Episode 1 - SEO Misconceptions, SEO's Value, & Competitive Impacts of Generative AI
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SEO Misconceptions, SEO's Value, & Competitive Impacts of Generative AI Video & Podcast Transcription
[This transcript has been lightly edited to ensure readability]
The Idea Behind The Show
Dave Dougherty: All right. Welcome to the first episode of Enterprises Minds. I'm Dave. I got Alex and Ruthi here as well. Your hosts for the show in the inaugural episode. We're going to bring three topics for us to discuss, which may be a format we'll play with down the line, or we'll just take one big chunk of a topic that's in the industry and try to lend our voices to it. We may provide an answer. We may not, because some of them, like subfoldering, or subdomains will go on forever.
Ruthi Corcoran: It depends.
Dave Dougherty: Yes. So all about fun. You know a little bit about us and, and the podcast idea was that, uh, you know, we all met in a similar, in a previous role, uh, that we all shared and became friends, and we love to bounce ideas off of each other.
And as soon as we started recording this with the pandemic, uh, at least from my side, teasing it around with some other friends going, “Ooh. I'd listened to that.”
So here we are. We're recording, we're bringing it to you. Uh, thank you for joining us. And Alex, why don't you start us off with a little bit about yourself?
Get to Know the Hosts
Alex Pokorny: Sure. So, I'm Alex Pokorny. I've been an SEO for over a dozen years now. Got to stop counting after a certain point. I’ve been doing agencies, freelancing in-house roles, you name it across the. And then did the alphabet soup as well, so B2B, B2C, D2C. So a variety of clients, which gives kind of an interesting perspective on little bits here and there.
But deeper roles as in-house roles. So always love to see things scale and kind of move up. And as my time with SEO has continued I've also seen kind of how the industry has changed, which has changed significantly over time. As we all know. For the SEO, it changes a lot. But man alive, if you look at like 10 years worth, it really has changed.
So that's kind of me, Ruthi?
Ruthi Corcoran: Hi, Ruthi Corcoran. And you know, my background is a bit, it's a bit of a mix. A lot of in-house small nonprofits, large enterprises, small teams, large teams, global teams, local teams, sort of a mix of all the in-house activities you could have. SEO has been scattered in throughout my career for the last 10 years or so.
Sometimes it's been larger digital marketing more broadly. Sometimes more heavily web, sometimes just SEO. It sort of bounces back and forth. But inevitably, SEO is one of the fantastic tools that we have in our kit these days.
And on the side, I'm pretty excited about keeping up with all the emerging technologies, especially these days. We have a lot of exciting things coming up that are going to impact SEO and the digital marketing world in a big way. Exploring and sort of speculating about what that might look like. And coming along for the ride is a lot of fun,
Dave Dougherty: Right. Yeah. And so finally Dave Dougherty. Started out as a musician. For those of you watching on YouTube, you'll see the background. That's legit real. That is my studio.
And like Ruthi, I bounced around a lot. I like to say I graduated into the recession with two art degrees, so I had to build my own way because nobody was going to hire an artist during the Great Recession.
So, everything from copywriting, PR, crisis management, content marketing, SEO, and paid. All of it from startup companies, solopreneurs, enterprise level, agency. You know, just took one opportunity to the next. But, you know, I really, really love the search and the content marketing space. So, you know, how do you find your audience, address your audience in a way that they care about, and have a good relationship with the people that you're actually trying to serve? Those are my main things.
And, you know, the listeners probably are not actually here for us. They're here for the topics we will discuss. So now that you know a little bit behind us, and then we're not just some schmuck in the basement saying we know what we're talking about. We actually do. You know, double-digit experience.
Ruthi, you had a topic you wanted to discuss and then I think we'll kick over to Alex. We'll wrap up with a quick topic that maybe will be the standard Dave rocket launch at the end.
Ruthi Corcoran: Going to lob a grenade at us? Is that what's going to happen?
Dave Dougherty: We shall see.
Alex Pokorny: I look forward to it.
Ruthi Corcoran: Keep it lively.
Dave Dougherty: Yes, exactly.
Communicating SEO's Value in Business
Ruthi Corcoran: All right. Let's start with the big one. For all the SEOs out there, you're going to appreciate this and it's communicating SEO's value. It's, it's sort of a nebulous thing. It's an important part of our toolkit, but it has a lot of different facets. There's technical components, there are on-page components, and there are enough nuances that it sort of confounds everyone.
Especially in leadership. They know it's important, but it's unclear exactly how in the feedback loops [SEO nuances] aren't strong. So how do we communicate SEO's value to marketers who are perhaps less in tune with the digital world to marketers who are really excited about the digital world? And then of course leadership and management?
