Episode 7 - Is SEO a Luxury Good?
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[This transcript has been lightly edited to ensure readability]
Dave Dougherty: All right. Welcome to the latest episode of Enterprising Minds. I'm Dave. Ruthi and Alex are both here. We are going to bring three topics and talk like we normally would.
Surprise Segment: Did Alex Have That Job?!
Dave Dougherty: However, I do have a surprise segment based on one of our last episodes. And I'm thinking out loud, so this will be a fun experiment here.
Ruthi and I are going to play, Did Alex Have That Job?! And so we're going to throw out a couple of titles and if we got the one. Alex, if you're comfortable sharing, you can tell us about that job. If we don't get it, you can choose whether or not to name one or let us keep guessing until we get it. Alright?
Alex Pokorny: All right.
Dave Dougherty: Sound good?
Alex Pokorny: Sounds like fun.
Dave Dougherty: Okay. Ruthi, why don't you throw out the first guess.
Ruthi Corcoran: Airline marketer?
Alex Pokorny: Yes. Accurate. Did airline marketing at one point.
Dave Dougherty: Okay. Um, donkey trainer?
Alex Pokorny: No. Um, volunteered at a horse rescue, which turned out to be Wild Animal Rescue as well. Ended up being llamas, alpacas, Nigerian dwarf goats, and smaller stuff like that. So volunteer.
Ruthi Corcoran: I love how close that is. And I also love that I've never heard about this experience before.
Alex Pokorny: Turns out llamas or alpacas I maybe both. Maybe one of them. They hum like a really high pitch, warbling hum when they're happy. And weirdly, apparently, I make llamas happy. I was just like showing up and I started making his noise and I was like, that's alarming. Like, you know, they're also tall and large and I'm like, OK, ok is it angry?
They’re like, No, it really likes you.
I'm like, Cool.
Dave Dougherty: So that's not an alarm system?
Alex Pokorny: That's, it. Seems like it would be. Seems like it should be.
And Nigerian dwarf goats. Yeah, it's super tiny. Apparently, there was a couple who lived on Lake Minnetonka and walked them around the lake. Like on a leash and then they lived in a pen that was basically underneath their deck.
But they ended up having to move and not being able to take them with sent them to this animal rescue place. These Nigerian dwarf goats love to be petted and act like dogs, which was weird. Very weird, but unique experience.
Ruthi Corcoran: Um, okay. Airlines, we can just end there. I think we're good.
Dave Dougherty: It's a hard transition out of dwarf goats.
Alex Pokorny: The airline one's accurate too. I once interned for a small local, company, a very small little company, but the weirdest experience and fun story off of that one, just quick, was around Christmas. They dress up as elves and hand out candy canes to the people who are waiting for flights. So very small airport, like if you know, the Humphrey Terminal, very small airport.
So, wearing a hat with, I kid you not, elf ears handing out candy canes to little kids. And then of course I had to take off the hat at some point. So it was the competing airline space as it turned out that I was in and I took off the hat and freaked the heck out some little kids.
Ruthi Corcoran: No, no.
Another fun airline fact. Just one more. Turns out, if you go to Mardi Gras Delta puts up a nice little gate you can walk through on your way onto the airplane going to New Orleans as an introduction to Mardi Gras.
Alex Pokorny: Hmm. Wow. Get you going.
Ruthi Corcoran: Oh, I was going to Charleston. I didn't even go.
3 Topics for the Episode
Dave Dougherty: I, I'm not really sure how to transition from those things.
Alex Pokorny: Marketing, Dave. It's marketing.
Dave Dougherty: Oh, cool. Yeah. All right. Three topics for today. Yeah, I guess I'll just talk generally about the Google I/O conference and what you guys thought about the announcements. What you're excited about? What you're not.
Ruthi, what do you have?
Ruthi Corcoran: Very different topic. Whether or not SEO is a luxury good.
Alex Pokorny: That's a very fun one. And then kind of a “back to tactics” kind of a topic, but how to get more budget for SEO. So either you're hiring more people or you're trying to sell it or build up some budget.
Reactions to Google's New AI-SERP Announced at the 2023 Google I/O Conference
Dave Dougherty: Okay. Cool. All right.
A little bit ago Google did their I/O conference and I know in the days afterward, of course, everybody's so quick to memeify it or do all of the news and I'm just not going to try to compete with that speed. But somebody put together a video of all the times the CEO said “AI.”
It's actually pretty funny and it goes on surprisingly long, longer than you would think. So some of the things that jumped out to me…actually did both of you get a chance to see it?
Ruthi Corcoran: Yeah, I was just going to say I was busy being a mom and doing other things in life. So maybe you can give me a recap?
Dave Dougherty: That's time better spent for sure. They announced how they're infusing AI largely in response to what Microsoft has already announced it's going to do with their Copilot and incorporating GPT.
Google's incorporating Bard into Google Workplace. So everybody on your team can have access to Bard, like through your organizational account. Which is cool. I should have brought all the announcements to this, but I didn't, so I'm going off the top of my head.
It's going to start allowing you to export whatever Bard produces to either Gmail or a doc, which is really nice. And one of the features that I really liked about Bard before all of these announcements and upgrades was the fact that you could Google whatever topic it was based on what your conversation was with Bard. So if you didn't trust what the AI had the output of, you could then Google it to see what a more traditional source would look like.
And then, they announced the new SERP which, for me, makes a lot of sense for how you would want to incorporate AI without destroying your cash cow.
So it basically sets up AI as a new SERP feature along with all of the other ones. And there is, for me, the nice thing about it is that it does have some citations on where it would've pulled the data or related articles from other places specific to the output of Bard in the SERP. Which is great because then that allows us to have some opportunities as SEOs to have some content there, and optimize for it like we would normally.
But it also puts more of that onus of being that expert in that particular field if you're going to rank for things. Actually generating useful content for the robots to take advantage of. Which might be a topic for later: As marketers who are actually working for now?
Yeah, so that's the quick recap. I like the direction it's going. I think the big thing for me is just that citation piece. It could just be my English major background of if you're going to write something, cite your source. This has always been one of the things that threw me off with GPT…I have a high level of mistrust of any kind of stats or figures that aren't followed up with something, you know?
