Episode 8 - Creative SEO: Oxymoron or True Definition of SEO?
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Episode 8 - Creative SEO: Oxymoron or True Definition of SEO? Podcast and Video Transcript
[This transcript has been lightly edited to ensure readability]
Alex Pokorny: All right. Well, welcome to the Enterprising Minds podcast. Typically we have Ruthi Corcoran, but she is out today. So with me is Dave Dougherty and me, Alex Pokorny. We have one topic for the day, and it's going to be a unique one. We'll definitely dive into it and see kind of some different viewpoints around it as well as where it hits in everyone's life as an SEO. The topic today is Creative SEO: Oxymoron or true definition?
Basically talk a little bit about the creative process and how that creativity inspires us as SEOs. Is it really a necessary component to our jobs, or does it have to be there? And then we'll get into a little bit about technical SEO versus content-based SEO and is that split a good thing. Some other topics too.
Dave, if you want to start us off. What are your thoughts about it?
Dave Dougherty: So, I don't think it's an oxymoron. I think you're a moron if you don't think of it as a holistic SEO actually.
So now that we're done with the sound bite…I think with a lot of what we're seeing in the marketplace and a lot of trends that I'm seeing with the job recs in the digital marketing space, and some of the news from talking to friends around the industry, it just seems like we're getting more and more and more siloed over specific things.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah. Right.
Dave Dougherty: For example, seeing jobs for conversion rate optimization. As your sole job. That to me seems like an oxymoron because that is the definition of marketing activities. Like if you are not doing that, you're not marketing.
We've been hearing for years and years and years, the riches are in the niches. But if you go too deep or too specialized in any kind of role, there are some downsides. Especially when it comes to SEO, I feel like, it has to be more holistic.
When you are hiring though, of course, you're going to have more of a technical person and you're going to have more of a creative person. Sure. And again, there are drawbacks to both, but that's why I think, if you think you can get by with only like a single SEO, depending on the size of your organization or what you're trying to do, you might be fooling yourself. You may want to have the two people playing around with each other to do the technical and the creative. But it's not impossible to have both in a single individual.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah. I think it's a difficulty in a couple of areas. So one is how SEO is seen by the organization when there isn't a pre-existing SEO team or leader. Or even a knowledgeable individual who at least understands the concepts of it. Who sees SEO as sometimes as accessibility/SEO/requirements that are enhancements of the websites that are required.
Then there's the other side of it that says, No, this is a marketing promotions function and this is something that we're doing to get more traffic and we're getting more customers through it. So we're trying to increase our pipeline through it.
And depending on how that role is basically set up, it can be siloed into one of those versus the other one. Are you checking off the checkboxes and going down the list of standards that should be done for best practices' sake? The phrase best practices bugs me. But moving on.
Are you looking at the campaign side of it and saying, we're doing SEO for pure traffic volume and what we're caring about is traffic volume, but not necessarily about site best practices or standards or something like that? That is a little bit of an oxymoron statement right there thinking that these things are siloed, thinking that these things should be separated.
Also from an SEO standpoint, if you grew up in a career where you're put in one of those two boxes, that's a bad idea because SEO is by its very nature, a holistic venture because if the page doesn't load, if it's a 404, it's the partnership with IT kind of analogy. If the page doesn't load, who cares how good your metadata was or how good the content is? Because if the page is down, no one's going to see it.
And if you make a great page, but no one ever visits it, what was the point of that effort? So you have to do both of the traffic side of it and the site standards, the technical side of it.
I think the other thing is it becomes stifling as an SEO, especially as you mature a little bit in your career and you understand a little bit more about all the different areas and opportunities, if you're being boxed in, I think that leads to burnout and poor mental health.
Dave Dougherty: Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
I know we've talked about this on record or at a coffee shop as we've hung out. For me, SEO really is more about the digital business strategy. If you are going to be a digital-first organization, you have to be thinking along the lines of SEO right off the bat because you have to have the proper website and the right content depending on your business model.
For example, if you're e-commerce, you have to have all that data syndication and syndicating perfectly. You have to be so close to perfect now with all of the different ranking factors, that you are at a competitive disadvantage when you don't focus on that. Or when you don't lead with “What's the digital experience?”