Alex Pokorny: Sure. I can start a little bit. I think it always depends quite a bit. Right On what you were saying Ruthi about that digital maturity level too. How excited are they? How interested are they? How educated are they? How much experience do they have in it?
I mean the one that I usually start with, like small businesses, is even just talking about offline competition versus online competition. If you're a small company but someone outranks you, even if they're a random blog, they're taking your traffic. Even though you're a company and that's a blog, that's a threat to you. So you gotta react to that. That's an online competition issue.
Small businesses have that problem constantly where you have some big, usually, kind of conglomerate company who has a whole bunch of different service providers listed, their SEO is pretty topnotch. They're all over the place and they're outranking you left right, and center, and then if you want a lead from them, they will gladly charge you for a lead.
So trying to outrank that kind of a company or that kind of competition it doesn't matter if you're in the healthcare space, the same thing. You got big companies out there, big organizations out there, nonprofit organizations, government organizations. That's the online world that is taking that traffic.
So I think a key one is basically trying to set that stage of what are you kind of hoping to achieve with that SEO. Are you trying to just make your brand more frequent in searches? Are you trying to push down competitors because you got somebody who's trying to eat your lunch or are you pushing into a new area, or a new product?
It has so many different kinds of entry points. It's kind of almost like the entry points of marketing. Like what are you trying to do with it?
Ruthi Corcoran: Right? Step one is what's your vision? What, what's your purpose here? What is it you're trying to accomplish?
Dave Dougherty: Well, and you know what? You queued this up in the beginning, Alex, on how things have changed over the last 10, 15 years.
Like outranking someone 10 years ago when it really was just about how many internal links you have. How many external links? Are you targeting the keyword properly? Do you have enough content around it? That was a little bit, relatively easier then. But now I feel like there's so much SEO for specific business types. Right?
Like if you're e-commerce first, that's going to naturally put it into a smaller focus. And you're going to care less about the article publishing and whatever else. I mean, it all depends, obviously. It all depends. I mean, we are marketers, so we have to say that at least once. Anyway, that was my one thought, so I'll stop there.
Ruthi Corcoran: Yeah, a lot of it for sure goes to what you were talking about, Alex, which is what is the purpose? What is it that you're trying to achieve here? We've all been in that scenario where you get, “What are our top 20 keywords?”
Alex Pokorny: Yeah.
Ruthi Corcoran: What is it we're trying to do? Like, we're not going to compete with Wikipedia. That's not what our purpose is. So step one is, “Hey, let's take a look at what it is that we're trying to do.” Whether we're trying to sell something, whether we're not, or we're trying to just be more present in the marketplace we're in.
And then I suppose the next step from there we think about is, “Okay, how does SEO help us better understand our customers?” That's always top of mind. I think that's a big piece of SEO's values. It helps us understand what is it that the people we're targeting or the audiences that we're targeting, what they are looking for. How are they speaking?
And from there, then who are our competitors within the space? Which goes back to that point of Wikipedia, right? If all the keywords you're targeting are leading to sort of generic information sharing, does that relate to your goal? Because if you're trying to sell something and you're going after phrases and search terms that are all informational, well you've got a disconnect there.
Helping you reach your business goals and then helping you better understand your audience, I think those are two really good starting points.
Dave Dougherty: I think there's another thing too with it though. With the value for what? Right? I mean as search practitioners, of course, we're going to immediately go to the kind of intrinsic value of it. It's like, “Well, of course, it's valuable. That's what we've been doing for 15 years!”
But I think I come back to a presentation that I saw Rand Fishkin gave a year ago or so where he compared it to paid search and why does paid search always get the dollars over SEO? When SEO always converts better and brings in more traffic. Yada, yada, yada, yada. All the stuff that we know. And he had the interesting thought that it was easier to communicate the value of paid search because it's easier to understand. You put a dollar in, and you get $1.50 back.
So you can immediately talk about it. You don't have to talk about the two-year lead cycles for something like a really complex healthcare product. Where you might actually circle through a couple of people in a role before the customer actually buys the product that they started [being interested in] a long time ago.
And so the value of SEO becomes more of that relationship building.
It's more of that long-term [strategy]. I think SEO's value in that regard really is the kind of digital health of the organization. Like how good are all of your marketing plans, your channel mix, your...
Ruthi Corcoran: More as an indicator.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. Rather than individual tactics. So thoughts on that? Does that spark any ideas?
Alex Pokorny: Yeah, that's an interesting stat, and Ruthi, Dave, we were both talking about how there's a data analytics, data insights, aspect of SEO, and I think that is really undervalued. I mean, it's not what someone thinks about when they think about SEO.
It's basically the blue links on Google. You know, are you ranking number one? Are they ranking number one and all the rest? And it's still stuck in that era. Instead of thinking about something a little bit further along the line of customer insights. Can we actually start informing, can we start to understand, you know, how we are positioned in the market?