Anybody else? What are your takes?
Alex Pokorny: Well, there were a few things. So one, Aleyda Solis, if you're familiar with her, she's rather prolific on Twitter, but also kind of known as an international SEO expert. She had a really good, and I think very balanced summary coming out of it.
So one of them was basically that SEO is not dead, which was kind of the big fear. There's a lot of talks afterward being like, And organic results are getting shoved down yet again.
We all know click-through rates, drop the lower you go on the page so that hurts. And she made a really good point, basically saying that as SEOs, we are not tied to a particular Google feature. Instead, really we're findability experts. So we're helping customers find the information that they seek and we're figuring out different ways to do it.
One of the other things that Google mentioned was talking about Perspectives, which was their name for kind of short videos that are basically being incorporated inside the SERP. So if you wanted a restaurant review, you could watch this like ten-second clip of somebody's review of it.
Potentially there are some leaks around Project Magi that I was talking about, whether or not that would come from YouTube shorts or not, which makes sense. Basically, Gen Z searches Instagram and TikTok, so you have to figure out a way so that your product Google, you know, Google's discovery basically doesn't die off.
So some of these elements are like, yeah, it kind of makes sense. And then I also go back to Dave, I think you shared this, but it's Clayton Christensen’s Jobs to be Done, presentation, talking about people over time had always had this job to be done of discovery and learning and they used to go to a library and use the Dewey Decimal system and now they Google it and use kind of random language like “restaurant near me,” which is an odd phrase.
And now we're getting to something more natural where you could say, what are some great restaurants near me that are open now, or that deliver in 20 minutes or less? You know, you can. It's just the next step, the next iteration too. So if you look at Google 10 years ago versus Google now, yeah, it's changed hugely.
But as SEOs, we've existed that entire period of time and I think that's going to keep going. So how we think of ourselves, I think needs the headspace kind of shift. But that's it. I mean, talk about content. Yes, the content's going to change a little bit. Video's a lot harder to produce than a ChatGPT article.
I mean, we've seen programmatic SEO create thousands of articles in a day. That means the barrier for ranking and the moat of content when it's text-based is going to be pretty low. So we need to come up with a different way to show off our expertise, as you were saying, like trying to show the value that your brand, and your website brings to the searcher.
So those pieces, I just want to kind of start with that because that is kind of like a calming, let's stay moderated kind of tone with this is it's a lot of change. It's a lot of change happening very quickly, but it's not necessarily the sky's falling sort of a thing.
The other part is I am very concerned about traffic levels. I mean, I think any publisher, especially if you're news or any other kind of publisher that's based upon those clicks, this hurts. I mean, quite frankly, it hurts. You might get impressions, the same thing with the People Also Asked, you know, you click one of those questions, you get the answer right there. Do you click more results? I'd love to see numbers on that. I doubt most people do.
So you've lost clicks, you've lost ad revenue, you've lost impressions. I mean, maybe you get impressions on the SERP but I'm not even seeing that kind of data show up in GSC you know, properly showing that you ranked wherever in People Also Asked. SEMRush does give you that data, but I mean, it seems like some elements aren't quite ready for that. Like Google Search Console and kind of building up the other side of it. So I don't know that's kind of my first thought.
Ruthi, do you have some quick ideas on this one?
Ruthi Corcoran: I do. I do. I think your comments always tie back to something Dave's talked about a lot, which is, it goes back to the foundations and the fundamentals, and that's what you focus on, right?
I think sometimes SEO is equivalent to, I understand Google, but maybe it just needs to shift a little bit to I understand search engines and how they operate, and then expand a bit into those other types of content, which SEO has touched a bit with voice and image, but maybe it goes beyond that. That's how we see the landscape shifting.
I'm also very excited about this new type of search result. We'll toss a link, I suspect in the show notes are on the, on the blog post of a look and feel of what this looks like. But essentially you put in sort of your request, you get the AI response, but then you can also see where the sources might pull or related sources.
An example of the new Google SERP with the ai-generated results featured at the top of the search page results.
And this to me is very intriguing because what it does is it cuts out the sort of middle crap. Like if you just have a boring answer to an average search question that is duplicating what 10 other search results are saying the AI is taking you out.
But if you have sort of an expert level opinion or you have in-depth knowledge on a particular topic, potentially this is to your advantage because you can get the quick answer from the AI, whether that's ChatGPT, with Bing or Bard, et cetera. But then you can go in-depth with an expert on the site.
So it does lower the moat to some extent, but it also might raise the moat in another dimension because you actually have to be more on top of your content. I can't say that I'm too sorry about the crowding out of ad-based websites.
I just don't know that that's a great way for us to be interacting with technology and for us to be essentially the product to marketers. That just doesn't seem great. It doesn't seem to be an awesome incentive model for really good content. So that doesn't make me too sad.
The last thing that intrigues me is Google integrating Bard into Workspace, which seems like a very fast follow to what Microsoft's doing. Obvious choice. I'm excited that all these productivity tools become even better and I'm curious to see how they play out. You know, I suspect both Google Workspace and the Microsoft Office Suite are both going to become better and will there be a number of startups who sort of integrate AI natively and we get an even better suite of tools than exists today.
Alex Pokorny: You can definitely see that. Yeah. It definitely rang true when they started mentioning Gmail. There are prompts and now we're going to do better with that. And it's like, Oh, so we're talking about Microsoft Copilot, is that basically what we're talking about here?
Yeah and I mean, Google's tools are nice. I use them professionally and personally, but they aren't as polished as Microsoft's tools. I mean, Sheets versus Excel. There are some major differences there with the browser version on, you know, the benefits of that. But you look at Slides, Google Slides versus PowerPoints, it's kind of a joke. I mean, there's such a difference between the two. So I'd love to see that increased competition and focus in that area.
And you're right about the ad-based sites. The other side of publishers is that they are ad-based, and that's been their revenue model. If you look at sites from 10 years ago versus sites now, there have been shifts and there have been changes in the model, like the online marketing model of how you make money online.