I was reflecting on this a little bit ago because 10, 15, whenever it was years ago when we started out, the big conversation there was, at least in the agency world when I was doing the consulting, was: Our business is based on XYZ relationships, shaking hands, doing the local, oh, what was it called…the local commerce community commerce things [local Chamber of Commerce meetings]…And it's like, okay, but that's detrimental to the long game, right? But convincing people that no, your business model needs to change. I mean, it took that whole amount of time and then the pandemic to switch some of these people's minds.
Alex Pokorny: Oh yeah. I was thinking of one of the agencies I was with, we had a variety of clients, a lot of contractors, and small businesses. There was this point I kept trying to make to them about offline competition versus the online competition, and there was always a mindset shift that finally, sometimes, made that thing click. Sometimes it didn't.
There's the point of let's say you're off the painter and I'm Alex the SEO, and I have to write a blog about how good of a job I was doing and painting and how to of how I painted or ruined my house, right? If I outrank you and I get traffic, I am your online competitor. It's like, there was a statement from Disney a while back talking about how city-level soccer teams were competition to Disney because it was time taking away from those kids who could have been consuming Disney products.
Their definition of competitor was just mind-blowingly broad. Right? But when you look at it that's actually pretty fair. Like if you search for something that is related to your business and somebody else shows up, or other people show up next to you, which of course they will, they're taking some of that traffic and they are your competitors.
If you're looking for St. Louis painting or how to paint and they're somehow trying to weasel your way into that and saying, this is a really complex thing. You should hire a painter and you should hire us. That now is a competitor set as well. Those how two videos are competitor set now.
I think that mindset shift is difficult. It's a hard one for the retailers, the brick and mortar local service companies, to start thinking about what's the online impact here. I think you're right about the pandemic that it really shifted a lot of people's mindsets. But I think the digitally native generations that are coming up that of course someone's going to look for your business by looking in their phone, not yellow pages, which no one even has in their house anymore. But things have, things have changed. Things have shifted.
Dave Dougherty: Well, and I remember one of the big arguments then, and it shocks me that I'm still having these debates in meetings, was just the fact that: Hey, leadership, the website might be the first brand experience.
Still. And it's only getting worse because of the generational turnover and who's coming into positions of authority for the purchase decisions.
Alex Pokorny: You mean worse by it's getting more important?
Dave Dougherty: Well, it's worse for the old-school model. Yeah.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah, absolutely.
Dave Dougherty: Thanks for the clarification there. More and more and more people and there are plenty of studies that show this, want that digital-first I don't want to talk to somebody unless I can't find the information that I was looking for. Yeah. or I need to know something super specific and super technical about whatever product it is…Okay, fine I'll call.”
If it's complex enough of a sell, then I'll call someone right. And so that's something. Okay. The digital experience has to be front and center and then you have to tailor it to the job to be done. When you do that, you are then rewarded in the search engines. And the more we're seeing with the ChatGPT or the BARD rollouts, or however generative AI changes the way things go, it's still going to be the trust in relationships with the brands or the organizations that you're choosing to work with and whether or not, you have a good experience with that. Because it'll be too easy to switch over to something else.
Alex Pokorny: I think it was Will Critchlow who put together a presentation that’s still on SlideShare talking about, it was like 10 years in SEO, or 15 years in SEO or something like that. But he was talking about some of those long-term trends that have been moving across and how the rise of mobile versus desktop, was something that Google pushed way earlier than everybody was prepared for. The user population was pushed over. They weren’t quite transferred over, but Google was already pushing, Hey, you need a mobile site. You need to be able to have a mobile experience, not just an m-dot experience, but an actual responsive site.
That leads also to core web vitals, where we start talking about the user experience of the page if it was really poor, even though the content's good, the backlinks are good, let's say even the page speed was good, but your content's shifting around constantly. It's really hard to get around all the popups and all the rest. Your site's going to get devalued or it's going to be at least a red flag that you really should be focusing on and changing. Pushing that tide between that IT side and that marketing side and saying, Are we customer-focused? Are we site focused? Are we code-focused? What are we focused on?
