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The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
Entity SEO & AI Search: Winning in the New Search Landscape with Zach Chahalis
00:57:23
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- [00:03]
A
This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential?
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B
Let's get started.
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A
Howdy. Welcome back to another fun filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I am your host, Matt Bertram. I am just having a great time here. I know we've been releasing these weekly, we've been recording about three podcasts a week, so a lot of great content to come. I got zach here from apartments.com who used to be over there at IPool Rank, and we've been just getting to know each other and talking about a lot of things. He was just at pubcon and we were catching up on kind of what's going on because things are changing so quickly. And Zach, welcome to the show.
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B
Yeah, thank you for having me.
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A
Awesome. Well, let's just kind of pick up where we got where we left off before. I just thought we would include everybody in the conversation. What were the things that you were picking up from pubcon of things that's maybe changed since let's say, SEO Week. And I know SMX advance just happened, so, I mean, things are just rapid fire right now.
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B
Yeah, it seemed like folks are still maybe struggling or grappling with how to think about the impact of AI and generative engine searches and things like that. It was interesting. There's definitely a lot of conflicting opinion on the impact of what's going to happen here, how we should look at things, how we should look at data points, KPRs, things like that. But yeah, I think we're still maybe at a crossroads a little bit in the industry where folks are not 100% certain on the direction to go. But I also think that's maybe a subset of folks not necessarily knowing how to evolve as the search engines are evolving. I think a lot of folks might get stuck in the legacy ways of thinking about search engine optimization and not thinking about the generative engines or not thinking about the impact of things like AI mode that are coming into play.
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A
Yeah, I think everybody's going to wake up with AI mode when that hits and the 10 blue links are gone. I mean, they're pretty much like pushed so far down the page at this point that I'm seeing this inverse correlation between you get to the top spot in Google and you lose traffic because now you're in the overviews or you're in the people also ask. And so traffic's going down. But then my brand searches for a number of my clients are going up. Right. And Then I'm like, going, okay, how do I track attribution across all these different platforms? And we're having quarterly meetings with clients right now. And, you know, I'm starting to talk about Reddit and, like, the information architecture that you're needing to build. And I've, I've had a couple clients. They're not ready yet. Like, they're not ready yet and they're not changing. And I think a lot of people are still playing that old game. And luckily, a lot of that old game, if you do the traditional stuff really well, does have a positive impact on the new game. So, like, I think it was like, what was it like when Google Adwords, you know, they keep changing, like, the interfaces, you just like, wait because you know how to use. You know how to use it the old way. I feel like it took me a real minute to get immersed in what's happening and to understand where we're going, because it's like search just broke out of the website and it's just scattered all over the place. It's running in all these different directions. And you're like, what do I do first? What is the impact? What is the waiting? You know, how should I think about this? And I think. I don't know. Did you hear people talking about different frameworks? I know, what is it? Malik from Search Atlas had a couple different frameworks that he was talking about. I want to bring him on. He was talking about a scholar framework of like, here's how to look at the content. And he came up with a, A new weighting system for like, link power or something like that. And it was a. It was like an aggregated, aggregated score. But it was like, here's all the different things, and this is really what we should be looking at. So it, it could be a little bit of marketing, I guess, but. But I think it was still hitting on all the right things.
- [04:49]
B
Yeah, I, I see that as a general theme, and I think there's just several different ways that folks have been approaching it, whether they're thinking about the value of an entity and the value of, I hate to say page rank, because that's, I mean, still kind of in theory, a metric that folks do look at, but, like, thinking about how authority is flowing between entities and how you tie the relationships to one another. I'm just seeing it referred to in a lot of different ways. And in some cases, I'm seeing it more thought out. There's definitely a lot of folks in the SEO space that are kind of Taking this to the next level, folks doing it more at an elementary basis too, where they're just beginning to think about the idea of vector embeddings and how certain pieces of content relate to one another. Query fan out is one that I see also being thought about in, I guess I'll say different levels of success and different levels of depth so far, but I think the folks that are thinking a little bit more intricately about that are probably going to do better in the long run. But I do agree with you. Like I'm kind of, I'm in an interesting spot in how I've adopted myself here because the real estate space hasn't changed as rapidly as some other areas in search engines. So you know, with things like E commerce, with travel, with news and editorial type stuff, there's a, a bigger impact of AI on that. We, we've certainly seen some impacts of, of AI overviews, AI mode generative engines impacting some, some traffic numbers and visibility and that's just everyone seeing that. But I don't see something like an AI mode as frequently in the real estate space. I see it for something like hey, what's the average rent of a two bedroom apartment in New York City? Instances like that. I see us ranked number one traditionally and as the top source in the AI overview. I still see those things bringing traffic to the site. I'm not sure how much that's been impacted given these pages are maybe a little bit newer on our side and didn't get the full weight of pre aio. But we're not overviews on our commercial type queries just yet. Or if we see Google experimenting with them, they're kind of bad. I mean I know folks are going to be surprised by a overviews giving bad answers, but like we've seen instances where it'll be like, hey, I want to find an apartment in Atlanta. Oh well, we recommend that you go visit apartments.com and these other websites. Like cool, I could have saved that space.
