← The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
The AI Revolution in Search Marketing with Cindy Krum
00:55:55
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- [00:04]
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? Let's get started. Howdy. Welcome back to another fun filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I'm your host, Matt Bertram. We've been bringing on some fantastic guests. I am remote, so. So if there are any glitches or sound issues, please, I apologize ahead of time, but I think you'll love what we're going to be talking about. It's not something we've talked about a lot on this podcast yet, but we've indirectly talked about the buyer's journey and what's happening with the buyer's journey and how that's changing and how to measure things. And there's a term called mum, multitask, unified model. The way search online is changing. Like, I don't even know if Google's really a search engine. The analogy I heard is it used to be like the librarian that you would go to and it would tell you, hey, go check this out over there. And now you go to the librarian and it just gives you the answer. And so everybody's starting to optimize for the answer engine. SEO's got a lot of different terms. Things are changing, and I wanted to bring somebody that's an expert on to really talk about that. Cindy Crumb with Mobile Moxie, welcome to the show.
- [01:34]
B
Hi. Thanks very much for having me.
- [01:38]
A
We met at SEO conference and you actually grew up down the street from me. And that it's such a small world. You're now based out of Denver, but this world, as everybody transverses, I just even remember, and I know that this is not the point of the podcast, but the world's so much smaller today. Like, I remember calling cards, like if, if, if someone lived near you, you would have to go a calling card to talk to them and schedule everything. And mobile phones and how people are searching online has absolutely changed. And how people search online, we used to talk about, like a standardized funnel, right? And it was very linear that you would go from here to there to there to there. And, you know, I remember reading a Google study where that said it, it kind of looked like a atom or something. Like people would come out, come back to the center, come out, come back to the center. And then I've seen those images where it's like a squirrely line. For those of you listening, I don't have the image pulled up, so don't worry. But it's like, you know, they Go back, they, they get distracted, they come back and, and it's not a linear funnel. And now with LLMs and Mum, like, everything's changed. And I would love to kind of get your perspective on, maybe you define for the audience what MUM is and how it's changing stuff and we can just start the conversation there.
- [03:05]
B
Sure. So mum is something that Google started talking about back around 2017, 2018 as I recall, and it was right around or just after mobile first indexing started rolling out. And the abbreviation or the acronym stands for Multitask Unified model, which doesn't really mean anything. Those are just a bunch of words. But a lot of people remember it as Multimodal unified model. And that's kind of more representative because when Google announced mum, the announcement talked about this language model that didn't just use text, it used images and videos and maps and statistics and facts and all of those other things and it could combine those into this unified model. And so the multitask part is really checking all of those different kinds of assets to put them together into a model where the search engine can understand a topic in a more multidimensional way and understand what is the right kind of experience that the user wants when it's searching for this topic. So it kind of takes, you know, we went from having entities, sorry, keywords, and then we got into entities which were kind of groups of keywords and language agnostic keywords. And then we have journeys. And journeys are kind of like all of the things you could do with an entity. And that's what Google was trying to map. So that's kind of it. But then they've taken it a whole lot further in terms of the way Google is talking about search these days versus how they used to. And a lot of it does seem to incorporate these MUM concepts.
- [05:00]
A
You talked about the different customer journeys, that was one of the things that really got my ears to perk up is based upon the journey, like the bucket they fall into and the typical, like, I mean, they mapped out, right, like how you used to buy a car or a computer online and what, what that process would look like. But now they're, they're, they have enough data to figure out what these typical buckets are. And when they drop you in that bucket, that's going to be representative of the search. So it's not just all the searches that are out there based on that, that keyword or that entity, but it kind of falls you into that, that, that journey. How, Cindy, does that affect, like, does that give Small businesses a stronger opportunity to rank. Because I'm concerned with the bifurcation of all the things you have to do online to show up that small companies can't compete like they have the GMB or the gdp. But beyond that, now to show up, I feel like it's a lot harder to do and you got to have a lot more plates spinning and, and, and things working to, to reach these different things unless you've built a community. And I think everything we've, we've talked about on the podcast, going back to a very laser focused community centric model for small businesses, I mean, how would they deal with something like that with these changes?
