← Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Live At Brighton SEO With Cindy Krum
00:18:36
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Transcript49 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. Ready to give your brand a voice? 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. Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search Podcast, Jordan Cooney.
- [00:43]
Cindy Crumb
Welcome to this Voices of Search and SEO Video Live podcast. I'm thrilled to be joined by Cindy Crumb, the CEO of Mobile Moxie. We're going to be diving into the Bryton SEO sessions and sharing some insights from this conference.
- [00:57]
Ahrefs Sponsor
This podcast is also sponsored by Ahrefs. What if I told you that you could monitor your website's SEO, health, backlinks and organic rankings at no costs? Sounds too good to be true. Well, it's not, because my friends at Ahrefs just launched Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. Ahrefs new Webmaster Tools product quickly helps you improve your site's visibility by pointing solutions to over 100 technical issues that might be holding your search performance down. Plus, AWT monitors for backlinks so you'll know the most link to pages and how those links are affecting your rankings. And AWT shares what keywords your website ranks for and compares how you stack up against competitors for key metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty, and traffic value. Look, monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools and now, thanks to Ahrefs, that's not the case anymore because AWT will help you monitor your SEO, health, backlinks and keywords for free. And no, it's not one of those 14 day free trial offers. It's a powerful site audit tool that will keep working for you for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.com AWT that's a h r e f s.com AWT Cindy, welcome to the show.
- [02:17]
Cindy Crumb
Thank you. I'm pleased to be here. It's so exciting and I love the show. It's been a great show for me.
- [02:21]
It has been a great show. This is your first or second year?
- [02:24]
Second year here, but I've also done the show in actual Brighton at Brighton itself.
- [02:29]
So you're very familiar with this conference, the way that it's set up for our listeners who. Who may not be familiar with the show Give a little bit of context to the conference and how the conference is set up.
- [02:39]
Pre Visible Sponsor
What.
- [02:39]
Cindy Crumb
What makes this a special and exciting environment for the SEO and content marketing community.
- [02:44]
Yeah. So what I really have always loved about Brighton is that they're really good at bringing in new speakers. So you get new, fresh faces, fresh ideas, not just the same people over and over again. Of course, I'm one of the same people, so they should always invite me. But other than that, like, I, like, I love hearing new ideas and new takes on things and seeing, you know, younger people in the industry, you know, start up and shoot their shot and kind of like, you know, get on stage. It's really, it makes me so happy to see the whole industry evolving and to experience the marketplace of ideas. Right. There's not just one right way to do SEO. And, you know, everything is changing so fast now, so I think it's just a huge benefit for the industry.
- [03:25]
I'm with you. I think one of the things that stands out from, from being here for the past few days is just how many great people and new faces are in the SEO industry, which brings in new energy, new ways of thinking, and it's such a critical need that we have as the industry is evolving, as SEO is starting to change. Right. And so some highlights from, from the show so far, from the conference so far. Some of the things that you've seen in terms of sessions that stand out for you.
- [03:54]
Yeah, so just like lots of new and interesting ideas about AI. Of course, that's something that everyone cares about and no one really knows which direction things are going to go or how it's going to impact our jobs. We just know it is going to impact. That's true. And it's going to impact our lives outside of our jobs as well. So hearing the different takes on that, especially actually from your session earlier today. Thank you. I love. You know, panels can be good or bad. And that was an especially good panel because it wasn't everyone just agreeing all the time because that gets so boring and like, why that's not helping me learn or think or evolve, you know, anything. When everyone agrees, like, there are some things that are simple to agree on, but that means you should have asked. Someone should have asked a better question. Right? That's right. That's right. So getting the disagreement, getting the different perspectives was so good. And, you know, Mike was on there, Marco was on there. There was a lot of discussion of schema and, like, structure and like, how to structure information so that AIs can process it. And understand it correctly and better and faster. And there was the idea that the Internet is going to go away. Like you said that. Right. The Internet's gone in three years. We don't need it anymore because the LLMs will know everything. And there was discussion on that. And that's an interesting. This has occurred to me. I'm not sure I agree with it, but I agree. Well, and I've said, and this is good.
