come in, give some advice, give a roadmap, if you're not finding what you need, you know, from other people's blog posts and YouTube channels. I've just been rambling. I feel so rude. Sorry, Norm. Speaker 2: Is that why, like I just read something recently, Google is now prioritizing e-commerce links and UGC links. They used to be, you know, people would game the system with SEO and create, here's the 10 best blenders for Father's Day or the 20 best of this. And it's all just affiliate stuff. It's not, they didn't test any of this stuff in most of them. And there's some legit sites, but the vast majority, Just gaming the system and Google is now moving towards more, let's actually send to the actual e-commerce platforms and actually send the UGC content and send to video, you know, if you got a video, YouTube is, and Google is the same company, so if you got a YouTube video short that's optimized for a specific topic or whatever, that's going to oftentimes show up on the first page. Can you talk a little bit about what's going on around all that? Speaker 1: Yeah, of course. And this, again, it's not just about, hey, let's optimize specifically for one platform. Let's figure out how we can make sure that our message is consistent and relevant in all those different platforms, because we don't know how they're going to use it. That's why we've always recommended like in our SEO content briefs, clients are like, why do you have video on every single content brief? It's because we want diversity and the uniqueness of our content compared to our competitor's version of that page. But we also want to make sure that we have content that's going to appear in video search or if we're lucky, as a video thumbnail. We did that with Belkin back when video thumbnails were a capability of what you could have on individual pages, even if it wasn't a page specifically about a video, where now your page has to be about a video to get it. Back then, we would put a video on different product detail pages, mark it up with video object schema, and we'd see a beautiful little thumbnail, right, a video thumbnail. And so we'd customize the video thumbnail at that 50% halfway mark with something that looked like a product listing. So our organic product detail pages would look like a product page in Google search results, but just normal organic result with a thumbnail of the video in the snippet. So I think paying attention to shorts and short form content, it almost seems too obvious. If you go to any YouTube channel and you look at their top videos and then toggle over to shorts, look at the difference in how many views the shorts are getting compared to your standard video. It's almost like, if you haven't seen it, it's a mind-blowing kind of, what am I doing? Why am I creating long-form content when people just want to see 30, 60 second videos? So yeah, I believe that. And I see a lot of my peers doing this as well. Joy Hawkins does a lot in the local SEO community and she did an interview recently with Ran Fishkin and Mike King around the Google algorithm leak that happened recently. Well, leak. And it was funny because they talked about it and then she took the clips from that and she created short form content. And guess what appears now in my TikTok, even though I wasn't following her at the time and I'm like, oh, there's Joy. Of course, I did follow her after I watched the video because I want to see what she's doing, what she's up to and the content's great. But that's the way we have to think about digital marketing now in 2024 is that if we don't have that media component, that video component, and yeah, it's going to be hard to learn, but once you learn it, it's just going to be like anything else you do. But you've got to take the time and get through that hurdle or you're not going to survive. Because every other page on the internet and every other piece of content is going to be augmented and supported by some type of really rich media and video is the way to go right now. Speaker 3: So I want to talk a little bit about old school, old man content. Speaker 1: So why are you looking at me? Speaker 3: No, no. I'm talking about me, the fossil. I'm the fossil on this podcast. So we've talked about content, but how important is it getting it on to your website? Not the social side, but just putting good content, all contents not created equal. But good content onto your e-commerce site. And I know we've only got a few minutes, but can you run through quickly the structure because that's so important. Speaker 1: Sure, sure. And I know that the community is up in arms with AI overviews and like, well, we're not going to waste our time on informational pages anymore, because Google is just going to steal it, and we're not going to get any clicks. And that's what a lot of publishers are worried about. And fact is, they can actually block the large language models, you know, from Even using them as a data source if they wanted to, while still keeping it open to Googlebot to crawling for organic search. So there's a lot that they can still do to get visibility, but it seems to me like, you know, they just need to focus a little bit more of their time in different areas of search. So thinking about that upper funnel and I think Kevin you'd mentioned ask the answer the public, right? I think you said ask the public, but answer the public is a tool that you can use to find questions that people have about a particular topic. You always want to start with a really broad seed keyword like something really short and then you start to see all sorts of really great ideas for content. What was one we did recently We're helping a group that's working on a product for PCOS for women that are struggling with that. And we just punched in PCOS. And we found all sorts of really interesting questions that people have about PCOS where we could put