What do people see us as? What kind of keywords are actually converting? Should we be doubling down with paid search and SEO basically in that area? Or are we seeing some stuff from paid? Then pulling those keywords in and saying, "Hey, these are some phrases and some topics. We're going to build some content around from an SEO standpoint."
There's always that kind of back-and-forth relationship that can exist and should exist. The other side is from the dollar value. Funny you mentioned Rand Fishkin and Will Reynolds did a sea fireside chat and it's on the Seer website if you are interested in it.
But they went back and forth. I dunno if it's the same one you were thinking about, but they went back and forth on the value of SEO and Will Reynolds from Seer was talking. Okay, so one easy one that a lot of SEOs do, and this is one, you're going to find blogs everywhere. You take, what is the Google keyword tools, cost per click, or that given term, and then multiply it by how much traffic you got in saying organic gave you this dollar value of traffic.
You know, you saved unpaid searches by doing SEO. You know, that's a metric there. And Will Reynolds was, he was like, “Okay, I'll take maybe 70% of that, 60% of that. Heck, 30% of that. Doesn't matter. I'm able to kind of pull credit for what we've been able to do.” So that's a dollar value kind of way to do it.
If you're e-commerce, of course, it's a lot easier math, when you talk about what's converting. What's the profit margin? What's the profit of a particular purchase and average order value, lifetime customer value? And then go into all those metrics if you have those dollars.
If you don't, you can do the CPC one. I don't know. Like if you try to get real tangible, like a real, I should say, probably real tactical. Aside from CPC, what's another kind of valuation way that you can do or a way that you can value us?
Ruthi Corcoran: Yeah, so we can think of a couple, and I remember Google has some sort of ROI calculator that I've used in the past.
I don't know if it exists anymore. We can find a link if it's still there, where they sort of give you estimates. But it's all based on whether or not you're selling a product. And I think that's sort of an interesting thing, a piece to this, which is CPC. And using the paid search data that gives you a proxy if you don't have it.
The ideal case is, especially if you're e-commerce, you're selling things, you can see. Okay, somebody came in through an organic search. They clicked this, this, and this, and then they bought the product. Hooray. Except, of course, we all know that marketing and customer journeys are much more complex, right?
Organic is one piece of the larger pie. So part of it is having the infrastructure in place to be able to see how people are coming through at one point, and then where in the buying cycle are you influencing them? And that can be really sophisticated.
But I keep thinking of, there's this fantastic Rory Sutherland lecture that he gives where he does a good job of reminding us all that we are playing the Financiers' games. This is the accountants' game, which is they love spreadsheets. They love to see the ROI. But marketing isn't necessarily. All about ROI.
That's of course an important piece, but we also have to remember, like, there are some more esoteric pieces of this. Like what is the value of being present and findable on the internet, right? That has some intrinsic value in and of itself, and it's how do we communicate that component as well as the very strict, ROI, what's the dollar value on this?
Dave Dougherty: Right. To that point, I think of some of the solopreneurs or the startup companies I worked with a long time back. People don't search for what they don't know. So if you have some crazy unique name, well then you have to go hit the ground and do all of the PR stuff. You have to get all of the radio shows, like, do a bunch of advertising so that people start to know your name and that is easily tracked.
That's where for me, branded search really comes into place. When you have a new product, a new brand, or a new company, you want to see how much purchase you're getting within the markets that you're targeting. Because if people are actually remembering it and using it, or even getting a misspelling of it, you're starting to be top of mind.
But once you have that established company, it does become much more of that accountant game and tailoring your message to whatever leader you have for the next two years.
Ruthi Corcoran: That's a really good point, Dave. There's sort of, keeping in mind, not only what SEO is valuable for, but also what it's not valuable for. Because I've definitely worked in organizations or situations where it just didn't make sense for us to have a strong SEO play because, to your point, we were targeting something that people didn't even know existed. Let alone that they might want it. And so in that case some of the social media targetings made a lot more sense because we could target interests.
Because we could say, “Okay, if you're interested in this, you might be interested in this.” Which is a little trickier to do in the search space, so it's good to know your limitations.
What Do Most Organizations Get Wrong About SEO?
Alex Pokorny: We could actually probably transfer the next topic too, just because we're kind of right there and we're kind of edging up against it, which is, what do most organizations get wrong about SEO?
And one that always comes to mind, of course, is speed. And basically a little bit of the SEO magic part. So two parts. One is exactly throwing a little magical SEO fairy dust on each of those pages. And we're, we've "SEOed it," which yes. Hate that phrase so much. So much. That's, it's not a, there's no stopping point here.
