Episode 10 - Enterprise Crawling Tools
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Episode 10 - Enterprise Crawling Tools Podcast and Video Transcript
[This transcript has been lightly edited to ensure readability]
Episode 10 - Enterprise Crawling Tools
Dave Dougherty: Welcome to the latest episode. Dave here. Alex here. Ruthi is handling some family stuff, so you're stuck with the two of us this week. Alex, you had some good ideas for what you wanted this show to be about, so why don't you kick us off?
Alex Pokorny: Sure. So some of the topic ideas came from Ruthi, so some credit there. Basically, I had a couple of different types of questions. We'll kick off with the first one and we'll transition over to the next one as we get through it.
Enterprise crawling. So it's a pretty massive topic, and one any enterprise SEO will have to wrangle with. Is Screaming Frog not enough? That's usually the first question that comes to mind, right?
But a couple of things with that. One, what are the common issues that you have with crawling at an enterprise scale? And then the second one is when to move to an enterprise crawler.
I can give a quick opinion about it from at least the first one. But I would love to hear about the issues you've seen, the problems that you've encountered over different clients, and the like. And then as well as, what did you see from tools? Or what did you see that was a value that you really thought that this is something that resonated with the internal teams or the internal leaders, and what really got them interested in it?
Dave Dougherty: No, go, go. I'm still thinking...
Alex Pokorny: Some of the things that I've run into from the common issues with enterprise crawling is 1) really messy websites and that can be technical problems, flukes. Odd things that are just a part of the site. For instance, Hey, we've got a whole giant gallery of videos and they're just not crawled, or not crawlable or something like that and that's a main money maker or subscription model or something like that. And we're just losing that in our data. It just doesn't show up.
So then you have to figure out, Okay, how can I tweak things to basically make it work? And eventually, you're tweaking so much, it's taking a lot of time.
The other thing is enterprise crawler tools that are out there. They remind me a lot of Google Analytics. You click around, the data's there, the charts are there, and the graphics are easy to pull. The dashboards automatically email a lot of stuff integrated with it. It becomes almost a home for you given that it pulls in analytics data, pulls in Google search console data, pulls in all these other sources of data, and becomes this main piece that you use.
Versus Screaming Frog, while it has some API connections, it isn't that yet. It's still a lot of data, not too many charts. Right? And it takes a lot of processing yourself to turn it into something that's PowerPoint-friendly.
Some of the difficulties though, I definitely see as pricing. I mean, honestly, good god, the cost of some of those tools is just astounding. So, it's such a gap in the market that I see between, like we have Screaming Frog and then we have like Botify and there are a couple of other tools that are recently renamed themselves, but enterprise crawler tools.
And the cost difference is within a couple of hundred dollars to tens of thousands of dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars. This is where those next ones even start. There's this big gap in the middle that for $1500 you can't get anything. There isn't really a good middle ground. So you're either between scrappy and my gosh, that's a massive contract that's going to take us six, nine months to get my leadership on board to even fund the thing.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. There is that weird spot to your point of either the pricing is totally for enterprise, where they're adding a couple of points on the margin just because you can.
Alex Pokorny: Boat payments. Boat payments. Boat payments. You know, EU tax. Wait, what?
Dave Dougherty: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That being said, all of our friends in the tool companies we kid out of love. Because I don't begrudge that sales model.
But then, like the creator side too…Because you're caught between these weird things. On the one hand, you might have a really knowledgeable SEO that's also doing this creator side thing and wants to use the tools but doesn't have the money on their personal site. Or you have the creator side where it's like they're so focused on, or small business side even, I'm using those interchangeably. They're so focused on content creation. If they're focused on digital marketing at all, is it easier to buy a tool and start that as a capability? Or do you just outsource it, right?
Like, is it easier to find an SEO agency to outsource that activity? Because as we've talked about before, and I think this is true in a lot of enterprise organizations as well, Do I spend the money to have this capability in-house? Which requires people and startup time and, having somebody knowledgeable enough to bring everything together. Or do I just say, Hey we're pushing towards this priority, go to this agency to do the work? They can pay for this subscription and, and whatever else, right?
That middle ground is lacking, but it also, I think it's more of the strategic problem too, where it's like, either you're doing some things really, really well enough to get to the point where SEO becomes an optimization piece, right? I'm already going to take some stuff and polish it really well. Sure, sure.
Or you're developing the capability to the point where if you're at the enterprise level, Okay, now I have 70,000 SKUs across seven countries. Okay, now I need a team. You know? And that's a totally different thing, right? Because now you're talking multiple site maps and all that super hard technical stuff.
SEO Tools Reinforce Internal Company Narratives
Dave Dougherty: One other thought immediately jumped out of my mind and then maybe we can keep bouncing ideas off each other. The big thing for me with the crawler tools that I've had, experience with in the past is that the messaging that the crawler tool tends to reinforce is the internal narratives of the organization.
Alex Pokorny: Tell me more.
Dave Dougherty: So you talk about the weird structures. The weird structures are probably there because of the give and take of launching the platform or somebody didn't want to do the budget arguments to get that extra tool that would have solved that IA issue or the content gallery issue or whatever else. So you get those weird nuances because people only have so much emotional capacity for negotiating.
Alex Pokorny: It's fair. It's fair. Yeah.
Dave Dougherty: But crawling is inherently an internally focused piece. Because you have your marketers focusing on the data that is on your owned media platforms. And then at best, you are focused on the link-building piece of it, who's linking to me? How do I get more people to link to me? This is not audience-focused.
