.jpg)
Numbers and Narratives
Numbers and Narratives bridges the gap between the marketing/customer experience and data - come listen to marketing and CX experts talk about how to use data to better engage with your customers and provide a great experience.
Numbers and Narratives
How SEO Ruined the Internet, and why AI is going to save it - Sean and Ibby
This week, we had a pretty fascinating chat about how SEO and content marketing are changing. Turns out 97% of web pages get zero (yes, actually zero) traffic from Google, and we went into detail about how SEO has basically ruined the internet by gaming the system with crappy listicles and generic content.
Key stuff we covered:
- How AI is taking over search results (but might not be terrible)
- Why most SEO strategies are kind of pointless now
- Why distribution matters more than ever
- Using programmatic SEO (which sounds cool)
We got into some really practical stuff about content strategy - like how companies need to stop delegating thought leadership to junior writers and actually get their experts involved. Sean makes this great point about how brands should create content that's actually valuable, not just trying to game Google's algorithm.
All right Sean. In the length of a tweet or tweet thread, what did we talk about today?
Speaker 2:How SEOs ruined the internet. Ai is going to save it and you need to get better at content marketing.
Speaker 1:That's, I think, the best intro yet. All right, everyone, enjoy the episode. I'm Amit Syed. I'm Sean Collins, and this is Numbers and Narratives. I'm Mubi Syed. I'm Shaq Hans, and this is Numbers and Narratives. For those of you who aren't getting interested in recording podcasts, we use this product called Zencaster and I think that like Zencaster is like 90% great and 10% like catastrophically bad. We've like had a couple episodes or one or two where they've basically just like not finished properly and, you know, you just kind of can't get the guest on again. There's like still one guest who we've never published, two guests actually, but one guest we haven't ever published the podcast because it just didn't Like it was just we just never got the recording properly, and so that means all of you missed out on a conversation with elon musk.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, you've all, you've all got really mad at us because we he was.
Speaker 2:He was episode three. Because he was like I'm, why am I not the first guy you came to for this? And so we brought him in on episode three. And then technical issues.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so the Elon Musk archive is somewhere in the Zencaster background. All right, sean.
Speaker 2:If you pay to subscribe to our podcast, we'll send you the Elon Musk raw files.
Speaker 1:Do we have a way, do we have a way, for people to pay for this podcast?
Speaker 2:You have to Venmo me directly Venmo, sean Venmo, sean Venmo but yeah, venmo Sean the. Boss Collins Shoot me the annual subscription via Venmo.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sean the Boss Collins. All right, I probably should. We should probably get this going, because I have to run for a flight at some point and I need to stop touching my hair because you know people do watch us on YouTube, sean, and I need to stop touching my hair because you know people do watches like YouTube, sean. All right, so tell me about the NerdWallet SEO research that you guys did. I'm so interested. I don't know anything about this. By the way, we did not discuss this before listeners.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so, important note, I didn't do any research. I read a blog post by somebody else, so I guess that was my research, which is, you know, in the world of content marketing, which is one of my points from my rant today, uh, that would. That would be all the research that so many, so many fucking content marketers do. So it was basically what they said. You know, nerd wallet largely makes its money through affiliate deals and uh and stuff like that. Traffic, or a large portion of their business model is based off dominating organic search, bringing in people. They click on the recommendations and NerdWallet can speak for that.
Speaker 1:And so that makes, I think, all of the credit card decisions that I've made like NerdWallet has actually been a pretty significant research place.
Speaker 2:Their insights are great, right, they really do understand, they're a phenomenal resource, but you should know that they are getting paid for the recommendations. Yeah, for sure. But so this model obviously makes them very beholden to organic traffic and therefore changes in how they rank in the Google algorithm can really mess with their business. And so, basically, this writer at Ahrefs looked at the impact to and, since they're public, you know, basically looked at their S1 filings on revenue and all that and was able to kind of map algorithm changes to revenue changes and say like here's where the Google algorithm changed and impacted the walletWallet team. And so you know, blah, blah, blah, it was pretty fascinating and it showed like, hey, I looked at a bunch of the changes they made and how they've rebounded since and blah, blah, blah, like it's really just a great thing.
Speaker 2:But overall, you know, it's something I've been thinking about a good bit and you know, seo has always been kind of a long tail strategy, right, like it takes a while for you to get enough content marketing to matter. It takes a while for you to build up the links and get the traffic and and climb up the rankings, um, and so you know it should not be your go-to play if you need fast growth, and I think coming times like AI is going to dominate search in a way that most people aren't prepared for. So if your company is super reliant on organic traffic, you need to start figuring out a solution to hedge against that, because more and more stuff is going to be answered on the SERP search engine result page and so you can't expect to get a ton of traffic, especially, I think, upper funnel traffic. Right, like if I'm searching for Cotera or say like sign up for Cotera or something like that, cotera will still rank very high. It's the informational searches uh, right now at least, that are like there's no reason for you to have to like Google what are the right personalization softwares or best personalization softwares, and then like go read a listicle, which is always an awful experience anyways.