I guess one of the big ones always is the question, “What's the timeline going to? When am I going to see the results?” There's always that question that comes up first and the expectation is based on other forms of digital marketing channels. You turn on that paid search campaign and you start getting traffic that day or that hour, potentially that minute, right?
Same thing with your social media campaign, especially from an advertising standpoint. Not necessarily organic, but from an advertising standpoint, absolutely. You move that needle pretty quickly.
And then the other one that I receive is also, “What does SEO all entail? And then when is it done?”
Because you have that phrase of SEO hit or do the SEO thing or whatever phrasing they end up using. But it is all the same thing that they're looking for a cut-and-dry activity each time.
Ruthi Corcoran: Yes. Jumping off that sort of SEO activity, I think that has led to a lot of unnecessary SEO. Activities, myths, factoids, right?
There are a lot of things that can lead you astray in the world. And I think of things like link toxicity and link sculpting. And things like this, which, yeah, maybe at the margin can impact you, but aren't really going to have a lot of lift. And so I think it's really easy to get off, get stuck in some of one, some of these avenues that aren't particularly helpful or, you know, there's a lot of low hanging fruit.
And then on the flip side, you miss the unseen things. You know, it's the boring stuff like making sure you have a proper site map, making sure you have a proper robots.txt file; things that just aren't really exciting. But at the end of the day, are leaving a foundation for something that's going to be really good.
Dave Dougherty: I have said for a long time that SEO is like plumbing because you don't really care about it until the toilet starts overflowing. And then you're like, “Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!” You know?
Because when you log into your analytics and you see that you've gotten no traffic for a week and a half. Hopefully, you're in your analytics more than that, you know? [But when you log in] and you discover that your intern disallowed everything accidentally. You know, that's a problem.
Alex Pokorny: That's actually another point that we kind of missed with the value is also risk mitigation. And there's of a large organization, small organization, anytime there's a code launch website, launch, relaunch, redesign, hosting change, domain name change. You name it. There's a giant risk that basically gets plastered all over it. It's usually up to an SEO to figure out how are we going to mitigate this risk or try to eliminate it as much as we can. So it's also a piece of it too. I think that gets glossed over real quick though.
I mean, because it's seen as, "Okay, we have yet another delay to the website launch. And how much effort do you want to really put on these developers? They're already overworked."
Dave Dougherty: Well, have you guys seen on LinkedIn…I've been targeted by these posts that they're coming from a number of different sources, but it's just like 50% of SEOs are waiting for code changes. And it's like, “Well, yeah.” That's the nature of the beast. Of course. Of course.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah. I mean, getting to what Ruthi was talking about, like link toxicity and disallows and stuff like that. There's a reason why people gravitate toward those blog posts, you know, pop up of how to go through that because you have control over that. It's one of the things you get control over, right?
And all those other systems, all those other things the big ones that really make a difference, like new content. You don't. So then it becomes this big giant waiting game. Yeah, you're right. It's a waiting game.
Dave Dougherty: Well, and when your leadership is expecting a recession that may or may not actually occur, and you have no budget, but you still have to justify your existence, what are you going to do?
You're going to find some obscure metric and you're going to shove it as hard as you can.
Alex Pokorny: It's called domain authority Dave.
Ruthi Corcoran: That's right.
Alex Pokorny: What does it do?
Dave Dougherty: It signs RFPs. That's what that does.
Alex Pokorny: It's a number and it's going up and to the right, so I can put in a slide and be proud.
Ruthi Corcoran: But that I think gets at it, which is there's a component of SEO, which can be a growth driver, and it's the hard stuff.
It's like let's learn from our customers. Let's inform our content so that we can have good quality content. And that's super hard. And then the other half of SEO is like replacing your roof. Like you spend a lot of money and at the end of the day you have a new roof, which is important, but like you're not really that excited about it.
And I think that's sort of the tension there. Which is, it's super, it's both exciting to be a growth driver and also exceptionally hard. And it's really boring to replace your roof.
Dave Dougherty: It's like supply chain in that respect, like, the supply chain for digital products. Whenever you're at a backyard barbecue and you meet somebody that works in supply chain, there is that pause where you're just like, “Oh. Okay. What do you do?”
I mean they end up being nice people, but yeah... And talk about another profession where it's totally details that certain people care about and if you're on the outside of it, you're just like, "Okay, cool. So I'm getting my package? Awesome."
Alex Pokorny: I'm getting my converting traffic. Cool, thanks.
Dave Dougherty: So, yeah.
How Are You Feeling About Being Competitive as a Marketer with Generative AI?
Ruthi Corcoran: You going to lob a grenade?
Alex Pokorny: Go for it, Dave. Pull that pin buddy.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. Okay. So, well, I had two that I was going to maybe talk about, because I think like most marketers, or at least the ones I hang out with, we've been doing deep dives into generative AI since November of last year.