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A
But yeah, so okay, so one of the things that I'm, I'm kind of implying, I guess, and I want to ferret it out a little bit more is you mentioned this early on too. Like people don't understand the impact yet. And really it's only a fraction of the overall search from Google, right? It's just a fraction, but it's where things are going is what people are looking at and concerned about. And that's kind of the feedback we got from a number of our clients that were in industries that haven't been impacted is like, hey, like I'm not seeing much change and I'm currently still using Google and you know, like, I think we're good and I think that there's that bell curve, I guess of you know, early adopters and the transition's gonna take longer. Like I remember my mom, my mom's one of the first employees at Microsoft and she told me I wanted to get set up those like before Redbox, the Redbox things. And I wanted to put, I wanted to get those set up everywhere because I saw like a bunch of pharmacies and grocery stores didn't have them. And my mom was like, no, don't do that. Like everything's going online, everything's going to be streaming in like couple years and Redbox is still holding strong. I mean they can just raise their prices. I mean maybe they, they've owned the market and there's not a bunch of players anymore. I get it. But I mean, and it will go the way I guess of Blockbuster eventually. But there, there's a long tail on this stuff and if you're focused on the traditional stuff then does it matter that much now? I guess people are reposition like getting positioning ahead of it. Is that kind of what you're, what your thought is?
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B
I think so, yeah. I mean my long term prediction is that AI mode will become more of a default experience down the line at least. With the last adoption numbers I was seeing though, it was only hovering around like 1% to maybe somewhere between 1 and 2% now given it's been two or three weeks and that's with Google heavily pushing the, hey, try AI mode thing. I'm getting the push notifications all the time whenever I try and use Google or Chrome on my phone. I did see that it looks like the new version of Chrome. I just saw a couple folks talking about this on social media. Is now incorporating AI mode as an option in the URL bar. So I am curious if this continues to result in more adoption there. But I do think maybe some folks are a little anxious and putting themselves ahead of like the, the car before the horse type of thing. Right. I'm sure there are instances where folks want to start thinking about how this works and how to get involved with it. But the adoption rate. Yeah, I mean to your point, we're kind of in the beginning of that, that adoption curve where you have the early adopters that are doing it. Some of the folks that I've seen outside of the space and this is just my own personal experiences and Talking with folks kind of saying like, hey, I'm not really enjoying this, I'm not getting what I need out of it. If they're looking for more commercial based intent, if they're just asking it a question or, you know, they're, they're kind of treating it like a conversation engine, it's been doing okay, but I'm just not seeing folks go out of that system yet. And then you run into the issue. You mentioned this earlier, like where attribution is still kind of questionable. I know Google fixed the analytics measurement of attribution that might be coming in from AI mode, but there's still limited opportunity to click out of that into a website or just brings you into another Google experience. And we're seeing the same thing with other generative engines as well, where some do okay on attribution and some don't. But yeah, I do think folks are feeling the pressure to adopt and I think it's going to take time to get there. I think you've got time before AI mode becomes the standard.
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A
Yeah, I think we're in an echo chamber.
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B
I agree.
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A
And I literally ask every person I hang out with socially what they're doing with AI. Like, like what are you doing with chat GBT or you know, have you used any other stuff? Right. And chat GBT is a lot more personable than like Gemini for, for example. Right. When, when you're, when you're talking to it and like how are you using it? What are you using it for? And then, you know, there's some data that I, I was pretty shocked, Pete. Some people are leveraging it too much and they're like losing brain capacity because.
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B
Right, right.
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A
I just, you know, and so I don't think people know what to think about everything. And most people are just using like they're AI curious. Like I feel like that's what's really happening is people are going like let me go check it out and like, let me see, not let me incorporate it into everything I do and my workflow. And I just don't see that transition happening. I mean, I do think that on the enterprise level, I'm curious what, like at the executive team of a large company, how are they talking about incorporating maybe AI if we even remove ourselves from search for a second and just say there's this thing called AI and artificial intelligence and deep learning that, that we can take data warehouses and, and do all kinds of cool stuff with it now generally where we're not having to label everything and you know, like it's a lot more user friendly. Like when you're up with applied AI. What, what are big corporations like apartments.com, like how are they thinking about it? I'm just curious.
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B
Yeah, I think I'll speak as generally as I can.
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A
Yeah, talk, talk, talk just as you and what you think and don't share anything that you can't share.