content together that solves some of those problems. And yeah, we might not show up number one in Google for it. But if somebody's performing a search because they're writing their own article, And they want a place to reference that's written by a doctor. And since they have a doctor on staff, they can do that. You know, we've got an opportunity to earn links and help with discoverability for bots that are crawling the web, looking for really great content. So we're satisfying principle two of SEO in our visibility and link building. By creating upper funnel helpful content, even if that content isn't going to show up number one in Google organically or get clicked on thanks to AI overviews or something else, it's still the catalyst to visibility, credibility, and can be a great way to earn the track links. And there are several other tools that you could use to find that. But when you create your keyword universe, you're out there looking at your search console search terms and you're filtering out all your brand terms so that you can see all the non-brand ideas. You're looking at tools like SEMrush and SpyFu and other tools to see what keywords your competitors are receiving traffic from. Again, filtering out their names so that you don't have to, you know, see that in the mix of the noise. And then you put that kind of organized list together and categorize it in an Excel workbook or Google Google Sheets, you start to start to see specific themes and you start to silo those different themes into content sections on your website that may even drive a change in your site navigation, but ultimately will expand your site map altogether. Now you've got all this great content, prioritize it based on those terms that have the highest search volume and are the most relevant. And you've got yourself a content map for the next 10 years of things to write about. The process, of course, includes looking at the topics that are on the pages that already compete with those terms. So as you start with a single page of content, maybe it's PCOS supplement as an idea. We do that search, and this is where AI can come in. You can use AI and say, extract all of the entities that are emphasized on the competing pages in this search result. And so AI will look at titles, it'll look at headings and subheadings, image names, URLs, all those SEO focal points, and it'll say, across these 10 pages, here are all the entities. that are mentioned in context. Great. Could you get me some keywords from this as well? Sure. Here's some keywords. Great. Could you take these entities and keywords and create a table of contents for me for a page that I need to write to, you know, to solve for this particular search term? Sure. Here you go. And then it combines it all for you into this beautiful, organized outline. And then you, of course, have to take out whatever is off brand for you. And your writers, of course, will add in things that aren't part of that outline that are things they still want to talk about that don't have any SEO value to them. And you've got yourself, you know, a pretty good starting point for creating something that's going to help you to get traffic. That page gets launched, you share it with those partners and affiliates and customers that you think might be really interested in it in the hopes of earning maybe one to three links to that page so that you don't end up with thousands of pages on your website that haven't earned links, giving us kind of a broader authority score that, you know, Google's recently admitted to despite years of telling us they didn't have it. And you repeat that pattern, whether it's once a week or once a day, hopefully, you know, You're not doing once a day because that usually means that the content isn't as media rich or as helpful. But if you do one a week, that's 52 new pages a year, 104 in two years of really thought out, researched, topic heavy and user intent heavy content. That's, again, going to be the catalyst to tons of new clients for you and hopefully attract a lot of links to your website. Speaker 3: Would you add video and images now just summarizing like the the videos just summarizing the blog article? Speaker 2: And on that same note, how important are the images for actually search results? Now, are they not just the metadata in the images per taps, but what's actually in the image? Are they actually reading the image and like, this is an image of an old man smoking a cigar. So we're going to rank this higher for something versus it's just an, you know, or whatever. Is that, how's that coming in? Speaker 1: I would encourage you to do for those listening that do a search for Google's image recognition API. And the first thing you'll see on that page is this cool little testing tool where you can upload an image and Google is going to tell you based on percentage probability what that image is. And so we've done some tests, some of the restaurant chains we work with. And, you know, we're like, OK, the first site that comes up in the first image in Google images of a pancake. Has a 70% probability of being a pancake. Let's take 20 different pictures of a pancake on site at one of the restaurants and see if we can get to 75 or 80% confidence and then test it and see what happens. I think there is a lot there with how Google is interpreting what's on the image. Of course, if we're talking about embedding text on an image, While they can still read it and of course they've got their whole Google Lens available to them and to us to use, I still refrain from that from an accessibility standpoint because it's not really accessible for people who are visually impaired to have text on images. But I get it. There's scenarios where you have to do it. Just make sure that your alt attribute is clear for the user. And if that image is also a link that you're using a title attribute, So the