And with a couple of my friends, I think, Alex, you and I talked about this off camera, so I hope you don't mind me saying it. When I first started in search and got my first agency job, I remember going to a local event. It was their big annual search event [MNSearch]. And I walked into the room and it is the first time in a professional setting that I saw 2,000 people who do the exact same thing that I do.
And I remember immediately having the thought, “I have to be better than every single person in this room.” Like, this is my competition. In terms of providing good work to clients, having the right skill sets, and just doing all that. Then, you know, over the course of that day, it was like, “Oh, right. If I'm client-facing, that gives me a level up on some of these coder people. Or, you know, yada, yada, yada. So you start refining, refining your list.
But I thought of that experience again recently when I was on one of these AI things and the phrase was, AI's not going to replace marketers. Marketers who use AI will replace those who don’t. And that's from the Marketing AI Institute, which is a great resource if anybody needs it.
So how are you guys feeling about competition against other marketers or other marketing providers? Now that generative AI is part of our life experience in terms of career development or whatever else.
Alex Pokorny: I've got a really long one. I dunno if we can branch into it.
Dave Dougherty: Well, Ruthi seems annoyed with my question, so why don't we start with her?
Ruthi Corcoran: Not annoyed. No, I'm contemplative. I think it's a very good question because I think that's the one that's in front of all of us. There's a lot of excitement and curiosity with AI. There's also, at least on my part, a little bit of dread, and a little bit of FOMO. Like there's a lot going on there.
Alex, I will kick it off to you if you already know what you're going to say, and I will contemplate a little bit more.
Alex Pokorny: One of the main things I was thinking about with any of the diffusion or LLM (large language model) AI, generative AI that basically have come out recently is, I think of it in terms of a 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G. Yeah. From a mobile phone network perspective where this is technology, it is not the application that was built on top of it.
It's something that's going to enable something pretty cool. That's going to be probably world-changing. So 2G to 3G, we went from letters to images, which gave us MySpace and Facebook. 3G to 4G gave us videos. So we got TikTok, but 4G to 5G is probably going to give us some kind of AR/VR thing, which is going to be pretty awesome because data transfer basically is allowed at that point.
You finally can have that bandwidth connection to support those different mediums, which then allows a whole new industry, people who produce TikTok videos. And a lot of people who sit on their couches watching those TikTok videos.
Dave Dougherty: Until it's banned.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah. Right. We'll see where all that goes right now. I see it as that because those coming changes are based upon this core technology. How much do you need to understand the difference between 3G and 4G? You really don't. You don't really have to understand that.
But you have to, as a marketer, have a really good understanding of how it can utilize Facebook for a client. Yeah, so right now it just seems like we're seeing beta versions and demo sites and quick little apps that do one particular thing, but they don't really do much else.
Right. Those kinds of things make me think that we're in the very early stages and we're still at that point where we're just starting to scratch the surface and trying to figure out, “Okay, this is a really cool technology. What can we do with it? And we're all kind of still in that early phase of what can we do with it.
I think Bing and Microsoft as a whole are further down the line than anybody else. Google [with BARD] is obviously trying to catch up and they're not doing a really good job of it. They're just announcing a partnership. So maybe they'll get there, but not yet. Microsoft 365 is finally going to get better, basically.
And Bing is someplace where people want to go, which is just mind-blowing as an SEO to say that still. I'm still trying to get over that. I mean, usually, it's like “Bing. I know, I know. But really Bing.” It is like you're apologizing right after you say Bing, now it's like…
Dave Dougherty: It's not just 70-year-olds. It's okay.
Ruthi Corcoran: It used to be the case that 30% of B2B was on Bing, so you know, you had to pay a little bit of attention.
Alex Pokorny: Oh yeah. I mean if you're doing healthcare market, governments, people who basically can't change their browser, or people who aren't technologically savvy enough to change their browser, you're hitting those audiences.
It was great, but I would always have to like caveat after I say Bing and I'm trying to like stop myself. It's like there's a psychological tick that I've got with Bing, but I'll get over it here.
I think yes, we definitely need to keep on top of it. You need to understand some of its limitations of it because no doubt, your clients, your boss, and your coworkers have already brought it up. You've already been asked for an opinion on it, so that's not going to stop. As the technology progresses, it's going to become a lot more useful and a lot more fun.
But I would totally encourage anybody to at least try some of them out, and create some accounts. A lot of them are free. Play around with it. At least nothing else get an understanding of how could this be used and start realizing some limitations. Because every technology has problems.
I mean, every technology does. So it's a good thing to be cognizant of those when people are getting into kind of a fever for new tech.
Dave Dougherty: I will say quick, just a quick interjection. Have you guys played around with BARD yet?