- [06:35]
B
Yeah, I think that you're right and I think that there is a lot of good reason to worry about smaller businesses and how they're going to compete, especially in Google getting the traffic that they maybe used to get. Because it is true that bigger brands are getting a larger share of the traffic and for some kinds of businesses it is getting much harder to show up in search results. So with journeys, what Google talks about or what they originally talked about was what they called micro moments. And this was aligned with kind of Google's move towards mobile and they called them micro AKA like small. And this was kind of, I think micro moments they started talking about before mobile first indexing started rolling out. And what those were, were they said when people are on their phone, they're more action oriented and their actions fall into one of these four things. And it was I want to know, I want to go, I want to do, I want to buy. And I think that someone's told me that they later added another micro moment. I'm not sure about that. But what's interesting is that those four micro moments fall neatly into Google properties that have been well monetized or at least have been attempted to monetize. So I want to know is regular search I want to go is maps I want to do ends up being YouTube and I want to buy is merchant center. And of course we've seen massive progression and evolution of how Google has monetized those properties for themselves to make them kind of profit centers where they can make money by driving more searches and selling PPC ads in the searches. But then if they want to keep making money, then they can rank and send searchers to other properties that they've also monetized because obviously all of those properties are owned by Alphabet. So you know, they, they benefit either way. And then the other thing to know is that even when Google isn't actually making money on a transaction or an ad or something like that. They're making something monetizable which is they're collecting data that they can monetize later. And so all of the behavior that they're capturing through Chrome about us as we search is allowing them to do things like create the AI that now runs PMAX and all of the cohort modeling and journey modeling. That makes PPC much more profitable. Like they needed the data of what people want to make that a profitable solution for advertisers.
- [09:27]
A
I love how they even have added like the captchas to training labeling data for you right? I didn't know that until I don't remember when someone shared that with me is that's what they're doing right? And they're training their, their you know before Tesla they're self driving cars and like all this data is super valuable. I remember was it Google that bought it was like a, a temperature company. Did they buy the Nest or something like that? They, I think they bought. I, I could have this wrong Alphabet buys a bunch of stuff. I think they bought Nest and the reason they bought that is it was all this digitized temperature data that they could use. They were buying for the data, not necessarily for the cool, you know, Apple looking tool. That's probably a nice add on but, but everything data is the new oil. I know that that's been talked about. I think it's starting to come to the forefront with all these LMS and these models now like I think people had said that but there was a lot of manual effort that had to be done to label all this kind of data and Google's been capturing and labeling data for so long and that's why on these ads you know you turn them on, you set up your parameters and over time it's just like a heat seeking missile and it finds your right type of person. I also know that Google started moving like really pushing in their last announcement, you know E commerce like on the site because they're not going to drive them necessarily off the site. They're going to do the transaction there and then they're leaning into YouTube really big. I'm not sure exactly how they're going to add additional ads to YouTube because YouTube if you don't pay for the subscription are already. I can't even handle it. I had to, I had to pay to the subscription model to not get ads every 10 seconds. But I mean what, what can you speak to of where the general market's going and, and Maybe how companies need to be thinking about this journey and how to track it.
- [11:35]
B
Sure. So Google has updated how they're talking about micro moments and they don't use that phraseology anymore. Most recently they've published some articles about the four S's of search. And those are Stream, Scroll, Search and Shop, or the four S's of discovery or something like that, or brand awareness or whatever. So it's those four S's streamscroll, Search and Shop. And those also fit with properties that Google has. Right. Stream is YouTube, scroll is Discover, search is regular search, and shop is merchant center. So again, Google is telling marketers that this is how journeys happen, that people bounce from these four S's while they're on a brand discovery or product discovery or a search and discovery process. And that if you want to be seen, you need to be potentially in all of these, or at least you need to map out where people are doing these activities in the discovery process. And they give even an example, I think they call it, they don't call it journey mapping, but they call it some other mapping like awareness mapping or something like that. And they say, figure out what percent of your traffic is coming from each of the four S's in early discovery, mid and then end of funnel, and make a graph. And they show you how to make the graph. So what that tells me about Google's vision of the world digitally is that successful brands are not just banking on one website to do all the work. And this is what you were alluding to is that you kind of, you know, a lot of SEOs right now are saying you have to be everywhere. And that sounds really overwhelming to small business owners. And so I think what Google is kind of trying to subtly hint at is you don't have to be everywhere, like full time 100%. You have to be where your users are and where they're looking for you in their normal journey and give them the kind of content they want for that particular product or service at the point when they want it. So I think that's their, yeah, that's their advice of like, you don't have to do everything 100%. We want you to be a multifaceted business that isn't just pumping out loads and loads of kind of light, fluffy, boring content every week on your website, but creating a community like you said, and doing, creating the community, engaging with your community where they are already.