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B
Y. I think it comes down to a couple of things, right? You're one, you're trying to figure out how to integrate AI in the products. I think that seems to be the hot thing where everyone's integrating AI in some form. I see a lot of companies doing this. Some are doing it in an interesting way, others are doing it in, I'll call them lackluster approaches. You know, speaking for ourselves, you know, we've announced some products on the front end where it's a conversational approach to finding a rental, finding a house. We also costar ownshomes.com so we have folks that are working on that side where you can kind of speak into it and in theory it understands, you know, what you're asking for, what amenities you're asking for and then can apply those filters dynamically. So that's been an aspect. We also have independent landlords and operators that exist. So we've been trying to create products that help them, I would say complete their listings and make them more successful in finding a renter on their side. So like we have the ability of helping you leverage AI to create a property description based on looking at some of the images of your property. So there's, there's aspects like that. I also think there's a good amount of conversation around how to integrate AI into efficiency and how to leverage that to be better at what you're doing on a day to day basis. That's resulting in kind of a couple of interesting things. As I see folks have dove into it and they understand like, hey, this is, this allows me to be quicker at what I do. It may still have errors. We need to account for that and be responsible for what we're doing with it. But then I also see a lot of folks that are scared of it kind of taking their jobs. And that's a reasonable concern. I'm not going to argue with that. What I've been trying to tell folks is, and maybe a random aside here, I have a weird fascination with engineering of certain things including like cruise ships and theme parks and things like that. But there was a good documentary on like how they built Disney World, like many, many, many years ago. And this analogy has kind of stuck with me, but they were talking about, hey, all the animators that were programming these rides were programming them manually and they're sitting there and they're getting recorded in their motions and things like that. But, but it came out with this box that allowed them to program what was going on and what you wanted the right to do. And a lot of folks were concerned, hey, this is just going to take my job, I'm not going to, I'm not using this, I don't want to get involved with it. And they started having conversations with those folks going, hey, this allows you to take some of the menial aspects of what you're trying to do on a day to day basis out of it so that you can focus on the things that do matter. So I see AI being adopted. I think it will be adopted more readily in the enterprise space to improve efficiency, whether that's helping to do initial coding or even coding whatsoever. I know Google at this point, I think they stated in their last earnings call they're using AI to write about half their code right now, somewhere around that number.
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A
And it's self improving, right?
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B
Right.
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What is it? Alpha or I forget what they call the engine, but it's self improving. So it's writing the code and then it's improving upon the code that's written to reduce, what was it like data storage by 7% or some number across all of their infrastructure, which is like a huge amount in savings or something like that.
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B
Yeah, they're going to keep trying to figure out ways of incorporating it into the day to day process and be more efficient. I do think folks still need to be careful with how they do integrate it or how they rely on it. Although it continues to get better. I see hallucinations, I see bad recommendations. I was talking to some developers the other day where it's recommending inefficient ways of handling some aspects of coding that either result in additional latency or say low time effects or things like that. So I just encourage folks to not be relying on it, but use it to help improve your efficiency. And even I was having a conversation with one of my team members this morning where, hey, we're trying to figure out how we organize this data that we have to ingest it into our platform just more effectively. And we kind of sat there going, we could regex this and probably get it 90% right, or we could stick in ChatGPT and see if it can do any better. And it did. I would say it got 99% of the way there. Couple of things that we didn't like, but that improved the efficiency. I don't have someone sitting there and going through multiple thousands of lines of a spreadsheet trying to recalculate something.
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A
Yeah, no, for sure. I feel like we're making this an AI podcast, which is awesome because I think that that's what everybody cares about and everybody's trying to orient their, their head around it. I think we covered quite a bit of information already. I wanted to walk back to entity SEO. I really haven't covered that as well as I should. We, we are working on entity SEO and schema markup internally. I am a customer of wordlift. I want to get the CEO on and you know, we're, we're early in this process, right, because we were doing a lot of manual schema and starting to build like these associations. But I would love for like you to kind of map out, you know, what dabbling with it looks like and then what advance looks like and just give people that understanding of we're now moving from like word to vector, like keyword association or even semantic search to relationships. And you know, how the knowledge graph plays into it because I mean, you see it at such a broad level and it's really important to understand all these different associations of, well, what makes up an apartment. Right. And I would love for you, like if, you know, you could speak to us like we're one of your team members and we're new and you're educating us on what this is and why it's important. I think that'd be pretty interesting.
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B
Yeah. So the way that we, we look at entity perspective is we're trying to tie together all of the information about what we work with on a day to day basis. So an entity could be defined as the organization of apartments dot com. It could be defined as a place. Hey, I'm, you know, I'm talking about apartments to rent in San Diego. It could be defined as an author, folks that are writing our content and contributing, contributing to that. There are multiple different ways of defining and thinking about what an entity is and how we explain it to the search engine in the form of structured data. So I'll come back to that in a second. But also in how we tie it together from a relationship conceptual perspective. So I talked a little bit about this actually in my pubcon talk last week where, you know, if you land on that Apartments for Rent in San Diego page that we have, there's contextual linking that exists, driven by the entities that we've defined that say, hey, you're in San Diego. But a lot of folks tend to look at these neighborhoods. So here are the neighborhoods and we're trying to tie the relationship to say, hey, this neighborhood is a part of this place of San Diego, which is a part of the state which is being listed on this website. We have our properties and we're defining the listings as the type of property that they are. And we're trying to explain the search engines that, hey, this property is located here. We're talking about it in this way. It ties back to that parent geography. Oh, and this islist on apartments.com. oh, and this piece of content was written by so and so. We're trying to help search engines understand all of the relationships that exist between these different data points. I think structured data is an interesting piece and I've been a structured data nerd since really since it came out and started to get integrated. And I'm thankful for the approach of implementing JSON, LD schema versus microdata, and some of the legacy formats. But we're able to do so much on the structured data side. Like I said, I do like cheesy analogies. I attribute structured data to taking a Shakespearean novel and distilling it to a kindergarten and reading level. For a crawler, you're taking all that information about what those entities are and making it very digestible at the beginning of the page load so that search engines or generative engines don't have to go and process the entire page to understand what it's about and how it relates to other things. So, for example, apartments.com was kind of the pioneer in the unit level shopping experience. Meaning folks want to look at a specific unit unit of an apartment complex, they want to rent that unit, they want to know all about it. They want the videos, they want the 3D tour, they want the photography, they want to know how much it costs. So we've tried to structure the entity of the apartment building to also explain the entity of the units that exist within it. So that way folks are looking at that, then they can understand the relationship between, hey, this 3D tour aside, we own Matterport, which is a 3D tour.