Marketing will always say that they're customer focused, but IT probably wouldn't say that. Right? And I think that that message is changing because that's the business nowadays. It is that competitive. It has to be that good and there are teams that have to be that integrated.
Which getting to that kind of greater point of the splits we're seeing between content SEO being hired as a different role from technical SEO. I don't know. I, I think I'm with you on that. Where I get my concerns about it…I always think with silos that you can have fantastic people doing fantastic work. But there's a multiplier effect when they start to work together. And if you don't break those silos down, you'll do fine. Probably if you have good enough people and a good enough product. But you won't really get the benefit. I don't know.
Core Web Vitals as a Proxy for Organizational Health
Dave Dougherty: Well, to that point, and you know what we were talking about with the core web vitals and all that, I really feel like the, the vitals are a proxy for the organizational health.
Alex Pokorny: Oh yeah.
Dave Dougherty: You know, because if you have the proper structures in place, you have people who are empowered to make choices and do the edits means you can respond when things happen. So if you go to a site and you see that every page is super slow, that the content is old, there's going to be some backend, “Whoa,” that is preventing those things from being properly done. And what does that say about the business as a whole? Is that something you want to deal with? Maybe, maybe not.
Are they [the company with the bad website] the only ones with the product? Maybe? Yeah. You know, depending on what the product is. Otherwise, if you're able to just go to the corner store to buy it instead of ordering 12 at a time online, then you know, go support the bodega.
Alex Pokorny: Right, right, right.
I was just thinking, there's a recruiter who reached out to me and asked if I had experience with a couple of CMSs that man throwback. Like I hadn't heard those names in about 10 years. And it was like, do you have experience with it? It was three in a row and I was like, “Technically, yes. Over a decade ago.” And that says something about the organization. They haven't moved on since then. I do wonder about this, so I don't know.
Are Websites the Front Door of a Business?
Alex Pokorny: I’d be interested to know what’s your opinion. Do you think, businesses fully see the website as being the front door of their business? And I mean this in a couple of different ways. So one, a quick story.
There is an automotive dealership I worked with. They had a lot of problems with attribution. Basically what? I mean, handshake sales, that's automotive, right? The owner was saying, “I don't know if your paid search is actually doing anything, but I do know when I see someone with a newspaper tucked under their arm and a highlighter around a particular car ad that that newspaper did something for me.”
Fair point, but at the same time, the guy was really missing the connection to the website, to the forms, to people who were showing up. Like there was a pretty clear path there, but he just glossed over it basically.
And the other piece about this is I see a company's customer service as great. We need to have better customer service, better training, better hours, accessibility, chatbot, you name it. There's always that gap of maybe that content should be easier to find on the site, so customers wouldn't be reaching out to customer service.
It's pretty hard for us to really think of a complex product that is that complex from the person who would be purchasing it if they already have some knowledge that they would be so confused that they have to call a salesperson, a customer service person.
Or is that just a sign that the SEO is, or the website is off? So much of this in my mind always tracks back to the website. But what do you think, do you see businesses really thinking a website is the front door? Or are they seeing it as this is a promotional activity? This is a channel?
Dave Dougherty: Well, I think the smart ones see it that way, and I think the ones that are doing well, that have the premiums on the stocks are the ones that are adopting the digital side of things. And you know, I hate to play into the sort of status quo, but if you look at the consumer package goods, everybody likes to use those as the [examples] because they're sexy.
They have digital experiences, right? And it is about not just building the awareness, but are you the type of person that wears Gucci over Prada, or do you not care and you buy both? What does that end up saying?
Same thing with sports organizations. They have a really strong digital presence because it's not just about the team, it's about developing that community and the fandom, different levels of being fans of the organization that way. Yeah. All of it is the touchpoints there.
Rally old-school organizations are not immune to it. I think what The New York Times has done has been really, good in that respect. You know, you might not want the newspaper anymore, but you can still read it on the app or get a couple of articles a month. Or maybe you're the type of person that really wants to play Wordle or any of these prism games or whatever other things they offer. So they have their gaming division.