- [14:21]
A
So Cindy, it's interesting, like if you look at like the major gold standard tools that measure a lot of keyword Tracking, they typically broke content up into, you know, informational, transactional, commercial and navigational. I think is, is the other one. And most websites were heavily or brands, SEOs, you name it. It was all about the brand discovery at the top of the funnel. Right. So it was like really heavily informational searches. The, the direction from Google that I saw in one of their, I don't know exactly where it was, but I believe it came from Google. They really want you to be 25, 25, 25, 25. And you know, if you have a online business or other things, maybe there's a carve out for that navigational search. And what we see with a lot of clients is they don't have as much transactional search at the bottom of the funnel. And that transactional search, the comparisons, the, you know, you're trying to make a decision is across the Internet. And so, you know, the traffic, what Rand Fishkin said, you know, like based on a number of his slides, I saw him at a couple SEO conferences, is like, traffic's been cut in half or more than half. And so, you know, you need to help the LLMs understand the bottom of the funnel, transactional content that you can control on your website and listicles and there's other things and, and what I'm seeing from what you're saying, what Google's saying is no one's really mapping that one for one. Right. It's like everybody's got their own ranking factors that they're using. And then there's like, this is what Google wants you to do. And then you're trying to have to connect the dots there. I mean, what are your thoughts around that? Just in the market in general?
- [16:18]
B
Yeah, I think at large that is kind of what we're trying to do, is connect the dots. But I think that the way that we're all thinking about SEO and search as a whole right now is probably going to need to change soon. Because if you think about what Google's been investing in marketing towards recently, it's AI mode and then all of the AI stuff in, in the paid side of the house, AI mode. And even, you know, recently, I think it was a week and a half or two weeks ago, Google added AI summaries to Google Discover. And this was something that I kind of predicted at SEO Week was I said, you know, at that point Google had just internationalized SEO or Google Discover and made some changes towards making it more international. And I said, this is not an accident. And they've just rolled out AI mode. Now they're making Google Discover international. AI mode is rolling out internationally. This seems like it goes together. And then of course they just added the AI summaries to Google Discover and they added AI mode as an option on, you know, the main page of Google. And I think we're gonna see more convergence where potentially AI mode and Google Discover combine or at least are going to test that is my guess. And the reason that's important is that Google Discover has always been personalized to not just a cohort, but a person. Right. And their own individual interests. And I think that AI mode, if it's going to be successful, they're probably going to try and go really personalized. And that's why it's, you know, in, in AI options you're getting the chat with Gemini stuff because it's trying to understand you and your decision making process and what you in particular want and are looking for. So if I have a history of consistently, you know, shopping for groceries on the Internet and looking for the best price on paper towels, it's going to stop showing me the most expensive paper towels and it's just going to show me the best deals potentially. So the idea and the takeaway is yes, we can't, we're not going to be able to optimize for you or me, but we're going to have to understand our customers on a very deeper level and understand why our brand stays sticks out to them as opposed to the other ones. So if all I want is the cheapest paper towels out there and it's showing me deluxe paper towels, I'm going to have a bad experience. So if you're trying to talk to the LLMs and you sell cheap paper towels, what you need to say is our paper towels, you know, are super cheap. We know you're just using half of it and throwing the rest away anyway. You don't need the super heavy bulky whatever. Buy these, save money, it's better for the planet and then you're going to make me feel good about my decision to buy cheap paper towels. Stuff like that, where it's not just listing product like basic specs, but it's listing more deeper benefits that'll resonate with a buyer when they're making a final decision.
- [19:57]
A
So I'm hearing, and I've heard this with in other conversations, is we have to go so much deeper on the ideal target Persona than what we think. And doing additional research, there's tools out there like Rand Fishkin's tool that like, it really opens it up of like where Your people are at what they might be looking at, what are the associations? Because it's going to be so personalized to you. And I've seen some customer journey maps where, you know, if you're not speaking to that person's value structure or what they've done historically, even if you're ranking for that keyword, you might not show up in that journey at all. And so it's again, getting laser focused, like you said, on that target Persona. So the question that I ask, and I think we've been kind of dancing around it, is, okay, like, I understand that it's changing. I understand I need to know this better, but how do I measure this? Like, like, how, how do I see how I'm doing? And I've hear a lot of people doing like manual searches, and that's not a very unified way to see what an agnostic look of what other people might be searching for. Because again, all your searches are now customized to you. And I would even say, which I don't have complete clarity on this, this is my assumption, but when you go to incognito mode in Google, when Google said, hey, you can do do not follow links, and we're still going to look at them, I feel like the same thing is, is the case for incognito, because you're incognito. My incognito is going to be different. What is that based on? Well, where we are geographically maybe, and our user preferences. And so, you know, that's where I think everything starts to unravel for people that are trying to rank in search is how do you measure all this stuff? The current set of tools that are available today are not what we need for AI mode. And mom and I know that there's a couple people out there that are trying to stand up tools, but the majority of the industry right now is still playing the old game.