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A
Yeah, no, I'm familiar with it. I didn't know you all own it. That's awesome.
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B
Yeah, we closed on that one a couple. Couple months ago now.
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A
Okay. Because for home inspections, it's just amazing, right? Like you can buy a house unseen, you can tag all the issues, you can walk around the house Matterport's a fantastic technology.
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B
And that's where, like I'm loving the approach of being able to tie together. Hey, you can go and view every unit in this building, in theory mapped and you can actually navigate the hallways and the parking lot and, and all that. But we're, you know, we're trying to express that in an entity perspective that search engines understand as well. So that way it kind of ladders up. Hey, you have this, this unit in a building. This building is an apartment complex. This building lives in the neighborhood of X, which is a part of the city of Y and is listed on, on this site and is written by so and so. And that's just scratching the surface of the idea of entities there. But really we're trying to tie together all these things so that search engines understand. Search engines, Lucy. I guess, I mean, every engine in Crawler, but understanding the relationship that exists between these things, the big shout out, I'll say with structured data is, and this bothered me a little bit. I saw so many folks about six months ago saying, hey, structured data is meaningless now. Don't bother doing this.
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A
Just that the generative images are going to figure it all out, like without any help.
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B
Yeah, like I saw that and it kind of made me question a lot of things about people. Then you have both Bing and Google come out and say, hey, this is still valuable. And like the AI crawlers and engines rely on this extensively, like, don't get rid of it. So it kind of makes me laugh because like I said, I've been a fan and structured data nerd since the beginning just to see folks say, like, now this is meaningless now just because something doesn't appear as a rich snippet in results. I see so many people get rid of FAQ schema, for example. Right. But folks are still asking these questions and especially as you're thinking now about something like an AI overview, if you're making that question and answers more digestible for search engines or generative engines to understand, you're more likely to get that treatment because they understand the entity and they understand the data that they're looking for.
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A
Yeah, there's some trust associated with it. Like you've structured to say this and I know that this to be true. So I'm much more likely to show that. I mean, we were doing a training internally on, on GMB actually, because no one's talking about GMB right now. And there's all these kind of things like veteran owned. Right. Women owned, like there's all these different Choices you want to select? No, like, you want to give it more data. Like there's a score associated with that. Like, because if you're, if it's, if the, if the LLMs are out there guessing or, you know, the, the bots are out there just trying to figure it out on their own, they want to show the right thing, they're going to show something that has a higher trust. I wanted to go back to something you said and I wanted to get your opinion and I, I don't know the answer on this. I want to know if I'm looking at the right way and I, I love to just, you know, get your take on it. So I feel like entity SEO or like entity associations, when you're building that vocabulary of like this entity versus that entity is just the next layer of categories and tags. Right, Categories and tags. So this is my thought. Categories and tags was so that the bots could figure out what was going on and what you were talking about on the site as a quick reference guide before, it would have to go process all this data so it could go across more of your site and it would have to use as much process power. Now you got the entity associations. So again, it uses less compute power. So you're going to get more crawl budget potentially if you don't have a bunch of errors. And it's just kind of like 3D chess versus 2D chess and you're just, it's just this natural progression is kind of how I look at it or saw it. How would you add to that or change that viewpoint?
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B
Yeah, I don't, I don't disagree and I actually don't. I don't hate that analogy. I mean, in theory you're, you're trying to. I think it's more the 3D chess model. Right? Like, in theory, you're trying to tie together the categories and tags that exist underneath one another. So like for an apartment complex versus an individual apartment, you're laddering that up and you're laddering it up to the city in that sense. But then off to the side you've got who the seller is, who the agent is, who the author is. So, yeah, I think, I think there's an element there where you're thinking about it from a top down. Like, let's say we're just sticking in the realm of a geography and a place aspect. Then you also have those related entities of. I know folks are kind of still debating on the value of eat and even me just saying that is automatically like a A debate topic. But you know, it has been expressed in Google's quality writer guidelines that it is something that they look at. If you can define an entity in thinking about it from an EAT perspective, I think there's value there. Like, all the authors that we have that write content on apartments.com are well versed in the real estate space or well versed in the rental marketplace space. And, and they're, they're kind of established as leaders that talk about and write about and have experience with these things. So it's automatically naturally applying the idea of EAT and then looking at the entity. And we're talking about building up the entity of, let's say apartments.com by having these knowledgeable authors that are, that are.