person who's clicking on it knows where they're going to be taken when they do click that image. But I do think at a foundational level, images and video are what are going to set us apart from the competition. They show expertise, they show trust, they show authority, especially if we're creating them and we're not just using AI. You know to generate something just take a picture on site of the people who are working They do a quick video. Hi, I'm Joe from such-and-such plumbing today. You know, we're on site with this customer We just did this thing. Let me show you how we did and by the way while we're here. How was the service today? It was great. Oh cool. Thanks If you want to hire us, we're in the neighborhood. Here's our phone number Now let's go into how we did this, you know, and so you you create some sort of authentic video content so the user knows who you are and They learn the kind of people they're going to be working with and they've got some trust signal in there from a testimonial or a review from somebody else. I think it's a huge differentiator and it's worth blocking out a Saturday and just knocking out as many as you can. Speaker 3: All right, Steve, it looks like you got one minute to go. And I can guarantee just based on talking with you today, you're going to be a repeat guest. Speaker 1: Oh, thank you, guys. Speaker 3: So there's one thing that we try to ask all of our guests. And at the end of this, we're looking for misfits. Do you know a misfit? Speaker 1: I know several. I think I'm a misfit. You are a misfit. Yes, I do. I know several. The one misfit I'd love for you to meet is Tim Ash, owner of Sight Tuners. He is the coolest, smartest, most creative guy that you'll ever meet. He's also an author of several really, really smart books on intelligence and consumer behavior. So I'd love to make an introduction and have Tim be on the show as well. Speaker 3: That's fantastic. Thanks a lot. We will get in touch with Tim. You've been awesome. We got you out of here on time. Kevin, anything else? Speaker 2: No, I really appreciate it, Steve. This has been great. I think we could keep doing this for about five hours. Speaker 1: I'd love it. Speaker 2: This is fun. Speaker 1: I'm so grateful for the opportunity to hang out with you guys and anytime you want to have me on, even if it's just a backup for somebody who flakes on you, count me in, I'm here for you. Unknown Speaker: Appreciate that. How do they reach out to you? Speaker 1: I'm SEO Steve everywhere. That was my handle since the late 90s, just SEO Steve. Our website's wiideman.com, W-I-I-D-E-M-A-N. I'm happy to help answer questions, solve problems and whatever we can do to help you get through whatever SEO challenge you're having to hear for you. Speaker 3: Fantastic. Speaker 1: Thanks Steve. Speaker 3: Okay, so that was great. Speaker 2: No, that's good stuff. We could keep going for a while. I was just looking at the clocks like, damn, it's already been an hour. I'm like, time flies when you're having fun. Speaker 3: But if you talk, I've talked to him a lot about different things, but even site structure, you know, what you have to put on your site, like getting into the content, right, for your website. We didn't have time to go, that could be, that could be one hour just by itself. He got us, like he's changed the way everything we do on the site from The way that we use the H1 headers, of course, but going into a summary at the very beginning, a table of contents, go into the body, but just after the very first paragraph, maybe the second paragraph, but usually after the first, there's a video and just a way that you would go down just to keep people to read the content. And how to just continually bring on new content. Now, one thing I wanted to mention, I don't know if you've ever used this company, but Answer the Public is one. But there's another company out there, and they're awesome. Phrase, F-R-A-S-E.io. And they do the exact same thing, except they go out, they find all of the keywords or the questions, just like Answer. But the difference is, They bring up the number one rated article and then they summarize it and you can bring it off to your team to try to replicate and get a higher score. Speaker 2: Yeah, I've played with Phrase. Phrase is really good. That's a really good suggestion. You should, anybody listening should definitely go try out both of those. Speaker 3: Actually, we should bring them on the podcast. Speaker 2: Phrase guys? Speaker 3: Yeah, they've been on Lunch. Speaker 2: So, yeah. Answer the Public is Neil Patel. He owns that. Speaker 3: I didn't know that. Speaker 2: Yeah, he created Answer the Public and it's a lead magnet for him. Speaker 3: Oh, great. Speaker 2: But yeah, and it's done very well. It's made him a multi-bazillionaire. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 2: That and a few other things. But yeah, But yeah, that would be great to get the guys from praise.io on. Maybe we'll have to do that. Unknown Speaker: We'll see. Speaker 3: We'll see who that misfit is. Can I get all of them? Speaker 2: That's right. Well, I appreciate everybody tuning in today and listening. Hopefully you found this beneficial with Steve. That was some great stuff. We'll be back again next week with another awesome episode of The Marketing Misfits. Be sure to hit that follow or subscribe button if you're watching this on YouTube or hit the follow button if you're watching this on your favorite podcast player like iTunes or Stitcher or whatever it may be. And yeah, marketingmisfits.co is the website. Is it .com, Norm, or is it .co? Unknown Speaker: It's C-O. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 3: Not dot com. Speaker 1: That's right. Speaker 3: C-O. Speaker 2: Not C-O. Speaker 3: All right, everybody. We'll see you on the next podcast. Speaker 1: Take care. Speaker 2: Misfits out.