- [22:20]
B
Yeah, and I don't think there's a great answer to the question, honestly, because you're right. The industry is still playing the old game because the idea of summarizing everything that's happening in everyone's private AI chat conversations is just so monumental and hard. There's this. Oh, not allegory, but there's this. What do you call it? A story that tells Analogy. It's like a fable, Morris.
- [22:49]
A
Oh, fable. I love fables. All right, let's do it.
- [22:52]
B
But there's this fable, and I'm not even, I don't even know the name, but it's about a map maker and the King of the region has a contest for, for the map makers to see who can make the best map of the region. And this one guy goes crazy and wants to make the best map. So he makes the most detailed map because he thinks detail is the best. And so he makes the most detailed map possible. And it ends up that the map is the same size as the territory and it covers the territory and kills everyone, basically. So not helpful. Right. Like, so you've got to know, like, when to summarize and when to omit details. Right. But the problem is when things get so detailed and so deep down and individualized, it's really hard to summarize that and know what's important. And so I think we're going to be ending, I think for a while and maybe, you know, for a long time we're going to be leaning harder on basic query statistics rather than success statistics or visibility statistics. And we might have generic visibility, share of voice kinds of statistics statistics, but not like you showed up for these 8 billion queries. Because the queries are all going to be so different and they're going to be strings of queries in a conversation. Not a single keyword or not a single keyword phrase. You know, they're going to be in a deep context that you're not going to be able to tease out. And so that makes our job harder. But that's why Google needs the journey modeling is because in a conversational sense, search, they need to understand what the next most likely question is going to be. And you can already see them using search to train to further train their journey models. Right? Like think about, if you think about every time you see a, people also ask, that's a prompt to say, hey, your question was kind of vague. Did you really mean this? And when they click on it, people also ask. You're saying, yeah, when I search for that, what I really meant was this. Right. And it's a bit of a deeper iteration on the question. It's not the same level, it's slightly deeper. Right. And then they'll keep going a little bit deeper. Okay, now you have that. Do you also need this? Do you also need this? And so they're trying to, they're seeing what users click to get a model of. You know, when someone searches for this, what they really, where they really want to end up is there.
- [25:18]
A
So it feels like we're going back to like old school marketing, right? Where you're measuring like uplift and you're doing something and you're seeing, okay, my Impression counts higher. Did that produce over X period of time, more leads, more revenue? Right. And I mean you can measure stuff that's happening on a website, but how, how do people wrap around their minds? Because we've trained them so for, for so long. Right. Like you're at the top of the rankings for X amount of these things. Like you need to track these keywords. Like how do you, how do you follow the analytics?
- [25:57]
B
I guess I think, yeah, like I said, like I don't think there's a great answer. I think there are a lot of people trying to solve this problem. I think we're going to need to change KPIs. What you said about community building is huge. I think that's really kind of the sneak, the sneaky way to get around having to not have data is when you build a community you can have real engagement data and real interactions with your customers and that not only helps your brand resonate better in a more long term way, but gives you a lot of more data about them, more opportunities to reengage them and stuff like that. And then there are also, I think that we might see a shift towards more active engagement metrics. Things like comments on a post or a video or. And when I say post, I mean like social media posts, not a blog post necessarily. I think we're going to see a decrease in, I hope we're going to see a decrease in people just like pumping out the same boring website content and it's going to shift to these kind of multi channel distributions that represent the brand as a whole across the Internet. Where your website is just, you know, for a while people have said your website should just be one part of your marketing. But the other parts were like your website and your emails and in offline. But now I think it's like your website, your Instagram, your TikTok, your LinkedIn and stuff like that. Because the LLMs, what they are looking for is not just on your website. And if you just have a website, even if it's great, it's not enough to convince the LLMs that you're good. You need to be the places where the LLMs are looking. And what LLMs. You know, SEOs keep saying that LLMs love novelty and they like novelty, they like to learn new things. But what they love is consistency. And if they see a consistent message across your brand from you and other people that you're engaged, that you're the best, that you're the cheapest, that you're the whatever is, then they believe it.
