Loading summary
Transcript34 lines
- [00:00]
Jordan Cooney
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit.
- [00:17]
Ben Shab
Ready to give your brand a voice?
- [00:19]
Jordan Cooney
Then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts.
- [00:32]
Ben Shab
Sit back, relax, and get ready for.
- [00:34]
Jordan Cooney
Your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search Podcast, Jordan Cooney. Hello SEOs and marketers. My name is Jordan Cooney from Free Visible. Joining me today is Cassidy Clement, who is the Senior Manager of SEO and Content at Interactive Brokers. Interactive Brokers offers a wide range of investment options and cutting edge trading technology. The company's innovation in solutions for traders and investors is renowned for its low cost options and global reach. Today, Cassidy and I are going to discuss key items to retain SEO value. Okay, here's my conversation with Cassidy Clement, the Senior Manager of SEO and Content and Interactive Brokers. Cassidy, welcome back to the Voice to Search podcast.
- [01:24]
Cassidy Clement
Thanks for having me. Great to be back.
- [01:26]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah, we've recorded before. As always, this is going to be a blast. So listeners, this is a repeat guest, usually the best guest because only the best guests make repeat appearances.
- [01:38]
Cassidy Clement
Thank you.
- [01:39]
Jordan Cooney
On a serious note, let's just start off by kind of going over what your view is on this concept of retaining SEO value. So it's a pretty broad reaching a topic or area to cover. So what is your view on that? What does that really mean? Let's break this conversation down for our listeners.
- [02:03]
Cassidy Clement
Sure. So really, when it comes to the value questions and the retention questions, I will kind of do a little bit of a triage if I was your SEO manager, for example, because this happens with many different companies. It's not just one over the other. The idea though is like, okay, is there a certain thing we're trying to retain and state of the website is going to stay the same and we're going to have the same CMS and the same domain, or are we going to be going to something new? New cms, new domain, new subfolder, anything of that nature? Really, the idea is we want to keep what we have and somehow gain more. And in a lot of ways that can be a little bit confusing. I mean, you really need to make sure you're compiling all of the items that you have that are worth keeping. And then also keeping in mind your site's security authority and then the ancillary pieces, which is, you know, your media part.
- [03:03]
Jordan Cooney
So as we think about just the changing horizon here. Right. Like what value means. I'm getting a lot of questions and I've had a lot of guests recently, you know, talk about some, some key metrics that we used to spend a lot of time talking about things like click through rate, just general traffic impressions and impression value. And there's just a lot of swirl right now around what's working and not working. So to your point, what are we going to keep or retain? It's interesting because it's hard to evaluate that if all this stuff is changing in the background.
- [03:47]
Cassidy Clement
Yeah.
- [03:48]
Jordan Cooney
So how do we compromise or how do we define our best path forward when we're in the midst of kind of a landscape shifting scenario?
- [03:58]
Cassidy Clement
Yeah, I mean, I tend to look at a lot of things as your initial steps still need to include an SEO foundation. I know we're going to talk at a different time about the AI search engines. That is a huge driver as to how do we migrate value and retain value and then what we actually consider anymore because old session sources or maybe just traffic acquisition isn't from the same buckets. They are from the same buckets, I should say. But they're not held at the same weight as maybe they used to be because there starts to be a shift in what the consumer is utilizing. I mean, I would mainly see and say now utilizing the idea of an SEO foundation. And kind of like the icing on the cake then is the AI optimization as well. And what I mean for that is optimizing for AI search engines, not utilizing AI to optimize for you. That's kind of where I look at it for the changes over time. Meaning you want to still utilize your engagement metrics, but there's also sides now that we have to kind of lean weirdly enough on like not necessarily impressions, but integration of your content utilized in other search engine results and results pages. And that's kind of the at a glance stuff. The snippets and the other types of search engines that are coming into popularity.
- [05:21]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah, no, that's really valuable insight there because that changing landscape of value perception requires slightly different input factors. You know, the age old assessment of just looking at clicks, click through rate, you know, maybe a business metric or two or like completely now, like just, just turned upside down because you have to take into account all these other factors.
- [05:46]
Cassidy Clement
Absolutely.
- [05:47]
Jordan Cooney
So as you go into this process of retaining your value, tell us a little bit about how you think about the prioritization or the exercise to start this work.