Speaker 2:Again, those are all affiliate links. Those were not unbiased opinions about what is actually the best. It's companies who are making money saying these are best or it's other, you know shitty bloggers realizing this is an easy way to get links and get traffic and so it's a way to kind of climb the SEO ranks. Like it's. It's not. It's just not as nice and valuable as you think it is. But so that kind of stuff can be answered by AI and with the. You know just to on this search engine result page. It can give you an answer and you can click to that if you want. But most people are going to be pretty satisfied with just whatever the AI response says, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was talking to somebody about this the other day where they were like they were talking about how they use the SERP AI result and then they like try to use that to like maybe like narrow in their query a little bit. How does that? Do you know anything about how that search engine result page works? Like in my head, like is it Google basically just taking like Gemini, which is like their version of chat GPT, and chucking like the first page of results into chat GPT and asking it like here is your query, here's the payload of information. Give me like a summarized response.
Speaker 2:A little bit I mean it's not.
Speaker 2:It's not that grossly grotesque, okay. It is more like using a perplexity or chat GPT right, like they've trained a bunch of agents on this already. It's not just like scraping the first 10 things they would have organically shown and then rewarding those. They are actively at least according to Google looking to get resources from smaller businesses, more niche businesses, other publishing places right Like Reddit continues to climb in the rankings, and so brands should probably spend more time on Reddit. What's interesting? I think people are freaking out about this AI domination of the search engine and, like I don't think that anyone should other than these major massive companies, actually Spicy Spicy. So, first of all, ahrefs did some research a while ago and found that 97% of web pages get zero traffic from Google and an additional 2% get one Wait did you say, 97%, 97, 96.55.
Speaker 2:From Google and an additional 2% get one to 10 visits a month. So that means roughly 99% of web pages get fewer than 10 site visits a month from. And so you ask yourself, like how much is this going to demolish me? Like? And there certainly are businesses that are reliant on organic search and and they should, you know, properly, be uh, examining their strategy and coming up with other plans and hedges and stuff like that, and I recognize that will hurt for them.
Speaker 2:But I've joked to you about this before. Like SEOs ruined the internet is one of my stake in the ground stances. Can you explain to the listener Most, yeah, most content marketing sucks now because SEOs learned how to play the game that Google put together, and so now it's instead of having great original thought, instead of awarding different opinions and more researched stuff, they reward you for just having links, having a strong domain, and so the more you can just you know you can pay for links. There's a lot of ways you can kind of gamify the system. That's why shitty listicles exist. It's purely just just to rank high, it's not because it's actually a good content format this is interesting.
Speaker 1:this is interesting because the thing that I just realized is that a lot of times I will just, whenever I'm looking for doing some research, my brain automatically types in like site colon, redditcom afterward, because I want to like, find something organic, like I want to have, I want to find a conversation where people are like and that's going to start happening.
Speaker 2:they are going to be ranking organic even without that. They will start ranking higher routine, yeah, but like, most brands are lazy about content marketing, right? So let's, I'm going to tell you what I mean by that one. They, under they use know a content marketer or a copywriter to write their their content marketing. That's often delegated down to a junior or mid-level person who is underpaid, not experienced in the field they're writing about and is supposed to be writing thought leadership.
Speaker 2:If you're a company who's trying to execute a thought leadership strategy, have your goddamn thought leaders be part of that content creation. They don't necessarily have to write it. They can sit and do an interview with your content marketer. Content doesn't just have to be written anymore. Have them just talk for 10 minutes, transcribe that, edit it, and there's some content marketing. Like, there's a lot of ways you can approach this, but what so many brands do is they they're trying to check a box and just like ship blogs, and so they do it fast. They do all their research off of page one of the Google SERP and so they're just quoting the exact same pages that they're actually trying to compete against, but they're going to link to them and reference them, thus making those other pages actually get more relevancy and value. They're not having any unique opinions because they're just taking what those same 10 other content marketers have already gotten, rather than referencing their expertise, their perspective, right. And then they think that just by publishing the blog, you know, mission complete, we wrote it, it's out there now. Surely traffic will come in.