Alex Pokorny: Right, right. No, you're right.
Dave Dougherty: So while it is absolutely important to polish the experience that you have for the customers that you have, crawling and that whole section of SEO is not a part of that “growth marketing piece.”
Unless you do all of that polishing to make the experience better, you'll get marginal gains. But addressing a new audience, it doesn't necessarily help you there.
Now I know a lot of people will be like, Whoa, you have all the data and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But…
Alex Pokorny: But no, you've got a really good point there. So I've always seen technical SEO as being one of these things of if the page isn't crawlable and if the page doesn't load, who cares how nice the content is? Right?
But those are kind of like the table stakes level, and you're absolutely right that what it does is really gets into the minutia after that. So once you fix the, Oh my gosh, we put a no index across our entire site and told Google not to index us! Well, that's a problem. You should remove that.
Or you have broken pages all over the place. Well, yeah, obviously you need to fix that, but once you get past that, it does get down to that pretty quickly gets down to the minutia. It gets really stuck in the weeds of, right, we're not playing the 80/20 rule anymore. Instead, we're just looking at like this squeezing up the couple percent that we can't.
I think that is, might be a bit of a bold statement, but I always think that is true that technical SEO really when you're looking at organic traffic growth, after you fix those basic things, technical SEO gives you a single-digit increase in organic traffic, like an annual basis. You really want that double-digit, that triple-digit growth. You're looking at content. You're looking at building out something new on the site. You're looking at trying a new endeavor. You know, maybe a different business model even like, or a different subscription model or advertising methods, something like that that's really going to start bringing in a new set of customers. Maybe the new market segment, or something like that, will really change things up. But I really resonate. That's a really interesting thought, Dave and I really resonated with that because there's that same piece I've always had a problem with, like, rank tracking tools.
I think for the most part they're kind of BS because the problem that they start with is, What do you want to track? And that is a bad starting place because I've never seen a company not start with our own brand name, which of course we ranked for. We invented the word or the phrase of our own product names, which of course we ranked for.
I mean, it's like such a tiny little pinpoint of a flashlight in a giant dark room. And you're saying, I'm only going to focus on what the flashlight happens to be focused on right now. And I'm going to forget about the entire dark room that's full of scary monsters because it's too much. I'm just going to focus on what I can see in it. It looks nice so that looks good.
That's not helpful and that's not good for marketers to get focused and so stuck on. Oh my gosh. Our average ranking dropped by an average position of one or something on this particular keyword.
It's like, okay, but how many sales did you get? How many conversions did you get? How many website signups, webinar signups, and email signs did you get? We're not tracking those. We're not thinking about those. Well, then it doesn't matter. I mean, your rank tracking doesn't matter at all. You have to get to that next level.
And I think you make a really good point about the backlinks. Especially when we start talking about competitor sets because that's another thing that most crawler tools do, you're just focused on your site. You're not crawling your competitors and it's not giving you a summary of the changes of what Honeywell did or GE did this last week, or what Target or Walmart or Amazon did this last week and then says, Hey, by the way, they're trying something new. Here's an early look before it hits you.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. And this is one of the problems I think, with crawling. Well, okay, so a couple of thoughts. These are disjointed, but I swear they'll come together.
Alex Pokorny: Okay. I'm patient.
Dave Dougherty: You know, you talk about the pricing model. You will not be able to convince your bosses, your managers, your whatever to pay the money to crawl your competitor sites, right? Even though it is public data to have a reoccurring crawl, it's expensive. It's super expensive. So that's just not feasible unless you're going to do the one-off research study. Right?
Alex Pokorny: And again, you're talking at that enterprise-scale when they probably have a large catalog, like a Walmart at Amazon. But the cost is really, really high.
Dave Dougherty: So that's just, that's just a non-starter, so you have to go in there. Secondly, at least my mind immediately goes to anybody who's in-house. Right. And as much as I love our agency friends, one of the reasons that I went in-house was to get the technical SEO expertise because it became clear that none of my clients were going to give me access to the backend and the systems that you need for the crawling and technical SEO.
So to be able to have that experience and to go in and say, Hey, let's test out this more technical side. You have to go in-house for that. Just because of the proprietary data and different tools and whatever else. You don't want a lot of that getting out.
So, that's where in my mind, if you're going to sell crawling as a capability or as a tool set, I think the, the crawling piece of it, to your point with the webinars, crawling in that instance could be a really good case for conversion rate optimization, because if you, if you're bringing in Okay, the page loads at two seconds, and if we get it to one second we'll increase the thing there because we're reducing the friction for the decision making. and if you are at that level of conversation within your organization, hats off to you because so many people are struggling to get to that point no matter what.
In regards to reinforcing the internal marketing piece of it, if you are able to have, a crawling tool and talk to the businesses, the problem with the crawling data is when you go to the business and they say, Okay, here's the priority portfolio, here's what we want to do within this particular thing. Then you come back at them with, Well, I decreased 40,000 server errors. They're going to be like, No, this is a marketing meeting. This isn't IT.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah, yeah. It does make a good sound bite, but you got a good point that the things that they're really focused on, the big numbers on the wall are not server errors. It's sign-ups, MQLs, or something like that.
Dave Dougherty: Right. And as SEOs, you have to go, you have to straddle that line, right? Between the IT stakeholders and the marketing stakeholders. especially in the older, traditional ones where there are still separate things. If you have a CMO who's also a CTO, that's a pretty good organization to be in.