- [05:57]
Cassidy Clement
Yeah. So really what I tend to do is I have three different areas that I focus on. If I'm talking about retention or migration, and it's always your standard issue SEO and analytics items. So what that means is your core foundation of SEO, is everything still in check? Now I'm going to be talking in broad terms, so obviously it's going to sound like, oh yeah, thanks for the grocery list. Let me just get on that. It might take me a year, but this is just helping. So generally you would go, you'd look at your SEO foundation, then your analytics structure, tag's still working, Everything is still functioning. There's no actual deprecation in metrics. That was a huge issue when GA4 hit the scene. I can tell you I probably lived and breathed that software for about six months and it was very tough because of name changes and deprecation of certain metrics that were utilized in reports for IBM believe at that point. 13 years, 14 years from Universal Analytics. The other piece is links and feeds. So how does that happen? Is it integrated with products? Are there links throughout other places such as redirects and other elements? Do those have to enter your plan? And then of course, if there's something like a very simple thing which would be your actual site navigation changes the link, wrong elements of that nature. Then finally your media, which is videos, infographics, photos, banners, social media pieces, social media accounts, if links are changing or call to actions are changing. All of these things kind of go into the area of what you have to keep as in control as possible for retaining value. And when you're looking to go elsewhere, as I said in the beginning, cms, domain subfolder, any of those places, you have to keep an eye on them because there is no physical storefront anymore. This is your storefront. If you pull out one of the beams, there's a chance it could fall. So you have to think about it like that. I use a lot of visual examples. I am a teacher's daughter. But that is the best way I can explain it. I've done trainings with actually a pizza pie. That's another way I do it, which is you can't deliver the pizza. If you're missing a slice, they're sending it back. So that's kind of how I look at that.
- [08:22]
Jordan Cooney
So a couple of things that I think could be really helpful for our audience is what's the right time to start something like this? When do you start? Should this be Done every week, every month, once a year. What's your framework or what's your experience on cadence? And then as we're seeing this change happening in our landscape, how often should we be coming back to the well here to ensure that we got it right and we're maintaining the right direction on the content pages experience that we're retaining?
- [08:58]
Cassidy Clement
Yeah, that's a totally fair question. From the sake of, in general, how much are we looking at these metrics or looking to review what we have going on out there? A lot of it is dependent on the industry you're in and the business that you're running. I have things that I do in my day to day that may be a daily report, a monthly report, a quarterly report. That all depends on how much that area is changing. If you have a SEO team, I will say it's probably something to look at from a broad spectrum, meaning like a dashboard scenario, at least on a weekly basis, because there's a lot of anomalies that happen. And if you're in an industry that derives a lot of its traffic sometimes from a hot topic, whether it's an E commerce website. I'm in financial services, so maybe something news, news broke, something of that nature. That's important to understand because if you look at it in aggregate at the end of the month, there's a chance that from a management perspective who's not looking under the hood as close as you do, it looks like there should be an incline to future performance. And if you don't actually look at any anomalies or note them, it kind of gives a viewpoint that maybe your SEO is somehow a secret sauce, which sometimes it is. But as most people know who are seasoned SEOs, it never is an overnight or a month success. It is consistent work and it is over sometimes the course of a year for a full content change to really show its potential. And those are kind of the ways that I would look at it. Unfortunately, as always, SEO, it depends. It doesn't always apply for the same thing. But if I was speaking directly to somebody who is an SEO or an SEO team, I would say creating something like a dashboard or even we've had projects where we've created our own dashboards in Excel where it's just a drop in the database and have the charts refresh, something like that for you to actually get an understanding of. Is there seasonality associated with my business? Is there a hot topic that's triggering some of these words to show up in keywords and searches? Why is this going this Way, is this a new country of origin that I'm getting users from? These are all super important things where you just look at the end of the month and go, oh, well, users went up 10,000 users and page views went up 5,000 page views. That's just a number at that point. That's numbers for the sake of numbers. If you can actually be able to tell a story or have an anecdote along with the reasoning of the increase or decrease at the end of the month, it's much more valuable and it helps you look at what areas you need to tweak and what value you need to retain.
- [11:45]
Jordan Cooney
One thing that strikes me about where we're going with the conversation, but also more broadly as we think about the approach to retaining SEO value, is that we're in an inflection point in trying to understand what is business value from SEO. So I've heard a lot of different concepts get thrown around over the last six to 12 months and I'll just fling a few over your way. Things like awareness, measurement or brand footprint. I'm hearing a lot around relevance, targeting. And there's these concepts that are getting thrown around in the SEO bucket, right, that conventionally has been very much a performance driven or a like outcome driven type function. It's like, I do X, Y happens and this is good for a company, right? And like pretty linear. But like, when you think about something like awareness driving, when you think about something like refined or really specific targeting, you're narrowing into areas that have a lot more ambiguity. And so understanding this ambiguity to value is the question I have for you, Cassidy. Like, how are you doing this in your current role? How are you talking to other teams, partners, or just thinking about this concept in general when it comes to the conversation we're having?