Alex Pokorny: No. Still on the waitlist.
Dave Dougherty: So I got access like two days ago. And I started playing around with it, and one of the features that I love about it as opposed to any of the other ones is that it gives you three drafts of the same thing. So you can toggle between them and it will give you the reasons why one does one thing better.
This one has this type of voice and this one sounds friendlier than this one. And that kind of editorial on the thing that I asked you to do is wonderful. I'm still going to copy-edit it. Of course, I'm still going to of course do all this stuff. I'm not going to just take it verbatim, but I think that that one feature really lifts BARD in my mind over some of the other ones. As you said, Alex, though, everything is still just an experiment and still whatever. So I'm interested to see how these go.
Alex Pokorny: It's moving super fast though. I mean, it's right now. But holy cow is it moving fast. The difference in technology, I mean, you said you were looking at this stuff since November.
Well, that's when ChatGPT got released. Yeah. Now it's three, and then 3.5 got released. Now four is out and they're talking about five being next. I mean, it's like, it's moving way faster than most other technologies.
And I think the other big thing is it's way more companies, so it's a lot harder to keep track of not just Apple versus Microsoft or versus Google or somebody else. That's not the big three. It's hundreds of companies.
Ruthi Corcoran: That to me, I think is what's most surprising and something that you have to keep track of. I mean, in general, this is...Dave, the question you pose is something that I'll continue to be thinking about. For the coming months, probably the coming years.
And at the moment, yeah, it does seem like it's the marketers who utilize it, that are going to be the winners. But your point about it moving fast is it's moving very fast, which makes me stop and go, “Hmm.” There are probably some unknown unknowns here in this new world of AI that we won't even see because we can't see. We don't have the infrastructure, necessarily.
But some of the things that pop to mind when you ask that question, and in listening to your analogy with the 2G, 3G, Alex, there's this fantastic Virgil Abloh quote where he says, “I think what makes room for large opportunity is there's new space for a new dialogue.” And that's exactly where we're at right now.
There's so much new space for dialogue and new ways of thinking about the world, how we interact, and the tools that we use. That's a huge opportunity creator. The other little quote that I've got in the back of my mind, I was listening to Kevin Kelly yesterday. He's got a new book coming out. Kevin Kelly's fantastic, right? You can read his works [about] the internet when it was evolving and sort of get a sense of a similar sort of paradigm shift in the world, I suppose. And one of the things that he talks a lot about, and I've heard him say over and over is, "Don't be the best, be the only."
I think that to me is sort of what this AI area really opens up and what we can think about as marketers is: How do we use AI to do the things we couldn't do before to be the only one who can do certain things? Rather than trying to beat out all the other marketers at copywriting or something like this.
I think if we try and play the competition game well, we ourselves might be sort of outsourced by the technologies. Whereas if we find new, unique ways of using the technology that gives us something, certainly a competitive advantage in the marketplace. But also something interesting to do, right? We can grow and we can evolve with technology as it's moving so rapidly.
What's the Value of Someone Doing SEO in an Organization?
Alex Pokorny: There's also value. I was just thinking of the different questions we talked about today like the value of SEO. We're kind of getting to the value of having a person do SEO and what's the future value of that person. How do you maintain your value or increase your value?
A lot of it comes down to this is techy stuff. While there's a user experience element to it and some of the user experiences are very, very easy to use, they're still intimidating because they're different than what it was before.
In any kind of change management activity, you sell those early adopters, you sell the late adopters and quite frankly, you got a whole bunch of people who just don't have the time or care, or bandwidth, to deal with this stuff.
Ruthi Corcoran: So true.
Alex Pokorny: They're still going to look for an SEO to figure out how to use generative AI to basically make themselves a better SEO. Which is something that a lot of other people have no interest in doing.
So as long as you keep going down that path yourself, you're creating a kind of intrinsic value for yourself. You're keeping up to date. You're probably saving yourself some time and headaches. You might be playing around with some cool tools, and running into frustration with tech. Sure, there are pros and cons there, but there's still a techy person who's going to be dealing with stuff that other people would rather not deal with. So you're still going to have value. I mean, that's part of it.
Ruthi Corcoran: Maybe that's the true niche of SEO, Alex, the techy person who will do things other people don't want to or don't understand.
Alex Pokorny: I'm doing a whole bunch of redirects. Who cares? Nobody but me. Who values it, nobody but me.
Ruthi Corcoran: It's real important. So you better do it.
Alex Pokorny: Exactly. Will I eventually communicate this when I'm done? Yeah, fine.
Dave Dougherty: It's like turmeric, but you need the black pepper.
Ruthi Corcoran: That's right.
Alex Pokorny: It helps with inflammation. General, general inflammation.