- [28:22]
A
So the thing that I think about when you shift from like website content to social media content is, which I would, if you have any data or can point me in the right direction, it would be great because I don't know the answer. The decay rate on social media posts, okay, like for a visual user is, you know, four to six hours maybe, right. And so when I hear you need to be on, on social media, like, I know people that are very big on Instagram or TikTok and they have to continue to produce these videos because they, they only, they only have so much like life in them. There are some kind of information architecture structures like Reddit and things like that, you know, GMB where you can grab some of that stuff. But I wonder how far. And the lms, I did see some data that said on a blog post, on average they only look back about 10 months. So I'm wondering, you know, there's so much noise on LinkedIn right now, but there's a lot of great stuff that people are posting. I wonder if, if you've seen anything about the decay rates for LLMs going further and reading social media posts. Right, because you're, if you're building out the hashtags and you're, you know, you're, you're setting that, that in motion, you know, is it just the life cycle of the post or is there, you know, more Runway to speak to the lms? And again, right. I do need to say it. The LLMs are only, you know, 1 to 3% of search still. Right. So it's not that big of a deal. But we've even shift in at our agency to offering more of a social media as a SEO company because it's kind of like left arm, right arm, like the full body of your, your brand, like building your brand online, you need to incorporate some of those things. And I think historically when I would talk to other SEOs, SEO was a silo and social media was a silo. But there's a big merger happening. I don't know if anything I said you can kind of speak to it. But I'm just talking out loud now because I agree with you that social media shouldn't replace being search optimized. But what is a search engine now and then as people move over to AI mode, which I think AI overviews for me was a way to keep people in the old search until they get everything else set up, you might have a different perspective on that. These other LLMs, like when I started using LLMs pretty aggressively, like I go to Google and a website to, to do a final check on something. But a lot of my research is done on social media or what are other people saying? Reviews. Yeah. And that engagement rate, I, I have seen data that 30% of the time that people spend on social media is now reading comments, you know, and so I think that that's really, really important. But for a business, whether it be a big brand or a little brand, because big brands you got to go through legal or maybe you have some executive that people are ghost writing for potentially because they can't spend all day on social media. And then the smaller brands, well, they're trying to run a business and they don't have enough people to do it. Like you got to pump out a ton of content to, to just keep up and it's, it's really quite noisy. I like your idea of going back to really focusing on those new, new micro moments, whatever they're called. I remember micro moments. I can't even say GDP without thinking about it. Like I still say gmb like it's ingrained in my brain. But it's not gdp, it's gbp and I'm dyslexic. I'll say sorry to everybody. Hopefully they know what I'm talking about. But this just looks to be, Cindy, a monumental task for any brand or any business to do. Now I do think all of these things have been said over and over again. You should be doing all these things. But now it's kind of like, it's not like a bonus, it's like a necessary thing that you need to be doing to be able to compete. What is the world going to look like in another 18 months?
- [32:59]
B
Yeah, I think this is now table stakes for SEO. This is what you need to be a good SEO is to be doing this kind of cross platform optimization. They used to call it barnacle SEO and it does still have that benefit where if you're struggling to rank your blog on XYZ keyword, you might have an easier time ranking a YouTube video on that keyword or an Instagram post on that keyword. And I think that has not gone away. That may even have doubled down now that Google is ranking UGC forum content and whatever with more preference and big brands with more preference. Right. Like so. So it's a really, I think solid strategy. But I think that, you know, you're right that it's this huge commitment. But if you think about how many blog posts people were pumping out that were kind of like mid quality, whatever, I think the idea is, and there's someone who talks about this a lot. Ross Simmons, the coolest cool on Twitter, one of my favorites. And he talks about like not creating, you know, so many blog posts all the time, but creating like better ones and then getting the distribution really right. And if you spend, you know, five hours writing the blog post you need to spend and I don't remember his math, but let's say if you spend five hours writing it, you need to spend 10 hours doing the distribution and I think that is going, going to go even further. So let's say if you're a small company or even a big company, let's say you're a big company and you have to get a concept approved by legal and that takes months. So you, you have to plan out your content way in advance. You do one 10x piece, but then you get the distribution of that 10x piece, right. Then you break it up into a million different shorts and videos and stills for Instagram and stories and reels and put it everywhere where it's already the whole major concept, it's been pre approved. You're not actually creating new stuff. You're creating one big thing and then breaking it out and turn and allowing the smaller pieces. So the, the one, the one piece, you know, gets you links, gets you authority from people who already know who you are and are aware of you. The smaller pieces feed the journey of people who are still in the discovery phase to get to you. Right?
- [35:27]
A
Yeah, I feel like you need to produce one like pillar piece of content and then splinter it out. Ryan Dice, his social media marketing course, which now all that stuff, he's like just giving it all away because everything's changing really explained to me conceptually many years ago about taking that piece of content and I, I haven't heard the word barnacle sbo before. I got to look that up. That's, that's really cool. It makes a lot of sense.
- [35:58]
B
I haven't heard that bigger site and then you rank by proxy.