What does gaming have to do with newspapers? Yeah. Not a whole lot. I mean, they had the crossword forever and ever and a day. But on the face of it, that's not when you immediately associate with the New York Times. But they've been transforming really nicely over the last 10 years.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah. They're a rare example. With a lot of the print, especially the newspaper side of things, has gone so far downhill. How much do you get your content? When do you push that five free article viewing limit or subscription limits, that sort of thing? But yeah, like their purchase of Wirecutter, that was huge of you looking for product reviews and techy product, reviewed webcam reviews and new stuff.
Dave Dougherty: And what Consumer Reports is not covering.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah. And they're not fresh enough. Consumer Reports, it's a nice nonprofit organization that does get things from the consumer side of things, the consumer advocacy side. But you know, how relevant can they really be? When you can look at Amazon reviews that somebody threw in a review five minutes ago and they're trying to review blenders once a year. Sorry. I think it's, things change faster than that. I think it is a different, difficult model to shift into, especially with those pre-existing businesses.
There's a, this was a digital-first company, but it was a clothing brand and it was the CEO kind of reminiscing on the story of when they started and they had mentioned: Who is this person? Where do they shop? What kind of things do they like to buy? You know, where do they hang out? It's refreshing to hear that a CEO was thinking about the customer in terms of who is this individual. Who are we going after?
And in your point about a sports team, I was thinking about that pretty hard. That's a tough one because you think of your product as winning a championship, getting a team. But is that where the money comes from? Because the money comes in from merchandise sales, ticket sales, and every other sponsorship partnership, your advertising thing, you name it. And that's, that's a tough mindset shift. I mean, to say like, Yes, our product is great football or great baseball, or great what pick your sport. But our customer is this fan. And who is this customer? How do we get them attracted? How do we get them interested? How do we keep them involved?
You know, lifetime customer value. Just thinking of that side of it, how do you get them to be season ticket holders? That's such, such a different conversation that it always seems like two parts of a business, but it shouldn't be. It should be one part of the business that understands both.
Dave Dougherty: And yeah, I think, circling back to one of your earlier points on, whether or not somebody calling in as a failure of something or not. I think it also really, really depends on what product you're selling.
In the super regulated industries, I'm thinking chemical, I'm thinking finance, and that kinda stuff. You are going to want to make sure that, okay, this product meets such and such legal requirements so that I can keep my employees safe when they're mixing pharmaceuticals or whatever it is. That is a very particular use case that you're going to want to support through other things. You can get it only so far.
But part of that is also product data, right? Where in the customer journey is it? Where on your website services is that particular element of the journey? Yeah, you're going to want to have a physical conversation there.
And it's not any different than the text messages that you, me, and Ruthi were sending on retail the other day where we were saying Yeah. You know, some of these new digital-first, Instagram first even, not even fully digital, but Instagram first, brands that are now opening up stores in malls or Mall of America here in the Twin Cities. Even the in-person physical piece is to support digital sales. Where it's the stores can serve as a particular thing.
It's not necessarily, selling a product like you would with a JC Penney or a Kohl's or Bloomingdale's. For certain people, and I'm totally included in this if I'm going to buy something, I want to feel it first to know that that's not too thick, that's not too thin. This white shirt's not see-through.
But then also…fashion has a particular problem in that one designer really fits me, another designer, it looks like I'm squeezing into something I shouldn't be wearing. Even though they're the same size, they're targeted to the same midlife male or whatever you want to say. So yeah, you have to go try it on, you have to go see if it works.
But with these, these new ones, at least the experiences that I've had with a lot of these, newer brands, You're essentially driven to the iPads that are set up around the only desk in the entire space to then buy the version of it that you want, because they only have that shirt in red. Well, I don't look good in red, so I'm going to have to go get the blues or the blacks or whatever. But then they'll just ship it to me.
Sure. That is a totally different sales model and the store has a totally different function, in that case than that kind of traditional…
Alex Pokorny: Yeah. I guess we've talked about a couple of different ways of the traditional retailer, and traditional service providers shifting over to a digital mindset, and there are those who are in the digital-first shifting over to how do you basically expand and break into new markets?