And we're getting really ad-heavy. I mean, my gosh, try searching for a recipe and it annoys the heck out of me trying to find a recipe site that's not covered in ads or opening it in some ad-blocking browser and denying them that revenue.
Anyways, the one last piece about this is I see this change heavily affecting the top-of-funnel searches. It is a funnel, the top’s bigger, and there's a lot of volume there, but as you move down it, you're still purchasing on a site. You're still continuing those activities like requesting information on a site. So this is also going to take off a section of it, but this is a section of the funnel where people are looking for a quick answer or even a slightly more complex answer. It’s still a top-of-the-funnel kind of answer. So not a huge loss. Some branding loss, absolutely, but that's about it.
Dave Dougherty: I mean, I could see this impacting different industries a lot more than others. You know, like we talked with the State of Search and SEMRush, how retail and travel have been impacted quite heavily with their overall traffic in 2022. I could see that being a problem with the new SERP result.
Like a lot of these creators that are putting out their content, maybe it's ad-supported, maybe it's affiliate supported, but they've developed a little bit of a community to go to these specific places. Well, now my understanding of the new SERP would be that their articles may show up for the AI-generated thing, but will that negatively impact what it is they're doing? Because we've also seen the flight to quality and quality in this case, meaning the more known sites that have been around a long time with a lot of backlinks from known brands.
So yeah, it'll be interesting to see how this affects the creator economy versus the kind of standard, you know, those other big industries. Whether or not social becomes the audience development place to then ladder up into your website.
Alex Pokorny: That's an interesting point. Ruthi, sorry, did you want to follow up quickly?
Ruthi Corcoran: Just a quick follow up. One of the reasons backlinks are so key is because they are one of the early signals for search engines about what was relevant or important or useful. Do other people link to it?
And I think maybe that we're going to see an analogous situation with this credibility piece of what is the thing that the large language models, the AIs, are going to rely on in order to determine credibility. Maybe it's academic paper style sourcing. Maybe there's some other thing that is going to become maybe not the new standard, but a component into the way credibility is established.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah. There's an interesting point with Google. I mean, they have that EAT formula talking about content and they added an extra E for experience to try to, I think in some ways, kind of head off some of the AI-created content saying that you actually need to know what you're talking about to publish and get ranked.That's really difficult.
I mean, there's this nagging thought that I keep having though with this, is to stand out from all this content that's being produced by AI, you have to have a unique perspective. You have to do something a little bit different. Something personalized saying that, you know, Jim's time at Yellowstone was best described using this. And this was really important and this was terrible, and this was, you know, all the rest.
And I wonder if, and this is my nagging thought, that content will become more divisive, basically more argumentative just to try to stand out from the crowd. You're going to shout louder or shout a different opinion, a conflicting opinion, just so that the AI says, here's a balanced perspective. Here's somebody who says Yellowstone is terrible for a state park or something. You know, just, just to be able to show up and just to be able to get some traffic away from this. I don't know.
It is a point about the experience. How do you tell who has experience? How do you show the newest information, new additions, and how do you basically better validate that those new additions are from credible sources, not just people who've been publishing recently.
So that's a tough. It's a tough scenario. I don't know exactly a good way to get around that.
Dave Dougherty: I think for me, the thing that's promising, at least for Microsoft and Google doing this and why, at least in these early days, I tend to trust what they're doing a little bit more than just these one-off smaller startup AI companies is the fact that Google has 25 years of dealing with the most horrible content on the internet. And how do you not show horrible, racist, misogynist crap.
Which, you know, a lot of the new startups, they know they have to deal with it, but what experience do they have with that really? So I don't know. I think the big miss for me is like, I'm excited for them to have some of the AI things in Sheets or Excel or things like that. But that's really where, at least for me, I think the most value for these AI tools will come from the fact that I can say, Hey, I just wrote this particular thing, or I'm halfway through this paper, summarize it for me. All of those kinds of additive things that are the next steps.
Like, that's what I really want it for. Because that's the kind of writing that is just, it's an also that you have to do and by the time you get to it, you're already tired. You're kind of done with the topic. So I would like to see more of that stuff come around more quickly than just generating random blurbs. But it's exciting to see where we're going.
My final thought on it though is you talked about the perspective of SEOs on what it is we're optimizing for. We talked a little bit in a previous episode about how we got started and how we've changed our perspectives over time.
And really I think for me, SEO is the health of the entire organization. I think this particular new SERP feature with a generative AI is just going to reinforce that. Because if you're not creating content already in order for the robots to take it and feed it into their own answer, you're going to be stuck. You're going to be lost in the sea of everything else, so you can either invest in building content on the front end, or you can pay out the wazoo for advertising.
But that's not a new situation. That's just the way it's always been. Are you going to pay for the ads and be disruptive or are you going to generate a good experience long term for what it is you say you want to do?
I do think with this focus on digital real estate, I have a hard time thinking of how organizations will structure their teams. If you're not taking a spoke and wheel, or hub and spoke, kind of team setup, where you have your website as the main focus, and then everything else branches off of that.
Because if you have somebody who knows the website, knows the flaws, knows the key pillar content, it'll be much easier to create all of this extra content around social posts and ads and all the things that you wouldn't want copyright for. Right now the robots are able to do that. AI can do that for you. So how soon will we start seeing these changes in the job roles of the organizations? Probably five years out just because of how slow a lot of orgs move, maybe sooner? Who knows? But that was a random thought I had as well. Does that seem viable? Interesting? Totally off base?
Ruthi Corcoran: I mean the, the job roles, formalized job roles. Yeah, maybe three to five, closer to the five end. But I suspect it'll be sort of an informal job role in that it'll just become a natural expansion and then...
Dave Dougherty: You're the only one left do it.
Ruthi Corcoran: Well, and then eventually other companies realize, Oh, okay, that's actually an advantage.
Alex Pokorny: So, right. Yeah. I mean think about the growth of social media marketers. We've seen that basically come from, man, that's a thing that you're going to throw to an intern to, Wow, we really need a director, a manager, and a team to handle our social media presence. I mean it's a new media format, but it's going to get integrated into the role at some point.