But if they're still separate, then you're going to have those conversations and you're going to have to code-switch between the two of them because you're going to have to talk a very different game to both of them.
Alex Pokorny: That's true. That's definitely true. I always think there are tool gaps, always. I mean, I talk about tools pretty frequently, but I've seen a lot of them get created. I've tried to make my own even. I've packed together some using Google Data Studio plus Screaming Frog data and plus other tools or something like that.
I've hired developers to create ones for myself, different endeavors, basically down that line and I think there are always gaps. Because an SEO has a toolset, there's never really a complete all-in-one SEO tool. And that's usually the problem you need to take this knowledge from tool one and get into tool two to tool three and combine it together. And then you really have something that's actionable, right?
And if you are just piecemealing it out, I mean, you can look at a number three different ways and say, well, it's not high enough, it's not low enough. Maybe it's steady enough. I mean, you can always pick apart any tool, any data point, and make an action item out of it. But it's not the ones that matter.
So I always think that's partially just the SEO job but I think there's also always gaps between those different ones too because, are you targeting the right terms? Are you going after the right entities? Are you talking about the right sites? Are you trying for things that honestly the only people ever searching for it are looking at images And that has nothing to do with your products? So you're throwing up blog posts and really, Give it a quick search and you'll start to realize that you have the wrong format of content. And there are tools that don't even tell you that piece. And then you start going down the wrong rabbit hole basically.
Yeah, there are gaps all over. I don't know, I guess I really haven't seen, I've seen a lot of development and I've seen a lot of acquisitions, especially in recent years. So I'm definitely optimistic that these tools are going to really show a lot of value to different teams. And you're right, with the CMO/CTO piece of, depending on the organization, they're going to be interested in this data set or this data set, you know.
It could be they really want to know what's the seasonality that nobody ever talked about in our business. Because we're able to see that through Google Search console data saying that or just keyword data, basic monthly volumes. And say we've got a seasonality peak that always comes in spring. Don't know if you guys are aware of that. But maybe we should try to branch out a little bit.
Yeah. There's, there are gaps there, but I think the tools are really coming pretty fast, and as they start to combine together and people have that more holistic view, then it will get interesting.
If you're okay with transitioning? I got another holistic view question for you after this.
Dave Dougherty: All right.
Alex Pokorny: Go for it.
Opportunities for Enterprise Crawler Tools
Dave Dougherty: Well just a thought came to mind while you were talking. You know, the difference between what I've seen thus far and those companies that are specifically targeting the enterprise market segment don't have to worry so much about is integration.
They integrate with the big things, like “We export to Excel. Yay!” That should just be a thing. No matter what tool you're building. Or “We pull in data from Search Console.” Great. Because that's 95% of the internet. Right?
Where I think there's a lot of opportunity within the enterprise segment of the market is the integrations that the smaller companies are going after. Or the tools that are targeting the smaller businesses or the agencies that have to deal with a ton of different tools. Being able to have that workflow between all of the different apps would be outstanding.
Now. It is a really hard problem to solve. It's okay if we're going to go after this particular enterprise segment. What are the tools that everybody's using? You can make some estimations on a lot of it, but if you look at the MarTech stack…What's that organization? What's the Scott Brinker's organization that always releases the…
Alex Pokorny: The MarTech map? Yeah.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah, yeah. I mean, that is a ridiculous map every year of just how many apps and tools there are. You know, so it would be tough to choose a chunk of them to then say, Okay, this is what we're going to play with.
But, the capabilities that you can get even as an individual, like offline I was talking about how getting my to-do list app to talk to my calendar app to then automatically update each other so that I can track progress on my projects and my content calendar and everything else is outstanding. Because otherwise, it's 15 minutes here, 15 minutes there. Being able to get that level of integration at scale is definitely that big gap, at least in my mind.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah, I kind of see that as different workflows, like the small business and the creator aspect. I think the only thing useful out of Screaming Frog would be basically like an insights tab saying like, I don't have time for this.
I'm supposed to do five other jobs and wear 10 other hats, give me the top five things I need to care about. And after that, honestly, I don't have time for it. I don't care about the alt tags that much unless I'm at work, because that really matters, towards that usage. Just give me the top things like is one of my pages broken? Just tell me that.
And then from an agency standpoint, you're more technically minded, so you want more of the details, but you're right with the workflow aspect, it gets really complex. Where you have multiple tools, you're trying to pull it all together. Honestly, there's always a presentation like breathing down your neck that you're trying to pull together and scramble for. But you're also trying to quickly get the insights you need for this client versus this client. And quickly remember, Okay, my 26 clients, what does this guy have a problem with again? Oh yeah, this one. Or what was the major issue with this site again? And yet this one.
And then you have a really good point that at an enterprise level, you start to have those full-timers who are focused on very narrow aspects in comparison to those other ones. And you have the small business owner who has 10 different hats. And enterprise, one of those is split into five different people's jobs. They really start to get into those, those fine details, which those enterprise tools, you're right kind of go after that right now, so. It fits.
Dave Dougherty: Well, I've said transitioning from the agency side and the small business side into the in-house enterprise side, my biggest takeaway, especially as somebody who has a background in content marketing and making those recommendations, across the spectrum. You know, if you are tackling or if you're using the BERT model for or the, or the EEAT sorry. I'll hand in my SEO card here…
Alex Pokorny: Yeah, they recently added another letter. So now the E-EAT, the EEAT.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. So if you, let's just assume that that is how the world works as a digital marketer. Okay, angry comments aside here flooding in, as people are listening to this, the biggest thing that I realized was that the expertise piece and the trust of the expertise within the model are huge.