You do that possibly through retail and going back to that kind of brick-and-mortar experience of how you build in that area and that you can attract a new set of clients, a new set of customers to it. That's a shift.
Dave Dougherty: And this is fully back to my thesis, that SEO is the business. Right?
Because if you're going to have store locations, if you're going to have physical experiences, you're going to also want local SEO. You're going to want the reviews, you're going to want all the citations, all of the traditional promotional stuff that you're going to do around opening up a new location like the PR, the news interviews, and all of the other things that you're going to try to do. All of that goes into what is that SERP experience when I type in brand XYZ.
Alex Pokorny: Or product XYZ. Yeah.
Dave Dougherty: Is it within 25 miles of me? No. Okay.
Alex Pokorny: How bad are their customer service reviews? Like, do I really want to go?
Dave Dougherty: And then as you get more and more specialized. Like in particular the guitars that I'm into, are, frustratingly, there are only one or two stores in over a hundred-mile radius that sell the particular kind that I want…
Alex Pokorny: Yeah, tell me about it.
Dave Dougherty: …and that I like. And so that's a particular problem for me because now all of a sudden it's like, “Okay, I have to do a day off work. I have to drive to this place to try it out. Or you know, I just drop a huge amount of money for something that I think I'm going to like. But really, honestly, every guitar is an individual snowflake, so you gotta try it.
You know, although, yeah, I've been told I'm not allowed a new guitar for a while, so…
Alex Pokorny: That's tough. As you speak with two of them on either side of you.
Dave Dougherty: I'm down to 12! I'm down to 12!
Alex Pokorny: Down to 12. There you go. Down to 12.
Dave Dougherty: So I don't have a problem. I don't know. When was the last time you bought a tool?
Alex Pokorny: I was, I know, I was about to say there's, there is the same story. There's a woodworking store and it is way too far for me to go to, but it is the only one around and in the big box stores there's a limit to how DIY intensive they get. Once you pass that level, you want some specialty stuff and my gosh, they don't carry it, so.
Yeah. I still need to go. keep planning out this visit that I'm eventually going to do to this particular store, and it's like, it's just a little, it's quite a bit too far for me to go to in a regular day.
Dave Dougherty: There's a particular British Amp [Victory Amps] that I want to try. But the closest retailer is in Indiana.
Alex Pokorny: From Minnesota? Yeah. That's a stretch.
Dave Dougherty: But then you're like, “Eh, I'm in Indiana.” So maybe I'll drive a little farther and end up in Nashville.
Alex Pokorny: No complaints to those who are in Indiana.
Dave Dougherty: Yeah, no. Indiana's great.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah. Nashville might be a more fun weekend
Dave Dougherty: If I'm going to drive that far. I want something else to do other than just jump in and head back, you know.
But along those lines, we talked as you get more specialized, right? This is where we've also talked, as SEOs forever and ever on the generic terms versus the long tail. All of this consumer behavior, all of the discussions that we're having is exactly that, right?
You can bring somebody in on the general brand awareness and all the activities that you would do for that. That'll be your top-level website stuff. But then as you get more specialized or you're addressing the individual needs of your audience, you're going to have the content that is there.
And I feel like, going back to the beginning of our conversation where we've said the technical versus the creative. I feel like organizations for a really long time have just said “Let the creatives be creative. Let them do their thing because they're the ones that create all the content that brings people in.
“Then we'll have the technical people that will set up the systems that enable things to work, and they can polish the content that's there.” Right? But you need both, you know? You can only polish crap so much. You need to do more stuff.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah. There was a major retailer that, I don't want to name them because, I mean, it was, it was pretty tragic, but they deleted their entire site and redid it into something that basically looks like the weekly flyer that they used to mail out.
They had the team who was in charge of the flyer basically recreate the entire website. And not surprisingly, it didn't index well and it didn't get much for traffic and it basically shot to the bottom pretty, pretty darn fast. It was just this like, are you kidding me? How does a nationwide retailer think that that's a smart call and a good idea? But it still is.
At that same point who's making these decisions? Do they fully understand basically that additional front door to the business? And do they see where basically those other channels play a part?