It's an interesting point you really make there about the pillar content and knowing the site. I always use this analogy with websites that they should be books. So you have a main message, you have your cover that's going to attract people in. That's your homepage. You've got your categories, that's your chapters, and then you've got your supporting copy for the points that the chapters are trying to make. So that's your copy below your categories and that basically is a structure of a website. It's good information architecture structure. It works.
The interesting piece is what you're adding onto it is basically the missing pictures, graphs, charts, all the things that make a magazine article or a more interesting book be interesting. Right? And are you adding those different elements in it? Do you know where and how to put those elements in that page, in that book and how to make the most out of them and understand which ones are worth the time and money basically?
It's interesting. I've always struggled with putting imagery and charts in things, so that's an interesting thought of like, how do we incorporate a rich media or mixed media site and how do we make it useful again for that individual?
There's been a lot of talk about how technical SEO only does like a small percentage difference, and we can debate that at a different time. But there is a main piece that I think is always glossed over so fast with SEO. That the basis of SEO is getting in the mindset of your searcher. That's the basis and figure out what they want, figure out what their fears, their loves, their passions, their interests, their related topics, their education level about the particular topic. How they like to receive information like a short bullet list because you just have a few points to make anyway.
If you like to give them 1500 words because at this point they're looking for the advanced version of your topic or an all-encompassing summary. That's the point. The point is always to get inside that head of that person and then you create the site to basically reflect that, to serve those interests, to serve those needs.
This might just be another push for SEOs to stop looking at so many of the keyword volume tools and instead start thinking about who this person is and start providing to them.
Ruthi Corcoran: I like that framing of it, and there's sort of a natural overlap with UX.
Alex Pokorny: Absolutely.
Ruthi Corcoran: But the distinction is as an SEO you're thinking about the mind space of the potential visitor, whereas the UX is the actual visitor as they're going through. There's overlap of course, but it's sort of a different take on those two roles.
Alex Pokorny: And seeing Google Bot as a different type of user as well. What content does it consume? How does it get around the site? All those kind of details.
Dave Dougherty: Right. Because if you think most things in life, and this might just be a particular worldview, but I think you have 85% of things will just be kind of basic, good enough kinds of things. But the stuff that actually makes life worth living is that 10 to 15% on the top where it's that little bit extra. It's that little bit more money for the nicer bottle of wine, or you have heated seats in a cold environment instead of just the normal ones that require your body heat to warm them up. You know, it just makes life a little bit nicer.
All right, so speaking of life being a little nicer, Ruthi, you had luxury goods on the docket. So why don't yoIs SEO a Luxury Good for Organizations?
Ruthi Corcoran: I'll give it a little intro. Okay. So, as I've been thinking about the role of the SEO in the organization, and especially recently, we've had a lot of different large companies doing various tech layoffs. So it’s top of mind.
One of the questions I have is, where does SEO fit within the company and their growth maturity curve? And maybe I'll phrase it a little differently, so, is SEO simply table stakes or is it a luxury good?
And some nuances on that. From the table stakes perspective, is it just an input on how to be best found on the internet, which is table stakes for any website? Or is it something where once you're established you knew you needed a website, you got the website, but perhaps that wasn't your main driver of revenue, and SEO is a way that you can own the market in a way that you weren't before.
So then to expand that a little more, do we think of SEO and the answer could be all of the above as a good tool for entry and expansion into a market. Or is it a better tool for owning the market and crowding out your competition? And that's, I think, the basis of my question.
I think it's important because if it's more of a luxury good, it's the first to go when you have the layoffs. And if it's something that's table stakes, you've have to be there from the very beginning because you're actively helping in that growth stage of the company.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah, I think it depends on the business model and what you're trying to do. We've talked previously about how SEO is kind of like plumbing. Nobody cares until the toilet's overflowing and then it's like, Oh my God, we have to do something!
I think SEO suffers from being the, you know, sprinkle the magic dust on it and just go do that SEO thing. Because it's remained technical and because you actually have to stop and think about your searcher, your potential visitor and what they might be thinking or feeling or wanting. That is this high upfront cost in terms of time and depth of thought that a lot of people aren't willing to do, just because of how they manage their lives and their meeting schedules. At least that's my hypothesis.
I think if you are a small business and you are entering a new space, having a firm grasp of what the digital landscape looks like is absolutely a requirement. Because then at least you've done your due diligence before launching your venture.
We talked about programmatic SEO recently as well, where that is a particular strategy, but that is only after you are established. Because you have to have a certain amount of scale and a certain amount of budget to be able to afford the thousands of articles in terms of creating them, posting them, and maintaining them.
I guess with AI you could just spam the hell out of people really quickly and not do any of that and just see what sticks. Personally, I try to be more strategic in my life than that, but maybe I'm wrong.
Alex Pokorny: I guess Dave, I think that the main thing you're saying about the business model, I think of with that organization, get to the next question of how important is digital marketing? Kind of expand it up a little bit or how important is marketing to that company? And if those things are important, then SEO is important too.
And just tie right in with that because if you are looking to get more customers, then you should think about SEO. If you're trying to get more customers and you're willing to put money forth, I mean either for an individual or campaign budget. Paid search also probably makes sense. Paid social might make sense. Depends on your tactics, depends on your market.
I think of some really niche kind of manufacturers. They basically just need a website because when someone's searching so specifically their site probably will pop up because they are so specific. I mean, there's just not much for competition and they basically are one of the few matches that sells that particular thing or does that particular thing.
It also could be super niche to the point where some product line engineer or design engineer is looking for this specific part. There's not really a good Google search for a weird random shaped part or something like that. Instead, you're just looking for a manufacturer partner, something like that. That's probably more of a sales mentality to get their name in front of that audience to be top of mind. Maybe there is some marketing play there, but it'd be a tough one from a keyword research standpoint.