Speaker 2:Like, distribution needs to be a deliberate effort. God bless you, thank you. Like, distribution needs some serious thought and attention, and it's not just publishing it in. You know, submitting your new site map to search console. It is. You should have a distribution plan across. You know, all your social channels, your email, um. Are you sharing it with people? Are you, you know, hitting your crm up with people? That are the articles relevant to both existing customers and prospects? Right, like, how is this actually being used? And if you think about it that way, yes, google is one distribution method, but if you're writing up content just for Google, you are underutilizing it, and so this shouldn't be that big of a blow.
Speaker 1:Okay, so let me kind of parrot some of this back to you, cause this is this is fascinating. It's something that I really want to learn a lot about but don't fundamentally know that much about. So companies are like things like listicles aren't working as much. People have to change their content strategy. The sort of AI SERP is going to change this a little bit, and it's changing things. What should I do? Today? I want to hear a couple of the ideas that we're throwing around for SEO purposes.
Speaker 1:One of the content marketing strategies that's working for Cotera is again, for those of you guys who listen what my company does is we have AI software that sits on top of your data and helps you do everything from understand what your customers love about your business to help you retain your customers more, to help you personalize your marketing. One of the things that works well for us on the customer experience side is having that sort of like organic research where you can type in the name of a company and it'll pull all of the sort of positive sentiment, negative sentiment and categorize it using our AI and make a public listing on it. Now, you can't push web traffic to an appurl, right. I can't have SEO rank our dashboards highly because they don't actually have words on them. So one of the things that we're doing is we're hiring people to write content around some of the more popular companies, and this is a long-term SEO play. That is kind of one of the only things that we're like thinking about doing. There's a couple other thoughts that are going around my head, but now you have a little bit of a context to like what my business is thinking about for seo purposes.
Speaker 1:Um, because what we're thinking of is I don't necessarily necessarily need to be able to rank highly for how to do research about a company, because I think there's actually a lot of people that are ranked highly on that one how to do like topic analysis or whatever. I think that it's going to be hard to rank on that one. But one thing that I think is actually going to be easy to rank on is like how does Allbirds compare to Alloyoga, right, like the very, very specific ones? And I think if we can get like a very, if we can get like a lot of those out, we've kind of been able to show that the SEO for things that don't get searched that often but do get searched sometimes, we actually rank pretty highly for it and it ends up leading the track. What's your sort of recommendation for what I should do to kind of get on top of this SERP AI thing, like, if I want to be, you know, be at the or maybe it's the wrong way of thinking about it.
Speaker 2:No, I mean, I think it's an interesting point, right. So there's a couple of things you could do. One you can go with like a programmatic SEO approach, and so you could. And so, programmatic SEO, basically you predefine a format. It's almost like setting a scraper, right, like you tell it what to look for, how to, what the keys are, what data it should collect, and then you can kind of automate this scraping. But, yeah, so you can do programmatic SEO. You predefine the how you're going to map data to content. You kind of predefine what some of the content is going to be, and that's gotten even easier now with some of these AI tools, right, like you can set a couple steps where it kind of does the app analysis that pumps results into a middle layer, which can be Cloud or ChatGPT or whatever, and you can have that output a block. So that's the first thing you could do is programmatic SEO, and you could do that pretty largely at scale. You could start to come up with network effects of all sorts of brands and their competitors. Yeah, you can win these super long tail searches A very few if anyone else has written about them, and so if someone does search, you will rank high.
Speaker 2:If a, if google does do an ai search, it will be referencing your blog most likely, and so if anyone does click, you know it'll go to you. You probably won't get too many clicks, but, um, but maybe you will and you know, or I guess that'd be a percentage you wouldn't get that many clicks. There's not that many searches, um. But the other thing to think about, right, is kind of my point is, um, content marketing should be bifurcated from the idea of SEO, Uh, and so you can write these blogs and produce this content and have it be valuable, independent of it being a major traffic driver for organic search. And that's because it does fuel your LinkedIn content. It can fuel YouTube content. You could have a whole podcast about it. You can create a whole lot more mediums.
Speaker 2:You could then almost turn it into this for your use case in particular. Right, you could almost like, turn it into a meta analysis where you've now run hey, we've done this analysis for 10,000 brands, comparing them against their competitors, and here are the key trends that, like, inexplicably, are linked to higher ratings and lower ratings. And so now you have, you know, the credibility that comes with a book. You have, um, you, you know people who are going to get that, that book and learn about cotera, learn about you, you can, it's like goes back to that founder brand idea where like ibi is now building a name in it's cotera, but it's also ibi, right.