No, print catalogs aren't out, and direct mail is not out. The email campaigns are not out. Facebook campaigns, heck you name the particular platform and those campaigns are not out because of who your audience is. If your audience happens to be there, then yeah, it's a valid place to throw some money down and to go after.
Dave Dougherty: Now this next idea, I want to, we'll have to circle back because I want Ruth's opinion on this as well. We'll at least tease a future episode, right now with it.
But recently I was watching some old, Clayton Christensen videos and presentations that he did. There's one where he did at a Google employee conference or something, and they put it on YouTube. But his thesis was essentially on the research that he has done, or did before he died, at Harvard that good management is what makes organizations able to scale and be very successful for a period of time. But then good management is also the thing that will drive them to fail and die horribly in the end. Because when you stop innovating, you start managing what you have, which then starts the spiral down into worse culture, less innovation, having a harder time hiring people, and all of these things.
It's a fantastic, watch, so I'd recommend that I'll put it in the show notes and maybe we'll give ourselves some homework to do a deeper dive on that presentation. I feel like that does come into it as well where, yeah, some of these organizations that we see, to your point, We've always done a weekly thing. That's what drives people into the stores because I see the brochure or the flyer tucked under their arm when they grab the cart or they agree to look at the car. So let's just do the brochure online, and that'll be fine because they'll buy from everybody else.
But no this is a channel that you have to optimize for. And the person that's making that kind of decision is trying to optimize the budget that they've been given in order to hit the growth goals that they've been given, you know?
Alex Pokorny: Yeah, it reminds me of a Denny Hecker billboard [former MN automotive dealer] and it bugged the heck out of me because I ended up driving past it every day as I went to work. It was literally like a section of the classified ads as a billboard. Like impossible to read font. And just tons and tons of text all over this billboard.
And every time I passed it, I kept thinking, who do you think you are? I thought was the dumbest idea. It took me forever in the daily commute to finally even understand who put up the billboard because the text was so small. It was just one of these mind-blowingly dumb things that sometimes gets done in marketing and a lot of people get exposed to it, sadly. Not a great brand impression.
Dave Dougherty: You know what, there was one really good exercise or at least my way of getting around that when I was in the agency side. Because you get the client feedback on the billboards or whatever and We need to have this because this is important to blah, blah, blah.
So you took a TV, you put it in the corner of the meeting room, you put the billboard design on the TV, and then you have everybody sit where they're facing away from it.
Then you say, glance at it, and come back. How much information did you get from that glance? That's what you're getting when people are driving by. And then it was like, “Oh, okay. Yeah, get rid of everything else.”
Alex Pokorny: We did a similar thing. It was a flashcard kinda thing. To print it off. Basically, it was like, okay, this is your design. Okay. Do you like it? What did you think of it? You asked very specific questions. What did you think of this element or this element?
And they’re like can I see it again? It's like, well, no you can't because you drove past it already.
Dave Dougherty: Unless you want to buy a series of billboards down that particular road.
Alex Pokorny: Exactly. I've seen that done in South Dakota and North Dakota has that. It's cheap enough. You can do it.
Alex’s Perspective on Technical SEO vs Content SEO
Dave Dougherty: So I know, you and I both have hard outs here. So in, in the final section, I guess what are your thoughts on the technical versus the content piece?
Alex Pokorny: I think it's getting tricky. I will say it's getting tricky because if you're a large enough organization, Target, Walmart, or something large like that, you're going to have a hard time having just one SEO who can be holistic enough to cover those two areas. You have too many teams, too many large-scale content teams, agencies, PR groups, you name it, that are constantly doing stuff in a given project. Or code launches, technical changes, you name it, that is also happening in that same week.
You're going to need talent. So I think we're starting to see a shift where you do have split talent, but the big thing then becomes who's going to tie it together? And the team? So speaking of management, good management or bad, I think you have to have some sort of a manager who can understand, knows both and has that experience, but their main focus is tying it together, keeping it holistic, keeping on that big picture and talking to those teams making sure that they know what each other are doing and that they're moving in the same direction. These both can go off in their own direction so fast, and it's fine. They'll do great, but it won't be that good.