Like going from a small to a medium-sized business consultant where it's like you need to be seen as the expert in your field. The way that we do this is bah-be-dah-dah-dah. That was a whole year-long initiative. Maybe two years if you really wanted to do it well, like you had to be all in on being seen as the expert.
Whereas going into the enterprise side, it's like, Wow, I can get away with a lot of sins and still do amazingly well. Just because of the authority of the domain and how many sites are linking to it. And the fact that we've been around forever and ever and a day.
You have to catch yourself going, Wait, am I about to be a lazy marketer and just launch something that I know is not awesome, but I know it will rank well? Yeah, I probably am.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah. It can encourage that complacency. It definitely can.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. But I mean, depending on the industry you're in though you're going to have to fight for it and the market that you're going in. I mean that health and wealth piece of it, you're going to have to do everything really, really well and you can't necessarily afford some screwups, just because of the importance of getting factually correct content out there and having that reputation.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah. Actually taking it back to the old school, like the white hat versus the gray-black side of it where I would see those best translated really. Any kind of financial terms of are you day trading, which is your black hat because you're burning domains daily or hourly or immediately.
Or are you doing long-term investments, which is slow, it's steady, but you also don't want to rock the boat too much. And that's when it gets to the enterprise scale. You're absolutely purely stuck in the white hat world of we have to do everything by the book because we can't screw this up. And if we screw this up, it's a big deal. But yeah, it's a slow path.
Dave Dougherty: And that analogy is a really good one because whenever you're in a presentation and you see all of that data, to your point with the keyword tracking, the first thing you have to do is couch it by saying, Okay, this end of the graph is daily information for the last three weeks. And then this side of the graph is.... and it's already too hard.
Because like, here are the trend lines, and then here's the day trading. And you're like, No, just give me the average data so that we can talk about Hey, I'm, I'm hitting my percentage let me keep my job kind of a thing. I mean you have to talk about the long-term trends because especially with the way tastes are changing as quickly as they are. Like you stand for something and you just follow that path.
That was one of the things when I was doing crisis communications, back in the day. It takes years to build a reputation and it takes one thing to completely destroy it. You know, like instantly. So those are considerations.
Even on the technical side, you might not have to deal with the angry mob that's tweeting at you, if you're on the technical side. But, you're part of the problem, you know?
Search Marketing & Airbnb’s Marketing Mix
Alex Pokorny: I got a little bit of a hot take, but I'm curious about your opinion on this just to spice it up just a little bit. So Airbnb is massive in their market of vacation rentals. There's, even now, small companies are basically starting to buy up properties, just to put them on rentals for Airbnb.
There really isn't a good second player in the market. There's Vrbo in the US market. There are a couple of others, especially once you get into Europe, but Airbnb is pretty much a mammoth currently.
They cut their performance marketing team, basically all of it, and they talked about it on an earnings call. Then they cut the team and then they continue to say, this was a great move for us because we used to be spending millions and now we're not. We've been able to smack it down like crazy in terms of our marketing cost. Instead, we're just going to keep our brand advertising up. You'll still see some paid search ads with that, but we're going to cut all performance.
And my thought with that is you are hanging too much of a hat on the brand, which is that crisis communication of your experience there. That's the thing that smacks me around is just like you are one mistake away from just tanking a brand. I mean, for those who don't know of Airbnb or those who are looking to make some extra money because they're in that market, or those who are wondering how they can make use of the second home that they have because they're in that market, you have still some performance marketing options. But you have that brand mistake and you've now killed the brand side of things. Thanks.
But what's your take on that? I think my point is that I think Airbnb is in a very unique situation where that worked out well for them. But I would say the vast majority of companies out there, that would be a terrible idea.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. Well, because brand is really only, you're only as good as your last project, right? I mean, that's the thing with that, however…
Alex Pokorny: The latest scandal…
Dave Dougherty: Man, this is where having Ruthi really balances us out. because she's going to listen to this and just be like, Why are you so dark?
Alex Pokorny: …Pessimistic about brands? Do you think there's always going to be a problem? Yeah. Overall, yeah.
Dave Dougherty: Well, are human beings running the company then? Yes. Yeah.
Alex Pokorny: Man, if we started talking about Ole Musky. I mean, it's, it's going to change.
Dave Dougherty: No, thanks. I need to keep nice things on this show.
So specifically the Airbnb piece, this is where as SEOs or as marketers, you absolutely have to pay attention to what the financial people are doing and what the CEOs are doing within the financial markets. Because at that point your boss really is the shareholders and what the market feels about you.
And I know having gone to any number of conferences where you hear the side conversations or the presenters and as marketers talking to marketing, and that's fine, up to a point. Right. But the results are for who?
I don't want to get into the pros and cons of private versus public on this particular show. I have some thoughts though.
Alex Pokorny: Basically you're saying is to better fit toward the market or to the shareholders that's a fine decision. Basically, because that's what the shareholders want.
Dave Dougherty: I wouldn't put it that simply. No. So the nuance about this, I think Rand Fishkin had a fantastic presentation on, shareholders and SEO and why ads always get all the budget versus SEO. I'll try to find a public link and, put in the show notes here.
But essentially, and I’m paraphrasing, it is easier to set a duffle bag of cash on fire with ads and say, you gave me $10,000, I brought you back $12,000. Because then the shareholders will be able to say, yeah, they're growing. They brought in X number of percent into the margin and cash flow is going on, and blah, blah, blah.