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A
Also entities as a person. And there's some authorship associated with like some same as schema of. They've written all this different kind of content. So there's some more authority there that's still murky. Talking about things, it makes sense, but it's murky to me. Like, how much weight, right? Like, and I, I guess it pulls. I don't know how it pulls. Like, you got a bad doctor and a good doctor, right? Someone graduated top of the class, bottom of the class. Like, I guess they pull from reviews, they pull from, you know, the corpus of information they have. No, there's no great tools or do you know of any that can kind of start to weight that? Like, you know, if you're looking at influencers or whatever, or content writers to guest posts, like, how do you. Wait, who does what? Like, you know what I mean? Like, it's, it's murky to me.
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B
I think it is still murky. I don't know if there's a way of it getting better. I'm not sure of anything offhand to answer your question.
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A
Okay, cool. No, I just. If there's a tool out there, tell me because I'm trying to figure it out.
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B
When you see so many of these, let's look at the generative engine of like, hey, who's the best SEO consultant? Half this list doesn't do SEO anymore. And you know, for folks that were at SEO Week and heard Rand talk, he's kind of like, I don't do this anymore. Take me off this list. So, yeah, I don't think it's great at understanding currently. And there's definitely not a tool that I'm aware of it might exist that identifies what the most valuable entity within a set of entities would be if you're comparing them to one another. Especially if since in theory you become less tied to a topic over time. Like, let's, let's look at Ran. Right. Like he's doing so many great things with Spark Tour. I know he's also doing like a video game development company. That's awesome. But he's not doing SEO anymore and he fully admits that. So he's like, he's shifted away, buddy.
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A
But okay, like I get it. Like it's almost semantic because he's the keynote speaker at SEO Week.
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B
Right.
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A
Okay. And, and Spark Turo is very much like next gen, where you know what your target Persona is, where, where to find them, which is that kind of speed. He like, he's in front of the curve right of. Of where everything's going.
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B
So it's going to come back more in the SEO, right? Yeah.
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A
Like, so I, I think, I think it's a strategic positioning play and he has a corpus of information out there that he is like, if you compare him to anybody else, even though he doesn't do it, he still knows more about SEO than, you know, 99 people or what. Or whatever number you want to put on that. Right. But he's, he's one of the top SEOs based upon the knowledge in his head. But he's changed his title. Right. So.
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B
Right.
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A
It's semantic in my mind.
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B
Exactly. Because. Yeah. I mean there's still the general relationship of it, but like those lists just generally don't represent.
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A
Yeah, they're not. Yeah, they're not right now. I, I agree. Like, I mean, people. Yeah. That those lists are pull. Are aggregated based on. On. On data. It's not. And that would be interesting to. Is it who. Who has like an awards or whatever that is is really curated and maybe community driven on like who's doing that? I don't know. Who would you say, like where you would go get the real list? Like, I mean it's either people's opinion. Like that's the problem with SEO. There's no standard like framework. And I think people talk about that a lot too.
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B
And it is sort of comical to me and I mean, maybe just I'll speak to myself for a second here. Like, I've been doing SEO now for 15 years. I have historically been an SEO that loves working kind of in the background. Like, I don't want to be famous. That just hasn't been a thing for me. But lately I've been wanting to do more speaking and educating and helping the community and giving back. But I don't make any of these Lists, despite having, you know, 15 plus years of experience at this point, because folks just don't know who I am. So they reference the ones that are visible and that opens up to interpretation who people think are the best SEOs. I see folks trying to do it and trying to curate their own list. I actually saw a good one recently from Digital Eat, if you're not familiar with them. But like, it's a curated list of, hey, here's a bunch of professionals in the industry and folks have gone through and try and say, hey, you know, these lists we see aren't as relevant as they used to be. Here's what we're thinking now. But that's someone's opinion that's not graded in any particular way. And I don't know that we have.
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A
A way of grading that I would love to see. Like, I've always thought like a competition, right? You know, it's like you enter in the competition, you start from scratch and it's like go. And people are using different strategies because that's what they do. Did, huh?
- [34:24]
B
At some point, a long time ago, I think this was many, many, many years ago, but I think they tried doing a competition to basically like prove that their platform was, was SEO friendly. And they basically said, hey, have at it. But I think that's been some time.
- [34:38]
A
Well, WIX is doing a lot. I'm impressed with what WIX has been doing and how they've been out there. I don't know, I just want to see a game show because, you know, you got the SEO weather, right? You got the SEO weather. I like, I thought, I thought I was like, I was waiting for more stuff to come out like that. I thought it was so cool. Okay, so I have one more big question for you and then I want to open it up to anything we didn't cover that you want to highlight as well as like, you know what you're doing and what you're working on. Really enjoy hearing you talk. I'm glad you're out there putting yourself out there more. I mean, that kind of is part of it for brands too, right? Like if you've done if a tree falls in the woods, but no one's there to hear it, does it happen? Right? It's, it's kind of that analogy, you know, and, and you alluded to this earlier. I, I feel like SEO's really growing up and getting a lot more scientific and I really like the presentations I've seen about, you know, the vector based, like keyword associations and pruning the content that's not relative to that topical authority. And, and I would love to hear kind of how you're looking at that, how what your take on that is and whatever you're willing to share. Because I mean, you cover such a wide corpus of knowledge with apartments.com. like how, how do you even rank what those topical authorities are and how do you decide because the site's so big? Well, we want to go after this and we want it, well, we want to go after it all, but like we can't go after everything. So how do we force rank it and you know, link equity? Like how are we going to distribute this? Because I see with a lot of medium sized companies, they want to be an expert in all their services, right? Or if they're selling a product, they want to be an expert on the product. But I'm like, we need to give a real world like mirror to how you, are you the category leader in all these things? Like, because we can't just make you the category leader unless we spend a ton of money, which, you know, we can do that, but it's going to take some time. I'll, I'll tell you one funny story about this, which I don't know if I could do it today, but a company that I was working with is a MMA company and they had multiple locations and they came to me and they were like, we want to outrank Barsi, Gracie Barry or whatever the, like, whoever the inventors were. I think I'm, hopefully, I don't think I'm saying that right. The MMA people are going to get on to me. But Gracie Bari, I think is the name of it. They invented mma. Like they brought it over here. Okay.