- [13:19]
Cassidy Clement
Yeah, I mean, there's definitely layers to the answer. Unfortunately, again, it depends. It depends on your business. But really, if I were to break it down and put it into a handful of buckets, we would be looking at the first and foremost thing is the user experience. The second is the intent and the way that we can market towards intent. And then finally it's actually the brand, the brand reputation, et cetera. So when you're saying old school thinking, I do X, Y is the outcome, the difference now is for that scenario, there was only one door to go through. Usually it was a search engine. We'll make it a little more complicated. Ooh, two doors. Maybe you typed it into your URL bar. The playing field's now crazy. It looks like Monsters Inc. Out there you got a thousand different doors. Social media, YouTube, call to action on a referral, affiliate links, AI, search engine, mobile, voice, search, voice assistant. Now we have all of these layers. So when you incorporate this into why is not always going to be the same metric for all of those. So the way that I usually am going to bring it to the team that is asking for this SEO help is look at it from three of those buckets just to make it generally easy to think about. Are we looking for something that's going to explain information about the user? Are we looking at something that's going to explain our marketing and the intent of our marketing, or are we looking at something that's direct to our brand and our brand representation that kind of makes it a little more digestible for stakeholders to understand. And I know I've had questions come to me about intent specifically because a lot of tools will utilize different definitions for their metrics associated with intent or marketing intent. And what I mean by that is like it's very easy for people to understand metrics when it's associated with E commerce because it's very one to one and it's also derived from traditional marketing. But when it comes down to something else like informative search or not even brand comparison, but I guess you could say comparison of anything type searches, now we're really starting to break it down and I can't just tell you, oh well, you got so many page views, it doesn't matter now because you've garnered a snippet and a snippet rich result is now actually where you're getting a lot of value on this page from because it's being utilized. So really I think the way of going about that if you are an SEO team, is to try to unfortunately boil it down. We all know it can't be boiled down to a point of like three bullet points. But trying to put it in the idea of okay, am I looking for my user? Am I looking for the marketing intent of this and that would go easily for E commerce, something like that, or is it brand representation? Are we looking for reviews? Are we looking for somebody reviewing our company, our products? Is it something that we're trying to do? I mean you could put backlinks in technically any of those buckets too. So there's many layers to it, but that's kind of how you have to bring it together, especially when it's not fully explained anywhere. Now no one has direct metrics.
- [16:28]
Jordan Cooney
That's right. And how do you feel about answering those Questions to the various internal stakeholders who are trying to understand this. And I think that's where it gets complicated. Where I see a lot of challenge in the SEO space right now is how do I go back and communicate to this marketing stakeholder that the game has changed and this is now an AI prompt driven response or whether it be AI overviews or people just going to an AI search engine, right? Like if I owned a recipe website right now, I would be scared, I would be nervous, I would not be happy because I can go to ChatGPT and get the instructions, the ingredients and I don't have to read grandma's ridiculous story, I don't have to review these freaking ridiculous comments and deal with the 7,000 pop up ads that come up with these recipe websites. So why would I go there? Why would I search on Google when I can just put in tomato soup and get a very simple clear response on how to make tomato soup and go to the store and buy it?
- [17:31]
Cassidy Clement
Right?
- [17:31]
Jordan Cooney
But answering those questions internally about this journey that consumers are on, this direction, that informational queries are going on, how are you sharing that story whether internally or through your experience, through your work?
- [17:44]
Cassidy Clement
I mean I will say, and you know what? I hope the next time I'm on here my response changes to this. But from my own experience I have found that a lot of tools that are incorporating AI search engine metrics are not as robust marketed. A lot of that is because if you, and let me get real meta with you, no pun intended, I have even asked these search engines how their search engine data can give me user engagement data similar to A, B and C of what we're normally used to in traditional SEO and the answer is we don't have it, we don't give it and meaning. If I went in ChatGPT right now and I said I would like to know search volume data similar to GSC in this timeframe for this domain, say we don't release that data and AI search engine data is not the same one to one as traditional search engine data. That's fair, that's fine. But now when you have third party tools who do this and you ask, okay, well I got to go and make a pitch for maybe six figures for your tool. How am I going to convince somebody that this is going to actually tell me how we're doing? What I'm noticing is it's still kind of, the gears are still kind of turning of how they're going to track this. Google's in an okay place because tools are able to count the AI snippet at the top of traditional search results. Bing is similar, but I mean, if we're talking just bare bones, the best thing that you can do is look at your traffic acquisition and filter by certain AI engines that you care about. Or you can utilize a regex code snippet to filter out all the noise and just incorporate the traffic from the buckets that you care about for those AI engines. I've used it before. It does take a little bit of tweaking on the filtration code, especially like if you're somebody like me. I work with many websites a day, millions and millions and millions of lines of data and traffic. So I don't have the time or the amount of contact solution for my eyes to keep them open long enough to even make it through there to do this manually. So I'm going to use that filter system anywhere, tableau, Google, et cetera. And that can really bring it together to help you to kind of go to your stakeholders to say, where, how are we doing and where are we even getting users from? That's another important thing is if, for example, let's just pretend that perplexity becomes the new king. Google gets overthrown, the new monarch has risen. It's. It's perplexity. In two years, okay, you're going to want to see how you've been doing with that. So you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket and just say, I'm going chatgpt or die, right? For like the next year. You know, you. Here's what else is weird. Nobody has really risen in being the number one to create the rules.