Whereas if you're talking about enterprise crawling, now you're talking about plumbing and nobody cares about plumbing until there's a backup and you're sitting there going, “Crap, crap, crap, crap!”
Alex Pokorny: Yeah. That's generally true. Same thing with enterprise SEO. Not until everything's tanking and why are we wiped off the face of Google and my gosh, everything's on fire.
Dave Dougherty: I did a search and we didn't show up on the first page.
Alex Pokorny: Oh my gosh. Or the CEO Googled us while he was on vacation and we didn't show up for X term Y.
Dave Dougherty: Exactly. Yeah. X or Y priority every…yeah. Yeah. Let's not go into that PTSD bag….
I think depends if you were to, and I haven't done this, but it might be an interesting experiment. If you go into the shareholder meeting notes or the quarterly reports, what are the higher-ups saying about the Airbnb piece?
Are they saying that we've grown the company to a high enough point that we don't need to differentiate ourselves enough or as much as we used to?
Alex Pokorny: Sure. What was the reasoning behind it?
Dave Dougherty: Because we brought ourselves to this. We're in a dominant position in the market, so we don't necessarily need to focus on growth as much as we did.
We need to focus on positioning and retention essentially. Like I've experiences with Vrbo and is it all together better than Airbnb? No. I think my biggest pain point between the two of them is the user experience in the apps. I tend to like how one categorizes things and presents collections better than the other. But for a single user that's not enough for them to change.
Alex Pokorny: Plus it's an experiential product. Where the need for, what kind of accommodation you're looking for, depending on the type of location you're in. If you're at a beach house, and my gosh, it was so easy to come in off the beach and have to get rid of all the sand and stuff. Is there an outdoor shower or something?
And that was super convenient too. Or they had a grill, which was amazing that one night when we all bought some stuff from the local grocery store and grilled it. It was so nice. Or that condo in downtown X Country or X City was so convenient with their underground parking, which is impossible to find parking in that particular city.
I mean, it's very, it's very experiential to the point where, I mean, it really gets into exactly how you felt about that experience at that time with that usage. You know, that mentality. Where you stressed out that entire vacation while it was a horrible vacation, and everything about it becomes kind of tainted, you know?
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. I have a family with little kids of course there was stress on the vacation. That's just…
Alex Pokorny: I heard the phrase that if it'ss with your kids, it's not a vacation.
Dave Dougherty: That's right. Yeah.
Alex Pokorny: It's a trip. It's not a vacation. If it's without your kids, then it's a vacation.
Dave Dougherty: God forbid it's with the in-laws.
Alex Pokorny: That's called an intervention. That's a little different.
Dave Dougherty: I think of my experience this last summer when we went to San Diego. We did a trip, and it was a fantastic trip. Would I hold, the platform responsible for anything that happened? No, because I'm immediately thinking this is somebody's house. This is somebody else's property.
The host was, luckily, the host was awesome. And when we ran into an issue, because trying to fit a Toyota 4runner into a tiny garage, that's a unique issue to the area. And things happen, but we were able to work it out. The host was great.
I like to think we're reasonable people but that's for other people to say about us. But I do think when you look at, especially a lot of these startups that are starting to get I mean, they're teenagers, right? I mean, they're starting to grow beards. Some of them are going to be at the dominant position within the market, and then the priorities will have to change in order to keep things and the shareholders happy. And that's just part of the natural life cycle of any organization.
We got so caught up in the narrative of growth and small startups need to just grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. Unicorns, unicorns, unicorns. Well at some point is that a unicorn or is that a horse with a party hat?
Alex Pokorny: Yeah, I was about to say, speaking of Rand Fishkin. I would really recommend his book. Lost and Founder. Because that talked and included some of the blog posts that he had on his departure out of Moz, into Spark Toro.
Between there, you can see the two different blogs and the post and the various kind of almost counter posts that go on in Moz as well. But really talked a lot about the growth stage, that plateauing stage, and are the right people right for that company at those certain points in time.
You know, when does that leadership change have to happen and how much of a hangover does it happen basically when they hang on too long and you get that a hangover effect? And then those different issues that pop up during those times. But you're right, again that narrative changes as those businesses mature past the 10-year mark, past the 15-year mark.
I mean, competition pops up as well because they were the disruptor originally, but then Uber messed up with their PR scandals, and then Lyft was able to get a boost and Lyft was, yeah second in the market and Uber was the one hitting against all the legal challenges. They broke ground, Lyft got to walk in, and yes, I would say Lyft also had a lot of challenges as well. I mean, both of them are in a difficult spot, a difficult market, and now a very competitive market as well.
But things have to change and the models have to change and the marketing behind it has to change along with it.
Dave Dougherty: Right, because you know, the model with Airbnb and that whole concept was a new concept, right? Because growing up, what are you told? Don't talk to strangers. Don't mess with strangers' things, and now all of a sudden it's go spend a week in a stranger's house.
Alex Pokorny: Yep. Or never get into a stranger's car unless you had an app open and you asked for that vehicle and then you could get into a stranger's car.
That's fine.
Dave Dougherty: Exactly. Yeah. And so, they had to not only get people willing to put up their house or vacation house or whatever else as a potential property. They also have to get people interested in doing that and going into that. So now that's become a very familiar thing to a large segment of the population.