- [37:13]
B
Yeah.
- [37:14]
A
And somebody else wanted to outrank them and I was able to do it like, you know, I was able to in a geographic area based upon these things, I was able to outrank the inventor of it. Going back to what you said, hey, like if you're not putting yourself out there, you could be the best SEO in the world. But if no one knows about it or you haven't put it out there in the way that the LLMs understand it. And I think Google's just a big LLM myself. Like it's just a big machine learning tool. Like you got to feed it the right data and it's, it's learning and it doesn't know everything today. But man, the trajectory rate is like crazy. But I, but I agree that if you're talking about random stuff over here, it's going like that, that based on math and vectors, not close to what you typically talk about over here. And I've seen a lot of case studies where you chop that data off and it just kind of slingshots sites up in keywords ranking even though keyword ranking is not a factor anymore and we shouldn't be looking at that. But I would love to just hear kind of your take on that and how your approach to it is. Because there are some new tools doing some of those type items and even I was playing with loading content and building some really advanced prompts and some of the different LLMs and I was getting some pretty cool outputs. But I still feel like it's pretty early and not a lot of SEOs. This is not in their toolkit and I want to try to give them something actionable to start thinking about when they're thinking about content. Because what I'm hearing is like we're just going to generate a bunch of content with chat GBT with basic prompts and no tuning and we're going to post it and that stuff's getting unranked, like that's getting delisted. That stuff's not, it's just diluting, it's just creating a bunch of noise, you know.
- [39:07]
B
Yeah, it's interesting from, from that perspective. So from an E comm side, from a marketplace side, like what I'm dealing with, apartments.com has the benefit of being the leader, a leader and a legacy brand. Right. So like we've been around for a while and we're trusted name and we are always getting brand references and mentions and, and that type of thing. Do we see competition from other folks in the space? Yeah, of course. Everyone, everyone's competing against everyone else. So we, I guess we have a little bit of luxury in, in saying, hey, let's look at a certain geography. Let's figure out what content we're missing here because we always have on our site like a summary of an area, a guide around why you would want to live there. We have some data driven content pages like our average rent pages that exist. But sometimes we're getting the questions going, hey, you know what, what's the top neighborhood for X, Y and Z? Like I mentioned San Diego. Right. Let's go back to that. What's the top beachside neighborhood for someone that wants to be near the water? We get those types of questions and if we're going to write that one, we need to make sure we have the right data and that we're authoritative on it. I don't want to say we're cheating, but apartments.com is a part of Costar Group. We. Our goal is to digitize the world's real estate and have those data points. So it's very easy for us to get that and make the right decisions, but then figure out how we write that content and support it. But we almost kind of have to break it up in certain areas and focus on one thing at a time. And we can see when we focus on that one thing that does great and then you kind of move on to the next one, but you almost can't let it. You can't rest on your laurels in a sense. Right. Like, you can't not forget about the ones that you've already been working on. We also have, I guess blogs is kind of what I call them that go after and work for both the landlord side and the renter side. So we're trying to target both of those audiences. And in that case, we're trying to cover multiple different approaches to topics. Right. Like what are the questions that people are asking? Are the questions changing or new questions coming up because of new technologies or things like that? Do we need to go back and update old content? Are laws changing? So a big one that, like, we've talked about a good amount in the past is the New York City Fair Act. So for folks that aren't familiar, like New York City used to have, broker fees was a concept, and the Fair act essentially eliminated this. So there's historically been content from us and from other folks. Like, hey, how do you negotiate the idea and navigate the idea of broker fees in New York City? That's not a thing anymore. So that content's almost not necessary, but it was something that was needed to become an authority on that topic in the past. So you're kind of thinking about that, but now. All right, does that content need to exist anymore? No. Unless maybe you want to talk about the idea of that going away and how you think about it now, but how you thought about it two years ago doesn't matter anymore. So, yes, there's some value and benefit in content pruning in that sense, but I think you've got to focus on what you're capable of doing within the skills, the technology, and the bandwidth you're working with. Right. I mean, you can't be the knowledge of everything if you're trying to divide your attention across five different things. It's the whole, you know, I'd rather whole ass something than half ass, two things type of thing if you can and you can do that effectively, that, that's great. But I, I generally try and encourage these days like focus on a certain area and become well known in that area and talk about that and publish content that's helpful for your renters, your customers, your whatever in that particular area. But cover off on those topics and make sure that you're well versed in them before you move on to the next thing. You can start to do that, move on to the next thing if you need to, but just know other folks are, might be playing catch up or you know, the competition might not be sleeping on that and they might go down a path that you haven't. So just need to continue to think about that.