Dave Dougherty: Really? Do you have anything for the general frustration I got?
So it is interesting you bring up the general value because the second one that I had act actually tied to this because. In these larger discussions, and some of the articles that I've been seeing, there are so many people making these declarative statements that I just feel are so unwarranted.
Like “GPT will replace SERPs!” “Don't Google it, just GPT it!” And I'm like, you're a moron if you do that. Do both! See what happens. But don't just rely on [ChatGPT] like that. It's not a reasoning thing to do.
And this is where I think with the history of how search has changed, you bring up 3G, 4G, and 5G. I mean, we still have some, if you're doing global marketing, you should take that into account when you're designing your websites because you're going to have some priority countries that are still running a 2G or a 3G.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah, absolutely.
Dave Dougherty: You know, they're not going to have the download speeds that are available, or it's still going to be on the, the cell towers. And if you're building an American-based website with all the videos and bells and whistles and whatever, you're doing yourself a disservice.
But I also think there's going to be some lag time, right? There are all these marketers that are jumping in, trying things out, trying some new things, and then making these declarations when really you're at the tip of the spear.
You have to account for that 10-year, 15-year adoption of the normal person and then the laggards. Right? So even though it's fast and it's amazing and it's awesome now, I don't think most of the general public even cares. Yet.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah. There's a weird bubble that happens. I think that's kind of a little bit of a sign of the times. A little bit. But it's also where we get our information from. If it's from Twitter, who knows? Mastadon maybe. Maybe. Who knows? LinkedIn, other sites, Ars Technica, you're in this little tech bubble. I mean, you're a part of this small population.
The other one I would say though, in a kind of defense of whether is it a bubble or is it not is a stat that's been thrown around a lot about ChatGPT and the number of user accounts. How fast it hit a million, which is faster than TikTok.
Yeah, there's a consumer element to it that's still fairly broad, and if it's brought into things like Bing, actually your 70-year-old's going to be using it before your 50-year-old. Weirdly enough they just won't know it.
Ruthi Corcoran: Guys, 70-year-olds are still on the tech. We gotta up our age ton like 90.
Alex Pokorny: Probably true. Yeah, right.
Dave Dougherty: Nobody in my family makes it that long. I don't know about you…
Alex Pokorny: Uh, health issues decide, I guess.
Ruthi Corcoran: Good genes. Yeah, right. I hang out with a lot of 70-year-olds. They're great. Love them. But on that point though, this feels a little faster. A little faster I think than technology like the internet took, right? Where it was like, oh, you know, it was only Good Morning America.
And people are like, what do we do with this thing and all that stuff? Why? I think the time it took for ChatGPT to be on Good Morning America was much faster, which is sort of interesting to watch. The adoption might be quicker because of the bang, certainly, but also because of, maybe it's the wow factor perhaps as well.
Alex Pokorny: I think there's an element, I mean the main element that I just think of with ChatGPT was, it has a threat to journalism. And where do we get all our news journalists and they're threatened by this tool? They see it as some big scary thing that is producing content, which is their job. It's doing it fairly well.
I mean, there's this natural kind of feedback group of journalists having opinions about it super quick and just get a whole bunch of news published about it. Which gives it that spin. I don’t know, I was sending it in a text conversation because I was trying to figure out, “Why does AI seem so cool?”
Because the phrase AI's been around forever. It's like people when they say that, the algorithm, and it's like, that's a really simple equation. We're going to call it algorithm because it's fancy. But why, why does this seem cool?
And what it got down to was, and I really wanted to hear you guys' opinion about this cause there was just kind of random thought of like, maybe we understand a little bit of how we input into it. Basically writing out a sentence or phrase, you name it. Something pretty natural language, that you're just saying like you normally would to anybody else. You don't really understand what it does and it produces something far faster than any alternative. So there's an element of it that we understand and it seems comfortable, but then there's this sudden element where it's like, I don't have a good frame of reference to attach to it.
So it seems really cool like sports cars seem cooler than a Toyota Camry because the sports car's faster, but, you have so many other elements to it. Costs, whether or not it works for where you happen to live. You know, all the rest of those kinds of things come in and it breaks down the coolness factor of it.
This, on the other hand, doesn't have so many other factors to it. It's very simplistic as well, where you put in something pretty basic you get something back that you fully understand. You just don't have a preference or alternative.
Dave Dougherty: I do think you answered your own question, to be honest. For me, I think back to when I took the first internship that I could get and it was writing product descriptions and meta descriptions for a startup e-commerce company. When you're writing the sixth version of a six-pack of socks. You question your life choices.
So if you can just say, “Write a general description for a six-pack of plain white socks.” And you get two, or three versions. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Yeah.