And that's where I think that key piece kicks in still that kind of “Head of SEO” piece, and we'll do it for a later episode about talking about like head of search versus head of SEO. How do you create that? How do you ladder that up in a way where teams are actually working together, innovation cycles…
Speaking of stagnant companies. How do you bring in an innovation cycle to boost things up again? You know, hackathons, you name it there are methods there. That is a difficult question. I think it's getting more and more difficult as time goes on. And when we have Ruthi back, we'll definitely get into kind of an AI conversation about where content goes, the importance of it, the creation of it. How much do you need to create?
Like mobile searching, people are very verbose. Speaking of the long tail, they go super long tail and they're searching for things where it's a combination of phrases that have never existed before. Happens all the time. It's going to change.
Dave Dougherty: If you want to see a really interesting debate on the content side of things. Go to ChatGPT's Instagram profile where they show all of the Dall-E, or I should say OpenAi, they have their Dall-E images and they basically showcase what some people have done with it.
Now, anybody who's been in the content game long enough will realize, Okay, so that's the Dall-E creation, but they're combining it with this particular Photoshop template. And some of them are very cool. If you click into any of them, start looking at the comments and you have the true believers and you have the people who don't want it to be happening. For sure. And then all the passive people in the middle.
It is on the one hand, it's really cool to see how everybody is approaching it differently, but it does reinforce in my mind that AI and the tools that are built off of it are a boost to what you are already good at. You know, the fact that I could have a robot write code for me doesn't change the fact that I don't know Python right now.
And so if I have it do code, do I trust it? If I say, write me a Python script for this, that, or the other? Maybe. But do I want to launch that on anything that I would represent people for, or myself, or would have an impact on the perception of me or the brands that I represent? No, absolutely not. I'm not going to take that risk.
But for individual creators, you might start seeing some of those things. It is an interesting, interesting debate.
Anyway, so in the last few minutes, and in the last section of the show. What's your recommendation for this week?
Recommendations From What We’ve Discovered Recently
Alex Pokorny: I'll put in the show notes, but it's the Will Critchlow presentation about his experience of search and some of the trends. It's really good because it's not just talking about the trends that we know about. He's talking a lot about where did we first see evidence of those trends and where did that go? So that you can get into an inspirational cycle of looking at things and saying: Yep. I see that this is a teaser of what's to come and this is important and I should pay attention to it.
I really like that aspect of that presentation, so I'll find that one and share it. And yourself?
Dave Dougherty: So I might be really late to the game on this, but, I recently rediscovered an artist that I listened to a lot, like six years ago and then just stopped for whatever reason.
Alex Pokorny: Yeah. Brittney Spears was cool. Yeah.
Dave Dougherty: It wasn't. No, it was not. Ok. It was Dead Mouse and I forgot how good those first couple of records are. I've been revisiting those but my recommendation is not Dead Mouse.
My recommendation is on Apple Music they now have at the bottom of the profile, the record company of the particular group as thing as a thing to click.
Apple Music now has links to a page for the record company that helped distribute the album. The link like that shown above can be found on the page for a particular album.
So then it becomes a collection of all of the releases from that record company. So as a way to discover new music...
Alex Pokorny: That's cool.
Dave Dougherty: ...or artists that are similar to what you're listening to and you like, you can go on that. I know a lot of people are always like, Man, I listen to the same stuff because I just don't know how to find new artists anymore.
That could be a cool way for people to discover things because I know when I've done that, I've realized that almost all the artists that I like to listen to are out of like one or two particular record companies.
Alex Pokorny: I can imagine.
Dave Dougherty: So yeah, check it out. Look at the metadata, because metadata does make for new fun features, in certain things. They can be absolute headaches too, but, yeah.
Alex Pokorny: Sounds good.
Dave Dougherty: Anyway, everybody, thank you for hanging out. Let us know what you think about anything that we've covered here. I know we've circled around a lot. We've covered a lot. Technical versus holistic SEO. What are your thoughts? Content creation?
Let us know and stay tuned for the next episode after you have liked and subscribed and helped out the show. So, take care and we'll see you.