You mentioned before about SparkToro that was started by Rand Fishkin the creator of Moz used SEO Moz and then Moz. But there wasn't really a good keyword research play for what he was trying to do. So that's a business model limitation where SEO kind of gets there, but also stops. You could build the brand in different ways, then try to get related audiences and then try to put the brand in front of those audiences.
There are still ways to do it, it's just that would be like three steps down the road and there's probably faster ways to get a new customer.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. One of the things that I don't hear a lot of people talking about with SEO is the margins on the products, right? So much of the conversation stops at the search volumes. But if you have, let's just say generally, you have an arbitrary cutoff that you’re only going to do something for 200 searches a month. Well that's kind of high, depending on what it is you're doing.
But to your point, with the niche manufacturing or the niche topics, it might be only a 20 search volume term but if each sale is $50,000, I'll do that all day, you know? I absolutely want to do that because I only need a couple of sales each quarter to justify the work around that.
Yeah, I think of like Rolls Royce with their airplane engines or GE with the airplane engines, there's not going to be a much of a search volume for that, but each one of those things is so expensive that you need to show up for those, even if it's only one or two or three players in the market for those particular items. You know your competition. So you know how you're going to have to beat them. Because then that also plays into how to actually get budget for the activities that will support what it is you're trying to do with your SEO because if you can bring in the margin calls, that'll be a lot easier.
Alex Pokorny: I'd actually argue against your airplane one. Once I had a, I was subcontract as the SEO for an agency and there was a client that came to them and they made this very specific product and they had six potential customers. That's it. And they wanted to do SEO.
My first thought was, Why? I mean, heck, take that money and call whatever support line phone number exists for these six, take that person out to dinner and start talking to them. It doesn't matter if they're an intern or whoever picks up the phone. Now you have an in and keep working those leads and connections and all the rest. Either your product is a fit for those companies and needs some tweaks until it becomes a fit or it's not a fit and that's it.
I mean, if there's only six, I mean that's it. There's just not much out there. I mean, if you're Airbus, you know about Rolls Royce and you know about who's making engines and you're already established either current customer of them or there's probably a different method that you could probably go after them.
It's a question of are you breaking new ground? And that's I think where SEO plays in is. When's the seventh customer that could potentially buy this product? What are they going to do? Well, they're going to Google it and then SEO makes sense. When's the new Airbus come, the new airplane manufacturer comes up and says, I need a, whatever, whatever, whatever. They're going to Google it, and then Rolls-Royce should show up.
So I don't know, I go back and forth with that because there are probably extreme examples like the one I mentioned, but I would hazard a guess that for the majority of companies, yeah you know, getting that traffic is going to be worth spending some time and money towards SEO.
Ruthi. What's your opinion on this? What's your take?
Ruthi Corcoran: I mean, based on the conversation you guys have been having, I am somewhat convinced about SEO's going to play a much stronger role in that discovery piece. Which puts it more on the, almost the table stakes piece. Depending on your business, of course. So I think the dichotomy of text, table stakes versus luxury is perhaps a poor one in this scenario. Which is just fine.
So then if you're looking to grow, SEO is an important part of your toolkit. And if you already know your customers and you know your market, SEO can be important if you know that's an important part of your customer's way of interacting with you so that when they search for something, they're still finding you and you're there for them. But if you have customers and you know them all, and that's just not your way to go, you can better spend your money elsewhere.
Alex Pokorny: There's one that I also kind of struggle with and I'd be interested in your guys' opinions on this one. So in my family, there are a bunch of small businesses. One of them is a plumbing repair business and I keep in my mind over many, many years trying to think, is SEO actually a good play for a local plumber?
Because it becomes this weird thing of like, Home Advisor is getting fined to be honest, finally, for some of the junk that they've been pulling. But there's so many other companies that are pushing ahead. Does this random local website have any chance of ranking? Uh, not really. Fill out your Google My Business profile. Absolutely. I mean, there's a local search kind of component of making sure that you show up correctly. The phone number's corrected, not an old number. I mean, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean, get your name, area, place (NAP), location page, and stuff figured out.
That I can get, but general SEO for plumbing repair or trying to rank for every plumbing article out there. I mean you search for stuff for DIY kind of stuff and you come across plumbing companies across the United States who have tried that. So they're offering free advice and I'm not hiring them because they're in North Carolina and I'm in Minnesota, or you know, I'm somewhere else.
Product-based SEO Versus Brand Narrative SEO
Dave Dougherty: So this was one of the things that I thought of as you were rebutting my airplane example, which I should know not to have brought up, given the first segment of the show. But I think like anything, what's your strategy? If you're doing product marketing via SEO, that is a very particular need that also has some underlying assumptions to it.
Whereas if you're doing SEO as a brand narrative, reputational control method, that's a totally different thing. And that's where my brain immediately goes if I want to be able to control the narrative people may have, or control as much as it’s possible what people find when they type in my business, my product or me personally.
Because people don't know to search for things they don't know about. So when they become familiar with it, they're going to search. And what is the first experience they have with that search?
The example that I like to use is my dearly departed grandma was a gardener and she made the mistake of typing in Mexican flowers into Google and then was very surprised with the results that she got. She didn't Google for a while after that because of that experience. Now that's where that example dies.
But this reputational management idea is going to be more and more important, especially with the AI piece of it, where if you have trust with an audience, trust in a segment you'll be more likely to rank. Therefore you'll be more likely to drive more of the traffic, convert more of the traffic, and show up for more of those terms.
Whereas, and again, it goes to the Clayton Christiansen job to be done, if you are solely looking for a plumber, if it's the I have a leak and I just need them to tighten something, well then yeah the YouTube videos might make sense because you can grab whatever random tools you have in the house and do it yourself.
But if it's something more major, then yeah, you need that plumber now that's where that local [SEO] comes in because you're optimizing for that emergency section. Not the kind of general contractor that I know, like, and trust. Right?
Ruthi Corcoran: I think there is a really good tieback in this plumber example to what we were talking about earlier about shifting the idea of SEO.
Like if we're just thinking about what SEO is. Optimizing the copy that's going to help you rank for all these questions out on the internet. Yeah, that probably needs to change. AI is going to dominate that every day, but if we're thinking about SEO as how do we make sure that the small business plumber is able to be seen when people in the area are searching and are looking for it. That seems like a really great play. But it takes a different form than copy optimization on a webpage.