- [36:03]
A
Yeah, we, we did that but I never heard it called that. That's really cool. That should be a name for a company. So what that makes me think is like people are just churning out content, right? And you said that the, the mid quality content, the, you know, people are just throwing something in chat GPT and posting it. Like you're like the bar is coming up but it's still like that's the bare minimum and it's really that really high quality content. The where I see this stuff where it's original research and you know, something different that's, that is novel that, that people might not know about but is helpful. So I mean, where's the balance between volume and, and quality? And I mean it's very hard to get both of those off the charts for, for, for any business. And going back to what you said before, what are the things that you've seen that maybe because I think LLMs are just modeling very intelligent people of looking for stuff online and getting a bunch of different resources and coming up with, you know, a conclusion like how do people need to be thinking, thinking about this in a framework like high quality sites or you know, certain types of content that map to those different decision points. I mean, what would be a SEO plan for, I don't know, pick any company and like, let's just do a walkthrough of what that might look like. I love the idea of getting that concept approved and splintering it, but I just still think, you know, how many times can you post about that same type of thing from a different angle? Right. If you got a four to six hour window on social media, why do.
- [37:54]
B
You say four to six hour window? Tell me more about that.
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A
So from what I've seen of how the algorithms work, like if you post on Facebook or LinkedIn, unless through the initial audition period you get some really high engagement, those, those posts will get kind of down indexed. And not to say that if not a big influencer reposted or comments on it, it's never going to get the trajectory or reach of another post. And so if we have that initial concept that we've broken apart into all these different things and we post that and maybe we post it from a couple different angles, tell that story, like how many times can you recycle that type of content before you need something new? Because like you made me think maybe we just do one really, really good piece of content that goes viral versus a bunch of mediocre content.
- [38:51]
B
Yeah, that's the idea. Yeah, that's the idea. And then you're posting, when you're breaking it into the smaller pieces and posting it across the web, it's going to resonate and you'll learn this, it'll resonate in some communities better than others. And so then you learn what that community likes and then you do slightly different things. If a different community likes different stuff, right. And you get to fine tune your messaging and how you repurpose content for the different audiences in the different places. Or you say like this isn't working, this Channel isn't working. We're going to de emphasize. But I think like one of the reasons I like Ross's model is like, how long did you spend on it? Create a multiplier of that's how long you should be repurposing it or how much effort you should spend on distributing it. Creating a model like that for your own business, because it's going to be different for everyone and it's going to be different with the level of effort you put in in the first place. If you put in five minutes, then spending 10 minutes to distribute it is fine. Spending 30 minutes to distribute it is fine. But yeah, I think it'll be different depending on the content and depending on what your availability is and what the depth, you can go on the initial idea in the first place and then you've just got to measure the success and the roi. Right? So I don't think there's going to be one specific answer for everyone, but the idea. So I totally shifted how I think about digital marketing as a whole. And I am really interested in the brands and products that are succeeding without websites at all. So things products that have gotten TikTok famous or maybe they have a website, but it's auxiliary compared, you know, products that are just TikTok products basically. And yeah, now they have a website, but they didn't originally. Or people who have made millions of dollars doing influencer marketing. Right. Like I think influencers, digital influencers and influencers even that are, I think AI influencers is an interesting future space. Terrifying, but also interesting. And so I think we really need to shake off, you know, the shackles of history and of the way we've thought about SEO before because, you know, when you search for something that you know, or if I were to search for something that I know is on TikTok a lot, the likelihood of the website ranking versus a TikTok video or a reel or an Instagram or whatever, because all of those things can usually be cross posted across all the places. I think the website might come in eighth, you know, and what we're tracking, what we have great tracking on is the website. What we have less good tracking on is sometimes where people are discovering us and like how many times it takes them to see the brand on a couple different channels. Channels to actually make a decision and seek us out and search for us by the brand name and stuff like that. So I think we have to kind of get comfortable in this lack of data and like, I don't know how to convince people that that's the reality. Except to say that like you've been operating on horrible data for years. Like just don't like, it's always been bad data. It's been directionally accurate at best.
- [42:32]
A
So, so we got to grow as SEOs. We got to evolve as SEOs. Is the message that, that I'm getting and you know, being more comfortable with other verticals inside digital marketing, really looking at like, how is your brand showing up, like being. And to your point, I'm about to bring somebody on that's grown totally through influencer markerships and partnerships on. He's grown his own brand. It's a speaker brand and you know, hundreds of thousands of visit valuable traffic, never done SEO, all brand searches. Right. Like, how are these brands growing? Because we gotta be thinking about it differently and the current set of skill sets that a lot of SEOs have, it's like, well now you're telling me I need to be social media and I need to do this. And it's like, yeah, you do. I think everything's shifting and a lot of people have heard shedding off the SEO title and maybe becoming more of a digital marketing. We talked about relevancy engineering, like kind of that, that concept.