Because now you're not hating your life. I totally get that. It allows you to get rid of a lot of that just grinding work unless you are a writer who likes a particular type of thing.
As someone with a writing degree, I think I like writing more than most people and the nuances of it. I think most people in the workforce are just like, “Yeah, it's something I do. I write. I do the emails. I do the whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” But you know, and when you're after your sixth meeting, are you really going to come up with the best copy when you've just been listening to other people talk for that long?
No. You're just going to pump it out and try to get it done as quickly as possible. And again, it goes back to how is your organization set up, right? If you have been thinning out your marketing ranks and everybody's doing more with less, even though the leadership won't ever say that, you're going to find the workarounds, right?
Ruthi Corcoran: ChatGPT is a heck of a workaround.
Dave Dougherty: And that's the thing for me... yeah, it is a, yeah. Now I think it's going to be awesome for the “good enough content,” but where you truly want to differentiate then you're going to want to have that extra time. You're going to want to find the person who's looked into copywriting for marketing really well. Or someone who can bring together analogies really well because it will be like going to a David Chang restaurant or buying Top Ramen. Right?
I mean, there's going to be a difference.
Ruthi Corcoran: I have quite a different answer than the one that you bring up, Dave. Although I think yours is an important one, which is it takes care of a lot of the tedium in the corporate world. I mean that alone is a cool factor. Another dimension to it is, right, computers have had a lot of potential for a long time. Like they've been part of our world, well, our entire lives. Most people, they've been part of their world, if you're living in the United States, for a good chunk of your life.
But it always required a ton of input and you alluded to this too, a little bit. Alex said, you know, you can get some really cool stuff back with an Excel formula, but you have to know how to use Excel. You have to be the techie who does it. And I think the key here is it does give something back to you all of a sudden.
You are not just doing voice-to-text for it to record what you're saying into your little notepad on the computer. Now all of a sudden you're writing something and it is giving you something back. That is a very new experience that we haven't really had with computers in such a streamlined way.
I can ask a question or I can put out a statement and all of a sudden I'm getting a response. That's pretty damn good. It's not perfect, you know, it certainly needs some editing or some fact-checking, but that's sort of a different way that we're interacting for the first time with computers. And that didn't strike me until you asked that question.
Alex Pokorny: That makes a lot of sense. I mean, that is something about each one of these kinds of new technologies. What becomes so fascinating about them is that it becomes more natural, basically. You're not typing in restaurant near me. Which is a really weird phrase. If you walk up to somebody and say, restaurant near me, they're going to stare at you.
“Hey, can you suggest some random restaurants around here that are open for lunch?” Somebody standing next to you can give you a response to that. That's a much more natural way to go about it, and if you're able to have an input like that versus, you know, typing out a weird phrase, then yeah, it clicks a little bit faster.
I guess that that's an element of it too that I wasn't thinking about. How natural is it? Or how [close] to the way people interact in the real world is it? Is it helping us get further into the real world?
Dave Dougherty: I was smiling when you were talking because it reminded me of one of my favorite standup, one-man show things by Colin Quinn. It's The History of New York. And he talks about how New Yorkers when they're asking for, when they see somebody eating something they want to try, it's just, “Hey, where'd you get that? Is it good?”
So we've gone from that in-person experience to “restaurant near me.”
Ruthi Corcoran: Yes. Yes.
Dave Dougherty: And actually, really what you bring up is kind of a perfect tease for what we end up talking about in episode three. So for anybody who's made it this far, stay tuned for that. Join us for that.
I don't know any, any final thoughts? Any recommendations from the week on fun things you might've seen, or…
Ruthi Corcoran: I've got one on this topic.
Alex Pokorny: I would just pitch to keep trying new stuff. Keep looking at this kind of news and try to keep up as much as you can. It's going to change rapidly. But there are so many different companies out there and so many different things that you're going to get a unique blend just by trying to keep up with it.
Ruthi Corcoran: And taking a bit of the opposite approach on that. If you're feeling a little angst, a little dread with how fast things are moving, I highly recommend some of the articles that Douglas Adams wrote as the personal computer and the internet were emerging because it's a similar phenomenon and some of the ways that we think about it can be similar. So we'll toss those in the show notes.
Alex Pokorny: That's a great suggestion.
Dave Dougherty: My recommendation. It actually popped up today when I was looking at LinkedIn, is the Lego Company marketing. It is just wonderful how not serious they take themselves. The question they posed on LinkedIn today was, “Batman Legos, do they only come in black or very, very dark gray?”
It's like, yes! I love that so much.
Alex Pokorny: I love that.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. So anyway, anybody out there, thank you for listening. Thank you for joining us. We will see you in the next episode of Enterprising Minds and have a great time experimenting with the new tools out there. Take care.
Ruthi Corcoran: Cheers.