Dave Dougherty: And this is where I think SEO is, at least for me, migrating more towards that PR idea of if we assume SEO and your ability to rank for things is incumbent on getting credit for all of the things you do in and around your business. Then you need to be doing all of those things in order to take up that digital real estate and get credit for it.
So what does that mean? You're going to put a higher priority on YouTube shorts. If it's going to be pulled into the Perspectives things, you're going to put a higher priority on having TikTok or Instagram if those results are going to be brought in. You're going to be doing articles so that you can have the blue links, even if it only makes up 60% of the SERP experience and then as you build your business to a higher level, now you can take up more real estate on the key terms because you can afford to post that sign in the digital space.
How Do You Build Trust Through Content Without a Figurehead Leader?
Alex Pokorny: I got a question for you Dave. I think you may have answered part of it already, but as I'm just kind of tossing around in my head. We're talking about enterprising, kind of enterprise-level companies. So from an enterprise standpoint, can you build trust and reputation online through content and not have an online personality?
What I mean is like not having a personal spin on articles, building up some sort of, I'm not going to say like Wendy's Twitter, I mean as far as that, but like some sort of personality to each piece of content. How do you build your reputation and trust without creating that?
Dave Dougherty: Without the figurehead?
Alex Pokorny: Yeah, without the figurehead. Basically by being the blank corporate brand, that there are so many out there and they don't like to put a personality behind their copy. Can you still create trust in a relationship-like way without having that personal touch?
Dave Dougherty: Absolutely. John Deere started a magazine in 1895. That's why I was looking down, I was looking up when it started. It's called The Furrow and it's a very popular example of the Content Marketing Institute, you know, all those guys.
Because they [John Deere] realized if they could support farmers in doing better farming, knowing that audience, knowing the perspectives, knowing the trouble that they're having, if they can do better farming and they get reliable information from the company, you will be more likely to come and reward the company with your business.
We have been obsessed with kind of rock stars for a while in our culture and even in the business world. The obsession with the genius founder and all that BS. That's a modern interpretation of things. But if you have the organization actually go with this idea, you absolutely can.
Airbnb tried it for a while with their magazine called the, I think it was a Pineapple or something like that. It was a traditional media play where it was, we're going to build a magazine around the experiences you can expect from our organization so that you can like and trust that you'll have a safe, fun experience with this new concept of staying in a stranger's home.
Because not all of us are comfortable with that, still. And yeah, you don't need the rockstar figurehead, but what you do need is you need to have enough people in the organization good with the idea to do the long play.
Red Bull Media House, is another example of that. It started as a magazine specifically for the Red Bull team with the F1 races, and then that ballooned into what everybody thinks of now. You know, we discussed that.
So it is absolutely possible. We're just so used to that figurehead, cult worship that we lose sight of what's actually possible.
Alex Pokorny: Yes. There's one more I was just thinking of. We mentioned Moz. I mean SEO Moz got its kind of popularity from its blog, but it's a lot of its blog content is actually submissions from the community. I mean, it helps to share it as well. But it also means that Moz didn't really have to have such a personality actually, even on their own company blog.
Others did. I mean, they had some, I'm sure, some editorial standards and the light that they wanted to make sure that they were fitting, but they put the disclaimer at the top saying it doesn't represent Moz and this is the author's view and all that kind of stuff. And they were able to build up a ton of content and they didn't even create most of it.
Dave Dougherty: Right. And, you know, Huffington Post had the exact same thing. I mean, they were syndicating other people's articles. They very rarely wrote their own and still to this day, that's what's going on. I mean, they have some of their own writings and stuff, but yeah, for the most part, it was just reposting other things.
I will say, my one reaction to your Moz example is that community. The community-generated content is absolutely a good play. If you're going for that, “let's build that community around the particular specialty” because then it's a safe place to nerd out with like-minded people on a particular topic.
However, you need to have good products to sell to that community. Yeah. And not just host a community. You also have to have that other side, building a community and an audience, people just make it seem super easy. Well just get the audience and then you'll have the money.
No, that's actually really hard to do because if you know it's a relationship like anything else, if you break that trust and the tiniest little thing could break the trust, you're gone. The community's gone. Right? You're not getting that back.
So, it is a longer play. It is a harder play, but I think longer term it serves you much better than just being disruptive and interruptive with your advertising. I mean, ads serve a point. I'm not totally against ads. It's a tool. It should be used, but I think there are better ways,
Ruthi, thoughts? You're just kind of sitting there and looking shocked.
Ruthi Corcoran: I'm enjoying the thread. I wasn't expecting the question Alex brought up and I really wasn't expecting the answer you responded with and I was just enjoying the whole interplay.
Dave Dougherty: Alright, cool.
Final question. Finish this off.
How Do You Get More Budget for SEO?
Alex Pokorny: Last one. Do this? Okay.
So this is a common question. I think it's brought up a lot, but never answered well, so I just wanted to...
Dave Dougherty: So let's add to it.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah, right? So I wanted to add a few points to it and then give it, I don't know, some real-world examples. And that's: How do you get more budget for SEO?
We've all been there. So that's it's a common problem, but I've seen so many poorly worded or half-baked articles on it that I just wanted to try giving my own answer to it.
But I really wanted to see what your guys' opinions and additions are to it because this is just what's worked and I'm sure there's a lot more out there and you've had very different experiences that I've had with this as well.
A few different tactics that I found that work well for getting more budget. One of which is there's a black eye approach. Basically, you ask what are our top competitors? Or heck, you can ask ChatGPT what are your top competitors with this company and you'll get a list, compare them, and contrast them against your own SEO efforts.
Highlight the ones doing well and what they're doing well about themselves. And say, Hey, we should at least keep up with the competition. We need to get going. And that can help. That can really work well, especially for those who are neck and neck or really keeping an eye on their competition. Or competition has been a hot-button issue recently. Great, great way to go after it.