- [20:50]
Jordan Cooney
Correct.
- [20:50]
Cassidy Clement
Google was always the one to create the rules. And that's kind of interesting because once somebody sets the precedent and it works, that's where I think the winner is going to be. Because it's still kind of new.
- [21:04]
Jordan Cooney
That's right. And everyone will probably follow to that, right? Like if, if there's guidelines and ways for us to inform our stakeholders. Going back to that point of like, how do we communicate internally to this? Like, if someone comes out and says, this is how we're going to do this in ChatGPT, this is how you can prioritize your crawl, this is how you can prioritize your presence in this experience, a lot of people are going to flock to that and want to be part of that game.
- [21:34]
Cassidy Clement
Right?
- [21:35]
Jordan Cooney
So like, as we kind of close out this episode, what is the kind of the perspective of what you can control? Right. We're talking about all these things that we don't have a ton of guidance on don't necessarily have all the exact recipe on data on. We'd love to get more guidance from these LLMs and AI search experiences, but what can we control? What are the areas like around UX design, our own web experience or web assets that we can control to help influence and drive our value?
- [22:09]
Cassidy Clement
Yeah, that's a big piece that a lot of people don't always take into consideration because in my opinion, it's easy to sway people's opinion on numbers than saying, hey, the users are giving feedback about this. Sometimes depending on who you're working with and where you're at in the food chain, there's a chance that even if you hear the complaint, it's not going to get there, you know, for another couple of years. It's the pony express can take forever to get over there. But it's a really, really, really, really important. Now you want to talk about grandma's recipes and all the ads, they're really going to get hit in the gut with this because as you as anybody who uses like Page Speed Insights or anything of that nature, that area is coming to be huge. Accessibility is massive now, especially with different legislation, so you need to have things in place. It can't just be an ad farm. The more engagement that's actually happening on the site, whether it's a session duration or there's actual that are positive and efficient, both in the way that they load and the way that they're interacted with that is now being weighed in part of your ranking. And you want to be able to work with your UX team or your user interface team, if that's more so what you have so that you can incorporate so users stay longer in your site, thus having a higher rank. So you want to start thinking about, okay, what exactly does my user need? What's the intent of them coming here? Does my navigation look kind of crazy or is it like crazy Nest? I know a lot of people initially are like, well, it works for me and I understand it. I'm telling you, do the weird thing where you show grandma and you see if she can handle it, right? Because sometimes you don't always think about people who know nothing about something. You know, it's like somebody might have a great idea and they know all the ins and outs about it and they show the prototype to somebody else and they're like, well, I don't initially get it. So you have to kind of work through that and then eventually work through that design and layout area and make sure that the load time is under control. Finally, that huge piece is accessibility. Now, at least that's my opinion. It's very big. If you're somebody who has international websites, it's literally necessary now you really don't have much of a choice. So that's something to truly keep in mind is when you're working with UI UX teams, keeping them kind of in the loop with your SEO efforts because they do go hand in hand. I mean, SEO incorporates so many other areas and it's really important to think about that, especially when you're looking at retaining your value, because if you just start making some changes for something that used to rank so high and give you so much traffic, that could be negatively influenced. And you want to make sure if you're updating it, you're updating it in the right way and not just because you're like, eh, this bothers me. I want it to look different. Like it needs to have. It needs to have a little bit more of intention and thoughtfulness behind it. Because while the robots aren't speaking English or speaking like you and I are for natural language, for the most part, the people are. So you have to make sure that they understand it too, 100%.
- [25:23]
Jordan Cooney
And that's a great place for us to wrap up this episode of the Voice to Search podcast. Huge thank you to Cassidy Clevette from Interactive Brokers for joining us. In part two of this interview, which we'll publish tomorrow, Cassidy and I are going to discuss elements of optimization associated with AI search engines. If you can't wait until our next episode and would like to learn more about Cassidy, you can find a link to our LinkedIn profile in our show Notes or visit our company website, interactivebrokers.com.
- [25:51]
Ben Shab
Okay, thanks to Jordan Cooney, the founder of Pre Visible. If you'd like to get in touch with Jordan, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show Notes. You can contact him on Twitter. His handle is J.T. cooney. That's JTKO. Or you can visit his company's website, which is Pre Visible. IO that's P R E V I S I B L E I O. Just one more link in our show Notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com, where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is Ben Jschab B E N J S H A B and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day during the work week. So hit that subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.