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We need debate in our industry, right? We need it.
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Yes. But for years, like, if Google couldn't do away with the web, they totally would, right? They would just want everything in a feed, like, just like fed to them.
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And funneled to people.
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Yeah, exactly. Take it in an API and we will represent it however we want in AI and we'll monetize it and like, overviews and featured snippets. And people also ask, just feed us your data. Right. And that is a possible future where, you know, Google's been eroding clicks for a long time. And the other thing that came up in your session that I loved, and I can't remember who said it, but the idea. Oh, it was Martha. The idea that we've always lived under this kind of unspoken contract with Google where we provide content and Google provides clicks. And as you know, the idea that the clicks have been eroding for years because Google keeps putting googly stuff to click on into the SERP and then mysteriously not counting it as a ranking item in search consoles. So we can maintain position one forever, but position one keeps getting lower and lower and lower and less and less clicks and less and less clicks. And so is Google still, you know, bringing their full game to the bargain that we originally started with, or do we need to re understand and renegotiate this bargain? Yeah. And if we did, how do we do that? Like, what do we change the way we, like, create content? Do you create more content? Less content. And I even had an interesting conversation last night with Michelle Robbins, who's also really big in the AI space, and a couple other people in this conversation where it's like, okay, if the contract has changed or what Google's. The clicks that Google's willing to give has gone down and the chance of you ranking, getting clicks, whatever goes down with it. What's to keep us doing white SEO if there's no penalty for doing or being more aggressive? Let's talk about so much lower, right? Let's duplicate content everywhere, for sure.
- [07:08]
And a lot of companies have been doing this, right? I mean, I mean, we see this with all these companies are just building up, couponing sections and doing all these things. So let's talk about like, what is good SEO? Because good SEO is changing and good SEO is, is right now facing a transition point in the sense that historically SEOs have been very aware of what Google's guidelines are. But Google's guidelines don't dictate a business strategy. Google's guidelines don't determine a content strategy. Google's guidelines are not a playbook for SEO growth. They're simply directional advice from the monopoly that we're working with. So, so how do we do white hat SEO knowing that the guidelines themselves are not the checklist to growth?
- [07:50]
So the first thought that came to me when you said, how do we do white hat SEO now is like, maybe you don't like, maybe go a little gray. But you know, we should still like, see in your heart, what is white hat to you? The relativist position.
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Maybe it's not a hat at all because.
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Because Google is not the law, right? Google is not the government. It's just a place where you used to be able to get clicks, but if you can't get the clicks anymore, don't follow their rules, like get clicks somewhere else and do whatever it takes to be there. And so I think the idea of like duplicating content all over the place because the duplicate content penalty might not matter as much if you weren't ranting anyway, who cares? There's nothing to lose.
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So spawning galore.
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Saturate the web with your content and hope that it's training the LLMs that you're the expert on that. Because it's so diffused like and dispersed that the LLMs are like man the city girls. Cindy Crumb girl says a lot of stuff on this topic all over the web, right? She must be the expert, right? Like, but there's a strategy, there's other.
- [08:52]
Data influencing how rankings and search is evolving. And yes, absolutely. How we manage and scale our content is one of those, which is what we're talking about here in terms of this concept of what is SEO now, Whitehead SEO. But I got it. I got to believe.
- [09:09]
Pre Visible Sponsor
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- [10:37]
Cindy Crumb
And you've shared this, I've seen this in your presentations. There are other ways that Google is making decisions. There are other influences and inferences that Google is leveraging. And I saw your presentation. Yes, there's some, some serious, you know, UFO like theories on this. But I think it's important for us as SEOs to talk about this. This is where the debate should be in these places, which is where are these technologies and capabilities going? And so you shared in a previous presentation how Google's using Chrome data. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Where you're, where you're seeing that, what you believe is happening in that zone of, of Google data and then relating that to rankings.