- [43:35]
B
Well, if you're not convinced by what I've already said, think about like what would have happened if all of the companies that were hit by helpful content had a diverse set of traffic sources and a well established brand that wasn't just getting traffic from Google. You know, like, this is good business strategy, good marketing strategy. It's not necessarily, it's not just good SEO strategy and it's not good. You know, what was it? What is it, Mike? Call it what? Engineering? Relevance engineering. Relevance engineering strategy. It's just good business strategy as a whole to not put all your eggs in the Google basket.
- [44:13]
A
Yeah, no, I think, I think everything is changing and broadening. All awesome. I would love to transition to what you do over@mobile moxie.com you know, where, what, what you typically talk about. I think some of this stuff, this was the podcast that I really. You really did it to, to get people to shift gears. Right. Like everybody's talking about what's changing, but the reality is you got to make the shift to say there is, there is a whole new way of looking at things. And I, I actually heard from a lot of different sources SEO is going to kind of go away and get integrated into everything else, those concepts. But it's just that broader business strategy of what you talked about and you really put A great, great point on that. I would love to, to talk about more about what you're doing over at Mobile Moxie and how, how people can find out more of what you're talking about in your speaking talks and all that.
- [45:11]
B
Yeah, sure. Well, so I, I'm going to agree before I get into my personal stuff, like, I think SEO should have been integrated into all the different things for years now. Like that's, that's how SEO is done correctly and I think it has been true for years. There need, it needs to be at all of the different aspects of a marketing journey in a company, need to be informed by SEO. And so that's kind of what I do is I'm a consultant. I help some of the biggest companies in the US and in the world with their SEO strategy. And that's what I'm doing is usually like cross functional, making sure the different people in the company are aware of SEO, understand how it works and what they're doing right and what they're doing wrong and what they can do to help and stuff like that. Educating internally to make sure everyone's singing from the same lyrics and yeah, so I do a lot of consulting, I do a lot of speaking and training around the world. I'm still, you know, even though it sounds like what I'm saying, people might interpret it as me saying SEO is dead. I don't think SEO is dead. I think it's absolutely changing and evolving and I'm here for that. I think it's exciting. I think it's also scary. But you know, we've got to evolve or die, right? So that's what I'm helping is helping my clients evolve and make sure that they're doing the best job they can to still show up in Google, but also be ready. As all the AI systems come on board, I'm talking to clients and training people about the four S's, about how Google views journeys and journey modeling and how they're using that data. Then of course, I have a tool set on mobilemoxy.com and the tools that people love the best are called the Social Serpirator and the pagescope. The Serpirator lets you see real live search results from anywhere in the world, down to an address. Most tools just work on a, like a postcode or whatever, but we can do it down to an address and we show you the live search result of what it looks like right now and we can track that over time and we parse it with different metrics so we do like, if you set it up, we'll track the same search result over time and give you things like your website's pixels from the top percent of search. We let you claim things that aren't just your website. So we have a score called Moxie Score. So you can say, this is me, this is me, this is me. And you can claim all the things in the search result that are actually you or benefit you. So if you're a restaurant and you're in a top 10 list, claim that. And that way SEO gets credit for everything SEO is doing and not just for the website. Right. So if you have a YouTube video as social. So this is kind of how I'm looking at the future is this Moxie Score concept of like how much moxie is like how much do you own that search result? And then we also show AI overviews and stuff like that. So that's the serpirator. And the long term tracking is called SERP Datalyzer. And then the PageScope lets you track competitors and it gives you a visual and then rendered and unrendered source code for whatever page on the Internet you want. So it's like the Wayback Machine but it's reliable. And you can say get this page and get it daily, weekly or monthly, whatever you want. It's a great way to track your competitors because if all of a sudden you lose rankings and your competitor gets above you and you didn't change anything and Google didn't really have any big things, then you know that your competitors changed something but you might not know what. And so we have all the code, all of the visuals and we have a diff checker that'll let you say like check rendered code from this day versus this day and show me what's changed. That way you can see, oh, they added schema, oh, they changed the title tag or they added this piece of content and that's why they're ranking. The hard part about selling those tools is that it's like selling insurance to healthy people. People are like, oh, I don't need that, I'm doing fine. But by the time you need it, it's too late because it's capturing things live as they are. But we can't go back in history. And that's the problem with any SEO troubleshooting. Like your boss might come to you and be like, when did this happen? And they're showing you a search result and you're like, I don't know, I wasn't, you know, so.
- [49:26]
A
The competitor rank tracking and the Share of voice is, you know, in the. Social listening tools are now a staple. Like you. You need to have those to. To be able to understand because how these algorithms work is. Is how you're doing versus what's going on in your marketplace in that area. So if you don't know where the weights are changing for the competitor, those. All those things impact you. Even if you didn't do anything or got a penalty or whatever. And now you tanked. It's not that you tanked, it's that other people shot ahead of you. Right. And so. So I think that those tools are really powerful if you understand that you need to be contracting competitor data of what they're doing. It's not. You're not in a vacuum. You got to. It's all in comparison. And so tools like that are super valuable.