- [43:29]
A
I think that's great advice about going deep. Right. And you really need to become that subject matter expert on that one thing. And, and, and I, and I try to give that advice when I'm doing coaching to smaller brands because like going up against apartments.com, you're already, I call it like a jet stream. Like you get to the top, right? And it just, people keep mentioning you and traffic keeps coming and it, you just, you're kind of floating up there and if you keep doing some stuff, you can maintain that, that jet stream. But if you're, you're not that, you got to punch through to the top and you got to focus on one area, maybe where someone is sleeping or where you're laser focused on that, that target Persona. I just, I, that resonates with me on the advice. I have one follow up question for you. Yeah, traffic just, just getting crushed, right? At least that's what I'm seeing. That's what Rand talked about, right? Traffic is, is 58.5% getting cut. I'm not quite seeing that. I'm, I'm seeing something more like 15, 20% drops. Some clients are actually bucking the trend. But I do agree that the traffic that comes to your site is a lot more educated, a lot more transactional, they're well researched. And I'm curious how you're mapping or is there a renewed emphasis on mapping the UX of what people are doing when they get to your site and where they get stuck and then identifying. Hey, like a lot of people maybe in the search are asking this question, we're going to build content for this or like how are you deciding. Yeah, that's my question. How are you deciding what content you should build next with the amount of information you have? And then also how are you looking at the customer journey because you have so much data, like, how are you, how are you viewing all that?
- [45:27]
B
Yeah, I'll go into it as much as I can.
- [45:29]
A
Yeah, tell me.
- [45:30]
B
Just.
- [45:30]
A
Yeah, whatever. I'm just interested. It's really.
- [45:32]
B
Yeah. Public company perspective is always fun. So we do a fair amount of surveys. We're always asking renters, landlords, property management companies, what are the things that you're seeing? What, what is it something that you care about, like a good one that is public that I can talk about, like give or take. I think this is our second quarter renter survey. Then some of those days gone out. Somewhere in the 40% range of folks are willing to rent an apartment site unseen because they've looked at it from a 3D tour or a video and that gives them enough of the information. And folks will actually not rent something that doesn't have that unit level information and detail. So in that case, it's trying to provide what folks are looking for. So we're getting the feedback from our customers going, hey, these are the things we care about. Number one, typically is always price point. Cool. Well, let's figure out how we can support that conversation from a price point perspective and either offer new product features or new elements on our page that helped you understand that process or you get those types of things where, hey, having a 3D tour is very important. Oh, cool. We own a company that does that. Let's make sure we're integrating that properly. That's something we've done a lot of lately since the acquisition is integrate that effectively into our site. I think the other thing there is we're just trying to continue to improve on the user experience and understanding that journey more effectively. To your second question, if folks are coming in, we still see folks coming in on some of the informational content that we create. We also see folks coming deeper in the funnel. We see folks coming on the brand. I think to your, to your point earlier, we've tried to figure out ways of saying, hey, the folks that are coming in here, based on the navigational path we see them taking. They're trying to get from here to here. So we've tried to revisit a lot of our page templates and understand that user journey to support them with what they're looking for. They may come in already well educated and they might be further down that conversion funnel where they're going, hey, I know I want to live in the Buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta and I want an apartment with two bedrooms and a pool that has a doorman and they're able to execute that search and get in and find exactly what they're looking for. We might have folks that just say, hey, I don't know what neighborhood to live in, but I got to move to Atlanta. And you're much higher up that funnel. So it's trying to support that navigational aspect down the funnel that says, hey, you started out here, let's help you find the best neighborhood for you. Maybe based on price, maybe based on what you're. You like to do in your free time and navigate them down. Well, you know, maybe the Buckhead neighborhood is best for you because of this. Here's how you can drill down even deeper. Now you can figure out how much it costs you. Oh, you're moving from an entirely different city. Hey, here's the cost of living differential. So based on this, you're moving from New York City to Atlanta. That money might bring you a lot further in what you can afford. So now, based on general rules of looking at real estate and how much money you should spend on rent, here are properties that you could look at that fit your new budget and fit your lifestyle. So we're trying to provide those touch points during the journey that help to say, hey, depending on where you come in, how do we bring you to the next thing and how do we bring you to eventually finding the right place for you to live and either go take a tour, look at media, submit a lease or an application, but we're trying to support the entire funnel and how you come in from the side of it.
- [49:23]
A
I hear you got to have stuff mapped out like down to a T. You got to know exactly what's going on and then really looking at that next step in the data. I love that we've covered a lot today. I have some other questions about the future because you're generating so much content and you have a lot of visuals, so I'm seeing all the meta glasses and all this kind of stuff. So I'm going to have to have you back on as that becomes more in the zeitgeist. But I would love to see how you all are incorporating that and, and all the content that you're creating with Matterport I think is super, super interesting. When I first saw that tool, I was blown away. It was amazing. So that's awesome that you're with such a forward thinking company. What is anything that maybe we hadn't covered that you want to share? What are some interesting projects that maybe you're working on? When's your next talk? How can People find out more about you. I would love to talk a little bit more about that.