Speaker 2:And so now, um, we're kind of decoupling the idea of like content just for organic traffic, and so we're actually moving back to what HubSpot was pushing the early days of inbound. You know, where the content exists to provide value to the reader, not the content exists to get traffic. So that I can have you pixeled. Try and get you to download an ebook, try and get you to sign up for my newsletter while you're here reading this blog. We're going back to a world where the content exists purely to provide a great experience, whether that's to learn something, to answer a question, just to be entertained, whatever, well, the purpose of Google, then right, like, that's the reason.
Speaker 1:I think this is like hey, like people are going here not to try to buy a product, necessarily, but to. It's the same thing that we talked about during last week's episode. You want to be it's cool to not explicitly sell. You want to build a brand, you want to build like a.
Speaker 2:If people keep landing on your site because they're making very, very similar queries, they're much more likely to probably buy your product because they're affiliating you with that, you know thing, right, yeah, I mean, like when you think about, like when you go out to dinner with with a sales rep, right, if, if they can get it across quickly that, hey, this is, this is not a sales pitch we're just hanging out and having dinner and like whatever, your guard comes down and you're now making a relationship with that person and you know, with the venn diagram, that person's company, if, if you feel like you're being sold to, your guard is up the entire time, you're having less fun, first of all, but you're also not open to the relationship building side of it. Um, and you know whether it's the mere exposure effect, whether it's, I don't, I don't know many psychological effects. So that's the one I list. A lot Get off my case, um, but uh, you know if the more positive.
Speaker 2:There are a lot of softwares that, like, I don't use. But I know that whenever I come to this problem set, I've already kind of decided who I'm going with. Um, right, and even if you already have a solution, you know there's a rule of thumb that 95% of your target market is not shopping actively for your product at any given time. So that means 5% is. Are you going to concentrate your product at any given time. So that means five percent is. Are you going to concentrate your marketing efforts on trying to identify that five percent and only be focused on them, or do you want to address the hundred percent of people that are in the tam and let them kind of guide themselves down the front right?
Speaker 1:that's the definitely the right way. Okay, I like the ai stuff by the. That is also something that we're heavily invested in. If you write good, organic content, like using a human, you can actually train an AI to follow that path and it doesn't sound bad. The one thing that you do run the risk of is I do think that this is apocryphal, because I've only I don't have like actual data on this, but I have a friend who runs a company and they tried hacking seo by making a ton of ai generated content, uh, and they got put in google jail for a while. Like they. They like stopped getting any traffic to their website for a month. So I don't quite know how that works and, again, apocryphal, it's one sort of data point. I don't know if they did something else that was bad. I don't know if Google is doing this at scale. I have no idea, but that's something they did say to me. Yeah, I don't know if you're, I know if you're seeing that kind of thing yeah, I, I think that's the association of of two.
Speaker 2:You know that's correlation, not causation in my mind, like, my guess is that he was punished for that plus something else, or the content wasn't that great and and so just having a ton of content isn't the same as having good content right.
Speaker 1:I wonder if the amount of content published in a short amount of time also matters, like if you publish, like, 500 pages in one day.
Speaker 2:It's got to raise some alarm, right.
Speaker 1:I don't really know that much about crawler technology and I don't know how it works, but that's pretty sweet. This has been good advice. Okay, I don't really know that much about crawler technology and I don't know how it works, but that's pretty sweet. Um, this is.
Speaker 2:this has been good advice. Okay, I think it's about time for you to go to the airport. The one thing we didn't talk about this week is who did not sponsor this episode.
Speaker 1:This episode is not sponsored by send spark, which is a. Okay. I'm going to one of the things that we're trying, and I don't think anyone who's listening to this podcast is. Part of this campaign, I hired a really cool he's part-time on the team working with us on just trying out some different sales strategies, and he showed me this product called SendSpark, and SendSpark SendSpark, basically is one of those things.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you're getting this, but it makes a video, but it deepfakes you, so it personalizes the video for the person that you're sending it to, so you can send thousands of personalized videos. I don't know I'm being like I'm putting my hands back. I don't really know if this is going to work. I don't really know if this is going to work. I don't know if people listen to this. He's like it's worth a try.
Speaker 1:We should just make a lot of personalized content and try to personalize that scale, which, I agree, I think providing value. The thing that we are sending them a video about is something that is personalized specifically to them. I just don't want to make a thousand videos. Sendspark's personalization is not great. I will send you a video that is quote unquote personalized Sean, and you will see. Uh, so this week's episode is not sponsored by Senspark, a software that you can use to deep fake yourself and maybe trick people into thinking that you've sent them a personalized video. Send us an email if you want to yell at us, if you want to be angry, if you want to suggest somebody that we have on as a guest, if you want to suggest topics for future episodes. Send this to your friends, get the conversation started and let us know what you think. Thanks so much.