- [11:13]
Yeah, so it's an interesting, it's an interesting thing to bring up because like the other thing I was going to say, you know, following up on duplicate content is, and just because it could work and it could work elsewhere doesn't mean it's the right strategy for everyone. And it doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. And when I say like White Hat is in your heart, like it's actually not probably still the right thing to do because it's ruining the Internet. It's going to ruin the Internet. If everyone is producing duplicative AI kind of boring content, we're going to pollute the water that we're swimming in. But with Chrome and Google being more aggressive, it's another way where we like, we need to reevaluate this contract. So the idea in that talk was that it was a Reimagining of what Google has always told us about the launch of Mobile First Indexing. So I talk about how Google kind of in my mind bungled the launch because they called it mobile first Indexing. And they nicely gave us a year to prepare for it. And they said that it was about switching from the desktop crawler to the mobile crawler. Well, the truth was they had already been leaning very heavily on the mobile crawler by that time for a number of years. It might not have been the primary crawler for indexing, but it was in some cases already a primary crawler on a lot of sites. And so this was a weird naming thing. So mobile indexing, but it was really mobile crawling.
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Right.
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At least before they launched it. And then when it turned out that it launched, they started changing how they were talking about it again and they said well it's actually more about rendering JavaScript. It's not really about crawling and we call it indexing, but it's really about rendering, which was a new thing. And now we used to say crawling, indexing and ranking and now we have to add something crawling, rendering, indexing and ranking. And so this, this thought was okay, Google said they're using a second phase of crawling to render and then index and that's how they're getting the JavaScript. So they do two phases now. Yeah, but they said when a JavaScript rendering resource becomes available, which is kind of mysterious and vague, like they don't know their own technology or there's a queue, maybe that's fine. But so the new theory was like what if it was kind of a hypothesis, like let's kind of a thought experiment, let's game this out. What if the rendering resource that Google is actually using as the rendering resource for the second phase of Chrome is just they fetch the information from the rendered version of the page after it's actually just been rendered on someone's computer. Because why render it yourself when you own Chrome and you know that page has already been rendered recently enough and you can just have Chrome pre process pages for indexing whenever a page a.
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User is writing it on their Chrome browser. But doesn't that change the contract again? Because now Google is not only have a contract with all website owners that says hey, we're going to use your content to create rankings and then thus create money through ads, but they also now have another contract with another free product by the way, called Google Chrome.
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Yeah, it's never free though, right? Is you. Wait, it's not actually free because you're Trading your data and you're trading your compute power and the electricity that runs your computer, your Internet service provider bill. All this stuff paying for Google's indexing via like. But it's so, such a small amount and it's so distributed that we don't notice. I mean, we do notice when like Chrome crashes the computer and makes laptops.
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Or your entire laptop is burning because you're using Chrome and that's the only thing you're using.
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Yeah. And everyone's like, why is my computer working so hard? Well, maybe this is why. Like, this is the theory and a lot of other, you know, conspiracy theory, like, things do line up to say, like, this is very possible and Google hasn't always been honest about exactly what they were doing. Yeah.
- [15:01]
Like, and in closing here as we, as we wrap up this episode, you know, we're here live at the Brighton SEO Conference where we're learning a ton. We're looking at theories like this one, right? And we're gathering that as a, as a data point about how search may evolve. We're also looking at concepts and workflows and processes to become better and more effective SEOs. I'm curious to see where you believe these sources of data, whether it be data that Google's using to determine search ranking results or data that we use as operators of SEO, whether it be what we get out of Google Analytics or we get out of Google Search Console, how those data points need to change or we need to think about changing them to make a more effective and useful SEO world and AI driven world in search.
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I mean, I think that we need to get more comfortable with the idea that the data that we're all using and making lots of decisions on is all that bad data. Google's been mixing up the data that goes into Google Analytics even before they transition sampling or sampling, but also not provided. Like, there's so much data that they withhold from us and use privacy as an excuse or use other things that are kind of valid as an excuse, but kind of valid, but then kind of not valid.
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Pre Visible Sponsor
Right.