- [50:17]
B
Yeah. I think SEOs for years have been so focused on just their own website and what did we do to make it better or worse? And like, maybe you didn't do anything. Maybe someone else just changed something and that helped. And they're all like, well, what are. Where is our website ranking? Well, where's the. What else is ranking that's influencing a searcher's journey? Right. Like, that's kind of what we want to capture. So, yeah, those are the tools. They're really cheap, actually. I think our lowest price is like 30 or 40 bucks a month. I don't know.
- [50:44]
A
I would encourage people to go check it out. I, you know, wanted to bring her on as well to talk more about how to use her tools and let her kind of walk me through it. So I got a little free demo here. So this is awesome. I would encourage everybody else to go check it out. You really should be looking at what competitors are doing. That's what's going to give you the insights. And some of these tools are absolutely powerful. So I would go check out Mobile Moxie. Cindy, I know you're active on LinkedIn. Is that the best place for people to find you?
- [51:14]
B
No, actually, LinkedIn is the worst place. I get so much spam. The best place is, unfortunately, Twitter or email. I need to get better at LinkedIn, but I get so much spam there, they've reduced the.
- [51:28]
A
The amount of connections. They've been really working on that signal. I do Twitter. If y' all are wanting to rank in Grok, like, that's why he bought Twitter. If anybody wants to know, he needed a data set. And Twitter. Twitter we're talking about, the information architecture is somewhere you need to be That's a lot, Cindy. What we're talking about with clients is, like, why you need to be all these different places and like, where you're showing up. And like, you got to really understand that market and understand what the competitors are doing and how people are searching for you. Twitter. Twitter's great, Mike. My account got banned twice. So I've started over well.
- [52:08]
B
And I know people have bad experiences on Twitter, but I tweet, like, I tweet a lot of dog videos. Not my own dog, sometimes my own dog videos, but mostly I retweet dog videos. And my algorithm is great. So you just have to like, retweet dog videos and you won't get the bad people. People on the Twitter.
- [52:23]
A
Yeah, yeah. So, Cindy, definitely give me your Twitter and we'll, we'll share that in the show notes. So hopefully everybody got a lot out of this podcast. There's two big takeaways for me and, and you need to know that SEO is changing and you're. If you're struggling, which you may be, because everybody, everything's new. It's because the game has changed and, and you need to think of yourself as a digital marketer, a Swiss army nice multifunctional tool. You need to be able to be everywhere. You got to be able to explain that to your clients. If you're listening, please understand, like, it's not a one trick pony with Google anymore that owns most of the market for people searching. So it's getting harder. There's. There's other services and areas that you want to be optimizing for your brand. And then the biggest thing that Cindy said right there at the end is you really need to know what your competitors are doing. Like, if you don't know what your competitors are doing, you're running blind. Cindy, I want to end this podcast with asking you what is the biggest unknown secret? And you can repackage something we've talked about, but what would you say the biggest takeaway is for somebody listening that they need to be thinking about? Like, what's the one unknown secret of Internet marketing in your book?
- [53:46]
B
I think I'm thinking really hard. So I think that I have been successful because. And I've gotten a reputation for being able to spot and understand changes that Google is making and explain them before their public knowledge, before they're announced. That's kind of my special skill, I think. And the reason I'm able to do that is I spend a lot of time looking at what Google is doing, what Google is publishing, what they're investing in and what they're writing about. And that helps me connect the dots of going, oh, they're writing about this, but in SEO they're talking about this and how do those two things go together? And you think about it for a day or two and then you're like, oh, that's how they go together. That makes sense. And that has really helped me be able to understand where Google is going. And I've gotten it right quite a number of times. So I would say think like you were Google and say like, what would I be doing if I were Google? And then plan on them making reasonably intelligent. And I used to just say reasonably intelligent. Now I'd say reasonably intelligent and money making decisions. Decisions like Google is really trying to make a lot of money right now and they're changing their decision models in favor of making more money where it used to be more on the don't be evil side. Now they're like, make more money. And that's, that's cool. They're a business, they're allowed to do that. But how is Google going to monetize? This is an important question.
- [55:23]
A
Absolutely. Well, everyone, hopefully you enjoyed this podcast. Please shiko a Share Like Follow us Please leave a comment if you've got any value, please tell us what, what you found valuable or what you want us to talk about. Thank you, Cindy so much for coming on. Until the next time, everybody, my name is Bat Bertram. Bye bye for.