Well, now they don't have to advertise so much. You don't have to convince people to be comfortable with this proposition anymore. Because the biggest thing with those platforms is that they don't own anything. They don't own the products that they're selling.
So if they all of a sudden started having their own properties, well then how are they going to go fight against the hotels that are saying, wait a second, why are they not regulated under the same things as we are?
Well, essentially, I mean, you're providing the same service, but you're doing it in the same way, but the regulations haven't caught up the same way…
Alex Pokorny: I mean, that's always the case, especially with the regulations. There's, I always had this analogy whenever I think of going back to the thing that owes a political statement that turned into a meme about the internet is a series of tubes, or is the internet a series of pipes?
Depending on your actual recollection of the, the true quote, was always that the laws are looking at each other like we're throwing rocks at each other, but really we're like shooting lasers from space. It's like it's always this gigantic lag time, right? We finally get to this regulation point, but it probably is around that same timeframe where you're talking 10, 15 years in when you're starting to see federal laws come in, which are affecting not just local cities banning Uber or local states trying to fight against Airbnb or something like that if there wasn't that sort of a case. But instead, you start to see that national-level attention that usually comes in around that time.
Dave Dougherty: Right. And to your point, we've seen a number of businesses that I mean, they looked at the existing laws and essentially said, you know what, we're just going to go ahead and break those. And that'll just be the tax of doing business and…
Alex Pokorny: Man, electric scooters.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. We're just going to earmark a portion of our annual budget to deal with these fines, but eventually, we'll get critical mass. You know, that's the belief.
Alex Pokorny: And the public will want it. Yeah. I just think about that with like the Lime scooters. Electric scooters that used to basically be literally dumped off from the back of like a pickup truck all over a city. And cities are like you're littering.
Where local users are making use of it, but then other people are stepping around them and wondering, like, what the heck is with all these things laying around all over the place? Or Uber coming into cities that haven't allowed them quite yet.
Dave Dougherty: And the trade-offs of parking in the city versus the rows of bikes for rent, right?
Alex Pokorny: And now cities are behind that where they have their own. Yeah. I think actually one of the next ones, just one little point on that, it was the last time I was looking at a vacation. I got a lot of ads for park sharing and it was, instead of doing Hertz rental or whatever, the major rental companies that even have a nice little shuttle bus straight from the airport where you have somebody instead locally drop off the car at the airport or you take a Uber or cab to their place and then you pick up their car.
For a period of time, it was way cheaper. I didn't do it because I wasn't comfortable with it yet, which I think it's going to be that next stage of it's fine to use someone else's house, it's fine to use someone else's car. But, I'm nervous about driving a friend's car.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah, there is that question of liability, right? Because if you're borrowing a friend's car and you get into an accident, you know what I mean? There's sort of that there's a more familiar insurance process. Yeah. yeah. Yeah. But again, it goes back to the need, right?
Like when, I remember when the first wave of covid broke and then all of a sudden everybody's like, Screw it, I'm traveling, I'm getting out of the house. You know, you saw all these people going to Hawaii and then there were no cars available in Hawaii and you can't just ship more cars to Hawaii in a decent amount of time. So at that point, it is okay, let's take advantage of the blip in the market right now.
But to that point, the problem, my problem with the Airbnbs and the renting other people's stuff is at what point do they not have what they need to go with their day?
If you don't have a car and you don't have a house, because now, you're going back to your friend's house to sleep on the couch so you can make some money to pay for the rent…At what point do you just need more money?
Alex Pokorny: There's the thing about Ecolab, who makes a lot of soap products and hotel detergents as well as laundry detergents and stuff like that.
They were getting a lot of random phone calls from not hotel chains, but individuals because they were having problems with things like lice and other issues that hotels deal with on a daily basis and are used to dealing with. But now these are Airbnb hosts, who never realized that now they have an infestation or a problem and what do they do about it?
So they called the manufacturer and the manufacturers like, Who on earth are you? Why are you calling us? Yeah. We're used to dealing with that market segment. So it opened up, I'm sure a new market for them if they were able to take advantage of it.
But it also becomes that line of. Also when it gets to the point of once we reach a certain level of maturity, you're starting to see that with small businesses who are buying up a number of vacation properties than just using them purely as Airbnb or people seeing it as a second source of income and building properties long-term investment there that starts to change.
Search Engine Optimization and Mergers and Acquisitions
Dave Dougherty: Well, to jump in with a thought, to the first topic of our conversation with the enterprise crawling piece. Yeah. You know, one of the things that I think is underutilized with the crawling piece is M&A. I don't think marketers are involved enough with M&A, to be honest.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah, a hundred percent agree.
Dave Dougherty: Especially with the larger companies where it's largely seen as either a portfolio extension, you're buying the capabilities, or that you get the acqua-hire thing instead of looking at digital portfolios, right?
I think there's a lot of the opportunity there if you are looking to vet some companies and maybe making the pitch of hey, you know what, if we're going to go look at this potential thing, or this potential site, or this blogger who's got the audience that we want to address and crawling those potential targets to see as you transition those assets to your organization what headaches are you going to have.
I mean, being a part of some of those things before, having a tool that you can leverage to look into and say, Ooh, okay, this is actually being hosted on some third party thing and you know, do we have the necessary contracts to migrate this over? Or God forbid you didn't negotiate things properly and you don't have access to that IP even though it's part of that company you purchased.
Alex Pokorny: Like IP address, not intellectual property, but Yeah.
Dave Dougherty: Oh, both.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah. Oh sure.