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Cindy Crumb
We had it for years and no one was hurt. And maybe there are ways that they could still give it to us but anonymize it better. Like that's on them. Maybe that's part of the new contract. Right. But the other thing is like things like Search Console not counting everything that's in a search result as a ranking position. That's ridiculous. And that's kind of one of the perfect examples of if you torture the data long enough It'll say whatever you want. Right? Like, you're in position one, but you're 700 pixels down. Because we don't count those. If we adjust what we count as a position, then you're rocking and rolling and you haven't lost any traffic. Don't worry about it. Correct. So we need to question the data and how it's collected and what it actually means and what is not in the data. Like what's been removed or hidden or not counted. Because Google didn't want to count it, someone else didn't want to count it. Like, we need to be on our toes and not just, like, carry Google's water and take what they say without questioning it or without understanding what is their incentive for doing whatever it is they're doing right now. Not a generous, like an overly generous company. And they're not doing this for our benefit unless it also benefits them. Correct.
- [17:24]
And I want to bring up one last point, because this is important to you. In my opinion, Mobile Moxie is in the tool space. And I think that as an SEO community, we need to start challenging how we're getting our data and so quickly tell us how Mobile Moxie is challenging the status quo around data. Challenging the status quo around how we think about the practicalities of information related to our websites and the audiences we're trying to reach.
- [17:50]
Well, so for years, I was very mad or like, I felt focused on mobile for a long time, and I was kind of mad or dejected by all of the tools in the SEO space is focusing still more on desktop data when we knew that there was more search volume on mobile. And so you're getting bad data just there by trusting the main tools because their desktop data is way better than their mobile data. And the mobile data is so sparse and it's always inaccurate, especially for anything with any kind of local component. And I knew, you know, for years I've been saying, like, mobile search results are different from desktop search results in a number of ways. They can be affected by your location, by your device, you know, by so many things. And no one was reporting on that. And everyone was just taking like a rank number five for this keyword. And I'm like, no, you don't. Like, maybe just in that tool on that day, you know, at that location on a desktop, who cares what that is, right? Like, and so I wanted to get a more holistic view of what is a. What is actually showing up on people's mobile devices. And I didn't want to necessarily lean so hard on Numbers. Because I think numbers don't tell the full story because they don't tell you what's above you and below. You might think the Surface changed too much. Yeah. And so I built these tools to let people test real search results. Google thinks for phones still, like, we pass all the same user agent. We're not using APIs. All the main tools that are reporting rankings for SEO are using API. Google says they intentionally.
- [19:18]
Yep.
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So I was like, let's show some real. Let's let people find the real search results and see exactly. On this phone at this, like, full address. Not just a city, not just a postcode. Like, if you're standing at this GPS coordinate, what does the search result look like when you use this phone? And da, da, da, da, da. So we built those tools out and I think that we allow people to, like, show things over time and see how it's changed. Where you can say, yeah, we're in position one, but now we're below these five things. We're still physician one, but there's a bunch of, you know, or whatever to give it more context and meaning. And it's not meant to be. Like, we don't want to track a million keywords. We want to track your big, important keywords that are driving lots of clicks. Where if you lose a ranking or you lose traffic on this keyword, it's a big, big deal. Right? Yeah. We're not trying to aggregate the entire web of rankings. We're just trying to give you a reality check on what your current performance.
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Is in a specific location.
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Yeah.
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Awesome.
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So that's the tools.
- [20:14]
Huge thank you to Cindy Crumb, CEO of Mobile Moxie. If you'd like to learn more about Cindy, you can find her LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can also connect with her on Mobile Moxie. Com.
- [20:23]
Jordan Cooney
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 J, T, K O, E, N E. Or you can visit his company's website, which is Previsible IO That's P R E V I S I B, L, E I O.
- [20:43]
Ahrefs Sponsor
And a special thanks to Ahrefs for sponsoring this podcast. Monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools, but that's not the case anymore. Thanks to Ahrefs, because they just launched their Ahrefs Webmaster Tools product which monitors your SEO health, helps you keep track of your backlinks and gives you the insight into what keywords are performing for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.comAWT that's Ahrefs a h r e f s.comAWT.
- [21:16]
Jordan Cooney
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 social media. Our handle is voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is Benjayshab 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.
- [22:01]
Ahrefs Sponsor
Are always in the.