There is also a positive spin, which is asking your boss or your boss's boss, you know, figure out whoever the or maybe it's some other kind of companies in the area because they're doing some unique digital marketing efforts for some different area and or different reason they're doing a webinar series, you know, they're building an audience. It could be something else too and it starts opening up and sparking conversation of, Okay, where does SEO fit in there? Can we, do webinars ourselves and can SEO help push it? Or can we write a blog ourselves and SEO can help decide what kind of content we should write? There are different ways to go after that one.
And then I'll just run through my next one and then I want to bring it up to you guys what your opinions are.
Valuation. Basically, how do you get an exact dollar amount? I think this one's really difficult and this one a lot of companies struggle with. Especially if you're not an e-commerce cut-and-dry company where you can look at your analytics and say, X number of visits typically gets us X number of dollars and therefore we want more visits so we'll get more dollars. And as long as we spend correctly, we'll get a return. That one's easy, but most people aren't easy. So that's not really helpful for a lot of companies.
One that I've seen work is basically search engine marketing, Google Ads, side of it. Either current cost or potential cost and savings. With this you basically say, we are going to go after these terms. Typically we would be spending this much amount of money to be getting traffic for these terms that are highly related. By doing our SEO strategy instead, we're going to have some savings on that. You know, the bigger the numbers the better. Or you can say, we are currently spending X number of dollars.
We might be able to reduce that spending if we rank better. Or show up better and organic results, which get a higher click-through rate anyways. So it might be worth it. It could also be worth it just to do both, but it's one way to build up some budget or try to carve out some budget too.
The other one is, you can go at it from a brand play option, Dave, you actually went through quite a few of those topics already, talking about the brand aspect of SEO where it's reputation management. You want to show up, you're trying to make sure that if people are searching for your products or things related to your products that you show up and it's not some random blogger, somebody's opinions, or a news article that might be negative. There's a great aspect there.
And then the last one, which this one has worked really well for me, especially when doing paid search and the advertising side of digital marketing. Another significant chunk of my background. I always think about the ad side of this, and this was a game that I always played because it's an awkward topic. But what you have to figure out is what are you willing to spend. What are you willing, what's your number?
And quite frankly, nobody has a number ever in their mind, but they do have a gut feeling about a number. And quite frankly, that's good enough. It's good enough to start.
Dave Dougherty: Same problem with engagement rings.
Alex Pokorny: Just because…Oh, if they have a number, they don't have a number. Yeah.
Dave Dougherty: And you really don't know what you want to spend but it always seems a little too much.
Alex Pokorny: My number is lower than that. That's all I know.
But the game I would play and it would make people awkward. So I had to give a little bit of intro to it saying we need to basically have a starting figure so that I can determine whether or not I'm providing a good return on this investment. So I need you to bear with me for the next three minutes, and we're going to play a little silly game, but it's going to give me at least a good starting point and we're going to get through this.
So what I'm going to ask you to do is I'm going to get you a lead off of your current form. Okay, I'll get you one more lead and it's going to cost you a thousand dollars. Would you pay for that?
And they'll be like, No, absolutely not.
Okay. A hundred dollars. Would you pay for that?
Yeah. Yeah, I'd probably pay a hundred bucks.
Okay. $250?
Uh, $250 is kind of pushing it.
Okay. We'll call it $200 and we'll just start from there.
And that basically is a good enough number to say a form fill is worth 200 bucks. And that's good enough to basically carve our budget because, I mean, how does anybody estimate how much money they want to put towards anything? They have some kind of idea of what kind of return they're getting and they think it's a good bet or it's not a good bet. That's it. It's betting. I mean, nobody knows from a budget perspective of what you're really going to get as a rate of return. So it's good enough.
The same thing you can do from webinar viewer. I'll get you one more webinar viewer. Can't comment on quality, but basically whatever you're currently getting right now, just one more. Would you pay 50 bucks for that? Would you pay 25 bucks for that? Okay, I'll try to get a hundred of them.
So then I have some decent starting points for the budget. I can get a new tool or some part-time help or something like increasing some hours of an agency, MQLs, SQLs, some market-qualified leads, sales qualified leads. You can, I mean, you pick it, you can basically play this game with any of them.
And I've never had someone refuse to play the game. And I've played this game at least a dozen times if not more than that. So it does work. And from the paid search standpoint, I mean, that's the thing you're stuck with always is what am I going to set as my cost per click (CPC) for my ads?
And you don't know until someone can tell you, Hey, it's going to be this. And you can say, okay, we’ll estimate a 3% conversion rate or a 1% conversion rate because we're just starting out and we'll assume a 2% clickthrough rate or 6% clickthrough rate, whatever it is, depending on what system you're using, advertising system and all the rest. But that's the one I use.
What have you guys tried? What have you seen work? What are some different ideas that you have either from the competition black eye like we're comparing SEO versus SEO? They're doing good, they're doing bad, or something like that, or we're doing bad. Or the valuation side of it.
Dave Dougherty: You know me, I'm always good for an opinion, but I'm interested in Ruthi's first. If I can put you in the hot seat.
Ruthi Corcoran: Okay. Deal. I'll go first. So I’ve played with all of those. And I think this comes back to something we've talked about in the past, which is just knowing your audience and adapting your pitch in this case to the audience.
Within those tactics that I've found particularly helpful is pulling up a visual or having it ready on a slide deck or screenshot, whatever, of the search results for something that they should be ranking for and that they know they should be ranking for so that they can see you're missing and like, here's the potential and here's what we're talking about to make it very concrete in showing the absence.
I think the fast follow that are the starter tactics that get quick results, right? Especially if you're working with a site that has a lot of potential, but because they're just missing some of the basics. They're just, there's, to use the corporate term, there's “low-hanging fruit” everywhere.
Giving them a couple of, maybe even you're, you're walking alongside them and just updating the pages with what you know makes sense to like say, Hey, here's the potential, and then if you want to do this on a wide scale, here's the dollar figure, which then potential you make the argument about that ROI. That way they have something to grasp onto.