Dave Dougherty: That's the thing. You have to remember what the contracts were negotiated and God forbid somebody wasn't reading everything.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah. I think that's largely, I mean, I know you've had more experience with it than I have where you're dealing with a post-acquisition of even very large brands buying other very large brands and trying to intake that company. I've been a part of some of those in some ways, but never as close as you were.
Yeah, I see that consistently as largely missing as whenever you're seeing it or hearing it from the IT side or from the marketing side, they're always going to be left in the dark and it's like an afterthought that we will sign the paperwork, we'll buy the rights, we'll buy the financial aspect of it. You know, we're looking at those levels, but we're not looking at what's the cost of transitioning this business into ours? How are we unearth, are actually going to combine these two brands together? Right. Like, that seems to be a pretty major question that just seems to be missed. Like, I get it that the books look great, but my gosh, do the brands make any sense or do the product portfolios make any sense, like to the customer base?
I was a part of a reverse acquisition once, which was, it happened pretty quickly, and then a whole bunch of layoffs. It financially looked like a fantastic deal. Tax savings. A lot of things basically with the reverse acquisition you kind of get that hope that you have that, but my gosh, the product lines did not line up and the customer set did not line up.
And the brands, therefore, even though were technically in the same industry category, they were not really sister brands close enough to really be purchasing one another and trying to integrate with a smooth fashion. It was, it was a disaster.
I mean, teams got laid off. People left. Champions left. That's the reason I left the company basically shortly after.
Dave Dougherty: The statistics on acquisitions are not good. Yet it's an easy way to communicate growth. Right? Oh I mean, talking about the business life cycle piece, right? You want to talk about organic growth you either buy it or build it, right? So what's going to be easier?
When you talk about the huge brands buying another huge brand and trying to build those in, you go and you look at what are the case studies for website migrations, right? Because especially coming up in the SEO space, those are always the favorite case studies because you always see the crash and burn examples. The “Everything was de-indexed because we hit the wrong button!”
You know, whatever that was one site, one product line, one whatever. Now let's talk about one brand with a hundred thousand SKUs and 20 languages and 18 main websites or whatever it is. And then now you can't screw up any of them. Go.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah. I always think of the acquisition strategy like the old medieval slash-barbarian method of growth. Like, we don't have enough money to pay for our own food, for our own people. We should probably just take over our neighbor because I hear they have money and oh wait, now we have two places that we need to feed. Take over the third! Take over the third. I think they have money!
It's like, my gosh that's going to eventually catch up with you and crash and burn. Yeah. It looks fantastic at the beginning and yes, you seem to be the winner of the battles, but man, you're going to get bitten in the butt. You always know it. History is going to come after you at some point. I mean, it's yeah. That generation might do okay. Especially medieval generations after that very 20 year, like five year, oh wait, two year period. Yeah, no, it, it, it's all over.
I mean, it just crashes and burns like giant empires doing the same thing. Giant collaboration companies seem to somehow get that same mentality that we can buy it and that we don't have to build it, but you always have to buy it. And then you have to build that into your company. You end up doing both costs in some way.
Maybe you took them out of the market, maybe you're able to capture some of their customers because some will leave. But you still have those costs. I mean, those costs still pick up. And I think that again, gets largely missed where you get this one-time acquisition, but it's not a one-time acquisition. It's acquisition. And then cost. And cost and cost. As you rebuild their imagery, you buy the rights to their whatever their copyrighted images and videos, and you start to realize that, my gosh, they've got 20 subdomains that nobody even knew about. And what are we going to do with those? And the cost of those meetings even is expensive. There's always a cost.
Dave Dougherty: Although, it is a necessary thing, right? I mean, that's a necessary part of business and it's going to…
Alex Pokorny: It is at some point.
Dave Dougherty: You're not going to stop doing that. You know, especially when we talk about the tool stack. I mean, yeah, that's kind of the perfect case study.
You know, at the bottom, you're going to have all this churn, you're going to have all of these companies, you're starting, failing, selling out, selling, and whatever else, right? Partnering. It's an interesting piece to watch, but again, what are you focusing on and what are you trying to do? I've even said this even as an SEO or a content marketer, when you come to me for a strategy, with questions about a strategy, I'm just as likely to tell you not to do the tactics associated with my job as I am to use the ones. What's going to be the best-case scenario for you, given the goals and whatever else you're trying to accomplish?
Alex Pokorny: Absolutely.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. I mean, that's my thing with ads. I mean, ads are a necessary thing. They can do some wonderful things for an organization, but once you get that lazy, the lazy marketer, or the, oh, we're just going to let the robots do all of the bidding and all of the ad copy and all of the everything.
Alex Pokorny: Oh my gosh. Yeah.
Dave Dougherty: You know what? Just light that table of cash on fire. Go ahead. Just do it.
Alex Pokorny: You know, every single account I've ever taken over, I've been able to improve upon. And I don't think it's because I'm some rockstar paid search, display advertising advertiser. I don't think that's the case. I think I'm probably pretty okay at it.
What I end up seeing over and over again is just that same laziness and it's really easy to do better than somebody who didn't care at all. It's like, yeah, I improved, which means I didn't bid on things that made absolutely no sense and I improved the keywords, which were my gosh, broad match everything. Really? Really? We're going to broad-match everything?
Dave Dougherty: Well, that's kind of how I feel and maybe we'll do a, a full episode on this next statement. but in typical Dave Fashion, I'm going to throw a bomb at the very last piece of it.
Alex Pokorny: Love it. Go for it.