- [50:26]
B
Yeah. So for me, my passion is really in all things SEO. So I've historically done a lot of speaking and educating on the technical SEO side. I've kind of fanned out a little bit from that. So some of my talks at pubcon were more on the content heavy side of things. I also did a talk on how to work effectively with your developers. You know, there's a lot of conversation around SEO and product and how they live together. Apartments.com, the SEO perspective, lives as a part of the product organization. So we're creating things that focus primarily on users and also benefit search engines. So there's a lot of talk from folks in the industry around how to think about product SEO. And that's something that I've been enjoying drilling into because I get to create things that I see people use and that they, they're excited about touching and interfacing with. Like our cost of living data. I referenced that earlier. That's new for us. We launched that almost six plus months ago now. But that was a new idea for us, going like, hey, we have folks asking about this thing, let's create it. Cool. It also happens to have a lot of demand from the search engine perspective, from the gender of engine perspective. Well, let's make sure we have the content that supports that need. But I've also kind of ventured out, like my role is also from like a leadership perspective. Right. Like I still do some day to day because A, I enjoy it and B, I want to stay sharp. But a lot of it's how to manage a team, how to have that team work effectively with developers. So my next talk is actually a digital summit Minneapolis, where I'll be talking about like how to lead a team effectively and build that cohesion in between them. Even from the technical side, like one of my weird passions. I would say that one of the things I love more than structured data is re platforming as a migrations. And I think maybe I'm mental for saying that because most folks think that's their idea of hell. But for me, like, your brain is.
- [52:27]
A
A, you got an engineering brain. Like everything's got a map, right?
- [52:31]
B
It's a fun puzzle to solve, right? It's an exercise in compromise, in time management, in knowing how to develop requirements, understanding the data, implications of doing things. Those are all things that I enjoy. So like myself. And there's another gentleman on my team that is also big into doing that. Like maybe we're weird, but that's just something we've enjoyed doing. I think at this point in my career, I've done, if not over, close to 100 different forms of replatformings, migrations, redesigns, things like that. So you end up seeing and learning so much about the technical side of SEO, but also the interpersonal side of how you work with other people, how you work with developers, how you communicate between a developer and a cmo, and how you change what you talk about in those cases. It's one of those things where it's interesting and it's fun to me, but it's also taught me a lot in my career and helped make me. Like I said, I've been doing this for about 15 years, but I feel like I have even more knowledge than that because I've worked with so many different scenarios of those types of things and understanding how all these different brands and categories might work.
- [53:44]
A
I feel like that's a talk in a podcast on its own, talking about like enterprise level migrations and figuring out do we need to move all this content. Like, you got huge sites, right? And that have been there for years and years and years and you're like, let's change it over. And you need to do that, right? You need to do that and how do you do that effectively and what are the things you need to bring across? And at a large organization, there's a lot of red tape and approvals and people that have to correspond. I think that that's a really amazing topic I got. So before, before we move on to the last question, I wanted to know, like, where are you most active? Like, so I know you speak a lot or you LinkedIn, I'm assuming, is a good place to find out what you're doing or is there somewhere else that people want to check out?
- [54:35]
B
LinkedIn is where I would say I'm most active, typically also active on X, a little bit on Blue sky and kind of navigating around there, trying to get into blogging more. So maybe more to come there. But I think even to your point of explaining to the gender of engines and the search engines that you're a knowledgeable entity on things. I feel like I need to do more blogging. I like doing this type of stuff where it's a conversation rather than writing, but trying to do more of that. So, yeah, definitely, come chat with me on LinkedIn, come chat with me on X or Blue sky and look forward to that.
- [55:07]
A
Awesome. So we've talked about so much today and people that listening are at different levels of, of where they're at in their SEO journey. If we brought it back to one thing, maybe it's something you mentioned, maybe it's something you haven't. But what's one tip? What's one unknown secret of Internet marketing you would give to people today that's actionable, that they could do something with to try to figure out what to do with all the changes that are coming down the pipe?
- [55:38]
B
Yeah, something that's been sticking in my head for a couple months now and for anyone that was at SEO Week or saw my participation there, I was on a panel with Jorie Ford and Lori and one thing that Ian said really continues to stick with me and it's the idea of don't try to get fancy without making sure that you're doing the basics correctly. There's still a fundamental need to make sure that your website is crawlable, that you're handling the technical components of SEO. A lot of these LLMs and generative engines don't understand any form of JavaScript, and as much as Google says that they do, I still see them struggle with certain components of it. Other search engines struggle more with it. Don't try and get fancy with doing a whole bunch of different AI stuff if your site's not even properly crawlable or if you don't have an understanding of this is more so for enterprise sites and larger sites. But your crawl budget and how it's being used and how much of your site's search engines and generative engines are actually seeing. Maybe spend some time looking at your log files, but understanding where you have those gaps in your technical foundation and addressing that before you try and do the really fancy stuff.
- [56:52]
A
Yeah, I'm going to have to have Laurie on to talk about the log files because that's thanks so much, Zach for coming on. For everyone listening, if you want to grow your business with the largest, most powerful tool on the planet, reach out to EWR for more revenue in your business. Thank you so much Zach for coming on. Until the next time, everyone, my name is Matt Bertram. Bye bye for.