I think the trickier one is the big technical pieces. If there's a lot of technical debt getting in the way or if there are just some really significant problems with the site those can be harder because, on the one hand, you want to show like, Hey, here's how you're getting in your own way.
But that also puts you in such a negative light of like, we're the problem fixers. Like we're the plumbing versus that aspirational growth of here's how this is going to help you grow, which I think is where this is where you're missing in search results has a much stronger incentive about it because it shows the potential of what you could be getting.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah. With the technical ones, I usually go to a user example saying that we're going to focus on core web vitals, for instance. Well, here's a really slow-loading page. Let's try loading it during a meeting. Again. Wait for the awkward pause of guessing. Now we're finally loaded. Okay. It's been 20 seconds.
What the heck? There are other pages. That of course would be the worst.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah. Sitting in that awkward silence is really powerful and making everybody wait.
I think the points that you guys bring up are all valid. And I agree with all of them and I've done all of them in my experience thus far.
I do think the fact that SEO really has to go in between the technical side and the business side as we've discussed previously puts us at a disadvantage because, some people, some SEOs will be better at going to the technical side and talking to the technical people, the technical teams. Others will be much more suited to hanging out with the salespeople and the business leadership because that's their vocabulary.
I do think, and this is not limited to digital marketers, this is like an all-marketers thing and I would even challenge technical teams to get better about this too. Understanding actually the financial terms and the financial context in which you are operating. Because that is how you are actually going to convince people. You know, if you just say traffic went up and to the right. Okay, cool. So what? What does that mean?
Alex, you touched on it a little bit of how you can forecast a little bit by what spend you want, and all of that. I think that where the initial response is to say, Okay, you put x number of dollars in, and I get x number of dollars out. That should be good enough for you to say yes to my marketing idea.
But it's not because if you end up looking at where in the budgetary items, like if you've taken an annual report or a quarterly report, or even, a monthly P&L, and you look at where marketing expenditures and the value driven by those marketing expenditures come into play. You are in two categories that are not awesome to be in, right? You have SG&A and you have intangible assets, right?
So if you build the brand, cool, you don't control what that market value is other than through the perception of your company. So if you're having a particularly good year, yeah, that's a great thing to be able to talk about. Is it a really hard number that you want to stake your career on? No.
With SG&A, this goes back to Ruthi's point about is SEO a luxury good, in this sense yeah. Because if you're under the same line item as the secretaries, the pens and the post-it notes that you buy to keep your office running, and that's where you're advertising and your marketing spend is also. If you're having a couple of down quarters then yeah, you're going to go to that SG&A line item and reduce it. Right? Because it's in the name, it is general spending.
So until we can make a better narrative around actually the monetary and fiscal value of these things we're going to struggle and I think coming up with…
Ruthi Corcoran: that... And I think there's a mix there.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah, go ahead.
Ruthi Corcoran: It's knowing the business and how to basically speak the language of the accountants, the financiers, and upper management, but then also being able to make that more emotional argument of, you're missing out from here, or this is what we could be doing. And giving that vision, because you are right, you need the emotional side of it to get people hooked and then back it with the other half.
Dave Dougherty: And the intangible asset argument is, I mean, if you're Prada, then you're absolutely going to be looking at that. Because that industry is a very specific brand-driven industry.
But if you're that niche manufacturer like Alex brought up previously, the brand probably doesn't matter. It's probably one of those small manufacturers in the business parks you drive past and you wonder who's back there. You know, it'll be like Johnson and Sons. Well, that doesn't tell me anything but your sign's been up for 20 years, so you must be doing something.
Anyway. Alex, are you going to say something?
Alex Pokorny: There's one last one I've never really gotten this pitch to work, so I'll start to preface it with that. But it's one that I've always hoped would because I think it's the right idea. Especially even with the AI content and People Also Asked kind of section of it too.
It's basically going after customer service and saying, What kind of phone calls are they getting? What kind of information could we make it so that they can just Google it instead? How many hours can we save basically by not getting that question anymore, whatever the most frequent question is? What kind of information can we make it easier for our users, our customers, to be able to find that's going to prove their view of our company?
Plus how many are frustrated versus how many call in? There are probably a lot more frustrated ones out there than the ones that are even calling in. So we can estimate that we're even helping more customers than even just the ones who usually would call in. Can we change that volume?
Plus, I always think of it as just an absolute goldmine for content ideas, because those are your customers. Those are the ones who are interested. Those are already the ones who are talking to you and being active. They're looking for, I'm sure others are looking for too and it's worth putting together a FAQ or blog post or an addition to a product detail section or something like that. Never got that one to work.
Ruthi Corcoran: How many people searched? For every person who called, how many people searched the same thing and just didn't get their answer and gave up?
Dave Dougherty: Yep. Well, that's the one in that sense, I like to grab some questions and say, People are uncomfortable asking this particular question in real life, and therefore they Google it. This is the potential value.
I will say one addition to your competitive piece that I've found really helpful is if you take those annual reports and what their business leadership says, like, we invested…If you get a CEO to say, we invested $20 million in this digital initiative, and then you go find the case study from whatever agency they used on that and then whatever articles that might be based around that. To then say they put $20 million in, this is the amount of revenue that was generated as reported by their agency and as reported by this news agency. So now we can do some estimations around that.
What's up? Why are you saying no? That can, that can be useful. Again, it just depends on how politically motivated you are.
Ruthi Corcoran: How are you going to segue us?
Dave Dougherty: I'm, you know what? I'm not. I need to get better at ending on a positive thing. Um, you know, general life goals…
This was a really good conversation. I think we're going to probably have like a part two and a part three, but my brain's kind of fried from keeping up with you guys. So I'm going to have to come back to it.
To everybody who's listening, thank you for staying with us. Thank you for listening.
If you have any thoughts, please let us know on social media, you can find that on the YouTube description, the transcript, links, and examples will be on the Dave Dougherty Media website, and blog page for the particular podcast episode.
And you can reach out. We have an email now. So we will put that in the description reach out to us and let us know any thoughts, episode ideas, or anything you might have. Appreciate it. Take care, and see you in the next episode.
Ruthi Corcoran: Cheers.