Dave Dougherty: The broad match piece, that, that is exactly how I feel most people are going to use generative ai. As much as people are saying, don't do it leverage it to do the nice things.
Now, I mean, you're talking human nature here. What you're going to do is you're going to take the broad match keywords and the topic clusters, and you're going to throw everything against the wall with the AI to see what sticks so that maybe you can rank for a while on the topic, while you figure out what resonates with your audience, because god forbid you actually talk to your audience and understand what they need. Because it's just easier to produce content and say, look, I did a thing.
So I think that that deserves probably an episode.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah, Dude, I have a lot of thoughts on that. Oh my gosh. Yeah, because you're right because that is human nature. You are always looking for the get rich quick, the shortcut. My gosh, where's that easy button? Bring that into my life somehow.
And that actually might spur content marketing as like this lauded expertise, because you're finally able to break past the baseline. The baseline will be this AI written copy, which will be generic, and dated it's based on training data, so it's going to be you know what it is.
But then you'll finally be able to say content marketing has this new holy grail, which is to get above the baseline, get above the AI content, and or revisit a site and rehash their content because my gosh, it's a mess of somebody just doing keyword generation based. AI blog post built and knowledge that's not going to be fantastic.
Dave Dougherty: And we know this because we've been through enough SEO and content cycles to know that the hot new thing will go up, people will do it, and then there'll be some kind of tweak and then it'll crash and burn. And then what stays is all of the baseline, do the right thing, send the right information, all that kind of stuff.
The fundamentals of marketing and addressing an audience will stay the same and they will continue to work. But it's hard. And I think strategically too, I mean with a lot of this technology and a lot of this stuff coming up here, it increases the importance of the brands to stand for something.
It's not going to be good enough for the big organizations or the medium organizations to be like, look, we're just a business. I don't care about these social issues. We just want to sell you a die-cast.
Alex Pokorny: You know, that's going to be another episode. I'm just, I swear, the movement of, ESG, it's played through the market, but also in relation to that EEAT now.
With the expertise, the authority, the trustworthiness, but also the experience means that new E of how are we talking to our customers, in what way and what fashion, are we doing it in a way that attracts them beyond the idea that yes, we make Product X.
Dave Dougherty: Well, and to the point of the conversations we've had even before we decided to start recording our conversations for this podcast.
Who are we talking to? Why do you go to a particular content creator or content platform? It's because you might be sharing the same information, as somebody else, but it's the way in which you engage with it. It's the way in which you present it, that that actually resonates with people and that's why people stay. You might come for the information, but you stay because of how it resonates.
This Week’s Recommendations
Dave Dougherty: So in classic form, I do have to jump to something else. Yes. But in the last, in the last couple of minutes here, let's try the newish format and recommend something.
So what in the last week has caught your eye that you want to say is, something fun people should look into?
Alex Pokorny: You know, it's going to be stuck around ChatGPT, so sorry. But, what I'd actually be pushing is a podcast that you turned me onto This Old Marketing, and some of their episodes. Basically, look at some of the descriptions whenever they start calling about basically ChatGPT.
They've got some really good insights into basically how they feel about it and how it can be basically used, especially in a content way where it can fit into marketing.
And then recommending a second podcast. Because why not two, is called Making It, David Picciuto. And basically, I'm blanking on the two other guys who actually probably have far larger YouTube followings, but David Picciuto in particular, just because he brings up an excellent point talking about the use of AI-generated models and ideas and how it basically fits into creating physical goods, and all three of them are makers. They make items, they make things. They have YouTube followings and channels about it where they see that line and where they see when is it stealing, when is it being inspired by and when is it scrolling through Pinterest the same as basically getting inspiration off of that.
It's a really different way to look at it, and I think it's a fantastic way for a marketer to really start to wrap your head around how AI can really affect us.
What about you, Dave?
Dave Dougherty: Interesting. You talked about MarTech and you know, how you and I love to just play around and, and try new things. I've been recently blown away by the tool called Descript, and I know I'm kind of late to the game with that. But if you are challenged to do more with less, I would highly recommend looking into that and you know, no affiliation with them at the time of this recording.
So purely because I've played around with it and found it interesting.
Alex Pokorny: Can you give a quick summary of what it does?
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. So it's an audio-video editor that also does the transcription. Fairly well. I've always gotten burned with the transcript claims by a lot of these MarTech companies so far. They're just never quite as good as they say, they would be.
But this is actually, this is probably the best that I've seen thus far. It also has a lot of useful tools for repurposing your original content into other formats so that you can easily take one thing and then have the YouTube shorts version, TikTok version, or Instagram, like different content types and capturing quotes. It just makes it a lot easier than having to do that linear editing.
And then just, I don't know what compelled me, but I recently rewatched some old films and just as a general PSA: don't forget about the old, good films like Godfather or, Dirty Harry, just as a fun, gratuitous action film, you know?
Yeah, so that would be my recommendation, even with all the fun new stuff, don't forget about some of the old classics and revisit those as to why they're awesome. Even if they are awesome for their time.
So, yeah, that's it for us this week. Thanks for hanging around, like, subscribe, share, and let us know any episode ideas, comments, or questions.
Anything overly negative, keep to yourself because the internet doesn't need any more negativity. But we'll take any feedback and welcome it for sure because you know, we enjoy these conversations and definitely want to find out what everybody else is thinking too because these are definitely things we're throwing around and mulling the questions on.
So, thank you, and see you in the next episode. Take care.
